Airlines canceled 300 flights Sunday as a hard-blowing nor’easter gathered strength along the East Coast and threatened to deliver some of the worst shore flooding in 14 years. The storm, already blamed for five deaths on the Plains, also flooded people out of their homes in the middle of the night in West Virginia.
The Israeli and Palestinian leaders discussed the broad outlines of Palestinian statehood for the first time in six years in a Sunday meeting that both sides called a small step toward breaking the paralysis in peacemaking. In the first in a series of biweekly talks, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spent most of their time discussing day-to-day issues such as travel and trade restrictions.
A moderate earthquake jolted central Japan on Sunday, injuring at least five people, damaging houses and a 400-year-old castle, police and officials said. The 5.4-magnitude quake hit at 12:19 p.m. local time and was centered in Mie prefecture, about 200 miles southwest of Tokyo, the U.S. Geological Survey said. About six hours later, a magnitude-4.5 quake believed to be an aftershock struck the area, Japan’s Meteorological Agency reported. A woman and a man suffered minor head and shoulder injuries at a roadside restaurant in Kameyama city when part of a ceiling fell on them. Elsewhere in the Mie province, three people received minor leg and arm injuries, prefectural official Yoshihisa Ito said. No serious injuries were reported.
Pope Benedict XVI celebrated his 80th birthday a day early with a Mass in his honor Sunday on the flower-bedecked steps of St. Peter’s Square. Cardinals, priests and tens of thousands of faithful joined the pope in prayers of thanks to God for his long life. Benedict was born in Marktl Am Inn, a riverside town in the Bavaria region of Germany, and sprinkled among the crowd in the square were fellow countrymen and women in traditional dress, including feather-trimmed hats.
