updated 2 minutes ago

Winter storm rips into Midwest, Northeast

Milwaukee's airport was shut down and travel treacherous across the upper Midwest as a major winter storm plowed eastward Friday, the National Weather Service said.

"This is essentially the reincarnation of the same storm that brought the heavy snow to parts of California, southern Nevada and northern Arizona," Steve Corfidi, lead forecaster with the weather service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, told CNNRadio.

As much as 10 inches of snow was predicted for southern Wisconsin and Milwaukee's General Mitchell International Airport before dawn Friday.

To the south and east, snow and ice were creating havoc at major airports, from O'Hare International in Chicago, Illinois -- almost three-hour delays -- to New York's John F. Kennedy International -- 2½ hour delays, the Federal Aviation Administration reported.

And the storm's effects were felt far from its icy grip. It was a sunny 77 degrees at Florida's Palm Beach International Airport at noon Friday, but those with travel plans to Boston or New York saw their flights canceled, CNN affiliate WPBF-TV reported. Florida fliers could still get to Newark Liberty International, WPBF said, but the FAA reported Newark arrivals were delayed up to 5½ hours.

Almost a foot of snow was predicted for parts of central Michigan, CNN affiliate WNEM-TV in Saginaw reported. Classes were canceled in hundreds of schools across the state, according to the station's Web site.

Police in Buffalo, New York, shut down the city's Skyway highway because of winds and snow, CNN affiliate WGRZ-TV reported. Western New York had several inches of snow on the ground by noon, the station reported.

To the north in Ontario, Canada, southbound Highway 400 was shut down outside Toronto after an multi-vehicle accident in near whiteout conditions, CNN affiliate CTV reported.

"Lots of blowing snow. Visibility is next to nothing," CTV senior cameraman Tom Podolec reported from the scene.

Ontario Provincial Police reported 70 accidents in less than five hours Friday morning.

Forecaster Corfidi said the storm is expected to maintain intensity into Saturday, continuing eastward and "spreading a swath of very heavy snow and freezing rain all the way into Pennsylvania and New York."

Storm watches and warnings extended from the central Plains to the mid- and north Atlantic coast, he said.

"There could easily be up to a foot of snow over parts of Illinois, northern Indiana, perhaps into parts of Michigan and southern Wisconsin, eastward into parts of New York and Pennsylvania," Corfidi said. Watch Arizonans cope with snowfall »

The system should move quickly, Corfidi said. It was not shaping up as an extraordinary winter event, he said.

"It is December, and winter storms certainly raise their ugly heads this time of year," Corfidi added.

But in New Hampshire, still reeling from an ice storm last week, crews worked feverishly to restore electricity service to more than 30,000 customers remaining in the dark, CNN affiliate WMUR-TV in Manchester reported.

Southern New Hampshire could get 10 new inches of snow before midnight Friday, WMUR said.

While the weather focus was east of the Rockies on Friday, forecasters in the Northwest had dire predictions for the weekend.

"It's going to be a real mess," National Weather Service forecaster Brad Colman told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A major storm with wind gusts up to 90 mph and snowfall that could be a much as a foot deep was moving in from the Pacific, the newspaper reported.

This accumulation could pile on top of ice and snow left over from earlier this week. All major schools in the Seattle-Tacoma area were closed Friday, CNN affiliate KIRO-TV in Seattle reported, as roads were too icy for buses to navigate.

A bit of unsolicited advice to business executives trying to explain why their company or their industry is suddenly in the soup:

Please spare us the "perfect storm" metaphor.

It's hackneyed, for starters. It doesn't square with the facts. And for people who fancy themselves leaders, it's downright unbecoming.

The reason the perfect storm is such an appealing metaphor for these shipwrecked captains of industry is that it appears to let them off the hook. After all, who can blame you if the ship goes down in one of those freak, once-in-a-century storms that result when three weather systems collide? It's an act of nature that nobody could have predicted -- or so the story goes.

The latest victim to offer the "perfect storm" defense is Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon who was smart enough to sell out at the top of the commercial real estate cycle, only to dive into the newspaper and broadcast business of the Tribune Co. just as circulation and advertising revenue were about to collapse.

Three weeks ago, it was the auto executives on their first visit to Washington who tried to convince us that the only reason they were running out of cash was a sharp drop in vehicle sales brought on by sky-high gas prices, a credit crunch and rising unemployment.

And in several recent interviews, Robert Rubin, the Treasury secretary turned boardroom consigliere, conjured up the perfect storm to explain how Citigroup and the rest of Wall Street nearly brought the global financial system to a grinding halt, vaporizing trillions of dollars in wealth and putting large swaths of the economy on government life support.

The first thing to understand about the perfect-storm defense is that these guys actually buy into this nonsense. The rest of us want desperately to believe that what brought us this economic crisis was some combination of greed, fraud and negligence -- and, no doubt, there was quite a bit of that. What the populist critique ignores, however, is that at the heart of any economic or financial mania is an epidemic of self-delusion that infects not only large numbers of unsophisticated investors but also many of the smartest, most experienced and sophisticated executives and bankers.

It's not that they don't see the excesses and dangers in front of them -- how could they not? But somehow they convince themselves that the world has changed, that the old rules no longer apply or that, because of competitive pressure, they had no choice but to run with the herd.

In recent months, I've had a chance to talk with half a dozen top business leaders whose companies have fallen into the soup and read published interviews with many more. And almost to a person, they say that they've been replaying the tape over and over in their minds and, even now, they still can't figure out what they might have done differently, given what they knew at the time and the various pressures they were under. Or put another way, they continue to think of themselves as victims of a perfect storm.

The second thing to understand is that, fundamentally, they're wrong.

It is useful to remember that in Sebastian Junger's gripping account of a shipwreck that popularized the notion of the perfect storm, Billy Tyne, the skipper of the Andrea Gail, received urgent and repeated warnings that he was heading into what could be a monster storm off the Grand Banks -- warnings that Tyne and his crew chose to ignore. After all, the weather immediately around them had been relatively calm, and the swordfish had been tantalizingly plentiful. And there were always worrywarts warning not to do this and not to do that. If Tyne had listened to them, the Andrea Gail would never have left port, let alone become one of the most successful sword boats in Gloucester, Mass.

Commandos who stormed the Mumbai headquarters of an ultra-orthodox Jewish group found the bodies of five hostages inside, including a New York rabbi and his wife, officials said, as a fresh battle raged at the luxury Taj Mahal hotel and other Indian forces ended a siege at another five-star hotel.

More than 150 people have been killed since gunmen attacked 10 sites across India's financial capital starting Wednesday night, including 22 foreigners - four of them Americans, officials said.

Early Friday night, Indian commandos emerged from a besieged Jewish center with rifles raised in an apparent sign of victory after a daylong siege that saw a team rappel from helicopters and a series of explosions and fire rock the building and blow giant holes in the wall.

Inside, though, were five dead hostages.

A delegation from Israel's ZAKA emergency medical services unit entered the building after the raid and reported through an Indian aide that five hostages and two gunmen were dead, a ZAKA spokesman in Israel said. The spokesman had no information on the hostages' identities or whether there were wounded inside.

Jewish law requires the burial of a dead person's entire body, and the mission of the ultra-Orthodox ZAKA volunteers is to rescue the living - and in the case of the dead, carry out the task of gathering up all collectable pieces of flesh and blood.

Numerous local media reports, quoting top military officials, also said five hostages and two gunmen had been killed in the Jewish center.