Amna Nawaz:
The fire came at the start of a two-week school holiday, when hotels in the area are full. Authorities have detained four people for questioning, including the hotel’s owner.
A rare winter storm is hammering parts of Texas and the Northern Gulf Coast. Authorities have announced the first ever blizzard warnings for several coastal counties near the Texas-Louisiana border. The famous streets of New Orleans are expecting as much as six inches of snow, as is Houston. Meteorologists are calling the storm historic.
The governors of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida have all declared states of emergency. Further north, a large part of the country is still facing dangerously cold temperatures. Subzero windchills are expected from the Dakotas and Upper Midwest across the Great Lakes and through the Northeast.
On Wall Street today, stocks rose as investors adjusted to the new Trump presidency. The Dow Jones industrial average added more than 500 points on the day. The Nasdaq tacked on more than 120 points. The S&P 500 also saw solid gains.
And Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer has died. His weekly strip, “Feiffer,” which was initially called “Sick Sick Sick,” ran in “The Village Voice” for more than four decades starting in 1956. He wrote comics, plays, children’s books and screenplays in a tone often neurotic, sardonic and spot-on. His best-known screenplay was “Carnal Knowledge” about the exploits of two men as they navigate a changing romantic world. The 1971 film version starred Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel.
Jules Feiffer died at his home in Upstate New York. He was 95 years old.
