Major snowstorm slams northeast US, grounding flights, snarling traffic
Washington grinds to halt as bone-chilling weather keeps government workers at home

The northeastern US shivered amid heavy snowfall and far-below-average temperatures yesterday in a storm that grounded thousands of flights and triggered traffic chaos.
The weather stretched from Washington to New England. The Midwest was hit hard, too.
Taking into account the wind chill factor, the temperature in Chicago plummeted to minus 28 degrees Celsius, the said.
The Tuesday evening commute home in New York, the nation's largest city, was a mess, and the city was expected to get as much as 35cm of snow by yesterday morning.
"It's horrible. Snow is cute for only a little bit," Mary Catherine Hughes, standing by a subway stop with an umbrella rendered useless in fierce wind, told . The city's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, urged people to stay home.
Downtown Washington fell eerily silent after the federal government, seeing the swift-moving storm approaching, closed its doors and told civil servants, who already had the day off on Monday for the Martin Luther King holiday, to stay home on Tuesday.
