(The last) four months have been warmer than normal so there's a lot of stored heat in the lakes and the rivers and the land and the soil.

The last two days, it has been downright miserable.

All of this is a bit of a yawner from a weather point of view. It's dramatic because it's so sudden.

The easy answer is the fact that the source of cold air this winter tended to be more in Eurasia and not North America. So what we got was more Pacific air and not Arctic air.

Grandparents will tell you that winters aren't what they used to be and they're absolutely right about that. Winters have been generally getting warmer and warmer and with generally less snow than what we have seen in the past.

He arrived in Norway having not lost a pound,

I don't want to go through that again. If another big storm comes, I am going to lose everything again.

I don't know if we feel guilty, but we certainly feel as if it's the first year we've cancelled winter. We've gone years without summer, but never winter.

Clearly the deadline is not working as there are still such big issues outstanding and putting pressure on them to meet the timetable is probably causing more division among the Iraqis than consensus.

If you stand back and look at the past 50 years, all these parties have been competing with each other for resources. There have been some agreements but essentially they've been competing in a zero-sum game.