Dozens of airline fees rose, changed in 2012

Airline travel fees — including charges to check a bag and to board early — have become so prevalent that travelers almost need an advanced degree in mathematics to calculate overall trip costs.

Last year at least 36 airline fees increased, and 16 others were redefined, bundled or unbundled with other services, according to a recent study by the consumer travel website Travelnerd.

One bright spot in the Travelnerd study of 14 U.S. airlines is that most fee increases were only $5 to $10 each.

In one case an airline had a big fee reduction. The study found that United Airlines reduced its fee for checking an overweight bag to $100 from $200 for bags 50 to 70 pounds and to $200 from $400 for bags 71 to 100 pounds.

"Travelers really have to be extra cautious when booking a flight," said Alicia Jao, vice president of travel media at Travelnerd, who predicts travelers will see even more fees in 2013. "U.S. carriers are becoming creative at charging consumers extra fees."

But some airlines seem to charge fees arbitrarily, said Perach Mazol, a Los Angeles resident who recently flew to Florida with friends from Romania to take a cruise.

On her flight from L.A. to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Spirit Airlines, she said the Florida airline did not charge for the carry-on bags she and her friends were carrying, but the carrier asked for $50 each to carry the same bags on the flight back. (Spirit is one of only two airlines in the U.S. that charge passengers for carry-on luggage.)

"I don't understand why they charged us on one flight and they don't on the other," Mazol said. "It's confusing."

A spokeswoman for Spirit said the airline tries to enforce its policies consistently.

"Maybe she got lucky one way and didn't have to pay," Spirit spokeswoman Misty Pinson said.

United offering satellite-based Wi-Fi

United Airlines was one of the last major airlines to offer onboard wireless Internet. But the Chicago carrier is trying to make up for its tardiness.

United offers Wi-Fi in about 3% of its fleet of about 700 planes, one of the lowest rates of any major carrier in the nation, according to a recent study.

But United recently became the first U.S.-based international carrier to offer satellite-based Wi-Fi Internet for passengers traveling on long-haul overseas flights.

The carrier has installed satellite-based Wi-Fi on nearly a dozen planes, with plans to expand the service to more than 300 planes, or about 43% of the fleet, by the end of the year.

"With this new service, we continue to build the airline that customers want to fly," said Jim Compton, vice chairman and chief revenue officer at United.

Satellite-based Wi-Fi is typically as fast as ground-based Wi-Fi, experts say, but the advantage is that it can give passengers Internet access when flying over areas where cellular towers don't exist — such as the Pacific or Atlantic oceans.

But, of course, there is a price to pay for the service.

United is charging $3.99 to $14.99 for standard speed, depending on the duration of the flight, and $5.99 to $19.99 for faster speeds.

United is not the only airline to offer satellite-based Wi-Fi. Southwest Airlines, the nation's largest domestic carrier, offers it through Westlake Village-based Row 44.

Delta to raise fee to access lounges

Airline fees are rising not only for onboard services but for amenities at the airport too.

Delta Air Lines, which has invested more than $20 million in its airport lounges over the last two years, announced that it would raise the cost for annual membership to access its lounges across the country by $50, starting March 1.

The increase means that an annual membership will range from $350 to $450, depending on membership level. (The more miles passengers fly on Delta the less they pay for membership.)

Among the investments Delta has made is the addition of a new luxury bar that opened recently at Delta's lounge at Los Angeles International Airport. Instead of helping themselves at a self-serve bar, members can now belly up to a fully stocked bar and order a drink from a bartender.

hugo.martin@latimes.com

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Inmate accused of seeking to kill girl, 11, her sister and mother

A man jailed on charges of having sex with an 11-year-old girl tried to hire someone to kill the girl, her 16-year-old sister and their mother, according to the Cook County sheriff's office.

Brian Thurman, 28, of the 2400 block of North Mannheim Road near Melrose Park, sought a hit man after he was jailed the middle of last month on charges with predatory criminal sexual assault and ordered held on $480,000 bail, the office said.

On Jan. 29, Thurman asked another inmate with street gang connections to find someone to kill the three, the sheriff's office said. The next day, he was given the phone number of a sheriff's undercover investigator posing as a hit man, authorities said.

Over the phone, Thurman offered the "hit man" his SUV and $8,000, the office said. During a jail visit on Feb. 4, Thurman met the undercover officer and repeated the offer, police said.

In return for his Mercury Mountaineer and the cash, Thurman wanted the 11-year-old girl, her 16-year-old sister and their mother killed "as soon as possible," the sheriff's office said.

Thurman was charged with murder for hire and solicitation of murder for hire, both Class X felonies, and is scheduled to appear in Bond Court on Sunday, police said.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com
Twitter: @ChicagoBreaking

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For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

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The fine line between legitimate businesses and pyramid schemes

Controversy is again casting a shadow over the multilevel marketing industry, as nutritional supplement company Herbalife Inc., which has thousands of distributors in the Chicago region, has been publicly called a pyramid scheme by a prominent investor — an allegation the company vigorously denies.

Meanwhile, a different multilevel marketer, Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing, was shut down in recent weeks after a lawsuit was brought by regulators and several states, including Illinois, alleging the company scammed consumers out of $169 million. The scheme affected an estimated 100,000 Americans, including some in Chicago, where it targeted Spanish-speaking consumers, the Federal Trade Commission alleged.

Most people outside the industry might have only a vague notion about multilevel marketing, also called network marketing and direct selling. It often involves personal sales of cosmetics, wellness products or home decor items — or as critics flippantly call it, "pills, potions and lotions" — usually sold through product parties hosted by friends or relatives.

For sellers, the companies offer the appeal of starting a business on the cheap with little training, working from home and being their own boss, if only for part-time money. Some might recruit friends and family to become sellers, which augments their own commissions and gives them a shot at the six-figure compensation many such marketing companies tout but few distributors attain.

The largest multilevel marketing companies, often known as MLMs, are household names: Avon, Mary Kay, Pampered Chef and Amway. MLMs have annual sales of about $30 billion, with about 16 million people in the United States selling their products, according to the industry group Direct Selling Association, which represents these firms and others.

The recent controversies might raise the question: What's the difference between a legitimate multilevel marketing company and an illegal pyramid scheme, in which only people who get in first — at the top of the pyramid-like structure — make money and everyone else is a dupe?

The harshest critics maintain there is no difference, that there's no such thing as a legitimate MLM and that the industry's secrets stay safe because of a cultlike mentality and a blind eye of regulators.

Jon M. Taylor, who was once a seller for an MLM company, said he has studied the industry for 18 years and analyzed more than 500 MLM companies. He maintains the website MLM-thetruth.com and offers a free e-book there.

"I have not yet found a good MLM — a good MLM is an oxymoron," Taylor said.

He said all MLM companies have the same flaw: They depend on endless chains of recruiting new members.  "There is no more unfair and deceptive practice than multilevel marketing," Taylor said.

Tracy Coenen, a forensic accountant and fraud investigator with Sequence Inc. in Chicago and Milwaukee, is author of the Fraud Files Blog. She is also a critic.

"Multilevel marketing companies are pyramid schemes that the government allows to operate," said Coenen. "The only difference is that Herbalife, or any multilevel marketing company, has a tangible product that they use to make their pyramid appear legitimate."

The Direct Selling Association says MLMs are legitimate businesses, and that the group has about 200 members carefully screened by the organization to ensure they are not pyramid schemes and don't use deceptive practices.

The Federal Trade Commission agrees there are legitimate MLMs. The difference between a legitimate business and pyramid scheme comes down to products.

If the company and its distributors make money primarily from the sale of products to end-users (and not boxes of product accumulating in a distributor's garage), it's OK.

By contrast, a pyramid scheme compensates those at the top of the pyramid with participation fees paid by those recruited at the bottom. It eventually collapses when the scheme can't recruit more people.

But identifying a pyramid scheme can be difficult because MLMs typically have product sales, along with recruitment fees and recruitment incentives.

"It gets cloudy when you have a situation where you have fees being paid for both," said Monica Vaca, assistant director of the FTC's division of marketing practices. "It's very nuanced."

While prosecuting an MLM can seem somewhat of a judgment call, cases have a common factor: deceptive promises about how much money distributors will earn, Vaca said.

In the Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing case filed last month, C. Steven Baker, director of the FTC's Midwest region, said, "These defendants were promising people that if they worked hard they could make lots of money. But it was a rigged game, and the vast majority of people lost money."

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Michelle Obama expected at Hadiya Pendleton funeral today

First lady Michelle Obama is expected to attend Hadiya Pendleton’s funeral this morning at Greater Harvest Baptist Church in the Washington Park neighborhood, about two miles from where the 15-year-old girl was gunned down last month.

Hadiya was a majorette for King College Prep's band and performed during President Barack Obama's inauguration festivities just days before she was slain, shot in the back while hanging out with friends at a North Kenwood neighborhood park.

The shooter was after someone else, police said. No one is in custody.

Michelle Obama's plan to come to the funeral puts Chicago solidly in the middle of a national debate over gun violence that has polarized Congress and forced President Obama to take his gun control initiatives on the road to garner more public support.

The first lady's visit is being seen not only as a gesture of condolence to the family but as part of an effort to draw attention and support for the president's gun initiatives.

Inside the church, Hadiya’s silver casket was placed in the front, surrounded by flowers, and two large hearts, one with her picture on it.

Behind the casket, a TV screen showed pictures of Pendleton with her family, from birth to her teenage years.

Guests who were invited by the family were given orange wristbands and were able to enter through a shorter security line. Classmates and friends of Pendleton were given green wristbands and allowed to enter through that same line.

As of 7 a.m. there were already about ten people lined up outside the church, 5141 S. State St.

A hearse arrived shortly before 8 a.m. with a police escort.

Uniformed Secret Service officers, before the arrival of the 15-year-old's body, were moving people through metal detectors, though the public won't be allowed in for about an hour. 

Media and a select few others are using a separate entrance, also manned by uniformed Secret Service officers. City and Secret Service officers' K-9 unit dogs sniffed through camera bags before camera crews were allowed inside. 

The church is surrounded by an iron fence and all of the openings -- a pedestrian gate in the front, front and side doors to the church, and a driveway to the north  -- are guarded by city police or men in white shirts, ties and long black coats.

The early arrivals were being held outside the gate while security officers move portable barriers toward the front entrance.

Chicago police vehicles - two wagons, a handful of squads and SUVs - were guarding the outside of the church. Two more vehicles were circling the block.

Chicago police staffing the event are wearing dress blues -- a blue overcoat with pockets that allow access to the duty belt, creased navy pants, and a hat.

To the south of the church is a child-parent center and behind it, a boarded up three-story brick apartment building.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com
Twitter: @chicagobreaking 

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Michael Costigan Lands two-Year, First-Look Deal at Sony Pictures

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Sony Pictures Entertainment said Tuesday that it has entered into a two-year, exclusive first-look agreement with producer Michael Costigan and his company COTA Films.

The deal reunites Costigan with Sony Pictures, where he previously worked for nine years and served as a production executive. Costigan then served as president of Ridley and Tony Scott‘s Scott Free Productions from 2005 until 2012.

Doug Belgrad, president of Columbia Pictures, and Hannah Minghella, president of production for the studio, made the announcement jointly.

“We couldn’t be more excited to be back in business with Michael,” they said in a statement. “He has a great eye for material, strong director and talent relationships and has been making interesting, original movies during his years with Scott Free. Of course he remains a great friend and we’re thrilled to be professionally reunited.”

Costigan most recently produced “Stoker,” Park Chan Wook’s English-language debut starring Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode, and “The East,” starring Brit Marling, Ellen Page and Alexander Skarsgard, and directed by Spirit Award nominee Zal Batmanglij. Both films premiered last week at Sundance to positive reviews and will be released later this spring.

Costigan also produced “Out of the Furnace,” directed by Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) and starring Christian Bale, Casey Affleck and Woody Harrelson.

As executive vice president of production at Sony, he acquired and developed films including “Charlie’s Angels,” “Gattaca,” “The People Versus Larry Flynt,” “Girl Interrupted” and “Bottle Rocket.”

Under the Scott Free banner, Costigan executive produced “Prometheus,” “The Counselor,” “Robin Hood,” “Body of Lies,” and “American Gangster.” He also produced Mark and Jay Duplass’ “Cyrus” and “Welcome to the Rileys.”

Before joining Scott Free, Costigan executive produced Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain.”

Joining Costigan is Ben Leclair, who most recently produced the “Upstream Color,” directed by Shane Carruth, which premiered at Sundance. He previously worked as VP, production for Mike White at Ripcord, where he was a producer of “Year of the Dog” and oversaw Jared Hess’ “Gentlemen Broncos.”

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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Rosenthal: Chevrolet restores style to Impala name

Because a brand embedded in our subconsciousness can find a space in our garage, the Impala endures.

About 16 million Chevys named for an African antelope have hit the road since 1958. And even though the one you recently returned to the airport rental lot bore little resemblance the one whose "giddy-up" the Beach Boys sang of a half-century ago, General Motors is betting the bloodline still can claim hearts.

A revamped 10th-generation 2014 model is now on display at the just-opened 105th Chicago Auto Show as a prelude to its dealership debut in a few weeks, a bid to re-establish its good name.

"It's always been a great brand name," Russ Clark, director of Chevrolet marketing, said alongside one of the made-over Impalas on the Auto Show floor at McCormick Place. "In fact, when we did research on the name, we found Impala is one of the strongest in terms of consideration and favorable opinion of any name in the industry. A lot of that is heritage. A lot of it is the fact that people say, 'I know people who have had them, and everybody loved them.'"

The brand has been ubiquitous for decades, even if you don't remember the Beach Boys immortalizing the vintage growl of a "four-speed dual-quad Posi-Traction 409" or how Robert Blake's 1970s TV tough guy Baretta drove a rusted-out Impala from '66, the era when Chevrolet could move about 1 million Impala sedans and station wagons a year. My own first car was a four-door V-8 '72 Impala, a powerful and roomy hand-me-down whose weather-beaten body — like the brand's identity — clearly had seen better days by the late '70s and early '80s.

More recent Impalas have hardly been the stuff of song, and it's hard to imagine them inspiring nostalgia. They've been too dully utilitarian to be iconic.

Nonetheless, although sales have slowed, it has been the overall best-seller among big sedans. Three-quarters of those sales have been as fleet vehicles for corporate salespeople, government agencies and rental companies. That means the premium has been on space, reliability and keeping costs down rather than the kind of panache and extras that might foster pride of ownership.

The goal of this Impala overhaul in both four- and six-cylinder iterations — drafting on similar nameplate revivals for models such as Ford's Taurus, Dodge's Charger and Chrysler's 300 — is to flip that 75-25 ratio of fleet sales to retail on its head.

"It makes perfectly good sense on General Motors' part to finally put some style back in the Impala," auto industry analyst Art Spinella, president of CNW Research, explained. "If you have a great brand name, to almost toss it off, treat it as an orphan and send it off to the fleet sales department with bland styling and cheap interiors, that's a disgrace. What they've done is kind of salvage themselves with this.

"It's finally dawned on General Motors that you can sell a consumer car to fleets, but you can't sell a fleet car to consumers. You always keep fleet cars (looking) relatively obscure and you keep the price way down, and that's what General Motors had been doing for years to keep the (Impala sales) volume up. Now they're taking another look. I don't think they've necessarily gone far enough, but it's a step in the right direction."

To wander through the vast Auto Show, which runs through Feb. 18, is to be reminded of how deeply many of us connect to vehicles, starting as children playing with toy trucks and cars. There's a teenage rite of passage when car keys and a license expand the world. Certain makes and models mesh with what played on their radios, the places traveled in them, the stage of life they marked.

That emotional bond doesn't form so easily with a mere box with wheels.

"What was it that made us fall in love with cars in the first place?" Henrik Fisker, executive chairman and co-founder of high-end hybrid carmaker Fisker Automotive, asked the crowd at Thursday's Economic Club of Chicago luncheon. "It struck me that most of us, when we really start to get our heart pumping about cars, it's usually not the cars of today. It's usually the cars of the '50s and '60s."

Road salt, slush and rain were my old '72 Impala's kryptonite. In time, its front bench seat reclined like a La-Z-Boy whenever I hit the gas because the floor beneath had rusted through. Whatever my affection for the vehicle, I could see the road we were on — literally and figuratively — both looking ahead and glancing down.

Thirty years after I traded it in for a sporty red Pontiac with seats that reclined only how and when I wanted, I would not have expected my old flame to generate much heat.

Carmakers, like most marketers, know that even when a brand is disconnected from what it once represented, it still can resonate. The new Impala is neither the muscular car of old nor the generic conveyance of late. Yet Impala means something to would-be buyers, and good or bad, it gives them something to measure this latest version against.

"They have equity in the name and you never get rid of a brand that has a good reputation," Spinella said. "Some people will buy it because it's an Impala. Some people won't. But they'll look at it because it's an Impala and they remember the Impala. It's easier to reintroduce a name than to introduce a name nobody knows."

I can still remember driving around with my friends with no particular place to go, a song on the radio about a horse with no name. If there was a tune about a nameless car, I don't recall it.

philrosenthal@tribune.com

Twitter @phil_rosenthal

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Blizzard packing more than 2 feet of snow reaches East Coast

A powerful storm expected to bring driving winds and more than 2 feet of snow to the Northeast, along with the potential for coastal flooding, touched down early Friday morning, canceling thousands of flights in its wake.

Blizzard warnings were in effect from New Jersey through southern Maine, with Boston expected to bear the brunt of the massive storm that could set records. The day began with light snow and winds that were due to pick up with much heavier snowfall by afternoon.

Officials urged residents to stay home, rather than risk getting stuck in deep drifts or whiteout conditions.

Boston and surrounding communities said schools would be closed on Friday, and city and state officials told nonessential city workers to stay home. Businesses were urged to let staff work from home or shorten schedules.

"Accumulation is expected to be swift, heavy and dangerous," Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick told reporters. "I am ordering all nonessential state workers to work from home (Friday). I am strongly urging private employers to take the same precautions." Officials across the region echoed his recommendations, telling residents to prepare for any power outages and consider checking on elderly or disabled neighbors who might need help.

In New York City, still not fully recovered from the effects of October's devastating Hurricane Sandy, officials said they had 1,800 Sanitation Department trucks equipped with snow plows ready to be deployed. In New Jersey, also hit hard by Sandy, state officials expected major coastal flooding, high winds, and possible blizzard conditions in the northeastern section of the state.

"This is a dangerous storm, and we ask motorists to be careful while driving. There is also the potential for downed trees and wires because of wind conditions," said Colonel Rick Fuentes, director of the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management. "(The) evening commute will be treacherous throughout much of New Jersey."

The National Weather Service, warning of a "major, maybe even historic, snowstorm," said Boston and much of New England could get up to three feet of snow on Friday and Saturday, its first heavy snowfall in two years. Winds could gust as high as 60 miles to 70 mph. If more than 18.2 inches of snow falls in Boston, it will rank among the city's 10 largest snowfalls. Boston's record snowfall, 27.6 inches, came in 2003.

Cities from Hartford, Connecticut, to Portland, Maine, were expected to see at least one foot of snow. Airlines have already canceled nearly 2,500 flights for Friday, according to website FlightAware.com, with the largest number of cancellations at airports in Newark, New Jersey; New York City; Chicago and Boston.

"This is really serious," said FOX CT meteorologist Joe Furey. "This is a storm that can cripple all of southern New England," Furey said. "A blizzard is not about the amounts of snow. A blizzard is about sustained winds or frequent gusts of 35 mph or higher over three hours or longer."

Boston's Logan International Airport warned that once the storm roars in, all flights would likely be grounded for 24 hours.

United Continental Holdings Inc, JetBlue Airways Corp and Delta Air Lines Inc all reported extensive cancellations.

ECHOES OF '78

For some in the Boston area, the forecast brought to mind memories of the blizzard of 1978, which dropped 27.1 inches, the second largest snowfall recorded in the city's history. That storm started out gently and intensified during the day, leaving many motorists stranded during the evening commute.

Dozens of deaths were reported in the region after that storm, many from people touching downed electric lines.

Officials warned of a high risk of extensive power outages across the region due to the combination of heavy snow and high winds. Residents were also at risk of losing heat at a time when temperatures would dip to 20 Fahrenheit (minus 7 Celsius).

Across the region, store shelves were picked clean of food and storm-related supplies such as shovels and salt as residents scrambled to prepare.

Some big employers said they were considering pleas by officials to let workers stay home, including State Street Corp, one of Boston's largest employers in the financial sector.

Reuters and the Hartford Courant

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The New Old Age: The Executor's Assistant

I’m serving as executor for my father’s estate, a role few of us are prepared for until we’re playing it, so I was grateful when the mail brought “The American Bar Association Guide to Wills and Estates” — the fourth edition of a handbook the A.B.A. began publishing in 1995.

This is a legal universe, I’m learning, in which every step — even with a small, simple estate that owes no taxes and includes no real estate or trusts — turns out to be at least 30 percent more complicated than expected.

If my dad had been wealthy or owned a business, or if we faced a challenge to his will, I would have turned the whole matter over to an estate lawyer by now. But even then, it would be helpful to know what the lawyer was talking about. The A.B.A. guide would help.

Written with surprising clarity (hey, they’re lawyers), it maps out all kinds of questions and decisions to consider and explains the many ways to leave property to one’s heirs. Updated from the third edition in 2009, the guide not only talks taxes and trusts, but also offers counsel for same-sex couples and unconventional families.

If you want to permit your second husband to live in the family home until he dies, but then guarantee that the house reverts to the children of your first marriage, the guide tells you how a “life estate” works. It explains what is taxable and what isn’t, and discusses how to choose executors and trustees. It lists lots of resources and concludes with an estate-planning checklist.

In general, the A.B.A. intends its guide for the person trying to put his or her affairs in order, more than for family members trying to figure out how to proceed after someone has died. But many of us will play both these parts at some point (and if you are already an executor, or have been, please tell us how that has gone, and mention your state). We’ll need this information.

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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