Frank Morris

Debilitating ice, possibly up to an inch thick, is expected to sweep from Louisiana across Mississippi into Tennessee before striking the Carolinas.

It brings back bad memories for people living in the Mississippi Delta, some of whom lost power for a month in an ice storm there three decades ago.

Janice Kitchens, who teaches in a rural district south of Clarksdale, Mississippi, says her students can't afford a long outage.

Kitchen says resilience is a prerequisite for living in the Delta, but she's hoping her community misses the brunt of the storm.

Frank Morris, NPR News, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

As it got underway, the storm knocked out power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses in Texas and Arkansas.

Ice could cause widespread outages from Texas to the Carolinas and into Virginia.

Leon Craigle in Tulsa, Oklahoma, manages street maintenance for the city and says clearing deep snow may be a losing battle this weekend.

The storm's scrambling air traffic, too, with thousands of flights canceled, primarily in the southeast and east coast.

Frank Morris, NPR News, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The bailout will go mostly to row crop farmers, people growing primarily corn, wheat, cotton and soybeans.

They'll get $11 billion.

Well, specialty crops, nuts, fruits and vegetables will fight over the remaining $1 billion.

Farms with gross revenue of $900,000 a year are supposed to be ineligible.

But Anne Schackinger with the Environmental Working Group says farmers know how to skirt that threshold.

Schackinger says past bailouts have gone overwhelmingly to the largest farms, which are also the ones growing the most food.

For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris.

President Trump's trade wars aggravated a bleak equation for U.S.

farmers.

His tariffs jacked up the prices of the supplies and equipment they need to buy.