NATIONAL ― A teenage skier who was lost in an avalanche was found at 9 a.m. Tuesday, two days after he disappeared from Sugarloaf Ski Resort in Maine on Sunday afternoon. Nicholas Joy, 17, of Medford, Mass., was found on the Caribou Pond Road snowmobile trail, on the west side of the mountain, by Warwick, Mass., fire captain Joseph Paul. Joy was about 4 miles from a road and 2 miles from Sugarloaf Mountain when he was found by Paul. Joy survived the event by staying in an igloo he built the majority of the time, but ventured away from the shelter during the day to look for help, Austin said. He stayed in the igloo for both nights, but made his way to the road when he heard Paul’s snowmobile. Paul said after he found the teen, Joy told him that he learned how to survive in the wilderness by watching a wilderness survival program on television.
WORLD ― President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela died Tuesday afternoon after a long battle with cancer, the Venezuelan government announced, leaving behind a bitterly divided nation in the grip of a political crisis that grew more acute as he languished for weeks, silent and out of sight in hospitals in Havana and Caracas. Vice President Nicolás Maduro said that he and other officials had gone to the military hospital where Mr. Chávez was being treated, sequestered from the public, when he “received the hardest and most tragic information that we could transmit to our people.” Chávez’s death casts into doubt the future of his socialist revolution. It not only alters the political balance in Venezuela, the fourth-largest foreign oil supplier to the United States, but also in Latin America, where Chávez led a group of nations intent on reducing American influence in the region.
SCIENCE ― A comet spotted earlier this year will pass very close to Mars in October 2014, according to new reports. The comet, named C/2013 A1 “Sliding Spring,” may pass within a few tens of thousands of miles of Mars’ center, with a remote chance that the miles-wide comet will collide with the planet. The comet, between 5 and 30 miles wide, was spotted Jan. 3 by astronomer Robert H. McNaught. Researchers were able to look back in the image history of the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and spot signs of the comet as early as Dec. 8, 2012. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration states that other archives have traced sightings back to Oct. 4, 2012. According to scientists at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office, Sliding Spring originates from the Oort Cloud of our Solar System and has been journeying to this point for more than a million years.
HEALTH ― A Mississippi baby born with HIV more than two years ago appears to be the first documented case of a child being cured of the virus, according to doctors and scientists. The unidentified child has now been “functionally cured” and has been off medication for about a year with only trace amounts of HIV in her bloodstream and has been able to keep the virus in check. If the child remains healthy, it would mark only the second time in the world’s history that a person has been cured of HIV, which is the virus that causes AIDS. The landmark case was announced Sunday at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta, G. If researchers demonstrate that the same treatment can work in other children, it could drastically alter the lives of the estimated 1,000 babies born with HIV every day, most of them in Africa.
