Here are five things you must know for Friday, Dec. 29:

2. — Apple Apologizes

Apple Inc. (AAPL) apologized and said it would offer discounted battery replacements for older model iPhones after users discovered that the company’s operating system updates deliberately slowed down the devices.

Apple said the operating system changes were made to avoid sudden shutdowns of devices as their batteries age. But some users complained that the degraded speeds actually served as an underhanded trick to drive people to upgrade to a newer phone.

Apple denied that. “We have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades,” the company said in a statement.

Nevertheless, Apple said it would cut the price of replacement batteries for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later to $29 from $79 starting in late January. The company also said it would update its operating system to give users “more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery.

• Apple Apologizes for Degraded Batteries, Offers Discounted Replacements

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One 2009 study found that the United States saw roughly as many record highs as record lows in the 1950s, but b y the 2000s there were twice as many record highs as record lows. Severe cold snaps were still happening, but they were becoming less common.

“Of course it sometimes gets very cold,” said Todd D. Stern, the United States climate change envoy under President Barack Obama. “Five minutes’ worth of education would tell you that what matters are global averages, and those are going implacably up.”

Politicians have tried to use cold snaps to prove a point before. Mr. Trump’s line of reasoning recalled a February day in 2015 when Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the Senate floor as evidence that the Earth was not warming.

The president’s tweet also took an implicit swipe at the Paris climate accord, which Mr. Trump has vowed to abandon. In announcing that the United States would withdraw from the agreement among almost 200 nations to collectively rein in greenhouse-gas emissions, Mr. Trump lobbed a similar charge that the deal put a burden only on America.

The United States under Mr. Obama pledged $3 billion over four years to the Green Climate Fund, aimed at helping countries build resilience to extreme weather and develop clean energy. Japan has paid about $1.5 billion into the fund, Britain $1.2 billion and France and Germany about $1 billion each. Developing countries like Mexico, Chile and Indonesia also have contributed.

Mr. Trump, who once called climate change a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese, has recognized its threats where some of his properties are involved. Last week a council in Ireland gave a golf resort owned by the president approval to build two sea walls. An early application for the construction cited the threat of global warming.

Mr. Trump has made a habit of airing his climate skepticism on Twitter, posting comments on “climate change” or “global warming” more than 100 times since 2011. Thursday’s tweet appeared to be the first time he addressed the issue head-on since becoming president, however. The last time he fired off a tweet on global warming was more than two years ago, when he declared:

It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!

—
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Oct. 19, 2015

The climate may be changing, but some jokes stay the same.

Continue reading the main story

Over 5 feet of snow has fallen in parts of western New York and Pennsylvania in a record-breaking lake effect snow event as bitter cold temperatures are heading to the Northeast.

The airport in Erie, Pennsylvania, has had a whopping 65.1 inches of snow from this lake effect event — the highest snowfall total from any event on record in Erie. (Heavy lake effect snow is produced by cold Arctic air moving over relatively mild water temperatures in the Great Lakes.)

Now, with over 100 inches of snow in December, this has become Erie’s snowiest month on record.

Greg Wohlford/Erie Times-News via AP

Courtesy of Instagram @DANIELLESOFANCY/via Reuters

Teo Carranza Luna/Instagram

The upstate New York town of Redfield has seen 62.2 inches of snow since Christmas Day, making it the highest two-day snowfall on record for Oswego County, New York.

A state of emergency was declared in Oswego, with the mayor saying in a statement that City Hall is closed and residents should avoid traveling and parking on city streets.

In Lorraine, New York, firefighters reported that a resident was trapped in her home after several feet of snow fell in the area.

Lorraine Volunteer Fire Company Inc.

“Residents in the Town of Lorraine and Worth, please check on your neighbors,” the fire department wrote on Facebook.

Lorraine Volunteer Fire Company Inc.

Lake effect storm warnings remain in effect this afternoon from east of Cleveland, Ohio, to Erie and to Fulton, New York.

ABC News

An additional 2 to 4 inches of snow is likely in western New York and Pennsylvania today, which will bring snow totals to 4 to 6 feet in some areas.

ABC News

The snow is expected to wind down tonight.

But bitter cold is coming to much of the country.

A major Arctic blast with frigid wind chills will move into the Northeast tonight.

Stephanie Zollshan/The Berkshire Eagle via AP

In some of New England it will feel like 20 to 30 degrees below 0 Thursday morning, and it’s expected to feel like minus-33 degrees in Burlington, Vermont.

Wind chills will even be below 0 in New York City Thursday morning.

Max Golembo/ABC

Wind chills are expected to stay below 0 all day Thursday across New England and only reach the single digits in New York City and Philadelphia.

The bitter cold is likely to stick around in the New Year. Another widespread and major arctic blast will move across the Midwest and East over the weekend.

Sunday morning wind chills are forecast to be minus-30 to minus-40 degrees in the Northern Plains and well below 0 degrees yet again in New England. In Washington, D.C., and New York City the wind chill will be around 0 degrees.

MOSCOW — The explosion at a supermarket in Russia’s second-largest city was a terrorist attack, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, adding that another attack had been thwarted.

At least 13 people were injured Wednesday evening when an improvised explosive device went off at a storage area for customers’ bags at the supermarket in St. Petersburg. Investigators said the device contained 200 grams (7 ounces) of explosives and was rigged with shrapnel to cause more damage.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Putin made his comment Thursday at an awards ceremony at the Kremlin for troops who took part in Russia’s Syria campaign but did not offer any details. He also said another terrorist attack had been thwarted in St. Petersburg but did not elaborate.

Putin has portrayed Russia’s operation in Syria as a pre-emptive strike against terrorism at home. He said the threat of attacks at home would have been much worse if Russia had not intervened in Syria.

“What would have happened if those thousands (of terrorists) that I have just spoken about, hundreds of them had come back to us, trained and armed,” he said in comments to Russian news agencies.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov would not say what led authorities to declare the attack an act of terrorism, but he said the fact that the bomb was rigged with shrapnel proved it “was a terrorist attack anyway.”

Earlier this month, Putin telephoned President Donald Trump to thank him for a CIA tip that helped thwart a series of bombings in St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown.

The Federal Security Service said seven suspects linked to the Islamic State group were arrested in connection to the alleged plot. The Kremlin said the suspects had planned to bomb Kazan Cathedral and other crowded sites.

In April, a suicide bombing in St. Petersburg’s subway left 16 people dead and wounded more than 50. Russian authorities identified the bomber as a 22-year old Kyrgyz-born Russian national.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

People across the United States rushed this week to pay their 2018 property taxes early, hoping to take advantage one last time of a federal deduction that will be scaled back under the tax-code overhaul signed by President Trump.

On Wednesday, however, the ­Internal Revenue Service announced that those prepayments could be deducted only in limited circumstances, a decision that appeared to invalidate many taxpayers’ efforts and raised the prospect that local governments could come under pressure to refund millions of dollars.

The announcement stoked confusion surrounding one of the most controversial elements of the tax law — a $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local taxes that will disproportionately affect higher-tax, Democratic-leaning states. It also offered a glimpse of the kind of hiccups that could arise in coming weeks as the IRS releases guidance on other facets of the bill, the largest overhaul of federal tax law in three decades.

In affluent states with high taxes and property values, local officials have been besieged in recent days by people trying to pay their 2018 property taxes early so they can deduct those payments before the cap takes effect.

However, the IRS said Wednesday that filers could only avoid the cap by paying property taxes that have been assessed in 2017. Many local governments, including most Washington-area jurisdictions, have not completed assessments for upcoming years.

Roughly 60 people stood in line midday at Montgomery County’s Department of Finance in Rockville, Md., to prepay their 2018 property taxes. (Rachel Siegel/The Washington Post)

Critics said the last-minute confusion underscored the haste with which Republicans passed their tax bill, completed in record time for such a far-reaching piece of legislation.

“This is not the way to do legislation that will massively impact the entire economy. It sets off a flurry of action from people trying to save money, and they act as rash as the legislators who pushed this thing through,” said Philip Hackney, a tax expert at Louisiana State University.

That confusion was echoed among thousands of taxpayers in the Washington region and elsewhere — some following the advice of their accountants — who interrupted their holiday activities to line up in subfreezing temperatures at tax offices.

In affluent Fairfax County, Va., more than 1,700 property owners came to the government center Tuesday to prepay their property taxes, while 750 people sent wire transfers and about 650 dropped off payments in a government lockbox that normally gets two or three pieces of correspondence a day, according to Scott Sizemore, director of the revenue collection division.

The county collected nearly $16 million in tax prepayments on Tuesday alone, county spokesman Jeremy Lasich said, with more money flowing in Wednesday. He said the county would devise a reimbursement plan if it cannot accept the prepayments. “We don’t know the full impact of that [IRS] statement yet,” he said. “We’re still studying that.”

Brian Lowit, 43, of Baileys Crossroads, Va., said his accountant told him that prepaying his 2018 property taxes this week could save him more than $1,000. He then checked with his mortgage company, where an operator told him that there were 150 people on hold behind him ready to ask the same questions.

Eventually, he wired $5,100, a full year’s payment, to Fairfax County. Soon afterward, he learned of the IRS announcement.

“It’s a nightmare,” Lowit said. “I’m definitely frustrated, annoyed and irritated. The rush to get that bill done screwed everyone up. It’s insanity and it’s stupid.”

The deduction for state and local taxes is especially popular in high-income, highly taxed and often left-leaning states: More than 37 percent of tax returns in Virginia included the deduction in 2015, compared with 23 percent in Texas, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. In the District, 40 percent of returns deducted state and local taxes, and in Maryland, 46 percent.

In Maryland, the Montgomery County Council broke its winter recess Tuesday to pass a law authorizing prepayment of 2018 property taxes. On Wednesday, hours before the IRS announcement, neighboring Prince George’s County said it would convene in an emergency session Thursday to do the same. The council canceled those plans Wednesday night.

Neither Montgomery nor Prince George’s appears to have assessed property taxes in time for residents who prepay to claim their full deduction.

Nationally, more than 96 percent of tax increases resulting from the loss of the state and local deduction will be paid by those in the top 20 percent of the income distribution, a recent analysis by the Tax Policy Center found.

Republican supporters of the bill say the cap on deductions and other changes were needed to offset a reduction in personal and corporate income tax rates.

The tax law explicitly states that the $10,000 deduction cap cannot be avoided by prepayment of 2018 income taxes but had left open the question of whether it applied to prepaid property taxes.

“There are so many questions around this,” said Sean S. Zielenbach, a business owner in Alexandria, Va., who prepaid his $12,000 property tax bill for 2018 early Wednesday only to learn later in the day, after the IRS announcement, that he might not benefit.

In Virginia, counties mail out tax assessments in February.

“It’s as though they set up just to harm folks who live in higher-tax states,” Zielenbach said. “There are definitely winners in this tax bill, but it’s not ordinary folks and it’s not folks who live in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut or places like Alexandria, which, oddly enough, didn’t vote for [Trump].”

While the IRS announcement sought to clarify rules regarding prepayment, many questions remain. Counties across the country have different laws and timelines for assessing property taxes, potentially making it difficult for the agency to enforce its interpretation, tax experts said.

“It’s really difficult to guess what will happen if folks don’t follow this ruling,” said Bradley Heim, a professor at Indiana University who worked in the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis under President George W. Bush.

Andy Grewal, a tax expert at the University of Iowa, said local lawmakers could try in the remaining days of the year to formally change their assessment dates but cautioned that doing so retroactively “would raise some thorny legal questions.”

In the District, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) openly encouraged homeowners last week to prepay their 2018 property taxes, either online at the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue or at any Wells Fargo branch in the city. (Those seeking to pay at the bank locations were told to bring a 2017 property-tax invoice with them.)

D.C. officials said Wednesday that they were reviewing the IRS announcement and could not yet comment on whether prepayment might benefit taxpayers.

Roughly 700 people appeared in person to prepay taxes in Montgomery County on Wednesday, forking over about $8 million on the first day such payments were accepted, county officials said.

On Wednesday night after the IRS announcement, council member Nancy Floreen took to Twitter, saying that those still wondering if they could prepay should seek out expert tax advice before doing so.

“The plot thickens,” she wrote.

Rachel Siegel and Perry Stein contributed to this report