AP Top News at 11:59 p.m. EST

A weekend of ferocious winter weather could see low-temperature records set in the US heartland

O'FALLON, Mo. (AP) — Icy winter weather blanketed the U.S. on Saturday as a wave of Arctic storms threatened to break low-temperature records in the heartland, spread cold and snow from coast to coast and cast a chill over everything from football playoffs to presidential campaigns. As the three-day Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend began, the weather forecast was a crazy quilt of color-coded advisories, from an ice storm warning in Oregon to a blizzard warning in the northern Plains to high wind warnings in New Mexico. “It's, overall, been a terrible, terrible winter. And it came out of nowhere — two days,” Dan Abinana said as he surveyed a snowy Des Moines, Iowa.