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Nearly half of the people who died had been advised to take shelter. Indeed, most of them did.
• But many of the tornadoes were so fierce that few structures were able to withstand them.
• "These were catastrophic winds that could destroy pretty much anything in its path," Cindy Chiu, an epidemic intelligence service officer, said in reporting preliminary findings this month at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conference in Atlanta.
• Unlike in other tornado outbreaks, the largest group of people who died were in single-family houses -- not mobile homes -- the CDC analysis found.
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Wanna be famous?
• Forget reality TV. The presidential campaign could be just the ticket from nowhere to notoriety.
• It can be done with a heartfelt story. An off-hand remark. Or simply by having a distant connection to someone who's Somebody.
• Think Sandra Fluke. She was just another outspoken college student before her defense of insurance coverage for birth control drew biting ridicule from conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh and then a sympathetic phone call from the president. Now she's got more than 35,000 Twitter followers.
• Think Joe the Plumber, aka Samuel Wurzelbacher. The Ohio worker rocketed to the center of the 2008 presidential campaign after John McCain decided to play up his encounter with candidate Barack Obama over taxes. A poll at the height of the campaign found 84 percent of Americans knew that Joe the Plumber was campaigning for McCain. Now he's running for Congress.
• ___

• LOS ANGELES (AP) -- An ex-Marine filmmaker whose unit carried pocket digital cameras into some of the worst fighting in Iraq is using that footage, and post-war interviews, to open viewers' eyes about combat and help himself deal with the lasting emotional impact.

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