Lawyer: Army officer recommends against prison time in Bowe Bergdahl case

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's attorney said Saturday, Oct. 10 that an investigating officer has recommended against prison time for the soldier’s desertion case. The attorney for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl said Saturday that an investigating officer has recommended against the most serious kind of court-martial and prison time in the soldier’s desertion case, despite a months-long manhunt in Afghanistan that put other U.S. troops at risk after he walked away from his base. The investigating officer, Lt. Col. Mark Visger, recommended a special court-martial, rather than a general court-martial, said Eugene Fidell, Bergdahl’s attorney. The process carries with it a maximum penalty of 12 months of confinement, forfeiture of two-thirds of a service member’s pay for a year, reduction in rank to private and a bad-conduct discharge. [Disillusioned and self-deluded, Bowe Bergdahl vanished into brutal captivity] Visger called for even lighter penalties than that, though, Fidell said. Visger recommended against both a bad-conduct discharge and confinement, Fidell said, potentially allowing the soldier to receive some military benefits after he leaves the Army. The recommendation comes after a two-day preliminary hearing in San Antonio, in September, in which Visger heard testimony in Bergdahl’s case. He faces charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, and is accused of walking away from his patrol base late on June 29, 2009. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, left, and defense lead counsel Eugene Fidell, center, look on as Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl is questioned during a preliminary hearing to determine if Sgt. Bergdahl will be court-martialed, on Friday, Sept. 18, 2015, at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. (AP Photo/Brigitte Woosley) Fellow soldiers on his small combat outpost discovered Bergdahl was missing the following morning, but it was too late: He was captured by insurgents affiliated with the Taliban, and held captive for nearly five years. The United States recovered him in May 2014 in a controversial deal in which five Taliban detainees were released from the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They remain under supervised release in Qatar. Gen. Mark Abrams, the commanding general of U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., could still decide to send Bergdahl to the more serious kind of court-martial, potentially upping his penalties. He faces up to life in prison if that occurs. [Bowe Bergdahl’s Army investigation just proceeded to the next step, lawyer says] An Army spokesman, Paul Boyce, declined to comment on the case on Saturday. “We will notify


Distinguished persons of the week

Kaci Kullmann Five, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, announces the winner of the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. (HEIKO JUNGE / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images) In a stunning departure from recent history the Nobel Prize committee picked worthy recipients of the Peace Prize. From the announcement: The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2015 is to be awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011. The Quartet was formed in the summer of 2013 when the democratization process was in danger of collapsing as a result of political assassinations and widespread social unrest. It established an alternative, peaceful political process at a time when the country was on the brink of civil war. It was thus instrumental in enabling Tunisia, in the space of a few years, to establish a constitutional system of government guaranteeing fundamental rights for the entire population, irrespective of gender, political conviction or religious belief. The National Dialogue Quartet has comprised four key organizations in Tunisian civil society: the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT, Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail), the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts (UTICA, Union Tunisienne de l’Industrie, du Commerce et de l’Artisanat), the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH, La Ligue Tunisienne pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme), and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers (Ordre National des Avocats de Tunisie). These organizations represent different sectors and values in Tunisian society: working life and welfare, principles of the rule of law and human rights. On this basis, the Quartet exercised its role as a mediator and driving force to advance peaceful democratic development in Tunisia with great moral authority. The Nobel Peace Prize for 2015 is awarded to this Quartet, not to the four individual organizations as such. When the Middle East is on fire and there is widespread skepticism about the “democracy agenda,” Tunisia, as the committee put it, “shows that Islamist and secular political movements can work together to achieve significant results in the country’s best interests.” We should recognize another achievement for the National Dialogue Quartet: By capturing the award the committee avoided bestowing the prize on Secretary of State John F. Kerry and the monstrous regime which took him to the cleaners and helped ignite even more violence and instability in


A scientist found a bird that hadn’t been seen in half a century, then killed it. Here’s why.

“It’s one thing for a community to say, ‘Look, we have a code of ethics, we abide by it, no responsible biologist would ever do this,’ ” he said in 2014. “You know, we think that those are all good things and good statements, but it’s harder to actually create a sort of ethical culture in the field when no one’s looking — when no one’s watching.” The article raised the hackles of many in the scientific community. In the next month’s issue of Science, more than 100 biologists signed multiple response letters in defense of collecting. “Our goal should be to document biodiversity and rigorously as possible through carefully planned collections so that it can be effectively preserved and understood,” one letter read. “Specimens from such collections and their associated data are essential for making informed decisions about management and conservation now and in the future.” The letter pointed out that species collections can lead to unexpected discoveries — famously, a discovery that recent eggshells were thinner than older ones at a British museum alerted Europeans to the dangers of DDT in the 1960s — and that scientists have come a long way from the indiscriminate collecting practices of the 19th century, supporters of collecting argue. Now, researchers must get approval and permits to collect before they even go out in the field. Each request is evaluated based on the distinctiveness of the find and rarity of the species. If a species is unknown to science, or if there aren’t other good museum specimens in existence, then killing and preserving an individual might be the best way to learn more about it. This, Filardi argues, was the case with the moustached kingfisher. Until now, there were only three specimens in existence, and all of them were female. A modern, male sample will improve scientists’ understanding of the species and its changing environment, he said. It might also galvanize support for efforts to protect the kingfisher’s island home. Speaking to Scientific American, Filardi said that mining and logging threatens the mountains where the elusive blue-and-yellow birds live, as does climate change. “We still have the potential to steward this big sky island and preserve all of its richness,” he said, but only if conservationists and local governments work out ways to negotiate those threats. For years, Western scientists have referred to the kingfisher as a “ghost” species because they’ve never


After Edsall’s firing, Maryland football moves forward under Mike Locksley

Offensive coordinator Mike Locksley will take over as interim head coach. (Doug Kapustin for The Washington Post) The Gossett Team House was as quiet as a funeral parlor on Sunday afternoon. Off the facility’s main hallway, where Randy Edsall’s photo as head coach still hung just hours after his firing, some players ate in the cafeteria and made very little sound. The team was introduced to its new reality earlier in the day in a meeting with offensive coordinator Mike Locksley, who told them that some changes were coming now that he is replacing Edsall as the team’s interim coach. [Maryland fires Randy Edsall after dismal start to 2015 season] These won’t be “wholesale changes,” Locksley explained during a solemn news conference on Sunday afternoon, but he will attempt to impart his own coaching philosophies on the team in the coming weeks. Shortly after Maryland Athletic Director Kevin Anderson informed Edsall of his decision Sunday, he next sat down with Locksley to formally offer him the interim head coaching position, a changing of the guard that seemed unlikely 104 days ago when Edsall had signed his three-year contract extension. “As I told the fellas, there will be some small tweaks with how we do some things around here, and that’s just based off my philosophy as opposed to necessarily how we did it under Coach [Edsall],” Locksley said. Anderson said he expects Locksley to be a candidate for the permanent job in the coming months, although the next six games aren’t entirely about auditioning for a job. Maryland is a mess at the moment. It has been blown out by 21 or more points in four games this season, including in three consecutive losses. The offense, while showing life for the first time in weeks Saturday against Ohio State, has a dismal body of work and the defense statistically ranks among the worst units in the country. [How will Edsall’s firing affect Maryland’s 2016 recruiting class] Locksley is now charged with re-energizing the team as it enters a bye week, a much needed break before meeting Penn State in Baltimore on October 24. He showed an understanding for the gravity of the situation on Sunday. Locksley also showed gratitude. He thanked Edsall for opening the door at Maryland four years ago, which came after Locksley himself had been ousted by New Mexico just four games into his third season. It


Most thieves are actually really bad at what they do

Not your average thieves. George Clooney and Brad Pitt in "Ocean's Thirteen." (Warner Bros.) Our ideas about thieves are often tinted by Hollywood depictions, like the calculating heists of "Ocean's Eleven" or "The Pink Panther." The truth is a lot less glamorous. According to a new study of long-term data on theft, the typical story is one of bumbling teens, most of whom quickly grow out of their bad habits. Most thieves are active only for a short period of time and make very little money at it, economist Geoffrey Fain Williams of Transylvania University has found. In fact, theft looks not so much like a way of getting free stuff or money as a stage some people experience in adolescence — and most grow out of. Williams looked at data on self-reported thefts from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from Ohio State University, which followed more than 8,000 people between 1997 and 2011. In addition to lots of other things, the survey asks people if they stole anything in the past year and how much it cost. Williams classifies those who report stealing at least one item worth more than $50 in the last year as "thieves" and those who stole something worth less than $50 as "petty thieves." He finds that theft isn't that uncommon -- 16 percent of the people overall, one in five men and one in 10 women, report having stolen something worth more than $50 in the last year. Including the petty thieves, the numbers rise to one in three men and one in four women. These statistics are self-reported, so they likely miss out on some people who simply don't report their theft. The thieves include a disproportionate number of men, minorities and people with less education, as well as people who smoke, drink, have mental health challenges and lower standardized test scores. What is striking in the research is that Williams finds that thieves are active for only very short periods of time -- on average, less than one year. Over the 15 years of data, fewer than 5 percent of thieves continue their behavior for more than three years. The data suggests that a "thief" is less a type of person than a stage some people go through at one point in their lives -- specifically, adolescence. "For the majority of offenders, property crime may simply be an exploratory phase,"


Princeton professor Angus Deaton wins Nobel Prize in economics

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Scottish economist Angus Deaton on Oct. 12. Angus Deaton, a professor at Princeton, has won the Nobel Prize in economics for his diverse contributions to the study of consumer spending. His research has explored how people, particularly the poor, make decisions about what to buy and how much to save. "I've always been interested in what makes lives better for people and how they behave," Deaton said Monday morning in a phone interview with the Post. The Nobel Prize committee recognized Deaton, 69, for his "analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare" — a broad phrase to describe a broad body of research. "His work covers a wide spectrum, from the deepest implications of theory to the grittiest detail of measurement," the panel of Swedish economists wrote in its announcement. Princeton University "I always thought that because I'd worked on so many different things they would tend to pass me over," Deaton joked. "But they did a wonderful job of sort of cobbling it all together and making it sound really integrated," he said. Deaton's early research into theories of consumption and survey techniques helped bridge the divide between those who study the choices of individuals and those who study the larger economy. In recent decades, he has spent much of his time using those ideas to investigate poverty in developing nations, especially India and South Africa. The prize Monday brings attention to the increasingly vigorous field of development economics. "I'm so delighted, not just for myself, but that this sort of work is being recognized," Deaton said by phone at a press event Monday. Asked about the refugee crisis sweeping Europe, Deaton expressed sympathy for those who have been uprooted by poverty and war. "What we're seeing now is the result of hundreds of years of unequal development in the rich world, which has left a lot of the world behind," he said. Deaton's efforts surveying poor households — measuring malnutrition, living standards, and whether parents discriminate between boys and girls — has helped economists better understand those who live on less than a dollar a day. Through his research, often with the World Bank, he has been a first-hand witness to the decline of extreme poverty in recent decades. At the press event Monday, Deaton expressed optimism about continued progress — but reminded the audience that several hundred million


Could Tunisia’s National Dialogue model ever be replicated?

FILE: Tunisian mediators Wided Bouchamaoui, Houcine Abbassi, Abdessattar ben Moussa and Mohamed Fadhel Mahmoud. FETHI BELAID/AFP/Getty Images If the story of the Arab political rebellions is one of failed leadership, Tunisia’s story is an epic tale of a political class that forges a remarkable — if still fragile — democratic transition. This victory earned the four leaders of the National Dialogue the Nobel Peace Prize. Cause to celebrate, the prize also offers a timely opportunity to reflect on the wider question of how and why elite bargains or “pact-making” succeed or fail to advance transitions. Is pact-making a product of local or national conditions — a happy accident of a specific history — or does the success or failure stem from broader or “exogenous” logic that transcends time and place? In a practical or policy-related sense, what is at stake is whether the Tunisian experience is unique, and unlikely to be repeated or emulated, or whether it offers wider lessons that can be applied to other national dialogues. [Tunisian group wins Nobel Peace Prize] I believe that the success of national dialogue in Tunisia is rooted in forces that were deeply embedded in the soil of one country, particularly the absence of a politicized military and the presence of a massive domestic force, the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT), the leading member of the quartet. The UGTT acted as both a third party arbiter that claimed to exist above the political fray and a key actor implicated in the very conflicts it tried to mediate. This has no parallel in the Middle East, or as far as I know, in any other national context. While Tunisia and its National Dialogue offer an inspiring example for the region, given such unique circumstances, it is unlikely to become a model that can be easily emulated elsewhere. Before considering the Tunisian case, we need to conceptualize the role of dialogues or “pact-making.” Taking a page out of “The Godfather,” we might say that this dynamic pivots around the transition from autocratic to democratic “protection rackets.” In the former, autocracies protect groups who fear that their political, social or even physical survival might be undermined by a move to free elections and majoritarian rule. In the Middle East, vulnerable minorities — based on economic, religious, sectarian or ideological cleavages — often depended on autocracies to shield them from their real or imagined adversaries.


China welcomes Apple’s iPhones. Its News app? Not so much.

(Photo by Ken Ishii/Getty Images) Apple has reportedly shut off access to its News app from inside China, an apparent response to Beijing's policy of censoring online content that is politically controversial. Although American iPhone users who travel to China can open the News app, the software won't refresh with the latest headlines, according to the New York Times. Instead, it displays an error message: "Can’t refresh right now. News isn’t supported in your current region." Apple News isn't offered in much of the world yet, let alone in China. For Apple, having to comply with government restrictions on Internet news is merely a speed bump in a wider story about its success in China. The company saw a dramatic 75 percent jump in Chinese iPhone sales over the past year, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said last month. It spent several months this year as China's top smartphone maker, battling it out with the Chinese giant Xiaomi for first place. (Xiaomi took the lead in August.) But even as Apple makes its own pivot to Asia, the company is confronting some inevitable long-term challenges in China. The entire country is grappling with an economic slowdown that some analysts believe will ultimately hurt sales. And as cheaper labor moves to Vietnam and other parts of Asia, Apple's costs could go up. Those are all mostly economic forces shaping Apple's ability to expand its core business in China. What makes the censorship issue different is that Apple News represents another of Apple's expansions into services rather than hardware. Apple may be best known for making great devices, but as it continues rolling out products like Apple Music, Apple News and perhaps soon its long-rumored streaming TV service, the more it begins to look like its archrival, Google. Not in the online search sense but in the kinds of problems Google faced in China before it famously withdrew from that market in 2010. [The auto industry is about to go to war over high-tech cars.] Confronted with the demands of the Chinese government, Google chose to exit China rather than continue censoring its own search results there. In what became a high-level chess game with Beijing, Google suspended its Chinese-based search engine and began redirecting searches to a Hong Kong portal, where it said the censorship policy didn't apply. The decision effectively meant a full withdrawal from the Chinese mainland, where search


Meth isn’t an argument for drug prohibition. It demonstrates prohibition’s failure.

that the Sinaloa Mexican drug cartel “is now the main distributor of methamphetamine in Nebraska.” - The results have been similar at the national level. In a 2006 rider to the PATRIOT Act renewal, Congress passed a federal law requiring ID to purchase pseudoephedrine and putting federal restrictions on the amount of the drug anyone can buy in a month. Five years later, the Associated Press analyzed a decade of federal data and found that the law “has not only failed to curb the meth trade, which is growing again after a brief decline. It also created a vast and highly lucrative market for profiteers to buy over-the-counter pills and sell them to meth producers at a huge markup.” Meth-related incidents (arrests, seizures and lab discoveries) were up 34 percent in 2009. In the three states that passed more restrictive cold medication laws in 2008, the number of incidents went up 67 percent. That includes a whopping 164 percent increase in Oklahoma, the first state in the country to pass the ID law. - According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the number of people reporting use of methamphetamine in the previous month jumped from 353,000 in 2010 to 595,000 in 2013. The number reporting use in the past year was about the same as it was in 2007. (The survey cautions against comparing data prior to 2007, when the survey methodology changed.) - According to the 2014 National Drug Threat Assessment, “methamphetamine availability is increasing in the United States.” Seizures of meth at the southwest border have increased threefold since 2011, and the meth they’re seizing is exceptionally pure. The increasing availability of meth and the increasing restrictions on pseudoephedrine actually prompted the Journal of Apocryphal Chemistry to publish tongue-in-cheek step-by-step instructions on how to turn street meth into cold medicine. Meanwhile, families in Oregon and Mississippi now have to schedule an appointment with a doctor to get cold medicine. That likely means time off from work and a co-pay for an office visit. This would seem like a pretty significant burden on, say, a low-income family with three or four allergy-laden kids. Other cold and allergy sufferers just face increasingly difficult barriers to relief. And there have been several reports over the years of people who certainly don’t appear to be drug manufacturers getting arrested and prosecuted for mistakenly buying more than their allotted share


8-year-old boy dies of rare, vaccine-derived poliovirus in Laos

A Pakistani health worker gives a polio vaccine to a child in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, last year. (AP Photo/B.K. Bangash) The World Health Organization reported Monday that an 8-year-old boy in Laos became paralyzed from the poliovirus in early September and died five days later. The case is believed to be the first infection in the country since 1993 and is part of an alarming reemergence of polio around the world in recent months. Ukraine and Mali -- two other countries where the virus was thought to have been wiped out -- also reported new cases of polio. WHO officials said that genetic sequence showed that the virus was derived from an oral vaccine and that it may have been circulating in Laos' Bolikhamxay Province for more than two years. The oral polio vaccine contains a weakened virus, and when a child is immunized the virus replicates in the intestine and is excreted by the individual. In places where there are sanitation issues, this virus can infect others in the community before dying out. When a population is seriously under-immunized this virus can circulate for a long time and mutate into a form that can paralyze. The district where the child lived in Laos has chronically low immunization rates: 40 percent to 66 percent between 2009 and 2014 and 44 percent in 2015 to date for three doses of oral polio vaccine. Before this most recent infection, Laos had been polio-free since 1993, when its last case of indigenous wild poliovirus was reported. The WHO said that the country's ministry of health, in conjunction with the WHO, UNICEF and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sent a team to the boy's village to collect stool samples and that they have activated an emergency immunization effort for the province and several adjacent provinces. Health officials said the risk of the virus spreading from Laos to other countries was low given the relatively limited travel to and from the area where the infecttion was found and given the emergency immunization effort. In September, the WHO said poliovirus had returned to Europe after a five-year reprieve, paralyzing a 4-year-old and 10-month-old in the Ukraine. The two cases were in the southwestern part of the country -- bordering Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland -- and the strain responsible, vaccine-derived poliovirus type 1 or cVDPV1, may still be a threat to the region. The


Report: U.S.-backed Kurdish rebels may have committed war crimes in Syria

Members of the Syrian Kurdish People's Defence Units (YPG) celebrate their victory in Kobane, Syria, on Jan. 26, 2015. (EPA/STR) A new report from human rights group Amnesty International suggests that Kurdish forces in northern Syria, among the most significant U.S. ground partners in the fight against the Islamic State, may have committed war crimes with a campaign of displacement and home demolitions aimed mostly at the local Arab population. In the report released on Monday, Amnesty says it has found evidence that the local armed group known as the People’s Protection Units – better known by the acronym “YPG" – forced Arabs and Turkmen in northern Syria from their homes on behalf of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Kurdish political organization that has held de facto control of northern Syria's so-called "Autonomous Administration" since January 2014. “By deliberately demolishing civilian homes, in some cases razing and burning entire villages, displacing their inhabitants with no justifiable military grounds, the Autonomous Administration is abusing its authority and brazenly flouting international humanitarian law, in attacks that amount to war crimes,” Lama Fakih, a senior crisis adviser at Amnesty, said in a statement. The YPG has earned praise for its fight against the Islamic State and the United States has offered a variety of support for the Kurdish group during the conflict, including airstrikes, training and supplies. On Monday, the YPG announced it would be joining forces with Syrian Arab groups under the name "the Democratic Forces of Syria." The move prompted speculation that Kurdish forces would be involved in a new U.S. strategy designed to push into Raqqa, the Islamic State’s base of operation. Amnesty's report suggests that sometimes entire communities have been displaced by Kurdish forces in what it says may have been retaliation for perceived support or links to the Islamic State or other groups. While Kurdish authorities have argued that cases of displacement were limited and had occurred only for security reasons, Amnesty say that they have been able to find examples where local populations had not only been displaced, but their homes had been destroyed. For example, satellite images obtained by Amnesty appear to show 225 buildings standing in the villages of Husseiniya near Tel Hamees in June 2014. However, satellite images of the same area appeared to show only 14 buildings remaining a year later. Locals say that their homes had been demolished after the YPG


The states where people have the best and worst financial habits

The states where people have the best and the worst financial health, according to a ranking from GoBankingRates.com. (Courtesy of GoBankingRates.com) Where you live might have a huge impact on your wallet — and not just for the reasons you expect. Most consumers think of affordability when they calculate how their location will affect their finances. But a person’s access to banking accounts, for example, can also have a big effect on a person’s financial well-being. That is partly the basis of a new ranking out by GoBankingRates.com, which created a list of the least and most financially savvy states. The survey also looked at whether residents in each state saved for emergencies, kept up with debt payments and what portion of consumers used alternative loans, such as payday loans, which are more expensive than most traditional loans. States were also judged on their policies for teaching children healthy financial habits. The District, for example, ranked eighth on the list of the least financially savvy states largely because high schools are not required to teach economics or personal finance. As of last year, 19 states required grade schools to teach personal finance, and 24 required high schools to teach a course in economics, according to the Council for Economic Education. (Courtesy of GoBankingRates.com) At the bottom of GoBankingRates.com’s list were Oklahoma, Kentucky, Nevada and Arkansas. Dead last was Mississippi, which had the highest poverty rate of all 50 states last year, according to a survey by 24/7 Wall St. Possibly because of those money issues, people in Mississippi often lag other states when it comes to saving and investing, according to GoBankingRates. Sixty-four percent of Mississippi residents do not have an emergency fund, the survey found. Close to half, or 47 percent, of households lack a traditional bank account or need to supplement their accounts with another financial product such as a prepaid card. About 41 percent of consumers turn to nontraditional lenders, such as a payday lender, when they need money, more than any other state. (Courtesy of GoBankingRates.com) Many of the states ranked as financially savvy were in the north and northeast, with the top five including Virginia, Minnesota, Utah and New Hampshire. At the top of the list was North Dakota, where consumers were more likely to save, keep up with their debt and learn financial basics at an early age. Close to 75 percent


How a 16-year-old found himself caught up in China’s latest crackdown

a pro-democracy activist, live in exile, campaigning from afar. Others can’t get out and may face years of living under surveillance, their communication and movements monitored and controlled. Bao’s case stands out because he is so young — still a high school student — and because he was apprehended abroad, while trying, desperately, to escape. Bao’s troubles began in July, when his mother, Wang Yu, a lawyer who has represented Tohti and one of five Chinese feminists jailed this spring, disappeared along with more than 200 lawyers, legal aides and activists. Around the same time, Bao and his father were about to board a flight to Australia, where the teenager was set to attend classes at Melbourne’s Strathmore Secondary College, when they were dragged from the security line, separated and put into vans, according to account in the Sydney Morning Herald. “I was happily preparing to go to Australia to start my studies," the younger Bao told the paper in August. "For something like this to happen, it's like falling to hell from heaven." Neither his mother nor his father has been seen since then. Bao, meanwhile was taken to a hotel in Tianjin and then to Inner Mongolia, where he was told he could not leave China, according to family friend Liang Bo. His passport was confiscated, rights groups say. In an interview with Hong Kong’s Stand News published on Aug. 11, Bao said local officials told him he was not allowed to hire a lawyer, contact his parents’ friends or foreign groups, or study overseas. When he objected, he said, he was told the measures were “for his own good.” Asked how he was doing, he reportedly said, “I’m suffering, but not afraid.” At some more recent point — details of his journey to Burma are still spotty —Bao made it to Mong La, where he was apprehended alongside two Chinese nationals at a guest house and led away by uniformed police. From there, he appears to have been sent back to China, where he is now believed to be with his grandparents in Inner Mongolia, under house arrest. More than 80 human rights lawyers have signed a petition denouncing "extralegal and inhumane treatment" of a minor. When Philip Wen, China correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, tried to reach Bao in the Inner Mongolian city of Ulanhot on Tuesday, he was stopped by police and subjected to


Albino squirrels are rare, but here’s one spotted in Arlington

— squirrel in Washington’s Franklin Square. These albino squirrels, according to Alonso Abugattas, the natural resources manager for Arlington Parks and Recreation, are extremely rare — rarer than the already uncommon black squirrels and white squirrels. Abugattas said it’s unknown how many albino squirrels live in the D.C. region, but it’s likely not many. Albinism is a recessive trait, a complete lack of melanin. White and albino squirrels are easy for predators to spot and, unlike white squirrels, albino squirrels have trouble seeing. (Albino squirrels have pink eyes, which helps to distinguish them from white squirrels.) Oberlin College in Ohio has an unusually large population of albino squirrels, and the white animal is even the school’s mascot. If you see an albino squirrel on campus, legend has it that you’ll have good luck that day. Olney, Ill., also has a high population of these squirrels, and has used them to help market the town on mugs, shirts and Web sites. An annual census has counted about 100 white squirrels in the downtown area there — down from 182 in 1977 — and a 2002 ordinance in the town makes it illegal to kill squirrels and gives them the right of way on streets. The Washington area is more known for its rather large population of black squirrels, which is the same species as gray and white squirrels with the only difference being a color variation. As The Washington Post’s John Kelly wrote in a 2011 column, a Canadian park in Ontario sent the Smithsonian’s National Zoo batches of these black squirrels in 1902 and again in 1906 in exchange for some gray squirrels. Squirrels in general were rarer a century ago than they are today. According to the 1923 Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, the squirrels adjusted well to their new lives here and spread northward, nearly to Chevy Chase. “I think this is just a one-time deal, it may not repeat itself,” Abugattas said of the latest albino squirrel sighting in the area. “But you never know.” Read more about squirrels: City Wildlife nurses baby squirrels and finds them new homes Squirrel chilling out at National Zoo gets its moment in the sun In epic chase caught on film, a squirrel star is born Squirrel week has arrived. Post columnist John Kelly journeys to Maryland's Delmarva Peninsula to track down the elusive and endangered Delmarva fox squirrel.


British family says 74-year-old grandfather faces 350 lashes from Saudi Arabia for illegal wine

in to help their father. The family said it had worked with the British Embassy in Riyadh to no avail. "The Saudi government will only listen to him," Andree's son Simon told the Sun, referring to Cameron. On Tuesday, Cameron's office indicated that the British leader will write to Saudi authorities to protest Andree's "extremely concerning" case. “Our embassy staff are continuing to assist Mr. Andree, including regular visits to check on his welfare and frequent contact with his lawyer and family," a Foreign Office spokesman told WorldViews. Saudi and British officials told the BBC on Tuesday that "there was never any question" Andree would have been flogged, because of his age and ill health. However, his children had told the Sun that he was sentenced to the flogging last year and Saudi authorities had kept him in prison for two months longer than scheduled while they decided whether he would have to undergo the flogging. Sevag Kechichian, a researcher with Amnesty International, says a local prison doctor would have decided whether to proceed with any planned flogging after assessing Andree’s health. “He would be taken for a doctor's checkup just before the scheduled flogging, and the doctor would determine whether or not he is healthy enough to be flogged,” Kechichian said. “That's the routine.” Andree's case comes after a groundswell of international criticism over Saudi Arabia's human rights record, sparked by the flogging of blogger Raif Badawi and reports of the planned execution of activist Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr, who was arrested at 17 for allegedly taking part in anti-government protests. Saudi Arabia has responded to these criticisms forcefully over the past year, arguing that its legal system is based on sharia, or Islamic law. The flood of criticism has brought heightened scrutiny of Britain's ties with Saudi Arabia, a major financial and political partner in the Middle East. On Tuesday, the prime minister's office announced that Britain had pulled out of a proposed $9 million deal under which it would sell prison expertise to Saudi Arabia. The proposed deal had proved exceptionally controversial in Britain, with opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn last month calling for the government to cancel it. The Times of London reported that the Conservative government had been split over it, with Justice Secretary Michael Gove reported as saying that he opposed supporting a regime that carries out beheadings and stonings, while Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond


How the beer world is about to change

(Photo illustration by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller announced Tuesday they had reached a deal to combine two of the world's largest beer companies. The acquisition, which was agreed to after several failed offers over the past few years, is reportedly worth $106 billion, which would make it one of the biggest corporate mergers in history. As of now, the agreement would create a behemoth that would control nearly a third of the world's beer supply. Anheuser-Busch InBev, based in Belgium, owns a handful of the world's most famous beer brands, including Bud Light — which accounts for one in every five beers sold in the United States — Corona, Stella Artois, Beck's and Modelo. London-based SABMiller, meanwhile, sells a number of well-known brands, too, including Castle Beer, Miller Lite and Miller Genuine Draft. The company also has found success with a selection of more localized beers, such as Aguila and Poker, which are popular in parts of Latin America. Together, the combined reach would be like nothing seen before in the industry. And for that reason, there has been some reluctance regarding what that kind of power could mean for beer markets such as that of the United States, where the two companies control more than 70 percent of sales. But there's reason to believe this deal has more to do with synergies around the world than it does with exerting power over any single market. "I keep hearing people talk about how this is going to affect the U.S. market, but there will be virtually no impact at all," said Mike Mazzoni, a senior partner at Seema International and longtime beer industry veteran. "Things will literally be just as they were before." The expectation, according to Mazzoni and others in the industry, is that Anheuser-Busch InBev will have to sell its ownership stakes in companies such as Miller Coors to gain the approval of antitrust officials. As a result, familiar brands such as Miller Lite and Coors Light could end up in the hands of a third party. "That's the extent of it," Mazzoni said. "I'm told Molson Coors, which operates globally and in Canada, and sells Molson and Coors, is the likeliest buyer." Gene Kimmelman, president of Public Knowledge and a former top antitrust official, says the buyer probably will have to be large and able to handle a beer company as big as Miller


Dutch report: Buk missile downed MH17 in Ukraine

Ukraine's government was complicit in the passengers' deaths for allowing a jetliner to fly through a war zone. National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said Washington's assessment remains unaltered. “MH-17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile fired from separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine,” he said. But disputes immediately flared, suggesting Moscow could dig in. Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, was quoted by Russian media as dismissing the report as "biased" and the result of unspecified "political orders" to reach a conclusion. Dutch experts identified an area from where the missile was fired — a span of about 123 square miles that was believed mostly held by Moscow-backed rebels at the time. The Dutch Safety Board report discredits at least one Russian theory: that the passenger plane was shot down by a Ukrainian air force jet. But both the Russian and Ukrainian armies have Buk missile systems, and Russian officials can and probably will continue to argue that the Ukrainian army was behind the attack on the plane. In an effort to buttress that argument, the Russian weapons manufacturer Almaz-Antey destroyed a decommissioned airliner using a Buk missile in a controlled experiment. The goal of the experiment was to show that only the antiquated version of the Buk missile used by Ukraine, and not the modern version used by the Russian military, could have caused the damage done to MH17. Nick de Larrinaga, Europe editor for IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly, questioned the assertion by the company that Russia no longer operates the missile variant that carries the warhead cited in the report. “This is not borne out by the evidence, which shows they remained in Russian service and in Russian military stockpiles at the time of the shoot down,” he said in a statement. Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 298 people fell in a field in Ukraine. "The results of our experiment contradict the Dutch report," said Yan Novikov, general director of the company, at Almaz-Antey's Tuesday conference. "It can now be clearly said that if a rocket was used it was a Buk 9M38, not a Buk 9M38M1, fired from the area of Zaroshchenske." Tuesday's report is the first official finding by Dutch investigators since they announced that MH17 had been penetrated by "a large number of high-energy objects,” indicating shrapnel from a missile, in September 2014. A Dutch broadcaster, NOS, citing a Ukrainian official earlier attached to the


Why trying to help poor countries might actually hurt them

wealth, yet slower growth. Economists postulate that this "natural resource curse" happens for a variety of reasons, but one is that such wealth can strengthen and corrupt a government. Like revenue from oil or diamonds, wealth from foreign aid can be a corrupting influence on weak governments, “turning what should be beneficial political institutions into toxic ones,” Deaton writes in his book “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality.” This wealth can make governments more despotic, and it can also increase the risk of civil war, since there is less power sharing, as well as a lucrative prize worth fighting for. Deaton and his supporters offer dozens of examples of humanitarian aid being used to support despotic regimes and compounding misery, including in Zaire, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Biafra, and the Khmer Rouge on the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Citing Africa researcher Alex de Waal, Deaton writes that “aid can only reach the victims of war by paying off the warlords, and sometimes extending the war.” He also gives plenty of examples in which the United States gives aid “for ‘us,’ not for ‘them’” – to support our strategic allies, our commercial interests or our moral or political beliefs, rather than the interests of the local people. The United States gave aid to Ethiopia for decades under then-President Meles Zenawi Asres, because he opposed Islamic fundamentalism and Ethiopia was so poor. Never mind that Asres was "one of the most repressive and autocratic dictators in Africa," Deaton writes. According to Deaton, “the award for sheer creativity” goes to Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, president of Mauritania from 1984 to 2005. Western countries stopped giving aid to Taya after his government became too politically repressive, but he managed to get the taps turned on again by becoming one of the few Arab nations to recognize Israel. Some might argue for bypassing corrupt governments altogether and distributing food or funding directly among the people. Deaton acknowledges that, in some cases, this might be worth it to save lives. But one problem with this approach is that it’s difficult: To get to the powerless, you often have to go through the powerful. Another issue, is that it undermines what people in developing countries need most -- “an effective government that works with them for today and tomorrow,” he writes. The old calculus of foreign aid was that poor countries were merely


PM Update: Breezy and cooler on Wednesday, but mostly sunny and pleasant

Two hour radar loop of rain and storm movement through the area. Refresh page to update. The clouds lingered through mid-afternoon, but the cold front failed to deliver any measurable rain to the D.C. area. Temperatures quickly rebounded this afternoon into the low to mid-70s. Now that the cold front is east of us, the most notable weather we have to talk about is a pop-up shower or two this evening, and then how nice and fall-like it will be until a cool-down this weekend. Through Tonight: Tomorrow (Wednesday): See Matt Rogers’s forecast through the weekend. And if you haven’t already, join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter Want our 5 a.m. forecast delivered to your email in-box? Subscribe here. (Jenn Vogel via Flickr) (This post, originally published at 4:05 p.m. was updated at 4:30 and 5:00 p.m. to reflect a few stray showers that formed from the District and to the south and east).


This refugee has been stuck in asylum limbo for 25 years

of one of the few Muslim victims of a terror attack that killed 77 people at a summer camp on the island of Utøya in 2011. Mubarak Haji Ahmed and his older brother Khalid narrowly survived the attack, while another brother was killed. The family originally came from Djibouti but later lived in Yemen. Khalid and their father had made false statements about their identity when they arrived in Norway and were deported two years ago. But human rights advocates are outraged that Norwegian authorities are in the process of also deporting Mubarak, who was 10 years old when he entered the country with his parents. Yemane Teferi is facing a similar fate. At the age of 17, he fled Eritrea, where he says he was a courier for the Eritrean Liberation Front -- a guerrilla group and now a rival of the current regime. According to the Norwegian anti-racism center, the country's Immigration Appeals Board did not view that affiliation as a potential threat for Teferi. Human rights campaigners, however, say that it could endanger his life if he returns to Eritrea. On its Web site, Human Right Watch states that "forced labor during conscription, arbitrary arrests, detentions, and enforced disappearances" are common in Eritrea. "Other abuses include torture, degrading treatment in detention, restrictions on freedoms of expression and movement, and repression of religious freedom," the organization concluded. "The response from the Immigration Appeals Board is almost Kafkaesque in its lack of understanding of the basics of the political situation in Eritrea. And this is the kind of nonsense answer we received after waiting a very, very long time for a new decision," Berglund Steen said. In its statement, the appeals board did not respond to a specific question about whether the committee had taken into account potential threats Teferi might face in Eritrea. "I am old now," Teferi said by phone. For years, he has been suffering from severe headaches and depression. "It's impossible for me to go back. But here in Norway, people usually don't speak to me either. Maybe in church, they sometimes do." Activist Berglund Steen has collected money to take his case to court again. But chances that previous decisions will be overturned are low. "If he dies like this, he will finally - for the first time - have a plot of ground in Norway where he can stay legally," Berglund Steen said.


Clinton and Sanders: Snowden should face prosecution

Edward Snowden during an interview in 2013. (Glenn Greenwald/Laura Poitras/EPA) LONDON — Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor? It was a question Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Snowden, a former NSA contractor who disclosed details of U.S. and U.K. mass surveillance activities, had broken the law and shouldn’t be brought home without “facing the music.” Snowden has been living in exile in Russia since 2013 and recently told the British Broadcasting Corporation he was The former secretary of state’s comments that Snowden “stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands” were seized upon by the Guardian newspaper, which said no evidence has been put forward to back up that claim. “To suggest otherwise, as Clinton did, was perilously close to teasing the American public with unsubstantiated rumor mongering,” A Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who worked with Snowden, has called the Sunday Times story "the very opposite of journalism." Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said he would shut down the NSA’s existing surveillance program if he was elected president, agreed with Clinton that Snowden had broken the law and that there should be a “penalty.” But he also said, “I think what he did in educating us should be taken into consideration.” Jim Webb, a former Virginia senator, said Snowden should face the legal system, while Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, said “whistleblowers do not run to Russia and try to get protection from Putin.” Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island governor and senator, was the only candidate to say he would “bring him home.” “What Snowden did showed that the American government was acting illegally,” he said.


The Daily 202: Hillary Clinton won the debate (and six other takeaways from Las Vegas)

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, but the report does not assign blame or responsibility. - “The head of al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Syria has called on followers to carry out retaliatory attacks in Russia, raising the specter of blowback on Russian soil over Moscow’s military intervention to aid Syria’s embattled government.” (Loveday Morris and Natasha Abbakumova) - Lamar Odom, former Los Angeles Laker and member of the Kardashian family by marriage, was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel and has been hospitalized. (Justin Wm. Moyer) - Peru is doing little to stop the growing flow of cocaine out of the country. - “A 55-year-old American missionary was ambushed and killed by gunmen while driving in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Saturday. A 4-year-old child who was traveling with her was abducted and hasn’t been seen since the incident.” (Abby Phillip) - New Hubble Telescope images show that the Red Spot on Jupiter is shrinking. In the last year, it shrunk by 150 miles and is now half the width it was a century ago, when it was around 25,000 miles across. (NASA) POWER PLAYERS IN THE NEWS: - Donald Trump will host “Saturday Night Live” on Nov. 7. - Carly Fiorina raised $6.8 million in the third quarter. She spent just $2.2 million during that time and has $5.5 million cash on hand, a low burn rate of 34 percent. (Matea Gold) - A D.C.-based staffer for Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) was arrested last week in Baltimore after allegedly beating his lover with a shovel. Levin, the ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee, has put his 32-year-old online communications director on unpaid leave. - Former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell formally asked the Supreme Court to review his conviction on corruption charges in a filing that spanned 36 pages of arguments with hundreds more in appendices. (Matt Zapotosky) - Rand Paul livestreamed his day on the trail in Iowa. The highlight of an otherwise boring day was when he listened to Metallica as he was driven between events. (Ben Terris) - Democrat Deborah Ross, a former North Carolina state House member, will announce today that she is challenging Republican Sen. Richard Burr next year. (WRAL) WAPO HIGHLIGHTS: —”The secret surveillance of ‘suspicious’ blacks in one of the nation’s poshest neighborhoods,” by Terrence McCoy: — “Federal prosecutors will call on Ron Paul to make case against former aides,” by David


Dazzling new images of Jupiter show the shrinking of the Great Red Spot

New imagery from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals details never before seen on Jupiter. The high-resolution maps and spinning globes are the first products to come from a program to study the solar system’s outer planets each year using the Hubble Space Telescope. Above, you can see Jupiter in 4k Ultra HD. Which is kind of useless, unless you own a 4k television. And if you do, can I come over? [Jupiter might have wrecked the first version of our solar system] Anyway, the point is: NASA has some really high quality shots of Jupiter. Including global maps to take a gander at: A look at the best photos of space. But they're more than just pretty pictures. Because the maps represent nearly back-to-back rotations of the planet, scientists can use them to study wind speed. Scientists have used the maps to spot an unusual wave near the equator -- similar to formations seen in Earth's atmosphere when cyclones are beginning to form -- that's only been seen once before on Jupiter. his false-color close-up of Jupiter shows cyclones (arrows) and the wave (vertical lines). (NASA/ESA/Goddard/UCBerkeley/JPL-Caltech/STScI) “Until now, we thought the wave seen by Voyager 2 might have been a fluke,” Glenn Orton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who co-authored a paper on the findings, said in a statement. “As it turns out, it’s just rare!” [Hubble catches a rare three-moon-parade in front of Jupiter] The new images also help scientists keep an eye on the The motions of clouds, with close-ups showing the movement of a unique filament, not seen before, in the Great Red Spot.(NASA/ESA/Goddard/UCBerkeley/JPL-Caltech/STScI) But as these images confirm, the GRS continues to shrink in size. It may have reduced by as much as half in the few hundred years we've been keeping tabs on it. These images show that it's about 150 miles shorter now than it was in 2014, and that it's growing rounder in shape. Its core is also growing less distinct than the rest of it, in terms of color. In the right-hand closeup of the storm, which focuses on red wavelengths, you can see a filament snaking through the center. That's a feature NASA scientists have never seen before. The images, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, are the first in a set of annual portraits that will be taken of the outer planets. So next year we'll get to see how


In Vegas, a debate full of losers … and Hillary Clinton

compared with that of everyone else onstage … yup. If this were a résumé-measuring context, Clinton had it in the bag. They had their shots, in some cases. O’Malley — hip and young at 52 — leveled what he clearly thought would be a serious taunt against Sanders, asking, “HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO THE EASTERN SHORE? HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO WESTERN MARYLAND?” and accusing him of pandering. “I don’t think I am pandering,” Sanders dismissed him. “But you have not been in the United States Congress.” (Sure, being in Maryland is probably a more popular move than being in the United States Congress, but I am not sure that this is a winning argument.) So much for O’Malley, who spent the rest of the debate talking about Glass-Steagall (the youth he is trying to attract clearly love Glass-Steagall). On Glass-Steagall, Chafee said that he had no idea what he was voting for because it was his first vote and his father had died and he had just arrived in Washington and he had not known what was going on. Other than this, O’Malley appeared to be competing for Mr. Congeniality. He was so congenial that he turned toward Clinton like a sunflower toward the sun. (Perhaps it would have been better if he had turned toward the camera instead. He seemed to discover it midway through the debate.) He devoted his entire closing statement to saying how exciting the debate had been and how it was an honor just to be (almost certainly not) nominated. (“I am very, very grateful to have been able to be on this stage with this distinguished group of candidates tonight,” he gushed.) Meanwhile, Jim Webb, like a “Jeopardy!” contestant whose buzzer was not working, stood in a corner growing increasingly frustrated that he was not allowed to speak. Seemingly alone among human beings, he had apparently expected that the debate’s focus would be Jim Webb. Here is a sample contribution from Webb: WEBB: Anderson, can I come into this discussion at some point? COOPER: Well — yes, you’ll be coming in next, but she was directly quoted, Senator. WEBB: Thank you. I’ve been standing over here for about ten minutes, trying. COOPER: OK. WEBB: It’s just — it’s gone back and forth over there. So much for Webb, the only candidate whose name recognition actually decreased in the course of the evening.


D.C.’s oldest home is on the market for $10.5 million

Photo of the entryway for the Lindens home at 2401 Kalorama Rd. NW. (Photos by Piers Freezer/Homevisit) D.C.’s oldest home is on the market, according to Washington Fine Properties’ Christopher Leary. A piece of history is available to anyone willing to pay the $10.5 million price. But there’s an asterisk: The Georgian-style house wasn’t actually built in D.C. “The Lindens” is named for the trees that surrounded it when it was built in Danvers, Mass., in 1754. It was later relocated to the swank Kalorama neighborhood. A Washington couple, George M. and Miriam Hubbard Morris, bought the home in 1934 for about $13,000, had it dismantled, with every piece numbered, shipped it to D.C. on six railroad cars, and rebuilt, exactly as it was. The family wanted an authentic colonial home to house their extensive antique collection, but since D.C. was founded in 1790, nothing around here quite fit the bill. Much of the venerable house, which has been on the market for about three weeks, remains as it was in 1754, Leary said, save for a few updates: wig-powdering rooms were transformed into bathrooms and a sauna was added. According to WFP co-founder and executive vice president William F. X. Moody, no one who’s expressed interest in “The Lindens” had been looking for a new home — but the opportunity proved enticing. “There are some buyers where it takes a specific house to bring them forward,” Moody said. And while homes in this ultra-luxury price range usually take around two years to sell, Moody doesn’t expect the house, which is on sale for only the second time since 1982, to sit for very long. Kenneth Brody, the retired co-founder of $8.2 billion hedge fund firm Taconic Capital Advisors, and his wife, Nina, are the current, and only the third, owners of the home. The “tavern room” of the Lindens home. The dining room.


Student: U-Va., stop spinning news about sexual assault

A student at the University of Virginia was surprised by the way the university administration handled a controversial issue recently. After a four-year federal investigation into the way the university’s administration deals with complaints of sexual assault, Nora Neus read the results of that investigation quite differently than the way the university chose to present them. [Read the Office for Civil Rights letter to the University of Virginia.] Neus, a master of public policy student and a journalist who has worked for Anderson Cooper at CNN and U-Va.’s student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, offers her opinion here. By Nora Neus Nora Neus (Jack Looney) Two weeks ago, I received an all-student e-mail from the University of Virginia public relations office on behalf of President Teresa Sullivan. We get a lot of these, most often telling us to be careful with drinking before a night football game, or with unfortunate frequency, announcing the death of a fellow classmate. I skimmed this one quickly, but it didn’t seem to be much more than yet another e-mail extolling the progress U-Va. had made in handling the response to sexual assault on campus. Apparently the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) had finished an investigation and while there were some past issues, the current conduct was “exemplary.” I deleted the message. But a few hours later, I noticed a headline in The Washington Post: “Dept. of Education: U-Va. violated federal rules for responding to sexual violence.” At first, I thought they were talking about a different report. The university’s e-mail noted prominently that, “In their findings, [the Department of Education] noted that we provided consistent support and comfort to survivors, and also found our new Policy on Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment and Other Forms of Interpersonal Violence to be ‘exemplary’ and fully in compliance with Title IX.” I tried to find the full report online to figure out what was going on. The e-mail from U-Va. included five hyperlinked resources. One directed to an article published in the University-run publication “UVa Today,” written by a paid “University Spokesperson,” with the headline, “U.Va. Moves Forward with Sexual Assault and Safety Enhancements Following Conclusion of OCR Compliance Review.” But there was no link to the actual report. I gave up on trying to navigate the complicated Department of Education Web site after half an hour with no luck, and finally found the report embedded


Ebola virus can linger in semen of survivors for 9 months, study shows

An electron micrograph scan shows the Ebola virus emerging from an infected cell. Researchers have long known that the Ebola virus can linger in certain bodily fluids even after an infected person begins to recover. But a new study shows that remnants of the virus remained in the semen of some male survivors in Sierra Leone for 9 months after the onset of symptoms, raising new questions about how long Ebola might remain transmissible. "These results come at a critically important time, reminding us that while Ebola case numbers continue to plummet, Ebola survivors and their families continue to struggle with the effects of the disease," Bruce Aylward, the World Health Organization's top Ebola official, said in a statement. "[The study] provides further evidence that survivors need continued, substantial support for the next 6 to 12 months to meet these challenges and to ensure their partners are not exposed." The findings, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, are part of a long-term effort to decipher the mysteries that still surround the deadly disease. While the unprecedented Ebola outbreak in West Africa has killed more 11,000 people, it also has left behind something previous outbreaks did not -- thousands of survivors that researchers hope can teach us more about the virus. Wednesday's study involved analyzing semen samples from 93 Sierra Leonean men who had survived Ebola. Researchers detected the presence of the virus's genetic material in the semen of all nine men tested in the first three months after their illness began. More than half of the 40 men tested between four and six months after the onset of their symptoms also tested positive, as did a quarter of the 43 men tested between seven to nine months after their illness began. [Sex in a time of Ebola] The findings shed new light on how long the virus can remain in the body. As recently as last October, the WHO noted that while the virus is spread primarily through contact with blood, feces and vomit -- and typically during the height of illness -- it also had been detected in breast milk, urine and semen. "In a convalescent male, the virus can persist in semen for at least 70 days; one study suggests persistence for more than 90 days," the organization wrote then. Wednesday's study suggests that the virus can hang around even longer than many researchers expected.


Oregon and the normalization of marijuana legalization

marijuana in the next few years, most notably California, which is likely to pass a legalization referendum next year. In 2010, Californians only narrowly rejected Proposition 19, at which time I predicted that things were likely to be different in the near future. Marijuana legalization is still opposed by an unlikely coalition of strong social conservatives and the United Nations. But it definitely has strong political momentum on its side. To be completely clear, I do not claim that marijuana should be legalized merely because majority public opinion now supports it. Having written a book on political ignorance, I recognize that the fact that a policy enjoys majority support is at best only a weak consideration in its favor. But I do support legalization nonetheless because it will increase individual freedom, and mitigate some of the terrible harm caused by the War on Drugs. As conservative icon William F. Buckley put it in 1995, “it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana.” Legalization advocates still have a long way to go before they can claim final victory. Even if many more states abolish their laws banning marijuana, the federal law banning remains in force. Even if it is not enforced very often, its very existence is a deterrent to investment in marijuana production and distribution. Enforcement could expand with a change in public opinion, or the election of a hostile presidential administration. So far, there has not been much in the way of a serious effort to repeal the federal law. Hopefully, that will change in the next few years. Even if marijuana is fully legalized in the next few years, it will only be the start of the larger struggle to end the War on Drugs as a whole. Most of the enormous harm inflicted by that war is caused by the banning of other drugs. Although skepticism about the War on Drugs is growing on both left and right, as yet there is little public support for legalizing currently banned drugs other than marijuana. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the current wave of state-level marijuana legalization is not the end of the War on Drugs. It isn’t even the beginning of the end. But hopefully it will turn out to be the end of the beginning of its demise.


The strange star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure

perhaps an extraordinary one was in order. Aliens. Or, to be more specific, something built by aliens — a “swarm of megastructures,” as he told the Atlantic, likely outfitted with solar panels to collect energy from the star. [No, we haven’t discovered alien megastructures around a distant star] “When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright said. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” To be sure, both Boyajian and Wright believe the possibility of alien megastructures around KIC 8462852 is very, very remote. It’s worthy of hypothesis, Wright told Slate, “but we should also approach it skeptically.” Yet compared to the vast majority of supposed sightings of signs of extraterrestrial life, this one has some credibility. Here’s why: KIC 8462852 was discovered through Planet Hunters, a citizen science program launched at Yale University in 2010. Using data from the Kepler Space Telescope, volunteers sift through records of brightness levels from roughly 150,000 stars beyond our solar system. Ordinarily, planet hunters are looking for the telltale drops in brightness that happen when a planet crosses in front of its sun. That’s how we identify planets now — brief interruptions in the progress of light as it makes its way toward Earth. Not a presence, but an absence. Already the project has uncovered a few confirmed planets and at least several dozen more planet candidates. But one finding from the program was unlike anything else scientists had ever seen. Volunteers marked it out as unusual in 2011, right after the program started: a star whose light curves seemed to dip tremendously at irregular intervals. At one point, about 800 days into the survey, the star’s brightness dropped by 15 percent. Later, around day 1,500, it dropped by a shocking 22 percent. Whatever was causing the dips, it could not have been a planet — even a Jupiter-sized planet, the biggest in our solar system, would only dim this star by 1 percent as it transited across, Slate reported. (The Kepler telescope was badly damaged in 2013, so the researchers don’t have data from more recent dips, if there were any). This artist rendition provided by NASA shows the Kepler space telescope. (NASA/AP) Another natural force must be at work here. In their paper, Boyajian and her colleagues went


How the NSO plans to get funky with Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar will be performing songs with the National Symphony Orchestra. Conductor Steven Reineke hopes that adding the orchestra will make Lamar’s music even more epic. On Tuesday, rapper Kendrick Lamar and his touring band will join forces with an unlikely collaborator: the entire National Symphony Orchestra. To make the partnership work, NSO Pops principal conductor Steven Reineke will have to translate between two groups of musicians that practically speak different languages. For instance, while orchestras mark time with measures and movements, hip-hop bands reference verses and choruses. And while a violinist says “fortissimo,” a hip-hop drummer probably just says “really loud.” How will this disparate group of musicians figure out how to play together with just seven hours of rehearsals before the sold-out show? We asked Reineke, the guy who’s been tasked with making it all come together. How did the idea of collaborating with Kendrick Lamar come about? It really started to happen last year, when we collaborated with Nas to perform his classic album, “Illmatic.” It was such a success that we thought, “We’ve really got to do more of this.” There’s nobody hotter in hip-hop than Kendrick Lamar right now, and it was a little bit of a pipe dream. But our team reached out to his team and they thought it was a really fascinating idea. There’s quite a bit of controversial language. Was there concern about having the N-word dropped so frequently at the Kennedy Center? In Kendrick’s case, I don’t believe it to be gratuitous. I believe it’s making a point. He’s got his message and he’s speaking in the real vernacular poetry of today. Not all art is going to go down easy; sometimes it’s important to be challenged. The orchestra was warned. What does the orchestra think about playing with him? There are some true fans in the orchestra, but it’s an 80-piece symphony, so I’m sure there are also some people going, “God, I hate this. Why are we doing this?” For those people, I want them to end up thinking, “Oh, this is harder than I thought it was going to be. This is better than I thought it was going to be.” It’s going to take some concentration and real skill to pull it off. Are you a big fan of his? I’ll be quite honest. A couple years back, this was not my go-to music. People would


As a Danish zoo publicly dissects a young lion, questions about conservation and compassion

past two decades. Commenters on the zoo’s Facebook page mostly supported the program, agreeing that it would be educational for kids. “The world is NOT a pink Disney movie,” one person wrote in Danish, the AP said. Although Danish zoogoers were mostly unfazed, people elsewhere were incensed — and not for the first time. Last February, a Copenhagen Zoo giraffe named Marius was euthanized to avoid inbreeding, then dissected and fed to the zoo’s lions, tigers and leopards. Staff at the zoo got death threats and the ouster of the zoo’s scientific director, Bengt Holst, was also demanded. Jack Hanna, the TV personality and director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio, called Copenhagen Zoo’s decision “the most abominable, insensitive, ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of,” according to CNN. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which represents zoos in the U.S., issued a statement against giraffe’s euthanasia. “The Association of Zoos and Aquariums regrets the unfortunate incident at the Copenhagen Zoo involving the death of a giraffe,” it read. “Incidents of that sort do not happen at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums.” Unlike many European zoos, AZA institutions use contraception to prevent the birth of animals that can’t be cared for. And, according to the New York Times, after Marius’ death People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals projected a huge lit-up message at the zoo’s entrance: “Zoos are animal prisons,” it blared. “You paid the ticket, Marius paid with his life.” This time, people are no less upset. “Thousands of animals are euthanized each year in zoos across Europe where managers feel that preserving a species is more important than the individual animals,” reads the petition to stop the dissection. “The Odense Zoo needs to understand that their obvious lack of respect for individual animals’ lives is unacceptable.” [National Zoo’s giant panda cub is officially named Bei Bei] Williams-Mitchell chalked up the disparity in methods partly to cultural differences. But, he added, humans are willing to let animals die for all kinds of other reasons — livestock gets killed for food, pets get euthanized at overcrowded shelters, frogs and sheep are killed so that high school students can cut apart their organs in class. “What is the difference between those deaths and this one?” he wanted to know. Roughly 3,000 to 5,000 animals are euthanized at EAZA zoos every year, executive director Dr Lesley Dickie told the BBC.


The South says no to marijuana but yes to hemp

hemp farms could be hiding acres of marijuana, which would become harder to detect. The South has largely resisted legalizing pot, even for medical use. (Medical marijuana is legal in 23 states and recreational pot is legal in four.) But in states where tobacco once reigned supreme, industrial hemp has come back into vogue. Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia are among the 20 states that have enacted laws allowing researchers and farmers to revive the long-forbidden plant. And late last month, the North Carolina legislature approved a proposal to do the same; that bill is on the governor’s desk. The end of federal subsidies for tobacco in 2004 and decreasing popularity of smoking have wiped out much of the crop’s prominence and profitability. The United States grew $1.8 billion worth of tobacco in 2014, a far cry from its peak in 1981, when the country produced $3.5 billion worth, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In Kentucky, 60,000 farms once grew some tobacco, mostly family farmers looking to make extra money, said Will Snell, an agricultural economist at the University of Kentucky. Now, just 4,500 do, as large-scale production has taken on a bigger role and family farmers have been pushed out of the business. Hemp’s backers acknowledge that the plant probably won’t completely fill the gap left by tobacco, but they hope it will give farmers such as Harrod a new, potentially lucrative option. The Hemp Industries Association estimates that Americans bought $620 million worth of hemp products last year — including clothing, building materials and food made with hemp seeds, said Eric Steenstren, the industry group’s executive director. “It’s not the replacement, but it’s part of the solution,” said James Comer, Kentucky’s agriculture commissioner, a Republican who sponsored the state’s hemp bill when he was in the legislature. The crop has set off something of a gold rush in states such as Kentucky, where hundreds have applied for permits to grow it, Comer said. Harrod said she will apply to grow five acres next year. She and her siblings stopped growing tobacco in 2002 as the crop was in decline and their mother died of lung cancer. Other alternatives, such as vegetables, hogs and cattle, haven’t made up the difference. Hemp’s relationship with marijuana has helped fuel some of the interest in the crop. The two plants are different varieties of the same species,


The impossibility of withdrawing from Afghanistan, visualized

At a news conference Thursday, Oct. 15, President Obama says the U.S. will maintain 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of 2016 and will not go down to a normal embassy presence by the end of 2016, but instead will keep 5,500 troops at a small number of bases. When he was running for president in 2008, Barack Obama pledged to end the war in Iraq so that resources could be redirected to the fight in Afghanistan. When Obama ran for reelection, he pledged to similarly end the war in Afghanistan. In 2011, the war in Iraq came to an end. Last December, the United States and its NATO partners marked the end of combat operations in Afghanistan. Except. On Thursday, President Obama announced that the United States will keep forces in Afghanistan even beyond his tenure as president, meaning that the war in that country -- or, at least, American troops -- would span at least three presidencies. Until Obama wound down operations in Iraq and ramped up in Afghanistan, the former conflict used far more American resources. But Afghanistan has defied resolution. Reports from the Congressional Research Service detail the monthly build-up in the two countries and the deployment of contractors to support those troops from 2008 onward. Iraq began with a huge investment that tapered off under the new president. The effort in Afghanistan ramped up under Obama, but it never completely tapered off. The United States currently has about 9,800 troops in the country, and is expected to have about 5,500 there after Obama leaves office. That's more than were in the country in March of 2002, when the conflict was just getting underway. [Here's how much of your life the U.S. has been at war] During Thursday's announcement, Obama again drew a line between the combat mission and the troops that are currently in Afghanistan. "While America’s combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures," he said. Which reinforces that the delineation of the start and end of modern conflicts is subjective, lacking declarations of war and documents of surrender. Regardless, the 14-plus year-old conflict in Afghanistan is among the lengthiest in American history, depending on how you draw the boundaries of the fight in Vietnam. It seems obvious, though, that the end of the war in Afghanistan has not yet arrived.


No, we haven’t discovered alien megastructures around a distant star

(AP/Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) Years ago, in the Pleistocene, I spoke with the great physicist Freeman Dyson about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. He posited that we'd find the aliens with our telescopes -- that we'd see something that was not natural. [Stephen Hawking announces $100 million hunt for alien life] Dyson, of course, is famed for his conjecture that intelligent civilizations would build some kind of megastructure around a star to capture and use its energy (think how much solar energy we let go to waste in our own solar system!). Still, such a Dyson Sphere would be just one potential megastructure. Astronomers have long understood that advanced civilizations, in theory, should be detectable through some anomaly in the radiation emitted by a star. But as we toy with these ideas we shouldn't whip every mysterious data point into a giant froth of speculation. The Kepler Space Telescope detected a star, KIC 8462852, with an unusual light pattern. The light from the star dips dramatically in irregular intervals. That's not the pattern seen in stars with transiting planets. Thus one conjecture is that this could be due to a swarm of alien megastructures, like lots of solar panels. [Why NASA’s top scientist is sure that we’ll find signs of alien life in the next decade] Here’s a look back at some of the space telescope’s discoveries. Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, who is involved in SETI research, told the Atlantic, “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” [The strange star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure] But it's also what you expect the universe to throw at you, repeatedly: stuff you can't quite figure out on first glance. Anyone remember pulsars? In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Anthony Hewitt discovered a mysterious pulse of electromagnetic radiation coming from the same location in the sky. The object, or whatever it was, emitted a pulse every 1.3 seconds. Stars don't do that. One possibility: some kind of alien beacon. Much excitement ensued. But further research concluded that it was an entirely new kind of object: a rapidly rotating, extraordinarily dense "neutron star." Kepler may simply have detected a star swarmed by comets. Not nearly as interesting an explanation. Or there may be something causing that unusual pattern of


Watch flesh-eating beetles strip this body down to the bone

Hope you're enjoying lunch! These flesh-eating beetles are sure enjoying theirs: Watch Flesh-Eating Beetles Strip Bodies to the Bone | Deep Look The above video -- the latest from "Deep Look," a series by PBS and KQED -- shows Dermestid Beetles doing what they do best. As the video explains, these beetles are an essential tool for museums that store preserved animal specimens. You can count on flesh-eating insects to leave skeletal remains squeaky clean, but not damaged. They can pick a small animal clean in just a day. [These ‘zombie’ bees make the flight of the living dead] The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley, shown in the video, has kept a colony of beetles going since 1924. But they have to be careful not to let them loose: Flesh-eating beetles are great guys to know when you've got a bone to pick clean, but they'll also eat through your carefully crafted taxidermy if they get the chance. (PBS via YouTube) They'll also eat paper or fabric in a pinch, which isn't so great. On the bright side, they don't care for living flesh. What happens when the beetles aren't biting? According to Smithsonian Magazine, scientists will spritz a little ammonia on the carcass. Ammonia gas is formed as bodies decompose, so for the beetles it's a little bit like getting a sudden whiff of fresh, hot french fries. Yum. Read More: Here’s what happens to your body when you die These scientists raised bot fly larvae in their own bodies — on purpose ‘Vampire squirrel’ caught on camera for the first time ever Watch museum bees get a shampoo and blowout before their debut This beetle’s butt is basically a machine gun


Bees love caffeine, too — and tricky flowers take advantage

back [to the empty feeder] for many more days, and more often within each day." The control bees -- the ones who hadn't had caffeine -- would check the flower they'd fed at previously, but would quickly move on to forage for food elsewhere. "If they've had caffeine, they're less likely to check the surrounding area," Couvillon said. "They're really hooked on that location." [Norway is creating a ‘bee highway’ to protect pollinators] Caffeine can be found in the nectar of coffee and citrus plants, among others. This drugging effect helps explain why caffeine -- which plants put in their roots and leaves to turn off herbivores with the bitter taste -- also shows up in nectar, which is meant to be sweet and appetizing. Researchers had previously investigated nicotine in nectar for the same reason, but found that these plants actually used nectar bitterness to their advantage: Bees, repulsed by the bitter taste of the nicotine, would move more quickly from flower to flower. "That's a behavioral effect that's similar to its primary purpose in the stem and leaves," Couvillon said. "But the caffeine seems to be drugging the bees." The caffeine addiction isn't exactly harmful, at least as far as Couvillon and her colleagues can tell. But it throws off the efficiency of the colony. By ignoring identical plants that lack caffeine, they're foraging sub-optimally. They're not taking full advantage of their potential food sources. "I think when people think about pollination, they think of the collaborative nature of it, the nice, sweet partnership of it," Couvillon said. "But as with many partnerships, there’s potential for conflict. One side will always want to cheat the other if they could get away with it." In the past several weeks, a spate of studies have appeared in scientific journals suggesting the culprit behind mass deaths of honeybees is widely used pesticides called neonicotinoids. On June 23, President Obama signed a memorandum establishing the first-ever federal pollinator strategy and the Agriculture Department announced $8 million in incentives to farmers and ranchers in five states who establish new habitats for honeybees. Read More: These caffeine-addicted beetles are using bacteria to ruin all of our coffee Here’s why coffee makes you poop These ‘zombie’ bees make the flight of the living dead New studies find that bees actually want to eat the pesticides that hurt them This brilliant plant pretends to be poop


Eritrea’s soccer team defects … again

and gross human rights violations" and said that its year-long investigation may have uncovered evidence of crimes against humanity. Huge numbers of Eritreans have risked their lives to flee the country in recent years, becoming refugees in a bid to escape indefinite national service, arbitrary arrests and detention. Sports is a rare path to foreign travel in a country where few are allowed to journey abroad. According to local newspaper The Voice, the Eritrean players in Botswana have said that they are refusing to return home, as they fear they will be made to join the army upon their return. The Eritrean government won independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a 30-year civil war. It relies on a fervent, sometimes paranoid, nationalism for support in place of democratic legitimacy and presidential elections. Repeatedly dismissing international criticism, it labeled the U.N. report a "cynical political travesty" and an attack "not so much on the government, but on a civilized people and society who cherish human values and dignity." In particular, the government likes to point to improvements in the country's living standards over the past two decades as evidence that criticism is unfounded – for example, Eritrea appears to have been the only country to achieve all of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals related to health. Eritrea's sporting success is perhaps a more visceral sign that some things are going right in the country: This summer, Eritrean cyclists Merhawi Kudus and Daniel Teklehaimanot made history by becoming the first black Africans to compete in the Tour de France, a remarkable achievement. The high-profile defections of athletes remain an embarrassing problem for the country, however. While Kudus and Teklehaimanot told reporters they were proud of their country, fears that three other young Eritrean cyclists might defect may have led the Swiss government to reject their visa applications last year. In the past, the Eritrean government has sought a "deposit" from athletes traveling abroad in a bid to ensure their return. If an absconding athlete has family remaining in Eritrea, these relatives may well face government retaliation too. “They punish the families by pushing them to pay around 5,000 euros [almost $6,000] and for those that have 65-year-old mothers with no money, those mothers are jailed for three or four months,” Berketeab Tesfai, an Eritrean now living in the Netherlands and working with former Eritrean national soccer players, told the New York Times


Federal Player of the Week

applications such as rotation sensors, improving the functioning of gyroscopes used to stabilize spacecraft and airplanes. Some day, the atomtronic circuitry also may be able to perform quantum computations that could offer a significant leap forward in computing speed, performance and capability, and lead to the next generation of technology that will enable smaller and cheaper devices. Katharine Gebbie, the senior adviser to the director of NIST’s Physical Measurement Laboratory, said, “there are very few people who can open up a whole new field.” “That takes creativity, drive and skill,” Gebbie said. “Gretchen has demonstrated that. She is leading the field.” Carl Williams, chief of the Quantum Measurement Division at NIST, said Campbell did not come up with the idea of atomtronics, but “all the breakthroughs have been hers” and “everyone is trying to catch her.” There are two ways to get recognition, Williams added, “Be first or be better. In her case, she’s done both. She’s been the person who has pushed and led the path.” Just as electronic devices manipulate the flow of electrons, atomtronic devices manipulate the flow of atoms, which are made up of electrons, protons and neutrons. Since atoms have properties that are very different from electrons—they do not, for instance, have charged particles—atomtronic devices have the potential to go beyond the capabilities of electronics. Using light to control matter, Campbell created the first controllable atomtronic circuit in 2011 by moving ultra-cold atoms through a wire made of light—just as electrons flow through a metal wire. To this simple circuit she added a permeable barrier, also made of light, to serve as the all-important control element, much as a transistor can control the current in an electronic circuit. “There are lots of opportunities to see how atoms behave. We’re still in the infancy of learning how to control our systems and what we can do,” said Campbell, a Silver Spring resident. Jun Ye, a NIST fellow, said Campbell is an “experimentalist” and is “discovering things completely new.” “She studies quantum physics using ultra-cold atoms,” said Ye. “This way the atoms slow down and their behavior can be more easily observed. They can exhibit phenomena that they do not exhibit when they are hot.” Campbell’s achievements include inventing a new technique that would enable an atomtronic circuit to function as the most precise and compact rotation sensor, a new kind of gyroscope that also displays the


NASA releases the first scientific results of the Pluto flyby

A composite of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI) In July, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zipped through the Pluto system, marking the culmination of a nine-year journey through space. Now the little spacecraft is hurtling toward a new target — one even deeper into the outer region of our solar system — and NASA scientists are busy downloading and interpreting the data gathered during the flyby. In a paper published Thursday in Science magazine, the team released the first official findings from that data. "We just have this wonderful first look that says the Pluto system is remarkable," New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver told The Washington Post. [New NASA photo captures a breathtaking sunset on Pluto] Many of the results discussed in the new paper sound familiar, because the New Horizons team has been generous in sharing its interpretation of new photos and data with the public. NASA’s New Horizons has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby – and the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades. The paper highlights the unexpectedly diverse terrain of Pluto and Charon. Scientists had thought that the dwarf planet — and especially its largest moon — would have the cratered, collision-scarred surfaces of worlds that had changed little since their formation. Instead, both worlds show dynamic geology, with parts of their surfaces seeming almost impossibly young. Something is definitely changing the surface of Pluto, but we can't yet be sure what's powering the resurfacing. "How can these small, cold objects be so diverse? What's driving what seems to be tectonic activity on the surface, these glacier flows, these incredibly complicated regions on the surface that just look like a jumbled mess of giant, icy mountains? The variety of the surface features has been a big surprise," Weaver said. [Pluto shows off snakeskin textures in highest-resolution pictures yet] There are glaciers made of exotic ices, and a mysteriously smooth frozen lake of nitrogen known as Sputnik Planum. In fact, the New Horizons scientists think that some of the glaciers might be water ice bobbing around in pools of nitrogen. It's possible that nitrogen flows on Pluto like groundwater on Earth. Even the smaller moons have been surprising. It seems likely, based on their level of reflectivity, that some or all of Pluto's small moons


The biggest question about climate change isn’t ‘if’ or ‘when.’ It’s ‘how abrupt?’

simultaneously dramatic and yet also difficult to assess. Models, after all, are mathematically sophisticated simulacra that embed scientists’ best current physical understanding of how the Earth system and its components work, but still should not be confused with reality. Nonetheless, the authors — led by Sybren Drijfhout, a professor at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute — assert that their results represent a sign of how unstable the future could really be, even before we reach warming levels of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (often thought of as a kind of guardrail in international climate negotiations). “It is likely that the Earth system will experience sharp regional transitions at moderate warming,” they write, “although the prediction of any particular event has a very high uncertainty.” So what’s going on here — and should we really believe this? Mining models for major disruptions. The topic has been much discussed — but also remains very murky. So to examine it in a new way, the researchers looked at the results of no less than 37 separate computerized climate change simulations, or models, which were used in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2013 assessment report of the state of climate science. Each model’s results were examined out to the year 2100 — or farther, in cases where that was possible — under different assumptions about levels of greenhouse gas emissions, and resulting planetary warming. In doing this, the work is entering new territory. “There has been no systematic study of the potential for abrupt shifts in state-of-the-art Earth System Models,” the research noted, calling the paper “a first step toward a robust assessment of abrupt change.” A high-resolution global atmospheric modeling run on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.(NASA/Goddard) And sure enough, the models did produce many abrupt changes — but they were also rarely in agreement with one another. Some changes — for instance, a massive oceanic algal bloom in the Indian Ocean in the next century, which only appeared in one model — are dismissed by the researchers as a possible fluke. “That’s the one we are really most unsure about,” says Drijfhout. On the other hand, other changes that showed up more frequently are precisely the types of things that scientists have long forecast might result from a warming of the climate. For instance, multiple models


The American boy arrested for making a clock meets Sudan’s president, an accused war criminal

was "extremely delighted" to meet Bashir and hoped to return to visit the Sudanese president again “with a new invention and success.” At first glance, perhaps Ahmed's journey to Bashir's presidential compound isn't so strange. The teenager has met with a variety of big names over the past few weeks. Besides, his family are Sudanese immigrants: On his Twitter account, Ahmed posted a number of images that described his visit to Sudan as a type of homecoming: I am coming home, tell the world I am coming home #sudan http://t.co/DEO0acpYtN However, Bashir is no ordinary world leader. He has an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, for example, for allegedly orchestrating genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur. The country he leads is under a variety of U.S. sanctions. His government harbored Osama bin Laden for five years in the 1990s. A leaked U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks even suggested he may have secretly stolen $9 billion in oil money. To make it even more remarkable, Ahmed's father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, has campaigned against Bashir in not one but two presidential elections. After he was blocked from appearing on the ballot in 2010, the father complained that Bashir had personally blocked his name from the ballot. "I was told that Bashir personally intervened with the [appeals] court to reject my challenge," Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed reportedly told the Sudan Tribune. He ran for office again this past February, proposing an improvement in relations with the United States and promising to deal with religious extremism. In an interview with the Daily Mail last month, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed's elder brother Aldean criticized Bashir and said the elections were not fair. "The government said Mohamed came fourth in 2015 but the elections are rigged, the whole international community know that," Aldean said. "Al-Bashir steals all the votes." There appeared to be little sign of this animosity on Wednesday. The Sudan Tribune reported that Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed attended the meeting and told reporters he hoped that talented young people would “write a new [chapter in] history for an advanced and developed Sudan." More on WorldViews 5 insights into the mind of Sudan’s President Bashir, an accused war criminal Why so many African leaders hate the International Criminal Court Texas ninth grader Ahmed Mohamed was arrested after his homemade clock was mistaken for a bomb. Here's what you need to know.