Study: Simple measures could reduce global warming, save lives

often burn agricultural waste, but plowing it under instead would cost almost nothing. Other interventions, such as capping landfills to trap methane, would be more costly. Several policy experts said that in the absence of a global treaty to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the new study should spur national governments to smaller actions. “This great news could not come at a better time for climate protection,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the D.C.-based Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. Zaelke said the proposed measures are particularly important for the world’s most vulnerable regions, such as the Arctic, which has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world over the past half-century, and the Himalayas, which have warmed three times as fast. But even advocates of the strategy warned that world leaders have not yet shown the political will to move ahead. Brooks Yeager, executive vice president for policy for the advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet, said the new study shows that “the technical means to get these reductions are clear.” But, he added, “the bad news is it’s not as easy as it sounds.” For instance, Yeager said that countries that make up the Arctic Council, including the United States, pledged in 2009 to reduce black carbon. But since then, the Obama administration has cut back on domestic efforts to phase out dirtier diesel engines because of budget constraints. Until 2009, Congress had appropriated between $75 million and $150 million for the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act, which gave grants to retire or retrofit polluting diesel vehicles. The program got a boost to $300 million under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but it has not received any more money since. State Department spokeswoman Emily Cain said the United States has spent $60 million to support methane reduction projects overseas and has pledged to spend an additional $50 million over the next five years. The administration has also committed $5 million to an Arctic Council initiative to reduce black carbon emissions in Russia. Yeager and Shindell said that reducing methane and soot, while laudable as a short-term strategy for dampening global warming, would not solve the long-term problem. “I think it’s a little dangerous to think you can do this instead of reducing carbon dioxide,” Yaeger said. “If you don’t reduce carbon dioxide, the benefits of reducing these [pollutants] will recede into the background and be overwhelmed by carbon.”


Officer recommends court-martial for Bradley Manning in WikiLeaks case

An Army investigating officer recommended Thursday that accused leaker Pfc. Bradley Manning face a court-martial for his alleged role in providing massive amounts of classified information to anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. The ruling came after a preliminary hearing last month in which prosecutors presented evidence appearing to link Manning with the security breach, including chat logs between him and WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. Manning faces 22 counts, including aiding the enemy, and could face life in prison if convicted. The investigating officer, Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, found that the charges presented at the preliminary hearing offered reasonable evidence that Manning had committed the offenses alleged. Manning, 24, worked as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad and was detained in May 2010 and charged that July. Manning is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks. They include State Department cables, daily field reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, detainee assessments from Guantanamo Bay, and a 2007 Army video of an Apache helicopter firing on civilians. Manning, a native of Crescent, Okla., was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer near Baghdad in November 2009. Manning first contacted Assange the same month he deployed to Baghdad. Investigators recovered a memory card from Manning’s aunt’s home in Potomac, Md., that contained Afghanistan and Iraq field reports. He had left the card there in January 2010 during home leave. In the preliminary hearing, more than 20 of Manning’s associates testified about his mental state, work product and training. The prosecution presented evidence showing that Manning had been well trained on the handling of classified information and would have been aware of the military regulations restricting the dissemination of classified documents. Defense attorney David Coombs argued that Manning’s superiors should have recognized signs that he was mentally unstable and stripped him of his access to classified information. He also argued that the military had overcharged Manning and made a plea to reduce the charges from 22 to three. Coombs did not reply to requests for comment on Thursday. Another military body, called a convening authority, will make the final decision of whether to refer the case to general court-martial. More national security coverage: - U.S. acts quickly to tamp down Afghan video scandal - Study: Cyber defense effort is mixed - U.S. peace talks with Taliban to resume - Read more national security headlines


U.S. acts quickly to tamp down Afghan video scandal

Military officials said they feared the photographic evidence of apparent Marine misconduct could produce a severe setback at a critical time in Afghanistan. U.S. officials have stepped up their long-shot efforts to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban while struggling to maintain support from Karzai. The United States is also confronting an increasingly war-weary population in Afghanistan, where people often lend a sympathetic ear to Taliban propaganda about the presence and motives of foreign troops. Before receiving Panetta’s call Thursday, Karzai reacted sharply to news of the video, describing it as “completely inhumane and condemnable in the strongest possible terms.” His administration called on the U.S. military to “apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.” Panetta said the phone call seemed to mollify the Afghan leader. “He appreciated what I was saying and appreciated the fact we understand how damaging this could be and that we are taking that kind of action.” Video implicates Marines The video, which runs for less than a minute, appears to show four Marines in combat gear laughing and joking as they urinate on three male bodies lined up on the ground next to a toppled wheelbarrow. The caption refers to the corpses as “dead Talibans,” but it was unclear whether they were civilians or fighters killed after a battle. A caption that accompanies the video asserts that the Marines are part of a scout sniper team with the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, an infantry unit from Camp Lejeune, N.C. Marines from the unit were deployed to Afghanistan last year but returned to the United States in September. The NATO-led security force in Kabul said in a statement that the acts of desecration “appear to have been conducted by a small group of U.S. individuals, who apparently are no longer serving in Afghanistan.” The statement did not elaborate. A Marine official said investigators were questioning two individuals whom they had preliminarily identified as being in the video. The Marine Corps is “fairly confident” that all four were members of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is underway. It was unclear where or when the video was made. It was posted on the Internet on Wednesday and began to circulate quickly as news sites reported on its existence. Pentagon officials said that they were still trying to confirm the


Taiwan elections stir hope for democracy in China

weekly magazine uncovered evidence of what it described as government spying on the opposition. Wang, the former Tiananmen student leader who is now 42, believes that the Internet and a rapid expansion in the flow of information through it will eventually allow today’s youth in China to succeed in bringing about change. “Everyone thinks young Chinese today aren’t interested in politics. This is a myth,” Wang said. “They might feel helpless but they still want change.” An example to follow At the end of Wang’s three-hour lecture, mainland students rushed to pose for a souvenir photograph with the man reviled by Beijing as a “counter-revolutionary” agitator. Public discussion of the Tiananmen Square protest movement and the massacre that ended it on June 4, 1989, is taboo in China. A 22-year-old electrical engineering student from Fujian province, which lies just over a 100 miles away across the Taiwan Strait, said he’d heard vaguely about Wang as a high school student but didn’t know much about what happened in 1989. He decided to attend Wang’s lecture so that “I can see what a student leader is really like.” China, which has more than 1.3 billion people, can’t jump to democracy in a single bound, he said, but it can “step by step” follow the example of Taiwan, an island with a well-educated and wealthier population of just 23 million. Before the lecture, Wang joined other Chinese exiles for a seminar. Li Hengqing, a Tiananmen-generation activist who, like Wang, got thrown in jail after the 1989 military crackdown, said that China, though much bigger than Taiwan, has already started on a path traced by the island nation. Taiwan’s own modern political awakening began, he noted, with a KMT massacre in 1947 and took decades of struggle. Hong Kong-based publisher Bao Pu, whose father was a senior Communist Party official who was purged and jailed for siding with students in 1989, said Taiwan’s biggest challenge to China is its stability, an order that has been reinforced not undermined by its retreat from authoritarianism. “Sooner or later, Beijing will get the message that it is their system that is unstable,” he said. Researcher Zhang Jie in Beijing contributed to this report. More world news coverage: - 2 Army brigades to leave Europe in cost-cutting move - Pakistan’s civil-army rift simmers - Putin site launch ignores Russian protests - Read more headlines from around the world


‘Crunch time’ at troubled nuclear fuel plant

reactors and will shut down the rest by 2020. U.S. nuclear power plans have been scaled back because of high construction costs and competition from new supplies of cheap shale gas. In December, Luc Oursel, the new chief executive of French nuclear giant Areva, said he was suspending work on the $3.2 billion Eagle Rock enrichment plant west of Idaho Falls, Idaho, even though the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had given Areva a license and the Energy Department had given it a $2 billion loan guarantee. The company, which is largely owned by the French government, plans to use centrifuge technology, but says it will start construction in late 2013 or 2014 instead of this spring. “If Areva has decided it doesn’t pay, why are we throwing money at it?” Sokolski said. “If Areva is inclined to say no, why is Congress inclined to say yes?” There are only a handful of firms in the uranium enrichment business. In addition to Tenex, Areva and USEC, there is Urenco, which opened a plant in New Mexico in June 2010. The British, Dutch and German governments each own one-third of the firm. “Completion of the new facilities poses a significant threat to USEC’s competitive market position because both facilities plan to use the lower-cost centrifuge technology, and both have applied to double the capacity of their U.S.-based facilities,” an S&P report said. Nonetheless, USEC and its supporters argue that a U.S. company with commercial U.S. technology is needed. “We do believe that having more suppliers is going to be helpful from a competitive supply standpoint,” said Marshall Murphy, spokesman for Exelon’s nuclear power business, a USEC customer. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said that the United States also needs “indigenous” enrichment technology to provide enough tritium for nuclear weapons and highly enriched uranium for U.S. naval reactors on submarines and warships. The TVA uses about 2 percent of USEC’s enriched uranium to power a process producing tritium, a hydrogen isotope with a half life of 12 years. U.S. agreements with foreign-owned enrichment facilities in the United States bar them from doing anything to promote military purposes, the Energy Department says. “As President Obama has said, while we envision a world without nuclear weapons, until that day comes we must ensure that our deterrent is safe, secure and effective,” Chu wrote in a Dec. 1 letter to Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Lamar Alexander


Incoming space junk: Failed Russian Mars probe expected to crash this weekend

filled with hardy microbes and tiny animals called tardigrades, or water bears, to see if the critters might survive the rigors of a 34-month trip to Mars and back. “If the probe should come in over land, it’s possible the return capsule could survive and be recovered,” said David Warmflash, a scientist who helped design the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, often called the LIFE experiment.The impending crash adds to concerns about the possible dangers of space debris. Last year, about 70 tons of space junk plummeted to Earth, including NASA’s school bus-size UARS satellite. During the UARS death watch in September, NASA estimated a 1-in-3,200 chance that the satellite could land on somebody. It didn’t. Instead, UARS broke up over the northern Pacific Ocean. The problem of space junk has drawn increasing international attention. In 2007, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space adopted new guidelines for space-faring countries to minimize the dangers of space junk. NASA now designs its satellites with thrusters that can point defunct craft toward the ocean or boost them into orbits so high they will never come back down, said agency spokeswoman Beth Dickey. The Phobos-Grunt mission was supposed to be a technological triumph for Russia. The $163 million craft was to travel to one of the moons of Mars, collect a soil sample (“Grunt” is Russian for “ground”) and return the sample to Earth in a hardened capsule. Such a return of a sample from Mars or its moons has never been attempted. It would have been a watershed moment for Russia. Instead, Phobos-Grunt has become a searing embarrassment. The high-profile blunder has spurred Russian space officials to offer increasingly bizarre theories to explain the problem. In an interview published in the Russian newspaper Izvestia on Tuesday, the director of the Russian space agency, Vladimir Popovkin, implied that an anti-satellite weapon may have damaged Phobos-Grunt. “We don’t want to accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now,” Popovkin said. “The possibility they were used cannot be ruled out.” Other Russian space experts said the cause of the failure was likely much more Earth-bound. “My strong belief is there are systemic problems in the industry which build spacecraft,” said Anatoly Zak, a Russian space historian and journalist who publishes the Web site RussianSpaceWeb.com. “Before the launch, I said the chances of mission success were nearly zero.”


At Olympic marathon trials, Desiree Davila seeks to validate Boston performance

were running incredible times in 10Ks, winning medals. Those are the things you want to shoot for.” In the men’s race, which begins 15 minutes before the women’s at 9 a.m. EST, top seed Ryan Hall (2:04:58) will face challenges from Meb Keflezighi (2:09:13); Dathan Ritzenhein (2:10:00) and Galen Rupp (1:00:30 half-marathon qualifying time). As Kastor, Flanagan and Goucher emerged as stars in recent years with breakout performances in major meets, Davila toiled quietly and improved gradually. A native of Chula Vista, Calif., she earned all-America recognition with the Sun Devils but never was considered the top runner on her team. During her senior season in 2004, she placed 23rd in the 5,000 at the NCAA championships. Still, she loved the sport and believed she could get better after college. In 2005, she joined the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project, a group of post-graduate athletes that trains under brothers Kevin and Keith Hanson in Detroit. In 2006, she finished 43rd in the IAAF World Road Running Championships 20-kilometer race in Debrecen, Hungary. A year later, she ran her first marathon in Boston, finishing 19th in 2:44:56 on a rainy, blustery day. The time was good enough to qualify Davila for the 2008 Olympic trials, which turned out to be a pivotal — albeit disappointing — event. A virtual unknown entering that race, Davila found herself about eight seconds out of third place at Mile 18. She admitted that she panicked, surprised that she was in the hunt. She did not drink enough water. At Mile 20, she said, “I completely hit the wall. It was like a death march” to the finish. Davila stumbled home in 2:37:50. She would never again make the same mistake. “That was probably the race that got me where I am now,” she said. “It was a learning experience.” Despite that setback, Davila believed she had found her calling and that success would eventually come. She liked the length, the road, even the long, painful training mileage marathons required. She entered the 2008 Chicago Marathon that fall, finishing fifth in 2:31:33. At the same race two years later, she finished as the top American and fourth overall in 2:26:20. In Boston last spring, she did not emerge among the leaders until nearly two hours into the race. Then, she began passing the top women. With six miles remaining, the race had become a duel between her and


As a Marine and Afghan war vet, I’m insulted by the desecration video

In March I returned from Afghanistan’s Helmand province after handing about 12 square miles of villages and farmlands to the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, the unit that is allegedly responsible for recording a video of Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban insurgents. The actions of these few Marines have rightfully garnered widespread disdain, but for me the affront is personal. In a 42-second video, these Marines undid everything that my unit spent seven months working to accomplish. Many civilians I’ve talked to about the incident act like it’s no surprise. Hollywood and media depictions have convinced them that war is filled with atrocities such as this one and that, but for lack of coverage, they’d hear more about them. But those of us who have worn the uniform don’t excuse these acts by saying, “War is hell.” There’s right and wrong in war, and we probably know that better than anyone else, because we’ve seen the life-or-death consequences of our decisions. Before my first deployment, though, I wondered if it was true. People don’t usually talk about the wars they fight in. Maybe it’s because the things they would say are dark and unjustifiable. But then I went to Iraq and Afghanistan, where I faced combat and death, and I discovered that it’s nothing of the sort. There’s a shock the first time you deal with the aftermath of combat, but that soon subsides because there is a lot of work to be done. We would collect enemy bodies so we could engage in the macabre task of identifying them and gathering intelligence. When that was done, we’d hand the bodies over to the Afghan soldiers and police we worked with so that they could receive proper burial. In my unit, I’m not ashamed to admit, we celebrated the death of the enemy. After one hard day in 2010 when we lost a Marine, we discovered two insurgents planting a bomb along a road. As the insurgents drove away, we shot a missile at them, killing one. Alongside the jubilation, we felt that justice had been served. At the same time, the insurgent who survived the blast was brought by locals to one of our bases for medical attention. So amid the euphoria, we also provided aid to the enemy. Doing so was required to accomplish our mission of building local support. But celebrating victory in battle is different


We’re all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy

but we remain oddly unfazed by the fact that, presumably, those same Marines just put high-caliber rounds through the fighters’ chests. American troops are not blind to this irony. They are very clear about the fact that society trains them to kill, orders them to kill and then balks at anything that suggests they have dehumanized the enemy they have killed. But of course they have dehumanized the enemy — otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings. Rather than demonstrate a callous disregard for the enemy, this awful incident might reveal something else: a desperate attempt by confused young men to convince themselves that they haven’t just committed their first murder — that they have simply shot some coyotes on the back 40. It doesn’t work, of course, but it gets them through the moment; it gets them through the rest of the patrol. There is a final context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one. When the war on terror started, the Marines in that video were probably 9 or 10 years old. As children they heard adults — and political leaders — talk about our enemies in the most inhuman terms. The Internet and the news media are filled with self-important men and women referring to our enemies as animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy fighters to countries like Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very regimes that we have recently condemned for engaging in war crimes and torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions — achieved through torture — will not stand up in court. For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting our wars. The video doesn’t surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad — not just for them, but also for us. We may prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is okay to torture the living. I hope someone else knows how to explain that to our soldiers, because I don’t have the faintest idea. outlook@washpost.com Sebastian Junger


The U.S. must decide: More money and forces for Afghanistan?

Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has written extensively on the Afghan war. It may be fair to argue that the last thing the nation needs at the start of an election year is yet another budget crisis and another decade of war. Yet this is the path the United States appears to be taking in Afghanistan. U.S. officials are talking about removing all American troops from Afghanistan and about massive cuts in military spending as part of the “transition” to Afghan control of combat and civil governance operations in 2014. Given the lead times involved in funding and implementing such massive changes within two to three years, Washington really has only a few months in which to decide whether we will take on the burden of funding the Afghan government through 2014 and beyond, and whether we will provide most of the funds, advisers and partners that Afghan forces will need until 2020 and beyond. There has been near silence about these issues from the Obama administration and every Republican presidential candidate. Yet working studies from the U.S. and British governments, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank show that the withdrawal of U.S. and allied troops from Afghanistan could plunge that country into a recession or depression by the end of 2014 unless Kabul receives a massive new aid package. Afghanistan would need major assistance to compensate for the phaseout of U.S. and allied military spending that has kept its economy alive during the past 10 years of war, to pay for the services its government must provide to win and retain the loyalty of its people, to pay for the military and security forces it must develop, and to sustain the government until the Taliban and other insurgents are defeated or accept a political settlement. The Afghan government raised this need in a paper circulated at the international conference in Bonn, Germany, last month, but its call for aid got little attention in the international media or among U.S. politicians. President Hamid Karzai requested some $10 billion a year through 2025 for a program that set ambitious goals for security and development. He called for equally ambitious reforms and improvements in governance and for the Afghan government to achieve full independence by 2030. The Afghan government paper tracked closely with World Bank studies showing


Marines questioned in connection with video

U.S. military officials said Friday they have questioned four Marines who were videotaped while urinating on Afghan corpses but that a criminal investigation was still at an early stage. Maryann B. Cummings, a spokeswoman for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, said the Marines are in the United States. They have not been arrested, and authorities have not decided whether to press charges. Cummings did not identify the Marines depicted in the short video, which shows them laughing as they urinate on three male bodies lined up on the ground next to a toppled wheelbarrow. A video caption refers to the corpses as “dead Talibans,” but it was unclear whether they were civilians or fighters killed after a battle. In a statement, Cummings said investigators are “still tracking down information on the individual(s) who created and posted the video as well as initiating computer forensic techniques on the video itself.” The caption asserts that the Marines are part of a scout sniper team with the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, an infantry unit from Camp Lejeune, N.C. Marines from the unit were deployed to Afghanistan’s Helmand province last year and returned to the United States in September. The decision on whether to discipline the Marines will rest with Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, the head of the Marine Corps Forces Central Command, who was appointed to review the case by Gen. James F. Amos, the Marine Corps commandant. U.S. military law and the Geneva Conventions prohibit desecration, mishandling or exploitation of bodies of people killed in war. More national security coverage: - DHS monitoring of social media wories civil liberties advocates - Study: Cyber defense effort is mixed - Court-martial recommended in WikiLeaks case - Read more national security headlines


U-Md.’s tone-deaf planning

Regarding Petula Dvorak’s Jan. 10 Metro column, “Appearances count, but U-Md. seems oblivious”: As a graduate of University of Maryland’s School of Law and a donor, I was already less willing to give to anything associated with the university as a result of its recent decision to eliminate certain sports teams. Although I am thankful my daughter is competing on the track team at Duke University, we are both saddened by the dilemma her racing friends from high school who chose College Park face, now that their NCAA careers have been cut short. The president’s fancy new house may be meant to win over donors, but what it says about priorities is further reducing my interest in donating. Liz Rubin, Annapolis


U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials: Meb Keflezighi and Shalane Flanagan win races, spots in London

HOUSTON — On a day of huge stakes and high nerves, it was all business in the front of both fields. Meb Keflezighi, the 2004 Olympic silver medal winner, won the title in the men’s race with a finish in 2 hours 9 minutes 8 seconds. Shalane Flanagan, the 2008 Olympic bronze medalist in the 10,000 meters, claimed the women’s title in 2:25:38. The pair ultimately took charge in two professionally executed, respectably paced, coolly run races that rewarded the athletes that pushed hard from the start and left no doubt about who deserved tickets to this summer’s London Olympic Games. U.S. marathon record holder Ryan Hall, who led for most of the men’s race, finished second in 2:09:30 and Abdi Abdirahman, a three-time Olympian, claimed third in 2:09:47 to secure the other two men’s Olympic slots. Desiree Davila (2:25.55), the 2011 Boston Marathon runner-up, and Kara Goucher (2:26:06), the 2007 world bronze medalist in the 5,000, earned the final two women’s slots. Both trios ran in front over their races’ waning miles, effectively settling the issue of who would represent the United States in London well before the finish. “Having the race unfold as it did is a very good simulator for the Olympic Games,” Hall said. “The Olympic Games marathon has changed. . . . Guys aren’t afraid to run hard.” Flanagan’s finishing time not only represented a personal best by more than three minutes, it also was the fastest marathon finish in U.S. championship and Olympic trials history. On the men’s side, Keflezighi also set a personal best, his by five seconds, just 69 days after finishing sixth in the New York City Marathon. Never had two men gone under 2:10 in a U.S. Olympic trials marathon, let alone four. Keflezeghi, the oldest Olympic marathon trials winner in U.S. history at 36, celebrated his victory over the last mile, grabbing a small flag from a spectator and waving it as he raced to the finish, where his 74-year-old father hoisted him onto his shoulders. Flanagan, 30, meantime, said her mind was torn between elation and agony in the homestretch. “The last mile was a cross between savoring the moment and just being really grateful that I was almost done,” she said. Dathan Ritzenhein, a 2004 Olympian in the 10,000, produced the most dramatic moment of the day, closing a gap that reached more than 30 seconds to


Retail vacancies beg a question of identity

Location, location On paper, Friendship Heights seems like the ideal location for any retailer: it’s home to one of the Washington area’s wealthiest populations, resides along the main thoroughfare of Wisconsin Avenue, and is centered around a Metro station and bus terminal. A who’s who of department stores — Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor and Bloomingdales — anchor the district. Yet the area is never quite as bustling as Georgetown or Tysons Corner Center. The closing of Borders bookstore, Filene’s Basement and Pottery Barn in the past 12 months has left a few dark storefronts along Wisconsin Avenue. Farther up the street at the Wisconsin Place development, the Whole Foods welcomes a steady stream of customers, much like the Clyde’s restaurant across the street at Chevy Chase Center. The former Borders store, which is temporarily housing a warehouse sale of inventory from Roche Bobis, a neighboring store in Chevy Chase. (Jeffrey MacMillan/Capital Business) The center, however, is peppered with vacancies, which may soon be filled, according to David Smith, president of Chevy Chase Land Co., owner of the project. He said there are “leases out for signature” to fill three spaces along Wisconsin Circle, but declined to offer any details. Smith noted that his company is also in talks with restaurateurs to replace Famoso and M Cafe, which closed last April, at the Collection at Chevy Chase, which is next to Chevy Chase Center. A need for more eateries Restaurants are in short supply in the shopping corridor, said Jonathan Bender, a neighborhood commissioner for Advisory Neighborhood Commission 3E. “You get some cross-fertilization on foot traffic with restaurants, so they become kind of an anchor in the evenings,” he said. “The folks moving into this neighborhood have disposable income, eat out and want a walkable space.” Later this month, Rosa Mexicano is scheduled to open a 7,304-square-foot restaurant at 5225 Wisconsin Ave. NW. “Rosa will add a new dynamic to the area. It has a thriving bar scene and could become a popular hang out,” said Perry Reith, senior asset manager at Grosvenor, which owns the site. Reith said he believes Friendship Heights, where Grosvenor owns more than 153,000 square feet of mixed-use space, “matured and stabilized during the last economic cycle.” He said, “New tenants will take all of the vacant locations in time because the area, despite the turnover in tenants, has attractive demographics. ”


Itzhak Perlman joins BSO at Strathmore

No one attends an Itzhak Perlman concert expecting to hear historically informed performances of baroque and classical repertoire. True to form, the violinist delivered well-upholstered, old-school readings of the “Winter” and “Summer” concertos from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” at Strathmore Hall on Saturday, playing the solo parts and leading the Baltimore Symphony from his violin. He then conducted the orchestra in a comparably traditional rendering of Mozart’s Symphony No. 25. Despite the reduced size of the orchestra (roughly two dozen players), string tone was silken and vibrato-rich in the Vivaldi, and Perlman’s playing possessed all its accustomed sweetness and warmth (although a handful of less-than-immaculate notes were surprising from a violinist known for flawless finish). The overall tone of the readings was decidedly beefy and larger than life, leading Perlman to have the harpsichord amplified, an unfortunate choice that resulted in a distractingly outsize keyboard part with the canned sound of a poorly amped electric guitar. Players were added, and the harpsichord jettisoned, for a moderately paced, neatly proportioned performance of the Mozart work. This is a symphony that comes to fizzing life when period-instrument ensembles rip through it at lickety-split tempos. But with Perlman’s modern sonorities and comfortable, middle-of-the-road approach (and his observing of repeats in the score that stretched the music’s youthful inspiration to the breaking point), this perfectly respectable reading outstayed its welcome. The concert concluded with Perlman conducting Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. If he found little new to say in this warhorse piece, his interpretation was poised and affectionately molded, with a balance of glowing, saturated string tone and character-rich work from the BSO’s winds. Banno is a freelance writer.


Plans for high-speed rail are slowing down

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Since then, things have only gotten worse. Spiraling cost estimates and eroding political and public support now threaten a project crucial to a 21st-century vision of train travel that President Obama promised would transform U.S. transportation much as interstate highways did more than a half-century ago. A national high-speed rail network would not only support tens of thousands of construction and manufacturing jobs, but it would get Americans out of their cars, revitalize struggling downtowns, and spare the environment millions of tons of carbon emissions and travelers untold hours wasted in traffic or in airport terminals waiting out delays. Obama set a goal of providing 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years. But that lofty vision is yielding to the political gravity generated by high costs, determined opponents and a public that has grown dubious of government’s ability to do big things. Virtually none of the projects has gotten off the ground, and the one that has is in trouble. For Obama, the political stakes are high going into the 2012 election. Republican front-runner Mitt Romney has accused him of putting too much faith in government to build the economy. The president, Romney says to the delight of Republican partisans, “does not know” how business, or the economy, works. The plan that envisions bullet trains trains zipping between the nation’s major cities at speeds up to 220 miles per hour, was one of the few transformative projects included in the $797 billion stimulus program enacted early in Obama’s presidency. “Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination,” Obama said in announcing his vision for high-speed rail in April 2009. “Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America.” So far, Obama has wagered more than $10 billion in federal money on high-speed rail, only to see his plans diminished, one after another. Republican governors in Florida, Wisconsin and Ohio turned back billions of dollars in federal money for high-speed rail, denouncing the proposals as both the creation of Big Government and as economically unfeasible. The objections in those three states left money to be redirected to a host of projects that promise to relieve bottlenecks and speed up traditional rail service in many parts of the country. In one case, the


Environmentalists celebrate long-shot victory at Mattawoman Creek

Even in cold January, when the woods are stripped bare, it’s clear why so many Maryland environmentalists compare the Mattawoman Creek to Eden. Eagles alight from barren trees and glide over serene waters, flocks of ducks darken the winter sky, and fish leap in the muddy shallows. Yellow perch will soon make their annual run to spawn by the tens of thousands in the Mattawoman, a feast for raptors. They release milky strands with 60,000 eggs each, bolstering the Charles County creek’s status as “the most productive tributary to the Chesapeake Bay,” according to state fishery biologists. And for years, the county planned to build a highway right through the watershed. But recently a strange thing happened. Local environmental activists actually won a fight against a development that they said would harm wildlife. The state said no to the road in a rare denial of a development permit after the activists relentlessly picked apart the county’s arguments for it in an application. The demise of the half-built $70 million Cross County Connector is being held up as a victory over urban sprawl that could be duplicated throughout the fragile Chesapeake Bay watershed. “There’s great enthusiasm for using the Mattawoman as a poster child for how the bay can be saved,” said Bonnie Bick, vice president of the Mattawoman Watershed Society. Early in the fight over the connector, opponents were a huge long shot to win. Like a boxer who takes a multitude of jabs to land one solid punch, they acknowledged suffering a series of defeats in failed efforts to get county planners to propose development designs that were friendly to the creek. The proposed 16-mile connector was designed to start at Route 5 and cut through small winding roads and the Mattawoman and end at Indian Head Highway. Eleven subdivisions with more than 2,000 homes were proposed, and were seen as likely to lead to more storm-water runoff laced with sediment and nutrient pollution — and foul the Chesapeake. Mattawoman Creek is like many of the bay’s tributaries. It’s good looks are only skin deep. Below its emerald tree canopies in Mason Springs are waters with shrinking populations of yellow perch, white perch, herring and largemouth bass. Walking through the area last week, Mason Springs Conservancy board member Ken Hastings explained how storm-water runoff from development, floods and sewage overflows have eroded and reshaped its banks, widening them, slowing


Pentagon interest in cybersecurity may ease contractors’ pain from cuts

$11 billion, Howard Rubel, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. in New York, said in an interview. That spending may increase faster than many other military programs, he said. Increased reliance on satellites and drone aircraft may raise vulnerability to hackers and other disruptions that are expanding with technological sophistication. The United States will “invest in new capabilities to maintain a decisive military edge against a growing array of threats,’’ Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said in introducing the plan. The National Counterintelligence Executive, an advisory panel of senior U.S. intelligence officials, blamed China and Russia in a Nov. 3 report for stealing sensitive U.S. economic and commercial data. The report said that the pace of cyberespionage is accelerating and threatening an estimated $398 billion in spending on research and development. Northrop chief executive Wes Bush said during an Oct. 26 conference call that the Falls Church-based company considers cybersecurity important “because of the just ever-growing recognition of the threat and the ever-growing magnitude of the threat.” Northrop is the Defense Department’s largest supplier of unmanned systems and the government’s biggest cybersecurity provider, spokesman Randy Belote said in an e-mail. Both sides of the coin Linking cybersecurity and space systems is “encouraging because it reflects reality that we need to be doing more on both sides of the coin,” said Roger Cressey, senior vice president for Booz Allen Hamilton, a McLean-based security and intelligence consulting firm. The Pentagon requested about $10.2 billion this fiscal year for its space initiatives, including about $5.8 billion for satellites and $2 billion in launch costs. Two of the space programs are being developed by Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin: the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite and the Space Based Infrared System, a network of satellites. Another is the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, a satellite system using medium- and heavy-lift rockets that the Pentagon requested about $1.7 billion for this year. It’s run by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Chicago-based Boeing. Increases in space-defense expenditures may lag behind those in the faster-growing cybersecurity area, said Mark Gunzinger, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington and former deputy assistant secretary of defense. NeuStar’s Joffe agrees, saying the United States should create “what our enemy already has, really good offensive cyber capabilities. We should be able to get enormous leverage from investments in offensive cybersecurity.” — Bloomberg Government


Desecration? Consider the circumstances.

Warfare in Afghanistan has long been characterized by brutality and cruelty [“Panetta decries Afghan video,” front page, Jan. 13]. Which is more harmful — to shoot your enemy or to urinate on his corpse? The answer is obvious: A dead man doesn’t care what happens to his remains. I do not excuse the Marines if, in fact, the reports are correct, but they erred because only a fool gives his enemies more reason to hate him. As Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman may have been the first to say: “War is hell.” You cannot put men through three, four or five years of hell and expect them to behave rationally and calmly. Many Marines have had eight, nine or more rotations in Iraq or Afghanistan. Henry J. Gordon, Falls Church


D.C. cardiologist develops mobile app to speed diagnosis of heart attacks

technology online, only to find it lapped in a year.” Multiple approaches In cardiac care, many hospital systems have already invested heavily in commercially available systems that use dedicated hardware and software to perform one of the same functions as CodeHeart: Send ECG results from the field to the hospital via a secure digital file. Montgomery County began using one in June. Doing so has resulted in faster diagnosis, officials said. That, in turn, has allowed some patients to bypass emergency rooms and go directly to a hospital’s cardiac catheterization lab for the artery-opening procedure known as angioplasty. District ambulance crews and three D.C. hospitals plan to test the same commercial system, Lifenet, in a few weeks, said David Miramontes, medical director for the city’s emergency medical services department. The first year’s cost is about $100,000, funded by a grant from George Washington University Hospital, which received a donation from the nonprofit CTIA-The Wireless Foundation. Unlike that system, the CodeHeart mobile application requires no dedicated software or hardware but does require a device with camera and Internet access. The app is portable and versatile, according to Lowell Satler, the Washington Hospital Center cardiologist who has been developing it with wireless carrier AT&T. And unlike the commercial system, he said, the application has potential for use in emergency situations beyond cardiac care. The live video can let a neurologist evaluate a possible stroke patient or a dermatologist assess a mysterious skin rash remotely. The application allows an authorized user to send a secure video and audio stream. The results are immediately accessible to consulting cardiologists on designated smartphones, tablets or desktop computers. Doctors can look at the patient and at the same time talk to an emergency room physician or first responder in an ambulance en route to a hospital. Such a function can also be important when doctors at different hospitals want to confer quickly about a case and need access to patient information. Incompatible hospital information systems can be a barrier, and mobile apps could be one way to get around that problem, Satler said. It’s unclear whether CodeHeart will eventually be made available commercially, but in any event, Satler said he will not seek to profit from it. His goal, he said, is widespread use of the application among physicians and emergency medical personnel. Early obstacles So far, only a handful of emergency workers in St. Mary’s County


Dan Evins, founder of Cracker Barrel highway empire, dies

Dan Evins, the Cracker Barrel founder who turned his eatery into a highway empire, offering millions of hungry motorists a down-home alternative to traditional fast food, died Jan. 14 at his daughter’s home in Lebanon, Tenn. He was 76 and had cancer, said his daughter Betsy Jennings. “Nostalgia Sells” was the headline of a 1992 Forbes magazine article that chronicled the rise of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store. The chain began in 1969 as a single shop in Lebanon, Mr. Evins’s boyhood home, and expanded across the southern United States before becoming the national grits-and-biscuits behemoth that it is today. The chain went public in 1981 and employs 67,000 people at 600 locations in 42 states. Cracker Barrel stores, with their barn-style, weather-beaten wooden architecture, stand like mile-markers along American highways. For fans, part of their draw is that no matter the location, the eating experience is almost always the same. Before being seated, visitors walk through a “country store” stocked with wares such as rock candy, marmalades and wooden toys. Once at their table, they open a brown-paper menu listing trend-resistant American dishes — hickory smoked country ham, “chicken n’ dumplins,” and meatloaf — and fare such as the catfish platter, turnip greens and country-fried steak. Dan W. Evins, the founder of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, died Jan. 14 in Lebanon, Tenn. He was 76. In this image he is shown standing on the front porch of one of his stores. (Courtesy of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store) After the meal, a porch lined with rocking chairs awaits. Mr. Evins owed his success in large part to two insights about American life in the second part of the 20th century. The first was that the interstate highway system, whose construction began in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration, would forever change the way people traveled and, therefore, ate. His second was that some things never change, among them the appeal of a home-style meal, especially to someone who is on the road. “Most people perceive tourists on the interstate as being mostly one-time customers,” he told the publication Restaurant Business in 1987. “We knew that tourists were just creatures of habit.” In the 1960s, Mr. Evins was working at the oil company founded by his grandfather as a jobber, or wholesaler, with Shell. He dealt primarily with small gas stations in rural areas whose roads had become less


wrinkles If inflation did happen, it should have sent ripples through space-time – gravitational waves – that would cause variations in the CMB too subtle to have been spotted so far. The Planck satellite, the European Space Agency’s mission to study the CMB even more precisely, could well see them. Einstein referred to the cosmological constant as his “biggest blunder”. What was yours? I used to think that information was destroyed in black holes. But the AdS/CFT correspondence led me to change my mind. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science. NS: Black holes consume everything, including information, that strays too close. But in 1975, together with the Israeli physicist Jakob Bekenstein, Hawking showed that black holes slowly emit radiation, causing them to evaporate and eventually disappear. So what happens to the information they swallow? Hawking argued for decades that it was destroyed – a major challenge to ideas of continuity, and cause and effect. In 1997, however, theorist Juan Maldacena developed a mathematical shortcut, the “Anti-de-Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence”, or AdS/CFT. This links events within a contorted space-time geometry, such as in a black hole, with simpler physics at that space’s boundary. In 2004, Hawking used this to show how a black hole’s information leaks back into our universe through quantum-mechanical perturbations at its boundary, or event horizon. The recantation cost Hawking a bet made with fellow theorist John Preskill a decade earlier. What discovery would do most to revolutionise our understanding of the universe? The discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known fundamental particles, perhaps at the Large Hadron Collider. This would be strong evidence in favour of M-theory. NS: The search for supersymmetric particlesMovie Camera is a major goal of the LHC at CERN. The standard model of particle physics would be completed by finding the Higgs boson, but has a number of problems that would be solved if all known elementary particles had a heavier “superpartner”. Evidence of supersymmetry would support M-theory, the 11-dimensional version of string theory that is the best stab so far at a “theory of everything”, uniting gravity with the other forces of nature. If you were a young physicist just starting out today, what would you study? I would have a new idea that would open up a new field. What do you think most about during the day? Women. They are a complete mystery.


Russia hints at U.S. radar role in Mars probe’s crash

in California and Puerto Rico, he said. Outside experts called the theory unlikely. “It’s not radar,” said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and president of the Mars Society. If radar could disable spacecraft, Zubrin said, “satellites would be dying all the time because they constantly pass over radar stations,” he said. Zubrin pointed instead to problems inside the Russia space industry. “It’s slipshod quality control. Every one of their Mars probes has failed.” On Tuesday evening, Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted another unnamed Russian official who blamed the crash on “a software mistake and ensuing steps by ground services, which ran the batteries down completely.” The person quoted — a member of the investigative commission, according to Interfax — said the main computer was overloaded and malfunctioned, preventing the spacecraft from reaching the orbit that would put it on course to Mars. Controllers tried to switch on the deep-space communications transmitter, the individual said, because the spacecraft did not have a close-range transmitter on board. “This transmitter, consuming a lot of power, worked for a long time and discharged the batteries, but the ground services still failed to contact the spacecraft due to a high speed with which it was flying over ground stations,” the individual told Interfax. “The situation was further complicated by the fact that the spacecraft was in the shade for a long time and could not recharge its batteries.” Once the batteries were drained, the problems could not be fixed. That theory contradicted part of the account in Kommersant, which said experts had determined that the spacecraft’s solar batteries were turned on normally. The idea of foreign interference was first floated by the head of the Roscosmos space agency, Vladimir Popovkin, who said last week that the probe might have been damaged by “a foreign technical facility.” The craft stopped responding to commands on its second orbit of Earth. The United States has come in for a lot of blame in Russia recently; some government officials have accused it of paying the demonstrators who turned out to protest the December elections. But James Oberg, a former NASA mission controller and an expert on the Russian space program, said radar interference does not seem likely. The U.S. Army radar station in the Marshall Islands routinely tracks every Russian space launch, Oberg said. “As far as I can tell, they have never accidentally or on purpose zapped a


Recommendations

Vintner: Available in the District at Connecticut Avenue Wine & Liquor, Cowgirl Creamery; on the list at District Kitchen. Available in Maryland at Columbia Palace Wine & Spirits in Columbia. Available in Virginia at Arrowine in Arlington, Locke Modern Country Store in Millwood, Planet Wine & Gourmet in Alexandria; on the list at Brabo and Evening Star Cafe in Alexandria, Tallula in Arlington. Planeta Cerasuolo di Vittoria 2010 ★★1 / 2 Sicily, Italy, $22 Nero d’avola meets frappato, in case you are keeping track of grape varieties you’ve tried. This is a delectable red. Planeta is Sicily’s leading wine family, and everything it makes is good; its wines combine the sun-baked yet mild climate of Sicily with a Burgundian sensibility that gives them elegance and complexity. Palm Bay Imports/RNDC: Available in the District at Calvert Woodley, MacArthur Beverages, Paul’s of Chevy Chase; on the list at Al Tiramisu, I Ricchi, Komi, Ristorante Tosca. Available in Maryland at Bay Ridge Wine & Spirits in Annapolis, Quarry Wine & Spirits in Baltimore; on the list at Charleston, Cinghiale and La Scala in Baltimore. Available in Virginia at Arrowine in Arlington; on the list at Il Fornaio in Reston. Murrieta’s Well the Whip 2010 ★★1 / 2 Livermore Valley, Calif., $20 A delightful melange of sauvignon blanc, viognier, semillon, pinot blanc, orange muscat and muscat canelli, this is the type of wine I revel in. It doesn’t follow any recipe or rules but is created new each year based on what the vintage and the terroir provide. Southern/FP Winner: Available in the District at Cairo Wine & Liquor, Central Liquors, De Vinos, Harry’s Reserve Fine Wine & Spirits; on the list at Agora, DC Coast, Firefly, Montmartre, Panache, Salt & Pepper, Serendipity 3, West End Bistro. Donkey & Goat Stone Crusher Roussanne 2010 ★★1 / 2 El Dorado, Calif., $35 Here’s an unusual wine for adventurous palates. Made like a red wine to emphasize its tannins, it challenges our preconception that white wine should be crisp and light. Although it definitely has heft, there’s also lively acidity, plus hints of pine forest and jasmine. Donkey & Goat wines are made in small amounts and can be hard to find but are worth looking for. Nice Legs: Available in Maryland at I.M. Wine in Fulton. Available in Virginia at Out of Site Wines in Vienna; on the list at Screwtop Wine Bar in Arlington.


U.S. losing high-tech manufacturing jobs to Asia

The United States lost more than a quarter of its high-tech manufacturing jobs during the past decade as U.S.-based multinational companies placed a growing percentage of their research-and-development operations overseas, the National Science Board reported Tuesday. The rapid expansion of science and engineering capabilities in China and its neighbors pose a more formidable economic challenge to the United States, according to the group, with Asia rapidly boosting the number of engineering doctorates it produces and research dollars it spends. The report comes as the Obama administration is seeking to make U.S. manufacturing more competitive through engineering and innovation. In June, it announced its Advanced Manufacturing Partnership and sank $500 million into the effort. But as the National Science Board publication shows, vast government efforts in Asia are working along similar lines. It offered abundant evidence Asia’s efforts to attract and develop engineering outfits, and not just low-wage factories, have paid off. Since 2000: • • • “Over time, global science and technology capabilities have grown, nowhere more so than Asia,” according to the report. “In most broad aspects of science and technology activities, the United States continues to maintain a position of leadership. But it has experienced a gradual erosion of its position in many specific areas.” The report also highlights the broader loss of related U.S. jobs. The number of high-tech manufacturing jobs in the United States has declined by 687,000, or 28 percent between 2000 and 2010, according to the report. Although the long decline of manufacturing employment in the United States is often attributed to the cheaper wages in developing countries, China and developing countries in Asia have in recent years sought to lure more sophisticated manufacturing operations — and better jobs — by expanding their engineering prowess through government investment in education and research. The decline in U.S. manufacturing as a share of the nation’s economy and employment over the past decade “is not solely due to low-wage competition,” the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology wrote recently. “We cannot remain the world’s engine of innovation without manufacturing activity.” The National Science Board publication issued Tuesday found that other nations, by increasing their research and education spending, “challenge the world leadership role of the United States.” “The continued increase in the trends of these indicators are cause for concern,” said Jose-Marie Griffiths, chairman of the effort by the National Science Board, which is a


Not quite a foe, U.S. looms large in Russian world view

was — and is — critical of Western intervention in Libya and does not want to see a reprise in Syria, which is an important arms customer. On Tuesday, Lavrov dismissed the idea that the United States had taken a back seat on Libya, letting the French and British take the lead. “The U.S. was not on the margins,” he said. “They had the situation under control.” On Iran, too, Russia opposes tightening sanctions — involving oil and banking transactions — that Western nations have been instituting following the U.S. example. Such sanctions, which Lavrov called “lopsided, unilateral Western additions,” would have little effect on nuclear proliferation and seem aimed at weakening the Iranian government, he said. He called that an unacceptable goal. If a war is launched against Iran, Lavrov warned, “the consequences will be dire.” It would, he said, set off a “chain reaction — and no knowing how it will end.” As he did in November, Lavrov warned the United States that if it does not take into account Russian objections to its missile-defense plan, Russia will be forced to take steps to ensure its national security. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said that such steps could include the targeting of missile-defense installations and Russian withdrawal from the New START arms-control treaty. Provoked by several cases of the abuse and death of adopted Russian children in the United States, Lavrov said Moscow might once more introduce a freeze on adoptions by Americans until Washington can provide guarantees that the children will be protected. He also said that because of the Jackson-Vanik amendment — a Cold War leftover that ties trade status to the free emigration of Soviet Jews, Catholics and others — Russia may choose not to abide by its World Trade Organization agreements in its dealings with the United States. This could affect U.S. chicken exporters, who have been targeted by protectionist measures. Lavrov did note that the amendment has no actual bearing on trade because its provisions are suspended every year. That the law still exists is a source of annoyance to the Russians, and a handy stick with which they can take swings at U.S. policy when they feel the need. More world news coverage: - Haiti’s former dictator lives in style - Dilemma for China’s one-child generation - Did U.S. radar fry Russian Mars probe? - Read more headlines from around the world


Marines, the Taliban and desecration of the dead

Regarding Sebastian Junger’s Jan. 15 Outlook commentary, “In war, we all desecrate the enemy”: As a Marine who went to Vietnam when I was 20 and served 13 months, I read with sadness and understanding about my fellow Marines who apparently urinated on the corpses of their enemy. There is nothing glorious, chivalrous or romantic about combat. These four American volunteers did what they’d been trained to do: Kill their enemy and survive. How they chose to express their relief at cheating death is an unfortunate but understandable reaction to defeating a contemptible enemy who moments before was trying to end their young lives. However, the broader shame and sadness is prompted by the behavior of our government, which has long seen our military as a blunt-force tool of specious foreign policy and has been only too willing to send its young citizens into incomprehensible life-and-death situations. Ronald A. Stup, Highland ● ● ●


NSO had Columbia Heights on a string

It was the National Symphony Orchestra’s grand experiment. Take the players far away from the hallowed halls of the Kennedy Center. Plop them in a high school auditorium in the socioeconomic stew that is Columbia Heights. Have them play some Dvorak, Debussy, Vivaldi. Then, observe: Who would show up? Would anyone? Warren Williams, who manages community outreach for the orchestra, was nervous that Friday night earlier this month. Then he was amazed. There were young black children, clinging to their parents. The local postman and some business owners were there, too. Thirty minutes before the performance, they waited in the hallway of Bell Multicultural High School along with an overwhelming mass of the skinny-jeaned, a line that stretched from the metal detectors at the entrance to the seats in the auditorium. Over the past decade, much has been made of the transformation of Columbia Heights, thanks to the extension of Metro’s Green Line; the opening of big-box stores, such as Target; and a crop of new condos. Housing prices soared; young professionals moved in. Then came the inevitable tension between the working-class African Americans and Latinos who lived in the subsidized housing that once defined the neighborhood. The NSO saw an opportunity and arranged a week’s worth of free performances and workshops at Bell and smaller venues. It especially set its sights on two of classical music’s most elusive audiences: minorities and young people. “We thought here was a chance to reach out to everyone,” Williams said after the concert at Bell. “We know there are barriers to people enjoying classical music. But I think this shows that the music itself is not the barrier. We have to do a better job of reaching out.” Orchestra officials and musicians plan to: They are thinking about expanding to other D.C. neighborhoods but haven’t chosen the next one yet. As Williams spoke outside Bell’s auditorium after the concert, the orchestra’s assistant conductor walked by. “That crowd — they were so young and so awesome!” exclaimed Ankush Kumar Bahl, himself only 34. “Let’s find a way we can keep them!” The audiences were overwhelming: a standing-room-only crowd in the 850-seat auditorium at Bell and more than 5,000 music fans over the course of the week. The symphony orchestra, whose 100 members see themselves as ambassadors to classical music, has long tried to shatter the porcelain image of symphony audiences being older — much


Thousands of veterans line up in Washington for job fair

A long line of U.S. military veterans wait to speak with résumé coaches as the Department of Veterans Affairs hosts a major career fair. (Jahi Chikwendiu/WASHINGTON POST) Even before the doors officially opened at 8 a.m. Wednesday for an enormous veterans job fair at the Washington Convention Center, hundreds of job-seekers had shown up and were going through security, getting in lines and signing up for interviews. “It was already packed,” said John Sepulveda, assistant secretary for human resources and administration for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Some veterans showed up at the convention center on Tuesday and were told to return the next day, he said Army Staff Sgt. Adam Porras was one of thousands of veterans and service members who showed up for the VA-hosted Veteran Career Fair and Expo. After meeting with a résumé coach, Porras waited patiently in the federal job center line, hoping to find an employer willing to talk to him about a job as he prepares to leave the Army. “With the job market the way it is, I’m not sure how it will go,” Porras said. Porras, who suffered a traumatic brain injury during a 2009 rocket attack at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Porras’s service dog, Atlas, lay at his feet, helping to keep his owner balanced and calm. “Were it not for him, I’d be running out of here,” said Porras. “It’s too big of a crowd for me.” The large turnout, at least in part, reflected the high unemployment rate for post-Sept. 11 veterans, which stood at 13.1 percent as of last month. About 6,400 jobs in the public and private sectors were advertised as available, including 800 with the federal government. “The whole federal government is stepping up here,” John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel and Management, said during a visit to the expo. “It’s a phenomenal response — all the agencies are here.” “We’re telling the federal agencies, ‘We’ve got hiring authority: Use it, use it, use it,’ ” said Mary Santiago, director of VA’s federal employment services office. The departments of Defense, Labor and Homeland Security had job openings, as well as the Philadelphia police department and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said more job fairs will be held. “This is just one piece,” Shinseki said. “We’ll take lessons from this and


America remains the world’s beacon of success

many small businesses. During a meeting in Mumbai with three dozen business millionaires in their twenties and thirties, I asked a simple question: Which market would you most like to access? Almost unanimously, the answer was the United States. U.S. companies remain world leaders in information technology, bioscience, nanotechnology and aerospace. The evidence is clear not only in the development of products such as the iPad and iPhone but also in new patents. Last year, U.S. firms captured more than 50 percent of all U.S. patents; they received twice as many corporate patents as Japan, which came in second. Yes, our high schools need to do better, as reading and math scores and dropout rates show. But when it comes to higher education, we remain a beacon of success. Four of the world’s top five universities, and seven of the top 10, listed in last year’s Times Global Higher Education Rankings are in the United States. Americans have won 333 Nobel prizes, almost triple the number of Britons, the runner-up. In the past three years, Americans have won Nobel prizes in such critical fields as economics, physics, medicine and chemistry. Even immigration, a topic of some tension, continues to enhance our competitiveness. Highly capable and legal immigrants flock to our country — aiming not for Ellis Island but Silicon Valley and the Research Triangle Park. As researchers at Duke and the University of California at Berkeley showed in 2007, 25 percent of U.S. tech and engineering start-ups between 1995 and 2005 had one or more immigrant key founders, whose companies collectively generated an estimated $52 billion in 2005 sales and created nearly 450,000 jobs. Since the time of railroads and canals, our often-maligned federal government has invested in vital research in early phases for developing technologies, such as the Internet and energy technology, helping build a head start for the next generation of U.S. industry. Other advantages include our positive demographic growth pattern, our environmental protections of water and natural resources, and, as demonstrated by the smooth operation that took out Osama bin Laden, incredible military skill. This country faces real challenges, including a growing deficit, crumbling infrastructure and unsustainable entitlement spending. Addressing these issues will require leadership to meet the times, as happened during the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II and the civil rights era. Leaders need to exhibit the spirit captured by Theodore Roosevelt when


The poor are the Americans no one wants to talk about

15.1 percent. The share of Americans in extreme poverty — with an income less than half the poverty line — is the highest in the 35 years that the Census Bureau has kept such records. GOP candidates seldom mention the problems of the poor, for fear of being viewed as ideological weaklings. Elected Democrats are advised by their pollsters to focus on the challenges of the voter-rich middle class. No president — including Barack Obama — is naturally inclined to talk about conditions that have grown worse on his watch. Yet a debate on poverty is needed. And it would benefit from specificity, which often challenges ideology. Conservatives naturally focus on equal opportunity rather than on equal outcomes. But equality of opportunity is a more radical concept than we generally concede. It is not a natural state; it is a social and political achievement. It depends on healthy families and cohesive communities. But opportunity also depends on effective government — on public safety, public education and public health. Governmental overreach can undermine other important social institutions. Yet the retreat of government does not automatically restore them to health. Liberals often fail to recognize that income redistribution, while preventing penury, is not identical to social equality. The main challenge of poverty is not a lack of consumption but a lack of social capital — measured in skills and values — and of opportunity. Addressing these problems is more complex than increasing marginal tax rates, particularly when revenue is used to cover the increasing costs of non-means-tested entitlement programs. The structure of the modern welfare state is not focused on empowering the poor. Instead, it has increased the percentage of government transfer payments that go to middle- and upper-income seniors. On all sides, the poverty debate can be paralyzed by an obsession with fundamental causes. A failing community is a puzzle box of interconnected failures. Globalization and technology put downward pressure on wages and lead to stagnant labor markets. Permissive cultural norms encourage family breakdown and self-destructive behavior. Complaining about the rise of China or the decline of morality can be satisfying. But cosmic explanations can be obstacles to action. The good news is this: During the past few decades, a focus on concrete solutions to specific problems has often yielded good results. Welfare reform decreased caseloads and child poverty while increasing employment and income for low-income families. Community policing and zero-tolerance


Mary Ellen Avery, pediatrician

School of Public Health, Dr. Avery joined physiologist Jeremiah Mead to study a lung disorder believed to be a leading cause of death among preemies. Before Dr. Avery’s research, the condition was called hyaline membrane disease, taking its name from the glassy, or “hyaline,” film present in the lungs of many premature infants who did not survive. Today it is known as respiratory distress syndrome. The condition entered the national consciousness in 1963, when first lady Jacqueline Kennedy delivered a baby boy more than five weeks before his due date. Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was diagnosed with hyaline membrane disease and lived two days. “When medical scientists can solve the mystery of why the membrane forms,” the New York Times reported upon Patrick’s death, “they will have trapped one of the major killers of premature babies.” During her own previous clinical studies at hospitals, Dr. Avery had watched babies succumb to breathing difficulties. She was spurred to pursue research because of her frustration at not being able to help them. With Mead, Dr. Avery began examining the lungs of premature babies who did not live more than a few days. She made an unexpected observation: Unlike babies who died for other reasons, apparent victims of hyaline membrane disease had no trace of air in their lungs. Dr. Avery’s research led her to John Clements, an Army doctor whose study of wartime nerve gases had significantly advanced the study of pulmonology. He showed her a handmade scientific instrument he built to measure surface tension in the lung. Dr. Avery realized that the concept of surface tension would determine the course of her research. Surface tension, she learned, helps allow lungs to inflate, deflate and reinflate. She further learned that lungs maintain their surface tension with the help of surfactant, a foamy liquid that coats the inside of the organ. Back at the laboratory, Dr. Avery observed that the underdeveloped lungs of premature babies lacked surfactant. That, she theorized, was why they couldn’t breathe. In 1959, Dr. Avery and Mead explained their findings in an article published in the American Journal of Diseases of Children. For decades, it went mostly unnoticed, as competing theories about the respiratory ailment continued to circulate. But Dr. Avery persisted, continuing to publish on the topic and standing by her findings. Over the next two decades, her work “turned the understanding of hyaline membrane disease on its head,”


10 NATO troops killed in Afghan attack, helicopter crash

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ten NATO soldiers have died in Afghanistan in the past two days in the country’s embattled southern and eastern provinces. Four soldiers were killed by a member of the Afghan National Army in eastern Afghanistan on Friday. The suspected shooter has been apprehended, according to a NATO statement. In Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy identified the four victims as French soldiers and said the attack is “unacceptable.” He said France was suspending its training program for Afghan troops, the Associated Press reported. The attack occurred just hours after a military helicopter crashed in southern Afghanistan, killing six NATO service members, according to military officials. “The cause of the crash is under investigation,” according to a NATO statement. “However initial reporting indicates there was no enemy activity in the area at the time of the crash.” In a statement, Taliban officials claimed responsibility for the attack. As the United States edges slowly toward a political settlement with the Afghan government and the Taliban, the insurgency has continued its campaign of attacks and regular statements advocating violence against both western and Afghan troops. More world news coverage: - Arab League monitors’ mission expires in Syria - Beijing makes rare concession on pollution measure - Afghan government feels out of the loop on talks - Read more headlines from around the world


France threatens early withdrawal from Afghanistan

reviewed. Although the French role in Afghanistan has often been criticized domestically — particularly since Sarkozy relaxed rules limiting exposure to combat — it has never been seriously brought into question in Parliament. But Sarkozy has moved into campaign mode, running for reelection in a two-round vote scheduled for April 22 and May 6. Any suggestion that he is not vigorously protecting French troops abroad could be disastrous for his hopes of a second term. Sarkozy’s main opponent in the election, Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party, reacted to the killings Friday by announcing that, if elected, he would bring French soldiers home from Afghanistan “as fast as possible, at the latest by the end of 2012.” “This operation has gone on long enough,” he said. About 400 French soldiers were pulled out of Afghanistan in October, leaving an estimated 3,600 in the country. Friday’s statement by Sarkozy is likely to reopen doubts about the depth of commitment to Afghanistan in Europe, where the war has long been unpopular and where leaders have been increasingly reluctant to put their troops in harm’s way. Some European allies have also expressed concern about the long-term cost of maintaining Afghanistan’s security forces, estimated at between $4 billion and $6 billion a year beyond 2014. The shootings Friday were the second such attack on French troops in less than a month. Two French Foreign Legion members were shot and killed Dec. 29 by an Afghan soldier in mountainous Kapisa province, which is France’s main area of responsibility. Kapisa is a relatively peaceful zone, but it includes key infiltration routes used by the Taliban to move fighters and supplies from havens across the border in Pakistan. Friday’s shootings occurred in the same general area. The French soldiers were finishing a workout on an Afghan-commanded base when they were joined by an Afghan army contingent that was to accompany them on a training patrol later in the day, according to reports in Paris. As a result, they were not armed or able to defend themselves, French officials said. The killings came on the same day that new details emerged about a helicopter crash Thursday in the southern province of Helmand, which claimed the lives of six U.S. Marines. The cause was under investigation Friday, but U.S. officials said insurgent fire did not appear to be involved. Sieff reported from Kabul. Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington


U.S. military chief in Israel for talks on Iran

each other, and I’m here to assure you that is the case.” No Israeli statement was issued after the day’s talks, reflecting the sensitivity of the subject, and spokesmen for Netanyahu and Barak declined to comment on the substance of the discussions, citing what they described as standard procedure for consultations with visiting U.S. military chiefs. A spokesman for Dempsey said in a statement that the talks had “served to advance a common understanding of the regional security environment.” News reports in Israel described Dempsey’s visit as part of an effort by Washington to clarify Israel’s intentions regarding a possible military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities and to press the Israelis to allow time for international sanctions on Iran to take effect before considering any attack. Barak said in a radio interview this week that any Israeli decision on military action was “very far off,” and he rejected suggestions that Dempsey was carrying a warning to Israel against going it alone. Policy matters, he said, were discussed in his regular contacts with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Dempsey’s visit came at a time of heightened tension after the assassination last week of the deputy director of an Iranian nuclear enrichment site and threats by Iran to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for about a fifth of the world’s oil trade, in response to U.S.-led moves to tighten international sanctions. Iran has blamed Israel and the United States for the killing of its scientist, the fifth such slaying since 2007. Washington has denied involvement, while Israel has not commented. Israel and the United States this week decided to postpone a large joint missile defense exercise scheduled for the spring, a move that Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman attributed to regional “tensions and instability.” Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have argued that crippling sanctions on Iran, coupled with a credible military option, are needed to prevent Tehran from pursuing what they describe as a drive to build a nuclear bomb. Israeli officials say they view a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat and have hinted at possible military action should sanctions prove ineffective. “Nuclear arms in Iran are a threat to Israel, the region and the world,” Netanyahu said in a speech Wednesday during a visit to the Netherlands. “Sanctions should be applied to Iran’s central bank and its oil exports — and they should be applied now.” A new


Military suicides drop, other problems on rise

The number of suicides among soldiers has been leveling off, but there has been a dramatic jump in domestic violence, sex crimes and other destructive behavior in a force that has been stressed by a decade of war, according to an Army report released Thursday. “There’s a lot of good news in this report, but there’s also some bad news,” the Army vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, told a Pentagon news conference. “We know we’ve got still a lot of work to do.” Suicides among active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers not on active duty totaled 278 last year, down 9 percent from 2010. “I think we’ve at least arrested this problem and, hopefully, will start to push it down,” Chiarelli said. But violent sex crimes and domestic violence have increased more than 30 percent since 2006 and child abuse by 43 percent. “After 10 years of war with an all-volunteer force, you’re going to have problems that no one could have [forecast] before this began,” he said. Chiarelli released a 200-page report for military leaders and health-care providers that is intended to assess the physical and mental condition of the force, disciplinary problems and deficiencies in how the Army deals with problems. It follows up on a 2010 report that said the Army was failing some soldiers by missing signs of trouble or by looking the other way as commanders tried to keep up with tight deployment schedules needed to fight in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Chiarelli said commanders are getting more troops into substance-abuse programs; are removing more troops from the service for misconduct; and are preventing would-be recruits with alcohol and drug convictions from joining. Other details of the report include: ● Post-traumatic stress disorder is epidemic, and there could be 472,000 U.S. service members with the condition, half of them in the Army. ■ Some 24,000 soldiers were referred to substance-abuse programs in the 2011 fiscal year, which ended in September. ■ The Army had more than 126,000 diagnosed cases of traumatic brain injury from 2000 to 2010. That included more than 95,000 mild cases, about 20,000 moderate cases and more than 3,500 cases in which there were severe, penetrating injuries. Chiarelli said the military has taken “a huge step forward,” with new screening procedures for troops who suffer concussions, a frequent injury in wars in which makeshift bombs have been


in a force that has been stressed by a decade of war, according to an Army report released Thursday. “There’s a lot of good news in this report, but there’s also some bad news,” the Army vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, told a Pentagon news conference. “We know we’ve got still a lot of work to do.” Suicides among active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers not on active duty totaled 278 last year, down 9 percent from 2010. “I think we’ve at least arrested this problem and, hopefully, will start to push it down,” Chiarelli said. But violent sex crimes and domestic violence have increased more than 30 percent since 2006 and child abuse by 43 percent. “After 10 years of war with an all-volunteer force, you’re going to have problems that no one could have [forecast] before this began,” he said. Chiarelli released a 200-page report for military leaders and health-care providers that is intended to assess the physical and mental condition of the force, disciplinary problems and deficiencies in how the Army deals with problems. It follows up on a 2010 report that said the Army was failing some soldiers by missing signs of trouble or by looking the other way as commanders tried to keep up with tight deployment schedules needed to fight in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Chiarelli said commanders are getting more troops into substance-abuse programs; are removing more troops from the service for misconduct; and are preventing would-be recruits with alcohol and drug convictions from joining. Other details of the report include: ● Post-traumatic stress disorder is epidemic, and there could be 472,000 U.S. service members with the condition, half of them in the Army. ■ Some 24,000 soldiers were referred to substance-abuse programs in the 2011 fiscal year, which ended in September. ■ The Army had more than 126,000 diagnosed cases of traumatic brain injury from 2000 to 2010. That included more than 95,000 mild cases, about 20,000 moderate cases and more than 3,500 cases in which there were severe, penetrating injuries. Chiarelli said the military has taken “a huge step forward,” with new screening procedures for troops who suffer concussions, a frequent injury in wars in which makeshift bombs have been insurgents’ weapons of choice. Troops are now taken off the battlefield and held off for days or weeks until they recover, he said. — Associated Press


Escapes: The old brewery’s gone, but there’s still lots brewing in Mount Joy, Pa.

Joy, Pa., between Harrisburg and Lancaster. This lovely area of rolling farmland has long been dominated by residents of German descent; back in 1876, Bube, an immigrant from Bavaria, opened a brewery in a two-story stone structure on North Market Street to serve them his popular lager. As his fortunes rose, he outgrew the old brewery and added a bottling works next door. In 1879, he built the three-story, Victorian-style Central Hotel, notable for its intricate brickwork. It backed onto the other side of the original brewery building, completing the block-long row that still stands today. Bube’s empire lasted until 1920, the year Prohibition was introduced, and the brewery closed for good. Bube’s current owner is Samuel Allen, who bought the idle brewery and adjacent buildings in 1982. These historic structures (on the National Register of Historic Places) now house a modern microbrewery and an outdoor biergarten. Restaurant options include the Catacombs, which offers fine dining in the old beer cellar; the restaurant Alois, for group events in the Central Hotel; and the Bottling Works tavern. The microbrewery occupies the original brewery’s icehouse. Allen’s vision also includes murder mysteries in the Central Hotel, themed feasts in the Catacombs (a pirate feast was going on the night we dined there) and ghost tours in all the buildings. Allen has also opened a public art gallery promoting local talent. His newest project is offering limited lodging in the hotel. Starting in April, groups may rent its several rooms for a flat fee. “I always have four or five projects in the hopper,” Allen told me. The Mount Joy area is underlain by hundreds of limestone caverns that were ideal for storing beer in pre-refrigerator days. On our first night in town, we dined in the Catacombs, 43 feet below the ground, in a candlelit stone chamber lined with huge white-oak casks that once held Alois Bube’s long-lost recipe. Carol had a New York strip while I chose the grilled pork chop, complemented by the microbrewery’s malty red ale and hoppy India Pale Ale. On the way down to the restaurant, our guide, Nic Ellis, a Bube descendant, showed us four enormous bald-cypress conditioning casks left from the old brewery, each capable of holding 2,000 gallons of beer. Then he told us a ghost story. We were standing at the foot of a staircase in a corridor between the old brewery and the


Coming & Going: More travelers head abroad and other travel news

Coming & Going More overseas visitors, more overnighters in Virginia parks Travelers abroad You can’t keep a good traveler down. The United Nations World Tourism Organization reports that international tourism arrivals in 2011 totaled 980 million. That’s 4.4 percent more than 2010’s 939 million. Lest we forget, the increase came despite worldwide economic and political upheaval. The regions that experienced the largest increases: Asia and the Pacific had 6 percent more arrivals (216 million total), and visits to the Americas went up 4 percent (156 million total). Africa held steady The UNWTO expects continued growth in 2012, with international arrivals hitting 1 billion sometime later in the year. Find more information at mkt.unwto.org/en/barometer. Park it here It looks as though tight budgets may be making travelers more savvy about affordable accommodations. In 2011, Virginia State Parks hosted a record number of overnight visitors. The system’s cabins, campgrounds and lodges welcomed 1,055,875 guests, up 3 percent from 1,022,698 in 2010. Of the 35 parks, 25 offer camping facilities and 18 have cabins or lodges. Nightly camping fees fall mostly in the $20 to $30 range. Rates at the cabins and lodges range from $59 per night for an efficiency to more than $300 for a six-room lodge, depending on the season and accommodation size. Overall attendance at the parks declined to 7,836,246. The previous year’s total was 8,065,558, an all-time high. Still, almost half the parks had higher daily attendance numbers. The system celebrated its 75th anniversary last year. To check out options for your next stay, visit dcr.virginia.gov/state_parks. Travel tickers Island Travel & Tours begins its charter flights to Cuba from BWI Marshall on March 21. Trips are still limited to “purposeful” travelers along the lines of journalists, academics and religious and cultural organizations. The roughly three-hour flight will leave BWI on Wednesdays at 3 p.m. . . . The State Department has issued an emergency message to U.S. citizens either in Thailand or thinking of traveling there. Officials are concerned that “foreign terrorists may be currently looking to conduct attacks against tourist areas in Bangkok in the near future.” . . . If you’re looking to help with restoration efforts in Italy’s Cinque Terre region, damaged by flooding last year, you can now make a donation through three Web sites: www.savevernazza.com, vernazzafutura.blogspot.com and www.amicidellecinqueterre.com. Help feed CoGo. Send travel news to: travel@washpost.com. By mail: CoGo, Washington Post Travel Section,


An interview with Burma’s democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi

think we didn’t have half the number of journalists and publications that we have now. Within the last year, the number of publications have proliferated. But they have to submit their stories to a censor. Yes. The censorship laws have been relaxed considerably. When I was released, I couldn’t publish anything under my name. Do you have ideas as to how to improve the living standards of the people of this country? We need to empower the people. One way to empower them is to make them stronger economically. That’s where we would like our friends to help: foreign aid in the right way; development aid that is not frittered away to those who are administering the funds. Do you favor privatizing the economy? Yes, but we need sound laws with regard to the economy. We need sound banking and sound investment laws. Only a small minority of our people have anything to do with banks. What is your view of the Arab Spring? Do you think the government in Naypyidaw was influenced by it? The situation in the Middle East is considerably different. I was heartened that people everywhere want certain basic freedoms, even if they live in a totally different cultural environment. I understand that when you met with President Thein Sein last summer, he had your father’s picture prominently displayed. When the military regime first took over, my father’s face was on the currency. It was gradually removed and replaced by the symbol of the USDP [Union Solidarity and Development Party]. All the photos of my father were taken down from schools and government offices. You were not allowed to put photos of my father in journals or magazines. The meeting without the picture would have meant less. Were you surprised when you walked in? I was, yes. I had not expected it. My father’s picture was in the center. Did you and the president decide you could work together? I felt I could work with him, and I hope he felt he could work with me. Did Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton invite you to Washington when she was here in December? Yes, I would love to go to Washington as soon as possible. Has it changed much in the last 40 years? Recently you have had many foreign visitors. Hasn’t your life changed drastically in the past year? It doesn’t seem all that different, except much


Blasting Mozart to drive criminals away

Some months ago, I was sitting at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York with enough time on my hands that I actually noticed the music coming over the speakers in the ceiling. It was the scherzo from Schubert’s first piano trio. Schubert’s piano trios are among my favorite pieces in the universe, but as I listened, I found that I wasn’t relaxing; quite the contrary. The music sounded awful: tinny, hard-edged, aggressive. I wanted to get away. I’ve long heard that the Port Authority is one of many public spaces across the country that uses classical music to help control vagrancy: to drive the homeless away. Listening to that Schubert rendition, I started to believe it. To many people, classical music is the perfect background music: soothing, attractive, undemanding. But for some time, it’s also been used as a form of crowd control: a kind of bug spray for people you don’t want hanging around. Early attempts in this direction date to the mid-1980s, when a 7-Eleven began playing music in the parking lot as a deterrent to the crowds of teenagers congregating there. Plenty of stores continue to use the technique, and other examples have been cropping up sporadically ever since. In 2001, police in West Palm Beach, Fla., blasted Mozart and Beethoven on a crime-ridden street corner and saw incidents dwindle dramatically. In 2010, the transit authority in Portland, Ore., began playing classical music at light-rail stops, and calls to police dropped. When the London Underground started piping classical music into its stations in 2005, physical and verbal abuse by young people (however you define THAT) declined by 33 percent. In a related story, a school in Derby, England, got into the news last year by using classical music to punish misbehaving pupils, forcing the disobedient to sit and listen to an hour of classical music. Behavior improved by 50 percent. Like many things in classical music, these endeavors have entered the realm of conventional wisdom without being adequately studied. Installing speakers in a public space to play classical music usually involves some degree of physical improvement to the area and an increased police presence. How, then, can you determine that classical music alone is responsible for improving conditions? (At the Derby school, the students were subjected to the hour of classical music on a Friday evening, followed by a DVD about math and then the


The immorality of Afghanistan’s ‘moral crimes’

of brutal crimes. My illiterate client told me of her experience going to court with her illegitimate daughter and not understanding the legal process. She was forced to represent herself after her Afghan lawyer failed to show up, yet the judges who presided over the case refused to allow her to speak. Instead, they berated Gulnaz for lying, insisting that women cannot get pregnant by having sex just once. This assertion was the basis for the 12-year sentence that was imposed, with a wrenching caveat: Marrying her attacker would allow her to be “free.” Unfortunately, Gulnaz’s case is not an anomaly but represents the situation that more than half of the imprisoned women in Afghanistan find themselves in — locked up for moral crimes, according to a recent studyby the United Nations. I submitted a pardon application for Gulnaz, accompanied by a petition with more than 6,000 signatures. She had no family willing to take up her cause, but the world, as we discovered, supported her release. Standing up for the rights of women like Gulnaz was part of the reason the United States went to Afghanistan in the first place. In 2001, one of the key political arguments that President George W. Bush’s administration used to support the military deployment was stopping the terrorists, for whom “the brutal oppression of women” was “a central goal.” In November 2001, Congress passed a bill noting Taliban oppression of women and stressing the need for Afghan women and children to have better access to health care and education. International attention to the fate of women in Afghanistan has been an issue throughout the war. In 2009, the Afghan government focused on violence and human rights when it passed the Elimination of Violence Against Women Law. Though this measure garnered substantial support worldwide, oversight has been limited. The law is largely ignored in Afghanistan’s justice system, and abused women are routinely imprisoned as a result. While Gulnaz’s case brought international media attention to the plight of Afghan rape victims, inside Afghanistan, gross violations of basic human rights are often business as usual. In Gulnaz’s case, after we submitted the pardon application, President Hamid Karzai formed a judicial committee with members from the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Court and the attorney general’s office. They were to investigate Gulnaz’s case and, reportedly, the cases of all other women imprisoned in Kabul. The formation of