Lockheed plans to furlough 3,000 employees next week

Marillyn A. Hewson, Lockheed’s chief executive, said affected employees should use vacation time and floating holidays so they can continue to be paid during the furlough. Those without enough vacation time will be given an advance on up to 40 hours of their salary, she said. “If the shutdown extends beyond available vacation time, employees will be transitioned to unpaid furlough leave,” Hewson wrote. The company declined to say how many of the furloughed employees are based in the Washington area. Hewson warned that Lockheed, the world’s largest defense contractor, expects the number of affected employees to increase “as we experience contractual actions and the impact of furloughs among” government inspectors. The Aerospace Industries Association, an industry group, said in a statement Friday that othermember companies will have to furlough employees if the shutdown continues. The pressing problem, the AIA said, is the shutdown’s effect on the Defense Contract Management Agency, which oversees contract performance. Without these inspectors, companies can’t continue work on some projects, the group said. United Technologies announced this week that the absence of DCMA inspectors will force it to halt some manufacturing work. The Hartford, Conn.-based company said that starting Monday its Sikorsky Aircraft unit will furlough nearly 2,000 workers — at facilities in Stratford, Conn., West Palm Beach, Fla., and Troy, Ala. If the shutdown continues through next week, the company added, its Pratt & Whitney and aerospace systems units would also take action, potentially furloughing an additional 2,000 workers. David F. Melcher, chief executive of McLean-based defense contractor Exelis, said this week that the shutdown’s toll on contractors would expand considerably as time goes on. “Shutting down for a day or two is not going to be that much of an impact,” Melcher said. But “I think there is a definite and real impact if the shutdown lasts more than a couple weeks — for every company in this industry.” Some contractors still haven’t announced how they will respond to an extended shutdown. BAE Systems’ Arlington-based U.S. business has said that it would pay its workers through the early days of the shutdown. In a memo to employees Monday, before the shutdown began, Linda Hudson, the company’s chief executive, said that for the first week, “at least, pay and benefits for BAE Systems employees will not change.” But a BAE spokesman declined to comment Friday on whether the company could begin furloughs next week.


Talk by Roger Dingledine of Torproject.org at the NSA

High Latency anonymity service was the /*MixMinion*/ family of open source projects. Mr. Dingledine was one of the key developers of these. His opinion is that the very limited utility of such projects has caused them to wither on the vine. He does *not* see any major development in such services for other than research in the forseeable future. Another key point is that the degree of anonymity in any system is proportional to the number of users. If noone is using any of the high latency systems, why bother. This proportionality is one of the ideas Mr. Dingledine refers to as a /tension/ in the world of anonymity systems. (U) TOR Issues (U) The short description of TOR for the reader is as follows: The user, via his/her TOR client, queries one of 5 directory servers for the current list of TOR nodes. Using metrics such as availability and bandwidth in conjunction with random choice, a set of 3 proxies is chosen for a “circuit”. It is this circuit which is used, with a unique layer of encryption on each link, for anonymous Internet interactions. (U) The lifetime of a circuit, a tuneable parameter, is another /tension/, this one specific to TOR. The longer the circuit life, the more various traffic that may transit it, forming a knowable relationship between the traffic streams. Too short of a lifetime means too much time/CPU is spent building circuits. The original default lifetime was 30 seconds but is now 10 minutes. Everything is tweakable in TOR, so a user if free to choose his/her own circuit lifetime. But this is dangerous, as a unique circuit lifetime could easily become a user identification feature :-). (U) Mr. Dingeldine was asked about the concrete choice of a 3-long circuit. This is unlikely to change soon, as it appears to be a very suitable tradeoff. (U) The mention of SOCKS proxies, such as /*Privoxy*/ as a bump in the chain before TOR was mentioned. These proxies can intercept and cleanup things such as cookies to further help anonymity. (U) The current “owner” of TOR is torproject.org, a US registerd 501(C) non-profit organization, of which Mr. Dingledine is a principal. In addition to specific technology issues such as scaling, other categories of work are: (U) 1. Usability (Targetting the ability of other than tech-savvy users to embrace the technology) 2. Incentives (Trying to get more people


The Washington Post Sponsors The Lincoln Legacy Project production of The Laramie Project

The Washington Post is the official media sponsor of the Lincoln Legacy Project and Ford Theatre Society’s production of The Laramie Project, originally scheduled to play through October 27. The Laramie Project is directed by Matthew Gardiner and portrays the impact of the 1998 murder of a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, on his small town of Laramie, Wyoming. The play was written by Moisés Kaufman and Members of the Tectonic Theater Project. Due to the government shutdown, all Ford’s Theatre Society performances of The Laramie Project at Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site through October 6th have been canceled. Two free performances of The Laramie Project will be held on Friday, October 4th and Tuesday, October 8th at the First Congregational United Church of Christ (945 G Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001). Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. and the performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. When Ford’s Theatre is allowed to reopen, The Laramie Project will resume as scheduled. On Monday, October 7th at 7p.m., Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post, will moderate a free panel discussion entitled, With Charity For All: Lives Changed by Hate. Panelists include Dave O’Malley, lead investigator into the murder of Matthew Shepard and Billy Rowles, Jasper County Sheriff during the 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr. The panel discussion will be held at the Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership, directly across from Ford’s Theatre. The Washington Post is the official media sponsor of The Lincoln Legacy Project and the production of The Laramie Project. The Post supports the arts and education through innovative programs such as The Lincoln Legacy Project, which aims to create dialogue around the issues of tolerance, equality and acceptance through a series of cornerstone theatre productions, educational programs and special events. Ford’s Theatre is a PostPoints nonprofit partner. For additional information, visit http://www.fords.org/ 10/16 update: Ford’s Theatre Society will reopen on October 16th. Performances of The Laramie Project will begin at 7:30 p.m. from Oct 16th through October 27th. Remaining tickets for all performances will be $25. 10/8 update: Due to the government shutdown, several Ford’s Theatre Society performances of The Laramie Project have been relocated to the First Congregational United Church of Christ (945 G Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001) during October 8th-15th. All performances will begin at 7:30 p.m. and the doors will open at 7 p.m. There is no matinee scheduled for


people. Bacevich, whose credentials for writing about the military are impeccable — he is a graduate of West Point, served for a year in Vietnam and did duty in the Persian Gulf before leaving the Army about two decades ago with the rank of colonel — is outspoken in his criticism of the all-volunteer Army. It’s not the soldiers whom he criticizes but the politicians who overreacted to opposition to the war in Vietnam and abolished the draft, thus establishing all-volunteer armed services, “a civil-military relationship founded on the principle that a few fight while the rest watch.” He writes: “Rather than offering an antidote to problems, the military system centered on the all-volunteer force bred and exacerbated them. It underwrote recklessness in the formulation of policy and thereby resulted in needless, costly, and ill-managed wars. . . . From pulpit and podium, at concerts and sporting events, expressions of warmth and affection shower down on the troops. Yet when those wielding power in Washington subject soldiers to serial abuse, Americans acquiesce. When the state heedlessly and callously exploits those same troops, the people avert their gaze. Maintaining a pretense of caring about soldiers, state and society actually collaborate in betraying them.” They are able to do so because the elimination of a truly citizen-based Army has also eliminated the need for the state to take its case to the people before going to war. Military action is now undertaken by “a small warrior class — less than 1 percent of the total population” — that has no choice except to do the bidding of leaders, both civilian and military, who for whatever reason want to go to war in remote places all over the globe. ‘Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country’ by Andrew J. Bacevich (Metropolitan) Bacevich does not dwell on the point, but surely it is worth noting that precious few of these leaders have done military service themselves. Many of the “chickenhawks” who egged George W. Bush on, notably the much draft-deferred Dick Cheney, had never worn military uniforms. Neither has Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton; John Kerry is the rare high-ranking official in the present administration to have gone to war, and it will be recalled that he was subjected by Bush allies in the 2004 presidential campaign to malicious misrepresentations of his service in Vietnam. This is a change of


T. rex skeleton’s trip to Smithsonian delayed by shutdown

in 1988. (Courtesy Museum of the Rockies) The latest victim of the shutdown has been dead for 65 million years. It is the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton that was scheduled to be delivered this month to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The fossil’s cross-county trip has been postponed until next spring, museum director Kirk Johnson said Friday. “Our primary goal is the safety and security of this specimen,” Johnson said. “It just doesn’t make sense to make the move now.” The fossil — one of the most complete T. rex skeletons ever recovered — belongs to the Army Corps of Engineers and has been in Montana since the late Cretaceous Period. Smithsonian paleontologists and preparation staff and Army Corps personnel were supposed to be in Bozeman, Mont., next week to inspect and catalogue the specimen, which is coming to Washington on a long-term loan. It was scheduled to depart Bozeman by truck next Friday and arrive in Washington in time for a high-profile introduction on the Mall on Oct. 16 — National Fossil Day. But, Johnson said, most of the 472 staff members at the world’s second-most-visited museum aren’t working because of the shutdown. The Army Corps, too, is short-staffed from the shutdown. Ditto the National Park Service, which produces the National Fossil Day event. Oh, and the Mall itself is closed. “We’re all playing with our hands tied behind our backs,” Johnson said. “It made a complicated situation more complicated. You don’t want to mess up something as important as this, so we did what was prudent.” The fossil — known as the Wankel Rex, after the Montana rancher who discovered it in a remote section of a wildlife refuge — will remain in a Museum of the Rockies storage facility, Johnson said. It will be trucked to Washington next spring, before the Natural History Museum’s dinosaur exhibit closes for a $48 million renovation. The 35-foot-long skeleton will be cleaned, restored and studied in Washington, then sent to Toronto, where it will be mounted in a lifelike pose. The Wankel Rex is not scheduled to go on permanent display until the new dinosaur hall opens in 2019. “So we had some flexibility,” Johnson said. “We didn’t need to move it” right away. Still, he added, “I’m terribly disappointed. . . . As a paleontologist, I’ve been looking forward to a Tyrannosaurus rex coming here for a long time.”


Shutdown transforms White House operations, foreign policy outreach

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering. While Secretary of State John F. Kerry will lead the delegation instead, White House press secretary Jay Carney said the fact that Obama won’t be there “sends the wrong message to the world.” From federal office buildings to the national parks and memorials, sights around Washington and across the country are closed after Congress failed to pass a funding bill. “There are consequences to this, and it’s unfortunate,” Carney said. “This is not good for America, it’s not good for our economy.” On Friday, U.S. Trade Representative Mike Froman also canceled negotiations scheduled for next week in Europe because of “financial and staffing constraints” imposed by the government shutdown. The partial government shutdown, which took effect early Tuesday after Republicans attempted to scale back Obama’s health-care law, cut White House staff by 75 percent, leaving 436 of 1,701 employees on the job. Some of the president’s main congressional foes haven’t been forced to cut as deeply because they have more flexibility on how much to shrink their offices. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who led the push to defund the new health-care law in exchange for funding the government, has furloughed about 40 percent of his staff, while House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has sent roughly half his staff home. Other lawmakers have made deeper cuts: Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) furloughed half his employees in Washington and his entire state staff except his southern Nevada director. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) cut his staff from 44 to 13. “Each member is given discretion about their own staff,” Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck wrote in an e-mail. Within the Obama administration, the shutdown’s effects have often reverberated in unexpected ways. On Wednesday, an official from the International Monetary Fund called the White House Council of Economic Advisers, hoping to schedule a future appointment with Jason Furman, the panel’s chairman. Furman, one of four people still working in the office, answered the phone himself; IMF staffers were soon buzzing about a government in such disarray that one of its top economists has to answer his own phone. One U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf complained this week that the shutdown appeared to have delayed visas for its delegation to the Board of Governors meeting at the IMF and World Bank next Friday, according to a person familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition


Potbelly shares soar 120 percent during IPO

companies going public. Shares of Sprouts Farmers Market rose 123 percent in the natural and organic grocery’s August IPO. Restaurant chain Noodles & Co.’s stock more than doubled in its June debut. Potbelly’s stock rose $16.77, or 120 percent, to close at $30.77, after the IPO raised $105 million — more than the company expected. Restaurant chains such as Potbelly and Noodles are attracting diners by using higher quality ingredients than fast-food chains and offering meals at lower prices than casual dining chains such as Darden Restaurants’ Olive Garden. Investors also have taken a liking to these chains, often categorized as “fast-casual.” Noodles shares doubled in their debut in June and are up 34 percent. “The overall trend is to go for speed and money,” said Harry Balzer, chief industry analyst of the market research firm NPD Group. Sales at fast-casual eateries jumped 13.2 percent in 2012, more than double the pace at which fast-food chains increased their sales, according to the consulting firm Technomic. Casual dining sales rose just 2 percent during the period. Potbelly’s sales were brisk in 2012, with revenue rising more than 15 percent to $274.9 million and profit tripling to $24 million. The company has posted positive same-store sales growth in 12 of the last 13 quarters. The stock was trading at a multiple of about 40 times trailing 12-month earnings, higher than that of most competing casual restaurant chains but below Noodles, which trades at a whopping multiple of 113. Potbelly started in 1977 as a food counter in a small antiques store in Chicago. Its 295 outlets are mostly concentrated in the Midwest, although it is also a popular fast meal in Washington, where it has a cluster of outlets within a few blocks of the White House. “It is gaining a lot of interest in areas outside the Midwest, where it seems to be focused currently, and expansion potential seems to be reminiscent of popular food chains that are going to succeed in markets,” said David Menlow, president of IPOFinancial.com. The company is headed by Aylwin B. Lewis, whose résuméincludes titles such as chief executive of Sears Holdings Corp. and chief operating officer of Yum Brands. He is also on the board of Walt Disney Co. and Starwoods Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. Other casual-dining chains readying to go public include the Mediterranean-style restaurant chain Zoe’s Kitchen and hamburger chain Checkers Drive-In Restaurants.


GOP, Democrats slow to budge on strategies to overcome shutdown

Republican members of Congress held a news conference Thursday urging the Senate to pass a measure to restore funding to the National Institute of Health. A group of leading House Republicans donned lab coats this week and took to a Capitol Hill news conference to plead for passage of a bill that would restore funding for the National Institutes of Health amid the government shutdown. “Whether it’s pediatric cancer research, diabetes, so many other cures and treatments that are being developed — we don’t want to put them on hold,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.) said Thursday. “We want America to continue to be the leader.” Yet three days earlier, McMorris Rodgers joined other Republicans in deciding to shut down NIH and other parts of the government after President Obama refused to curtail his health-care law. McMorris Rodgers, who has a child with Down syndrome, “has always supported the critical medical research at NIH, especially because she has a personal connection to the difference it can make in the lives of millions of families and children with disabilities,” a spokesman said. In ways big and small, Republicans and Democrats are trying — and often struggling — to square their strategy for overcoming the ongoing government shutdown with their prior positions. The challenge has been greatest for Republicans, who forced the partial government closure at midnight Monday by refusing to pass a funding bill unless Obama agreed to defund or delay the new health-care law. Many Republicans spent the remainder of the week bemoaning programs that had been closed and trying to restore funding to individual agencies through piecemeal legislation. Democrats, meanwhile, have faced the challenge of standing unified against the GOP strategy, refusing to agree to open agencies that they generally support. Dozens of Democrats have broken ranks, however, voting with Republicans in favor of restoring funding for the District and for veterans programs. The net effect is a sort of political cognitive dissonance: Republicans demand to reopen some agencies but not the whole government, while Democrats oppose relief unless everything is restored. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (Tex.) illustrated the risks of the GOP approach this week when he publicly railed against a National Park Service ranger working at the National World War II Memorial on the Mall. The monument was closed when the government shut down. In a moment captured on a widely viewed video, Neugebauer stood by a group


Shutdown trash builds as Mall tourists find locked restrooms, brimming trash cans

Mall’s east end. Asked whether she thought the shutdown would hurt such progress, Cunningham said, “Honestly, I think it’s the opposite. “It reinforces the fact that [government] funding is really questionable,” she said. “And private dollars are the major driver of the infrastructure that’s needed in these parks.” The effect of the shutdown rippled outward in many ways. In a statement announcing his trash initiative, Gray said, “It is imperative that someone remove the trash. . . [before] . . . rodents and other vermin are attracted. “Because the federal government cannot step up to provide this basic service to District residents and visitors, I have authorized [the D.C. public works department] to service the litter cans for the duration of the federal shutdown.” Officials said later that District crews would not collect inside Rock Creek Park or inside the Mall, but along the perimeters of these sites. The District government has remained open during the federal shutdown, drawing on a special reserve fund while the city budget remains in limbo alongside spending for federal agencies. The reserve fund is expected to last until about Oct. 13. At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the delivery of the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex, scheduled for this month, has been postponed until next spring because the museum is shuttered. At the National Institutes of Health, one researcher worried about the fate of untended experiments. The head of a biomedical research laboratory said he was upset by the enforcement of a federal law that prohibits federal employees from volunteering to work. “Really, my main beef is that I’d like to work,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of causing trouble for supervisors. “We’re in the middle of a huge experiment,” he said. “It’s biological material, so it’s very time-sensitive. A lot of us would like to work, even if we’re not paid. But we’re worried that there could be criminal consequences if we do — which seems odd.” “We’re dedicated to what we do,” he said. “Even if we’re shut down, we want to work.” Other federal employees who couldn’t do their jobs found charitable occupation. Cylia Lowe usually spends her weekdays processing legal cases at the Office of Personnel Management. On Friday, the furloughed lawyer was cutting up carrots and celery at Martha’s Kitchen, a nonprofit program in Northwest Washington that provides free hot dinners for


●An editor’s note with an Oct. 4 Weekend article about area restaurants that serve gluten-free pizza said that none of the chosen favorites operate in a gluten-free environment. In fact, one of the honorable mentions, One Dish Cuisine in Ellicott City, is a completely gluten-free facility certified by the Celiac Sprue Association. The Washington Post is committed to correcting errors that appear in the newspaper. Those interested in contacting the paper for that purpose can: E-mail: Call:


Dozens of D.C. nonprofits serving children lose funding during government shutdown

Dozens of D.C. community organizations that serve needy children are feeling the government-shutdown squeeze. The community organizations, which provide after-school programs for children, were supposed to receive millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grant payments Oct. 1. But the payments can’t be made as long as Congress remains deadlocked. The delay is squeezing small nonprofit groups that serve some of the neediest students in the city, said Rene Wallis, executive director of People, Animals, Love (PAL), which runs after-school programs for more than 300 children at two schools east of the Anacostia River: Stanton Elementary and D.C. Scholars Public Charter School. “It’s a big problem,” Wallis said. “This is definitely going to slow down after-school for kids in a major way.” PAL is one of 37 organizations that were supposed to receive a total of $2.25 million in grants from the nonprofit D.C. Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp., which funnels District funding to groups that serve city children and their parents. The organizations serve more than 2,400 children and about 80 adults. Ed Davies, the trust’s executive director, said that while the city government has continued to operate, all of the District’s fiscal 2014 appropriations are on hold until the shutdown ends. “I deeply regret the need to delay grant awards and payments, however this is a situation beyond our control,” Davies wrote in an e-mail to grantees Friday. “Like everyone else, I cannot predict when this issue will be resolved, but I assure you, we will move quickly to finalize grant agreements and expedite payments as soon as we are allowed to do so.” Wallis said that early fall is always a lean time for D.C. organizations such as PAL, which is awaiting city reimbursement for programs it offered children over the summer. “I’m going to have to sit down and look at cash flow and see what I can swing,” she said. Wallis said the $76,000 grant PAL had expected to receive Oct. 1 makes up 12 percent of the organization’s entire budget and is meant to fund its efforts to intensify help for children reading below grade level. The organization can dip into its savings for now but still faces the possibility of having to lay off some of its 42 part-time workers, she said. And not all organizations have enough financial padding to get them through a prolonged shutdown.


Ahead of Afghan elections, warlords and bureaucrats prepare campaigns

Afghan politician Abdullah Abdullah, center, sits with his two vice-presidential candidates, Mohammed Mohaqiq, right, and Mohammad Khan during a registration process for the forthcoming presidential election. (Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images) By Sunday evening, the list of candidates registered for next year’s presidential elections included some of Afghanistan’s most powerful officials and most notorious warlords. In a country still wrestling with democracy 12 years after the Taliban was overthrown, the high-profile candidates represent the pluralism of modern Afghan politics as well as the power still wielded by informal strongmen who once tore Afghanistan apart. The election comes at a crucial moment, as foreign troops prepare to withdraw by the end of 2014 and with U.S.-Afghan relations at a gridlock that could prevent a long-term security agreement from being signed. A well-run election and a qualified victor would help sustain the gains of the past 10 years, Western officials say. But with the stakes so high and the candidates so divisive, an electoral dispute could have devastating consequences. More than two dozen presidential candidates — each with two vice-presidential running mates — are registered for the election, which is scheduled to take place in April. Among those running are President Hamid Karzai’s brother; a religious scholar accused of leading a bloody campaign against the Hazara minority ethnic group; one of the country’s most powerful and controversial provincial governors, nicknamed “the Bulldozer”; a former militia leader whom Human Rights Watch accused of “widespread looting and violence”; and an Uzbek leader widely accused of war crimes. Also on the list are some of the technocrats who have ascended the ranks of Afghanistan’s government over the past decade: the country’s foreign minister, a World Bank official who became finance minister, a former defense minister who frequently lectured at Washington think tanks, and a sharply dressed ophthalmologist who became a vocal opposition leader after serving as a top diplomat. In some cases, those who have led ministries and those who have led militias or shadowy patronage networks are running together. Ashraf Ghani, the former World Bank official, chose Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord, as his running mate. Abdullah Abdullah, the ophthalmologist and a former foreign minister, chose Mohammad Mohaqiq, the former militia leader. Some chose running mates from different parts of the country but with similar positions in Afghan society. Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf, the religious scholar turned mujahideen commander, chose Ismail Khan, who once commanded a


D.C. food truck operators feel the pinch of a government shutdown

shutdown.” But Saltzman is fortunate, he noted. He has another business to fall back on. He’s a partner with Kangaroo Boxing Club, a separate bricks-and-mortar restaurant with a menu heavy on barbecue. The three PORC employees, one full time and two part time, will still get paid during the shutdown, Saltzman said. “We don’t think it’s fair that they get penalized” by the government’s actions, he said. The shutdown comes at a difficult time for truck owners, said Che Ruddell-Tabisola, political director for the recently renamed District Maryland Virginia Food Truck Association. Mobile vendors have already felt the effects of sequestration, the automatic, across-the-board federal budget cuts that required countless furloughs, leaving fewer dollars to spend on street food. But now truck operators have weeks before the weather turns cold and keeps customers indoors. “It’s scary to think that this is going to happen for a couple more weeks. . . . Then the temperature drops, and we have to compete with the elements,” said Ruddell-Tabisola, who also co-owns the BBQ Bus, which experienced a 40 percent drop in sales during a stop earlier this week. Ruddell-Tabisola added that four families depend on BBQ Bus to make payroll. “It makes me so angry that our elected leaders can’t fulfill their responsibility,” Ruddell-Tabisola said. Sandra Panetta, owner of the Sweetbites dessert truck, has experienced government shutdowns from two perspectives now. Back in 1995-96, when the federal government experienced its last shutdown, Panetta was a policy analyst for the Environmental Protection Agency. It was a scary time, she recalled: She had just bought a house and didn’t know if she was going to get her back pay at the end of the shutdown. This time, she’s experiencing the shutdown as a business owner and single mother with two teenagers to feed. “It’s equally terrifying,” said the McLean resident. To try to keep her sales up, Panetta said she’s steering her truck away from locations tied to federal workers and instead focusing on spaces such as Farragut and Franklin squares. She still figured that her sales are between 25 percent and 50 percent lower than normal. Parking enforcement officers aren’t helping, Panetta said. On Friday, they cited everyone on Farragut for parking during rush hour. A parking ticket is “a lot of money to take out of your bottom line when times are tough,” Panetta said. “They could have cut us a break.”


Idled workers find places to pass the time during government shutdown

out free pulled pork sandwiches to 276 people on Tuesday. He said he hoped the shutdown would end soon, however, because he couldn’t afford to give away sandwiches forever. At the synagogue, spokesman Hannah Orenstein said staff members came up with the idea of becoming a shutdown hot spot last week. They arranged for free yoga classes and sessions on networking techniques. To keep the tone light, they slapped cutouts of House and Senate leaders on table tennis paddles. Some played table tennis and others watched “The West Wing.” One called his parents to make sure they’d be able to support him if the shutdown is prolonged. Conversations were laced with sarcasm. One visitor asked another the familiar Washington question: “What do you do?” His new friend, a lawyer, replied. “I’m a pawn for a staggeringly baroque government.” Several colleagues from the same government agency wondered where might be a good place to hang out. “The Smithsonian must be filled today,” mused Doug Hale, 29. “All that space, the beautiful atrium, the free WiFi.” Then someone reminded him that the Smithsonian museums were also shut down, and they all sighed. Rahkia Nance was also in search of something to do. She is a communications manager for the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, which is partly funded by Congress and thus shut down. She said she had already toured the National Geographic Museum, grabbed a discount lunch and taken a free knitting class. “I had never knitted before, but I thought this was a good time to learn,” she said. “We are all looking for deals. There are a lot of things that I haven’t gotten to do that I have the time to do.” In Meridian Park on Sunday, the mood was defiantly carefree and therapeutic. Several furloughed workers playing stickball or walking their dogs asked not to be quoted, but they were clearly relishing their semi-scofflaw status. One couple said their regular weekend ritual was bringing their dog to run around and watch the ducks. “For us, this is a safe place near home where we can let her off the leash,” said Melissa Peli, 29, an architect. When the shutdown began, Peli and other visitors said, they were confused and worried about crossing the park barricades. But by Sunday, with dozens of dogs romping and the drummers pounding away, it felt as if the shutdown had never happened.


Value Added: Grocery store pickups could be next business disruption

My wife and I pulled up to a Connecticut Avenue gas station a couple of weeks ago, and I was surprised to see that it was owned by Giant Foods. I knew Giant operated 170 grocery stores in the Washington region. But I didn’t know the supermarket chain was in the gasoline business. Then I noticed something even stranger. Giant had turned the former Sunoco station into a drive-through grocery store for online ordering. It is part of Giant’s new pickup service. Instead of its traditional Peapod home delivery, you drive to the store, where a Giant employee deposits your order, from a loaf of bread to 50 bags of groceries, into the trunk. You don’t even have to unbuckle your seat belt. Giant’s 20-store pickup offensive is part of a broader invasion into the Washington region by grocery businesses disrupting the current big-box model by offering an online alternative to the weekly grocery store trip. Maddy Hall, a Relayfoods.com employee, hands groceries to a customer at one of the company’s mobile pickup locations at the Arlington Arts Center. (John Robinson/Relayfoods.com) Starting last fall, Charlottesville-based Relay Foods, founded by entrepreneur Zach Buckner, has established35 pickup locations around Washington, with a goal of hundreds eventually. Safeway, the other dominant Washington grocer, has started a pickup business. New York-based FreshDirect and Seattle-based Amazon Fresh, owned by my new boss, Jeff Bezos, may not be far behind. “This is undoubtedly the future of grocery shopping,” said Buckner, who predicts that grocery stores will go the way of the video store. “Netflix, Apple iTunes and others have wiped the video store category off the map. The same thing is on its way for groceries.” Buckner, 35, is a Baton Rouge native with electrical engineering degrees from the University of Virginia. He had a “flash of insight” while fixing the dehumidifier at his Charlottesville home six years ago. “I had to go back to Lowe’s for the third time for sheet metal screws, and it was 20 minutes away.” He thought there might be a business in delivering the stuff instead of constantly going to the store. Buckner then decided that food was the sweet spot for the delivery business because you had to keep buying it. “If I sell you an $8 block of French cheese,” he said, “it doesn’t take much space, it’s got a big margin, and you eat it and you’re


Veteran D.C. tour guide struggles to keep 80 eighth-graders occupied during shutdown

a long flight. But late Friday evening, Krepp realized that the preserve was part of the National Park Service, a federal agency, and was bound to be closed. Instead, the group went to Bull Run, a regional park in Centreville, about 20 minutes from the airport. There, they threw a football and picnicked with box lunches of turkey sandwiches and potato chips. After lunch, they headed to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate on the Potomac River, which remains open because of private funding. A gaggle of teen girls posed for group photos outside the house. “Wouldn’t you want to live there?” one gasped. A group of boys stopped to admire the statues of George and Martha Washington and their grandchildren. One grabbed George’s hand and gave it a firm shake. For a seemingly carefree Sunday afternoon, the students had a lot to say about the political interference with their trip to the nation’s capital. “Neither side will compromise,” said Jackson Key, 14, a self-proclaimed history buff. “[President] Washington warned about this in his farewell address.” Jackson wasn’t the only student to reference history. Flavia Lima, 13, said her classmates have been studying compromises made during Antebellum and Civil War periods. “I feel like we could learn from that. They’re not compromising,” Flavia said, referring to Congress. “Every proposition that’s being made is being torn down.” Joey Cascino, 13, said that his fellow students watched the news last week with apprehension. With the car chase near the U.S. Capitol, the government shutdown and an impending tropical storm, it was a lot to handle. Some spoke of postponing the trip. “But I thought about it, and we couldn’t be here in a better time,” he said. “We’re in history. We’re on the front lines.” He’s still upset, though. He won’t get to see the Holocaust Museum, which he heard is a type of experience that “changes your life.” And since he was a little boy, he’d dreamed of walking the halls of the U.S. Capitol. He’s sad about missing that. He shrugged his shoulders and went back to playing football at Bull Run. After about five minutes, Joey walked toward a group of teachers, wringing his hands. “There’s something else I wanted to say,” he said, then comparing the shutdown to a bomb that explodes and causes far-reaching effects across the nation. “The bad thing about this is that it’s been indiscriminate.”


Dual-leadership role at NSA and Cyber Command stirs debate

National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander testifies on Capitol Hill on Oct. 2. (Evan Vucci/AP) During suspected Iranian cyberattacks on the Web sites of commercial banks last year, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who simultaneously heads the country’s largest electronic spy agency and the military’s Cyber Command, proposed a simple solution: Shut off the attacks at their source. “We had the expertise and could have done something about it,” said one U.S. official, who like others interviewed for this store spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. “We’re sitting on their networks overseas. Why don’t we just turn it off?” But the proposal to send a simple computer “reset” command to the attacking servers was ultimately rejected by National Security Council officials this year because the attacks were not causing enough harm to warrant an offensive response. The episode shows the willingness — some say eagerness — of Alexander to use his authority to conduct offensive actions to fend off attacks against the private sector. If a similar proposal were on the table today, it would be the new cyber-teams that Alexander is creating to defend the nation that probably would do the job. As he builds out U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade, Md., and other installations to a fighting force of 6,000 over the next three years, there are fresh questions about the wisdom of so much power residing in one “dual-hatted” official. The debate has taken on greater significance in the wake of disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the sweeping scope of the agency’s domestic surveillance to thwart terrorist attacks and gain foreign intelligence. “The mashing together of the NSA and Cyber Command has blurred the lines between a military command and a national spy agency,” said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution expert on evolving modes of warfare. Alexander disagrees. “It’s one network,” he said in a recent interview. “We all operate on the same network. You create more problems by trying to separate them and have two people fighting over who’s in charge [of both missions] than putting it all together. I think our nation benefits from that.” He said that other countries “do similar things.” Britain’s GCHQ, the equivalent of the NSA, is able to conduct espionage and computer-network attacks. With Alexander expected to retire next year after eight years as the longest-serving NSA director, his successor


One dead, two injured in Metro tunnel explosion

rail,” according to Metro. Ingram worked for the Holland Co., a Crete, Ill., firm that is under contract to do welding services for Metro. The identities of the two injured Metro workers were not released. One is a supervisor, and the other is a track worker. They suffered serious injuries that were not life-threatening and are being treated at hospitals, according to Metro. No passengers were injured. At one point Sunday, Metro considered opening the closed-off portion of the rail system to passengers. After the maintenance shutdown had begun late Friday, passengers had been boarding free shuttle buses at Union Station and Dupont Circle, which took them through downtown and around the closed-off tracks, before getting back on the rail line to their destination. Nearly a quarter of Metro’s riders who use the rail system on weekends were affected by the closings. But Metro officials ultimately decided against reopening the Red Line early, focusing instead on putting the rail back as crews also worked underground to get equipment off the tracks and prepare for a 5 a.m. opening Monday. Metro is investigating the accident and has said that it has notified the Tri-State Oversight Committee, a watchdog group, and the National Transportation Safety Board about the incident. “Our first order of business after attending to the injured is to prevent anyone else from being hurt,” said Metro Chief Safety Officer James Dougherty. “We also need to ensure we have the safest possible working conditions going forward, which means learning lessons from the investigation of this accident.” In a statement posted online Sunday, the NTSB said it had been informed of the incident at Metro but would not be sending investigators to the scene because of the staff furloughs. NTSB said it could only “engage in those activities necessary to address imminent threats to the safety of human life or for the protection of property.” The Metro accident did not meet those criteria for exempting staff members from furloughs, according to the NTSB, but it asked Metro for its investigation report. NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman said in an e-mail that because the public affairs staff was furloughed, the agency could not provide additional updates to the news media. Officials at Metro said Sunday afternoon that the root of the fire and explosion “has not yet been determined” and that it “is not yet known if there was a fluid leak


CEOs uncensored: What you didn’t know about the founders of Honest Tea, Sweetgreen

At Adweek DC, Seth Goldman of Honest Tea discussed how to build a brand. (Jeffrey MacMillan/For The Washington Post) H Goldman: When first coming up with the company name, he and partner Barry Nalebuff thought “tea” was the most important part of their name. “But it turns out the word ‘honest’ was much bigger and that’s really what we’ve built on.’ ” The company applied for two trademarks: Honest Tea and Honestea. “We heard from Nestea’s trademark lawyer who said, ‘You’re trying to market a product called Ho Nestea.’ We said, ‘Well I don’t think that’s the idea, but now that you say it, you’re right, so we’re going to withdraw that application if you let us keep the name Honest Tea.’ ” He wants to make Honest Tea the next billion-dollar brand. “We’re at about $170 million in retail so we have a long way to go. In order to do that, we need to have our drinks sold wherever beverages are sold. We need to be in convenience stores, in major national restaurants. We’re doing very well in the natural foods channel, but we also need to get to a broader penetration and get more mainstream. We don’t do that by changing the product, we probably have to change the positioning. We have to make it more accessible.” Honest Tea didn’t make all its teas fair trade until it was bought by Coca Cola, and he is constantly looking for ways to improve, regardless of corporate ownership. “We say we’re ‘mission-driven’ as opposed to ‘socially responsible’ because in my view ‘socially responsible’ suggests you’ve arrived, that you are socially responsible. I don’t buy that. I think if you call yourself socially responsible, you’re not trying hard enough. We always want to make sure we’re challenging ourselves.” At Adweek DC, Nicolas Jammet of Sweetgreen discussed how to build a brand. (Jeffrey MacMillan/For The Washington Post) He got the idea for the new Honest Kids Drink Pouch from his son. “I’m the lunchmaker in my house. I was making lunch for my middle son one day and he said, ‘I know you sell healthy drinks to grown-ups but you’re putting sugar into my lunchbox.’ I had a Capri Sun, I looked at it and it had 100 calories a pouch, that’s more sugar per ounce than a can of soda. That led to the launch of Honest Kids, which is


Unionized grocers face competition from nonunion newcomers to Washington market

was a place to buy groceries.” Since then, Aldi, Food Lion and Yes! Organic Market — all nonunion shops — have arrived in the District. Another 12 are on their way, including at least five Wal-Mart stores. But it’s not always a quick process. Sellars says the organization had been in talks with Costco for 10 years before the chain opened its first District store in December. (While some Costco employees in Maryland and Virginia are part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, District employees are not.) “These aren’t one-time conversations,” Sellers said. “Sometimes we’ll meet with each retailer five times a year — and that’s something we will continue to do because there is still more room for both additional warehouse grocery stores and niche grocers.” But it’s not just about an increasingly crowded marketplace. There have been other changes, too. Rising gas prices and busier schedules have meant that consumers want more one-stop-shops. The average American made 1.7 weekly trips to the grocery store in 2011, down from 2.2 in 2005, according to Food Marketing Institute, a research firm in Arlington. To stay competitive, area stores have made a number of changes in recent years. At Safeway, that has meant opening larger stores with upwards of 60,000 square feet. Food Lion has made recent efforts to de-clutter stores and widen aisles so shoppers can be in and out as quickly as possible. Giant, meanwhile, has begun integrating pharmacies, housewares and party supplies into its stores. An upcoming location boasts a 78,000-square-foot space that spans an entire block at the City Market at O in D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood. “Locally, we’ve seen a lot of changes over the past 10 or 20 years,” said Jamie Miller, a spokesman for Landover-based Giant, which is owned by the Dutch firm Ahold. “It has really been a trend toward more convenience and value.” Local grocers say Wal-Mart’s impending arrival in the District — the company’s first two stores are scheduled to open this year — is likely to further change the landscape. Some stores say they are considering doing away with fresh meat counters and only serving packaged meat, like Wal-Mart does. But most say it’s too soon to tell exactly how they will react to the behemoth retailer. “I think it’s safe to say that a Wal-Mart that sells groceries near a Safeway that sells groceries will affect business,” Safeway’s Ten Eyck


Last week’s partial government shutdown reordered routines and generated plenty of commentary, online and otherwise. Here are some samples: ‘We’re kind of just sitting here, watching and waiting’ For many local companies, the shutdown wasn’t so much about what happened as what didn’t happen. Take Run! Geek! Run!, the annual 8K race at West Potomac Park to benefit the charitable arm of the Northern Virginia Technology Council. In previous years, teams from Deltek, LMI, Gibson Dunn and Houlihan Lokey turned up for the race. This year, the race was postponed, with no sign of an end to the shutdown. Evan Weisel, who came up with the idea for the race years ago, said organizers would like to reschedule it for November — but can’t even firm up a date until the National Park Service is back at work. “We’re kind of just sitting here, watching and waiting like everybody else,” he said. Meanwhile, this reporter was set to moderate a panel discussion on big data organized by the White House, but the event was shelved early in the week. The gathering, the organizers said, will likely be rescheduled for November. — Marjorie Censer *** Sarah Bolton @sarahwbolton 5h 3 Oct It’s official. 1.5 days of #furlough and I’m bored out of my mind. *** At Z-Burger, offer of free food left eatery overwhelmed Federal workers and government contractors who faced furloughs because of the government shutdown could take advantage of plenty of discounts from area bars and restaurants — at least for a while. Before agencies closed their doors, Peter Tabibian, co-founder of the Washington restaurant chain Z-Burger, said that those who presented their ID card could grab a free burger. He didn’t anticipate the overwhelming demand, however, as lines outside some stores extended 200 people deep. “I didn’t know it was going to be this kind of response,” Tabibian said. “I said, ‘If these guys don’t go back to work, I’m going to go out of business.’” But he couldn’t wait that long.By Thursday night, Tabibian decided to end the promotion. His locations in Arlington, Southwest, Tenleytown and Columbia Heights had given away roughly $88,000 worth of food. “I just feel so bad that I made a promise and I have to back out of it,” Tabibian said. “I didn’t initially think it was going to close down for this long and I wasn’t prepared with the staff that


Tanzania becomes a battleground in fight over genetically modified crops

orange-fleshed sweet potatoes to deliver extra helpings of the micronutrient that the body transforms into vitamin A. The St. Louis-based Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is working in Kenya and Nigeria to boost that provitamin and other nutrients in cassava. Another goal is to address deficiencies in the resources available to African farmers. DuPont Pioneer, for example, is helping develop corn that makes more efficient use of nitrogen so farmers could get by with less fertilizer. Behind the individual projects, GM foes suspect a conspiracy to slip American agribusiness into Africa. In 2012, the Obama administration prompted a flurry of suspicion when it used a Group of Eight summit to announce the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, with the goal of lifting 50 million Africans out of poverty by 2022. A working group of the German Forum on Environment & Development reacted with a statement saying the initiative “paves the way for radical opening of markets for international seed and agrarian corporations in African countries.” That response expressed the essence of the tension that persists across Africa, with American technology rolling forward against pushback from Europeans — and from some like-minded Americans. The controversy flared again this year after the World Food Prize Foundation announced that its prestigious annual award would go to three scientists who laid the groundwork for today’s GM crops 30 years ago by developing techniques for inserting foreign genes into the DNA of plants. The recipients are to be honored at a three-day international symposium in Des Moines beginning Oct. 16. While the global debate rages, many families in Engaruka remain perilously close to starvation after recent droughts destroyed crops and killed 65 percent of the livestock. Before 2009, Thomas Saitoti’o owned 30 cows, he said. Now he has just two. His family lost its cushion against the next drought. The family ran out of food in April and was saved by a government handout of corn. At the end of the dirt path leading to the next house, Juliana Saitoti sat shelling beans. Thanks to rain this year, her family had food in September, even eggs for the children. But with the dry season, food would run out in October. “Then we will not have enough to eat,” she said. Reporting for this article was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Finnigan wa Simbeye contributed to this report.


Five ways the government shutdown is slowing down small businesses

programs, international trade services and government contracting aid. Most importantly, though, the closure has forced the SBA to stop processing applications for government-backed, small-business loans, leaving many employers waiting with no end in sight for the capital they need to start, expand or even save their businesses. “You start looking for where small businesses get long-term loans, and the SBA is it,” Tony Wilkinson, president and chief executive of the National Association of Government Guaranteed Lenders, said in an interview. “And the government shutdown turns off that spigot.” IRS closure halts loans, too Small business owners seeking SBA-backed loans are not the only ones thrown into a holding pattern by the shutdown. Many banks and other conventional lenders rely on the Internal Revenue Service to confirm income-related information for prospective borrowers, and with the agency closed, there are no federal workers to conduct those checks. While that is expected to have the most severe impact on individuals seeking housing loans, some say small business owners could be left waiting, too. “It’s not just SBA loans, it’s the conventional small-business loans, too,” Rohit Arora, co-founder and chief executive of Biz2Credit, an online marketplace that connects small business owners to lenders, said in an interview, adding that this is typically the most busy time of year for small business borrowing. “It has come at the worst possible time,” Arora said. Contractors left hanging Every year, the federal government awards tens of billions of dollars in contracts to small firms across the country. But for those that rely heavily (or solely) on business from Uncle Sam, the shutdown could mean a temporary delay in work, late payments or even cancelled contracts. In a memo last week, for example, the Department of Homeland Security warned that, “as a consequence of the lapse, certain planned procurements may be cancelled and certain existing contracts may be stopped, reduced in scope, terminated or partially terminated.” In Baltimore, Md., one small contractor that serves the Department of Defense has said it may have to lay off workers if lawmakers do not reach an agreement soon, while another in Los Angeles, Calif. says its work for the Navy has come to a halt because of the shutdown. Federal workers short on cash Nearly 800,000 federal workers are out of work right now, putting less cash in those workers’ pockets and putting a strain on the local economy in areas


for those that rely heavily (or solely) on business from Uncle Sam, the shutdown could mean a temporary delay in work, late payments or even cancelled contracts. In a memo last week, for example, the Department of Homeland Security warned that, “as a consequence of the lapse, certain planned procurements may be cancelled and certain existing contracts may be stopped, reduced in scope, terminated or partially terminated.” In Baltimore, Md., one small contractor that serves the Department of Defense has said it may have to lay off workers if lawmakers do not reach an agreement soon, while another in Los Angeles, Calif. says its work for the Navy has come to a halt because of the shutdown. Federal workers short on cash Nearly 800,000 federal workers are out of work right now, putting less cash in those workers’ pockets and putting a strain on the local economy in areas like the Washington metro region. Small firms that depend on business from those government employees, for instance, could see fewer customers coming through their doors if the shutdown lingers. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans, a lot of whom live around here, don’t know when they are going to get their paycheck, and that means stores and restaurants around here don’t know if they will have as many customers,” Obama said during a speech at a small asphalt plant in Rockville, later adding that “companies like this one worry that their businesses are going to be disrupted.” Closed parks threaten tourism firms In addition to those selling to the government and its employees, businesses that target tourists near national parks are feeling the pain. All the parks are currently closed due to a lack of funding, leaving many small firms nearby without the steady flow of customers they are accustomed to this time of year. One tour company in Florida told NBC News it will likely go bankrupt if the government does not quickly reopen access to Everglades National Park, while another near Zion National Park in Utah says it is expecting to lose several thousand dollars as a result of the shutdown. Correction: An earlier version of this story suggested that SBA’s SCORE and SBDC centers would be closed during the shutdown. While the agency’s central offices for both programs are closed, most of the local outposts remain open around the country. Follow J.D. Harrison and On Small Business on Twitter.


Scientists and lab coats: A new approach for a Montgomery elementary school

listened as Joa read a story aloud, which led to the problem that they were solving: how to build a structure that would show static equilibrium. “We’re going to become civil engineers,” Joa told them. Soon, they got to work. Gathered around small tables in groups, they stacked blocks and shapes in different ways. They strategized. Before class ended, the children had used the day’s lesson to build bridges. Earlier in the afternoon, the second-grade class gathered in Glenallan’s STEM lab to listen to a hydrogeologist. Not that everyone knew exactly what a hydrogeologist was. But as Chris Carlson stood before them, no one was fidgety. Carlson was talking water. Water in the human body. Groundwater. They saw that he had water in a half-filled basin on a table beside him. It was mysterious. “How much of your body is water?” asked Carlson, who works for the U.S. Forest Service. “How much?” “Soooo much,” they called out. “Do you realize the water that is in your body was in a dinosaur at one point?” “Aaah,” they said. “In a woolly mammoth at one point?” “Aaah!!” “And probably in your great-grandmother at another point.” “Ewwww,” several children protested. Glenallan has applied to join a program that sends STEM speakers to schools. In the meantime, Joa, the STEM coordinator, is recruiting scientists on her own. As a Glenallan parent, Carlson stepped up. “I think this is huge,” Carlson said of the school’s new direction. “I want to do whatever I can to support it.” Glenallan also will benefit from a STEM volunteer program sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which expects to send more than 100 STEM professionals into Washington region schools this year. Talking to the second-graders, Carlson explained the water cycle and mentioned the Chesapeake Bay and the Anacostia River. He used the word “aquifer.” But he was kid-friendly. “The one nice thing if you’re a hydrogeologist, you get to play with water,” he said. They laughed. Near the end, he turned to the container of water on the table beside him. He showed them a tiny jar of “pollutant.” “Would you want this in your water?” he asked them. “Nooooo,” they said. He poured the red dye into the large bin. The water was no longer clear. “If this was motor oil, I wouldn’t want to drink it anymore. Would you?” “Nooooo,” they said again.


Colorado, still reeling from fires and floods, hard hit by furloughs

BLACK FOREST, Colo. — In Colorado, home to some of the highest concentrations of federal workers in America, the government shutdown feels particularly punishing, especially because so many homes and roads are still being rebuilt after a series of disasters over recent months. “When does Colorado get a break?” asked Jacque Ganger, whose children were trapped on a school bus stuck in a ditch for four hours during September's catastrophic floods. Last week, Ganger had to shift her focus from the flooding to the federal government shutdown, which put her and many people she knows at the Interior Department out of work. “It felt like a one-two punch,” she said. The impact is even more bruising because of the numbers: the federal government is Colorado’s largest employer with 40,864 in the workforce, from National Park Service employees who herd elk and manage moose in the majestic Rocky Mountain National Park to physicist David J. Wineland with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who won the 2012 Nobel Prize for research on quantum systems that contributed to the development of superfast computing. Even if Stockholm’s prize committee found Wineland’s work groundbreaking, he was deemed expendable by the government last week. “On the organization charts I’m just another worker, another non-essential,” said Wineland, sighing, during an interview from his home in Boulder. With the largest concentration of federal agencies outside of the Washington area, the Denver Federal Center houses 28 agencies in 44 buildings, including the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Ice Core Laboratory and a large branch of the National Archives. While Colorado’s 11,959 Defense Department employees were called back to work this week, nearly 28,905 federal workers are employed in dozens of other agencies. And a vast majority of them remain furloughed. “The hits just keep on coming,” said Josh Hadler, 45, whose home was flooded in Lyons, the hardest-hit area. The town is now uninhabitable and still does not have water, gas, power or sewer. Now he’s been furloughed from his job as a government physicist. His wife has also lost her job at an assisted living center because it was flooded. They are staying with family. Scientific studies on hold At his lab in Boulder, Wineland won the Nobel Prize jointly with Serge Haroche of France for research paving the way for super-computers that run massive amounts of calculations in parallel. His work, for instance, could potentially


species such as Africanized honeybees. He was finishing a paper about the spread of the bees in the Southwest when he was furloughed. “These harmful invasive species are not shut down,” Stohlgreen said. “It’s dangerous because they can attack people. The shutdown is bad for the economy, the environment and for humans.” Ordering government scientists off the job, he said, was “extremely shortsighted.” Arlyn Andrews, a furloughed chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said she worried about what would happen to the data collection central to her study of greenhouse gases. “Some of these records are decades long, and we work hard to make sure there’s no gaps,” she said. Communities rally support In the autumn, the weather in Colorado is crisp and the foliage is maroon-colored. It is also the busiest tourist season for the town of Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, as thousands watch the elk migrate in the park and through the town, where they hang out in the town’s center and golf course, often mating. But this year, flooding, followed by the shutdown, has closed the park and its mountain lakes, vistas and wooded forests. David Hamrick, a fire management officer with the U.S. Forest Service, was furloughed last week. Just two weeks earlier, an Estes Park coffee shop owned by his wife, Amy, was flooded so badly that the building had to close. Repairs will take several months. “It feels like Colorado has certainly endured more than its share,” she said. “We can only hope the furlough will be short.” The community has quickly rallied to support the store by buying coffee beans, mugs and T-shirts online and helping clean up floodwaters. Across Colorado, residents have been turning to each other. Inside her Ravissante Salon, near Black Forest, Alicia Taylor has been offering free haircuts to furloughed workers. “I just felt so bad for everyone,” she said last week as she trimmed the hair of Matt Clark, a Defense Department firefighter who helped rescue pets and put out smouldering pine-needle brush for four straight days this summer. In downtown Colorado Springs, the furloughed lined up at Poor Richard’s Cafe for free hand-tossed pizza and salads. “Everyone's been through a lot, “ said restaurant owner Richard Skorman, a former city council member who also gave out free food during the fires. “A free pizza is the least we can do.”


Contractor killed in Metro accident was a military veteran who’d been on the job 3 weeks

knew based on interviews with those who were involved, confidential memos and briefings. They asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the incident. Shortly after midnight, in a tunnel that runs between Union Station and Judiciary Square, flames erupted and a “loud noise” boomed near a piece of equipment on the tracks, according to Metro. Some people on the tracks said it sounded like an explosion. The incident occurred about 400 feet from the Union Station platform. Metro officials said Sunday they thought that leaking hydraulic fluid from an underground vehicle apparently was ignited by welding equipment, causing the fire and explosion. Later, in a statement posted on the agency’s Web site, officials said “the root cause of the fire/noise has not yet been determined. It is not yet known if there was a fluid leak or another mechanical issue.” Metro spokesman Dan Stessel declined Monday to answer questions about details of the accident, because it was “an active investigation.” As it was recounted to The Washington Post, a crew in the tunnel was using a piece of heavy machinery known as a “flash-butt welder” to join two pieces of rail. The welder looks like a horseshoe and stretches from one side of the rail to the other and secures new rail on the track. The welding creates a lot of heat and sparks, which reportedly ignited leaking hydraulic fluid. “Nobody had noticed that hydraulic fluid was leaking from this piece of equipment,” one Metro worker said. And there was another problem. The fluid had apparently left a trail along the tracks, according to one account, and the fire quickly followed the path. Ingram and one of the Metro workers were standing in the track bed, helping to guide and lay the piece of rail. A crane on the tracks, near where Ingram and another worker stood, was holding a 40-foot piece of rail. Something caused the rail to swing, striking the two men. According to Metro officials, a third worker was also struck by the piece of rail. The Metro worker in the track bed started to “jump out of the way” as he saw the rail coming toward him, said one of the people interviewed. But Ingram “looked up just as it came at his face.” When the piece of rail came down, it broke the Metro worker’s leg. “It all


Michael Gerson: Polio is a killer on the run

ATLANTA Following a walk through nearly empty hallways, there is no receptionist at Thomas Frieden’s outer office. Just a ring-for-service sign. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is trying to manage a partial shutdown at an institution where nearly everything is ultimately a matter of life or death. “The longer it goes,” he said, “the more complex it is. What isn’t an imminent threat to health on Day Four is on Day 10.” As of now, eight of 10 global disease detection centers — the field offices where outbreaks are identified and countered — are closed. No processing of blood samples for parasitic diseases is taking place. No testing of counterfeit malaria medicines. Fortunately, the CDC’s polio eradication effort has been largely exempted from the shutdown. It is part of one of the most ambitious medical enterprises in history — attempting to eliminate a highly contagious virus from the wild. This has been achieved only twice before, with smallpox and rinderpest. The end of polio transmission is a few hundred yearly cases away. Even a brief pause would risk losing ground. Poliovirus — which destroys neuron cells controlling swallowing, breathing and the use of limbs — was once a source of seasonal panic in the United States. Epidemics (usually arriving in summer) sometimes caused states to close their borders, with inspectors demanding certificates of health for children younger than 16. American infections peaked at nearly 58,000 in 1952. (Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. Steve Cohen were both infected as children.) As late as 2004, dozens of Americans still lived in iron lungs. A collection of cartoons from around the country. But the use of the Salk and Sabin vaccines has chased the virus across the planet. The last American infections were in 1979 (among Amish who resisted vaccination). This was also the year that Rotary International started a campaign to eliminate polio transmission in the Philippines, beginning a global eradication movement that now includes the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation and the CDC. In 1999, type 2 poliovirus (of three types) was eliminated in the wild. India has been polio-free since 2011 — an important proof of concept. (If polio can be eliminated in northern India — with its dense population and poor sanitary conditions — it can be defeated anywhere.) More than 99 percent of poliovirus transmission has been stopped over the


Government shutdown unlikely to damage economy, but debt limit could be catastrophe

its plans to furlough nearly 2,000 workers this week. McLean-based Science Applications International Corp. said it has sent hundreds of employees home but continues to provide them pay and benefits, while Falls Church-based General Dynamics said it has not furloughed any employees. Other types of businesses that rely on federal workers, such as food trucks and restaurants, may not be able to recoup lost revenue. Tourism may also be hit as national museums and parks remain closed. “This all comes down to a confidence issue,” said Lindsey Piegza, chief economist for Sterne Agee. “The consumer is just very, very sensitive to the shenanigans in Washington.” A survey by Gallup showed that Americans’ confidence in the U.S. economy plunged as the government shutdown became reality and that it continued to slide through the end of last week. The Gallup index now stands at its lowest level since December 2011. Investors are also getting worried. A poll by TD Ameritrade over the weekend found that nearly three-quarters of investors said they were beginning to lose confidence in the recovery. Though the bulk of them have not made changes to their portfolios, about 10 percent said they have moved some of their money into cash. “It’s affecting their opinion about how the government’s running the economy,” said J.J. Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade. Doug Handler, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight, estimated that the shutdown would shave about six-tenths of a percentage point from the nation’s gross domestic product during the fourth quarter. His calculations assumed federal workers would be paid eventually, but he said the benefit of an early return by Pentagon employees was almost too small to measure. Not raising the nation’s debt ceiling, however, could be catastrophic. A recent report by Goldman Sachs projected that halting Treasury payments would slash the growth of gross domestic product by 4.2 percentage points over a year. Although economists think the likelihood of default remains small, even flirting with not raising the debt limit could roil world markets. “There’s a modest amount of uncertainty and inconvenience associated with the shutdown,” Handler said. “But that will get magnified once the debt-ceiling debates get very intense.” Some firms have gone to great lengths to soften the blows from Washington. At Falls Church-based technology contractor IntelliDyne, just over a dozen of the company’s nearly 300 employees have been furloughed. Company executives, concerned about how they


Going Out Guide: Mix it up with DJs and drag queens

Every Tuesday, the Going Out Gurus highlight the week’s best DJs, bands, dance nights and parties. Find a longer list of events at www.goingoutguide.com. Bing Bang Bingo We’re not exactly sure what Mellow Mushroom’s monthly Bing Bang Bingo has in store for its Halloween edition, but when the host of the event is a drag queen named Heidi Glum, you know things will be interesting. The evening mixes a half-dozen rounds of saucy bingo and three even-saucier drag performances starring Jessica Spaulding Deverreoux, Pussy Noir and Ernie Erne Curtis. There’s no charge to play, and beer and cocktail specials begin at 7 p.m. Wednesday at 8 p.m. Mellow Mushroom, 2436 18th St. NW. 202-290-2778. www.mellowmushroom.com. Free admission. Deltron 3030 Kid Koala is the Willy Wonka of the turntables. Del the Funky Homosapien is a West Coast underground O.G. Dan the Automator is the master of concepts and studio alchemy. They’re all heroes in their own right, but together Deltron 3030 is more than the sum of its parts. Thirteen years after the hip-hop trio released its futuristic debut, the group has finally dropped its second album and will be presenting it at the Howard Theatre. Thursday at 9 p.m. Howard Theatre, 620 T St. NW. 202-803-2899. www.thehowardtheatre.com. $25 in advance, $30 at the door. U Street Brew tapping party We love the idea of U Street Brew — a new “funky IPA” that aims to “exemplify the U Street vibe,” not to mention that 50 cents from every pint sold will go to the Howard Theatre Foundation and the Ben’s Chili Bowl Foundation. We just wish that a beer celebrating one of Washington’s most important neighborhoods was being brewed in D.C. instead of at Baltimore’s Baltimore-Washington Beer Works, the home of Raven Beer. Still, we’re going to give it the benefit of the doubt for now: We enjoy Raven, and the charitable aspect is welcome. Give U Street Brew a try at its official launch party at Ben’s Next Door. Here’s an extra incentive: The beer will be $3 per pint from 6 p.m. to close. Thursday at 6 p.m. Ben’s Next Door, 1211 U St. NW. 202- 667-8880. www.bensnextdoor.com. Free admission. Fall beer tasting You probably don’t think of Politics and Prose as a place to grab a beer, although the popular bookstore does serve brews from D.C. Brau, Great Lakes and Port City during trivia night and selected


Nobel committee’s ‘Rule of Three’ means some Higgs boson scientists were left out

A look at the Large Hadron Collider, which scientists used to prove that the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that is central to physics’ Standard Model, existed. Physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert have been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics for postulating the 1964 theory that the CERN scientists proved in 2012. Carl Richard Hagen put his cellphone by the bed before he retired Monday night, just in case. The call from Stockholm, if it came, would come before dawn Tuesday. But he wasn’t optimistic. Two other people seemed much more likely to win the Nobel Prize in physics. He knew why, too: the Rule of Three. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has certain strict rules when it comes to Nobel Prizes. The recipient must be living. And no prize will be awarded to more than three individuals. Hagen, 76, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester, is one of six physicists, five of them still alive, who have been credited with developing the theory that led to the epic quest for the particle known as the Higgs boson. Scientists at CERN, the European physics laboratory, announced last year in Geneva that they had found it with the atom-smasher called the Large Hadron Collider. Tuesday morning, Hagen awoke at 6:30 and looked at his phone. The Nobel Assembly of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences awards British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs and Belgian theoretical physicist Francois Englert the prize for postulating the theory of the existence of subatomic particles that help in the understanding of the universe. No calls. The new Nobel laureates in physics are 84-year-old Englishman Peter Higgs, after whom the particle is named, and Francois Englert, 80, of Belgium. The selection, though widely applauded by physicists around the world, provided a reminder that the system for awarding Nobel Prizes is not an exact science, and can deliver a painful blow to the bypassed. Hagen was part of a collaboration with two other theorists in a key 1964 theoretical paper. For the Swedish Academy to have recognized Hagen, they would have had to honor his co-authors as well, which would have meant bypassing Higgs and Englert. Or the academy could have broken its own rules and made all five laureates. “Faced with a choice between their rulebook and an evenhanded judgment, the Swedes chose the rulebook,” Hagen said in a blunt e-mail shortly


thereafter. “Not a graceful concession by any means, but that department has never been my strong suit.” Hagen’s collaborator Gerald Guralnik, a professor of physics at Brown University, discovered that he’d been bypassed when he turned on his computer Tuesday morning. “It stings a little,” Guralnik said. But he added: “All in all, it’s a great day for science. I’m really proud to have been associated with this work that has turned out to be so important.” Rarely has a Nobel Prize announcement arrived with so much hype. It was as if the prize would be the final validation of the Higgs discovery. The 2013 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded jointly to Francois Englertand and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider." The Higgs boson has surely been the most charismatic creature in the physics bestiary ever since scientist Leon Lederman dubbed it “the God particle.” According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs is associated with an invisible field that is part of the infrastructure of the cosmos. The mass of particles is determined by how they interact with this field. The Nobel committee said it gave the prize to Englert and Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.” Englert, sounding unsurprised, materialized by voice in a teleconference after the announcement in Stockholm, and discussed the enduring unknowns in physics (dark energy, dark matter, quantum gravity). A Nobel committee official said no one had been able to reach Higgs, despite multiple phone calls. Higgs remained nearly as elusive Tuesday as the famous particle that carries his name. “I am overwhelmed to receive this award,” Higgs said in a brief statement released by the University of Edinburgh. “I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.” The experimentalists didn’t feel overlooked. Fabiola Gianotti, a research physicist at CERN, said, “It’s very nice that the ATLAS and CMS experiments have been cited


Taliban renews threat against Pakistani teen Malala Yousafzai as Nobel decision nears

The Pakistani 17-year-old survived a Taliban gunshot to the head for her advocacy of female education. ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — In a telephone interview late Monday night, a top Taliban spokesman said the group will continue to look for opportunities to harm the 16-year-old girl so long as she remains an outspoken critic of efforts to impose strict Islamic law in Pakistan. The threat comes amid speculation that Yousafzai, who sought refuge in England last year, is a leading contender to win the Nobel Peace Prize when it is announced Friday. She is the youngest person ever nominated for the prestigious honor, and if she won, would be only the second Pakistani in history to be recognized by the Nobel prize committee. Yousafzai’s family and friends say that winning the Nobel Peace Prize would represent a milestone for efforts to draw attention to the problems women and children face in Pakistan’s male-dominated culture. But some Pakistanis remain skeptical of Yousafzai’s motives, highlighting the broader societal split over the country’s ideological future. “Malala has been able to tell the world what is happening to Pakistan and how we are suffering,” said Kashmala Tariq, a former member of Pakistan’s National Assembly and a frequent critic of the government’s policies toward women. “It has brought the eyes of the world to Pakistan.” Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Taliban while travelling to school last year in Pakistan, speaks at the United Nations. After Yousafzai defied a Taliban campaign to shutter or bomb hundreds of schools in Pakistan’s remote Swat Valley, a gunman boarded her school bus on Oct. 9, 2012, and shot her and two of her classmates. Yousafzai survived after being flown to London for treatment and within months was one of the world’s most recognized humanitarians. Over the past year, Yousafzai has spoken at the United Nations, had a New York-based charity for girls named after her, was a runner-up for Time magazine’s 2012 Person of the Year and has been honored by dozens of organizations, including the Clinton Global Initiative. “We feel proud,” said her cousin Shahid Khan, who lives in the Swat Valley. “She has been a voice for peace, love and education.” But with Yousafzai in the spotlight this week, including the launch of her autobiography on Tuesday, she is under a renewed threat from Taliban leaders. In July, a senior Taliban commander wrote an open letter to


FULL TRANSCRIPT: President Obama’s Oct. 8 news conference on the shutdown and debt limit

democracy can't afford is a situation where one side says, unless I get my way and only my way, unless I get concessions before we even start having a serious give-and-take, I'll threaten to shut down the government, or I will threaten to not pay America's bills. So, you know, I will not eliminate any topic of conversation. And I've shown myself willing to engage all the parties involved, every leader, on any issue. Q PRESIDENT OBAMA: And so when I read people saying, now, this wouldn't be a big deal; we should test it out; let's take default out for a spin and see how it rides -- and I -- I -- I say, imagine, in your private life, if you decided that I'm not going to pay my mortgage for a month or two. First of all, you're not saying money by not paying your mortgage. You're just a deadbeat. And you can anticipate that will hurt your credit, which means that in addition to the debt collectors calling, you're going to have trouble borrowing in the future. And if you are able to borrow in the future, you're going to have to borrow at a higher rate. Well, what's true for individuals is also true for nations, even the most powerful nation on earth. And if we are -- are creating an atmosphere in which people are not sure whether or not we pay our bills on time, then that will have a severe long-term impact on our economy and on America's standard of living. And that's not something that we should even be in a conversation about. That is not something that we should be using as leverage. OK. Julianna Goldman. Q PRESIDENT OBAMA: I -- I do know that there have been some who've said that if we just pay bondholders, if we just pay people who've bought Treasury bills, that we really won't be in default because those interest payments will be made. And to them, what I have to remind them is, we've got a lot of other obligations, not just people who pay Treasury bills. We've got senior citizens who are counting on their Social Security check arriving on time. We have veterans who are disabled who are counting on their benefits. We have companies who are doing business for our government and for our military that have payrolls that they


BOXERS & SAINTS, Gene Luen Yang

Gene Luen Yang’s breakthrough graphic novel, “American Born Chinese,” was hugely ambitious: a modern coming-of-age story filtered through the transformational powers of mythology and caricature. “Boxers” and “Saints,” his two new, intimately connected graphic novels, are even more ambitious — and far grimmer. Set at the end of the 19th century, against the backdrop of China’s Boxer Rebellion, they’re historical fantasies that gradually curdle into historical tragedies, with a cruelly averted love story at their center. Little Bao, the protagonist of “Boxers,” is a peasant boy with a head full of the gods and heroes of Chinese opera. He joins up with the Big Sword Society, a group of fighters trying to protect Chinese villages from “foreign devils.” Vibiana, his counterpart at the center of “Saints,” is a peasant girl who, converted to Christianity by missionaries, dreams of being a maiden warrior like Joan of Arc. Yang hints at a romance between Vibiana and Bao, whose stories repeatedly intersect. Then he progressively grinds that hope into dust, as his characters are driven to ruin by forces beyond their control and convictions that prove worse than useless. Both books are marvelously crafted. “Boxers” begins like the kind of legend the rebels might have told themselves, with its scrawny young hero seeking out the magical Master Big Belly to earn his sword, then conjuring up visions of gods as he single-handedly slaughters a cohort of imperial troops. Likewise, “Saints” (colored in sepia tones, aside from a handful of religious visions) has the tone of a fable at first, as the girl who will become Vibiana is advised by a raccoon on how to become a “devil.” Yang’s bold, lucid artwork emphasizes that his characters see themselves and the world in clear-cut, cartoonish terms of good and evil, which makes it doubly shocking when their ideologies lead them into moral disasters and their visions of glory give way to meaningless carnage. Wolk is the author of “Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.” ”Boxers (Boxers & Saints)” by Gene Luen Yang. (First Second) BOXERS & SAINTS By Gene Luen Yang First Second. Two vols. $34.99


Boston Marathon lowers qualifying times, but runners who just miss the cut take it in stride

7,000 spots are reserved for runners raising money for a variety of charities. Other spots will go to people injured in the attack and their families, first responders, police, medical personnel at the hospitals that treated the wounded and some major sponsors, he said. “There’s a huge, huge, obvious interest in next April’s race, and it just makes the pool that much larger,” Davis said. No one I spoke with finds this unfair. “It would be great to be part of it, because you know the whole area will come out to support the runners, and I’d like to be part of it,” said Noam Neusner, co-owner of 30 Point Strategies, a communications firm in the District, who fell 61 seconds short of getting in. “But everyone wants to be part of it.” Neusner has applied to run for a charity group. “I have no issues with the Boston Athletic Association,” agreed Sandra Moncrief-Stuart, a licensed clinical social worker from Vienna who missed by a mere 19 seconds. “I’m disappointed, and I certainly would have liked to see more spots go to qualified runners.” But “there are other things in life more important,” she added. Moncrief-Stuart has never run Boston, but when she hit age 45 and her qualifying time moved to 3:55, she decided to go for it. She ran a 3:53:41 at the Shamrock Marathon in Virginia Beach in March and knew she was in. “I was ecstatic. Ecstatic,” she recalled. “The pictures of me at the finish line — I was jumping up and down.” Then came the bombing, which she knew would complicate matters. And then came the e-mail informing Moncrief-Stuart she was a “squeaker,” one of those runners who just missed. “I cried for about 20 seconds,” she said. When she told her family, her 9-year-old daughter said: “Mommy, do you remember the first time I tried out for travel soccer and I didn’t get in? But then I tried again and I got in. So maybe you ought to try again.” Moncrief-Stuart will be running the Chicago Marathon on Sunday, hoping to qualify for Boston in 2015. Taper time Are you tapering for the Marine Corps Marathon? Trying to live with someone who is? How do you, your friends and family handle the stress? Send me your best stories of running withdrawal and I’ll include them in my Oct. 24 column. @postmisfits on Twitter


Concert review: The Knights display deeply committed musicmaking skills

The Knights — a hip, collaborative and innovative Brooklyn-based chamber orchestra — made an auspicious Washington debut Monday and Tuesday at the Dumbarton Oaks Museum. Founded by two brothers, veterans of Yo-Yo Ma’s genre-bending Silk Road project, the Knights gave sizzling performances of classics by Bach, Haydn and Stravinsky. It is a joy to see such deeply committed musicmaking. The Knights have no conductor; only the bassoonist and cellists play seated; every player is viscerally caught up in the shape of every phrase. That they suggest a rock band is not accidental, but the precision of balance and ensemble bespeaks the highest level of musicianship and preparation. It is unfortunate that the string soloists play with a thin, quasi-baroque sound (unlike their woodwind colleagues); this affect marred the Bach concerto for oboe and violin and the Haydn “Le Soir” symphony. Given the energy and spirit everywhere else, this counts as just a quibble, but it is odd that so many excellent, conservatory-trained artists prioritize beauty of sound lower today than they used to. The concert concluded with two unclassifiable works: a Concerto for Santur and Violin by Colin Jacobsen and Siamak Aghaei (a santur is an Iranian hammer dulcimer) and “ . . . the ground beneath our feet,” apparently a group composition by the entire ensemble. The concerto hung together a little better (having fewer cooks than the second piece), though it was still a mish-mash of Middle East and West, including places where the concerto seemed like a Disney movie soundtrack and ending with a kind of Iranian tarantella. The final work was truly a Mulligan stew, an attempt at blending every kind of non-classical music that each member felt like tossing in — Irish bebop; Indian calypso; Peter, Paul & Mary; and so on. Bemusing, but ultimately silly; the joyous vibe the group clearly shared did not translate into or even suggest music of any permanence. Battey is a freelance writer.


Spouses of the furloughed, to Congress: Take my husband — please.

Jeff Gates, who is furloughed from his Smithsonian museum job, asked his wife, Susie Krasnican, to make a sign for him to wear on the Metro when he went to work the four hours before the partial government shutdown occurred last Tuesday. Now, a week later, she has made her own sign. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post) On Monday morning, Susie Krasnican of Silver Spring walked in on her husband, on the floor, goo-gooing at the cat. “He was using the new toy that our cat is completely fixated on” and making vacant cooing noises that she hadn’t heard since their teenage children were infants. “It’s hard to be sure,” Krasnican says, assessing her husband’s sudden feline communing. “But I feel that the furlough had to have contributed in some way.” She told him — and here her husband, Jeff Gates, a Smithsonian employee, joyfully remembers the exact wording — she told him: Pre-shutdown, “you used to be so intellectual.” Nationwide, 800,000 federal employees were affected by the government shutdown, worrying about jobs, back pay, a sense of purpose. Consider the collateral damage: This means there are approximately 800,000 spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates or otherwise affected parties who have spent the past week worrying about furloughed loved ones. Whether they’re all right. Whether they’re watching all of the TiVo’d “Homeland” alone, when they are supposed to wait until tonight. What, exactly, they’re doing. Congress, take my spouse back. Please. Graphic How long do you think the government shutdown will last? Submit your response. “He’s taken pretty much all of the CDs off of the shelves,” E.L. Farris, an author in Northern Virginia, says of her husband, a lawyer who is among the shut down. She is chronicling the experience on her blog. The moving of the CDs is part of a grand plot to arrange them by genre, then alphabetically, then by subgenre. “It’s becoming a very complicated plan,” Farris says. And it is accompanied by a parallel effort to organize their books according to the Dewey Decimal System. Then there is “his whole escape plan,” she continues. Which is: After nine years of meaning to, Farris’s husband is compiling a first-class disaster preparedness kit. “He can finally find the time to get to Costco,” she explains. And so water bottles are piled in the basement. “You know those crank-up radios? We apparently need to get another one of those. And


Consumer group finds racial disparity in bank complaints

second-rate,” said John Taylor, president and chief executive of the NCRC. “There isn’t the same level of commitment to communities of color from the banks that we’d all like to see.” Industry groups took issue with the methodology of the NCRC report and the conclusions drawn from the findings. For instance, industry officials said, the NCRC could not definitively determine the race of those complaining about their banks “The analysis is flawed and does not support the report’s recommendations,” said Richard Riese, senior vice president of the Center for Regulatory Compliance at the American Bankers Association, a trade group. “The banking industry’s record of supporting a color-blind, discrimination-free lending environment remains strong.” The NCRC’s report did not name individual banks, but the CFPB has jurisdiction over institutions with at least $10 billion in assets, including the nation’s largest financial firms. The findings highlight deep-rooted tensions within minority communities over disparities in financial services. For decades, large banks had few, if any, branches in communities of color, leaving families with limited access to mortgages and auto loans. The Community Reinvestment Act, passed in 1977 to encourage banks to lend to low- and moderate-income communities, helped narrow gaps in service. But the housing crisis revealed a new kind of discrimination against black and Hispanic borrowers, who were disproportionately targeted by unscrupulous lenders for risky, high-cost mortgages, advocates say. Once the housing market crashed, the unsustainable subprime loans led to an enormous loss of wealth for minorities. The NCRC is calling on the banking regulators to use the CFPB complaint database to assess whether institutions are providing affordable and reliable loans and bank accounts. Officials at the CFPB declined to comment on the report, but a spokesman said consumer complaints help the bureau “supervise companies, enforce federal consumer financial laws and write rules and regulations.” The coalition’s report arrives amid a growing number of bank branch closings that advocacy groups say could exacerbate service disparities in communities of color. Nearly 1,000 bank branches closed across the country for the year ended June 30, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. “It’s one thing to close a branch in a neighborhood that already has six, but its a whole other thing to be the last branch standing and to close,” Taylor said. “You can guarantee that the basic banking services for that neighborhood will be check cashers, pawn shops and payday lenders.”


D.C. mayor grows fearful of federal standoff

From federal office buildings to the national parks and memorials, sights around Washington and across the country are closed after Congress failed to pass a funding bill. Mayor Vincent C. Gray warned Tuesday that a drawn-out federal shutdown could lead to crisis in the city — a stark change in tone from his portrayal last week of a District government going about its business amid congressional dysfunction. The shift came as the clock ticked on Gray’s strategy of tapping a special budget reserve to fund city operations during the shutdown and as news emerged that the District had been forced to put off many of its financial obligations since the shutdown began. In a letter Tuesday to President Obama and top congressional leaders, Gray said “there will be severely negative consequences for us” if the city’s spending needs outstrip the reserves. He suggested for the first time that public safety could be placed in jeopardy, citing federal grants “essential for the continued protection of strategic and high-visibility targets” that have been placed on hold while the congressional showdown plays out. He also said the shutdown has forced the city to miss a $74 million payment to Metro and could interrupt a scheduled Oct. 29 payment to the city’s 60 charter schools, “many of which will be unable to absorb this blow to their finances.” The $145 million Contingency Cash Reserve Fund is unlikely to support city government functions much beyond Tuesday, when $98 million in employee paychecks are due. City officials have debated in recent days whether as much as $513 million in additional reserve funds might be available — extending the status quo several weeks should the shutdown persist — but no determination has been made. “In no other part of our country are Americans facing the loss of basic municipal or state services due to the federal government shutdown,” Gray wrote Tuesday to Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), demanding face-to-face meetings to plead the city’s case for an exemption from the shutdown. The District government is affected by federal shutdowns because, unlike the states, its budget is appropriated by Congress. Those appropriations — even of locally generated tax revenue — have stopped. The federal shutdown is now the longest the city has faced. A 1995 shutdown affected the District for five days, and the city was exempted from