Here’s why the WHO responded so differently to Zika and Ebola

Municipal workers wait before spraying insecticide at Sambodrome in Rio de Janeiro, in this Jan. 26 photo. (Pilar Olivares/Reuters) The World Health Organization jumped into action on the Zika outbreak in 2016. That’s in sharp contrast with the WHO’s much slower response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Political science research on international organizations and on how issues are framed can help explain the difference. Slow with Ebola, fast with Zika The WHO confirmed an Ebola outbreak in March 2014. Five months and nearly 1,000 deaths later, the WHO announced that the West African Ebola outbreak was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). This was only the WHO’s third PHEIC declaration, after the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic and polio’s resurgence in 2014. After the Ebola PHEIC delaration, donors mobilized financial and military resources, and the U.N. Security Council created the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response. Public health officials and policymakers found the time lag inexplicable, given the WHO’s scientific knowledge and experience with Ebola in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In contrast, the WHO quickly flagged Zika as a PHEIC, despite significantly fewer deaths. More precisely, the third Zika-related death in Brazil — the epicenter of the current outbreak — was recorded 10 days after the PHEIC announcement. Zika may have already infected more than 1 million people. Most have recovered, and an estimated 80 percent do not experience symptoms. The WHO’s PHEIC declaration was intended to jump-start scientific research, vaccine and treatment development, and mosquito-control campaigns. WHO officials blamed the slow Ebola response on budget cuts that hit programs on infectious disease control and on poor communication between Ebola-affected countries and WHO headquarters in Geneva. Despite ongoing budget pressures, in 2016 the WHO said that the need for greater scientific knowledge on Zika drove its PHEIC announcement. And surely the WHO, after being accused of dragging its feet with Ebola, wanted to act quickly with Zika. Political scientists would argue that the story is still more complicated. In “Rules for the World,” Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore show that international organizations’ internal workings and technical expertise influence their actions in ways that are sometimes at odds with the goals of the countries that set up these organizations to work on their behalf. 1. The WHO has six autonomous regional offices that behave differently The WHO is not a monolith. It does not always behave


Main Street Morning: Why you soon can rent out office space inside a Staples store.

a survey from insurance company MetLife. - Why expansion can bring challenges for many small business owners. - U.S. companies are strangely drawn to making acquisitions in the state where their CEO was born. Entrepreneurs - Irish entrepreneur John Hughes takes on Harlem. - The president of UBS Americas and UBS Wealth Management Americas goes on a listening tour of the country and finds that small business owners “believe our economic policies, regulatory system and tax laws enable them to succeed.” - How this woman entrepreneur is helping her customers age gracefully. Retail and Restaurants - Customers will soon be able to rent out office space inside a Staples store. - The legal marijuana business is starting to find its footing, despite challenges. - Patrons chase a would-be robber out of a Waffle House. Finance - Groupon receives a $250 million investment from the former chief financial officer of Comcast. Start-ups - This start-up will allow its customers to rent tools and get “T’Work.” - Amazon takes on PayPal and others with the launch of a new payments partner program. Technology - Researchers discover a new state of matter. - Microsoft and major banks strike a “blockchain” deal. - Microsoft is trying to find users to use Office’s plug-ins. Online - Google Domains moves to a “.Google” domain. - Here are 13 trends that will change e-commerce in 2016. - A jobs platform aims to connect refugees and employers. Around the Country - An iconic New Hampshire business is up for sale. - GE will be donating $50 million over the next five years to Boston public schools, workforce training programs and local health care centers. Around the World - European unemployment retreated in February to the lowest level since 2011. - Japan is seeing a record number of cases of people working themselves to death. - Saudi Arabia’s government enters the homebuilding business to tackle a housing shortage. - Most of Europe is a lot poorer than most of the United States, according to a report. - A fund firm believes that UK growth forecasts too high. - A bank takes over a London pub for a day, and trolls its customers hard. Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd PA consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. Follow Gene Marks and On Small Business on Twitter. News we should know about? Email us here.


There really are too many stores. Just ask the retailers.

retailers are simply re-purposing some of their real estate: Staples, for example, said Monday that it is teaming up with a company called Workbar to add co-working spaces to some of its stores. Sears has been leasing some of its store space to the likes of Nordstrom Rack and Dick’s Sporting Goods. As stores adjust their fleets, Nisch said you’ll see certain types of malls impacted more than others. Major malls in affluent areas will be able to hang onto their tenants, he said, because they are prime destinations for customers who like the social experience of going shopping, the ones who want to gossip with a pal in the dressing room while they try on jeans. But, it’s the smaller centers – the ones built for convenient fill-in trips – that will likely suffer. Those are the dollars that are likely to move online. There are other ways, too, that big retailers’ pullback appears to be playing out unevenly. In this chart, CoStar researchers show that retailers are disproportionately pulling out of poorer, rural neighborhoods. CoStar measured the number of households in a given area and the median household income to determine what it calls “buying power.” As you can see, vacancy rates are drastically higher in areas with lower buying power. The latest round of store closures has been wide-ranging: Finish Line, the athletic apparel retailer, is closing 150 stores, while Destination Maternity closed 20 stores in the fourth quarter alone. The closures across the industry set up a daunting challenge for mall landlords, who have to figure out how to fill the space. Still, while individual retailers may be overstored, some experts make the case that the retail real estate market overall doesn’t have a glut of space. Millions of square feet of retailing space will be added this year, and commercial real estate experts say there is a healthy pipeline of interested tenants to fill it. Cordero of CBRE says there is a bumper crop of European retailers looking to carve out a presence here, including U.K.-based fast-fashion chain Primark, German discount grocer Lidl. And players such as H&M that are already established stateside are still looking to expand. Plus, shopping centers are increasingly populated by non-traditional tenants. Gyms and even health clinics are moving into malls, and many mall operators are putting a greater focus on luring restaurants and entertainment outposts such as movie theaters.


This 430 million year old bug tugged its kids around on leashes

attached to its parent by a long string. That connection — floating along tied to a hard shell — wouldn't be favorable for a parasite trying to leech nutrients off of the bug, according to researchers. That helped them determine that the tiny passengers could conceivably be a brood of babies. Further examination showed that the little legs on the creatures were consistent with ones you might conceivably find on juveniles of the same species as the adult. "Modern crustaceans employ a variety of strategies to protect their eggs and embryos from predators — attaching them to the limbs, holding them under the carapace, or enclosing them within a special pouch until they are old enough to be released — but this example is unique," lead author Derek Briggs, Yale's G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. "Nothing is known today that attaches the young by threads to its upper surface." It's likely that arthropods of this era experimented with all different kinds of child rearing: everything from total neglect to methods of brooding that kept their young even closer than Aquilonifer spinosus did. But for Aquilonifer spinosus, at least, the kite-flying method didn't prevail. The researchers don't believe the critter is a direct relation of anything alive today. "It's what we refer to as being on a stem lineage," study author David Legg of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History told BBC News. "So it belongs to a group that would have evolved and diversified before the modern groups did." Based on analysis of its features, the team classified it as a member of the group of organisms known as Mandibulata, which includes all insects, crustaceans and millipede-type creepy crawlers. But no descendants or close cousins of Aquilonifer spinosus live today, which could explain why their method of child care seems so alien — unless you yourself were once a leash kid. Read More: How do these beetle moms make time for their kids? Very unsexy perfume. Video reveals the incredible acrobatic feats (and occasional face plants) of a pouncing praying mantis For pufferfish, motherly love means slathering babies in deadly toxins The gruesome price birds in the Everglades pay for using alligators as bodyguards Bees naturally vaccinate their babies, scientists find This beetle’s butt is basically a machine gun


Senators held a hearing to remind you that ‘good people don’t smoke marijuana’ (yes, really)

access to medical marijuana may reduce the fatalities and overdoses associated with heroin and painkiller abuse. The timing of the largely one-sided hearing on marijuana enforcement was somewhat odd. A growing chorus of researchers, doctors and former attorneys general are calling on the federal government to relax restrictions on medical marijuana, make it easier to study the potential risks and benefits of marijuana use and provide relief to "marijuana refugees" who are moving across the country to obtain marijuana therapies that are illegal in their own states. Activists have called on Grassley to allow a hearing in the Judiciary Committee on the CARERS Act, which would do just that. That bill has been sponsored by a bipartisan group of 18 senators, including Rand Paul (R.-Ky.), Lindsey Graham (R.-S.C.) and Cory Booker (D.-N.J.). Nationally, the latest polls show support for marijuana legalization at 61 percent -- the highest level of support in nearly 50 years of polling on that question. "An honest evaluation of marijuana legalization would include the undeniable benefits of legalization like the massive drop in marijuana arrests, the billions in taxes, and the transition from an underground market to a regulated one," the Drug Policy Alliance's deputy director, Michael Collins, said in a statement. "A more even-handed hearing would also address the destructive harms of marijuana prohibition." In the end, the hearing subtly illustrated one fact that supporters and opponents of marijuana reform would likely agree on. The Justice Department is trying to thread a very narrow needle on marijuana policy, one that attempts to allow states to experiment with legalization while also upholding the obligations of the federal Controlled Substances Act and numerous international drug treaties. That needle-threading is tenable when only a small handful of states are opting to pursue marijuana legalization. But with larger states like California, Arizona, Nevada and Massachusetts looking to vote on legalization this year, that approach may no longer be sustainable. Drug reformers and the burgeoning marijuana industry will clamor for more robust legal protections from federal interference for state-level experiments. Legalization opponents, meanwhile, will continue to decry what they see as the spread of a dangerous and addictive drug. In short, the Obama administration's hands-off approach may no longer be a realistic option for the next president, whoever he or she may be. Police surround marijuana activists holding a massive fake joint outside the White House on Saturday, April 2.


‘Quantum Break:’ An interesting science fiction game let down by its live-action series tie-in

(Courtesy of Microsoft Studios) Quantum Break For most of this young century, the cultural relevance of television and video games has been on the upswing. Whereas both formats used to play second-fiddle to movies, it’s now common to hear that we are basking in a golden age of television and that global video game revenues exceed those generated by the silver screen. Some may assert that the triumphs of cinema are broader and generally higher than either TV or games, but this is beside the point. Binge culture is a thing as are blockbuster video games that wrangle countless hours of people’s time. Given this configuration, it’s clear why an enterprising group of people would angle to bring the two formats closer together, which is what Remedy Entertainment has done with “Quantum Break.” The end product is a carefully plotted sci-fi game and an underwhelming live-action series (streamed following each of the game’s first four acts), made all the more disconcerting because some of its fine actors shine brighter in their digital incarnations. (Talk about your simulacra effects!) With its overlapping timelines and steady character reveals, “Quantum Break” feels much indebted to “Lost.” It’s a shame, however, that the game’s expository elements are more intriguing than the television show, which aims to flesh out the game’s supporting cast of characters. (Courtesy of Microsoft Studios) “Quantum Break” opens with Jack Joyce — Shawn Ashmore, who played Iceman in “X -men: Days of Future Past”– returning home to the fictional city of Riverport after sojourning abroad for six years to escape legal troubles. At the behest of his best friend Paul Serene–Aidan Gillen, aka. Littlefinger in “Game of Thrones” and Tommy Carcetti in “The Wire” — Jack meets him at the Riverport University’s physics building. After a brief catching up, Paul broaches the subject of the innovative work conducted by Jack’s older brother William. The elder Joyce’s contribution to the world of particle physics has resulted in a way to manipulate time. Paul has built a business around the fruit of William’s work but it would seem that his enterprise is in jeopardy. According to William — vividly portrayed by Dominic Monaghan, who played Charlie in “Lost”– the time machine Paul’s team has constructed is flawed, and its activation will lead to a fracture in time, a calamity resulting in a “zero state” where time will stop functioning normally. This assertion gives


Clinton says she would make employers review pay fairness

a problem," Clinton said. "It is a problem." She cited statistics showing that white women are paid roughly three-quarters as much as men for the same work, with black and Hispanic women making less. She drew a laugh from the largely female audience when she noted that grocery stores don't charge less because the customer is a woman, and she turned serious to say that lower pay for women cheats everyone — men, women and children. "I loved it the other day when the women soccer players sued," Clinton said, referring to a federal wage discrimination claim filed last week by the the players’ union for the women's national team. The women players, including team leaders such as Carli Lloyd and Hope Solo, claim that they outperform the men's team but are paid less. “The numbers speak for themselves,” Solo said when the complaint was filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “We are the best in the world, have three World Cup championships, four Olympic championships.” The male players “get paid more to just show up than we get paid to win major championships,” Solo said. Clinton drew loud applause when she made a sharp reference to Republican front-runner Donald J. Trump, whom she accused to trying to "divide Americans against Americans." "I wish he'd come out from one of his towers and actually walk this city," Clinton said. At a rally in Brooklyn, N.Y. on April 5, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton portrayed the 2016 presidential election as "critical" to women's rights. She alluded to GOP front-runner Donald Trump's recent remarks on abortion. In fiercely partisan remarks, she also said that "if anyone doubts the importance of the Supreme Court" and the current vacancy, they should recall that "the Supreme Court made George Bush president." Chirlane McCray, wife of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, led the crowd in chants of "We Need Hillary" before introducing the candidate. Clinton's remarks were interrupted by a chant of "I'm With Her," to which she replied, smiling, "I'm also with you." Clinton is campaigning in New York for several days this week ahead of the April 19 primary, when she hopes to deliver a decisive defeat to persistent rival Sen. Bernie Sanders. She did not dwell on the primary fight during her remarks at Medgar Evers College on Tuesday, and did not mention the primary vote Tuesday in Wisconsin, where she trails


New Horizons sniffs out the space weather around Pluto

(EPA/NASA/APL/SWRI) Compared with the hustle and bustle of Earth, interplanetary space seems pretty empty. But it's actually awash in particles ejected by the sun. Now, NASA's New Horizons — the spacecraft that flew by Pluto in July and has been speeding into deeper space ever since — has sent back some of the first data on this distant space weather. Spacecraft closer to home can tell us what kind of solar particles reach our neighboring planets, and the two Voyager probes — one of which has entered interstellar space, with the other soon to follow — show what's going on out in the deep. Now, New Horizons has given us three years of data from a journey through the outer edges of our solar system, allowing scientists to connect the dots. Their observations were published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. The sun ejects high-energy particles that form solar wind. On Earth, these particles can sometimes be energetic enough — such as in "solar storms," or coronal mass ejections — that they interfere with electronics and radio communication. Most of the time, our planet's magnetic field protects us, but we sometimes see evidence of these particles interacting with our atmosphere in the form of auroras, such as the Northern Lights. Those particles reach out much farther than our own planet. The Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument, operated by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), tracked solar particles and their influence as New Horizons made its way to Pluto — while the rest of the spacecraft's instruments were in hibernation mode. It observed the neutral space particles that become charged by high-speed, ionized particles from the sun. After they're charged, these particles get a speed boost and can actually be twice as fast and four times as energetic as the solar particles themselves. Simulating Space Weather at Pluto Researchers believe that these high-energy particles could be the seeds of anomalous cosmic rays. According to a statement from NASA, "anomalous cosmic rays are observed near Earth and can contribute to radiation hazard for astronauts, so scientists want to better understand what causes them." The Voyager spacecraft have observed fully grown anomalous cosmic rays, which are thought to help shape the boundaries between our solar system and interstellar space. “The Voyagers can’t measure these seed particles, only the outcome,” NASA's Eric Christian said in a statement. “So with New Horizons going into that region,


The DEA will decide whether to change course on marijuana by July

Demonstrators carry a mock marijuana cigarette as they march for the legalization of marijuana outside the White House, in Washington, Saturday, April 2, 2016. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) In a lengthy memo to lawmakers, the Drug Enforcement Administration said it hopes to decide whether to change the federal status of marijuana "in the first half of 2016." Marijuana is currently listed under the Controlled Substances Act as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning that for the purposes of federal law, the drug has "no medical use and a high potential for abuse" and is one of "the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence." Marijuana shares Schedule 1 status with heroin, and it is more strictly regulated than the powerful prescription painkillers that have killed more than 165,000 people since 1999. Police surround marijuana activists holding a massive fake joint outside the White House on Saturday, April 2. First set in 1970, marijuana's classification under the Controlled Substances Act has become increasingly out of step with scientific research, public opinion, medical use and state law. Citing marijuana's potentially significant therapeutic potential for a number of serious ailments, including chronic pain and epilepsy, organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have called on the DEA to change the drug's scheduling status. But the DEA has rebuffed numerous previous attempts at rescheduling, sometimes after decades of stonewalling, and in at least one case overrode the recommendation of its own administrative judge. The current petition before the DEA was initiated by then-governors Christine Gregoire of Washington and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island in 2011. In a previous letter to lawmakers, the DEA indicated it had all the information it needed to make the decision as of last September. The current memo, written in conjunction with the heads of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, also provides a detailed look at how the federal government provides marijuana to researchers. Currently, the government grants a monopoly on marijuana production for research purposes to one program at the University of Mississippi. "Because of this monopoly, research-grade drugs that meet researchers’ specifications often take years to acquire, if they are produced at all," a Brookings Institution report argued last year. According to the memo, in the years between 2010 and 2015, the government provided marijuana


DDT nearly wiped out these birds. Now they’re making a comeback

Researchers found that young ospreys are still exposed to PBDEs — polybrominated diphenyl ethers used in flame retardant, the USGS said. “Yet these residues had no discernible effect on the big raptors’ success in the Chesapeake region.” There was one troubling drawback, the researchers said. “Osprey nestlings’ blood carried low levels of a biological marker for genetic damage” that was highest in the bay’s most polluted areas, such as Baltimore’s Back River wastewater treatment plant. Nearby nests fared poorly at raising chicks to adulthood. “Baywide, the damage is not enough to affect the birds’ overall ability to reproduce, but it may be having subtle, undetected effects, and warrants more research,” said Rebecca Lazarus, a researcher at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and the lead author of the study’s latest findings, published in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. The breeding success of the bay’s most visible raptor, with its sharp golden eyes and curved talons for hooking and flying off with slippery fish, is being greeted as a conservation success after harmful chemicals were stricken from widespread use. The bay region that covers Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York and the District is once again earning its reputation as the world’s largest breeding population for osprey pairs, what one writer dubbed “the osprey garden of the world,” according to the USGS. Last month, both chambers of the Maryland General Assembly passed bills to further limit the use of chemicals, fearing that they were affecting bees. U.S. Geological Survey researcher Rebecca Lazarus prepares to take a blood sample from an osprey fledgling in a nest in Delaware Bay in 2015. (U.S. Geological Survey) The two pieces of House and Senate legislation are being streamlined into a single bill for Gov. Larry Hogan to sign or reject. They would limit the household use of neonicotinoids, chemicals linked to honeybee deaths. Maryland beekeepers lost 60 percent of their colonies last year, with up to 20,000 bees each. Beekeepers who fought for the legislation are hoping bees can rebound as ospreys have. Fish eagles are found on every continent but Antarctica, but most flock to the bay where shallow waters in tributaries make fishing easier. Ospreys recently returned to the bay from wintering in South America, prompting residents of Virginia and Maryland to train hundreds of cameras on aerial glides with six-foot wing spans and speedy descents toward prey. “Osprey populations


bay’s most visible raptor, with its sharp golden eyes and curved talons for hooking and flying off with slippery fish, is being greeted as a conservation success after harmful chemicals were stricken from widespread use. The bay region that covers Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York and the District is once again earning its reputation as the world’s largest breeding population for osprey pairs, what one writer dubbed “the osprey garden of the world,” according to the USGS. Last month, both chambers of the Maryland General Assembly passed bills to further limit the use of chemicals, fearing that they were affecting bees. U.S. Geological Survey researcher Rebecca Lazarus prepares to take a blood sample from an osprey fledgling in a nest in Delaware Bay in 2015. (U.S. Geological Survey) The two pieces of House and Senate legislation are being streamlined into a single bill for Gov. Larry Hogan to sign or reject. They would limit the household use of neonicotinoids, chemicals linked to honeybee deaths. Maryland beekeepers lost 60 percent of their colonies last year, with up to 20,000 bees each. Beekeepers who fought for the legislation are hoping bees can rebound as ospreys have. Fish eagles are found on every continent but Antarctica, but most flock to the bay where shallow waters in tributaries make fishing easier. Ospreys recently returned to the bay from wintering in South America, prompting residents of Virginia and Maryland to train hundreds of cameras on aerial glides with six-foot wing spans and speedy descents toward prey. “Osprey populations are thriving almost everywhere in the Chesapeake,” Lazarus said. “We found them nesting in some of the most highly contaminated areas in the bay, and we did not find any relationship between contaminants and their nests’ productivity.” Seventy percent of the bay’s tidal waters are classified as impaired by toxic chemicals by the Environmental Protection Agency. Two of the most toxic areas in the bay are the Baltimore Harbor and the Elizabeth River in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, said Barnett Rattner, a USGS eco-toxicologist who also helped write the study. “The issue with the older pesticides seems to have resolved itself,” Rattner said. “But PCBs are still there, and unfortunately their concentration really haven’t changed much in the last 30 to 40 years, showing how long lasting they are. They cause some problems in wildlife, but osprey seem to be reproducing well.”


MIT researchers are now 3D printing robots that can walk on their own

In a new paper, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory present the first-ever technique for 3-D printing robots that involves printing solid and liquid materials at the same time. For years, 3D printing has been hailed as an emerging technology likely to transform our lives. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have taken the nascent field to a new level with the creation of 3D printed robots made of both solids and liquids. The researchers created hydraulics to power their six-legged robot. (MIT CSAIL) Previously, 3D printing had only been done with solid materials. Printing with both materials allows for the faster creation of complex designs, lessening the time and expense required to make robots. Inexpensive robots could make remote exploration — or any activity where a robot is used — more affordable, bringing broad implications for the utility of robots. “It makes a big difference in what kind of machines you can make,” said professor Daniela Rus, who oversaw the project. “If you can make complex robots really fast — print them like you print a piece of paper — you can imagine not having to worry so much about whether you lost your robot.” The MIT team used the method to print hydraulic bellows that were filled with fluid. After adding a battery, sensors and computer to their small hydraulic robots, the robots could walk independently. Rus said her team plans to expand and improve its work before commercializing the technology. Their current process took 22 hours to create the six-legged, 1.5-pound robots with a commercially available 3D printer — costing more than $100,000 — that they modified. The printer — a Stratasys Objet260 Connex — wasn’t built to use liquids in the 3D printing process. So the researchers essentially hacked the machine, inserting a different computer chip in the cartridge holding their liquid of choice — the machine’s cleaning fluid — so that the 3D printer thought it was actually printing plastic, not liquid.


Ancient exploding stars hurled radioactive debris at Earth — and it’s still here

Artist's impression of a supernova. (Greg Stewart, SLAC National Accelerator Lab) When massive stars die, they sometimes go supernova — exploding in incredible bursts of energy. Scientists haven't spotted one in our own galaxy since 1604, and that explosion happened about 20,000 light-years away. But now researchers have evidence of two supernovas that occurred relatively recently, cosmically speaking, and happened just 300 light-years away. The explosions would have been visible during the day — as bright as the moon — for weeks at a time. That's long before our own species showed up, but it's likely that other humans were able to enjoy the light show. It may have even influenced their evolution. In a pair of studies published Wednesday in Nature, researchers report that a radioactive isotope that remains on Earth today most likely came from the debris of these ancient exploding stars. The general consensus is that a supernova would have to happen within 30 light-years for Earth to see any drastic damages, so our planet was perfectly safe when the explosions took place about 2.3 million and 1.5 million years ago, respectively. But the explosions, both about nine times as massive as the sun, left their mark. Our planetary scars come in the form of an iron isotope that can't be created on Earth but is commonly manufactured in the cores of dying stars. Traces of iron-60 isotopes were found in the ocean crust more than a decade ago, and scientists knew they must have come from space. But when and how remained an open question. In one of the new studies, a team led by Australian National University's Anton Wallner provide evidence that these isotopes are spread out globally. Based on the amount of the isotope, his team thinks the most likely source of the stuff is the (relatively) close explosion of a star. The second study The remnant of a supernova. (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/NRAO/AUI/VLA) Iron-60 has a half-life of 2.6 million years, which means that half of the original quantity decays in that time. So while Breitschwerdt and his colleagues believe this transiting star cluster produced many relatively close supernovas, only the ones that were both close and quite recent have left notable traces. Breitschwerdt, who likes to refer to his work as "galactic archaeology," believes that studying supernovas will help us understand the evolution of the universe. "All the chemical


How Mexico could call Donald Trump’s bluff

challenges in enforcing a rule against transfers by undocumented migrants could be substantial. U.S. citizens would presumably have to show that they are not undocumented immigrants before moving money abroad. Walmart, for example, recently set up a service to allow customers to wire money to Mexico and other countries, noted economist Mike Moebs, founder of the research firm Moebs Services in Lake Forest, Ill. To continue providing that service, Walmart would have to develop some kind of system for verifying its customers' passports or immigration documents. Clerks might also have to ask their customers to show how they got the money, since otherwise undocumented migrants could pay their friends and family who are here legally to move money for them. "The problem is there's all sorts of ways you can get around it," Moebs said. Authorities around the world are putting the onus on banks and financial institutions to enforce rules against laundering money and financing terrorism. Already, some of those banks are finding that investigating their clients and doing all the associated paperwork is just too expensive. Instead, they're cutting the wires. In the United Kingdom, Barclays simply closed the accounts of nearly 150 smaller firms that were handling remittances for clients in 2013. The bank couldn't eliminate the risk that some of those remittances were going to terrorists abroad, for example. Aside from major firms like Walmart and Western Union, some migrants use these smaller, mom-and-pop businesses to send remittances. These firms might not have the resources to check their customers' papers. Many have lost access to the financial system in the United States as well, according to a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office in January. The report warned that these requirements could prove counterproductive by encouraging people to move their money in cash. That would only make detecting suspicious activity more difficult. The report's authors also considered the possibility of confirming customers' immigration statuses, concluding that more restrictions could compound the problem. The World Bank raised similar concerns in another report last fall. The existing rules are already causing financial problems for households in developing nations, said Vijaya Ramachandran, an economist at the Center for Global Development. She and her colleagues published an analysis of the issue last year. "It has really terrible consequences for the families that rely on the money," she said. "Remittances are hugely important to poor countries." The World Bank estimates


Meet the latest multimillionaire with an out-of-this-world idea for space

there isn’t a demand,” he said. There are six astronauts on the station at any one time. The Russians and Americans get most of the slots, meaning there are lot of countries whose astronauts fly only infrequently. “How are they going to have a human space program if they fly once every three years,” he said. “That’s nothing. We’ve had a lot of conversations with different countries, and we know they are potentially costumers for us.” NASA is interested in the technology as well for its deep space missions. The expandable modules can be packed up tight so they don’t take up as much room on a rocket as traditional habitats. That’s key, NASA said in a blog post last year, for manned missions to Mars, where “several rockets filled with cargo and supplies will be deployed to await the crews’ arrival.” A lower-volume inflatable habitat could reduce the number of launches needed for the mission and bring down the cost, NASA said. Bigelow said the habitats could be used by astronauts visiting the moon. Once a fleet of the habitats is set up in low Earthy orbit, a space tug vehicle could pull the habitats into lunar orbit to await the explorers. The habitats could even land if outfitted with the right equipment, and be used as a lunar base. But that’s years off. In the meantime, the BEAM is scheduled to stay affixed to the station for two years while it’s tested for radiation, temperature and how it stands up to debris swirling through space at 17,500 mph. The BEAM was supposed to fly to the station last year but was delayed after SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket exploded. SpaceX’s launch is scheduled for Friday afternoon from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It'll be the first flight to resupply the space station with food and supplies since one of its Falcon 9 rockets blew up last year. SpaceX promises a show of its own after the launch, attempting another one of its landing on a floating platform at sea. In December, SpaceX successfully landed its booster vertically on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral, but so far has not been quite able to pull it off on the sea platform it calls an autonomous spaceport drone ship. The company is on a quest to recover and reuse the first stage of its rockets, the most expensive part,


More relatives of China’s top leaders implicated in Panama Papers

The newly released names include the daughter-in-law of Liu Yunshan, China’s current propaganda chief, and the son-in-law of Zhang Gaoli, the current vice premier. They also include the granddaughter of Jia Qinglin, who served on the Standing Committee until 2012. Jia’s granddaughter Jasmine Li Zidan took ownership of an offshore company named Harvest Sun Trading in 2010 for $1, documents show. At the time, Li Zidan was a freshman at Stanford University, the ICIJ reported. Later, both Harvest Sun and another British Virgin Islands company owned by Li Zidan were used to set up two similarly named companies in Beijing, the ICIJ reported. The offshore holdings structure prevented the family’s name from showing up on the public registration documents for the Beijing companies, the ICIJ says. Other names in the Mossack Fonseca documents include the brother of China’s former vice president Zeng Qinghong; the son of Hu Yaobang, who led the Communist Party from 1982 to 1987 before being purged; and the grandson-in-law of Mao Zedong, China’s leader from 1949 to 1976, according to the ICIJ. The Panama Papers consist of 11.5 million documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The papers apparently implicate a number of high-profile global figures in potentially illegal financial activities. Mossack Fonseca’s documents also show that other wealthy and famous Chinese control offshore firms, including movie star Jackie Chan, shopping-mall chain founder Shen Guojun, and Kelly Zong Fuli, the daughter of soft-drink company founder Zong Qinghou, one of China’s richest men. The disclosures don’t appear to contain any evidence of illegal activity by Chinese leaders or their relatives. But they are still sensitive in China, where Xi’s government has been leading a long-running campaign to crack down on official corruption and discussions of the wealth of party leaders are strictly censored. China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to the ICIJ’s request for comment. The ministry’s spokesman, Hong Lei, called the accusations “groundless” and said he had no comment Tuesday. Censorship instructions, issued by the government to the media and leaked to the website China Digital Times, ordered Chinese websites to find and delete articles about the Panama Papers, adding that any "material from foreign media attacking China" would "be dealt with severely." Past reporting has disclosed the offshore ties of relatives of China’s top leaders. Bloomberg News first reported on Deng Jiagui’s ties to offshore companies in 2012, while in 2014 the ICIJ reported on


How one man single-handedly opened the only grocery store in one of New Orleans’ poorest wards and inspired Ellen DeGeneres

any true New Orleanian’s diet. Cotlon’s efforts even caught the attention of New Orleans native Ellen DeGeneres, who brought him to Los Angeles last fall to appear on her daytime talk show — and donated washers and dryers so he could open a laundromat. Cotlon’s market is an oasis in the middle of what’s known as a food desert – defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a place devoid of stores selling healthful food, typically in a low-income area where many residents do not have access to a car. It was a term Cotlon first heard when he moved back to the Lower Ninth after Katrina and started calling Walmart and local grocery chains Winn-Dixie and Rouses, trying to get one of them to build a store. As it was, the closest grocery store was a Walmart in the next parish over. It took three buses to get there. “Imagine if you don’t have a car and you have three or four kids,” he said. “You have to get on those buses with those kids and then get to Walmart and go up and down those aisles. Now you have to get back on those buses with those kids and bags.” [Kids don’t have to be lonely at recess, anymore, thanks to one little boy and his ‘buddy bench’] “This is the United States of America,” he said. “You should not have a hardship like that you have to endure.” But his efforts to recruit a chain grocery store were unsuccessful. He said he was told “there’s not enough people back there for us to come and open up a store.” Cotlon made up his mind. “If the big-box stores are not willing to come back here and rebuild, I am.” Cotlon built the Lower 9th Ward Market by hand from the skeleton of a former two-story structure that was ripped to shreds by Katrina. To save money, he learned how to do electrical work and general construction from YouTube videos and hired a licensed contractor to inspect it. Burnell Cotlon inside the Lower 9th Ward Market holding a photo of the decimated tw- story structure he has rebuilt into a grocery store and sweet shop, with a laundromat opening soon to serve residents of the New Orleans neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina (Photo by Sarah Netter) Want more inspiring stories and ideas to improve your life and the


Supermassive black holes might actually be super common

The elliptical galaxy NGC 1600, 200 million light-years away — shown in the center of the image and highlighted in the box — hosts in its center one of the biggest supermassive black holes known. (NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope) Our universe might be as hole-riddled as Swiss cheese, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature. The discovery of a supermassive black hole in a sparsely populated region of space has scientists wondering if the behemoths might be more common than previously thought. A black hole “What this is saying is that you don’t need these galaxy clusters to grow very massive black holes,” Poshak Gandhi of the University of Southampton, who was not involved in the study, told the Guardian. “That throws a wrench in the works of our understanding of how these monster black holes form – it throws the field wide open.” The black hole sits in NGC 1600, a galaxy about 200 million light-years from Earth. Based on the movement of the galaxy's stars, the researchers say, it's possible that the black hole is actually a binary system – a pair of black holes brought together by a galactic merger, in the process of becoming one. If the black hole isn't actually a binary, then it's a bit of an oddball. It's about 10 times more massive than scientists expect a black hole inside a galaxy of NGC 1600's size to be. Then again, maybe it isn't an oddball. There's a lot we don't know about black holes, so it could be that this is just the first of many "unusual" finds. "Rich groups of galaxies like the Coma Cluster are very, very rare, but there are quite a few galaxies the size of NGC 1600 that reside in average-size galaxy groups," lead author Chung-Pei Ma of UC Berkeley said in a statement. "So the question now is, 'Is this the tip of an iceberg?' Maybe there are a lot more monster black holes out there that don't live in a skyscraper in Manhattan, but in a tall building somewhere in the Midwestern plains." A look at the best photos of space. Read More: Ancient exploding stars hurled radioactive debris at Earth — and it’s still here It turns out this planet has three suns in its sky Scientists found a nearby black hole burping out gas Cosmic breakthrough: Physicists detect gravitational waves from violent black-hole


What to expect from Whole Foods’ new, low-price grocery chain

Whole Foods is hoping millennials can revive the company’s lagging sales by opening a new store, 365 by Whole Foods, which has lower prices, a vegan restaurant and robots. We’re inching closer to the launch of 365 by Whole Foods Market, a new, lower-priced grocery store that the organics giant is betting will help pull it out of a rough patch. Whole Foods has been under siege lately as supermarkets and big-box stores are dedicating more shelf space to organic food, and often doing it at lower prices. With 365, they hope to fight back and broaden that kind of customer they cater to. The first 365 store is slated to open May 25 in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. And the company has offered fresh details on what the new store will look like and how executives will set out to lower prices. Jeff Turnas, president of new store concept 365 by Whole Foods Market, talks about the feel — and the freshness — of the stores which are slated to open in 2016. Filmed outside corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas. Jeff Turnas, president of 365 by Whole Foods Markets, said in an interview that he and his team have “looked and turned over every stone to find efficiencies.” That includes, for example, trying to lay out stores in a way that reduces the time it takes for a worker to get from the stockroom to the shelves. It means thinking carefully about how to create attractive merchandising and displays on the cheap, and creating a uniform store design prototype that can be used across many locations. “We’re not putting as much capital into these stores as we would a traditional Whole Foods,” Turnas said. [What job cuts at Whole Foods tell us about the grocer’s future] Even the product assortment in these smaller-format outposts is designed in part with an eye toward greater efficiency. Bottled water, for example, is a category in which 365 won’t have a particularly deep selection, because it takes a lot of effort to stock and because 365 executives don’t believe their customer demands it. And with a center-aisle grocery item like olive oil, Turnas said, they tried to narrow the offerings. “Rather than 50 or 60 olive oils, we’re going to have 10,” Turnas said. “But they’re going to be well-represented from around the world and [different] price points.” It’s not


‘It’s everyone’s worst fear’: How a small college survived an outbreak

A vaccination clinic for meningococcal meningitis, serogroup B, was held on Feb. 4 and 5, at SCU. (Joanne H. Lee/Santa Clara University) About dawn one Sunday morning, a health official at a small Jesuit college in California got an alarming phone call: A student had been rushed to the hospital. The ER staff quickly suspected meningitis. And while they treated and tested for the highly contagious, often fatal disease, scores of other students were streaming into the emergency room, frightened by their own symptoms. “It’s everyone’s worst fear in college health,” said Joshua M. Sharfstein, associate dean at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Meningitis strikes very quickly. Someone looking well one day could be dead the next.” What spun out over the next several days included thousands of panicky students and parents, the Santa Clara University president praying with the family of a student who had slipped into a coma, a top administrator bolting to the emergency room with his own son, the fastest-ever mobilization of a vaccination clinic in the United States — oh, and the Super Bowl, hosted in Santa Clara, with a pre-game event for 10,000 people planned on campus smack in the midst of the outbreak. What they learned in that head-spinning, sleepless week could help guide others looking to prevent and stop contagious diseases in the closer-than-close quarters of campus dorms. It’s all too easy to share germs at college: Last month, Harvard students with mumps were quarantined, and other Boston universities reported cases as well. Lafayette College in Pennsylvania shut down for several days in an effort to stop the spread of norovirus, which had sickened dozens of students. The outbreak of bacterial meningitis at Santa Clara effectively forced the private college of about 9,000 students to turn suddenly, in the words of one academic official, into a health-care provider. By noon that Sunday, Jan. 31, Sara Cody, the Santa Clara County health officer who had been alerted by a nurse at the hospital that there was a possible meningitis case, was working to ensure testing was done to determine if this was an isolated case or a public health threat. “Once you’ve determined someone has meningitis, you want to take action right away to make sure close contacts have antibiotics, to build up immunity … and manage anxiety,” Cody said. “This makes people really worried, really anxious. Someone who is sick


Why Bernie Sanders knows more about big banks than his critics are saying

unsuccessful has deterred Obama's deputies from pursuing a more aggressive but riskier strategy, like what Sanders and Clinton are proposing. Clinton joined in the criticism of Sanders's interview. "If you're concerned about income inequality and holding the banks accountable, you have to know how it works and what you have to do to make it work," she told CNN Wednesday. Bernie Sanders said Hillary Clinton is not "qualified" to be president because of the donations she accepts from the fossil fuel industry, while Clinton questioned whether Sanders's ideas are realistic. 'How do you ride the subway?' Wall Street experts took issue with several planks in Sanders's platform. Konczal noted that Sanders's promise to dissolve the largest financial institutions within a year is simply unrealistic -- it would take him several years, at least, to put the personnel in place to carry out his plans. Roy, Perry's adviser, excoriated Sanders's proposal to impose a tax on sales of stock and other securities -- which would be a major burden on Wall Street, but which was not discussed in the interview with the Daily News. "Sanders's overall concern about our banking system is a very justified one, but it's hard for me to see how his policies would have solved the problem," said Roy, who is now at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization. "It's far from obvious that taxing the banks more is going to change the incentives in banking that led to a financial crisis or that might cause a financial crisis in the future," he added, faulting Sanders for what he called a "simplistic worldview." There was one question that Sanders clearly flubbed. Here's that exchange, which started when the editorial board asked the native of Brooklyn about his relationship with New York, where Democrats will go to the polls in the primary in two weeks: Sanders: I know how to ride the subways. I’ve been on them once or twice. Daily News: Do you really? Do you really? How do you ride the subway today? Sanders: What do you mean, "How do you ride the subway?" Daily News: How do you get on the subway today? Sanders: You get a token and you get in. Daily News: Wrong. Sanders: You jump over the turnstile. The good news for Sanders is that riding the subway in New York isn't nearly as complicated as preventing the next financial crisis.


Why uncertainty about climate change is definitely not our friend

sunlight.” But if you change the ratio of water to ice, you also change the strength of the feedback. And based on recent satellite observations, Tan and her colleagues — from Yale and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — argue that water has a higher prevalence in these clouds than many climate models assume or allow for. Their water content is “severely underestimated on a global scale” in such models, they write. If the satellite observations are right, that means that as the climate warms, there will be less ice in these clouds to convert to liquid — and thus, less sunlight that will be reflected away from the Earth, leaving behind a warmer Earth. The new paper therefore surmises that because of this cloud process, the climate will warm more than previously believed for a doubling of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere — by as much as 1.3 degrees Celsius. The paper thus implies that it may be necessary to up the value (or the range) for a critical and long-discussed parameter, known as the climate “sensitivity” for a doubling of CO2, which the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change most recently defined as “likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C.” If Tan and her colleagues are proven right, then, the result could be to increase our expectations of future warming. But that requires them to be proved right — several experts consulted by the Post had differing reactions to the new study. The research is “a great example of the use of state-of-the-art satellite retrievals to constrain climate model process simulations, and this emerging constraint points towards a positive rather than a negative cloud brightness feedback and towards a higher climate sensitivity,” said George Tselioudis, a NASA climate expert who studies clouds and climate models, by email. However, Anthony Del Genio, another NASA expert, was a bit more skeptical, noting that satellites may observe one thing on the outside of clouds, but that doesn’t mean what’s happening on the inside of them is the same. He also said that generally, the key processes involved are just very difficult for scientists to observe. “It is easy to say that climate models should fix this problem. But in practice it’s hard to fix because we don’t have the necessary data,” he said by email. It is probably premature, then, to say that the new research means that scientists as a


The cat people vs. bird people war has made it to federal court

wildlife advocate told reporter Luke Mullins, who profiled Dauphiné in a Washingtonian article headlined “Apocalypse Meow.” “Members of both these groups feel they have concerns that have been ignored,” Nils Peterson, an associate professor in North Carolina State University’s Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology Program, told Audubon magazine. “This feeling of injustice is part of what leads them to identify with their groups.” The Jones beach battle has been simmering for years. The New York Times wrote about it in 2006, when state parks officials were mulling a cat removal. At the time, volunteers were feeding their feline charges broiled chicken and Thanksgiving turkey, and they argued that the colonies would eventually die off if authorities cracked down on animal abandonment. Neither removal nor die-off happened, and last year the Times was back at the beach, where, it wrote, state parks workers had erected “miles of symbolic barriers to protect the piping plovers during nesting season.” Caretakers of the cats, whose colonies are located one-quarter to two-thirds of a mile from the plover nests, said the animals weren’t hunters. “Every day the cats get fresh water and fresh food,” McKenna told the Times. “They are not hungry. They stay where they are.” These makeshift shelters house feral cats at Jones Beach State Park in Wantagh, N.Y. (Frank Eltman/AP) The American Bird Conservancy lawsuit counters that “feeding cats does not eliminate their instinctive hunting behavior” and cites studies indicating outdoor cats roam far and wide. A 2009 U.S. Fish and Wildlife report on piping plovers, it notes, identified cats, “particularly those associated with human-subsidized feral cat colonies,” as “an increasing threat to piping plovers and other beach-nesting birds.” (That report also called out other predators such as coyotes and raccoons.) Even the presence of cats can stress the birds into infertility, the lawsuit says. A New York state parks spokesman told The Washington Post that it would be “improper” to comment on pending litigation. But in a letter to the conservancy in 2015, Harvey wrote the cats’ caretakers “object strongly” to removal. Nevertheless, she wrote, her office would analyze the Jones Beach feline population and “begin the removal of these cats’ shelters and feeding stations” and “where appropriate remove these feral cats in a humane way.” The bird conservancy now wants the court to order that to happen. Ideally, the cats would get “forever homes,” Sizemore said. A feral cat sits


Here are 3 things you should read to know more about today’s election in Djibouti

Opposition party supporters chant slogans on the last day of campaigning for the presidential election at Quartier Phare dAmbouli, in Balbala, Djibouti on Wednesday. (Houssein I. Hersi/AFP/Getty Images) There is a presidential election in Djibouti on Friday and there is no doubt the current president, Ismail Omar Guelleh, will win reelection. Guelleh has been Djibouti’s president since 1999, and he won the last presidential election in 2011 with 80 percent of the vote. He’s facing a fractured opposition coalition of parties, three of which have decided to boycott the polls. While the outcome of today’s election is a foregone conclusion, that hasn’t stopped the government and its supporters from targeting the opposition and media. For example, members of the opposition coalition Union for National Salvation, claimed government forces killed 19 of its members attending a cultural event in December. Just this week, BBC journalists reporting on the election were detained and expelled from the country, and they were accused of supporting the opposition. Prior to the campaign period, the independent nonprofit media freedom watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists reported in January that Djibouti police detained two local journalists and held them without contact with the outside world for a week. For more background on today’s election, here are three things you can read to get up to speed: - Aden Omar Abdillahi of the Africa Research Institute in London wrote an expert briefing in advance of today’s election in Djibouti. In it, he gives a short overview of Djibouti’s political history since achieving independence from France in 1977. (The Africa Research Institute has been compiling a number of expert briefings on upcoming elections.) - For a richly sourced and thoughtful academic piece on what it means to be a citizen of Djibouti, I direct you to an award-winning article by Samson Bezabeh that was published in 2011. Bezabeh’s article shows that political parties formed prior to independence encouraged people to organize along ethnic lines, and these divisions continue to structure whether one is a full citizen in Djibouti. - See also “Djibouti’s unusual resource curse” (ungated), an article by political scientist Jennifer Brass. Brass argues that while Djibouti is not rich in mineral resources, it extracts significant income from its geo-strategic location. Djibouti houses military bases of major world powers, including a U.S. military base for which the Djibouti government charges $30 million per year in rent. Brass’s work shows


Just one conversation can reduce anti-trans bias, study finds

But the results, it turned out, were bogus. Though canvassers were indeed going door-to-door, it appeared that the researcher, Michael LaCour, had falsified the data. Hungry to know for sure whether his technique was effective, Fleischer tried again — this time, employing the research team that had debunked LaCour’s study to look at a project underway in Miami aimed at increasing support for an anti-discrimination measure there that included protections for transgender people. For the new study, the researchers looked at the work of 56 trained canvassers who engaged 501 voters in in-depth conversations about transgender people. Some of the canvassers were transgender while others were not. The conversations lasted about 10 minutes each and were much more intimate than most political door-to-door work; the canvassers showed the voters videos of anti- and pro-transgender ads and probed them about times when they themselves were judged for being different. The researchers returned to the voters weeks or months later, and using a variety of measures found that voters’ bias against transgender people had diminished significantly, with decreases “greater than Americans’ average decrease in homophobia from 1998 to 2012.” Fleischer says that the results in fact surpassed those of the discredited study. The original study had concluded that a long-term change in views of same-sex marriage only occurred when the canvasser was gay. The new study found that it didn’t matter whether the canvasser was transgender or not. The effect still lasted for three months. The study should not be viewed as providing an easy solution to the fights raging in North Carolina and elsewhere over transgender people and anti-discrimination measures, said David Broockman, assistant professor of political economy at Stanford University and the study’s lead researcher. The canvassers employed very specific strategies in their conversations with voters, learned as part of an in-depth training orchestrated by the LGBT Center and SAVE, a Florida-based gay rights group. “The message is not that there’s a silver bullet,” he said. “This is [a canvassing technique] that took the Leadership LAB a long time to develop, and I don’t think anyone should be under the illusion that they can just go out this afternoon and employ this technique.” Still, he said, it suggests that voters can be persuaded to change their ingrained beliefs, and that this canvassing technique may be useful in changing minds in a variety of areas, from climate change to racial stereotypes.


How banks, hospitals and universities buy broadband could soon see big changes

of terms on a limited basis. But they somewhat resemble the issues faced by ordinary consumers before a series of moves — by smaller wireless carriers such as T-Mobile — forced changes in the industry. The agency's proposal comes hours after Verizon and INCOMPAS, a trade association representing smaller competing carriers, announced a compromise on the business broadband issue that will lend the FCC some political cover moving forward. The deal lays out a number of principles that closely resemble what regulators have been planning, FCC officials said. But Verizon may be one of the few large telecom companies to support the move. It did not consult with others, such as AT&T, before striking the INCOMPAS compromise. Some industry officials argue there is ample competition in the market for business broadband. Technological upgrades driven by cable and fiber companies are already giving customers faster, better service — so there's no need for further regulation, they said. And, they add, calls by smaller carriers for new FCC rules amount to "favor-seeking." "Cable operators have invested $14 billion and competitive fiber providers have [invested] $30 billion since 2009 to expand business broadband networks," the trade group USTelecom said last month. "As a result of direct facilities investments, competitively supplied Ethernet service is rapidly displacing legacy business broadband services." The cable industry is expected to push back hard against the FCC's proposal. Because the type of connectivity it sells does not currently fall under the agency's rules for business data services, it has largely avoided much regulation in this part of the market. That could change with the FCC's proposed action. "Cable operators are new entrants in the business services market," said the National Cable and Telecommunications Association Thursday. "The FCC will not achieve competition if it burdens new facilities-based entrants with regulation.” Meanwhile, a study released this week by Economists Incorporated appeared to show that in some markets, additional regulation could reduce investment by large incumbent carriers such as AT&T. It also implied that competing carriers would be driven to stop investing as well, in favor of repackaging and reselling business broadband from the larger providers. But proponents of more aggressive intervention, such as the networking company Level 3, have said that the current rules protect monopoly prices and "limit the deployment of more and better communications networks." The FCC will vote on whether to launch the rulemaking process on April 28.


We tested how best to ‘sell’ climate policy. Here’s what we found.

climate summit heralded its success, some climate researchers project that the current pledges will still lead to warming of 2.7 degrees Celsius, exceeding the 1.5-to-2 degrees discussed in Paris. In addition, the Paris deal relies on states’ voluntary emissions reductions, in the form of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) — so public opinion will likely play a greater role in shaping the trajectory of climate change reductions in the future. Many climate policy consultants, activists, academics and policymakers are now using an alternative approach to galvanize climate policy changes. Their plan is to make climate policy, well, sexy. The most popular motivations give a personal and emotional appeal: A cleaner environment means economic benefits (technological innovation, green jobs), community building (creating a “better” society) and public health benefits. More policy announcements are beginning to use these justifications. For example, President Obama emphasized how the Clean Power Plan would improve public health, reduce electricity bills and create thousands of new jobs. Can “reframing” really work? Some recent research shows this approach can make the public more supportive of climate policy. We tested whether “reframing” can build support for climate policy We undertook two survey experiments in the United States to see whether such reframing boosts public support for climate policy. Since the United States has contributed most to the global warming problem, finding a way to beef up U.S. public support for climate change mitigation could have beneficial global repercussions. The study’s results are published in Nature Climate Change. The survey divided study participants into three random groups. The baseline category was the climate risk-based justification. The survey randomly assigned each group to consider one the three alternative frames (justifications) for climate policy: - Economic co-benefits — how reducing carbon dioxide emissions would lead to new scientific breakthroughs and new industries, which means new jobs and more sustainable economic development. - Good society — how reducing carbon dioxide emissions would help us become more aware of how we live and impact each other. It would also make people more considerate and less selfish. - Health benefits — how reducing carbon dioxide emissions would cut the number of cars on the road and reduce traffic injuries and fatalities. It would help people become more physically active and reduce air and water pollution, thereby curtailing many forms of illness. Our analysis shows that the reframing does not seem to work. We measured what


Greenland and Antarctic melt isn’t just raising seas — it’s changing the Earth’s rotation

body like the Earth, you also subtly change how it spins. This is called the conservation of angular momentum, and is often illustrated with the analogy of a twirling figure skater whose rate of spin changes when he or she extends or retracts arms or a leg. “Imagine we have a perfect sphere that is rotating about some spin axis,” says Adhikari. “And if you remove some material from any location … the pole must be heading toward the direction where you lose the mass. For example, just imagine that Greenland is the only region where we lose mass. Then in principle, the pole must be moving toward Greenland. That’s the kind of law of nature in a way.” Indeed, previously scientists thought that the loss of ice mass from Greenland and Antarctica alone was driving a polar shift. The new study says they’re still playing a huge role in it, but there’s a third factor as well, one that this study is new in identifying — the continents, and how much water they contain. “In some locations we are storing more water, maybe through extra precipitation, and in some regions, we are losing more water,” Adhikari said. “And this pattern is contributing substantially to this shift in the general direction of the polar motion.” Other recent research Ivins believes that with future research, it may be possible to actually use this same polar motion approach to determine whether from 1899 to the present, there was ever any past mass deviation from Greenland that’s at all comparable to what’s currently happening to the ice sheet. “We think we now have identified a new tool, and that’s the polar motion data, to be able to put bounds on how large the natural variability may be in terms of ice mass….and therefore to be able to make a stronger statement on how unique the current and apparently global warming related ice mass loss is” for Greenland, he says. While there may be a good case for attributing Greenland’s or Antarctica’s ice loss to human induced climate change — even though the paper itself does not do so — the changes in continental water storage, which also play an important role in the result, are tougher to attribute. These land water storage changes could be related to changes in the frequency or intensity of precipitation or droughts — which, itself, could be tied


Elon Musk’s SpaceX nails landing at sea

launch of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket "another step towards the stars" after its reusable main-stage booster makes breakthrough landing at sea At SpaceX's headquarters, just outside of Los Angeles, employees broke out in raucous applause, as congratulations poured in from across the country. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, tweeted their well wishes. "Opens the imagination to what is possible," Hadfield wrote. President Obama also tweeted his congratulations to SpaceX, saying, "It's because of innovators like you & NASA that America continues to lead in space exploration." Musk's ultimate goal is to colonize Mars, and his company has been gaining experience launching rockets under the lucrative NASA contracts it holds to fly cargo to the space station. Along with Boeing, SpaceX won a NASA contract to fly astronauts there by 2017, which would mark the first manned flights from U.S. soil since the shuttle was retired in 2011. In its previous attempts to land on what SpaceX calls an “autonomous spaceport drone ship,” the rockets came close each time and hit the platforms. But each time they either crashed hard, or fell over and exploded. Musk said the company would test fire the returned rocket 10 times, and then if those go well, the company would launch the rocket on an orbital mission, perhaps as early as June. The successful launch of the Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:43 p.m. was the company’s first mission to the space station since June, when its unmanned rocket blew up a few minutes into flight. Since that catastrophic failure, SpaceX has flown three times, launching commercial and government satellites to orbit. But this was its first mission to resupply the International Space Station under its contract with NASA since the explosion. SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is expected to rendezvous with the station Sunday morning. The spacecraft is filled with about 7,000 pounds of supplies and science experiments, including an expandable habitat. SpaceX is trying to land a rocket booster on what it calls an autonomous spaceport droneship, essentially a floating platform at sea. The habitat has been developed by another commercial space company, Bigelow Aerospace, founded by Robert Bigelow, a wealthy entrepreneur who started Budget Suites of America. In an interview this week, Bigelow said he has invested $290 million of his own money into the company. The habitat is packed


What SpaceX’s landing means for commercial space travel

as was the practice for decades — could help to dramatically lower the cost of spaceflight and eventually open it up to the masses. In December, SpaceX landed its first stage on a landing pad it had built at Cape Canaveral. But this time, the event — and that extra bit of daring by landing it on a boat — reverberated well beyond the space community. Actress Mia Farrow and director Jon Favreau tweeted their congrats. On her MSNBC broadcast, Rachel Maddow started off the segment by saying, “So here’s an incredible thing that happened today. You just kind of have to see it. It’s amazing.” Other journalists were publicly rooting for the achievement, just as Walter Cronkite did while watching John Glenn become the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. “Go, baby!” he cheered during the CBS broadcast, as the rocket soared into the sky. Years later, he would say he “dropped my impartiality for a moment. Well, it just burst out.” The launch to the space station was SpaceX's first since its Falcon 9 rocket blew in June. While the company investigated the failure, its rockets were grounded for months. Now it has a lot of catching up to do to work through a backlog of commercial and government launch orders. At a news conference after the launch on Friday, CEO Elon Musk said SpaceX plans to launch every two to three weeks later in the year. And it will continue to try to perfect the art of the first-stage landing, either on the drone ship, as it calls its autonomous boat, or at its landing zone on the cape. “We’ll be successful, ironically, when it becomes boring,” Musk said. “When it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, another landing. No news there.’” Later this year, SpaceX also plans to fly its newest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, which would have 27 engines, or three times as many as the Falcon 9. But Musk’s main goal is to fly to Mars. And later this year, he plans to provide some details on the space vehicles that would ultimately take humans there. Along with Boeing, SpaceX has a NASA contract to fly astronauts to the space station. First flights are scheduled for next year. If successful, those flights would represent an even greater achievement: the first manned missions to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.


Our new series on mortality in America: “Unnatural Causes”

TECUMSEH, OKLAHOMA,- MARCH 9: Death announcement saved by Maryann Payne in Tecumseh, Oklahoma, on March 9, 2016. Payne’s mother, Anna Jones, recently died of cirrhosis of the liver. (Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post) If you haven’t already, please read my colleague Eli Saslow’s story on the life and death of Anna Marrie Jones of Tecumseh, Okla. Eli is a masterful reporter and writer and this story kicks off a year-long project here at The Post in which we explore the rising mortality rate among white women in midlife — and what that means for everyone, and American health generally. The second story, which I wrote with colleague Dan Keating, will be published this morning. I’ll be back here to discuss what we found. And please feel free to comment on the story on the article page. This has been a lot of work and is the reason this blog has been quiescent for a couple of weeks. There’s a lot of data to go through, and we’re writing about a phenomenon for which there’s no simple explanation or singular cause. As always I’m so grateful that we have such smart readers out there who can help us make sense of these things. I’ll post a link when the story’s up. Update: Here’s our story.


Why women’s representation may suffer when Hillary Clinton is attacked as ‘ambitious’ and ‘unqualified’

office. Women who do run are held to higher standards on the campaign trail. This leads to pressure to project hyper-competence and preparedness. But this can produce a backlash: Women who assert confidence run the risk of provoking negative attitudes toward ambitious women. Extensive research illustrates that double standards about qualifications extend well beyond the political sphere. Ironically, then, women who run win at rates equal to men and may actually outperform men once elected to office — but only because they are stronger candidates. But even after taking office, women are less likely to advance to a higher level of office partly because of their lower levels of ambition. Remediating the ambition gap would need to start in childhood. Women, compared with men, report that they engage less in political discussions as children. The political scientists Jen Lawless and Richard Fox argue that this communicates to women that politics is a “man’s game.” But girls’ political ambition increases when they are exposed to high-profile role models. Our research demonstrates that even limited exposure to female candidates — such as having students interview a female elected official or having a female state senator as a guest speaker — can make young women more interested in political office. This research suggests that Clinton’s candidacy could have a similar, and perhaps larger, positive effect on how girls and women perceive their political voices and ambitions (something her campaign has consistently highlighted). Again, calling Clinton unqualified, or criticizing her ambition, probably won’t matter with regard to the outcome of the Democratic nominating contest. In fact, these attacks could even help Clinton by further mobilizing her supporters, who often feel that gendered concerns have been brushed aside by the mainstream media and that Clinton has been the focus of unusually high levels of scrutiny. But these attacks on Clinton may matter more for the community organizer or school board member wondering whether she should consider an open House seat, or a college sophomore wondering whether she might run for student body president. If a woman who was a U.S. senator and secretary of state is “unqualified” and “too ambitious,” what does this say to women and girls considering a career in politics? Jill Greenlee is associate professor of political science at Brandeis. Mirya Holman is assistant professor of political science at Tulane University. Rachel VanSickle-Ward is associate professor of political studies at Pitzer College.


Pain killers in the United States are living up to their name

(Tom Toles)


10 things to do in the D.C. area the week of April 11-17

Bleached performs at DC9 on April 13. (Nicole Anne Robbins.) Monday, April 11 “Almost Human” at National Geographic: Tuesday, April 12 “Burn to Shine” at Black Cat: Wednesday, April 13 202 Comedy Festival opening-night showcase at Big Hunt: Bleached at DC9: Thursday, April 14 Filmfest D.C.'s opening night at AMC Mazza Gallerie: Friday, April 15 Jim Koch at Politics and Prose: Saturday, April 16 DC Brau Fifth Anniversary Party: National Park Week: Record Store Day at multiple area locations: Sunday, April 17 ‘One Man Dark Knight’ at the Birchmere: Fritz Hahn, John Taylor, Emily Codik and Carrie Donovan contributed to this report.


Main Street Morning: As U.S. home-buyers seek affordability, “specialty housing” is catching on

in a dead heat. - Tax experts discuss the candidates’ tax plans. - Actress Kirstie Alley endorses Donald Trump. People - An employee embezzles more than $800,000 from a state communications group. - Family leave legislation is snowballing across the country. Management - These are five ways virtual receptionists can help automate your business. - A chocolate maker and a pretzel baker turn their business friendship into a partnership. - A tech specialist explains payment firm Square’s business model. - How Amazon’s Jeff Bezos makes failing a key part of winning. - Why, when it comes to architectural plans, so many of America’s most innovative companies are still stuck in 1950’s suburbia. Entrepreneurs - An entrepreneur hopes to turn an “oops” moment into a successful business venture. - This is the entrepreneurial journey of one food truck pioneer. - These business cats are ready to go to work. Restaurants - A prank caller tricks Burger King workers into smashing windows. - A Starbucks barista writes a savage message on a customer’s cup. Finance - A documentary on Frank Zappa becomes the first to capture $1 million on Kickstarter. - How the U.S. is also a haven for foreign tax cheats. - How a cashless society could embolden Big Brother. Online - These are 12 hilarious, brutally devious ways game developers punish pirates. - Newly evolved ransomware is bad news for everyone. Social Media - Facebook’s secret weapon to keep your attention is Not-Facebook. On This Day in 1968 - The Civil Rights Act is signed into law. Around the Country - A Rascal Flatts-backed restaurant is set for Cleveland’s Flats. - Finalists in a Wisconsin business plan contest capture the diversity of the state’s economy. - A Texas town is demanding reimbursement from employees who were overpaid. - A female-led pie business embodies the local entrepreneurship scene in New Orleans. - Downtown retailers in a South Dakota town are building business by banding together. Around the World - A U.S. trade group sees Vietnam as a lucrative market for agricultural products. - The Swedish Tourism Association has launched a number that will allow people worldwide to speak with random volunteers in Sweden about any topic, (almost) any time. - The founder of a Newcastle, England sandwich shop is gearing up to compete for the title of Sandwich Designer of the Year. Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd


The most controversial bagel in Brooklyn

The Bagel Store in Brooklyn has rolled into a new craze that has customers lining up outside the door - the rainbow bagel. It's mid-afternoon, but the line still spills out the front door, snaking around the block, eating up the better part of the sidewalk, as it has since early that morning. There are young couples, clinging to each other in the cold. Mothers, standing patiently next to their anxious children. There are teenage girls, chatting in packs. And there are SLR cameras — so many SLR cameras. "What are you all waiting for?" a passerby who lives in the neighborhood asks as she plucks an earphone out from one of her ears. She is looking at the crowd with amazement. "I see this line every day. It isn't just for bagels, is it?" "It's the line for rainbow bagels!" a little girl yells. She takes out her phone and opens Instagram. She holds it out so the woman can see the striped, multi-colored bagel in all its glory, accompanied, of course, by the hashtag #rainbowbagel. The woman rubs at her eyes. She is unimpressed. She turns and walks away, shaking her head in the sort of exaggerated and prolonged way people do when they want to make sure others notice. * * * The rainbow bagel, the brainchild of self-proclaimed "world premier bagel artist" Scott Rossillo, who has been making the brightly hued treat for almost two decades, is having a moment that many people in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, could do without. For years, Williamsburg was the epicenter of cool for a specific kind of person. A thriving artist population, a liberal bend and a general disdain for popular culture birthed a haven for counterculturalism, a capital of hipsterdom that was defined, at least in part, by a high concentration of yoga studios, organic markets, vintage stores and artisanal coffee shops. But time has transformed the neighborhood from the sort of place coveted by a select few to a destination for just about anyone visiting New York City. And that popularity hasn't always jibed with local values. The tourism triggered a commercial flood: First came the Dunkin' Donuts, then the Starbucks. A Whole Foods will be opening this year. In many ways, the rise of the rainbow bagel perfectly encapsulates this tension, an unlikely but apt example of a proud neighborhood confronting the inevitable: change. The dye-infused treat, whose


Five military leaders Republicans could draft for a run for president. (Hint: It worked before.)

can sometimes be dangerous in politics, our best generals and admirals embody the democratic values and leadership skills for which the country is yearning. . Who should be on the roster of potential national-security draftees? Gen. James Mattis, a retired Marine who served as U.S. Central Command commander, has already been floated. The Daily Beast posted an item Saturday reporting that wealthy Republicans were urging Mattis to consider a late candidacy. Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis in 2010. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press) Mattis is a blunt, plainspoken man who could rival Trump for impolitic comments. Four-star officers sometimes describe him as the “warrior monk” because of his intense, ascetic manner. But he’s a true military leader, beloved by his troops and an intellectual who kept a volume of mediations by the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius, in Latin, by his bedside. The GOP should consider some other names, if it’s looking for a former military leader who could unite a divided party and nation. A roll call, in alphabetical order: Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, right, in 2009. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images) • Gen. Stanley McChrystal commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan and, before that, ran the deadly strike force known as the Joint Special Operations Command. Like Mattis, he’s a warrior who earned deep admiration from his subordinates. In retirement, he has been teaching international relations at Yale University and writing about leadership. McChrsytal might be controversial because he was sacked as commander in Afghanistan after a 2010 Rolling Stone article quoted him criticizing Vice President Biden; critics argued that those remarks were unprofessional, but they probably wouldn’t bother grass-roots Republicans. McChrystal also helps lead a bipartisan group that advocates a new program of national service. Adm. Mike Mullen. • Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the military into a new era of tolerance toward gay men and lesbians. That might not endear him to Republicans, but officers who served with Mullen say he had a rare ability to unite the military and represent it to the country. His manner is low-key and cannily reserved, a bit like that of Eisenhower, another officer with the knack for managing difficult personalities. • Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Centcom, is probably the most decorated officer of his generation. Leading the surge of U.S. troops in Iraq in 2007, he managed to reverse the


Operations Command. Like Mattis, he’s a warrior who earned deep admiration from his subordinates. In retirement, he has been teaching international relations at Yale University and writing about leadership. McChrsytal might be controversial because he was sacked as commander in Afghanistan after a 2010 Rolling Stone article quoted him criticizing Vice President Biden; critics argued that those remarks were unprofessional, but they probably wouldn’t bother grass-roots Republicans. McChrystal also helps lead a bipartisan group that advocates a new program of national service. Adm. Mike Mullen. • Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the military into a new era of tolerance toward gay men and lesbians. That might not endear him to Republicans, but officers who served with Mullen say he had a rare ability to unite the military and represent it to the country. His manner is low-key and cannily reserved, a bit like that of Eisenhower, another officer with the knack for managing difficult personalities. • Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Centcom, is probably the most decorated officer of his generation. Leading the surge of U.S. troops in Iraq in 2007, he managed to reverse the sectarian bloodbath there and briefly stabilize the country, in one of the few bright moments for the United States in Iraq. Petraeus stumbled as CIA director when he shared classified information with a West Point graduate who had written his biography and with whom he was having an affair; he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in that case. Since leaving the CIA in 2012, he has been working for an investment firm and teaching at Harvard University, the University of Southern California and the City University of New York. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) in 2013. (Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press) • A final name would be former representative Mike Rogers (Mich.), who retired in 2014 after heading the House Intelligence Committee. Rogers served three years in the Army, but he makes the list because of his service as an FBI agent from 1988 to 1994 fighting organized crime in Chicago. Rogers also has a rare talent, among conservative Republicans, of working effectively with Democrats. He took a broken, divided House Intelligence Committee and, by allying with the Democratic ranking member, made the committee work. I tried to contact Mattis, McChrystal, Mullen, Petraeus and Rogers on Monday. But all of them either


Adams Morgan’s Line Hotel will have food by Erik Bruner-Yang and Spike Gjerde

Spike Gjerde, left, and Erik Bruner-Yang are opening restaurants at the pending Line Hotel. (Gjerde photo by Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post; Bruner-Yang photo by Dixie D. Vereen for The Washington Post) Adams Morgan's forthcoming Line Hotel will be home to restaurants from two local culinary luminaries. Chefs Erik Bruner-Yang of Maketto, and previously Toki Underground (see below), and Spike Gjerde of Baltimore's Woodberry Kitchen will both be part of the 220-room hotel when it opens in an early-20th-century church next year at 1780 Columbia Rd. NW. The new Gjerde restaurant will be the Baltimore-based chef's first project in Washington. He'll be joined by mixologist Corey Polyoka, a partner in Gjerde's Foodshed restaurant group who helped open Woodberry and other projects. Bruner-Yang's commitment to the Line prompted him to step away from the kitchen at Toki Underground, the popular H Street NE ramen restaurant he opened in 2011. He remains a partner at Toki, said co-owner Jeff Jetton. "There is only a finite amount of time for a chef to be doing things, so he's got his hands full," Jetton said. Bruner-Yang has handed off the reins at Toki to new executive chef Jonathan Uribe, who had previously served as his sous chef. "It's going to be pretty much business as usual" at Toki, Jetton said. He expects Uribe to put his own mark on the menu but doesn't anticipate dramatic changes. "It's pretty close to perfection as it is." This is the second Line Hotel from the Sydell Group. The first opened in Los Angeles in 2014. The group also operates the NoMad in New York and Freehand hostels in Miami and Chicago. (Chef Tim Ma's new restaurant in Shaw, Kyirisan, was originally known as Freehand until the hotel group put the kibosh on the name because of the overlap.) [h/t Eater DC] Related items: Maketto review: The H Street hangout looks, acts and tastes like a party Woodberry Kitchen review: A mingling of the familiar and fabulous


Boeing, Lockheed to launch habitats for space tourists and researchers

This image provided by Bigelow Aerospace shows an illustration of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), center right, attached to the International Space Station. (Bigelow Aerospace via AP) COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Bigelow Aerospace’s expandable space habitat just arrived at the International Space Station, but the company is already thinking about the next steps: flying even larger inflatable habitats into space to be used for research and even space hotels. The company announced at a conference here Monday that starting in 2020 the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, would deliver the habitats to space, where they would orbit the Earth more than a couple hundred miles high. The deal was heralded as a significant step toward commercializing space and creating a viable self-sustaining economy where businesses could thrive without being propped up by government. The companies said that the deal marked the “first-ever commercial partnership between a launch provider and a habitat provider." New industries would proliferate, predicted Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace, and "help pay for the future pursuit of eventual lunar enterprises." On Friday, SpaceX ferried a smaller Bigelow habitat to the space station under its contract to resupply the station with cargo and science experiments. The module, made of a Kevlar-like substance, is scheduled to soon be attached to the station, and tested to see how it fares against the heat, radiation and debris floating around in space. Astronauts will enter that habitat, called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, a few times a year to inspect how it is doing and take measurements. About the size of a small bedroom, the BEAM would stay on the station for two years, before being jettisoned. Robert Bigelow, founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace, speaks at an April 7 news conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux) In a news conference at the Space Symposium here, Bigelow said he hopes that another, larger habitat the company is developing could also fly to the station. Called the B330, it is 20 times larger than the BEAM, he said, and could increase the station’s volume by 30 percent. Bigelow hopes that eventually his space habitats could provide another destination in low Earth orbit besides the space station. There are several countries with human space programs that don’t get to fly to the space station as much as they would


Mom on buying son his first wheelchair: ‘It made us very sad,’ but I have learned to see the positive

(ISTOCKPHOTO) We all know parenting is hard. There are myriad articles written to help us navigate this important and daunting task. It is even harder when you have a child who falls outside the bell curve of normal. I have one of those children. I’m in search of the elusive manual that tells me how to parent this person. My second child has a genetic disease called familial dysautonomia. FD is a progressive neurogenetic disorder in which the autonomic and sensory nervous systems malfunction. Symptoms vary and may include insensitivity to pain, unstable blood pressure and body temperature, absence of overflow tears, frequent pneumonia and poor growth. FD is often associated with a shortened life span. People with FD suffer from episodes of cyclical vomiting, accompanied by extremely high blood pressure and increased heart rate, sweating and fever. These “autonomic crises” are among the most devastating symptoms of this disease, often requiring hospitalization. Ben is our second child, 16 months younger than his older brother. I am Jewish and was screened for diseases that people of Eastern European descent carry, which at the time — 17 years ago — was only Tay-Sachs. I was going to be 35 when I gave birth, so I also had amniocentesis. This led me to believe that my child would be fine. Since our first child was typical, it was obvious to us right away that something was wrong with our second child. He was unable to breast-feed, took forever to drink a bottle, seemed to have a lot of reflux and projectile vomiting. At 6 months, I took him to the emergency room because I thought he sounded horribly “junky” in his breathing. It was during that hospital admission that it was discovered that he was aspirating when he drank a bottle. They gave him a nasogastric tube, followed a few months later by a gastrostomy tube (because the aspiration had not resolved). After visits to many specialists, the mystery of what ailed him was discovered when Ben was 1 year old. As awful as it was to get a diagnosis, it was comforting to know what was wrong and have a medical team to guide you along the way. And fortunately, one of the characteristics of people with FD is a sunny disposition when they are feeling well. Ben is blessed with this disposition, which is an asset to our family —


The Daily 202: Ted Cruz’s war with Matt Drudge could become a huge problem for his campaign

New York, N.Y. At the White House: On Capitol Hill: QUOTE OF THE DAY: Trump said he forgives his kids for missing New York’s deadline to register as Republicans, which means they will not be able to vote for him on Tuesday. “They were, you know, unaware of the rules, and they didn't register in time, so they feel very, very guilty — they feel very guilty," Trump said on Fox News. “But … I mean, I understand. I think they have to register a year in advance, and they didn't." NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.: -- A damp and cloudy morning followed by sunshine through the rest of the week. -- The Wizards beat the Nets 120-111. -- The Nationals beat the Atlanta Braves 6-4. -- Police are seeking the killer of a 15-year-old boy who was stabbed to death yesterday at the Deanwood Metro stop in Northeast. -- Maryland lawmakers eliminated mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, marking a major shift to dependency-based treatment and education as alternatives to incarceration -- In the final hour of Maryland’s session, legislators passed a “Noah’s law.” -- Terry McAuliffe has now vetoed more legislation than any Virginia governor since 1998, -- The latest of those vetoes: McAuliffe blocked a bill that would require the use of the electric chair if Virginia could not obtain lethal injection drugs. -- A 35-year old Woodbridge woman was accused of stabbing a three-month-old baby with a kitchen knife. -- Police arrested a Metrobus rider in Silver Spring after he began assaulting other passengers and attempted to kick open the bus door. VIDEOS OF THE DAY: Excited about baseball season? Watch this kid bust a move on first base: Little Kid Busts A Move On First Base A rare black rhino was euthanized in Zimbabwe after a poacher attack: A well-known rare black rhino named Ntombi is put to sleep after sustaining serious injuries when shot by poachers in Zimbabwe's Matopo National park. Watch a baby wallaby peek out from his mom's pouch for the first time: A swamp wallaby joey at Symbio Wildlife Park in Australia poked its head out of its mother's pouch for the first time after it was born six months ago. Finally, check out SNL's Clinton impersonators through the years: Six different actors portrayed Hillary Clinton on "Saturday Night Live" between the early 1990s and 2016.