Magnitsky documentary suggests fraud, collusion among Russian officials, police

MOSCOW — This wasn’t their first trip abroad together, nor was it the first or last scheme that would be traced back to the same set of tax officials and police, along with a banker who handled the proceeds of the thefts. Their relationship, newly revealed in travel records provided to The Washington Post, illustrates a level of collusion at the heart of the Russian government that allows corruption to flourish despite repeated official promises to vanquish it. The 2007 case, unveiled by a Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky, has become widely known. Magnitsky’s death in custody in 2009 has prompted the U.S. Congress to take up a bill named in his honor that would impose sanctions on Russian officials connected to his death, freezing their assets and prohibiting visas. Russian authorities have said the tax officials were tricked into approving a fraudulent return. The prospect of U.S. sanctions has infuriated the Russian government, which has vowed to retaliate if the law is passed. But it had not been clear until now how close the Russian officials entangled in the Magnitsky case were to each other — that they were part of a tight group that traveled together to European capitals in between repeated multi-million-dollar scams. Nataliya Magnitskaya, mother of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, holds a portrait of him as she speaks with the AP in Moscow on Nov. 30, 2009. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/ASSOCIATED PRESS) “It’s about murder, it’s about corruption, it’s about a lack of rule of law, and it has come to represent a lot of what is wrong in Russia,’’ David J. Kramer, president of Freedom House in Washington, said, referring to Magnitsky’s death. So far, the Russian tax officials and police detectives have been promoted instead of punished, even as they amassed great personal wealth on official yearly salaries of $10,000 and less. They have been protected despite a protracted campaign by Magnitsky’s employer, William Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital, one of the companies used in the tax-fraud scheme. Browder’s persistence in pursuing his own investigation has rallied powerful advocates behind him, including Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) and Sen. John McCain (R.-Ariz.). Kramer said that Browder’s efforts have revealed a level of official impunity that would otherwise have remained hidden. McCain was present Tuesday when Browder presented the results of his latest investigation, distilled into a 17-minute video called “The Magnitsky Files: Organized Crime Inside the Russian


Latinos returning to Pr. William after immigration crackdown, but scars remain

Carlos Castro owns Todos Market, with two locations in Prince William County. He started catering to non-Latinos after the county’s immigration law passed. (MARGARET THOMAS/MARGARET THOMAS TWP) Now that the Supreme Court has upheld part of Arizona’s tough law on illegal immigration, Carlos Castro’s Todos Market offers a case study in how Prince William County has fitfully come to terms with a similar law. Castro had just opened his second Latino grocery store, in Dumfries — his other is in Woodbridge — when Prince William passed a forerunner to the Arizona statute in 2007, allowing county police to check the immigration status of anyone who authorities had “probable cause” to believe was in the country unlawfully. The county’s red-hot economy had produced a housing and construction boom that triggered a wave of immigration, legal and illegal. But once the law was passed, Latinos left in droves, leaving Castro with a choice: adjust his business model or go bankrupt. Five years later, Castro’s stores are doing well and serve a clientele that is roughly half Hispanic. His freezers are filled not only with Latino delicacies but also with more mainstream fare — Stouffer’s frozen dinners and T.G.I. Friday’s chicken bites. “We hit the nail on the head,” Castro said Tuesday, crediting his survival to a spirit of compromise that ultimately prevailed in Prince William. Latinos have started to return as the county’s economy slowly recovers, but the scars from 2007 remain. After the immigration law was passed, a wave of protest from Latino groups and advocates — and a concern about racial profiling voiced by the county police chief — triggered a compromise: Police wouldn’t check the immigration status of anyone they thought might be illegal, but everyone arrested would be run through a federal immigration database. Those identified as being in the country illegally would be turned over to federal authorities. Monday’s Supreme Court ruling struck down aspects of Arizona’s law but left in place something similar to Prince William’s statute: Police will be required to check the immigration status of people they detain and suspect to be in the country illegally. Corey A. Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, said he’s glad the county reached a compromise, although he doesn’t necessarily disagree with Arizona’s position. He said 4,700 arrestees have been turned over to federal immigration services. “Ultimately the improvement in public safety and in


Russian heartland fears NATO transit

support for the fight in Afghanistan. Little is said about the Northern Distribution Network, which allows supplies to flow on Russian rail lines and in Russia airspace to Afghanistan, unnoticed, without any distribution points on Russian territory. Now, as NATO prepares to withdraw its troops by the end of 2014, it faces a logistical nightmare in removing all the tents, armored equipment and other support material it has sent in since the war began. Russia has offered Ulyanovsk as a transit point, where all that heavy equipment could be flown in, then transferred to rail lines and on to Europe. Local officials, here in the city where Lenin was born, like the idea — it will bring in badly needed revenue and jobs — but many people are very much opposed. They are convinced that NATO will turn this foothold into a permanent base, a stake in the heart of Russia. “Let’s start with this principle,” said Alexander Kruglikov, sitting at a small table in the Communist Party’s little wooden headquarters house. “No matter where NATO and America go, they will never leave freely.” Just look at Okinawa, he said, where American troops have remained for 67 years despite citizen protest and crimes including rapes and murders. “There’s no threat there, but they haven’t left,” he said. Let government officials repeat all they want that the NATO presence will be temporary and it will be relying on local cargo and logistics companies — the Communists are convinced that NATO will establish a base, Western soldiers will swagger through their streets and life will get worse than it already is in this shrinking city of 600,000. They organized a protest in April that brought a well-known leftist leader from Moscow, Sergei Udaltsov, giving the authorities a high-profile target. He was accused of beating up a 20-year-old woman at the rally who belongs to a pro-Kremlin youth group. Wednesday, with scant evidence presented, Udaltsov was found guilty and sentenced to 240 hours of community service. ‘NATO moved in’ Unlikely NATO defenders have also emerged, such as Dmitry Rogozin, who until last year was the very anti-NATO Russian ambassador to NATO. “This is commercial transit, meaning that Russia will be getting money for it,” he wrote in a tweet. “I don’t think transit of NATO toilet paper via Russia should be qualified as treason.” But Kruglikov, a Communist for 39 of his 60


Queen Elizabeth and ex-IRA leader share historic handshake

often bloody history between Britain and Ireland. Sinn Fein boycotted that visit, but McGuinness has since spoken of how moved he was by many of the queen’s gestures, including her speech — partly in Irish Gaelic — at Dublin Castle and her placing a wreath at a garden honoring republicans who died fighting for Ireland’s freedom, often at the hands of the British. Analysts said Wednesday’s meeting also represented a strategic move by the media-savvy Sinn Fein — not only the largest Catholic political party in Northern Ireland but also a growing political force in the Republic of Ireland — to bolster its image as a party that is relevant and in the public eye. Peace is seen now as largely accomplished in Northern Ireland, where a stable Protestant-Catholic power-sharing government is in place. Tensions remain But several small IRA splinter groups still exist, and tensions persist in some neighborhoods that are almost exclusively Protestant or Catholic. On Tuesday evening, rioting in West Belfast left nine police officers with minor injuries. But the political landscape in Northern Ireland has transformed dramatically since the “the Troubles,” the colloquial name here for the three decades of armed conflict and bloodshed that largely ended with the 1998 Good Friday peace accord. Wednesday’s meeting was hardly the first in the peace process to be billed as a landmark event, but the queen’s two-day visit is yielding what are viewed as important symbols of reconciliation on both sides: the queen’s handshake with McGuinness; the sight of the queen and Prince Philip being driven around Wednesday in an open-topped Range Rover; and the announcement of her trip to Northern Ireland weeks in advance instead of on the day. Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, a party committed to the unification of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, said in a statement Wednesday that the meeting’s “significance will be seen in how much we can build upon it.” Although the 86-year-old monarch is the head of state of the entire United Kingdom — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — observers noted that Adams referred to her in his statement simply as the “Queen of England.” More world news coverage: - China’s bloggers push for change - NATO condemns downing of Turkish jet by Syria as ‘unacceptable’ - Egypt’s president is U.S. critic, but could be ally - Read more headlines from around the world


D.C. news in brief

the first data will be released in the form of grades. For information, go to www.grade.dc.gov. D.C. and Maryland receive $10 million to fund new trail The District and Maryland recently received a $10 million U.S. Department of Transportation stimulus grant to construct a missing link in the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail. The grant will fund the four-mile Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens Trail segment between Benning Road in the District and Bladensburg Waterfront Park in Bladensburg. The design should be done by the end of the summer, and construction is scheduled to begin by the end of the year. Construction will involve building raised pathways, multi-use paths and five bridges. The work is to be completed by 2014. The planned 20-mile Anacostia Riverwalk Trail will connect 16 neighborhoods along the Anacostia River, as well as the Southwest Waterfront, Nationals Park, the Navy Yard, RFK Stadium and the National Arboretum. More than 12 miles of the trail have been completed. For information, go to www.anacostiawaterfront.org/anacostiariverwalk. For updates or to comment, e-mail ddot.awi@dc.gov or call 202-741-8528. Housing department to hold hearings on homeless grant The D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development will hold two public hearings, at 6:30 p.m. July 2 and July 9, in the Second Floor Community Room of the Reeves Building, 2000 14th St. NW, regarding a $447,499 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for emergency shelter and homeless services. The hearing will discuss how to allocate the funds. The grant document can be viewed at www.dhcd.dc.gov. To register for testimony, e-mail dhcd.events@dc.gov or call 202-442-7251. Free legal clinics offered for transgender residents Whitman-Walker Health and Trans Legal Advocates of Washington are offering transgender residents free legal clinics that include counseling on name changes and changes to driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates and other identity documents. The clinics will be held at 6:30 p.m. July 11 and Sept. 12 at Whitman-Walker Health, 1701 14th St. NW. Clients will be served on a walk-in basis. For information, call 202-939-7627 or e-mail lbrubaker@whitman-walker.org. UDC lab tests water for lead and other impurities District residents who are concerned about lead and other impurities in their tap water can bring samples to the Water Resources Management Laboratory at the University of the District of Columbia, Van Ness and Connecticut Ave. NW, for testing. The lab opened in May. For information, call 202-274-5273 or e-mail tdeksissa@udc.edu. — Compiled by Terence McArdle


Committee acts to stop contractors from enabling human trafficking

A Senate committee wants to make sure Uncle Sam doesn’t act as an inadvertent enabler for international human traffickers and pimps. With a voice vote Wednesday, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee preliminarily approved legislation designed, as its title says, to “End Trafficking in Government Contracting.” When contractors submit proposals for government work overseas, they don’t include provisions for trading in humans or indentured servitude. But that apparently has been the case with some private firms operating on U.S. military bases in foreign countries. “Modern-day slavery by government contractors — unknowingly funded by American taxpayers — is unconscionable and intolerable,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), prime sponsor of the bill. “Current law prohibiting human trafficking is insufficient and ineffective, failing to prevent or punish abuses.” In contrast to all the debate about federal employees, too little attention has been paid to more than 70,000 people, from countries such as Bangladesh, Fiji and the Philippines, who work for military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, says information provided by Blumenthal’s office. Some of them are lured by promises of lucrative jobs, only to be paid next to nothing and forced to go heavily in debt from labor brokers. Their living conditions often are shameful and their passports are sometimes confiscated. Blumenthal said the legislation would “stop egregious human rights abuses on U.S. military bases.” Under the bill, companies, with contracts worth $1 million or more would certify they have plans and procedures to prevent trafficking. The plans, according to Blumenthal’s Web site, should cover such things as “destroying or confiscating passports; misrepresenting wages or work location; using labor brokers who charge exorbitant recruiting fees; and activities that support the procurement of commercial sex acts.” The committee’s action was preliminary because it did not have a quorum. The House has already passed companion legislation. When the bill was introduced, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a cosponsor, said “American tax dollars should never be allowed to subsidize human trafficking. The exploitation of persons recruited by unscrupulous labor brokers and subcontractors who misrepresent pay, charge excessive recruiting fees, and often confiscate immigration and identity documents, cannot be tolerated in overseas contingency operations under contracts funded by American taxpayers.” The legislation requires a federal official with “credible evidence” of trafficking or other prohibited activities to notify the agency’s inspector general. The IG then must investigate and take appropriate action, which could include stopping payments to the


Crowd-funded space telescope to spy dangerous space rocks

A former NASA astronaut worried about asteroids smashing into Earth is launching a crowd-funded effort to build a space telescope for spotting dangerous space rocks. Plans are for the telescope, called Sentinel, to launch in 2017 or 2018, drift toward Venus and then spend 51 / 2 years surveying the inner solar system as it orbits the sun. The telescope’s unblinking eye will spot the warm glow of asteroids larger than about 100 feet across — large enough to destroy a city. The mission is designed to give earthlings a head start of several years — or decades — to prepare a mission to deflect any threatening asteroids. Spearheaded by Ed Lu, a physicist who flew on the space shuttle and the international space station, the project needs to raise “a few hundred million” dollars to get off the ground. “This is crowdsourcing but on a grand level,” he said. While NASA spends some $5 million a year searching for big “planet killer” asteroids — and finding no such threats — no one has surveyed for smaller but still possibly catastrophic space rocks, Lu said. “The chances were pretty minimal somebody else was going to do this,” Lu said. “Federal budgets being what they are, it’s just not going to happen.” The project’s genesis reaches to 2001, when Lu joined with former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart to start the nonprofit B612 Foundation. The group brought together scientists to draw up plans for how to deflect any asteroids headed toward Earth. In the past year, Lu and the B612 Foundation — named after an asteroid in the 1943 French children’s tale “The Little Prince” — have rounded up a who’s who of space scientists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to lead the campaign. They’ve designed a telescope, tapped a company to build it — Ball Aerospace of Colorado, which has built other space telescopes — and signed an agreement with NASA to use the agency’s radio dishes for communication. Now they just need the money. The group is negotiating the final price with Ball. The dropping cost of computers, telescope components and rocket launches made the project feasible, Lu said. But another expert is skeptical that the telescope will cost just “a few hundred million” dollars. Tim Spahr of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., which tracks asteroids — and which would eventually analyze data from Sentinel — was


Something Different Country Store near Urbanna, Va., serves traditional food with a twist

location, the crossroads of routes 602 and 603 known as Pine Tree (which was never a town so much as a rural postal district, and today Gill estimates the population as a grand total of six). Urbanna, about two miles up the road, is charming and beloved by boaters, but its population hovers around 500. In 2002, Gill realized he had two choices: sell the store for a loss or transform it into a place that could draw people from as far as 100 miles away. He chose the latter, and, in doing so, inadvertently turned Something Different into a country store for the 21st century. In the early to mid-1900s, country stores dotted crossroads all over the rural South. They were not just stores, but also community centers. When Gill was a kid, he’d walk or bike the two miles to Bob Green’s country store to buy penny candy, hear the news and get the mail. Now, Something Different stands on the spot where Bob Green’s used to be. But instead of stocking convenience foods such as tinned sardines, milk and eggs, it sells specialty foods ( smoked salmon with dill sauce, and beignets) and heritage foods such as sweet potato pudding, hoecakes — and, yes, blow toads. Upon hearing about Something Different, John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, says it sounds “newfangled and old-fangled at the same time.” Edge is bullish on places such as Something Different. “In this moment, when people see a different value in food, and connect that to community, there’s a need for updating the country store,” he says. “Cracker Barrel does not suffice.” *** Late in the afternoon, a new handful of diners is at the counter, and Gill has his binder open. He turns to his dispatch on umami, in which he rhapsodizes about his discovery of kelp powder, which he uses in his she-crab soup, his barbecue rubs and his ice cream. Another dispatch offers an investigation of anasazi beans, which he has discovered to be “more socially acceptable than most beans,” due to their tendency to cause less, er, intestinal excitement. Yet another is on hoecakes, corn pancakes that, back in the Colonial era, were cooked on the blades of hoes over an open fire. “As an ethno-gastronomist, my passion is the ‘food of the people’ — not the ‘food of the


Forget the Supreme Court’s health-care decision, we need a health-care revolution

patients to check their symptoms whenever they want, wherever they are, and get quick feedback from their doctor. The product is expected to cost $100 or less—which is comparable to the cost of a single EKG test today. With health data captured and transmitted from outside of the traditional health-care setting, vast improvements in feedback loops and outcomes can be achieved. Take hypertension as another example: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 32 percent of American adults have high blood pressure, yet less than half are adequately controlled (with their measured numbers reduced to a safe range), resulting in significant morbidity and mortality rates (i.e. from strokes, vascular disease). Now, for less than $100, one can purchase a mobile phone-enabled blood pressure cuff, and a patient can easily measure, track, visualize and share their blood pressure readings. They can also enable optimization of interventions be they diet, exercise or drugs. Significant downstream savings can be achieved through such smart innovations, but they need to be integrated and reimbursed with the health-care system to fulfill their capability. Artificial Intelligence based systems also provide great promise. The technology that IBM Watson used to defeat human champions on “Jeopardy” is now being applied to health care. Despite my respect for my cardiologist, I would rather have a computer, with access to comparable data from millions of people, diagnose my EKG. Like IBM Watson, the computer has access to the latest knowledge from all over the world. It has the ability to analyze and integrate more information than the most accomplished clinician every could. The cost of DNA sequencing has been dropping at a breathtaking pace over the past decade. By the end of this year, a complete genetic sequence will likely cost about $1,000 and be available within 8 hours. At this rate, within five years, the gene sequencer may be an iPhone accessory—like my EKG monitor. Genome data of hundreds of millions of people will be available. We will be able to discover the correlations between disease and DNA and to prescribe personalized medications more tailored to an individual’s genetics and other attributes. We can also now “write” DNA. In an emerging field called “synthetic biology,” researchers, and even high-school students are creating new organisms and synthetic life forms. Entrepreneurs have developed software tools to “design” DNA. These technologies provide the ability to generate designer drugs, therapeutic vaccines, and


now being applied to health care. Despite my respect for my cardiologist, I would rather have a computer, with access to comparable data from millions of people, diagnose my EKG. Like IBM Watson, the computer has access to the latest knowledge from all over the world. It has the ability to analyze and integrate more information than the most accomplished clinician every could. The cost of DNA sequencing has been dropping at a breathtaking pace over the past decade. By the end of this year, a complete genetic sequence will likely cost about $1,000 and be available within 8 hours. At this rate, within five years, the gene sequencer may be an iPhone accessory—like my EKG monitor. Genome data of hundreds of millions of people will be available. We will be able to discover the correlations between disease and DNA and to prescribe personalized medications more tailored to an individual’s genetics and other attributes. We can also now “write” DNA. In an emerging field called “synthetic biology,” researchers, and even high-school students are creating new organisms and synthetic life forms. Entrepreneurs have developed software tools to “design” DNA. These technologies provide the ability to generate designer drugs, therapeutic vaccines, and microorganisms. Leveraged appropriately, this field can dramatically impact the development of novel, and more effective therapeutics. The good news is that we aren’t dependent any more on “Big Pharma” or government to create these advances; entrepreneurs are leading the charge. The EKG devices, DNA sequencers, and DNA printers are all being developed by entrepreneurs. That’s because the costs associated with developing these technologies have dropped dramatically. So, we could see major medical breakthroughs coming from the unlikeliest of places. Kraft says that he fears that government and over regulation will, however, hold entrepreneurs back. “While technologies ranging from medical apps, point of care diagnostics, synthetic biology and wearable health devices race ahead, regulatory bodies such as the Food and Drug Administration urgently need to keep up, both in their ability to foster and encourage the safe adoption and approval of many emerging breakthroughs, but also to re-imagine better ways to run faster, safer and more relevant clinical trials to bring these innovations to market” says Kraft. “Unfortunately in today’s political environment, often with perverse dis-incentives in place which hinder new approaches moving forward, drugs as common as aspirin and even table salt might not make it to market, let alone


Air Force investigates growing sex-abuse scandal

The Air Force is investigating a growing sexual-misconduct scandal in its basic-training operations, with a dozen male boot-camp instructors under suspicion of assaulting, harassing or having sex with female recruits. The case originated with a single complaint filed a year ago by a woman at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. It has snowballed into potentially the worst sex scandal in the U.S. military since 1996, when 12 male soldiers were charged with abusing female recruits and trainees at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. The Air Force investigation centers on a unit of boot-camp instructors at Lackland, near San Antonio, where 36,000 recruits undergo basic training each year. About one-quarter of the instructors in the 331st Training Squadron have either been charged with crimes or are under investigation for sexual misconduct. One trainer has been charged with raping or sexually assaulting 10 recruits. Senior Air Force officials said they have found problems in other units as well, prompting them to open multiple investigations to determine the extent to which female recruits face harassment and whether the Air Force’s selection process for male instructors is fundamentally flawed. “We are leaving no stone unturned,” Gen. Edward A. Rice Jr., the Air Force’s commander of training and education, said Thursday. “I am being as aggressive as I can.” Rice was in Washington to brief lawmakers and senior Pentagon leaders on the status of the investigations. Last week, the Air Force relieved the commander of the 331st Training Squadron, Lt. Col. Michael Paquette, citing “an unacceptable level of misconduct” by members of his unit. The Air Force also appointed a two-star general to investigate whether the Lackland boot camp and other training centers suffered from “systemic issues” related to sexual misconduct. Even as more women fill its ranks, the U.S. military has struggled to cope with the issue of sexual harassment and assaults. Despite numerous high-profile education campaigns and directives from the Pentagon, military officials acknowledge that a culture persists in which victims are reluctant to report abuse. Last year, about 3,200 incidents of sexual assault were reported or investigated by the armed services — a fraction of the estimated 19,000 cases that took place, according to Defense Department figures. To address the problem, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta in April announced several policies designed to encourage victims to come forward and to require that all sexual-assault complaints be investigated by senior


Small business lending growing scarce: Which loan alternative is right for your company?

David Sussman explains which type of company should pursue each loan alternative. Ever since the credit crisis began three and a half years ago, small businesses have found it tough to get loans from traditional banks. Although many of the larger banks claim to be expanding their small business lending programs, the reality is that nine out of 10 loan applications are typically rejected, according to Biz2Credit, and the total number of bank loans to small businesses have fallen 17 percent since October 2011, according to Pepperdine University. Why aren’t banks lending? It’s a complicated issue, but it generally comes down to the fact that banks haven’t fully recovered since the 2008 financial crisis and many of them wouldn’t be around today were it not for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Many of these banks are still exposed to bad U.S. mortgages and risky investments in Europe, which have prevented them from taking on new lending risks. The big banks know they can’t rely on a second TARP if they end up in difficult financial circumstances again, so they’ve become extremely risk adverse. Small businesses carry a higher risk of default than their corporate counterparts and they aren’t particularly profitable to begin with; as a result, banks are reluctant to expose their books to this type of lending. This is one part of the liquidity crisis facing small businesses. The other factor at play here is that accounts receivables are taking longer to be satisfied. According to Experian, larger companies now take 28 percent longer to pay their bills. Until bank lending steps up, small business growth will remain stagnant due to slower cash flow, and that impacts the whole economy. Many economists believe this is adding to the country’s high unemployment, sluggish recovery and declining household net worth. Small businesses are the engine that drives our economy; they employ half of all private sector employees, generate 65 percent of all new jobs in the country and pay 44 percent of the nation’s private payroll, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. But without sufficient financing or liquidity, these smaller companies can’t expand their operations, invest in new equipment or fund new research and development. Often, they can’t hire new employees and in many cases have to lay off existing staff. In this tough economic environment, when large banks are no longer an option, small businesses need to take


U.S. targets informal banks for alleged aid to Taliban

The Obama administration imposed sanctions on a pair of informal money-exchange networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan on Friday in what officials described as the first use of the tactic to attack the financial underpinnings of Taliban militants who rely on the system to fund their insurgency. The sanctions announced by the Treasury Department were coordinated with similar measures adopted by the United Nations as part of a broad effort to slow the flow of cash used by the Taliban to pay salaries and purchase weapons for attacks in Afghanistan. These informal cash networks — commonly known as hawalas — have long been used by Taliban commanders and other militants to move funds back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistani border, according to administration officials who helped prepare the legal case against the two institutions. The two hawalas were identified as the Haji Khairullah Haji Sattar Money Exchange and the Roshan Money Exchange. Both were described as large networks that operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with most transactions occurring in border provinces. Treasury Department documents allege that Afghan Taliban commanders maintained accounts in both networks and regularly withdrew thousands of dollars to pay off Taliban-backed “shadow” governors, buy weapons and pay fighters’ salaries. The documents say much of the cash deposited in the accounts appears to have come from narcotics trafficking, a multibillion-dollar business in Afghanistan that helps finance the insurgency. While U.S. officials in the past have targeted Afghan hawalas used by drug traffickers, the new sanctions are the first specifically aimed at disrupting the Taliban’s finances, said a senior administration official, who insisted on anonymity in discussing an ongoing investigation. On Friday, U.N. officials added the names of the same two institutions and their principal backers to a list of groups officially associated with Taliban militancy, meaning they will be subject to international sanctions as well. The U.S. and U.N. measures together are likely to severely restrict the network’s ability to conduct business with overseas banks or tap into international cash flows of legitimate hawalas, the senior official said. “We have every reason to believe that the designation will be quite disruptive to their activities,” he said. Hawalas exist throughout the Muslim world as a routine way of banking, particularly for immigrant workers and people too poor to have a bank account. But they are also “an important cog in the terrorist financing machinery,” said the senior official. “Whether it’s


With a master’s degree in operatic performance from Indiana University and a slate of symphony pop programs under his belt as president of his New York-based, eponymous artist management company, John Such is an apt representative of the perennially popular classical music/Great White Way concert collaboration. The artistic director of “Broadway Rocks!” — an evening of Broadway hits performed by artists such as Doug LaBrecque and “American Idol” finalist Lakisha Jones with accompaniment by the National Symphony Orchestra and the City Choir of Washington — talks about the program, back for a third time in Washington on July 6. “We’ve been doing [‘Broadway Rocks!’] for probably 10 years now. It’s our third return to the National Symphony and we’ve added new music. [‘Broadway Rocks!’ started] with myself and [NSO conductor] Randall Fleischer. We did a rough, hybrid version with a small symphony in New York . . . 15 years ago. It didn’t work as well as it does now; we were still working out the kinks. I put it on the shelf for five years and then as these rock musicals began to infiltrate Broadway, I thought it was time to resurrect it. “Usually, an orchestra will call us and say, ‘We have a pops program and we’d like to do one of your programs’ or they call us to say, ‘We’d love to do your ‘Broadway Rocks!’ We actually performed with Hong Kong Philharmonic and are performing this summer with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra.’ “There’s probably a dozen artists that perform this particular show. We usually do three or four artists [a show] and a chorus, a local chorus usually. I really try and gear the show to the performer and their strengths. I try to add new things if it’s a return engagement. This has a couple of new ones. We’re premiering Whitney Houston’s ‘And I Will Always Love You’ and then another piece, ‘And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,’ from ‘Dreamgirls,’ two pieces that were actually sung by Lakisha on ‘American Idol.’ We also have a new arrangement of [‘Rent’s’] ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ My artists have been trying to get me to do ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for two years. It took two years before [the song] bit; it takes me a while for it to get into my blood, and I was afraid of that piece with the orchestra. Now I can’t stop listening to


Why your July 4th hamburger hates America

just four companies in selling them is. The bun and a fair price It’s a safe bet that at least one in four hamburger buns doled out at holiday barbecues this summer will come from Wal-Mart. The discounter-turned-grocery-behemoth controls at least a quarter of food sales nationwide, according to an analysis of USDA and Wal-Mart data. In 29 metropolitan areas, it controls more than 50 percent, say analysts at the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents supermarket workers. Wal-Mart has won that rank through low prices, with at least one unintended and deeply un-American effect: It has helped put smaller farmers out of business, in part by manufacturing food products — including burger buns. Wal-Mart doesn’t make its buns itself but contracts with big food companies such as ConAgra to bake them. The baker (or bakery division) needs 10 times the amount of flour it used to need for smaller demand, and so it requires a mill that can refine 10 times as much grain. That grain mill, in turn, has two choices. It can buy grain from 10 times as many small wheat farmers or streamline the process and find one, giant farmer that can meet the entire order, probably at a lower cost. The more market share Wal-Mart attains, the more buns are bought from giant bakers — and fewer from small-scale ones. And by cutting out the middle man — think Sara Lee or Wonder Bread — Wal-Mart’s prices on its house brands are phenomenally competitive. It’s not just prices for the buns, but also for the ketchup, mustard, relish and whatever else you set out on your picnic table. As Wal-Mart rapidly expanded its grocery business in the 1990s, it set off a wave of consolidation in food retail. Big agricultural operations now dominate the U.S. food supply, with farms that average 2,200 acres providing most of our food. That puts American agriculture on a scale in dramatic excess of what Jefferson probably admired when he observed in a 1785 letter to James Madison that “the small landholders are the most precious part of a state” — and well beyond the 160 acres that President Abraham Lincoln gave to the homesteaders who settled the Great Plains. Tomatoes, onions and the land of opportunity No burger is complete without the fixings: tomatoes and onions. (More on lettuce later.) Yet the farmworkers who pick those vegetables


Why I’m not giving up on the search for extraterrestrial life

century with a popular, but false, interpretation of canals built by thirsty Martians to save their planet. But things got more serious in 1959, with the publication of a paper in the journal Nature marking the beginning of the modern era of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. The paper’s authors, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, recognized that the new science of radio astronomy offered tools — radio telescopes developed from World War II-era radars — with which these old human questions could be explored. This is what hooked me on SETI. As I was leaving graduate school in 1974, I was recruited to join a fledgling SETI project at the Hat Creek Observatory in California, mainly because I knew how to program an ancient PDP8/S computer that had been donated to the project. I was alive at just the right time, with just the right skills. In 1960, the pioneering astronomer Frank Drake, working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., pointed the Tatel telescope at two nearby, sun-like stars, seeking to detect any radio signals that extraterrestrials might be transmitting, whether for their own purposes or to attract our attention. Drake’s Project Ozma failed to find any engineered signals coming from the vicinity of those stars, but it did detect unanticipated emissions coming from our own technology. To this day, telling the difference between signals that might be “theirs” and those that are ours remains a major challenge. In his book “Is Anyone Out There?,” written with Dava Sobel, Drake describes an adrenaline-charged episode when he thought he might have found what he was looking for. The SETI research community is small, but almost all of us have shared that incredible experience. As our hardware and software have evolved in sophistication, we’ve built in safeguards that filter out most human-engineered sources of interference. Most, but not all. This happened to me in the 1990s, in the midst of a decade-long search called Project Phoenix. (It was named to commemorate rising from the ashes of congressional termination of NASA’s SETI program.) With the help of private donations, we transported a shipping container jammed with electronic gear to major observatories around the world. We would observe simultaneously with a second, smaller telescope located hundreds of miles away. This was our main defense against confusing our signals with theirs. For any signal to be considered a valid


Can Mexico’s incoming government make the needed reforms?

Enrique Krauze, editor of the magazine Letras Libres, is most recently the author of “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America.” This column was translated by Hank Heifetz. MEXICO CITY On Sunday, about 45 million Mexicans (roughly 60 percent of eligible voters in a population of 110 million) are expected to choose their next president. Most polls predict that the winner will be Enrique Peña Nieto, the young candidate of an old party, the PRI, that is often associated with the image of a dinosaur. Unless there is a major upset — which would probably be in favor of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left candidate — many Mexicans will ponder two questions: Will we see the restoration of the old regime, which Mario Vargas Llosa once called “the perfect dictatorship”? And will the next government basically alter President Felipe Calderón’s strategies to fight the drug trade and organized crime? The answer to both seems to be a qualified no. Vargas Llosa was right about the past. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, functioned for decades like a well-oiled machine, only occasionally feeling the need for physical or ideological coercion. Every six years, the outgoing president, who wielded absolute power, selected his successor. The “system” gave the country stability, order and growth, all at the cost of political development. It engendered theft and generalized corruption and a cancer that grew invisibly within the social body: governmental complicity with the growing drug trade. Mexico was a monarchy in democratic disguise. But the “perfect dictatorship” died in the 2000 presidential election, with the PRI’s loss of power after more than 70 years. Mexico changed. The president now exercises only his prescribed constitutional powers. We have a multi-party congress and an independent Supreme Court. A transparency law has reduced free-wheeling corruption at the federal level. There is absolute freedom of expression. The government no longer organizes and controls elections; they are regulated by a federal institute of citizens. The Bank of Mexico is autonomous. In short, a return to the days of the “perfect dictatorship” is impossible. But this doesn’t mean that the PRI has become a modern party. Its dinosaurs have taken shelter in state governments and in gigantic public unions such as the oilworkers union (whose leaders have become, in large part, proprietors of this public industry). Monopolies, public and private, have also survived. Peña Nieto has spoken of “a renovated


Music: National Orchestral Institute at Strathmore

Every summer, the National Orchestral Institute brings together the cream of young American instrumentalists to play orchestral repertory under important conductors at the University of Maryland. But another annual tradition is the New Lights concert, in which the students explore different ways to approach the repertory. This year’s New Lights concert, on Thursday at the Clarice Smith Center’s Gildenhorn Hall, began with applause. Well, at least it began with clapping, as a circle of students in the empty lobby started to clap, like kids enacting a ritual, and then moved into the hall like latecomers, still clapping. Their arrival triggered other students to stand and join in, until the room was ringed with rhythmic patterns washing around the audience. Music? Not music? At the very least, a bridging of the passage from silence to music; the clapping yielded without a break to the first movement of Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. This set the tone for an evening that presented the concert hall as a kind of laboratory, but in a seamless musical experience that was built entirely out of presenting different kinds and colors of sound, all strongly played. The performance was a single movement, about 45 minutes long, in which individual works or parts of works were linked like stations on a map, each leading logically to the next. The integrity of the works themselves was not affected — though one might question the substitution of a marimba for the trumpet in the Bach, a quiet instrument replacing a clarion one. The Bach ended with a sigh: The players all gave a collective glissando, letting the notes slide down their instruments as if letting the air out of a balloon. It was an apt lead-in to the fragmented sound world of John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts, represented by its second movement, in which little searching fragments of sound sighed up from the instruments, placed offstage. This segued into the more reassuring mode of Arvo Part’s “Spiegel im Spiegel,” (“Mirror in the Mirror”), which sent musical moods rising and falling on the repeating triads from an offstage piano, and led into an improvised vocalise that was meant to be joined in by everyone in the hall. And if this approach left anyone wanting more structure, they got it in the final piece, Paul Moravec’s “Brandenburg Gate.” A response to the Brandenburg Concertos as well as the iconic Berlin


Storm damage brings cancellations

Damage and power outages from Friday night’s storm have caused cancellations and delays to various events around the Washington region: • The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, held at the National Mall, is closed Saturday due to tent damage. Members of the public are not supposed to enter the area while the extent of the damage is being assessed. Officials said the planned evening concert will be held indoors in the Baird Auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History. • The AT&T National golf tournament, being held at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, has been delayed until 1 p.m. No fans or volunteers will be allowed on the course Saturday because of the large number of downed trees and hanging limbs. • The Launch Zone at the National Children’s Museum in Oxon Hill, Md., is closed due to loss of power. The Trader Center opening has been delayed. • The YMCA at Potomac Overlook is closed Saturday. The Silver Springs and Arlington locations, including the Arlington Tennis and Squash Center, may be affected by loss of power and phone lines are not responding. The Alexandria YMCA, which has an indoor pool, is open. • All Prince George’s County libraries are closed Saturday except the Accokeek, Bladensburg, Beltsville, Hyattsville, Largo-Kettering and Laurel branches.


July 4 in D.C.: The getting-around guide

provide longer green lights for traffic leaving the city. This is scheduled to begin about half an hour after the show ends and will continue for an hour. SoberRide The anti-drunken-driving program SoberRide will offer free cab rides to people 21 and older from 10 p.m. on Independence Day to 4 a.m. Thursday. To get a free ride home in the D.C. area (up to a $30 fare), call the SoberRide program toll-free at 800-200-8294 (TAXI). The Mall The Mall will be open to the public at 10 a.m. Wednesday. Entry will be restricted to specific points, where people will be subject to security checks. The Capitol grounds will open at 3 p.m. Performances on the Washington Monument grounds begin at 6 p.m. The Capitol Fourth concert on the west lawn of the Capitol starts at 8 p.m. The fireworks are scheduled to start about 9:10 p.m. and last about 20 minutes. Other events ●Baseball: The District had hoped to open the new ramp from southbound D.C. 295 to the inbound 11th Street bridge The closest Metro station to the stadium is Navy Yard on the Green Line. ●Parade: ●Folklife Festival: Metrorail On Wednesday, trains will operate from 7 a.m. to midnight. The transit authority says that near rush-hour service levels will be provided from 6 p.m. to midnight, but for most of the rest of the day, the scheduled will be comparable to Saturday service. No track work is planned. It’s a holiday, so no Rush Plus trains. After 2 p.m., every other Orange Line train in the direction of New Carrollton will terminate at Stadium-Armory and return to Vienna. After 6 p.m., northbound Yellow Line trains will terminate at Mount Vernon Square. Off-peak fares will be in effect, but they will reflect the fare increases that take effect Sunday. That includes a $1 surcharge for trips using paper Farecards. Parking is free on holidays at Metro lots and garages. In a change from previous years, the Smithsonian station will be open throughout the day. But it will be available for entries only after the fireworks. Because of the crowding, bikes will not be permitted. Metrobus Buses will operate on a Saturday schedule. Some buses will need to detour around closed streets. Updates on the detours will be available on Metro’s Web site at www.wmata.com . MetroAccess MetroAccess, the paratransit service, will operate on a regular schedule, but subscription


Sky Watch: Vivacious Venus returns

joins the pair on the morning of July 15. On July 16, the skinny moon continues a trek toward the horizon, moving away from Jupiter and Venus. From our earthly perspective, Venus and Jupiter appear to grow apart in the latter half of July. Hopefully, the light pollution won’t prevent you from noticing the star Aldebaran, a red giant, which appears to Venus’s right. And check out the Pleiades — the famed Seven Sisters (Messier 45) — above Jupiter. Saturn The ringed-planet Saturn, now at zero magnitude — bright enough to be seen from Washington’s light-polluted urban and suburban areas — sets around 1 a.m. now, and around midnight by the end of July. The calendar marches on and, with apologies to Bon Jovi, we’re halfway there: We officially reach the middle of 2012 on Monday, July 2, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. And ironically, as we broil in the oppressive Washington summer, Earth reaches its most distant point from the sun all year: This is called aphelion (pronounced APP-hee-leon), and it happens July 4. Down to Earth Events: July 2-3 — July 5 July 8 July 13 – Mars Day! The National Air and Space Museum, on the Mall, celebrates our red neighbor from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. See a real Martian meteorite, talk to planetary scientists and learn about the rover Curiosity – soon to land on Mars. www.airandspace.si.edu. July 14 — Star party, hosted by the Astronomical Society of Greenbelt, at the observatory at Northway Fields Park in Greenbelt. 9:30 p.m. (Also a similar event on July 28 at 9 p.m.) www.greenbeltastro.org. July 20 — “Dust to Dust: The life cycles of stars,” a talk by astronomer Sonali Shukla, at the open house, the University of Maryland Observatory, College Park. Telescope viewing afterward, weather permitting. 9 p.m. www.astro.umd.edu/openhouse. July 21 – Astronomers from across the region and from the National Air and Space Museum set up telescopes and binoculars to guide you across the cosmos at Sky Meadows State Park, near Paris, Va., from 8 to 11 p.m. Parking: $5. Arrive before dark. www.airandspace.si.edu/events/skywatching. July 21 – The Summer Triangle beckons at “Exploring the Sky” at Rock Creek Park, hosted by the National Park Service and the National Capital Astronomers. Meet near the Nature Center in the field south of Military and Glover roads, NW. 9 p.m. www.capitalastronomers.org. Blaine Friedlander can be reached at PostSkyWatch@gmail.com


NOI hits all the right notes in Mahler’s Third

The National Orchestra Institute hit a home run in its final performance Saturday at the Clarice Smith Center. Led by Israeli conductor Asher Fisch, this orchestra of hand-picked conservatory students from across the country outdid itself in Mahler’s Third Symphony, a work of Himalayan dimensions and difficulty. It is extremely doubtful that any of these young musicians had played this piece before, but they took on its marathon challenges with an eagerness that filled the hall. Fisch, best known as an opera conductor, was an exacting if sometimes interpretively cautious leader. But whatever he was selling, the orchestra was buying; ensemble, balance and intonation were of professional quality throughout, the first time I’ve been able to say that about an NOI performance. In a festival group such as this, different players rotate through the coveted principal chairs for each concert. By accident or design, the best ones were leading on Saturday (particularly the concertmaster and principal bass), and the orchestra had grown more cohesive and responsive during its month of work. There were, of course, individual bobbles among the eight horns, blowing hard all night, and the string players did not produce the kind of creamy, multihued sound in the finale that one hears on recordings. But Fisch had the full measure of the piece and its peculiar challenges, highlighting all of the images in Mahler’s sound world; the overripe string glissandi, the snarling brass, the shrieking piccolos and the feral low strings. He coordinated the offstage post horn solos perfectly and kept the massive percussion section musically proportionate. The vocal contributions were decent though not as impressive. The Maryland State Boychoir looked about one-third strength, and the University of Maryland Women’s Chorus was also underpowered. Although the singers sounded well-drilled, they were too often covered by the orchestra, which was playing sensitively. Mezzo Stefanie Iranyi drew long, admirably concentrated musical lines in “O Mensch!,” but the sound wasn’t always perfectly centered. So the night belonged to the musicians of the orchestra, who rose spectacularly to a challenge (and indeed a risk), passing with flying colors. Battey is a freelance writer.


Meat and ‘superbugs’

THE FOOD and Drug Administration (FDA) announced in 1977 that it would begin prohibiting the use of some antibiotics in agriculture, but Congress objected and nothing happened. Since then, the need for restraint has grown. The wonder drugs of the 20th century have been so widely used that germs are becoming resistant to them, giving rise to “superbugs,” bacteria that are immune to one or more antibiotics. Tens of thousands of people die every year from hospital-acquired infections, the vast majority of which result from such resistant bacteria. It’s a situation worth pondering when you next reach for meat or poultry at the grocery store. Food animals consume about 80 percent of antibiotics sold in the United States, of which two-thirds are similar or identical to drugs used in human medicine. Most of them go to make healthy animals grow faster and stay well, often in difficult and crowded conditions. Giving antibiotics to sick animals is proper, but questions continue to be raised about the wisdom of distributing antibiotics in their feed and water supplies to whole flocks and herds for growth-enhancing and prophylactic purposes. The agricultural industry says that the chances are very small that farm antibiotics will affect human health. But critics are pointing to fresh studies that suggest that antibiotics in agriculture do contribute to the growth of drug resistance and that the bacteria can make their way back to humans through food or the environment. After years of congressional and FDA inaction, the product-testing organization Consumer Reports is hoping to force change by urging shoppers to shun meat and poultry from animals that were fed antibiotics. We think that consumers ought to make their own choices, and for that they need proper labels. But industry and regulators face more complex problems. They can’t just ban antibiotics, which are a vital tool in medicine, and big changes would be needed in agricultural practices in the United States for farming operations to survive without them. In April, the FDA issued voluntary guidelines that called on farmers to be “judicious” with antibiotics, limiting their use to ensuring animal health. Significantly, the FDA said, using antibiotics for promoting growth or feed efficiency is not judicious. Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-N.Y.) has introduced legislation that would mandate an end to using antibiotics on healthy farm animals. The European Union did so in 2006. The evidence is overwhelming that bacteria are evolving


U.S. track and field trials: Sprinters agree to break 100-meter tie with run-off race

my first Olympic team so I’m very excited to represent the U.S. at the Olympics on the biggest stage in track and field,” Centrowitz said. Centrowitz, whose father, Matt, is a two-time Olympian and the head track coach at American University, shrugged off the fast early pace and led for most of the final lap before Manzano, a member of the 2008 Olympic team, caught him from behind down the final stretch. Not long after, before making his victory lap, Centrowitz spotted his father in the stands. “He came out a few days before the trials just to make sure my head’s in the right spot,” Centrowitz said. “Sometimes it wanders off with girls. . . . He focuses me up a little bit.” Despite the high drama in the trials’ final events Sunday, nothing seemed to match the theater that surrounded the women’s 100 race at these trials. Felix and Tarmoh had been locked in a dead-heat tie for the past eight days. In last Saturday’s 100-meter race, a photo review showed that both sprinters crossed the finish line at the same time — officially in 11.068 seconds — an ending for which USATF officials were not prepared. There were no rules in place to break the tie, and officials took nearly 24 hours to draft a new set of procedures to determine a winner, essentially coming up with two options, depending on the runners’ preferences: a run-off or a tie. There was not a quick consensus, as the two sides met Saturday night and again for two hours on Sunday afternoon before settling on the Monday runoff. USATF had hoped to have a resolution by the conclusion of the trials on Sunday evening, so they could forward the names of the men’s and women’s track teams to the United States Olympic Committee on Monday. Geer said it was more “practical” to stage the race Monday and allow each runner nearly 48 hours of rest before putting them back in the starting blocks. “The only thing worse than waiting too long to have a run-off is having it too soon and having one of your star athletes get injured,” Geer said. “That would’ve been a worst-case scenario.” With both Felix and Tarmoh scheduled to compete in the 200 meters — and each scheduled to run a total of six races at these trials — neither was willing to discuss


is widely viewed as one of the most popular and prestigious communities in the metropolitan region, and its multifamily and office development continues to attract attention. Class A apartments in the area are among the most well-appointed and priciest in the region. During the first three months of this year, high-rise Class A effective rents in Bethesda averaged $2,396 a month, or $2.60 a square foot. Overall vacancy in the area is 7.4 percent, which while high by historical standards is better than any other Class A high-rise market in suburban Maryland. As a result of the elevated vacancy rate, rents over the past year have decreased 6.9 percent. Currently concessions make up 4.3 percent of face rents, which is average for Class A high-rises in suburban Maryland. There are 320 units under construction, and an additional 1,003 units planned to open over the next 36 months. If all of the units make it to market, Bethesda-Chevy Chase may have more available units than takers, driving up vacancies and pushing rents down further. Since 2003, 962 new condominium units have been sold in the area. There are two condominium projects in the pre-marketing phase that will begin sales later this year, for a total of 115 units. Two additional projects with a total of 225 units are planned to begin sales within the next 36 months, with another 432 units planned longer-term. A portion of the 198 planned multifamily units in the pipeline may be built as condos. The 11.3 million square foot Bethesda-Chevy Chase office market is centered along Wisconsin Avenue on the northwest boundary of the District. About 768,000 square feet of the total is available to lease, which equates to a direct vacancy rate of 6.8 percent as of the first quarter. If sublet space is added, the vacancy rate rises to 7.9 percent, significantly lower than the countywide rates of 11.3 percent and 12.2 percent, respectively. During the first quarter, 23,000 more square feet were leased than during the previous quarter. The average effective rent in Bethesda-Chevy Chase was $28.95 per square foot at the end of the 1st quarter, up from $28.80 per square foot at year-end 2011. Rents increased 0.5 percent during the first quarter, after rising 0.7 percent during 2011. Michael Donnelly is a senior associate at Delta Associates. Staff at Delta Associates contributed to this article. For more information, please visit www.deltaassociates.com.


Deltek: Don’t expect immediate big data buying

Three years ago, cloud computing was generating all of the hype in information technology. Now the spotlight is on “big data,” a term used to describe the exploding volume of data accumulated by federal agencies. Despite the attention, big data spending within the federal government is likely to be limited at first and probably will not pick up until cloud computing is more established. Private industry has already realized the value in the collections of data stored on their servers. This data can tell companies what their customers have bought, and what they might buy again, particularly if a targeted marketing campaign reaches them at the right time. Now, federal agencies are finding that the data they accumulate can help them better serve citizens and more effectively carry out their missions. To encourage federal agencies to make use of that data, the White House earlier this year established a big data initiative. Still, that doesn’t mean all federal agencies are well versed in the advanced analytics and storage capabilities needed to truly make use of the information. In fact, an agency’s big data readiness is most likely linked to its cloud readiness. A cloud-ready agency has an integrated IT infrastructure that lives in a virtualized data center, giving it expandable and modernized storage space. Those same capabilities enable big data tools. Given the government’s struggle to make the most of cloud computing, Deltek analysts suspect the growth of the big data market for the federal government over the next five years will be slower than many anticipate. We expect to see considerable market research and a few small buys but few major purchases. The transition to cloud computing has been a muddled affair, filled with multiple adoption paths, service delivery models and types of deployment. It’s getting better, but it’s taken time. Big data will likely follow the same winding path. Until 2015 to 2017, most agencies will be consumed with data center consolidation and creating their cloud environments. Only after this will they be able to approach big data with confidence. Alex Rossino is a principal research analyst at Herndon-based Deltek, which conducts research on the government contracting market and can be found at www.deltek.com.


Fred Hiatt: Learning compromise from Chief Justice Roberts and Aung San Suu Kyi

her plane. In modern history it’s hard to find anyone who can match her combination of steely determination and good-humored lack of bitterness. Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel are two who would make that very short list. But she, too, is in the process of marrying conviction to practicality. Now 67, Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Burma’s independence hero, a general who was assassinated when she was 2. She spent much of her life abroad but returned to Burma in 1988 to care for her dying mother and was swept up in a movement for democracy. She electrified crowds with her modest eloquence and confounded soldiers by walking, alone and unarmed, directly toward their guns. Her democracy party overwhelmingly won an election in 1990 that the ruling generals effectively annulled. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 but did not travel to Norway to accept it because she feared the generals would not let her back into her country. She spent most of the next two decades locked up, separated from her two sons, and apart from her husband when he grew sick and died. Now she has been allowed to run for parliament (she won, easily) and travel abroad. At every step she has been criticized by some for sticking to principle too stubbornly and by others for being too willing to compromise with the generals and former generals who still call the shots. Her supposed intransigence always has infuriated those more eager to do business with Burma than promote its democracy. Last week, in response to her opposition to U.S. firms dealing with Burma’s corrupt state-owned energy company, outgoing Virginia Sen. James Webb (D) peevishly asked whether “an official from any foreign government should be telling us what sectors that we should invest in and not invest in.” But at the same time she has alarmed some of her supporters by embracing this chance at reform, even though there’s no guarantee (as she well knows) that it will bear fruit. She speaks warmly of President Thein Sein, takes her seat in a parliament the regime still controls and urges foreigners to invest, as long they do so in a “democracy-friendly and human-rights friendly” way. “I strive to be as practical as my father was,” she told the British Parliament, recalling that when a British general accused him of switching from the Japanese to


At ‘Don Giovanni’ and other performances, storm is a showstopper

power just 30 minutes too early to serve as the storm scene in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” Realizing that it was safest for the audience to remain seated in the Festival Theater rather than try to drive on the narrow and ill-lit country roads, Castleton’s general director, Nancy Gustafson, called on several performers to ad-lib to keep everyone entertained. First up was the violinist Eric Silberger, in town to play for Lorin Maazel, who made clear, in the Fuga movement of Bach’s G Minor Sonata for solo violin and a couple of Paganini caprices, lit by the ushers’ flashlights, that he was a considerable talent; it turned out he had placed fifth in last year’s International Tchaikovsky Competition. This was followed by some less-noteworthy offerings from the singers, and, ultimately, by excerpts from the second act of the opera, accompanied by a piano hauled out to one corner of the house. Finally, the storm subsided enough to allow a cortege of cars to make its way down the roads, clearing fallen branches as necessary. Castleton wasn’t able to get a generator in time to save opening night of Bizet’s “Carmen” on Saturday — the show has been rescheduled for Wednesday — but it was able to power the festival’s smaller Theater House for a recital of young singers from the Castleton Artists Training Seminar on Saturday afternoon, as well as resurrecting “The Barber of Seville” on Sunday afternoon. At Dance Place, scheduled performances by the Good Foot Dance Company on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon were canceled because of the lack of power. The Strathmore campus was also closed, necessitating a last-minute change of venue for “Serenade,” the new international choral festival in Washington that had scheduled a free concert of more than 325 singers from seven countries, including Namibia, Australia and Colombia. The concert was moved to the National Presbyterian Church. But sometimes, special circumstances can inject a shot of adrenaline into a performance, which would benefit “Don Giovanni’s” young cast. In the two hours performed before the power went out, Andrew Bisantz did a credible job conducting the small orchestra, and Tomer Zvulun’s staging got lots of laughs from the audience, though it was regrettable that he upstaged so many moments with gags involving projections from the iPad on screens around the stage. (The gimmick of having Leporello inventory Giovanni’s amatory adventures on an iPad, seen at


Outsourcing: What’s the true impact? Counting jobs is only part of the answer.

labor for U.S. labor. From a job perspective, perhaps the best face they can put on the process of shipping work overseas is that, by allowing the company to remain competitive, it helps to save whatever jobs are left in the United States. These are the types of companies that are more likely to be bought or directly controlled by private-equity firms. The job impact from outsourcing also seems to vary between sectors. As Slaughter notes, even in the most recent decade, the Commerce Department data on multinationals shows that service-sector firms continued to expand employment at home as well as abroad. Unfortunately, those gains were more than offset by the job losses in manufacturing. What happened to manufacturing? One theory is that in the early days of offshoring, moving production work overseas did indeed have that salutary effect of creating more than enough offsetting jobs back home in engineering, design, marketing and final assembly. But in the past few years, a number of respected tech executives, among them former Intel chairman Andy Grove and IBM’s former chief scientist Ralph Gomory, have warned that a tipping point of sorts has been reached. It turns out that designing and developing products requires rather intimate familiarity and close collaboration with the manufacturing process. That was not a problem when there was still some production left in the United States. But now that many categories of high tech have moved virtually all production offshore, companies are finding that they also need to move more and more of engineering and design work overseas as well. A shifting dynamic Arie Lewin, director of the Center of International Business Education and Research at Duke University, says we’ve seen a variation of this same dynamic before, with the consumer electronics business in the 1950s and ’60s. At first, U.S. companies found it cheaper to begin shipping some of the production of radios and televisions to Japan. But in time, Japanese suppliers reverse-engineered the products and figured out how to design and produce their own brands. They then took over the global industry. As a result, an outsourcing strategy that might have been benign or even beneficial in terms of U.S. employment eventually turned negative. Lewin, whose center does annual surveys with thousands of outsourcing companies and their customers, reports that a different dynamic is taking hold in terms of outsourcing service functions — not just call centers


Bedbug sprays fail to kill even vulnerable insects in researchers’ test

A new study brings bad news for people fighting bedbug infestations and companies that sell over-the-counter insecticides. Ohio State University entomologists Susan Jones and Joshua Bryant found that “bug bombs” and “foggers” — cheap, insecticide-spraying aerosols that have been marketed for decades as do-it-yourself alternatives to exterminators — were ineffective against even the most vulnerable of bedbugs. In the study, published last month in the Journal of Economic Entomology, the researchers tested three popular commercial foggers against five wild strains of bedbugs found in Ohio homes and one laboratory strain that had not been exposed to insecticides. They found that after spraying the bugs with a typical two-hour fog, only the laboratory bugs had died; nearly all of the wild bedbugs, though placed in completely exposed containers, had survived. When the scientists covered the containers with paper to simulate the bedding that the insects often nest in, nearly all the bedbugs from every strain survived — even the laboratory strain. The scientists concluded not only that most wild bedbugs are resistant to pyrethroids, the active ingredients in fogger aerosols, but also that the fogging process itself is fundamentally flawed. “The spray can’t penetrate through a thin paper sheet, much less into cracks and crevices where bedbugs hide in real life. On top of that, we’re dealing with bugs resistant to pyrethroids in the first place” said Jones. “It’s a death knell for this type of product.” Jones, who had initially designed the study to test whether foggers caused surviving bedbugs to scatter and inhabit previously uninfested areas, said the results were so unexpectedly poor that she had to backtrack and ask whether these products worked at all. “After we ran the first spraying experiments, we saw that the bugs were crawling around as if nothing had happened,’” she said. The study tested two general-use products, Spectracide Bug Stop Indoor Fogger and Eliminator Indoor Fogger, and one marketed specifically for bedbugs, called the Hot Shot Bedbug and Flea Fogger. All three were developed by Spectrum Brands. Missy Henriksen, a spokeswoman at the National Pest Management Association, said that Jones and Bryant’s results “could be new for consumers but weren’t a surprise to the professional pest-management industry.” University of Kentucky entomologist Kenneth Haynes, who wasn’t involved in the study, said that academics have not held stock in foggers for years. “I don’t view bedbugs as a do-it-yourself project, and I’d call an


Putin seeks to show he won’t buckle to U.S.

onerous burdens on organizations that engage in any activity that “influences” public opinion and that receive foreign financial backing. They would be required to register as “foreign agents” and to undergo twice-yearly tax audits and regular monitoring by law enforcement officials. Draconian penalties for infractions would include prison sentences. “They want to block channels of free information,” said Grigory Melkonyants, deputy director of Golos, an organization that monitors elections in Russia and that receives almost all its $700,000 budget from American and European agencies. “It’s very negative.” Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the 84-year-old leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group, said the organization would refuse to register. “The main goal of this bill is to humiliate the independent organizations and NGOs and to set our citizens against civil society,” she said. “We are not agents of foreign states. We defend our citizens when their rights are violated.” Critics of the Obama administration say the disputes with Moscow are proof that the “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations has failed. Defenders point to Russia’s impending accession to the World Trade Organization, the signing of the new nuclear arms reduction treaty and continuing logistical support for the shipment of American military supplies into and out of Afghanistan. Those gains, they argue, became possible because the administration was prepared to make progress where it was able to, while not ignoring more problematic areas such as human rights. That “de-linking” policy has its detractors — foremost among them those members of Congress who want to tie Russia’s trade status to punishment for officials involved in the Magnitsky case. Last month, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the Magnitsky bill, which would bar officials tied to his case from visiting the United States and would freeze their assets. The legislation has been denounced by Russian officials — and resisted by the White House, which has quietly imposed its own visa ban, by executive order, and views the proposal as an unhelpful public slap at Moscow. “Are we focusing on the human rights side? Quite frankly, one of the struggles here is to get our own State Department to focus more on human rights,” Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), the chief sponsor of the bill, said at a recent forum. Moscow, too, has its reservations about the reset. “The Russians feel they’ve done a lot for the U.S., and the U.S. never reciprocates,” Mark Katz, a professor at George Mason University


Kim promises crisis response if needed

was Monday. “We are ready to respond.” After the global financial crisis spiked in 2008, the World Bank boosted its lending to record levels, supporting projects to back weakened banks in Eastern Europe and help poorer countries cope with increases in food prices and a lack of access to trade finance. In response to a question during a meeting with reporters, Kim said he would be prepared to offer Greece and other European countries technical assistance, helping sort out the euro zone’s economic troubles through lessons his staff has learned working with developing countries. “Where we feel we can add value is in technical support around some of the structural issues,” he said. This wouldn’t be the first time that the World Bank provided help to countries that are not eligible to borrow from it because they are too rich. In Europe, countries like Slovakia and Latvia have “graduated” from World Bank borrowing but still get technical assistance. Oil exporters in the Persian Gulf have also relied on such help. Kim, a former president of Dartmouth College, takes over at the World Bank at a time when demand for its loans has been declining. During the search for Zoellick’s successor, some outside analysts suggested the bank’s importance had less to do with its traditional financing role and more to do with the expertise it has gained in overseeing projects, developing markets and improving how countries are governed. Kim, a doctor by training who has experience in health programs, said he agreed that the bank’s money was becoming less important. “There are so many sources of capital in the world these days that often that is not going to be our role,” said Kim, noting that his experience running a major university prepared him to manage an organization that he regards as “a huge academic institution. . . . There is a tremendous amount of research and analytic firepower.” Kim was nominated for the post by President Obama. By tradition, the United States, the bank’s largest shareholder, has named its president. Nominees from Nigeria and Colombia also vied for the post, but Kim was overwhelmingly selected by the World Bank board. With no formal background in finance or economics — his predecessors have all hailed from top banking, corporate or government posts — Kim relied heavily in his transition on a team of advisers from the U.S. Treasury. One, Navtej Dhillon,


A race against the thermometer for Alexandria brewery

There were no pint glasses raised for the derecho. Not at the Port City Brewing Co. in Alexandria, where owner Bill Butcher and head brewer Jonathan Reeves paced nervously, fretting about thousands of gallons of craft brew — especially an ever-warming tank of seasonal pilsner more than two days into the fermentation process. “It should be around 50 degrees,” Butcher said Monday morning after a long weekend without power in the midst of a relentless heat wave. “It’s around 62 right now,” Reeves said. The two men were racing against the thermometer to preserve the contents of the 1,860-gallon stainless steel tank, which (they hope) will be bottled as Downright Pilsner. Bill Butcher, owner of Port City Brewing Company pushes his son, Key, 8, on a cart through the brewery's darkened facility on Monday. (Matt McClain/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) “If we have to drop the tank, it’s about $20,000,” Butcher said. “As a start-up business, every dollar in sales is critical. We don’t have any margin for error. This is a crisis situation.” So, Reeves said, “we’re getting a generator to save the beer.” As Washington struggled to power up in the wake of Friday night’s freak storm, some area businesses scrambled to protect their perishables and other heat-sensitive products. A Northern Virginia pediatrics practice moved hundreds of vials of vaccines — worth more than $100,000 — to a pharmacy refrigerator at Inova Alexandria Hospital. Dry ice and generators were in short supply. Largess was not: Wagshal’s, the high-end grocery in Washington’s tony Spring Valley neighborhood, grilled prime cuts of meat before they could spoil and gave them away at a neighborhood cookout. “I felt good about it rather than throwing it away,” said owner Bill Fuchs, who estimated his losses in the tens of thousands of dollars — a “pretty devastating” toll. But insurance should cover the majority of the losses, he said — and other businesses lost just as much, if not more. “The guy who slaughters my beef up in Baltimore had to throw away 80 cattle,” Fuchs said. “So all the way up and down the food chain, you have people with some real devastating issues going on.” Since Friday’s mass outages, neighbors with power have helped those without save milk, ice cream and frozen meat. Elliott Staren, owner of Wide World of Wines, helped in a completely different way: A customer who’d lost power wanted


Expat navigates life and finds camaraderie in China, simple phrase by simple phrase

Holiday Inn card, or I never would have had the nerve to say it.) Then I made some real progress the other day in a cab to Houhai Lake (where I have taken up dragon boating, which is a story for another day). I was sitting up front with a female cabdriver (not that common here) so I could show her the map on my iPad. The iPad has added an interesting aspect to my getting around Beijing. Some cabbies touch the map and then jump back as if they’ve been shocked when the screen reacts. Others look at the iPad with amusement, as if I’ve shown them a rocket ship or a miniature nuclear reactor: interesting, but not necessarily relevant to their lives. This cabbie kept looking at it, pointing warily and saying stuff, and I kept not knowing what she was saying. It was probably something like: “I don’t want to go that way, but I can get you close. It might take a while.” I find that the best thing to do in cabs is agree with whatever they’re saying. I mean, I certainly don’t have the resources to argue. So I just say, “Dui, dui,” which sounds like “dway, dway,” part of my limited arsenal of words that mean “okay.” Anyway, we were moving along when she started to eat some snacks that made a loud crunching noise (she also spit out the window at one point and tossed out some trash). I glanced at what she was eating, and she handed me a miniature bag that was about the size of a “fun size” pack of M&Ms. This was no candy, though; I was being offered dried peas. I put a few in my mouth with some trepidation, having seen snack food in this country that has been flavored to taste like steak, shrimp, seaweed, tomatoes or chicken. I even found a haggis-flavored pack of chips in the expat grocery store so, I can only assume, Scots expatriates in Beijing can recall the taste of home. These, to my relief, were not particularly flavorful. Just plain dried peas. So we sat there crunching companionably. It was a nice moment. I can’t imagine a taxi driver in the District offering me some of his Doritos. Then I made out that she was asking whether I was English. “Wo shi meiguoren!” I said proudly. “I’m American.” She


Cracking the code on crabmeat

have a habit of cannibalizing each other.) Transportation, in particular, can be a problem for overseas processors who export their crabmeat to the United States. Fresh Venezuelan crab, for example, can “turn on a dime” if somewhere along its journey, the temperature of the meat rises above the danger zone of 40 degrees for a few hours, says Jimmy Phelan, a sales manager for Mister Fish in Baltimore. Phelan worked several years with a company that imported crab from Venezuela. Good crabmeat, like any other animal product, is the result of good-quality feed and good-quality habitat, experts say. The crabbers around the Chesapeake, of course, think their brackish waters offer the best of all possible worlds: succulent razor clams and soft-shell clams for blue crabs to feast on, and cold waters in the fall and winter that force the crabs into deep-water dormancy, where they store up reserves of rich, delicious fat. (Those fall-season specimens, in fact, are considered the finest Maryland has to offer.) All of this information naturally leads to some basic tips on buying commercial crabmeat: After you’ve decided on grade — in descending order: jumbo lump, super lump, backfin, special and claw meat — look for crab in plastic eight- or 16-ounce tubs. Those are filled with fresh meat, with a shelf life of approximately 10 to 14 days when refrigerated. Maryland tubs are identifiable by the processor’s name and its license number which will start with the letters, “MD,” followed by two or three digits. These local containers will have traveled a tiny fraction of the distance traversed by their Venezuelan counterparts, sometimes under better conditions than those afforded by Third-World processors. Ask your fishmonger how long the tubs have been sitting in the store. The metal cans contain pasteurized crabmeat only, often from countries that sell a different species of shellfish, like the red swimming crab from China. Would our taste testers show a Maryland blue crab partisanship? Would our voting match the results of a blind taste test last year at the Maryland State Fair, where the public favored the state’s blue crabs more than 50 percent of the time over meat imported from China, Venezuela and Indonesia? Find out in the chart below. RECIPES: Goan Crab Masala Crab Pancakes with Sweet-Spicy Hoisin Sauce Summer Crab Cakes Crab Spring Rolls With Grapefruit and Avocado Crab Crostini With Maple-Mustard Vinaigrette Crab and Mussel Salad


Two lion cubs born in 2010 are leaving Washington to live at a zoo in Canada

It’s time to say goodbye to the National Zoo’s two male lion cubs. Baruti and Aslan, who were born on September 22, 2010, to mom Nababiep and dad Luke, will soon be heading to a new home at the Calgary Zoo in Canada. Over the past year-and-a-half, zoo visitors have been able to watch the playful brothers chase each other, swim in the moat and wrestle. The exact date for their departure isn’t clear, but it will probably be this summer. It’s not easy to relocate lions; they need to travel in a special vehicle, and they need a special permit to travel to Canada. (Think of it as a feline passport.) Once Baruti and Aslan get settled in Canada, zookeepers there will pair them up with female lions in the hope that the Calgary Zoo can have wonderful lion cubs just as the National Zoo did. While it’s sad to say goodbye to animals we’ve watched grow up, the good news is that the zoo will continue to be home to male lions Luke and John and females Nababiep, Shera, Fahari, Zuri, Lelie and Lusaka.


For many seniors, a reverse mortgage could be a saving grace

as a line of credit, a lump-sum payment, fixed monthly payments or a combination. The loan size depends on the borrower’s age and other factors. For many seniors, a reverse mortgage can be a saving grace. But this product isn’t without issues, according to a newly released report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was required to study reverse mortgages as part of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act. For most Americans, their home is their largest asset. In 2009, half of homeowners 62 and older had at least 55 percent of their net worth tied up in home equity. In looking at the reverse-mortgage market, the consumer bureau notes that only about 2 percent to 3 percent of eligible homeowners currently have a reverse mortgage and that just 70,000 new reverse mortgages are originated each year. “But reverse mortgages have the potential to become a much more prominent part of the financial landscape in the coming decades,” the bureau said in its report. The bureau found some troubling issues. For instance, even though borrowers have to get mandatory pre-loan counseling, many still don’t understand the intricacies of a reverse mortgage. I’ve talked to a number of seniors who have gone through the whole process, and their lack of understanding of the product was worrisome. Further, some counseling agencies only receive payment when the reverse mortgage is closed, which could undermine counselors’ impartiality, the bureau points out. Yet another concern: People are taking out loans at younger ages. Last year, nearly half of borrowers were under 70. And when seniors are opting for a reverse mortgage, they are taking out more money than in past years. Seventy-three percent of borrowers took all or almost all of the available equity upfront at closing in 2011, an increase of 30 percentage points since 2008. “Taking out a reverse mortgage early in retirement, or even before reaching retirement, increases risks to consumers,” the bureau said. “By tapping their home equity early, these borrowers may find themselves without the financial resources to finance a future move — whether due to health or other reasons.” The bureau found that a large proportion of borrowers (9.4 percent as of February) are at risk of foreclosure because they haven’t paid their property taxes and insurance. The pool of people in this position is growing. “With one in 10 reverse mortgages already in default, it is important that consumers


Ocean explorer Bob Ballard finds bodies of Turkish pilots shot down by Syria

that. Territorial airspace extends 12 nautical miles offshore. Debris, if found, could help settle the matter. If the plane was hit by antiaircraft gunfire, it was probably attacked within Syrian airspace, as such weapons have limited range, said a senior U.S. military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. But if the wreckage indicates that a missile downed the plane, then it could have been hit either in Syrian airspace or farther out to sea. The official said that U.S. intelligence reports have been “inconclusive” on the location of the plane when it was hit and the type of weapon fired at it. In an interview published in Turkey on Tuesday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said he regretted the incident. “We had absolutely no idea about the identity of the plane when we were shooting it down,” Assad said. “We do not even want to think that this plane was deliberately and purposefully sent into our airspace. We want to think that the pilot made a mistake.” Turkey has said the aircraft was on a training mission and briefly and mistakenly entered Syrian airspace. Turkish officials, after asking NATO allies for resources to help with the search, approached the Nautilus team via the U.S. Embassy in Ankara last week. Ballard agreed to take on the mission, delaying a scientific expedition to explore the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. On Friday, the 211-foot Nautilus steamed out of Istanbul toward the Syrian coast, according to a statement from Turkey’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. The ship is now “under control of Turkey,” with Turkish officials onboard and directing the search, the statement read. Turkish naval ships are escorting the vessel. A Ballard spokeswoman aboard the Nautilus, Liz Smith, said via e-mail that she could not provide details of the effort. With powerful sonar and two remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) onboard, the Nautilus is equipped to find the jet’s wreckage, said Charles Royce, a veteran of similar searches as vice president of Oceaneering International, a Houston company that builds undersea remotely operated vehicles. Ballard’s search is likely to have started near the last radar contact with the F-4, Royce said. Any such search begins by dropping sonar “towfish” into the water, which trail behind and scan the bottom. Cutting swaths across the search area, the sonar towfish will hunt for a debris field — the same


Afghan Local Police group deserts to Taliban-led insurgents

of its kind by the force created as part of a U.S. initiative to keep the militants at bay and help break the battlefield stalemate. There were few details and conflicting estimates about the number of men who changed sides in various parts of the restive northwestern Badghis province on Tuesday evening. One Afghan security official put the number at 41. The force is known as the Afghan Local Police (ALP) and was set up under an initiative of the United States in 2010 during the peak of the war to help NATO coalition and Afghan troops prevent the influence and spread of the insurgency. The ALP men who surrendered in Badghis were armed with assault rifles, said Ghulam Sarwar, a local lawmaker, citing a provincial official. Interior ministry and security officials confirmed the surrenders and the accounts provided by Sarwar. “This [surrender] may not have a big impact on the security situation of the area, but raises doubts about the loyalties of those employed by Afghan Local Police,” Sarwar said. The Taliban confirmed that the militia group had joined its ranks and put the number of surrendered men at 86. The ALP, composed of men from the communities that they police, was seen by some Afghans as a successful effort in the fight against the Taliban. But dozens of the ALP members have been killed in Taliban attacks in recent months in various parts of the country. Deadly attacks against foreign troops by some men serving in the Afghan security forces have been on the rise, but there has been no report of such an act by ALP members against the NATO and U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. While there have been cases of desertions and surrender by Afghan regular police and national army troops to the Taliban, there seems to be no precedent for ALP forces to swap sides. If the numbers are confirmed, it would be the largest single such incident. The ALP has more than 10,000 members. It covers mostly the southern and eastern regions where the Taliban are heavily active. Although it has been praised by supporters, the force’s ranks include some men accused of war crimes and other abuses. Salahuddin is a special correspondent. More world news coverage: - Pakistan agrees to open supply lines - Iran nuclear talks could resume - Severe weather around the world - Read more headlines from around the world


didn’t go as planned, according to his brother, Hazem. Hallak was briefly detained at the airport and told to report to military intelligence headquarters in his native Aleppo. On May 23, 2011, military intelligence agents grilled him about his trip to the United States. What was this medical conference all about? Whom had he met? Why had he gone? He returned for more questioning the next day and assured his family that it was just routine procedure. But on May 25, Hallak, a father of two with a third on the way, was spooked. He asked his mother to pray for him as he once again went in for questioning, his brother said. Hallak didn’t come home that night, and his family began to panic. On Thursday morning, a close friend called the intelligence headquarters and was able to talk to Hallak, who said he was okay. A little later, Hallak posted a picture of flowers on his Facebook page and sent a greeting to several friends. That was the last message anyone received from him. The following day, a motorcycle rider spotted a pair of shoes in a dry creek bed about 15 miles outside Aleppo. The rider went for a closer look and saw a man’s bloody body. The official autopsy report said Hallak had died by hanging, implying that he had committed suicide. But other doctors at the scene noted signs of vicious torture. His arms, fingers and ribs were broken. His eyes had been gouged, and there were bruises from beatings. There were also signs of genital mutilation and multiple drill holes in his skull. “They drilled him while he was alive,” Hazem Hallak said of his brother. “It’s a very horrific way of dying.” Even now, Sakher Hallak’s family members say they have no idea why he was killed. They say he was not politically active and did not have ties to the opposition. His body was wrapped in a white burial shroud that covered the signs of torture before his family was allowed to see him. Two police officers stayed with the family members as they grieved, and the officers insisted that the body be buried the same day. Hallak’s wife gave birth to a baby girl two weeks after his death. “It’s unbearable,” Hazem Hallak said. “I never thought this kind of pain actually exists.” Suzan Haidamous in Beirut contributed to this report.


Report blasts Japan’s preparation for, response to Fukushima disaster

An aerial view of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is seen in Fukushima Prefecture in this file photo taken by the Air Photo Service on March 24, 2011. (Reuters) TOKYO — The sharp criticism of the Japanese government and the nuclear operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) provided an alternative narrative to an earlier investigation by Tepco, whose in-house panel concluded that the disaster was unforeseeable, spurred by a “giant tsunami beyond our imagination.” In contrast, the report released Thursday suggested that the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that triggered the tsunami may have caused critical damage that led to the series of meltdowns. It argued that the nuclear power plants should have been made more quake-proof, and blamed lax safety measures on what it called the country’s powerful and “collusive” decision-makers and on a conformist culture that allowed them to operate with little scrutiny. The nuclear bloc, while reassuring the nation about its safe atomic plants, ignored safeguards that would have helped strengthen the Fukushima facility against a massive but foreseeable earthquake, the 641-page report said. In a blistering assessment, the authors described how regulators and nuclear operators went to painstaking lengths to ignore safety risks at the plant or cover them up. It accused Tepco and government officials of slow and faulty communication after the disaster, which, the report said, hampered the emergency response. Regulators and nuclear operators disregarded earlier warnings from outside watchdog groups that earthquakes posed a significant safety risk to the nuclear plants, an English summary of the report said. In the process, they “effectively betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents.” “What must be admitted — very painfully — is that this was a disaster ‘Made in Japan,’ ” investigation chairman Kiyoshi Kurokawa wrote in the introduction to the report. “Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.” Before the accident, nuclear power supplied almost one-third of Japan’s energy. But many plants sit near seismic faults, and the parliamentary panel’s suggestion about earthquake damage could increase already fierce public opposition to restarting the nuclear reactors. It also may force Japanese utilities to perform pricey earthquake retro-fitting. The triple meltdown at the Fukushima plant spread significant radiation across 700 square miles of land and forced more than 100,000