Dentists keep dying of this lung disease. The CDC can’t figure out why.

Seven of the patients were dead, and two more were dying of a rare chronic, progressive lung disease that can be treated but not cured. It’s estimated that about 200,000 people in the United States have Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) at any one time. But the common denominator of a small group of patients at a Virginia clinic over a 15-year period is worrying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Eight were dentists; a ninth was a dental technician. The dental professionals were 23 times more likely to have IPF than the rest of the population, the CDC said in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, released Friday. Something in their workplace environment may have been poisoning them, investigators said, although they don’t know what. IPF causes scarring of the lungs, according to the report. It can be slowed, but nothing can remove the scar tissue. Over time, the lungs have difficulty getting oxygen to vital organs like the heart and brain. In April 2016, a Virginia dentist who had just been diagnosed with IPF and was undergoing treatment at a specialty clinic called the CDC with a warning: Several other dental professionals had sought treatment at the same facility. Investigators dug deeper, poring over nearly 900 records of IPF patients at that clinic over a 21-year period and found the nine patients with the common work history. The median survival age of IPF after diagnosis is three to five years. But first, patients experience shortness of breath, a dry, chronic cough, weight loss, joint and muscle pain and clubbed fingers or toes. Dentists and people who work in their offices are exposed to a specific set of hazards, particularly silica, polyvinyl siloxane, alginate and other toxic substances that can be inhaled when they’re polishing dental appliances or preparing amalgams. Older dentists usually fare worse, both because of increased opportunities for exposure and because they may have practiced at a time when safety standards weren’t as stringent. “We do work with materials and with human bioproducts that are potentially damaging to our bodies if we inhale them,” Paul Casamassimo, chief policy officer of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry’s Pediatric Oral Health Research and Policy Center, told CNN. For example, the dentist who alerted the CDC never smoked “but reported not wearing a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health-certified respirator during dental activities throughout his 40-year dental practice,”


Melting Swiss glaciers get unusual protection as weather warms: white blankets

Summer’s coming, which means that soon enough, it’ll be time to tuck the glacier in. This year, like every year, a group of Swiss will traipse up through the mountains to the Rhone Glacier, hauling huge white blankets. As E&E News reported in a recent article on geoengineering, the annual hike is part of a doomed effort to protect the massive blocks of ice from the rising summer heat. Earth is getting warmer, and glaciers around the world are retreating and shrinking. As previously reported, humans appear to have caused 69 percent of glacial melting between 1991 and 2010 — and warming has only accelerated since then. In the Rhone region, that shrinking represents an economic emergency as well as an environmental one. The ice mass, which 11,500 years ago covered a large chunk of Switzerland, is a significant tourist attraction; Agence France-Presse reported in 2015 that an “ice grotto” has been carved into the ice every year since 1870 for visitors to walk through, a tradition that is threatened by the shrinking ice. The glacier has retreated 4,600 feet since 1856. The blankets, their white color chosen to reflect light before it strikes the ice, may slow the glacier’s decline. But they won’t stop it. Glaciologist David Volken told Agence France-Presse that the glacier still loses three to five inches on a hot day. Nonetheless, this idea and others like it are becoming increasingly popular, as it grows clearer that the world will blow through the temperature-rise target that policymakers have set for limiting the worst effects of climate change. If the world’s glaciers do collapse entirely, the potential for raising global sea levels is enormous, according to research published in 2013 in the journal Science. As Oceans Deeply reported, scientists at the December 2017 meeting of the American Geophysical Union seriously considered proposals such as spreading giant sheets of reflective material on top of landlocked polar ice, building huge mounds on the seafloor to keep warm water away from melting glaciers, and pumping huge amounts of ocean water on top of sea ice in the summer to add to its mass. All these ideas and more are available to read as part of an ongoing E&E series on geoengineering. —Live Science — Live Science


Sea snail broth and kelp ice cream: The new Noma tastes like the future

Noma prefers you dine in the moment. “Creativity comes when you fill yourself with knowledge by reading, travel and conversation, then fuse it with the now,” says Redzepi. As early as it is in the seafood season, Redzepi is already mulling the next menu, a plant-based one, in May. “What can we do with crudites?” he asks himself. “What’s a vegetable main course?” There’s little chance Redzepi will get bored now that he’s back in Copenhagen. “We built this space with that in mind,” he tells me over coffee at the restaurant the next morning, where dozens of staff are back at work, pumping themselves up with “We Will Rock You” blasting in the kitchen. The seemingly humble star of the show is referring not just to the variety on campus but the possibility that the buildings might someday transform into multiple restaurants, a hotel or even a school. The new Noma, in other words, was “made to be able to change.” Will Noma — the original of which was derided early on as a “blubber restaurant” for serving only Nordic ingredients — recapture the No. 1 slot on the influential World’s 50 Best list, ranked by Restaurant magazine? (It was No. 5 in 2016.) The more pressing question is, of course, whether the price of admission, including the difficulty of getting in, is worth the effort and expense. There are thrilling restaurants everywhere these days, many of them easier to access than Redzepi’s, and some a great deal less expensive. (But not all: Lunch for two at the Michelin three-star Geranium, also in Copenhagen, can set a host back $1,000. Budget travel tip: The best Wiener schnitzel of my life might be the entree at Barr, in the waterfront space inhabited by the original Noma.) As in all high-stakes dining, I tend to ask myself a few questions, starting with whether the food was truly delicious. Most of it was, and while I hope savory fudge doesn’t catch on, I could live off sea snail broth, squid that eats like pasta and freak-of-nature mussels. Did I learn anything new? Tons, including a fresh appreciation for sea cucumbers, Danish design and housing requirements of ants. Was it inspiring? Noma is a rare chance to hang with a true visionary. And the guy wants his staff to enjoy a sauna! Ultimately, would I go back on my own kroner? Race tom.sietsema@washpost.com


The Senate is poised to roll back rules meant to root out discrimination by mortgage lenders

The Senate is poised to pass a bill this week that would weaken the government’s ability to enforce fair-lending requirements, making it easier for community banks to hide discrimination against minority mortgage applicants and harder for regulators to root out predatory lenders. The sweeping bill rolls back banking rules passed after the 2008 financial crisis, including a little-known part of the Dodd-Frank Act that required banks and credit unions to report more detailed lending data so abuses could be spotted. The bipartisan plan, which is expected to pass, would exempt 85 percent of banks and credit unions from the new requirement, according to a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau analysis of 2013 data. The mortgage industry says the expanded data requirements are onerous and costly, especially for small lenders. But civil rights and consumer advocates say the information is critical to identifying troubling patterns that warrant further investigation by regulators. “The data operates as a canary in the coal mine, functioning as a check on banks’ practices,” said Catherine Lhamon, chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “The loss of that sunlight allows discrimination to proliferate undetected.” For decades, banks have been required under the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to report borrowers' race, ethnicity and Zip code so officials could tell whether lenders were serving the communities in which they are located and identify racist lending practices such as redlining. But discriminatory practices continued, with the financial industry disproportionately targeting black and Hispanic borrowers with subprime mortgages loaded with high fees and adjustable interest rates that skyrocketed after the stock market crashed in 2008. “The experience of the financial crisis taught us that we really need to know more about the loan terms and conditions, not just a borrower’s race,” said Josh Silver, senior adviser at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. Lenders were supposed to start gathering extra information about borrowers’ ages and credit scores, as well as interest rates and other loan-pricing features in January. Congress had charged the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent watchdog agency formed after the financial crisis, with collecting, analyzing and publishing the data. But White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, named the CFPB's acting director last November, said the agency plans to reconsider the new requirements, and that banks would not be penalized for data collection errors in 2018. He also stripped the bureau's fair-lending office of its enforcement powers. The Senate


A literary quartet: Emersons return to theater, Shostakovich

The myth of Dmitri Shostakovich has entered the popular imagination: a dissident composer constrained by the evil regime of the Soviet Union, bravely writing protest into his music. The story isn’t that simple, but that hasn’t stopped the myth from spreading, and popping up in various forms — take Julian Barnes’s 2016 novel on the subject, “ The Noise of Time .” The Emerson Quartet, one of America’s leading groups, has been very caught up in this particular story. In 2000, after performing Shostakovich’s complete quartets, it teamed up with the Theatre de Complicité for a strong and thoughtful piece, also called “The Noise of Time,” based on the composer’s life and the 15th, and final, quartet. On Sunday night, the Emersons came to the Wolf Trap Barns with a brand-new Shostakovich-based theater piece, “Shostakovich and the Black Monk,” which centered on the 14th quartet and on a short story by Anton Chekhov that Shostakovich, who died in 1975, long wanted to turn into an opera. The whole thing is interlaced with scenes from Shostakovich’s life. James Glossman, the director who co-created the project with Emerson violinist Philip Setzer, is both ambitious and didactic. His piece hits all the familiar stations of the Shostakovich hagiography, from the moment when the seven featured actors enter while saying, “Muddle instead of music” — the headline of the infamous Pravda review that condemned Shostakovich’s successful opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” and put the composer into public disfavor — before taking up their places around the quartet onstage. But though the cast was more than competent — led by David Strathairn as Shostakovich and Sean Astin as a burly, affable Stalin, with Alex Glossman as a Harry Potter-like version of Shostakovich as a young man — the whole thing smacked a bit of a school play, with dramatic monologues self-consciously delivered while music played in the background. It is challenging to find a balance onstage between music and the spoken word, and the Theatre de Complicité’s long-ago production did it much better than this one did. And while the requisite themes were all woven together, so that the death of Chekhov’s protagonist became the death of Shostakovich, the evening had little to offer in the way of insight. What it offered, instead, came off like the project of an earnest, smart student, filled with self-conscious asides. Witness the monologue of Shostakovich’s third wife, played


This Trump fan would like to ‘buy American.’ So why doesn’t he?

forgings from Japan and an American alternative. “Look at this!” he says, pointing to visible imperfections in the surface of the U.S. product. Along with foreign materials, Scheurich relies upon foreign technology to produce his customized parts. A new $1.5 million Japanese automated machine tool turns generic steel bars into precision-crafted parts. A $275,000 robot is on order. Scheurich said he tries to replace his equipment every four or five years, to keep abreast of technology — something he says U.S. steel producers have failed to do. Developing CNC’s border-straddling supply lines took time and was not without headaches. Scheurich’s customers require him to use certain mills, and securing approval for a new one involves a cumbersome process that lasts at least six months. He nurtured ties with his Swedish suppliers on annual moose-hunting excursions and forged relationships with Japanese executives over endless rounds of golf. When he first turned to Japanese mills, his father, Raymond, who fought in the Pacific during World War II, stopped talking to him for a time. Concern over the tariffs’ impact is evident on the factory floor, where workers average hourly wages of $16 to $20. Some wonder about the cost of the president’s effort to boost employment at steel mills and aluminum smelters. “I can kind of see what they’re trying to do — make more jobs,” said Bobby Beyer, 21, a machine operator. “But at the same time, it’s also taking jobs away from other people.” Across the floor, machinist Michael Elabed, 27, gestured toward his bosses and said, “If it hurts these guys, it hurts me.” As the tariff imbroglio flared over the previous week, Scheurich found himself monitoring events in Washington, including Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven’s visit to the White House. Trump used the occasion to reassure his guest that he would impose the tariffs in “a very loving way.” In his announcement, the president invited U.S. trading partners to haggle over whether they could find other ways to address U.S. security worries other than paying the new import taxes. He also set in motion a bureaucratic process that could determine whether CNC Machine Products lives or dies. The company’s fortunes rest upon one paragraph in the proclamation the president signed Thursday, authorizing Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to establish a process for excluding from the tariffs any steel products “determined not to be produced in the United States in


When your favorite neighborhood restaurant closes, the grief is real

just businesses, with cooks who prepare the food and servers who bring it, a purely transactional experience. To others, restaurants are places where friends meet, birthdays are celebrated, special occasions toasted and memories made. To those in the latter group, a beloved restaurant closure can be a blow. Therese Rando labels these blows “disenfranchised losses,” which are personal losses that are not publicly recognized as such. Rando is a clinical psychologist and author of “ How to Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies .” Orphaned as a teenager, Rando has devoted her life to the study of human grieving. Grief can take many forms, Rando says, some of which won’t be validated by friends or family. Or even Rando’s own mentor, J. William Worden, a pioneer in the field of grief. When contacted, Worden called grieving closed restaurants “a little bit of a reach.” He suggested only people like the Kardashians do such a thing. But Rando strongly disagrees. “It’s incorrect to believe that grief is only after the loss of a loved one,” she says. “It’s after any perception of loss.” People grieve after divorces, demotions, jobs transfers, infidelities and, yes, even the loss of a neighborhood restaurant. It’s about a person’s connection to the thing lost. All across the country, you can find diners in various stages of grief, from anger to denial to a kind of low-grade depression. There’s the Philadelphia homicide detective who considered stealing(!) a memento from his favorite downtown diner before it was demolished. There’s the Houston musician who still hasn’t found a suitable Tex-Mex alternative after his first option closed down — 17 years ago. There’s the marketing and public relations professional who launched a full-frontal assault, via online petition, against the owners who decided to close an iconic pub in Menlo Park, Calif. There are, in fact, thousands, maybe millions, of similar stories around the United States. They’re easy to find. Just pose a question on Facebook — what restaurants do you mourn the loss of? — and watch the responses pour in. I got more than 150 on my page. If there’s a constant among the closures, it’s that most of these restaurants weren’t temples of gastronomy. They didn’t have Michelin stars or celebrity chefs. They were diners, fried-chicken stands, breakfast spots, barbecue joints, burger bars and pizzerias. They were neighborhood hangouts — affordable and comfortable. The kind of


Britain’s fanciest dog show had just named its ‘best in show.’ Then PETA struck.

It was Tease’s big moment. Four days of competition had winnowed the 21,000 contestants to six finalists on Sunday at the famed Crufts dog show in England. The Gremillet champagne already was laid out on the podium next to a silver cup as tall and filigreed as a wedding cake. With television cameras beaming the final moments across live television, the judge paced the floor in Birmingham, eyeing the contestants one last time, then threw a finger at Tease, a sleek two-and-a-half year old whippet. She was the best in show. As cheers echoed in the hall, her owner, Yvette Short of Edinburgh, Scotland, lifted the dog up onto the podium, her face lit with joy. Then it all went crazy. As the event’s live feed broadcast across the globe, Short’s features suddenly clenched. She quickly bundled Tease in her arms and ran for safety. Two individuals were running across the field, unfolding a sign reading: “Crufts: Canine Eugenics.” The runner-up, a pointer named Kanix Chilli, nervously chewed treats from a trainer’s hand while security personnel swarmed the field. The staff eventually piled on top of the intruders like NFL defensive backs smothering a touchdown run. The protesters were hauled off. Short and Tease returned to their interrupted moment of glory from the podium. “Well done, you as well, for reacting so quickly,” the announcer told Short. “Your instinct was to protect Tease.” People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) later took responsibility for the incident. It’s not the first time Crufts — one of the largest and most high-profile dog shows in the world — has fallen into the crosshairs of animal activists. “Crufts glorifies pedigree fetishists’ twisted pursuit of the ‘perfect’ dog’,” Elisa Allen, Peta UK’s director, told the Independent on Sunday. “There’s nothing natural about breeding dogs with extreme and debilitating physical traits, and PETA urges everyone to stay away from this cruel beauty pageant.” Activists take issue with the breeding of pedigree dogs, which can produce health problems and physical ailments. “Many bulldogs, pugs, Pekingese and other brachycephalic (flat-faced) dogs cannot even breathe properly — let alone go for a walk or chase a ball without gasping for air — because of their unnaturally shortened airways,” PETA UK stated on their website in 2015. “Almost all pedigree dogs suffer from abnormally high rates of disease and have much shorter life spans than their mixed-breed cousins


A Michelin-starred Italian chef made a whole-grain pizza. Outrage ensued.

Three years ago, the Michelin-starred chef Carlo Cracco earned a public censure from the town council in Amatrice for his unorthodox version of the city’s famous pasta dish, amatriciana. Now Cracco has earned the wrath of the locals in Naples, the birthplace of Neapolitan pizza, for the chef’s healthful, whole-grain take on a margherita pie. Neapolitan writer Angelo Forgione has apparently led the revolt against Cracco’s pizza, which, if Forgione’s photo below is accurate, looks like a pile of bird seed smothered in tomato sauce and barely melted mozzarella. Forgione, whose Facebook fan page has more than 40,000 followers, called out the chef for charging 16 euros (or nearly $20) for a margherita at his new restaurant in Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. Forgione notes, according to a Facebook translation, that a traditional margherita pizza in Naples would fetch around 5 euros (or just more than $6). The author then took a swipe at Cracco, a highly decorated chef who lost a Michelin star last year at one of his other restaurants in Milan. “We understand why #cracco lost a Michelin Star,” Forgione wrote, according to Facebook’s translation. London’s Daily Telegraph picked up the story from there, unearthing other malcontents who protested Cracco’s pizza as an abomination of the classic margherita. Most in the story complained about the exorbitant price of the pie instead of its deviations from Neapolitan traditions. But commenters on Forgione’s Facebook page were more direct in their disdain of Cracco’s work. Some gave it a thumbs-down. Others posted a vomiting emoji. “You can study 24 hours a day,” wrote one person, presumably addressing Cracco. “But the margherita is unbeatable, if made and eaten in Naples.” “Unsightly,” wrote another commenter. “Pizza is a serious thing, and it doesn’t have to be improvised.” Restaurant critic Ernesto Pentaglia wrote, according to the Telegraph piece: “We are certain that nobody will go on purpose to Carlo Cracco to eat his revisited pizza margherita, except perhaps some foreign punter willing to try the experience of his new restaurant.” The furor is understandable. In general, Italians have an appreciation for the historical roots of their cuisine, and in particular they have a passion for the margherita, a pizza ostensibly named after a 19th-century Italian queen (although the BBC has raised serious doubts about the backstory). Last year, UNESCO added the “art of Neapolitan pizzaiuolo” to its “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” list. In


Met Opera’s James Levine, once ‘America’s Top Maestro,’ is finished, after investigation finds years of ‘sexually abusive’ conduct

led to Levine’s demise, talk of his alleged history of sexual abuse has been around since the late 1970s, according to a 2001 book by the Met’s former chief press liaison Johanna Fiedler, “Molto Agitato: The Mayhem Behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera.” But, she wrote, “each time, the Met press office would tirelessly point out the cyclical nature of the gossip and the complete lack of substance.” “Everybody in the classical music business at least since the 1980s has talked about Levine as a sex abuser,” Greg Sandow, a faculty member at the Juilliard School, told the Associated Press in December. “The investigation should have been done decades ago.” A few times over the years, allegations did bubble to the surface. In 1987, for example, rumors that he was going to resign because of unspecified aspects of his private life surfaced in the New York Times. But he would deny them. ”I don’t have any idea why people start these rumors, but they’re a 100 percent fabrication,” Levine said at the time. ”Maybe it’s just jealousy.” Levine’s fall follows that of several other classical music stars. The most prominent was Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit, who recently stepped down as the principal conductor and artistic director at London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, which ranged from groping to rape. He denied the allegations. The prevalence of sexual abuse in the world of classical music, as in so many other industries, is not news to those in the business. Blair Tindall, a classical musician and journalist who wrote “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” has long spoken about sexual harassment in the classical music industry, which she told Deutsche Welle in December “has become so widespread that it has become ingrained.” She blamed a culture that views certain male industry leaders as “geniuses.” “A lot of the reason that this has happened with these men in power in classical music — and I am sure we will come upon a least one case of a woman in power somewhere — but much of the problem is that so many of these people are regarded are ‘geniuses,’ ” Tindall told DW, and somehow “above” questions of moral behavior. “I cringe when I hear the term ‘genius’ applied to a musician,” she said. More from Morning Mix: Bruno Mars was accused of cultural appropriation. Charlie


Trump blocks Broadcom’s $117 billion bid for Qualcomm out of national security concerns, a highly unusual move

President Trump on Monday ordered Singapore-based Broadcom to abandon its $117 billion hostile bid for Qualcomm, blocking what would have been one of the biggest technology deals in history. In his presidential order, Trump cited “credible evidence” that the takeover “threatens to impair the national security of the United States.” The merger would have put one of America’s largest mobile chipmakers in the hands of a company based in Asia, a region that has been racing against American companies to develop the next generation of mobile technology. The administration moved with unusual speed in the matter that caught many involved in the negotiations off guard. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, an interagency panel led by the Treasury Department, had several more weeks to render a recommendation to the president. Trump's order cannot be appealed, legal experts said. The move demonstrates the high value that the administration places on maintaining the U.S. edge in developing micro technologies. The administration did not detail its national security concerns, but CFIUS last week sent a letter to the attorneys of the two companies saying it was concerned research and development at Qualcomm might atrophy under Broadcom's direction, according to a copy that was reviewed by The Washington Post. If that happened, China's Huawei Technologies, a rival to Qualcomm and a major producer of mobile chips, might become much more dominant around the world. The tiny computer chips embedded in smartphones, smart home gadgets, and a wide range of other connected devices are expected to become one of the most critical technologies in coming years. These chipsets enable connected cars to speak to each other as well as stoplights. Almost every major business and consumer electronics manufacturer uses Qualcomm's technology as brains for their devices. Trump's order is in keeping with the administration's protectionist instincts. Last week, Trump also cited national security concerns in announcing harsh tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, a move that hit rivals such as China as well as allies such as Germany and South Korea. Several other technology deals fell apart, after CFIUS raised concerns. In September, Trump stopped the $1.3 billion acquisition of Portland-based Lattice Semiconductor by a private-equity firm that had close ties to Beijing. One factor that may have pushed CFIUS to move quickly was an unusual maneuver by Broadcom to relocate to the United States. The company had said in


Disgraced Levine: Met Opera delivers coup de grace

The Metropolitan Opera has severed all ties with James Levine, its former artistic director turned music director emeritus and head of its young artist program. According to an unsigned statement that the Met sent out late Monday afternoon, it had finished the internal investigation that the company announced in December after reports were made public alleging that Levine was sexually abusive. Involving interviews with more than 70 people, the report, the statement said, “uncovered credible evidence that Mr. Levine had engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct both before and during the period when he worked at the Met.” The press reports to date have focused on Levine’s conduct before his Met employment. Most recently, an article in the Boston Globe revealed a cultlike group of acolytes who allegedly submitted to him musically and sexually, to the degree of distancing themselves from family and friends. His allegedly abusive conduct during his Met tenure has yet to be revealed in print. [Institutions raced to dump James Levine. They should look hard at themselves.] “The investigation also found that any claims or rumors that members of the Met’s management or its Board of Directors engaged in a cover-up of information relating to these issues are completely unsubstantiated,” the statement said. The Met had received copies of a police report relating to one alleged case of abuse in October 2016, but did not act on it until the news reports appeared in December 2017. Levine has been the most prominent classical musician to date to be called out publicly as a sexual harasser or abuser in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Charles Dutoit, the former music director of the Orchestre de Montreal and a prominent guest conductor around the globe, has also been alleged to be a perpetrator. Richard Buckley was dismissed from the Austin Opera, and Daniel Lipton was allowed to resign from Opera Tampa, amid similar allegations. In addition to his 40-year tenure at the Met, Levine was also a former music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, and the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.


Three ‘powerful’ package explosions in Austin that killed 2 are connected, police say

Philips, who lives next door to House, said her husband was the first to find House after the fatal blast. She said that she was alarmed to hear about the latest bombings but also relieved that the police were now more focused on House’s death. “They’re not going to let this slide,” Philips said. “It’s really sad, but this means there’s a lot of attention on this now.” Isaiah Guerrero, 15, said he was spending the first morning of his spring break making music on his computer when he heard the third explosion go off just before noon Monday. “It sounded like two cars hit each other, you know? Like, rammed each other,” Guerrero said. The house shook, and so did his body, the teenager said. Guerrero then climbed up a tree and on top of his house. Within minutes, police and fire officials swarmed the scene, closing off streets. Guerrero, who lives behind the house where the bomb went off, said he couldn’t see the damage to the front of the house. He echoed law enforcement officials in warning the public to pay attention to things like packages, “especially if you didn’t order something,” he said. Guerrero added: “I expected my spring break to be peaceful, not harmful.” The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Monday it was dispatching members of its National Response Team (NRT) to help respond to the explosions. According to the agency, this group activates for “significant fire and explosion incidents,” considered those that are either large in scale or particularly complicated due to the size or scope. In the past, that has included responding to the West, Tex., plant fire in 2013; a string of church fires in Texas; and the bombings in Oklahoma City and at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. The NRT works with other investigators to reconstruct scenes and determine what caused the fires or explosions; in cases involving bombings, the team also searches for evidence to be used in any prosecution that may follow. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said his office is offering a $15,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the person or people responsible for the “atrocious attacks.” “I want to assure all Texans, and especially those in Austin, that local, state and federal law enforcement officials are working diligently to find those responsible for these heinous crimes,” Abbott said in a


Dogs can get a runner’s high, too: What to know about taking on a four-legged jogging buddy

Like a lot of runners, when Ducky Waite doesn’t get his regular run, he gets restless and antsy. The 4½ -year-old pit bull-Doberman mix gets into the trash or rams a chew toy into his owners until he gets some exercise. “He is a high-energy dog, and as a runner I get that,” said his owner, Shauna Waite, a veterinarian at Columbia Pike Animal Hospital & Emergency Center. As a marathoner who logs up to 60 miles a week, she can relate. “When we run, we’re both getting good exercise, and it keeps him in good shape.” Running delivers many of the same physical and mental benefits to dogs as it does to humans. It helps ward off obesity — a growing issue — and related health problems such as osteoarthritis and Type 2 diabetes. (Some 54 percent of dogs are overweight or obese, according to the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention.) A 2012 study in Journal of Experimental Biology showed that canines get the same “runner’s high” after intense exercise that people experience. “Exercise is physical and mental stimulation,” said Noon Kampani, a veterinarian with AtlasVet animal hospital in the District. “It gives them an activity and burns energy. An exercised dog is usually a better-behaved dog.” And buddying up with Fido for runs can help you reach your goals. Dog owners are 2½ times as likely to get the recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity physical activity, according to a study published in the June 2015 issue of the Journal of Physical Activity and Health. But running with a dog isn’t as easy as lacing up and getting out the leash. Whether you’re a new runner or you’re considering a canine workout companion, these guidelines will help you establish a safe, healthy, lasting routine that boosts you both. Talk to your vet. Get the timing right. Consider the conditions. Plan your route. Be flexible. Watch the leash. Get the right gear. Start slowly. localliving@washpost.com Gear up to run with your dog Getting the right gear will make running much safer and more enjoyable for you and your pup. Here are some recommendations from Bryan Barrera, a marathoner and founder of D.C. Dog Runner, who runs 40 dogs a week. Water carrier: Four-foot leash: Hands-free leash:


Republican senator proposes stripping Senate banking bill of help for big banks

are required to keep an offsetting percentage in capital. Last week, Corker filed a separate amendment to the bill to make clear that only three custodial banks -- Bank of New York Mellon, State Street and the Northern Trust Corporation -- could benefit from the proposed weakening of the surcharge. (These banks primarily hold on to assets on behalf of financial institutions and do not engage in either trading activities of their own or provide services to ordinary consumers.) But this week, Corker is going further, putting forward an amendment that would eliminate the part of the bill pertaining to capital requirements for custodial banks altogether. Corker said doing so was intended to put the discretion for those choices back in the hands of federal regulators. “I’m not sure if we wouldn't be better off if instead of the Congress weighing in on how these are going to be dealt with, letting [federal regulators] decide,” Corker said in an interview. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the ranking Democrat on the committee and a vocal opponent of the bill, welcomed Corker’s proposal and would vote for it, according to a spokesperson. It's not clear if Corker's amendment will be brought up for a vote. "Removing this and revisiting it with fresh eyes is a very good idea," Mike Konczal, a banking expert at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-of-center think tank, said of Corker's latest amendment. "Leverage requirements are incredibly important and robust to all kinds of problems regulators will not catch." Ultimately, the decision on how to enforce the new law is expected to fall to the nation’s banking regulators — the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. An internal analysis by the FDIC found JPMorgan and Citigroup might be able to reduce the amount of money they must keep on hand as a buffer against collapse by a collective $30 billion under the bill. The bill also offers small banks a range of regulatory relief, including exemption from a rule barring banks from making risky bets with their own money. It also reduces several oversight measures for banks with between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets, paring back “stress tests” that gauge their financial stability and “living wills” that require banks to produce detailed emergency plans if they have to shutter. These changes would not be affected by Corker's amendment.


The government is nearly done with a major report on climate change. Trump isn’t going to like it

it continues. Regarding agricultural communities, the draft states that “reduced crop yields, intensifying wildfire on rangelands, depletion of surface water supplies, and acceleration of aquifer depletion are anticipated with increased frequency and duration of drought.” When it comes to the fundamental science of climate change, the National Climate Assessment is based, in significant part, on another report, dubbed the Climate Science Special Report, that was finalized and released by the Global Change Research Program late last year. That document found that there was “no convincing alternative explanation” for climate change other than human activities such as fossil fuel burning. It also said a sea-level rise as high as eight feet is “physically possible” as an extreme by the year 2100, though there was no way to say how probable that is. Many scientists initially feared that the Trump administration would in some way suppress or otherwise interfere with the release of the Climate Science Special Report, given that it so thoroughly appeared to undermine the president’s personally expressed skepticism of climate change and his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate change agreement. But the report was released as expected, and there were no significant cries of censorship or political meddling. Now, the question is whether the same will occur with the longer National Climate Assessment, which goes beyond the Climate Science Special Report to locate the climate problem within specific U.S. communities and industries, describing both how they will suffer and how they are coping. The National Climate Assessment arguably has more potential for political ramifications, in that it exhaustively describes effects in specific places in the country. “There are many stories about the change, and that’s the beauty of this, you can go to the document and find stories in your community no matter where you live in the U.S.,” Bell said. Granted, the current review is not a 100 percent endorsement — for instance, it states that when it comes to discussing different types of scientific uncertainty, “improved differentiation and more standardized treatment is needed across the draft report.” The document also contains more than 40 pages of line edits to the longer report. But this is not a fundamental undermining of the document — it just means more work has to be done for it to be improved before publication. “They are meant to provide clarification and ease of use by the readers


Stephen Hawking was the ultimate image of mind over matter

Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. Carl Sagan, Steve Jobs, James Watson, Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking. There are more, but the list is short. Even though we live in the age of smartphones, GPS and gene therapy, celebrities in science are rarer than those in music, film, sports and politics. Hawking, who passed away Wednesday after a 50-year battle with the motor neuron disease called ALS, became a cultural icon after he appeared on the cover of the New York Times magazine in the late 1980s and, shortly thereafter, published his best-selling “A Brief History of Time.” Later, he appeared on “The Simpsons,” “Alien Planet,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” More recently, there was James Marsh’s 2014 dramatic film about Hawking, “The Theory of Everything.” There’s no doubt Hawking’s severe physical disability figured into his celebrity status and impact on the public. Almost completely paralyzed, able to communicate in his last decades only through a computer-controlled voice, Hawking appears to us as a crumpled figure of a man, slumped in a wheelchair, gazing out at the dark night sky and fathoming its secrets — the ultimate image of mind over matter. And he was that. Hawking worked in the study and application of Einstein’s theory of gravity. Einstein understood gravity as a geometrical phenomenon, as a bending of time and space. Hawking went further. Partly because of his physical difficulty in working with equations as most theoretical physicists do, Hawking developed new graphical methods that allowed him to visualize the physics of black holes, the paths of light rays in warped space, and the convulsions of the universe as a whole. Hawking was one of the first people to apply quantum physics to black holes and predict that these bizarre objects, previously thought to voraciously swallow matter and energy in a one-way path to oblivion, could also expel matter and energy in a process that became known as “Hawking radiation.” His other greatest scientific achievement was in the field of cosmology. Working with the brilliant British mathematician Roger Penrose, Hawking significantly strengthened the scientific conviction that our universe began in a “Big Bang” of ultra-high compression some 14 billion years ago, in which all of the galaxies we see were compressed into a region smaller than a single atom. Previously, such conclusions were based on calculations that assumed highly idealized


Measles warning issued for Detroit airport fliers after disease travels from overseas

A confirmed carrier of the measles disease passed through the Detroit Metropolitan Airport on March 6, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday. And if you passed through the airport that day and have never been immunized against the disease, be wary of any symptoms developing soon. A person carrying the disease traveled from India to Detroit, agency spokeswoman Lynn Sutfin told The Washington Post, but she declined to provide the gender of the person. The individual was mainly at customs and the baggage area in the north terminal, posing the most risk for anyone who was there from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., the agency said. The person lives in Washtenaw County, an area west of Detroit that includes Ann Arbor. That person sought medical treatment soon after arriving, Sutfin said. Anyone in those airport locations in that time frame who experiences high fever, red eyes, coughing, a runny nose or light sensitivity followed by a bumpy rash should contact their primary-care doctor, the agency said. Symptoms manifest 10 to 12 days after infection but could be spread to other people before that. Measles is notoriously contagious for people without immunity to the disease, with a 90 percent infection rate for nonimmunized people who venture near an active spreader, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus latches onto the nose and throat mucus and proliferates through coughing and sneezing, with a life span of up to two hours in the open air. About 9 out of 10 children in the United States receive their measles vaccines, and the vaccine’s effectiveness rate is above 90 percent, the CDC says. The Michigan health agency said only two of the 118 cases of measles in the United States last year were in the state. At this point, if you are digging into your vaccination records, immunization for the disease may show up as MMR — the common cocktail immunization for measles, mumps and rubella. There have been recent concerns about the disease. In late February, an Australian tourist with measles visited numerous places in New York, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, triggering a similar advisory. Three babies were recently infected with measles at a Kansas child-care facility, the Kansas City Star reported Tuesday. They were only months old and not yet ready for the MMR vaccine, typically administered at 12 to 15 months. The


Steering wheel issue leads Ford to recalls nearly 1.4 million cars in North America

nearly 80,000 are in Canada and Mexico, the company said. Ford said dealers will replace, at no charge to customers, the potentially faulty steering wheel bolt with a longer, sturdier one. Ford is also recalling about 6,000 Fusions with manual transmissions and certain engines in a separate issue: a risk of fire from clutch plate fractures. The company said it is not aware of fires, accidents or injuries caused by the issue. — Hamza Shaban RETAIL Consumer spending dipped in February U.S. consumers spent less at auto dealers, gas stations and department stores in February, causing overall retail sales to slip 0.1 percent despite signs elsewhere of a robust economy and the Republican-backed tax cuts starting to take effect. It was the third consecutive month of declining retail sales, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, though they’re still 4 percent higher from a year ago. The core retail sales that economists monitor — which exclude autos, building materials, gasoline and restaurants — improved 0.1 percent in February after essentially being flat in January. Auto sales fell 0.9 percent last month, while purchases at gas stations tumbled 1.2 percent. Sales at department stores declined 0.9 percent. Spending at online and catalogue retailers climbed, as did spending at building materials stores, restaurants and clothiers. That offset much of the decline elsewhere. — Associated Press GROCERY INDUSTRY Walmart to expand home delivery Walmart plans to expand its grocery home-delivery service to more than 100 metropolitan areas this year, the company said Wednesday. The service, now in six cities, will roll out to more than 40 percent of U.S. households by the end of the year, Walmart said. Deliveries will be handled by Uber and other providers, and will carry a $9.95 service fee, with a $30 minimum purchase. “We’re moving fast,” Tom Ward, Walmart’s vice president of digital operations, said in an interview. “We will be pretty aggressive with it.” The move into home delivery is part of Walmart’s broader push to get more of its in-store shoppers to also start buying online, where they typically spend twice as much. Walmart said the orders will be picked by in-store employees, who will receive three weeks of additional training. Orders placed by 1 p.m. will be delivered the same day. — Bloomberg News Also in Business U.S. wholesale prices rose Chipotle said Walt Disney Co. — From news services Coming today 10 a.m.: 4 p.m.:


Britain is punishing Putin. America should join in.

announced a more robust response, including the expulsion of 23 suspected Russian spies. But it will take more than action in London to stop Mr. Putin. A concerted response by the Western alliance is needed. It’s worth underlining the magnitude of the offense represented by the attack last week in the normally peaceful city of Salisbury. The chemical agent identified by British scientists, known as Novichok, was secretly developed by the Soviet Union beginning in the 1970s, in violation of Moscow’s subsequent treaty commitment to stop developing and producing chemical weapons. The agent is believed to be 10 times more powerful than other weaponized nerve agents, such as VX. That it would be employed in a civilian setting, endangering not just former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter but scores of other people, too, is not just a crime but also an act of state terrorism. The distinctiveness of Novichok means that Mr. Putin must have calculated that Russia would be identified as the author of the attack. Perhaps he wanted it that way: He was head of Russia’s spy agency, the FSB, at the time that Mr. Skripal allegedly supplied information to Britain, and had publicly vowed revenge. Most likely, he was also encouraged by the relatively weak British response to the killing of another former spy, Alexander Litvinenko, in London in 2006. Eight months after that attack, Britain finally expelled four Russian diplomats; but a full inquest, which concluded Mr. Putin was probably responsible for the killing, was not completed for nine years. Though the new British sanctions package is more forceful, it needs to be backed up by other Western governments, starting with the United States. All too characteristically, President Trump has equivocated about Russian responsibility for the Salisbury attack; and the administration has still not implemented sanctions mandated by Congress in response to past Russian offenses. Congressional leaders should insist that the sanctions go forward. It is imperative that the United States support its closest ally when it has been subject to such extraordinary aggression. An adequate international response to Mr. Putin would push back against his ventures on all fronts: Syria, where the United Nations has found Russia complicit in war crimes; Ukraine, where Russian-backed forces continue to seek military advantage; cyberspace, where Russian hackers and bots remain ubiquitous. In the absence of such action, Mr. Putin’s ambitions, and his audacity, will only escalate further.


Apple, Google take reputation ding among consumers for lackluster products in new poll

Consumers have lost some faith in Apple and Google products, according to an annual survey that looks at how average Americans view the 100 most talked-about brands. The reputations of the two tech giants both took a significant hit this year, falling out of the top 20 for the first time since 2009, according to the poll by market research company Harris Insights. Apple dropped from second place to 29th place; Google moved from eighth place to 28th. Neither firm appeared on the poll's list for best “products and services” either, though Amazon.com, LG Electronics and Microsoft did. The poll asked survey participants two open-ended questions: Which companies did they think had the best reputations last year? And which had the worst? The firm then took the 100 most-mentioned companies and asked more than 25,000 consumers how they view each brand on a variety of criteria including social responsibility and financial performance. Overall, Amazon took the top spot for the third year in a row (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post). The list covers a variety of industries. This year, air bag manufacturer Takata rounded out the bottom, just below the Weinstein Company. A slip in reputation doesn't necessarily spell doom for a company said David Schweidel, a professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business. (Apple, for example, recently hit a record high on the stock market in its pursuit of a trillion-dollar market cap.) Still, he said, the poll gets a sample of consumer sentiment that can be otherwise hard to measure. Those views can be valuable when taken into account with other surveys and story lines about the companies, such as the perception that Apple is losing its innovative touch. John Gerzema, chief executive of Harris Insights, attributed Apple's and Google's slide to a failure to deliver big products that fit into people's everyday lives. Consumer sentiment toward companies is often cyclical, he said, and for tech it is closely tied to what products come out that year. While Apple and Google released many products, including Apple's iPhone X and Google's Home Mini and Home Max, the poll indicates those gadgets didn't seem to resonate with the average person. “The story for me this year is that tech has got to provide utility and be tangible,” Gerzema said. “Apple had a down year on innovation — from the Apple Watch to a really expensive


Carolyn Hax: Telling your ex’s fiance about her cheating isn’t your best idea ever

Carolyn Hax is away. The following first appeared Oct. 8, 2003. Dear Carolyn: At first I was receptive, and allowed her to stay with me when he was out of town, but grew suspicious when she wouldn't move out of his home. She gave a variety of excuses that didn't ring true. This went on for months; she even lied to her own mother to go away with me. Finally I couldn't stomach her lack of integrity any longer and stopped seeing her. She's now engaged to the guy she repeatedly and enthusiastically cheated on. I'm not surprised, because she was desperate to settle down and he's probably as blind to her faults as I was. Should I tell him the truth about his trifling fiancee? I'd want him to tell me. — J.T. J.T.: You not only knew; you were complicit! You just told yourself . . . actually, I don’t know what line you used, but “for months” you worked to keep her despite the [mutual] moral decay. Assume her fiance feels the same way and stay out of it. His bride sounds bad enough; the last thing he needs is for the guy she used to cheat with to come galloping in to save him. Dear Carolyn: I want to wait until I'm married, or at least on the way there. It's not out of prudishness or discomfort with sex but precisely because I place such a high value on it that I want to wait. My problem is that I don't seem to meet any women who feel the same way, and I'm beginning to wonder if there are any anymore. I've met virgins, but they tend to think of sex as a terrible sin or, what's worse, they tend to be unspeakably boring (they've got no FIRE). Have I just painted myself into a totally unreasonable corner here? How can I figure out what to give up? — New York, N.Y. New York, N.Y.: There is no shortage of people who share your conclusion on this; some of them just made different choices en route and arrived there by roads different from yours.


The U.N. issued trade sanctions against North Korea. Then hackers infiltrated it.

FireEye, a California-based cybersecurity firm, described a North Korean cyberespionage group known as APT37 (Reaper) that appears to be working on behalf of the North Korean government. Among its targets was an entity associated with the United Nations missions on sanctions and human rights. John Hultquist, director of intelligence analyses at FireEye, cautioned that he has no information directly linking the attack on the U.N. panel to APT37. But “on several occasions, we’ve seen countries leverage their cyberespionage capabilities to surveil organizations and people who are involved in sanctions,” Hultquist said. “We’ve been tracking this group for a few years now. Their targeting is overwhelmingly focused on North Korean interests — on defectors, on sanctions and on organizations involved in the reunification of Korea. They’ve also made mistakes that allowed us to see their Internet addresses — in North Korea.” It can be difficult to identify the source of hacks, however. For example, U.S. intelligence officials say that a hack at the Olympics in PyongChang was conducted by Russian military spies but was disguised to appear as if it had been perpetrated by North Korea. North Korean officials have previously denied hacking the U.N. group. The report gives a fuller sense of the extent of the attacks against the U.N. than was previously available. In May, Reuters reported that an email alert at the U.N. said that hackers had breached the computer of one of the panel members and that “hackers have very detailed insight into the panel’s current investigations structure and working methods.” And in a footnote to a September report, the U.N. group said that persistent hacking had “hampered the ability of the Panel to report on the implementation of sanctions.” The new information in the report identifies the hackers as a “professionally operating” group from a nation-state and provides details regarding their methods and the extent of the attack. The U.N. incident report also indicates that the attack appears to have begun with a tactic known as “spear-phishing.” Victims received forged email messages with file attachments. Those attachments were made to appear like legitimate documents, according to the report, making it more likely for recipients to open the files — and expose them to risk. The panel members were using Microsoft’s Office 365 software, and after an investigation by Microsoft, the company reported to the United Nations that it associated the attack with a “nation-state.” “The incident


Trump administration sanctions Russian spy agencies and trolls over U.S. election interference, costly cyberattacks

The financial sanctions seek to deter Moscow from targeting this year’s midterm elections. It’s a noteworthy step, as President Trump has shown reluctance to blame the Kremlin for tampering with the 2016 presidential race despite the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Moscow did so. “The administration is confronting and countering malign Russian cyber activity, including their attempted interference in U.S. elections, destructive cyber-attacks, and intrusions targeting critical infrastructure,” Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said in a news release announcing the measures. “These targeted sanctions are a part of a broader effort to address the ongoing nefarious attacks emanating from Russia.” Mnuchin said his department intends to impose additional sanctions to hold Russian officials and oligarchs “accountable for their destabilizing activities by severing their access to the U.S. financial system.”This is a developing story. It will be updated.


The many odd and wrong things Trump said at his closed-door fundraiser, annotated

came right out of this country, got to stop it. And I'm very friendly with the president, he's a great guy. We have a great chemistry, a great relationship. But he's for China and I'm for the good old USA. [Applause.] As an example, they send a car to us, we charge them a 2 percent tax. We send a car to them, and they charge us a 25 percent tax. Somehow that doesn't work too well. That's not a great formula. But not only is it twenty five, twenty five, but most of the time you can't even get the car. Even Japan. Look, the prime minister's a great guy, Abe. He's a warrior. Tough, strong, smart. But I said trade isn't so good with Japan. It's so one-sided. They don't take our product and we take their cars, I mean the cars and 90 percent of the cars, they just come. They need Mario Andretti to drive those cars off the boats. They come off the boats like 60 miles an hour. We send a car to Japan, they analyze it for four weeks before they decide to send it back because it's not environmentally friendly. [Unintelligible.] They actually, one of the car companies actually h ad a car made and it was the most environmentally perfect car, cost them a fortune. They spent a fortune. And they had everything, the highest quality that you can have. Everything was far better than any car they ever sent to us. They spent three or four hundred thousand dollars for a car that would sell for like 35,000, right? Not a good deal. But they wanted to see if they could get it in. And it, they were going crazy. Four days went by. Then five days. And they were ready to approve it and they said, no no, we have to do one more test. It's called the bowling ball test, do you know what that is? That's where they take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and they drop it on the hood of the car. And if the hood dents, then the car doesn't qualify. Well, guess what, the roof dented a little bit, and they said, nope, this car doesn't qualify. It's horrible, the way we're treated. It's horrible. And then you hear about the free traders, because I'm a free trader,


When NCAA teams cheat, black assistant coaches wear the black hat

the source of the gains. As Reconstruction was dismantled, the first star black athletes in this country, jockeys, along with a few black horse owners and trainers, organized their own networks off the track to take greater advantage of the revenues they were generating, most of which went to line the pockets of white horsemen. Isaac Murphy was the superstar jockey at that time. Edward Brown was one of the first black owners. The two cut a deal in the 1870s for Murphy to ride Brown’s horses for $1,000. It was said then to be the largest payment from a black owner to a black jockey, and it set the horse racing business, then this country’s main pastime, on edge. It led to suspicion that black jockeys, trainers and owners were trading insider information and sharing it with friends who put the knowledge to use to beat gamblers at their game. LSU researcher Matthew Saul Perreault noted in a recent study, “Jockeying for Position: Horse Racing in New Orleans, 1865-1920,” that white bookmakers became so concerned that they complained openly at the 1875 Belmont Stakes: “Old Ansel [Williamson], [Oliver] Lewis, and the western ‘colored capitalists’ in general came down, like the wolf on the fold, with heavy investments,” that cost the bookmakers any profit. Perreault further noted that a black jockey William Walker, who won the the 1877 Kentucky Derby, was threatened by the Louisville Jockey Club president, M. Lewis Clark, with the ultimate penalty if Walker did anything against the rules to influence a race’s outcome. “You will be watched the whole way,” Perreault found Clark warned, “and if you do not ride to win, a rope will be put about your neck, and you will be hung to that tree yonder, and I will help to do it.” None of the 10 men centralized in this new scandal in college athletics face a potential death penalty like William Walker. One already had charges against him dropped. But for one of the first times in history, these men as a group face the criminalization of what heretofore were just violations of NCAA rules designed to keep the riches out of the hands of those who produce it, black athletes. Now, instead of facing permanent unemployment in college sports at worst, they face maximum penalties of decades in prison for behaving mostly like Robin Hoods. They were taking care of


Trump administration hits Russian spies, trolls with sanctions over U.S. election interference, cyberattacks

so this will have a negligible impact on their operations.” Carpenter also decried the administration’s “mixed messaging strategy” in which “Cabinet-level officials have ventured forth to condemn Russia’s subversion of democratic institutions, but the president himself continues to refrain from personally saying anything negative” about his counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Russia’s mounting aggression in cyberspace is part of a larger “hybrid warfare” strategy that marries traditional military means with digital tools to achieve its goal of regional dominance. The Treasury Department noted that it continues to pressure Russia over its ongoing efforts to destabilize Ukraine and occupy Crimea, as well as its “endemic corruption and human rights abuses.” To date, officials said, the administration has imposed sanctions on more than 100 individuals and entities under authorities specific to Ukraine and Russia. Eric Rosenbach, a senior Pentagon official in the Obama administration, said it was “extremely important” to impose sanctions on Russia in response to the NotPetya attack. “The United States cannot stand by and watch the Russians use Ukraine as a cyber test range for destructive malware that then proliferates,” said Rosenbach, now director of the Defending Digital Democracy Project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. The six GRU officials targeted for sanctions are Chief Igor Korobov, First Deputy Chief Igor Kostyukov, Deputy Chief Sergey Gizunov, First Deputy Chief Vladimir Alexseyev and senior officials Sergei Afanasyev and Grigoriy Molchanov. The two spy agencies and five of the GRU officials were sanctioned in December 2016 by the Obama administration. Those efforts have yielded little fruit. To have impact, the sanctions need to target the financial sector, said Carpenter, now senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. “Applying ‘blocking sanctions’ on just one of Russia’s top banks would have an immediate and consequential effect,” he said, by barring all transactions with that bank through the Western financial system. In a separate move, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are warning the public about Russian attempts since at least March 2016 to compromise the energy sector and other critical industries, including water, aviation, critical manufacturing and energy. Accompanying the alert are malware “indicators” to help companies detect Russian intrusions. The joint alert “is a wake-up call” for industry and “a reminder that . . . our defense needs to constantly evolve,” said Amit Yoran, a former DHS official and now chief executive of Tenable, a cybersecurity firm. ellen.nakashima@washpost.com


Russia sanctions: A baby step

The Post reports These are not, however, the broad-based sanctions envisioned in the sanctions legislation passed by Congress nearly unanimously last year. Ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Robert Menendez (N.J.) called the move a “long overdue response” but noted in a written statement that “the previous Administration had already sanctioned many of these individuals and entities.” He cautioned, “Separate from today’s sanctions designations, the administration has not implemented six other mandatory provisions of the law. I strongly urge the immediate imposition of these mandatory sanctions under sections 225, 226, 228, 231, 233, and 234.” The U.S. also joined in a statement with allies, The Post reports: We should acknowledge that this is better than what President Trump has done to date — which is nothing. “Today’s sanctions were predictable after the Mueller indictment, which identified specific Russians involved with the troll factory,” Alina Polyakova of the Brookings Institution tells me. “However, these individuals are small fish. [Yevgeny] Prigozhin, the so-called ‘Putin’s chef’ in charge of the IRA [Internet Research Agency], was already on the U.S. sanctions list for his activities in Ukraine. The administration deserves credit for following through on their promise to impose new sanctions, but much more still needs to be done to realistically deter Russia.” Moreover, if sanctions are justified for Russian meddling, then surely the Russia investigation is anything but a “hoax,” and any American who has cooperated in any fashion with Russia should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Max Bergmann, who heads the investigative Moscow Project at the Center for American Progress, agrees. “I think this is a useful first step. But let’s be clear; it is a pretty small first step,” he said. “These sanctions are focused on the Internet Research Agency and the GRU [Russia’s intelligence force], and [special counsel Robert S.] Mueller may have forced the administration’s hand with his indictments.” He adds that “we are still awaiting sanctions on oligarchs, additional sanctions on Russia’s economy and sanctions against those doing business with Russia’s defense industry. Those are the sanctions that will bite.” In short, our actions to date are in no way proportionate to Russian aggression which is increasingly bold. As Menendez’s statement explained, “The Russian government continues to aggressively attack democratic institutions and incite destabilizing behavior; its brazen chemical weapons strike on British soil is the latest example of what will happen if


So, uh, what’s this bowling-ball test that Trump was talking about?

negotiates a deal with a Japanese manufacturer to reopen a shuttered car plant in a fictional Pennsylvania town. At no point during the movie are bowling balls involved. (To be fair, I fast-forwarded through it.) In “Rising Sun” — a 1993 movie that’s almost literally what you would get if Michael Crichton had written “Gung Ho” — there is a scene in which garbage is thrown on a windshield, but no bowling balls. We will at this point note that it’s possible there was a last-ditch effort by Japanese authorities to keep some specific American car out of the country that some auto manufacturer conveyed to Trump. Efforts to contact Japanese representatives about the complaint were unsuccessful before publishing, but when the Trump administration filed a trade complaint over the automobile market last year, Japan responded by saying that it imposes no “non-tariff barriers” to entry to its market — meaning no weird tests that are impossible to pass. One reason American cars aren’t common in Japan has nothing to do with protectionist practices. The Japanese dealership system is much more generous than ours, the Atlantic reported in November, and it would require a significant investment from American manufacturers to build to scale. Update: There is a test that is conducted by the Japanese government that involves testing car hoods, as someone brought to our attention. In the test, a head-shaped object is fired at a car hood at about 20 mph to determine the effects if a car strikes a pedestrian. The head-like objects come in both adult and child sizes. In essence, the test is meant to evaluate how much damage would be done to the head — not the car — by a collision. It’s not clear whether this is Trump’s bowling-ball test. Of course, Trump also has something of a track record of telling stories in which details are misremembered, exaggerated or misrepresented. (There are also stories in which the entire conceit has proved false.) It’s entirely possible that someone told him about a protectionist test undertaken by a foreign government aimed at excluding certain products from markets and that anecdote became this story about bowling balls being dropped on Chevy Cruzes at the docks in Nagoya. Or maybe there was a movie in which Sinbad played a guy trying to save an auto plant in the Rust Belt, figuring out how to keep car hoods


The Senate rolls back rules meant to root out discrimination by mortgage lenders

its enforcement powers. The Senate bill repeals many of the new reporting requirements, exempting small lenders making 500 or fewer mortgages a year from the expanded data disclosure. “Banks say they don’t treat borrowers differently, but the data shows a different story,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) on the Senate floor last Thursday. “Redlining remains a major problem for communities of color.” A February report by the Center for Investigative Reporting showed that redlining persists in 61 metro areas — from Detroit and Philadelphia to Little Rock and Tacoma, Wash. — even when controlling for applicants’ income, loan amount and neighborhood, according to its analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records. Nevada saw the highest foreclosure rate for 62 straight months during the Great Recession, especially in minority communities, said Cortez Masto, a former state attorney general. More than 219,000 families lost their homes. Whole neighborhoods were hollowed out — with boarded-up homes, for-sale signs and empty lots dotting Las Vegas and Reno, she said. “By stripping away important regulations to hold banks accountable, we are risking another financial crisis that is rooted in unfair lending practices,” Cortez Masto said in a statement Wednesday night. Twelve of her Democratic colleagues co-sponsored the bill. Sponsors of the financial regulation rollbacks include Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a former fair-housing lawyer. The bill’s supporters say they don’t think it would widen the door for discriminatory lending, arguing that mortgage data such as race and gender collected before Dodd-Frank would still be gathered. The mortgage industry says the proposed deregulation would cut costs and help smaller community banks remain competitive, enabling them to make even more loans. The Mortgage Bankers Association estimates that expanded data would still be collected on 95 percent of loans. “If you want to provide some regulatory relief, it makes sense to do it for these institutions that aren’t making a lot of loans,” said Mike Fratantoni, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association. “You’re not losing much in terms of your visibility into trends in the market.” The problem with the former reporting requirements, advocates say, is that banks often blamed racial lending discrepancies on borrowers’ credit scores or other characteristics that were impossible to verify without additional reported data that lenders already collected as part of the mortgage application and underwriting process. The rollback in reporting requirements would potentially hurt not only minority borrowers but also older


Russia sanctions and spies, Rexit, and Trumpism stumbles in Pennsylvania – and It’s Only Thursday

Russia, Russia, Russia. The Trump administration finally slapped Russia with sanctions for election meddling and accused Moscow of likely poisoning a former spy and his daughter with a nerve agent. Plus, Trump fired his secretary of state over Twitter, picked a TV personality to be his top economic adviser, backed a former torturer to head the CIA, seems to have lost Pennsylvania Trump country to a Democrat, and it’s Only Thursday. Watch Post Opinions writers Molly Roberts, Dana Milbank, Christian Caryl and Christine Emba discuss the week’s top headlines on “It’s Only Thursday.”


Trump hotel managers say food writers are giving the place the cold shoulder

political climate, from a hospitality perspective, ESquared Hospitality and David Burke have worked diligently to bring an excellent dining program to Washington DC, and we are naturally disappointed that our hospitality and culinary efforts have not been recognized.” Aside from Tom Sietsema’s 2½-star review of BLT Prime in December 2016, there seem to have been no other serious critiques of Burke’s steakhouse. The Washingtonian has not published a formal review. Nor did the magazine find room for BLT Prime on its recent 100 Very Best Restaurants list. “So BLT Prime opened around the time I went on maternity leave in late 2016, which is why I never reviewed it,” emailed Ann Limpert, executive food editor and critic for the Washingtonian. “Even so, I didn’t feel super-compelled to cover it when I got back — more because it was yet another chain steakhouse in a hotel, it wasn’t that new anymore, and we have pretty limited review real estate in the magazine.” Limpert said she visited the steakhouse once while researching the Very Best Restaurants issue. She was underwhelmed. Had she liked it, Limpert said, she would have included it among the 100 best, no matter how disgusted some of the magazine’s readers might have been. “My feeling is that our readers are smart and decisive and opinionated enough to figure out whether to spend their money there on their own,” Limpert added. Neither BLT Prime nor the Trump hotel fare well on other lists. Gayot’s top 10 list from this year has no mention of BLT Prime (though it includes sister restaurant, BLT Steak on I Street NW). Eater DC’s countdown for “16 Superior Steaks Around D.C.” mentions the “Kansas City 20-ounce prime bone-in strip” at BLT Steak but nothing from BLT Prime. Even Yelp’s best steakhouse list doesn’t mention BLT Prime until the second page at No. 18, even though the restaurant has a four-star rating, better than four steakhouses ahead of it. BLT Prime and the hotel’s Benjamin Bar don’t fare any better on dessert lists. Neither appeared on Eater DC’s recent rundown. Nor did they make the cut on a November compilation of sweets by The Washington Post or Brightest Young Thing’s list of best desserts of 2017 or Zagat’s November roundup of “13 New Decadent Chocolate Desserts in DC.” “Contrary to the conspiracy theories Trump International Hotel managing director Mickael Damelincourt has taken to posting on


This is the March office pool for nerds who love animals

Jan Schaumann and his 10-year-old daughter, Ana, recently had an impassioned discussion about whether a mantis shrimp — a rainbow-hued and unusually violent bottom-dweller — could punch through an alligator snapping turtle’s shell. “We both concluded, ‘Of course!” said Schaumann, a New York City resident who works in information security. Such a battle isn’t likely to happen in real life. But whether the Schaumanns picked the right winner could make or break their own chances of triumph in a four-week, bracket-based tournament this month — not the college basketball one, but a far more academic contest known as March Mammal Madness. This tournament, founded by Arizona State University anthropologist Katie Hinde, pits pairs of animals against each other on an imaginary field of battle — and for the first time in its five-year history, the 2018 competition is open to non-mammals. In the opening match Monday, the preying mantis trounced the goldcrest bird. Other fights will feature a coyote duking it out with an opossum, a maned rat fighting a platypus and a secretary bird facing a horseshoe crab. On its face, March Mammal Madness is pretty simple. Like the basketball tournament, it begins with a bracket of 64 competitors. Each creature is seeded according to its likelihood of victory. Bigger animals tend to get preference, so an elephant will enter the tournament at a much higher seed than a shrew. Predators also get a boost because a leopard would be more likely to win a bout against a slightly larger but less ferocious animal, such as a white-tailed deer. Because it isn’t possible — or ethical — to gather dozens of species and force them to fight to the death, March Mammal Madness plays out on Twitter. Each night, the tournament’s organizers tweet out matches in gripping play-by-plays, deploying data garnered from actual scientific studies to give the audience an idea of how heavy, how fast or how deadly a certain species might be. Fans, who tend to be scientists or science students, follow #2018MMM to find out how their picks fare. And just as in basketball, there are upsets. To keep things interesting, all battle outcomes are decided by a random number generator. So if organizers, who include an entomologist and a marine biologist, looked at all the scientific data and decided one animal had a 75 percent chance of beating another, the first would advance if the


11 things to do in the D.C. area this weekend

Friday, March 16 DC Environmental Film Festival [No matter what time your March Madness game starts, these bars will be open] Innovative Lives: How Women Shaped the Alcohol Industry at the National Museum of American History In the Beginning: A 'Wild Style' Dance Party at the Kennedy Center 'Sights and Sounds of Ireland Today' at Dupont Underground Moombahton Massive at U Street Music Hall Saturday, March 17 National Cherry Blossom Festival Opening Day St. Patrick's Day at the Guinness Open Gate Brewery [These Irish-themed events are better than standing in line outside a pub on St. Patrick’s Day] Free Lyft Rides Home D.C. Reynolds Anniversary Party Shabazz Palaces at the Millennium Stage Sunday, March 18 Maker Faire NoVa at George Mason University Justin Timberlake at Capital One Arena — Fritz Hahn, Adele Chapin, Michael O'Sullivan and Briana Younger Read more: Chicken + Whiskey takes pollo a la brasa in new directions ‘Women House’ asks: Is the home a sanctuary or a prison? 8 surprising places to see free movies around D.C.


Putin has finally gone too far

Russian President Vladimir Putin told NBC’s Megyn Kelly this month that in using power, you “must be ready to go all the way to achieve the goals.” Now, it seems, Putin has gone all the way too far. Putin’s aggressive use of covert action to settle scores hit an international tripwire after the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in the quiet British cathedral town of Salisbury. An outraged Britain was joined Thursday by France, Germany and the United States in condemning the use of the banned Soviet-era toxin known as Novichok. A joint statement denounced the attack as “the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War” and called it “a breach of international law” that comes “against the background of a pattern of earlier irresponsible Russian behavior.” That strong language warrants action by NATO and the United Nations. The Trump administration, after a year of mealy-mouthed, temporizing statements, also announced sanctions Thursday against Russia’s “malicious cyberattacks.” The sanctions, targeting five Russian organizations and 19 people, will have little practical effect beyond those already in place. What matters is that President Trump finally seems to have eased, at least for the moment, his dubious defense of Putin. “It certainly looks like the Russians were behind it,” he said of the poisoning. “. . . We’re taking it very seriously.” So how can the United States and its closest allies alter Putin’s behavior, if they’re truly serious about holding Russia to account? The answer, say several former senior CIA officials, is to use America’s network of alliances to put Russia under strain. Putin has been playing a weak hand well, but the high cards remain in Western hands. Russia’s greatest vulnerability is its dependence on sales of oil and gas. Here, the United States is uniquely positioned for payback. Consider the ways in which Trump could stress Russia on the energy front. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visits Washington next week. “MBS,” as he’s known, has a quiet deal with Moscow to limit oil production sufficiently to keep prices above $60. If MBS truly wants to reciprocate Trump’s friendship, he should suspend this oil deal to punish Russia for its unacceptable actions. A united front should include the United Arab Emirates, which has also cultivated a relationship with Moscow as well as Washington. The UAE’s military leader, Crown Prince Mohammed


Why binge drinking increases during the NCAA tournament

For every tip-off during March Madness, it’s a sure bet that students at the schools playing in the basketball tournament will be tipping up more beer bottles than usual. This was one of the key findings of an analysis we conducted recently on the impact of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on college students’ drinking behavior. We Researchers have long known that alcohol consumption rises during college sporting events. Study after study has found that college students were more likely to binge-drink on football game days. The same is true for college basketball. For instance, a study of 206 undergraduate students at Syracuse University in 2003 — when Syracuse won the NCAA men’s basketball championship — found that alcohol consumption on the two game days of the Final Four exceeded what is typical on campus. Binge drinking is associated with many harmful outcomes for the drinker and those around them. These outcomes include lower grades and increased rates of drunken driving and sexual assault. One study found that assaults, vandalism and arrests for disorderly conduct and alcohol-related offenses increased on college football game days in the towns that hosted the game, especially after upsets. What is it about college sports that seems to lead to increased rates of drinking? The first thing to understand is that college students binge-drink and report heavy alcohol use at higher rates than their peers who aren’t in college. Social norms likely play a large role in this fact. For instance, one study found that college students tend to think that their peers drink more than they actually do. This perception can cause individuals to believe that heavy drinking is the norm, not the exception. A different study found that alcohol consumption can be reduced among college students by providing them with accurate information about how often their peers drink. To understand how a major college sporting event affects alcohol consumption across different colleges, we examined the effect of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on college students’ reported alcohol use. We relied on the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, which provides information on students’ alcohol consumption at 43 NCAA Division I institutions in 1993, 1997, 1999 and 2001. With this data, we compared drinking rates before, during and after the tournament as well as across tournament and non-tournament schools each season. We found that nearly 60 percent of male students whose school


alcohol consumption across different colleges, we examined the effect of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on college students’ reported alcohol use. We relied on the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, which provides information on students’ alcohol consumption at 43 NCAA Division I institutions in 1993, 1997, 1999 and 2001. With this data, we compared drinking rates before, during and after the tournament as well as across tournament and non-tournament schools each season. We found that nearly 60 percent of male students whose school had just played in the men’s basketball tournament reported binge drinking once more in the past two weeks than a male student whose school did not play a tournament game during the survey window. Overall drinks consumed experience a similar jump, as male students at tournament schools reported drinking 6.9 additional alcoholic beverages on average during the tournament. These numbers are comparable with elevated drinking estimates associated with college football game days. The increase in binge drinking appears to be concentrated mostly among white male students. While 60 percent of male students binge-drink more when their team plays in the NCAA tournament, we detect no increase in alcohol consumption among female students. According to our study, approximately 1 in 3 students who are over 21 appear to binge-drink more when their team plays in the NCAA tournament. One in four underage students report binge drinking once more when their team plays. The College Alcohol Study asked respondents about drinking and driving, so we were able to observe that students not only reported drinking more during the NCAA tournament, but that they also were about 10 percent more likely to report driving under the influence of alcohol or riding with someone who is under the influence. Our paper adds to the growing amount of evidence that alcohol consumption during college sporting events has harmful effects on society. While we do not know of any single solution for all students at all schools, we note that reducing the availability of alcohol at sporting events has the ability to reduce “arrests, assaults, ejections from the stadium, and student referrals to the judicial affairs office.” The National Institutes of Health has also created resources for both parents of college students and for college administrators to help reduce the amount of dangerous alcohol consumption among college students. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.


Nobel laureate found wandering disoriented in Illinois. Wife’s body discovered in car.

Before dawn on March 13, deputies from the Ogle County Sheriff’s Office south of Rockford, Ill., responded to a report of a man wandering on a rural stretch of a nearby state road. The 82-year-old man law enforcement found on foot was dehydrated and confused. As he was transported to a hospital for treatment, authorities did not realize that he was half of an Indiana couple reported missing the night before. They also did not know that he was one of the brightest chemistry minds on the planet. In 2010, Ei-ichi Negishi, a professor of organic chemistry at Purdue University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, the top honor for a lifetime of scientific work. The prize was awarded to Negishi for his research on “palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis” — a process known as “Negishi coupling.” As the Lafayette Journal & Courier reported, after his Nobel award, he frequently said the honor half belonged to Sumire, his wife of 50 years. In Ogle County, deputies soon realized that Ei-ichi and Sumire Negishi had been reported missing by their family members to the Indiana State Police. Eventually, police found the couple’s car in a ditch at a landfill eight miles from the Rockford International Airport. Sumire was found dead in the car. Police do not believe the death was the result of foul play, the Rockford Register Star reported. This week, the Negishi family released a statement to WTHR. “We are devastated by the loss of our beloved wife and mother, Sumire Negishi, who was near the end of her battle with Parkinson’s,” the statement said. “The car was stuck in a ditch and determined to be nonfunctioning and [Ei-ichi Negishi] appeared to be searching for help.” According to the family, when Ogle County deputies first encountered Ei-ichi Negishi, he said he was trying to get to the airport. He is still being treated at a hospital. The Negishis first arrived at Purdue in 1966 when the young researcher came to study under future-Nobel Prize winner Herbert C. Brown, the Journal & Courier has reported. After leaving for a few years in the 1970s, the family returned in 1979 and has been in West Lafayette ever since. In 2011, the school partly named an institute after Ei-ichi Negishi. Sumire Negishi was also an important figure in the area. When a Japanese auto plant opened in the region in


The high-level intrigue that’s overshadowing Egypt’s election

Bahey Eldin Hassan is a founding member of the Egyptian human rights movement and director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. Egypt is approaching a critical moment. Since last fall, the popularity of President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi has steadily diminished not only among the public and many of Egypt’s secular and Islamist intellectuals but also among key supporters of his regime. He’s still going to win the sham presidential election scheduled for March 26 to 28. But there are many signs that his second term might not last for as long as he hopes. Sissi has unleashed a crackdown on dissent that has no parallel in the country’s modern history. Yet this campaign is falling short of its intended objectives. Now discontent is brewing among the ruling elite, including the military. This is a much more serious threat to the president than Islamist and secular opposition. After Sissi failed in his bid to amend the constitution, which would have extended the presidential term from four to six years and enabled him to avoid holding elections this year, he embarked on an effort to ensure victory by preventing his fiercest opponents from running. The government ensured that Ahmed Shafiq, a former prime minister and air force commander who had declared his plan to campaign among members of the Egyptian diaspora, was deported from the United Arab Emirates to Cairo, where he was confined in a remote hotel until he withdrew his candidacy. Shortly afterward, former armed forces chief of staff Sami Anan announced his intention to run for the presidency; he was kidnapped from his car by soldiers a few days later. When his deputy Hisham Geneina, Egypt’s former top state auditor, set off to file an official appeal to restore Anan’s candidacy, he was brutally assaulted by police-affiliated thugs. Meanwhile, an army colonel was sentenced to six years in prison after announcing another presidential bid. Two of Egypt’s most powerful security officials have been fired and detained: Khaled Fawzy, director of the powerful Eyptian General Intelligence Directorate (EGID), and Mahmoud Hegazy, the armed forces chief of staff (the latter under house arrest). A genuine struggle for power is underway. Anan was pushing a plan that would loosen the military’s grip on power. This vision, developed through consultations with secular politicians and several former and current senior military officers, offered an alternative to the current political system, in which


Trump gives Putin a slap on the wrist. He needs to do much more.

at much bigger things to come, and soon, they also are inadequate. These measures alone will not deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from interfering in America’s 2018 elections, nor from engaging in the variety of aggressive attacks on the West that Russia continues to perpetrate. The statement, co-signed by France, Germany and Britain, concluded that it is “highly likely that Russia was responsible” for the chilling nerve-agent attack against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in southern England, which put them in the hospital in critical condition and sickened others nearby. “There is no plausible alternative explanation,” the allies insisted, noting that Russia’s refusal to cooperate with British authorities underlines the Kremlin’s probable guilt. This honesty is good. It must be followed by action. In announcing the sanctions, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin cited the “ongoing nefarious attacks emanating from Russia,” including election interference and cyberattacks. The Treasury Department targeted the sanctions at the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm responsible for much of the Russia-backed 2016 election interference, and at Russian spy agencies, freezing their assets and blocking Americans from doing business with them. There is no doubt the sanctions are well-deserved. Yet, as Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) noted Thursday, “Nearly all of the entities and individuals who were sanctioned today were either previously under sanction during the Obama Administration, or had already been charged with federal crimes by the Special Counsel.” In other words, the sanctions do not represent a dramatic change in U.S. policy. “With the midterm elections fast approaching,” Mr. Warner added, “the Administration needs to step it up, now, if we have any hope of deterring Russian meddling in 2018.” The Trump administration could start by slapping more sanctions on Russian oligarchs and others in Mr. Putin’s inner circle. Treasury released a list of potential targets in January. It should finally make better use of it. The Russian threat also demands that the Trump administration push much harder to obtain funding, intelligence and other support for states seeking to secure their election systems. And the president should express full support for the special counsel investigation into Russian actions. Encouragingly, Mr. Mnuchin said Thursday that he intends to impose additional sanctions “to hold Russian government officials and oligarchs accountable for their destabilizing activities by severing their access to the U.S. financial system.” With U.S. primary races already underway, time is fast running out to deter Russian interference.


Senate passes rollback of banking rules enacted after financial crisis

light legislative schedule expected in the Senate for the remainder of this midterm election year. But the debate highlighted how the political imperatives for red-state Democrats can collide with those of liberals such as Warren, who’s seen as a potential presidential candidate in 2020, creating the potential for conflict that could flare anew in future. Banks with more than $50 billion in assets are now considered “too big to fail” and are subject to the toughest regulations, including a yearly stress test to prove they could survive another period of economic turmoil. The Senate legislation, shepherded by Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), would raise that threshold to $250 billion in assets, potentially allowing several high-profile financial institutions, including American Express, Ally Financial and Barclays, to escape the extra regulatory scrutiny. The bill’s supporters say these banks have been unfairly saddled with regulations originally intended for global behemoth banks such as JPMorgan Chase, not regional or midsized firms. Lifting the restrictions would save the industry billions a year in compliance costs, industry analysts say. It would also make it easier for them to reward shareholders with dividends and stock buybacks, they say. Democrats and advocacy groups warn that the push to loosen the regulations fails to recognize that many of the midsized institutions that would be helped by the Senate legislation fell into dire financial straits less than a decade ago and needed more than $40 billion in taxpayer bailouts. During a financial crisis, they say, banks tend to fail in tandem, suffering from similar ailments. And the failure of several in a short time period could strain the U.S. economy. The bill has largely been marketed as long-overdue help for small community banks and credit unions. The legislation, for example, would exempt banks with less than $10 billion in assets from the “Volcker rule,” which bars banks from making risky wagers with their own money. The bill would also exempt many small banks from a Dodd-Frank requirement that financial institutions report more detailed data on whom they lend to. The industry has complained that both measures are too cumbersome and time-consuming. Exempting small banks from the mortgage data requirement would weaken the government’s ability to enforce fair-lending requirements, making it easier for community banks to hide discrimination against minority mortgage applicants and harder for regulators to root out predatory lenders, consumer advocates say. The bill still needs to be