Where to find 8 murals off the beaten path in D.C.

If you want to know your city, find the public art. The murals, graffiti art and mosaics take you away from the tourist sites and into neighborhoods, where each piece of art tells a local story. Hungry to learn more about my own city of Washington, I set out to explore the off-the-beaten-path murals and the neighborhoods they color. The well-known “Love” mural, in Blagden Alley, and the giant depiction of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on the side of a rowhouse on U Street NW, probably make regular appearances in your Instagram feed, drawing crowds of tourists and locals alike, but they’re only two within a larger body of work that covers every quadrant of this city. As I began my research, DC Murals  — an organization that maps the public art here  — became a leading resource. Through DC Murals, I learned there’s a hierarchy of public art. Mapping out my route, I intentionally avoided branded works like the one near Howard Theatre that was backed by beer maker Stella Artois. Murals that “artwash” — a term referring to public art funded by a business improvement district with the sole goal of encouraging development, like many of NoMa’s murals — didn’t dominate the list. My murals needed to be outside and accessible to all. I set out on foot and bike. Here are eight of the gems I discovered, along with location information and a bit of history. 1. “Deeply Rooted” by Maxx Moses 2314 Pennsylvania Ave. SE Growing up in New York City, Maxx Moses’s mother worked hard to expose him to culture. As they rode the subway, the graffiti art that Maxx saw led to what he calls his “spiritual awakening.” Now based in San Diego, Moses was hiking Machu Picchu when a nonprofit called Words, Beats & Life commissioned him to create a mural on the side of Thai Orchid’s Kitchen, a popular restaurant in the Southeast Washington neighborhood of Fairlawn. Colorfully woven, contrasting scenes are united — e.g., the mountains of Machu Picchu with a ship in a bottle — leaving interpretation up to the passerby’s imagination. “Your perspective is a perspective, and that’s valid,” Moses says. 2. Car mural by Hamilton Glass 1708 Good Hope Rd. SE Born in Philadelphia, Hamilton Glass lives in Richmond, where he helped start the public art movement in the Virginia capital. Glass visited the


Who makes the best store-bought hummus around? We tried 11 top brands to find out.

brand Sabra is the runaway best-selling brand (its market share was more than 60 percent in 2015, according to Statista), but it’s far from the only option on grocery shelves. To figure out whose chickpeas you should be checking out, we tried 11 different brands, including the most popular labels on the market, as well as a handful of grocery store brands (they are among the “private label” offerings that make up the category that comes in second to Sabra), and a few other popular options. Though hummus comes in a rainbow of flavors, we tested only “original” or unflavored varieties of each to keep the playing field level. Our testers assigned each a score of 1 to 10 based on overall taste and texture. Once we’d assembled the veritable swimming pool’s worth of the stuff, one thing stood out: There is remarkably little difference in the actual ingredients contained in most hummus. Chickpeas, tahini, oil and cumin were nearly ubiquitous. Which means the differences come down to proportion and preparation. Though, to be honest, there weren’t a lot of highs and lows among the batch we tasted. A few stood out, and one or two were major flops. But mostly, the available grocery store brands are a lot of middling middle ground that didn’t inspire consensus. The entire experiment had Food editor Joe Yonan, a well-known hummu-phile, repeating as he circled the tasting table, in a lamenting tone that indicated a mixture of sadness and frustration: “But it’s so easy to make at hoooome!” Here’s how they stacked up, from worst to best: 11. Ithaca This one was the showoff of the bunch, with slick packaging proclaiming it to be “cold-crafted” (the company boasts that it uses cold pressure instead of heat pasteurization) and a bold claim on the lid: “this hummus tastes fresh.” But all that bravado was for naught — our testers hated this dip (clearly, we are not Nancy Pelosi). It was the only one to list vinegar among its ingredients, which might explain the sour, bitter flavor. “Is there vinaigrette mixed into this?” one tester wondered. And then there was the aggressive lemony punch, which two testers independently likened to Pledge furniture polish and another to Sprite. 10. Hope Original Recipe Of all the varieties we tried, Hope’s texture was the most distinctive … and that wasn’t a good thing. Instead of the usual creamy


U.S. officials admit to fueling corruption in Afghanistan by flooding the country with money — and then turned a blind eye

warlords — who is going to get money from whom, on what basis, in exchange for what, what is the quid pro quo, etc.” “Let’s get on it,” Two months later, Rumsfeld sent a follow-up memo to Doug Feith, the Pentagon’s policy chief. “Is the DoD giving any food, weapons or money to any of the warlords or to Karzai? Is the CIA doing that? Is State doing it?” he wrote. “We need to get a sense of that balance.” The Rumsfeld memos were released by the Pentagon in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed in 2017 by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute at George Washington University. They are among hundreds of pages of memos, known as “snowflakes,” that Rumsfeld dictated about the Afghan war between 2001 and 2005. Another warlord who was a prime beneficiary of U.S. largesse was Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek strongman from northern Afghanistan who now serves as one of the country’s vice presidents. Dostum fought alongside CIA operatives and U.S. Special Operations forces after 9/11. He was accused of war crimes after his militia suffocated hundreds of Taliban prisoners in November 2001 by locking them in airtight shipping containers. Like Fahim Khan, however, Dostum was embraced by the Bush administration, according to the Rumsfeld memos. A few weeks after the Taliban prisoners in his custody died of asphyxiation, Dostum took the time to send a holiday letter to the U.S. commander in chief. “Dear U.S. president, George W. Bush!” “I wish your Excellency good health, great successes and the best of luck,” Rather than intercept the warlord’s missive, the Pentagon went to unusual lengths to deliver it. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, faxed the letter directly to Rumsfeld, who in turn ordered his staff to make sure it reached Bush’s desk. “Dostum is one of the Northern Alliance commanders,” More allegations of atrocities — rape, torture, murder — dogged Dostum over the years. He fell in and out of favor in Washington. But U.S. officials could never quite bring themselves to sever ties. In 2014, The Post reported that Dostum had been receiving about $70,000 a month in CIA funds routed through the Afghan presidential palace. In a 2015 Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed U.N. official suggested the amount was actually higher, alleging that the United States and other sources had been giving Dostum $100,000 a


The woman claiming she caught her husband cheating in a restaurant-review photo admits: She lied.

reason people wanted to believe it, says Helen Fisher, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and the author of “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.” It is a primal thing, she says, which is what one might expect from an anthropologist. Calling out a philanderer satisfies our age-old urge to protect the “pair bonds” that for millions of years ensured the continuation of our DNA, she says. “Of course, people don't actually think this way, but it’s why we have evolved protective devices,” she says. “We want to catch the cheater.” That is part of the reason we are obsessed with cheating — and cheaters. “Stories about infidelity are powerful,” she says. “How many books and poems and myths and legends and movies and operas and sitcoms deal with this topic? It plays on such a fertile mind.” Though the story of a busted philanderer might be satisfying, its spread is a cautionary tale. Media outlets ran with the story, with some playing down the caveat that the claim had not been verified and that it was suspected to be a “crank.” Syndicated TV show Inside Edition even aired a Post photo that accompanied a recent Sietsema review, circling the faces of an unidentified couple sipping wine in the backdrop that online sleuths suspected was the couple in question. The story offers another, perhaps more broadly applicable lesson: It is a reminder to cheaters everywhere that such a scenario could actually play out. Famously lucky ’80s movie hero Ferris Bueller might have gotten away with playing hooky and subsequently appearing on TV, but others might not be so fortunate to avoid a lens that could expose them. When Washington Post photographers arrange to shoot photos in restaurants to accompany reviews, they secure the permission of the management. “The owner of a restaurant can say ‘I don’t want you here’ — it’s their property and they can do that,” says Mickey Osterreicher, the general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association. “But it’s different for customers, and they shouldn’t have the same expectation of privacy.” At least a cheater might know when he or she will feature prominently in a photo. Washington Post photo editor Jennifer Beeson Gregory described the process thusly: “Photographers ask diners for their names when there is a handful — or fewer — of people in the photo or if the


After his big win, Boris Johnson could embrace pragmatism over divisiveness

THE GOOD news from Britian’s election is that the political impasse that has paralyzed the country since it voted to leave the European Union in 2016, and made it a weaker partner for the United States, at last is over. Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a resounding mandate, capturing the largest parliamentary majority for the Conservative Party since Margaret Thatcher in 1987. For the first time in a decade, Britain will have a strong leader. The wrinkle is that, apart from formally ending the country’s E.U. membership by Jan. 31, it’s not clear how Mr. Johnson might use that mandate. Having governed London as a centrist mayor, he has since shifted toward a populist nationalism that earned him the admiration of President Trump. That helped him to win over working-class voters in central and northern England and capture dozens of seats that for decades were strongholds of the Labour Party. Mr. Johnson will surely seek to “get Brexit done,” as his campaign relentlessly promised. But this momentous change in the country’s economic and political alignment could be more or less sweeping — and damaging to its economy — depending on what happens after Jan. 31. Britain has yet to negotiate its future relationship with the E.U., determining how much access it will have to its markets, how much it will depart from European regulation, and how free it will be to negotiate separate trade deals with the United States and other countries. Mr. Johnson, who helped lead the 2016 referendum campaign for Brexit, has seemed inclined toward a sharper break, and he has promised not to extend a transition period beyond the end of next year, which could cause Britain to crash out of the E.U. market without a deal. But the big Conservative majority may give a leader notorious for his opportunism leeway to shift back toward a more centrist course. That would be wise, given the dangerous political polarization that has overtaken Britain since 2016 — and the risk that the union may split apart. The most consequential result of the election, apart from Mr. Johnson’s triumph, may have been the landslide victory in Scotland of the Scottish National Party, which opposes Brexit and favors independence. On Friday, its leaders were already calling for a new referendum on independence, something Mr. Johnson opposes but may find difficult to resist. The allegiance of Northern Ireland and even Wales to


From Lincoln Logs to luggage, U.S.-China trade deal still leaves huge cloud over American business

technology, continuing to wax and wane for the foreseeable future,” Elena Duggar, associate managing director at Moody’s, said in a research note Friday. “Any partial deal in the short term will not resolve the fundamental differences in the two countries’ economic, political and strategic interests.” As Foreman drove to the airport for a business trip to China, he was glad to have dodged a new round of tariffs this Sunday. “But obviously everybody wants a final resolution,” he said. It was particularly true for business owners who weren’t so lucky. No change in tariffs When he announced the phase one agreement on Friday, Trump tweeted, “This is an amazing deal for all.” Joe Shamie counted himself out. His company, Delta Children, manufacturers baby and kids furniture. His cribs, bassinets and other safety products have been weighed down by a 25 percent tariff, and he worries that higher prices will prompt parents to start using old or unsafe cribs. Delta Children has nine test labs in China and hundreds of employees carrying out inspections. Shamie said he can’t just relocate production to another country because he relies on China’s infrastructure to guarantee his products are safe. “I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Shamie said. “I can’t move. What do I do?” Small and midsize business owners say the remaining tariffs are especially brutal for them. Larger companies may have more leverage to work with suppliers or retailers or have more room to absorb price increases before passing them on to consumers. But Tiffany Zarfas Williams, owner of the Luggage Shop of Lubbock in Texas, must raise prices in concert with her manufacturers. The vast majority of luggage and travel accessories are made in China, and Friday’s deal did nothing to ease the tariff burden for Williams and her five-person company. She said she doesn’t think she can increase prices any higher, raising the possibility that the quality of her products will suffer. “Our manufacturers are going to have to cut corners to keep prices from going up,” Williams said. “It’s hard to have a positive attitude when our tariffs are still there.” Farmers wait and see Of all the winners and losers from Friday’s deal, farmers who have been hit hard during the trade war said they were encouraged that some kind of preliminary deal had been reached. But some remained skeptical about the amount of agricultural purchases


Overhaul of anti-redlining law sparks rift among financial regulators

other business they do in places where they have branches, ATMs and other physical operations. Between 2012 and 2017, banks spent an average of $78 billion a year on community development lending and $55 billion a year on small-business loans in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods that fall under the law, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. Banks were also given credit for billions spent on mortgage loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers in poor neighborhoods. But the banking industry says the traditional measurements have become outdated as more of their customers have shifted online and the number of bank branches dwindled across the country. Under the proposal, banks would still be required to lend in lower-income neighborhoods near their branches. But they would also be judged on their activities in the other areas where they have significant customer deposits. The proposal “recognizes that banks may now receive large portions of their deposits from outside their traditional assessment areas,” McWilliams said during the recent board meeting. Communities groups say this new flexibility could also allow banks to skirt their core responsibilities under the law while seeking more lucrative work. “The stated intention is to bring more financing to underserved and rural areas. It is not going to accomplish that,” said Buzz Roberts, chief executive of the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders. "Instead it is going to add focus on states and metropolitan areas with greater populations like New York, California, Texas. … It is not clear that those states are underserved in general.” Under the proposal, regulators would develop and frequently update a list of commonly approved activities under the law, addressing one of the industry’s chief complaints. Banks would also be able to get preapproval from regulators for Community Reinvestment Act projects they are pursuing. “We’re encouraged that it would clarify what qualifies for CRA credit,” said Rob Nichols, president of the American Bankers Association. The plan could also clear the way for banks to get credit for activities the law had traditionally not allowed, including offering mortgages in high-cost areas such as San Francisco and New York or financing multimillion-dollar projects to build child-care facilities or hospitals. “Everyone is for hospitals, but the proposal [could] cover financing hospitals that don’t particularly serve communities where low- and moderate-income people are concentrated. That has a diluting effect on the broader purpose of the law,” Roberts said. That may also


Data Catch-22: How tech gadgets for exercise sometimes do more harm than good

When Bri Cawsey began running in 2008, she quickly got hooked on the sport and wanted to get faster. So she did what many runners do and bought a GPS watch that would give her real-time feedback on her pace, mileage and other metrics. First, she enjoyed the data readout. Before long, she connected her watch to an app that helped her track calories, as well. Then she added a second watch, more sophisticated than the first, and began comparing the data from the two for better accuracy. By about 2012, Cawsey found she couldn’t do anything without a tracking watch on her wrist. The obsessiveness all the data spurred turned out to be bad for Cawsey’s running and for her life: her times stopped improving because she was pushing too hard and she had trouble getting pregnant as her training wreaked havoc on her period. “I realized I was hurting my body and that the data was running my life,” Cawsey, now 34, says. Hollie Sick also developed an overdependence on technology, the data on her GPS sports watch driving her to do more and faster. In 2011, the runner wound up with a stress fracture in her tibia that forced her to lay off all sports for two months. “I became fixated on my pace,” she says. “Instead of running my easy runs easy, I ran too fast on every run.” Today, she often leaves the watch at home. “I will only use my GPS for specific workouts or races,” says Sick, who is now 29. “I have no real idea of what I’m running on my easy days — I let my body decide instead of my watch.” The paradox is real: Runners (along with cyclists and other athletes eager to track their mileage and time) can get all the data they want these days and use it to get faster. Yet, for many, that feedback can lead to overtraining, poor results and unhealthy behaviors. The bottom line, many experts say, is that far too many athletes are overdependent on their devices. “We are increasingly becoming a visual and data-driven society — many of us tend to get validation and comfort from numbers surrounding a workout,” says Adrienne Langelier, a sports psychology consultant from the Dallas area. “Running watches are now easily available and have more functionality than ever, creating a new norm surrounding run efforts.” “Technology


There must be a public accounting for the Afghanistan failure

What in the world should be done about senior U.S. officials who failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable? Those findings appear in a six-part Post investigative series on the Afghanistan war. It took three years, and three federal lawsuits, for The Post to obtain 2,000 pages of internal records on the Afghanistan war. The series laid bare — in stunning, depressing, sickening detail — the gargantuan failures and lies about the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. The war in Afghanistan has claimed the lives of more than 2,300 U.S. troops. Nearly 21,000 have been wounded in action, and nearly $1 trillion has been squandered on a haphazard nation-building mission that should not have been undertaken in the first place. U.S. policymakers at the highest levels made possible this enormous waste in lives, treasure and national honor. Are they going to be let off the hook with “oops, sorry, better luck next time” — the attitude that settled over official Washington after the Vietnam and Iraq debacles? Or, unlike the Vietnam and Iraq post-mortems, will there finally be a public accounting for the damnable Afghanistan failure? America has been down this road before. The U.S. policymakers behind Vietnam and Iraq had no idea what they had gotten themselves into. Both became wars in which senior military and civilian leadership bowed to self-censorship and uncritical acceptance of groupthink. As time went on, both also had their share of arrogance, duplicity and outright lies. But these were supposed to be things of a past well behind us. Vietnam was going to be the last of the quagmires, until it wasn’t. Iraq made sure of that. The endless 18-year Afghanistan war picked it up from there. And now, as was true with Vietnam and Iraq, U.S. leaders, finding things going badly in Afghanistan, still won’t own up to the truth. They keep up the pretense that the war is going pretty well. That it’s all a simple matter of winding down and handing things over to the Taliban and what passes for a government in Kabul. Those U.S. leaders know they have troops stuck on the ground, being sacrificed for a mission that cannot be accomplished, as the Post series shows. Will those leaders be allowed to get away with that pretense?


U.K. election: Boris Johnson wins majority, while Jeremy Corbyn says he won’t lead another general election campaign

years in the opposition. Reactions from Corbyn’s party were gloomy. Labour lawmaker Barry Gardiner called exit polls “obviously a devastating result for us.” “It feels like a punch in the stomach,” Labour lawmaker Jess Phillips tweeted. Party members immediately launched into a debate over who or what was to blame for a possible Tory landslide. Some on the left said it was Brexit, not Corbyn himself or the party’s transformative socialist agenda, that buried them. “We had a very similar manifesto to the manifesto at the 2017 election, where with that manifesto and Jeremy’s leadership we gained 3 million votes,” said Richard Burgon, a Labour lawmaker. “The thing which appears to be different this time is it was an election in which Brexit overshadowed traditional party loyalties.” While Johnson campaigned on a “Get Brexit Done” platform, Corbyn took a less decisive stance, proposing a softer Brexit — plus the guarantee of a second referendum within six months, another national vote on whether to stay or go, with the option to call the whole thing off. Others said the problem was that Corbyn was unpopular and that Labour’s agenda was too radical. [U.K. voters want Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘radical’ change. They’re not sure they want him.] Under Corbyn, the party swung hard to the left, calling for the nationalization of rail, mail, water and electricity, also pushing for a four-day workweek and free university tuition, and heavy taxes on corporations and the wealthy. In any case, Corbyn is expected to face pressure to step down. Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, said Labour has “a lot of very hard thinking to do, particularly with the leader it now chooses.” He said that if the party selected its next leader in Corbyn’s image, it would be in “trouble.” It was a grim night, too, for the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats, whose leader, Jo Swinson, lost her seat to a candidate from the Scottish National Party. Nationalist parties in Scotland and Northern Ireland, meanwhile, saw gains. While Brexit was dominant in many voters’ minds on Thursday, it wasn’t the only issue they talked about. Sarah Duncan, 71, a historian and lifelong Conservative voter, was up early to her London polling station, not far from the River Thames. She said this election “was particularly important, because I’m very frightened of far-left-wing government and what Jeremy Corbyn could do to this country.”


Virtual reality, robots, interactive apps, other new tech help people with dementia and their caretakers

has approved only five drugs for Alzheimer’s disease. Memantine, designed to treat confusion, was most recently approved in 2003. According to the World Health Organization, about 50 million people worldwide have dementia, with that number rising to an expected 82 million by 2030 and 152 million in 2050. Alzheimer’s accounts for 60 to 70 percent of dementia cases. Other major forms include vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia and frontotemporal dementia. While medical breakthroughs have fallen short, robotics and digital devices to help with coping are taking off. Among the new technologies available or in development, some of which were on display at the annual Alzheimer’s Association International Conference last summer in Los Angeles, are: lifelike robotic companion pets, other robots to help patients remember to complete a task, GPS tracking tools to help find someone who has wandered off, virtual reality systems that can mentally transport patients outside the four walls of their homes or assisted-living facilities to other parts of the world, and even to other decades. “In this challenging era of many failed drug trials to slow cognitive decline, a parallel track of research continues in search of better ways to help patients cope with existing symptoms,” said Seth Gale, instructor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and associate neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “There is emerging evidence to show that interventions like robotic pets and home monitoring devices for caregivers can help reduce many of the common neuropsychiatric symptoms, including depression, agitation and anxiety.” “These technologies fill a void,” said George Perry, professor of biology at University of Texas at San Antonio who serves on the scientific advisory board of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. “They can make a tremendous difference in having the disease and changing how patients deal with it.” Stephanie Rohlfs-Young, director of volunteer programs at the Alzheimer’s Association, said “almost every caregiver is looking for ways to make the burden lesser, and we hear from a lot of people, especially in the earlier stages of the disease, that certain devices or apps are helping.” The PARO, for example — a six-pound robotic baby seal that has sweet brown eyes and blinks its long eyelashes while it squeaks — was developed in Japan by Takanori Shibata with the hope that it might bolster the mood of someone with dementia and help improve communications skills, like a robot version of pet therapy. A small


Wafer-thin bikes, speedy shorts and go-faster running shoes spark questions about high tech in sports

When the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge became the first human to run a marathon in under two hours as part of the recent INEOS 1:59 Project Challenge, this was arguably one of the most significant achievements of athleticism since Roger Bannister of England broke the four-minute mile in 1954. But almost immediately afterward, there was controversy, not toward the runner or the unofficial nature of his run (his record has no official status), but over his running shoes. The shoes in question were the AlphaFLY running shoes designed and manufactured by Nike. They are built around a carefully considered sole design that absorbs the energy of each foot strike and then helps store, channel and return it as the athlete runs. Its various patented innovations include the types of polymers used and how they and air pockets are located to absorb and return energy, coupled with a carbon plate built into the midsole. The question is, can a running shoe really be the key to sporting success? Or is it just an easy target for others’ misplaced jealousy? A study published in 2005 predicted the probable limits of the men’s marathon record. Yet since then the maximum projections in that study have already been exceeded by around two minutes, and nearly by four if you include Kipchoge’s time. On that basis, it seems fair to suggest that the shoes are at least partly responsible for such large and unexpected performance improvements. The International Association of Athletics Federations, the governing body, has established a group to study the Nike’s running shoes and report back with an adjudication. A more recent study examining shoe technology supports this concern, suggesting that a predecessor to the AlphaFLY shoe design had been shown to improve running economy significantly. In fact, compared directly to other elite-level trainers in the same study, the performance gain was in the range of 2.6 percent to 4.2 percent. At the razor thin margins of elite sport, that sort of benefit is the equivalent of bringing a gun to a knife fight. To be sure, as far as debating technological assistance in sport goes, we’ve been here plenty of times before. The Australian sprinter Cathy Freeman wore a one-piece aerodynamic suit in the 400 meters at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. In 2008, the very nature of disability itself was challenged when South African Oscar Pistorius attempted to run in both the


Paralympic and Olympic Games the same year while using a pair of composite prosthetic legs. These, like Kipchoge’s shoes, also raised concerns about the nature of and extent to which technology contributes toward helping us perform at our very best. In a systemic review published in 2015, I found the impact of technology in sport as having brought a huge source of positive interest, but, on occasion, being hugely damaging. The British Olympic team recently unveiled its new track cycling bicycle, dubbed HB.T, upon which athletes will be competing at the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. This machine (a project undertaken between British Cycling and manufacturers Hope and Lotus Engineering) pushes the rules to their absolute limits and demonstrates the flair that Lotus themselves applied in 1992, when they designed Chris Boardman’s gold medal-winning Lotus bicycle. But this design was later banned from competition because of its perceived unfairness. The new Team GB bicycle is resplendent with an unusual fork configuration and bowed, thin frame members that virtually disappear from view when you look at it head on. Engineers will be keen to know the measured advantages. But I’m wondering whether the real effects of the bike are in the psychological blow to its opposition as it is wheeled out for the first time — at a point probably and quite intentionally too late for competing cycling teams’ to respond to in time for Tokyo. The general criticism behind such new technology is not just about how effective it may or may not be but also about its perceived fairness. Such arguments typically debate issues surrounding equal access to a technology, the ability to ensure any new technology is safe, that it is not fundamentally an unfair advantage, and that it doesn’t ultimately change the nature of the sport entirely. Some sports governing bodies attempt to remove or marginalize the impact of technology. Cycling has tried several times to do so. But even the relative simplicity of a sport such as running was changed forever when Kipchoge used a huge team of about 40 pacesetters in an aerodynamic formation and those shoes. Technological progress can be slowed, but it can’t easily be halted — and arguably shouldn’t be. So there will be much more debate on the effects of technology ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Games as more athletes, teams and manufacturers all compete for the most prized medals in


Transcript- The 2020 Candidates: Mayor Pete Buttigieg

So, now, I would like to welcome to the stage my colleague, Robert Costa and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Thank you. [Applause] MR. COSTA: Good afternoon. I'm Bob Costa, National Political Reporter with The Washington Post. Really appreciate you all coming out, again, for another Post Live interview. And Mayor Buttigieg, you began this series back in May. MAYOR BUTTIGIEG: That's right. MR. COSTA: Really appreciate you coming back. Thank you for your time. MAYOR BUTTIGIEG: Very glad to be back. Thanks for having me. MR. COSTA: Let's begin with policy: Afghanistan. My colleague, Craig Whitlock here at The Washington Post did an investigation about the Afghan War. It's a wonderful series, in-depth, if you have a chance to read it, the Afghanistan Papers. What's your reaction to it, and all of its information, as a veteran? MAYOR BUTTIGIEG: Well, it's an extraordinarily important piece of work and of reporting; although, I would also say that there's been a general sense, without the documentation to prove it, of exactly the kind of drift and confusion and sometimes deception or self-deception that was revealed there. When I think about how it relates to my service, I'm thinking about the fact that I thought I was one of the very last troops turning out the lights when I left years ago. And right now, somebody in Indiana is packing their bags, getting ready to go over, who possibly was not alive on 9/11, and is wondering exactly why they're going. And this shows us why we need to end America's longest war. What we see is what happens when the American people are not fully participating in the debate or the management of a conflict. You know, this is supposed to be something that our democratic political process has a handle on and yet, it feels like there's been more and more drift since 9/11 that has not only a lot of confusion over the mission in Afghanistan, but troops deployed all over the world pursuant to an authorization that was passed in order to deal with Al Qaeda. You know, when we lost troops in Niger, there were members of Congress who admitted they didn't know we had troops there. And it's one of the reasons why I believe, as President, that authorizations for the use of military force ought to have a three-year sunset, that if a president concludes that we've


Britain’s troubles to come after Boris Johnson’s landslide win

new.” But Johnson still has his work cut out. In a parting salvo widely pilloried for a lack of humility, Corbyn suggested that Johnson’s mandate is weaker than he thinks. “I am proud that on austerity, on corporate power, on inequality and on the climate emergency we have won the arguments and rewritten the terms of political debate,” Corbyn wrote in an op-ed in the Guardian. “But I regret that we did not succeed in converting that into a parliamentary majority for change.” Moreover, as my colleagues report, unity may be a tough pitch. While the Conservatives dominated in England, the victories of pro-E.U. nationalists in Scotland and Northern Ireland suggest troubles ahead. The Scottish National Party explicitly believes it has the mandate for a second independence referendum, even though it’s unlikely that a Westminster in Johnson’s thrall will permit it. And, once Brexit is carried out, Northern Ireland may find itself politically adrift from the rest of Britain. “Boris has won his gamble in England definitely and also in Wales, but the price is that you exacerbate divisions and you create a state crisis,” Richard Wyn Jones, a politics expert at Cardiff University, told my colleagues Karla Adam and William Booth. “The whole future, the territorial integrity of the state, is clearly in question in Scotland in Northern Ireland.” Then there’s the actual process of really implementing Brexit. “Virtually no one on the European side thinks it is possible to agree to a meaningful trade deal that quickly — meaning either Johnson will have to break a campaign promise by asking to extend the transition, or Britain and the E.U. could wind up with the same type of sudden break at the end of 2020 that Parliament until now refused to allow,” reported my colleagues Michael Birnbaum and William Booth. Some right-wing British proponents of Brexit have imagined a post-E.U. future where Britain can become a “Singapore-upon-the-Thames,” a business-friendly haven of low taxes and fewer bureaucratic barriers to entry. That’s not an approach many in Europe will welcome. “My message to the British is that the more loyal we are to each other, the more our relationship will be close,” said French President Emmanuel Macron over the weekend. “But don’t think you can have an extensive trading relationship, a maximal access to the European market, with substantial differences on sanitary, climate, economic and social regulations. This is not true.”


A blowout turned an Ohio natural gas well into a methane ‘super-emitter’

into the atmosphere — five times the amount ExxonMobil estimated. “We are eager to learn more about their study,” King said. “ExxonMobil is working with government laboratories, universities, NGOs and other industry participants to identify the most cost-effective and best-performing technology, including satellites, that can be adopted by all producers to detect, repair and accurately measure methane.” It is the first time methane from an oil or gas incident has been both detected and quantified via satellite during a routine global survey. Steven Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund and a co-author of the report, noted the unique aspect of the data gathering. “Methane emissions are a huge contributor to climate change, he said. “But source locations are often unpredictable and can occur in out-of-the-way places all over the globe. New results show the opportunity for satellites to help see and quantify emissions no matter where they are.” EDF, which will launch its own satellite in 2022, estimates that emissions from the oil and gas sector are 60 percent higher than estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency. The accident highlighted the expanded use of natural gas in the United States, thanks to the sharp increase in fracking and to opposition to coal-fired power. Natural gas emits only half the greenhouse gas as coal at the point of combustion. But leaks of methane throughout the production system can undercut the advantage of natural gas and can drive emissions back up to dangerous levels. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, up to 25 times as potent, pound for pound, as carbon dioxide, according to EPA estimates. Major oil companies have said that they are improving their ability to capture methane and seal leaks, yet many environmental groups say difficult-to-detect leaks — from the wellhead to the processing plant to the distribution pipes — continue to offset the advantages of natural gas. The blowout in Ohio was measured by the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument, a satellite that at the time was doing a routine global survey of methane emissions, scientists said in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The satellite was able to observe the well on the 13th day of the blowout, and it calculated the changes in well pressure and the speed of emissions. “To combat climate change and build a low-carbon economy, being able to accurately monitor greenhouse gas emissions is an essential


Do Americans approve of Trump’s pardons for court-martialed military officers?

In November, President Trump granted executive clemency to three U.S. military officers accused or convicted of war crimes: deliberately killing foreign civilians or prisoners, who posed no immediate threat, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those pardons have been widely criticized by former U.S. military lawyers, senior military commanders and Pentagon civilian authorities, including then-Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer, who says he was fired for his views. But what does the U.S. public think of these pardons? Are Americans opposed, agreeing with retired Gen. Charles C. Krulak, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, who told reporters that Trump’s intervention “betrays [American] ideals”? Or does the public side with Trump, who told a campaign rally that “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state”? How we did our research To find out, we contracted with YouGov to survey a representative sample of 1,000 U.S. citizens older than 18. We used the most clear-cut case in the recent pardons — that of Army Lt. Clint Lorance, whom a military court convicted of second-degree murder for actions in Afghanistan in 2012. Respondents were asked whether they approved or disapproved of “President Trump’s decision to pardon Clint Lorance, the U.S. Army Lieutenant who was found guilty of second-degree murder by a U.S. military court for ordering his soldiers to kill a group of unarmed Afghan civilians who posed no risk to U.S. troops.” Of our respondents, 41 percent approved of the pardon and 59 percent did not. That proportion seems to have shifted significantly since the war in Vietnam. In 1971, Lt. William L. Calley Jr. was court-martialed and convicted of murdering 22 civilians in the 1968 My Lai Massacre. He was sentenced to life in prison. A 1971 Gallup/Newsweek poll found that 11 percent of Americans approved of the verdict. Who supports pardons? Like almost all other issues in U.S. politics, support for Trump’s pardons is intensely partisan. Twelve percent of Democrats and 45 percent of independents approved of Trump’s pardon, while 79 percent of Republicans approved. Although the partisan breakdown of Vietnam War-era polls is not available, the overwhelming disapproval of punishing Calley suggests that attitudes did not divide cleanly along partisan lines. Partisanship is especially clear when respondents described the reasons for their opinion of Trump’s pardon. For example, one Republican respondent who approved of the pardon wrote, “Thankfully we now have a president that defends the military.” A


Boris Johnson sees ‘wonderful adventure’ after Brexit. But Scotland and Northern Ireland brace for a bumpier ride.

it passes and then is ratified by the European Parliament, Britain will leave the European Union in January, entering a year-long transition period. When he was asked whether the dreams of those who want to remain in the European Union were over, Michael Heseltine, a former Conservative deputy prime minister and a prominent pro-European, said that the debate was over. “We have lost. Let’s not muck about with the language,” he told the BBC on Saturday. “Brexit is going to happen and we have to live with it.” Heseltine said that it could be 20 years or more before the issue of rejoining the European Union is raised again, but he added: “You can’t escape the devastating results on Scotland and Northern Ireland, so the agenda is not going away.” The divisions that existed last week have not disappeared overnight. Hundreds of protesters descended on the prime minister’s official residence at 10 Downing Street on Friday night, some waving E.U. flags and others carrying placards that read “Defy Tory Rule” and “No to Racism.” Johnson’s Conservative Party won 44 percent of the vote share. In Britain’s first-past-the-post system, that is enough for a thumping victory. But an autopsy of the results also suggests challenges that lie ahead. “Boris has won his gamble in England definitely and also in Wales, but the price is that you exacerbate divisions and you create a state crisis. The whole future, the territorial integrity of the state, is clearly in question in Scotland in Northern Ireland,” said Richard Wyn Jones, a politics expert at Cardiff University. Johnson is fond of calling the four territories of the union the “awesome foursome.” But unionists in Northern Ireland say that Johnson’s “oven ready” Brexit deal will leave Northern Ireland in the E.U.’s economic space, which they say changes the terms of the union for Northern Ireland. In Scotland, meanwhile, Johnson’s elite, old Etonian schoolboy persona goes down poorly. Sturgeon’s SNP has called him a “recruiting tool” for their cause. Polls in Scotland show that an uptick in support for independence over the past year have come largely from those wanting to remain in the European Union. Sturgeon on Friday acknowledged that the election results do not mean that all those who voted for the party “necessarily support independence, but there has been a strong endorsement in this election over Scotland having a choice over our future.” karla.adam@washpost.com william.booth@washpost.com


President Erdogan has issued a license to kill

assassinations of dissidents abroad. It may have already carried out some killings — the most infamous being the assassination of three female members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), who were shot in the head at the Kurdistan Information Bureau in central Paris in early 2013. Turkey regards the PKK as a terrorist organization (as does the United States). According to one widely circulated interpretation, a faction within the Turkish state committed the Paris murders in order to sabotage peace negotiations then underway between the government and the PKK. Yet that is not the only possible scenario. Last May, despite Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization’s (MIT) denials of any involvement, France reopened the file that had been closed upon the alleged assassin’s death in prison. The prosecutors intend to investigate whether MIT was implicated. Germany followed next. At the end of 2017, Garo Paylan, a Turkish lawmaker from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), shared a tip with the press: “A number of sources confirmed that a series of assassinations are planned, targeting Turkish citizens living abroad, particularly in Germany, and are branded as ‘traitors’ by the government.” German authorities had already been alerted to the arrival in the country of a three-man hit squad, he added. At the time, I did some investigating that pointed to the source of the information: the interrogations of the two MIT operatives captured in northern Iraq by the PKK in August 2016. The PKK had leaked this bit of intelligence, prompting dissident circles in Ankara to warn Berlin, which boosted close protection for targeted dissidents in Germany. Last week, the Turkish authorities arrested a lawyer for the German Embassy in Ankara on espionage charges. According to Der Spiegel, the man was looking into cases of Turkish dissidents seeking asylum in Germany. His job was to report to German authorities on whether the applicants were truly under threat in Turkey. After his arrest, the police raided his offices, seizing files on hundreds of dissidents, including supporters of the PKK and Fethullah Gulen, the exiled Islamist leader Erdogan regards as a mortal enemy. Erdogan accuses Gulen and his followers of orchestrating the failed coup attempt in July 2016. Most of those suspected in orchestrating the coup fled to Germany. Erdogan has been pressing for their extradition ever since; the German authorities saw fit to issue an alert when they realized that Turkish intelligence had obtained information in


Voices from the war in Afghanistan

Post Reports is the daily podcast from The Washington Post. Unparalleled reporting. Expert insight. Clear analysis. Everything you’ve come to expect from the newsroom of The Post. For your ears. Martine Powers is your host, asking the questions you didn’t know you wanted answered. Listen online. Veterans respond to the idea that Afghanistan was an empty war Last week, The Post published The Afghanistan Papers — secret interviews and audio recordings of policymakers talking candidly about the failures of this 18-year-long war. The stories revealed how the Afghanistan war was fought without a strategy and how the American public was misled about the progress on the ground. Post staffers spoke with veterans and civilians who participated in the war. Some of them say the enemy was never clear, while others describe the lives lost over more than a decade. “I was like finally, there’s proof that it’s unwinnable, that every report that was being written was a lie,” Army infantryman Jonathan Rosario said. More on this topic: Big Oil is dividing an Arctic town and imperiling its foundations The Alaska Native village of Nuiqsut in the North Slope is facing an existential crisis: Oil drilling has brought great prosperity to the village, but this is also one of the fastest-warming places on Earth. Post national affairs correspondent Juliet Eilperin says this region is now weighing a comfortable present against a frightening future. More on this topic: Protests in India over a new citizenship law Last week, India passed a law that makes religion a criterion for nationality for the first time, sparking nationwide protests. The citizenship measure says that migrants who arrived in the country before 2014 illegally will have an expedited path to citizenship — provided they belong to one of six religions. Islam is not on the list, though the religion is practiced by about 200 million people in India. Post India Bureau Chief Joanna Slater says protesters are angry about the law and worried this would make Muslims second-class citizens. More on this topic:


Those who ran the Afghanistan war lied. They must be held to account.

more exposed in these papers, is that power often knows the truth. The real question is that posed by William Greider, national affairs correspondent for the Nation and a former national political reporter for The Post: Who will tell the people? Presidents and Cabinet officials in the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations generally knew the truth. Generals and officers knew, even though the military has perfected the transforming of ruinous realities into rosy power points, colored charts and press briefings. Despite their supposedly surprised reactions to the release of the papers, senators and representatives — particularly those on the Armed Services Committees — knew or should have known, if they had just bothered to conduct minimum oversight. Those who ran the war not only lied. They mocked and discredited those who told the truth. As early as November 2001, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Bush’s arrogant defense secretary, joked at a news conference: “All together now — quagmire!” As The Post’s Craig Whitlock reports, in 2006, Rumsfeld’s speechwriters delivered a paper on “Afghanistan: Five Years Later,” highlighting progress in 50 areas such as the “average speed on most roads" and concluding that “five years on, there is a multitude of good news.” The lies had brutal consequence. Since 2001, more than 775,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan. More than 2,300 died there, and 20,589 were wounded in action — and still counting. More than 100,000 Afghan civilians and security forces have been killed. The war has cost the United States more than $1 trillion. The $133 billion allocated to development, according to The Post’s reporting, is greater than the sum, adjusted for inflation, spent on the Marshall Plan after World War II that helped revive the whole of Western Europe. Nine billion dollars has been spent to eradicate poppy production yet, today, Afghan farmers cultivate more opium than ever, and, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, are responsible for 82 percent of global opium production. The flush of U.S. dollars helped turn the Potemkin democracy we set up into a “kleptocracy.” Ryan Crocker, who served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012, concluded that “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption.” Of course. Politically, the corrosive lying about progress for nearly two decades surely helped sow the grounds for the election


Colombia is exhuming graves of civilians allegedly killed by soldiers

Colombian authorities are exhuming dozens of graves to determine whether the dead were civilians who security forces falsely claimed were guerrillas. Authorities say soldiers killed thousands of civilians between 1998 and 2014 under pressure from their commanders and then claimed the victims were members of the FARC guerrilla group. They planted weapons on their victims and dressed them in fighters’ uniforms in a scandal Colombians have dubbed Falsos Positivos, or “False Positives.” The pace of killing increased from 2005 to 2009 under President Álvaro Uribe, who led an offensive against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The country’s Special Peace Tribunal, created under the 2016 peace accords that ended Colombia’s 50-year conflict, announced Saturday it had begun the exhumation of more than 50 bodies, the largest such operation to date. The work began last week at the Catholic Cemetery of Las Mercedes in Dabeiba, a town in the northwestern department of Antioquia, the tribunal said in a statement. It came after the panel heard “a series of voluntary testimonies,” including one from a former soldier who said he knew of false positives in the town. The soldier, who was in custody, accompanied authorities to the cemetery, located on a small mountain shrouded in fog, a human rights activist who was at the scene told The Washington Post. He spoke for an hour about his role in covering up civilian deaths. Activist Adriana Arboleda, who represents victims through the local Legal Freedom Corporation, called the exhumation “an important step.” “The tribunal is proving that it’s bringing to light cases that had been and would have remained unpunished,” she said. “It offers hope that the country will be able to know the truth and recover bodies. Things that victims’ families have long yearned for.” The tribunal said the first seven bodies of the more than 50 victims believed to be buried in the cemetery had been recovered. Most victims were between 15 and 56 years old, the panel said; some were disabled. Colombia’s main cities have been beset in recent weeks by mass demonstrations Dozens of demobilized FARC members, including some who participated in the peace negotiations, have retaken arms and returned to the jungle to resume the fight. More than 700 activists, indigenous leaders and demobilized FARC guerrillas have been killed since 2016. Guillermo Botero, Duque’s defense minister, resigned in November after evidence emerged that children had died in


main cities have been beset in recent weeks by mass demonstrations Dozens of demobilized FARC members, including some who participated in the peace negotiations, have retaken arms and returned to the jungle to resume the fight. More than 700 activists, indigenous leaders and demobilized FARC guerrillas have been killed since 2016. Guillermo Botero, Duque’s defense minister, resigned in November after evidence emerged that children had died in operations against dissident FARC groups. The New York Times reported in May that military commanders had ordered troops to kill more criminals and militants, suggesting they would accept more collateral damage. The exhumations had been long awaited by victims of the armed conflict as a next step beyond taking testimony. Dozens of soldiers have appeared before the tribunal since 2016 to be judged under transitional justice, which offers them reduced punishment if they collaborate. Investigations into false positives started last year. “We have talked to more than one hundred military men,” Alejandro Ramelli, a tribunal magistrate, told the national newspaper El Espectador. “They have revealed to us dozens of incidents, but we now have to confirm that what they are saying is true.” The testimony of more than 160 soldiers has helped authorities identify some 400 victims to date, the tribunal said Saturday. The panel said last year that 1,944 troops, involved in more than 2,500 false positive cases, were willing to cooperate with the investigations. The attorney general’s office has reported more than 2,200 victims since 1998. Activists say the number is closer to 5,000. Authorities entered the Dabeiba cemetery accompanied by soldiers who had been ordered to prove their testimonies, Colombian media reported. Ramelli told El Espectador that the bodies would be identified and more witnesses would be interviewed. The 2016 peace accords have polarized Colombia, and the tribunal has been at the center of the controversy. Critics say the perpetrators of war crimes are likely to get less punishment than they deserve. Others say the offers of leniency to those who cooperate are bringing to light crimes that would otherwise be forgotten. “The exhumations show that crime perpetrators are trusting the special tribunals,” said Kenneth Burbano, director of the Constitutional Observatory of the Free University of Colombia and a former auxiliary tribunal magistrate. “In the middle of protests, it’s a clear signal that the government has to understand: All it has to do is back the search for truth.” rachelle.krygier@washpost.com


Our favorite Washington Post op-eds of 2019

getting lost could be a good thing.” — Becca Clemons, opinions operations editor “ Having lived in Iran, both Alinejad and Hakakian took exception to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) praise of the hijab as a symbol of “power, liberation, beauty and resistance.” That might describe the “democratic hijab, the head covering that a woman chooses to wear,” Alinejad and Hakakian noted, but there is also the “tyrannical hijab, the one that a woman is forced to wear.” The writers spoke eloquently for millions of women who know too well that “a mere piece of cloth” can be turned “into a symbol of oppression.” — Mark Lasswell, associate op-ed editor “ Abdulaziz, a Saudi activist living in Montreal, worked with Jamal Khashoggi to defend Twitter as a public sphere. For this, he has been targeted by a campaign of online harassment. In this op-ed, he writes about why he’s determined to keep fighting for the rights of Saudis to engage in free debate about their country. — Eli Lopez, senior editor, global opinions “ In the spring of 2018, the author voted to find Frederick Turner, a meth addict with no criminal record, guilty of possessing a firearm while dealing drugs. Only after the verdict did St. Louis and the other jurors learn that, thanks to mandatory minimums, Turner would be sentenced to 40 years in prison. Within the year, Turner was dead. St. Louis’s op-ed is both a heart-rending account of regret and a textbook example of how America’s criminal-justice system can turn the best intentions into terrible consequences. — James Downie, opinion blogs editor “ Dingell was not only the longest-serving member of Congress in history, he was one of the fiercest advocates in the history of the body. It was an example of and tribute to that ferocity that Dingell wrote an op-ed for The Post, dictated to his wife Debbie, who succeeded him in the House of Representatives, on the day he died. — Ruth Marcus, deputy editorial page editor “ “As I traveled the world seeking the truth and calling for justice, not a single material step has been taken toward punishing the real perpetrators,” wrote Cengiz, Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancee, a year after the Post contributing columnist’s brutal murder. Her op-ed — published in a special section a year after Khashoggi’s killing — is a searing call for the international community to step up and take


Federal review of Baltimore-Washington high-speed maglev project ‘paused’

The Federal Railroad Administration has temporarily halted its analysis of the proposed high-speed “maglev” train system in the Washington region to give those behind the project more time to provide details about its design and engineering. Wayne Rogers, chief executive of Northeast Maglev, the team of private investors behind the project to provide service between Washington and Baltimore in 15 minutes, confirmed the delay in the federal analysis, saying the pause is related to optimizing the design of the maglev, its entire alignment and the stations. Rogers said the company is working to provide the “answers necessary” to move forward the environmental impact statement, or EIS. Without providing specifics, he said the group is preparing additional engineering information “so that more detail is available for review by the regulatory agencies and the public.” The FRA embarked on the project review in 2016 and was expected to finalize the process in mid-2019. Upon completion of the environmental impact statement, the FRA could give clearance for tunneling, now set to begin as early as 2021, and operations in 2028. The agency could also rule against building the line — a wish of many residents along the route’s path who fear its impact on property and the corridor’s environment. The federal government’s decision to pause the project was first reported by the Baltimore Sun. The Sun also reported a review of the project’s impact on historic property in Baltimore is unaffected by the delay and is expected to be completed in February. Erin Henson, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of Transportation, said the state and FRA are waiting on updated engineering input from Baltimore Washington Rapid Rail, the subsidiary of Baltimore-based Northeast Maglev. “FRA has decided to ‘pause’ the EIS so that work does not have to be redone once the engineering inputs are finalized,” Henson said in an email, referring questions regarding the status of the project to Northeast Maglev. The high-speed superconducting magnetic levitation system between Washington and Baltimore is planned with three stops: one in each city and at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. The train would not stop in communities between Baltimore and Washington. The 40-mile rail line is planned as the first leg of a system that would move people from Washington to New York in an hour. Building the D.C.-Baltimore stretch could cost between $10 billion and $12 billion, of which Northeast Maglev had said it has


Welcome to Music City, Md.: Will an arts district make Baltimore County a tourist attraction?

as Friendly’s and Plymouth Wallpaper have closed in recent years. The Plymouth sign still hangs over one of the three vacant buildings at Bloomsbury Avenue. “There’s a lot of people working hard to really make it an exciting destination place,” said Brian Higgins, general manager of Bill’s Music, where nearly 2,000 guitars line the walls. While he said Catonsville over the years “kind of needed a jump-start a little bit,” Bill’s is a landmark that has thrived for 54 years. Higgins wants musicians to have more places in town where they can collaborate, swap ideas and create. “We don’t want to become a ghost town out here,” Higgins said. “We want to be known as a hotbed of activity.” The arts and entertainment designation could encourage artists to create and sell their work, without having to pay state income taxes, and spur property owners and developers to spend money improving existing buildings, also with the help of tax breaks. Those organizing the effort say Catonsville can draw art studios, performance venues and more bars and restaurants featuring live music, citing Rams Head On Stage in Annapolis and Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory Art Center as examples. “Significant” investors are already interested, said Baltimore County Council member Tom Quirk, though he would not say who. There’s “a genuine excitement and a genuine energy,” he said. Activists have been seeking the arts and entertainment designation for Catonsville for two years, after the 2018 death of then-Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz delayed the first application. The Baltimore County Arts Guild, a nonprofit group that supports and promotes county arts programs and events, in 2017 formed “an arts and entertainment council” with leaders from Towson, Pikesville and Dundalk to discuss which community should apply, Spencer said. The southwest corner of the county was deemed “the most viable and ready” location, she said. Maryland has 28 districts spread throughout Baltimore and 18 counties. A Towson University study found the districts supported $1 billion of economic activity last year, $72 million in state and local tax revenue and almost 10,000 jobs, paying $320 million in wages. The designation is central to big redevelopment projects, such as downtown Silver Spring, and neighborhood efforts such as those in Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Avenue corridor and Highlandtown. An official arts district provides various incentives, including waiving the state’s 10 percent admissions tax for some businesses, exempting artists who live and work in the


Our favorite letters to the editor of 2019

You wrote to us. We published. Here are our 10 favorite letters of the year, from gun reform to pandas. See more of Opinions’ Best of 2019 content Dogged issues for public spaces While much of Washington’s attention was focused on Capitol Hill and the White House, a dispute over a dog park broke out in Chevy Chase — and readers could not get enough. Suzanne Bogart Richman offered a compromise. And Marla Brin wished her neighborhood issue would rise to the same level. Missing morality in the Jamal Khashoggi saga Readers Jerry Rose and Phelan Wyrick show that many Americans, not just journalists, care about the murder of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives in Istanbul. Every step of the way, readers expressed horror at what happened and gratitude that The Post would not give up in its pursuit of justice for Khashoggi. James Holzhauer should be celebrated, not reviled In his May 3 letter, Mike Waring defended a “Jeopardy” champion from attacks on his strategy. James Holzhauer was winning, Waring wrote, but because someone would beat him, we should enjoy watching while we could. Someone did beat Holzhauer, but his record run on Jeopardy had a lasting impact on the game — and on readers. Grossly misunderstanding the route to opioid addiction In his Dec. 3 letter, Russ Merbeth brought the opioid crisis into clear focus. His son died of an opioid overdose, and Merbeth said most people misunderstand how others become addicted to the painkiller. Thank you, Bei Bei, for just being you Washington, and the rest of the country, bid adieu to Bei Bei, a beloved panda, this fall. Roberta Bailey wrote in her Nov. 22 letter about how watching Bei Bei on the National Zoo’s Panda Cam helped her through a life crisis. There should be no more delays in the Bijan Ghaisar investigation Readers were aghast at the U.S. Park Police’s handling of the death of Bijan Ghaisar. In his Jan. 30 letter, Mike Kiley noted that the Park Police’s delay in disseminating information about the death was inexcusable. Our Nationals treasure The Nationals’ World Series win was celebrated widely. Mark Briscoe said anyone who gave up on the team after its slow start was a fool — including him. Chuck and Kathy McSpadden of Texas, Michael Leo Donovan of Montreal, Janet Wamsley, George Lewis and Donna Mrozek also weighed in. Readers


Mealworm mac and tarantula tacos? How to eat your way to a sustainable future.

students, educators and cafeteria staff to embrace edible insects. He is asking them to consider, with all the environmental and health benefits bugs deliver, why we’re not eating them already. Yoon says eating insects is like eating any other food. Because we’re not used to preparing them or seeing them on menus, he says, many Americans may perceive bugs as revolting. But when sampled in familiar, delicious dishes, views often change. With more than 2,000 types of edible creatures identified — including flies, bees, spiders and caterpillars, each with distinctive textures and flavors — where do you start? Here, Yoon shares three popular bugs for kids: ●Crickets: Like all insects, these great hoppers use far less water, feed and space than cattle and other larger sources of protein. Thanks to budding popularity, energy bars, chocolate balls, chips, pasta, flour and more made from crickets are widely available online and in specialty stores. These bugs even come in cotton-candy flavor. ●Mealworms: A mealworm is actually the larva of a beetle, and, yucky as that may sound, they’re yummy! What do they taste like? It depends on how they’re prepared. When roasted or baked, they have a nutty flavor. According to the growers at Livin Farms, many compare mealworms to sunflower seeds, peanuts or pumpkin seeds. ●Black ants: These little guys’ zesty, citrusy flavor is surprising. “It’s like popping a [lemon hard candy] in your mouth,” says Yoon, with delight. Nutritionally insects are powerhouses, containing about the same amount of protein as beans, meat or fish, ounce for ounce, as well as essential fatty acids, important fiber (not usually found in meat), and loads of healthy vitamins and minerals. If that’s not enough to persuade you to try a plate of environmentally friendly fried dragonflies, or a handful of chocolate-coated spiders, consider this: Like shellfish, insects and arachnids are arthropods, so if you enjoy shrimp, crab or lobster, you’re already eating their relatives from the sea. But insects therefore share some common food allergens with shellfish, too, so be sure to seek the advice of your doctor before eating any bugs if food allergies are a concern. For buggy recipes and inspiration, check out the Brooklyn Bugs Instagram feed, the Smithsonian series Bug Bites or an insect cookbook. But first, as with any other food, be sure to get your bugs from reputable farms or providers — not your local park! kidspost@washpost.com


Essential oils are potent, risky and promising. Here’s what you need to know.

“The research is quite promising,” said Harpreet Gujral, director of integrative medicine at Sibley Memorial Hospital in the District. She cited ongoing clinical studies that strive to measure the degree to which oils can alleviate symptoms of anxiety and nausea, as well as how they affect mood. “The results are mixed, but the research is there,” she said. “We just need more.” Of the 100 most common essential oils, about 10 have been researched “in great depth” over the past three decades, said Robert Tisserand, who wrote the widely cited 1995 textbook “Essential Oil Safety,” which received a substantial update in 2013. Those efforts have yielded some concrete evidence (the cooling sensation of peppermint oil, the bacteria-killing power of tea tree oil or the calming effect of lavender, for example) but the results aren’t guaranteed for everyone. Some researchers believe essential oils could also be key in solving the looming antibiotic-drug-resistance crisis. “Research strongly suggests that bacteria don’t develop resistance to essential oils the way they do to antibiotics,” Tisserand said. For now, most people encounter essential oils in cosmetic environments such as spas or salons or in health food stores. They make up what has become a multibillion-dollar industry. Revenue in the United States spiked 40 percent from 2014 to 2018 and, according to Grand View Research, is expected to reach more than $5 billion in the next four years. Although some of that growth is from the food industry, which uses the extracts’ antimicrobial properties to improve shelf life, the rise of plant-based chemicals in personal care is significant. As consumers search for greener alternatives to synthetic cosmetics and prescription drugs, aromatherapy has crossed over from New Age hobby to mainstream phenomenon and revived the conversation around the natural healing properties of plants. Skeptics tend to wrestle with the ambiguity of essential oils, which occupy a gray area between perfume and medicine. Plant elixirs are often promoted with lofty promises and fuzzy science and aren’t regulated by the FDA. That means companies don’t have to prove their products are safe or effective and largely aren’t held accountable for what they put on the label. As a result, shopping for essential oils can be a nightmare. Consumers face a marketplace that’s littered with deceptive marketing, unsubstantiated claims and conflicting advice. “There is, unfortunately, a lot of bad information out there,” Tisserand said. “And the way it spreads now, it’s


‘Our friends didn’t have to die’: Afghanistan Papers surface pain and familiar frustrations

Lawmakers, veterans and experts have expressed shock and resignation after a Washington Post report Monday unveiled 18 years of distortion by U.S. officials over the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan. The documents involved — more than 2,000 pages of confidential notes and interviews from more than 400 people, from ambassadors to troops on the ground — exposed a constant parade of failures while three presidential administrations insisted the war was moving in the right direction. “We must end the vicious, lethal cycle of misinformation and unspecified, unsupported strategies,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in response, calling for public hearings with Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other officials. “The Senate Armed Services Committee should hold hearings on the state of the Afghanistan conflict and the infuriating details & alleged falsehoods reported today,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a member of the committee. “The time to end this war and bring our troops home honorably is now,” said Rep. Max Rose (D-N.Y.), an Afghanistan veteran. Statements from lawmakers came amid veterans reconciling their war with a new lens through which to view it. For Marine Corps veteran Dustin Kelly, the report reignites the agony of not knowing precisely what comrades gave their lives for. “The most traumatic experiences of our lives didn’t have to happen, our friends didn’t have to die on the other side of the planet,” Kelly, who served as a mortar man in Helmand province in 2010 to retake the Taliban’s stronghold, told The Post on Monday. The Pentagon denied intentions to mislead lawmakers and the public and said the “hindsight” from Lessons Learned, the confidential records collected by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, helped revise and inform their strategy. “There has been no intent by DoD to mislead Congress or the public,” Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement. “DoD officials have consistently briefed the progress and challenges associated with our efforts in Afghanistan, and DoD provides regular reports to Congress that highlight these challenges. The information contained in the interviews was provided to SIGAR for the express purpose of inclusion in SIGAR’s public reports.” “We remain in Afghanistan to protect our national interests and ensure that Afghanistan is never again used as a safe haven for terrorists who threaten the United States,” Campbell said. Retired Army Gen.


Teen vaping of marijuana surges, spurring public health worries

by the University of Michigan. Among 10th-graders, 19.4 percent had vaped the drug in the previous year, and among eighth-graders, 7 percent said they had. The percentage of 12th-graders who said they had vaped marijuana in the previous month jumped from 7.5 percent in the 2018 survey to 14 percent in the 2019 survey — the second-largest jump for any drug in the history of the survey. “This is a really big increase,” Jonathan P. Caulkins, a drug-policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in an email. Caulkins said he had expected large increases in states that have legalized marijuana, but not a nationwide rise of such proportions. David Hammond, a public health professor at the University of Waterloo who studies marijuana consumption in Canada and the United States, said the data show not just a switch to a new delivery system, but an increase in overall consumption. He said he has reached similar conclusions from his own research. “This drug is here to stay. These new forms of delivery, whether you like them or not . . . they’re here to stay,” Hammond said. “What we need is a market that’s fairly regulated.” In just a few years, vaping has quickly surged to the second-most-popular method of consuming marijuana behind smoking, he added. The reasons are obvious. “It’s super convenient. It sits there in your pocket. It’s ready to go as soon as you take a puff. It doesn’t smell. It’s very portable,” he said. Although some states have legalized recreational use of marijuana for adults, adolescents cannot purchase the drug legally and are much more likely to use vape oils found on the black market, Benowitz said. An outbreak of lung disease associated with contaminated vaping products has killed 52 people and hospitalized 2,409, many of them teenagers and young adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most who have fallen ill vaped THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana obtained on the black market. Dried marijuana flowers contain about 20 percent to 30 percent THC, Hammond said. Vape oils, however, generally run at 70 to 90 percent THC, he said, exposing users to much higher concentrations in each puff. Users can mitigate that by consuming less. The survey showed that near-daily use of marijuana (20 or more occasions in the previous 30 days by any method) rose 1.3 percent among 10th-graders, to 4.8 percent, and


Sport climbing moves into the spotlight with an Olympic debut in 2020

The big sports news is that 2020, which is just around the corner, is an Olympic year. The Summer Games will take place in Tokyo, Japan, from July 24 to August 9. The big Olympic news is there will be five new sports at the Summer Games: baseball/softball, karate, skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing. It’s hard to think about surfing when it’s December. But competitive climbing is an indoor sport in which athletes climb walls covered with “rocks” made of hard, molded resin. There will be three types of competitive climbing in the Summer Olympics. In speed climbing, two athletes race up a 15-meter wall (almost 50 feet) as quickly as they can. Don’t worry! They have safety ropes that keep them from falling. Bouldering is when the athletes move across routes laid out on much lower walls. Finally, lead climbing is when athletes with safety ropes try to see how high they can climb a super-difficult course in six minutes. Nick Gava, the gym director of the Earth Treks climbing center in Arlington, Virginia, thinks the speed climbing will make the biggest splash in the Summer Games. Gava says the sport is “like sprinting . . . vertically.” While the Olympics will throw a huge international spotlight on the sport, most climbers will not become Olympians. According to Gava, climbers enjoy the mental and community aspects of climbing. Gava says climbing is a great way to deal with stress because climbing requires “complete focus.” You can’t worry about other things when you are climbing. The sport also helps people face their fears and learn to trust others. In most climbs, the climber is working with someone else on the end of the safety rope. As Gava likes to say, “Climbing can create good people.” That includes kids. David Rosman is a freshman at Washington-Liberty High School in Arlington, who has been climbing for three years. He recently gave up soccer to concentrate on competitive climbing. (David still runs track for Washington-Liberty.) David, who is 14, was introduced to the sport when he attended the Maryland Renaissance Festival and spent much of the day on a climbing wall there. He found Earth Treks, not far from his home, and soon he was a regular visitor. While he competes in bouldering and lead climbing, David says he enjoys the climbing community. “I’ve met a lot of good friends through climbing,” he


Boeing Starliner launch on Friday comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversy

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Boeing has been under siege for months after two of its 737 Max aircraft plummeted from the sky killing 346 people. Members of Congress are accusing the industry stalwart of putting profits over safety. A whistleblower testified that schedule pressure created a “factory in chaos.” Even Jim Chilton’s part of the company — the space division — was the subject of a searing watchdog report last month that found it had received hundreds of millions of dollars in “unnecessary” payments stemming from an unusually cozy relationship with NASA. For Boeing, the timing of the report couldn’t have been worse, coming as it was preparing to fly a key test of the Starliner space capsule designed to fly NASA’s astronauts to the International Space Station. That launch is now scheduled for 6:36 a.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral, and while no astronauts will be on board, the first launch of NASA’s new spacecraft has taken on a far greater importance for Boeing than just a test. It’s a shot at a bit of redemption. A successful launch would be a moment of triumph amid the tumult that has dogged the company the past year and the news this week that it will halt production on its troubled 737 Max airplane in January, a decision that could not only harm Boeing’s bottom line but also send shock waves through the economy. Friday’s launch also comes as Boeing, long one of the major dominant players in space, now faces increased competition from a growing space industry, including from rivals such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) So in the face of the critical report from NASA’s inspector general last month, Chilton, a soft-spoken engineer who has risen through the ranks during a 35-year career at Boeing, fired off an email to his staff. He reminded the team that it was building on a heritage that stretched to the dawn of the Space Age: “We have been part of every NASA human spaceflight from — from Mercury, Gemini and Apollo to the space shuttle and [the International Space Station] — and we’re proud to continue that unwavering partnership.” And he issued an emotional call to arms, both defending the company and its workforce while also pushing back against critics and competitors. The email, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, is


Climate politics is a dead end. So the world could turn to this desperate final gambit.

Speaking for the climate mainstream, activists such as Greta Thunberg stress that only a drastic push toward net-zero carbon emissions can save the world. But, as Thunberg readily admits, the politics to achieve this don’t exist. If anything, the events of the past decade — including the failure of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP25, climate conference in Madrid this month — have shown that asking our political systems to achieve net-zero emissions quickly is like asking a toaster to make a cup of coffee. Which is why the world could turn to a drastic step to evade the pitfalls of climate politics as we know them: geoengineering. The basic idea of solar geoengineering, which most often involves spraying shiny droplets into the upper atmosphere to cool the planet, strikes some people as outlandish. It isn’t. We know that spraying reflective particles into the upper atmosphere can cool down the Earth because we’ve measured volcanoes doing precisely that. And the key technologies we’d need to mimic that effect have been in place since the 1950s. Geoengineering’s biggest selling point is its cost. Up-front investments are estimated in the $1 billion to $100 billion range, not even 1 percent of low cost estimates for the proposed Green New Deal, or at most 15 percent of what the Pentagon spends in a year. Once it’s operational, estimates of what it would cost to keep it running vary, but the figure would likely be between $2 billion and $10 billion a year. By comparison, WeWork lost $1.25 billion in the most recent quarter. It’s important to avoid magical thinking. Solar geoengineering is not a solution to global warming. It’s a desperate gambit to blunt some — not even all — of its worst effects. And it comes with risks, including serious ones. Some computer models suggest it could lead to much less rain, and a botched project could disrupt key weather patterns such as the Indian monsoon and the rains that sustain the Amazon. Recent studies suggest it would make food crops less productive. Some worry a scheme that improves China’s climate could worsen India’s, setting the nuclear-armed neighbors on a path to war. We just don’t know. Even proponents accept that geoengineering would do nothing to blunt the ocean acidification that’s wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems, and it may not even stop sea-level rise, given that ice sheets are


Shoppers Food is leaving 13 locations. Here’s what is happening next.

After nearly a year of uncertainty, Shoppers Food & Pharmacy’s parent company announced this month that it is selling 13 stores to other grocery chains and shuttering four locations in the Washington region. Employees and local officials protested that decision Tuesday, demanding new jobs for laid-off workers and new shopping options for residents as United Natural Foods Inc. — which bought Shoppers last year — considers plans for the chain’s remaining 26 locations. “When you suffer, Prince George’s County suffers,” said Prince George’s County Council member Calvin Hawkins (D-At Large) at a rally Tuesday with union workers and politicians in front of the Shoppers in Landover. “It’s time to stop this foolishness.” State Sen. Arthur Ellis (D-Charles) said he planned to work with leaders at United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, which represents the Shoppers workers, to introduce legislation in January that would give more protections to workers. Currently, there are state recommendations that large companies provide 90 days’ notice before closing and offer employees retraining. But those are not legal requirements. Local 400 spokesman Jonathan Williams said the union learned about the most recent round of closures minutes before they were publicly announced and “after we had been asking [company officials]for a meeting for almost a year.” Williams said the union has been told that the Shoppers in Landover could close as early as Thursday — a decision that could leave its 72 employees without work heading into the holidays. Signs posted in the windows Tuesday read: “Store closing,” “Everything on sale!” “Nothing held back!” Inside, many of the shelves were bare. UNFI, a major supplier for Whole Foods Market, is committed to reducing its retail footprint, chief executive Steven Spinner said in a statement this month announcing the sale of the 13 stores. North Carolina-based grocer Compare Foods will take over the Shoppers location in Landover, in addition to those in Coral Hills and Colmar Manor in Prince George’s County and two locations in Baltimore, said general manager Leo Pena. He said that Compare Foods will receive the keys to the stores around Jan. 10 and that the stores will open 30 to 45 days after that. Pena said Compare Foods will offer “the same services as Shoppers, and more,” including free delivery. He said the store is considering renegotiating a contract with the union that serves Shoppers’ employees. Lidl, a German grocery powerhouse that is rapidly


asking [company officials]for a meeting for almost a year.” Williams said the union has been told that the Shoppers in Landover could close as early as Thursday — a decision that could leave its 72 employees without work heading into the holidays. Signs posted in the windows Tuesday read: “Store closing,” “Everything on sale!” “Nothing held back!” Inside, many of the shelves were bare. UNFI, a major supplier for Whole Foods Market, is committed to reducing its retail footprint, chief executive Steven Spinner said in a statement this month announcing the sale of the 13 stores. North Carolina-based grocer Compare Foods will take over the Shoppers location in Landover, in addition to those in Coral Hills and Colmar Manor in Prince George’s County and two locations in Baltimore, said general manager Leo Pena. He said that Compare Foods will receive the keys to the stores around Jan. 10 and that the stores will open 30 to 45 days after that. Pena said Compare Foods will offer “the same services as Shoppers, and more,” including free delivery. He said the store is considering renegotiating a contract with the union that serves Shoppers’ employees. Lidl, a German grocery powerhouse that is rapidly expanding in the United States, plans to acquire six Shoppers locations, said spokesman William Harwood. Those sites are in Annapolis, Brooklyn Park, Oxon Hill, Takoma Park and Wheaton in Maryland and in Burke in Virginia. “We will be making significant investments in the redevelopment of these sites, and will have more to share in terms of the grand opening timeliness and hiring events at the end of next year,” Harwood said in a statement. The four Shoppers locations that are closing by the end of January are in Baltimore and Severn in Maryland, andAlexandria and Manassas in Northern Virginia. This summer, the chain’s outlet in Chillum, Md., shut its doors; a store in Falls Church, Va., closed Sept. 1. Kevin Freeman, a butcher who has worked at Shoppers for 32 years, said the spirits of employees at the New Carrollton location where he now works are low, even though the fate of that location is unknown. “People don’t know where they are going to live — they are already living paycheck to paycheck.” In Prince George’s County, which had 12 Shoppers locations, officials say they have been frustrated by the lack of information they have received from UNFI. About 15


We’re letting China win the 5G race. It’s time to catch up.

Henry M. Paulson Jr. is the former treasury secretary and chairman of the Paulson Institute. England may have sparked the first industrial revolution with the steam engine, but its potential was realized in the United States. America led the second and third industrial revolutions — automobiles, computers and Internet — creating the foundation for U.S. economic superiority. But today, with the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, the United States is falling behind. While our universities and tech firms still lead in cutting-edge innovation — from artificial intelligence to 5G wireless technology — it is China that has deployed them. The United States is losing the commercialization race, a failure of our own making. We must urgently confront these shortcomings to make up for lost time and opportunity. Powerful AI algorithms and machine learning techniques make everything faster and more efficient. If AI is the new “electricity,” then 5G is the transmission and distribution infrastructure needed to enable these technologies to perform optimally. This new “digital highway” centered on 5G will give rise to new industries and services previously unimagined. The United States must redouble its efforts to build such a digital infrastructure and make the commercialization of the Internet of Things a reality. That’s because big data and AI algorithms require blazing-fast networks to succeed. And the latest 5G mobile network will be 100 times faster than existing networks. Movies will take seven seconds to download instead of seven minutes. But more important will be the major efficiencies and disruptions across industries — from helping doctors perform remote surgery to processing images for driverless cars in real time. Any notable lag could mean the difference between life and death. China is intent on realizing these goals. Beijing’s industrial policy and China’s private sector are racing to propel the commercialization of 5G and the technologies, products and services it enables, not only for China but also for nations around the world that would welcome Huawei 5G. Even China’s state-owned enterprises have deployed quickly. Meanwhile, Washington has stalled. When it comes to major breakthroughs, we must figure out how to shorten the lag between innovation and commercialization. Scale deployment is required with 5G. Small boxes, or microcells, must be placed on telephone poles or lampposts to ensure robust network coverage, but U.S. firms face regulatory hurdles in this effort that their Chinese counterparts don’t. Speed matters because deploying a reliable and


How we know global warming is real

[This story has been optimized for offline reading on our apps. For a richer experience, you can find the full version of this story here. An Internet connection is required.] Sonnblick Observatory opened and began recording the weather in 1886, a technological wonder that measured how wind, barometric pressure and temperatures changed at upper altitudes, and during storms. Although the alpine station was advanced for its time, it was inspired by a compulsion as old as humanity itself: the need to monitor the weather, to understand it and to learn when to avoid it. In the 19th century, violent storms sank so many ships on the Great Lakes that Congress authorized in 1870 a national weather service to help maritime navigators avoid peril. Eleven years earlier, a shipwreck off the coast of Wales led the United Kingdom’s newly formed Meteorological Service to set up a network of 15 coastal stations. Soon after, the forecasts generated were published daily in the Times of London. “Much like what happens today, what prompts people to be interested in weather data?” said Jon Nese, a meteorology professor at Penn State. “Disasters.” If early forecasting aimed to avert tragedy and economic loss, the troves of data it produced are used today to monitor a new sort of disaster, one that was scarcely foreseeable by 19th-century meteorologists but that now constitutes the single most significant fact about the planet’s environment. It is that the world is more than 1 degree Celsius hotter than it was before industrialization began pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere. This warming has fueled new deadly fires, strengthened hurricanes and displaced people. And many areas have warmed far more than the average. How can that be known? How can it be possible to take Earth’s temperature, not just for this week or this year, but for decades and centuries? The answer begins with nearly 1,500 weather stations already operating by the time Sonnblick began recording. The telegraph allowed all those readings to be collected and analyzed to show weather patterns. In recent decades, meteorologists have relied on those records — and thousands more like them — to compare how the world’s climate used to be with how it is now. And as more observations from the past are retrieved from dusty archives worldwide, they point to the possibility of even more precipitous warming. Station density is key in a weather network. The


Anne Arundel County and Howard County home sales

Union Ct., GLEN BURNIE-MARLEY CREEK AREA Booker Ave., Crown Rd., Dogwood Rd., Holly Ridge Dr., Jamie Ct., Marley Ave., Mockingbird Cir., Nandina Lane, Oak Spring Dr., Spring Maiden Ct., Taylor Ave., Water Fountain Ct., HANOVER AREA Compton Ct., Etley Ct., Nottoway Dr., JESSUP AREA Wigley Ave., LAUREL AREA Shannons Alley, Sudlersville S., LINTHICUM HEIGHTS AREA Carl Ave., Nancy Ave., LOTHIAN AREA Grenock Dr., Pemberton Lane, MILLERSVILLE AREA Fawn Haven Ct., Hortonia Point Dr., Mimico S., Stone Wheel Ct. W., NORTH BEACH AREA Walnut Ave., ODENTON AREA Bramble Cir., Commissary Cir., Lilac Ct., New Dawn Lane, Patuxent Rd. N., Regiment Ct., Willow Leaf Lane, PASADENA-ROCK CREEK AREA Abbey Ct., Bayside Beach Rd., Braid Hills Dr., Circle Rd., Division Rd., Eliot Rd., Hampton Chase Ct., Hillside Rd., Hunter Rd., Luke Dr., Mulberry Ridge Ct., Pinehurst Harbour Way, Seaford Ct., Wedgewood Ct., SEVERN AREA Branchard Ct., Champlain Dr., Redhaven Dr., Sappling Dr., Sicily Lane, Sunhaven Way, Willard Way, SEVERNA PARK AREA Baskerville Ct., Dividing Rd., Linda Lane, Marlbrook Rd., Northway, Retford Dr., Stinchcomb Rd., Wild Oak Rd., SHADY SIDE AREA Bay View Ave., Oak Rd., TRACYS LANDING AREA James Ave., These sales data recorded by the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation in August were provided by Black Knight Inc. For information about other residential real estate transactions, visit washingtonpost.com/homesales. CENTENNIAL-BENSON AREA Atwood Lane, Carillon Dr., Evergreen Way, Green Shade Ct., Hidden Fox Ct., Links Ct., Mount Albert Rd., Portsmouth Rd., Resort Rd., Stardust Lane, Wetherburn Rd., CLARKSVILLE AREA Distant Thunder Trail, Highland Rd., COLUMBIA (EAST) AREA Early Red Ct., Goose Landing Cir., Kilimanjaro Rd., Old Buggy Ct., Pressed Gentian, Reader Lane, Sharp Antler, Spindrift Pl., Sweet Clover, Thunder Hill Rd., Watchlight Ct., Whiteacre Rd., COLUMBIA (WEST) AREA April Journey, Blue February Way, Empty Song Rd., Harpers Farm Rd., Judy Lane, Little Patuxent Pkwy., Slalom Lane, Sunny Spring, Tooks Way, Twin Rivers Rd., Wilde Lake Terr., Woodenhawk Cir., DAYTON AREA Open Land Ct., ELKRIDGE AREA Abrianna Way, Cherrybark Oak Lane, Daniel John Dr., Diggers Lane, Elk Forest Ct., Hunter Rd., Mary Ann Lane, Rowanberry Dr., Sandpiper Ct., Water Oak Rd., Woodvalley Rd., ELLICOTT CITY AREA Blueberry Hill Lane, Brampton Pkwy., Brightwood Ct., Falls Run Rd., Haycarriage Ct., Ilchester Rd., Meadowpond Dr., Montgomery Run Rd., Nelson House Rd., Papillon Dr., Rogers Ave. N., Stony Creek Lane, Trotters Chase, Wilton Ave., FULTON AREA Tawes St., Westside Blvd., GLENELG AREA Patterson Farm Ct., GLENWOOD AREA Hobbs