Top-performing schools with elite students

on international awareness. It is one of the few elite public schools without a selective admissions system. Instead, as happens sometimes, the lottery participants self-select into an academic powerhouse. Liberal Arts and Science Academy (Austin) Derived from two separate programs born in the 1980s, the magnet called LASA became a separate school in 2007. It draws students from all over Austin based on an application process similar to that used by very selective colleges. Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts (Natchitoches, La.) Sophomores, juniors and seniors who survive the tough admissions process live at the boarding school, which was established by the state legislature in 1982. Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School for Government and International Studies (Richmond) Unlike the math-science orientation of most of the public elites, the focus of this school is on world cultures and building students’ leadership skills. North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (Durham, N.C.) This school, established in 1980 in an abandoned hospital, started the small but interesting trend of state-created boarding schools drawing bright and ambitious high-schoolers from around the state. Northside College Prep (Chicago) Opened in 1999, the selective magnet school was the first new high school in Chicago in 20 years. It has 1,100 students whose academic classes are at the honors and AP levels only. Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics (Oklahoma City) The state-funded boarding school teaches all courses at the university level. South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics (Hartsville, S.C.) Another state boarding school, this one is for 11th- and 12th-graders from around the state. Stuyvesant High School (New York) It has been teaching the city’s most academically ambitious students for several generations. It offers about 55 AP courses every semester and has many courses above that level. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (Fairfax County, Va.) It is the most selective public high school in the United States and draws mostly from the affluent households of Northern Virginia. Union County Magnet High School (Scotch Plains, N.J.) This selective-admission school focuses on science, math and technology. University of Illinois Laboratory High School (Urbana, Ill.) Admission to this day school on the University of Illinois campus is competitive. The school makes good use of its higher-education environment. Walter Payton College Prep (Chicago) Founded in 2000 shortly after the death of Chicago Bears football legend Payton, the magnet’s admission system is very competitive. The


After extinction threat, Delmarva fox squirrel is on the rebound

I’m biased. They always look healthy, and their fur is gorgeous. You know how raccoons and other animals sometimes look like they’ve had the worst of a fight? These guys always look gorgeous.” Their behavior doesn’t always mirror their good looks. Keller said Delmarvas can move elegantly through the open understory of the hardwood forests they prefer — their tails flowing behind them — but they can also appear sort of “klutzy and comical,” stumbling along gracelessly. By the 1960s, hunting and habitat loss had caused the population of the Delmarva fox squirrel to dwindle, and it occupied only 10 percent of its historic range. That’s when the feds stepped in. Working with natural resources officials in Maryland, Virginia and Delaware, federal biologists set about saving the squirrel. Hunting it was outlawed. Starting in the 1980s, groups of squirrels were trapped in relatively squirrel-rich areas and moved to other spots on the peninsula, a process known as translocation. The squirrels became firmly established in 11 of the 16 translocation sites, a high success rate. Today, the squirrel is found in 10 counties on the peninsula, with a population estimated at about 20,000. Last fall it was recommended for delisting as a federally protected species. Public comments are under consideration now. A final decision is expected this year. What of prospects for the future? An increasing amount of land has been protected through programs such as the Maryland Environmental Trust and the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation. Logging practices have shifted from short-rotation pulpwood — harvested every 25 years for paper — to longer-rotation saw timber, which is cut every 40 to 80 years for boards. Delmarvas like that. And Keller and others will continue to keep tabs on the squirrels, setting up trail cameras to catch a glimpse, using hair catchers to snag bits of fur for DNA analysis. On a recent visit to the Eastern Shore with Keller and Glenn Therres, who monitors endangered species for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, maps were spread out on the dashboard of Keller’s vehicle. Handwritten annotations indicated where Delmarvas had been spotted, crosshatching showed their range. The peninsula was revealed as a watery wonderland, shot through with rivers and coves, studded with forest. “So many people from D.C., they just stay on the highway and have a windshield view of the Delmarva Peninsula,” Keller said. “[To them] it’s just the road


Can insects go from pests to popular snack foods?

Meal worms are sorted before being cooked in San Francisco. A growing number of "entopreneurs" are trying to persuade people that insects are the next super food. (Ben Margot/AP) They hop. They crawl. They squirm. And they could be coming to a dinner plate near you. An increasing number of “entopreneurs” are launching businesses to feed a growing appetite for crickets, mealworms and other edible insects. (“Ento” comes from the Greek word for insect.) These upstarts are trying to persuade more Americans to eat bugs, which can be produced with less land, food and water than other sources of animal protein. The United Nations has been promoting edible insects as a way to improve nutrition, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and create jobs in insect production. At least 2 billion people worldwide already eat insects as part of their diet, according to the 2013 report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. But it could be a tough sell for Westerners, who are more likely to squash bugs than savor them. Genevieve Gladson Rainville turns over meal worms as they bake in an oven Wednesday in San Francisco. (Ben Margot/AP) “Insects are viewed as what ruins food — a roach in your soup, a fly in your salad. That’s the biggest obstacle — the ick factor,” said Daniella Martin, the “Girl Meets Bug” blogger and author of “Edible: An Adventure Into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet.” Inside San Francisco’s La Cocina, a commercial kitchen for food entrepreneurs, Monica Martinez empties hundreds of live mealworms, each about two inches long, into a plastic container. She uses chopsticks to pull out dead ones before pouring the squirming critters on a tray and sliding them into an oven. Martinez started Don Bugito PreHispanic Snackeria to entice American consumers with treats inspired by popular snacks in her native Mexico. Among her specialties are spicy superworms and chocolate-covered, salted crickets. “The idea is to offer another type of protein into the food market,” said Martinez, an artist and industrial designer who launched Don Bugito as a street food project in 2011. “The biggest job that we have to do is to try to get more people to try our foods.” Don Bugito snacks are sold online or at a La Cocina kiosk in San Francisco’s Ferry Building, where retail workers recently offered free samples of chocolate-covered crickets and


spicy superworms. “No!” said a young boy when asked to try one. But more adventurous eaters gave them a try. “It doesn’t really taste like a bug. It tastes like crunchy spices,” said Leslie Foreman, who sampled a chili-lime cricket. “I’m not sure this is going to be my everyday snack, but I think it’s fun and I think it’s cool.” Across San Francisco Bay inside at a kitchen in Berkeley, Megan Miller and her assistants shape clumps of orange-ginger cookie dough, carefully arrange them up on a tray and slip them in an oven. The key ingredient: flour made from ground-up crickets. Miller’s start-up, Bitty Foods, sells its cricket-based cookies and baked goods online and at upscale grocery stores. Many of its customers are moms looking for a healthful snack for their kids. “We like to say our cookies have twice the protein and half the sugar of a regular cookie,” said Miller, a former journalist and tech entrepreneur. Miller said insects have a “branding problem,” so she’s trying to change people’s minds and palates by mixing them into familiar foods in attractive packaging. “We’re going to see people start trying insects in a powdered form — incorporated into foods so they’re invisible — before people are going to make the leap to eating whole insects,” Miller said. Big Cricket Farms, one of only a handful of North American companies producing crickets for people to eat, is struggling to meet fast-growing demand for the chirping insects, said Kevin Bachhuber, who launched the warehouse farm in Youngstown, Ohio, last year after getting his first taste of bugs in Thailand. Bachhuber’s start-up currently produces about 8,000 pounds of crickets a month. He hopes to increase capacity to 25,000 pounds per month, but still doesn’t think that will be enough to meet demand from restaurants and health food makers. “We’re constantly slammed by orders. We simply can’t keep up,” said Bachhuber, a Wisconsin native who’s had a long interest in urban farming. “The speed at which people have been willing to eat bugs is crazy. It’s cool.” Oakland-based Tiny Farms is trying to address supply crunch by developing more efficient ways to mass-produce crickets and other bugs. It eventually wants to create a large network of insect farms to supply food makers such as Don Bugito and Bitty Foods. “The goal is basically to make it easier and cheaper to produce industrial-scale


On Capitol Hill, new homes come with history

The restored building has been a fixture in the neighborhood for more than 200 years. The restored building has been a fixture in the neighborhood for more than 200 years. The Georgian-style Maples manor house on Capitol Hill has had an eventful history. Designed by William Lovering in 1795, the Maples was visited often by George Washington and purchased by Francis Scott Key in 1815, one year after he wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.” It was used as a hospital for wounded soldiers during the War of 1812. And in 1936, the building was purchased by the Friendship House Association, a provider of social services that owned the house until a foreclosure in 2010. Today, architects Cunningham and Quill and developer Altus Realty Partners have renovated the Maples and built new townhomes and condos on the site that surrounds the property’s south lawn. Although the character provided by the architects and their homage to the original manor house are appealing, Christine Flohr, a buyer at the Maples, says she was attracted first by the location and second by the fact that she could buy a newly constructed home. “Right now I rent in Logan Circle, and I’ve been looking at homes for just a few months,” Flohr says. “My biggest priority is my commute, because I work near Metro Center and wanted to have a quick Metro ride to work. I love the Eastern Market and spend a lot of time in the area, but I didn’t think I would find a condo, especially a new one, in that neighborhood.” The carriage house unit at the Maples development has an open floor plan. (Benjamin C Tankersley/For The Washington Post) Move in next month: The developers dug an underground garage on the property that is connected to each building by elevators. One remaining parking space is available for sale at $40,000. The three townhouses, originally priced from $1.85 million to $1.9 million, have been sold, along with all the duplexes and many of the flats. Five of the 19 residences are still available for purchase, priced from $489,900 to $719,900. Residents are expected to move into the Maples in May or June. Flohr purchased a one-bedroom, one-bath unit in the Schoolhouse Row building which has an open floor plan and a balcony. “Each home in the Maples is unique, which is something you don’t see that much in new construction,” Flohr


The Middle East’s sick state

economic activity, delay reforms and dampen confidence,” warns the IMF. The Middle East’s body politic, enfeebled by these disorders, has been ravaged by sectarian and civil wars. The International Rescue Committee estimated this month that 11.4 million Syrians, or about half the population, have fled their homes. The Syrian disaster has affected the whole region. To take just one example, poverty has more than doubled in Iraqi Kurdistan, according to a recent World Bank report. As weak governance structures have buckled across the Middle East, extremist groups have become more powerful. The most potent is the Islamic State, which exploded out of the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq. But many other groups across the region are fusing popular rage with sectarian and tribal bases of support. Even if the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, can be “degraded” in Iraq and Syria over the next three years, as President Obama hopes, the underlying disorder in the region could spawn ISIS 2.0, or even 3.0. Observing the devastation in the Middle East is a bit like watching a hurricane pummel a vulnerable coastline. Outsiders can try to mitigate the destruction and provide humanitarian relief. They must also try to protect themselves from collateral damage. But they can’t stop the raging winds and surging tides from leveling fragile structures. As disaster-management experts have learned, a big storm has to blow itself out before rebuilding can begin. Graham Allison, who heads the Belfer Center here, argues that the U.S. government should be careful about trying to fix problems in the Middle East until it understands them better. He contrasts the deadly Ebola virus with the ideological contagion of the Islamic State. We know what causes Ebola and how to stop it, Allison wrote recently in Time magazine, but there is no such clarity about how the Islamic State toxin spreads or how it can be cured. What we do know is that this extremist virus has taken root in a body that is already severely weakened and showing no signs of recovering soon. Read more from David Ignatius’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. Read more on this issue: Valerie Amos: Who cares about Syria? Yochi Dreazen: In Yemen, the Middle East’s cold war could get hot Brian A. Catlos: Religious nationalism finds a footing in the Middle East The Post’s View: The militia menace in Iraq


Meet Jessica Pociask, your tour guide for crazy destinations

Jessica Pociask, owner of WANT Expeditions, at Great Falls. (Amanda Voisard/For the Washington Post) Correction: Jessica Pociask at Great Falls Park in Potomac. (Amanda Voisard/For the Washington Post) Jessica Pociask always packs three things when she travels: a camera, a pillow and a black-and-tan Bedouin scarf from Jordan, which can be used as a blanket, hat, shirt, skirt or to tie something up. She jokes that it’s all she truly needs as she crisscrosses the globe. Pociask (pronounced POE-zee-ack) has been to more than 80 countries and every continent. Her latest passport was issued in 2011 and is 50 pages long — there are only three blank pages remaining in it. As a tour operator for her boutique travel company, WANT Expeditions, Pociask, 34, takes her guests to some of the most remote corners of the world to see exotic wildlife. There are trips to see jaguars in Brazil’s Pantanal region, giant pandas in China and mountain chimpanzees in Congo. The company’s trips are priced as all-inclusive (with the exception of international air fare and visas), usually last about two weeks and accommodate up to 16 guests, although most groups are in the eight-to-10 range. Trips cost anywhere from $3,500 up to a $45,000 Antarctic expedition that includes stops at rarely visited ports of call such as the Crozet Islands, Kerguelen Islands, Saint-Paul Island and Amsterdam Islands. Pociask’s fascination with wildlife began at an early age. Growing up in Traverse City, Mich., she brought home creatures she found, bought or was given, including a fox, a snake, tropical fish, dogs, a hermit crab and more than 20 finches. “My parents had a lot of patience,” Pociask says. “And they really encouraged me to interact with the natural world.” Although her parents didn’t travel much, her father had armchair wanderlust. “He always talked about buying a sailboat, taking us kids out of school and home-schooling us as we sailed around the world,” says her younger sister, Catherine, who does marketing and public relations for WANT. The siblings also share a D.C. apartment when Jessica isn’t traveling or residing at her other home in Traverse City. When she was growing up, Jessica Pociask’s interest in travel was stoked through reading. “My grandfather had every National Geographic known to man,” she says. “Whenever we went over to his house for Christmas, I would go downstairs in his basement and thumb through them all.”


Debuting conductor offers experienced path through ‘The Bells’

Vassily Sinaisky is the epitome of a capable conductor. He’s been doing this for a long time, and it shows. In his debut with the National Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night, he showed none of the jitters of a newcomer. Sinaisky, after all, has been leading orchestras for more than four decades, first in the Soviet Union, then in Russia, and everywhere else. He’s held a number of music directorships, most recently at the Bolshoi in Moscow, a post he resigned, abruptly,in 2013. He knows how to make the music go, and for a diffuse and wide-ranging program like the one on Thursday, he’s a good man to have on the podium. Having said all that, I can’t entirely exonerate him from opening-night jitters, because some excuse was needed for the first piece, the overture to Borodin’s “Prince Igor.” It was the first time the NSO had performed the piece, and it sounded like it: Although its brooding opening was promising, the overall performance was messy, a bit raucous, and not very decisive. Sinaisky, however, made a point of acknowledging the wind and brass players who had offered solos. The orchestra rallied, a lot, for the Mozart clarinet concerto, which Sinaisky, a big, powerful figure on stage, conducted with a soft, firm touch, a sense of power deliberately restrained. The soloist was one of the NSO’s own: Loren Kitt, the principal clarinet, who joined the orchestra in 1970. His Mozart sounded as if he could play it with his eyes closed, even if he had the sheet music on a stand in front of him. In fact, sometimes it sounded as if he were indeed playing it with his eyes closed; he performed so fluidly that the whole thing felt leisurely, even when it was quite fast, and the energy flagged a bit in places. There were countless elegant touches, though, like one long, wonderful run that gradually scaled back from quite loud to quite soft, as Kitt’s fingers ran smoothly up and down the keys, and Sinaisky was a solicitous partner. The showpiece came after intermission with Rachmaninoff’s “The Bells,” big and burly and not all that frequently performed. (The only time the NSO had done it previously was in 1977 under the direction of Norman Scribner, the founder of the Choral Arts Society and a cornerstone of Washington’s choral scene, who died at the end of March, The


Former anti-drug activists reflect on marijuana legalization

marijuana laws. In the 1970s, when Pettigrew was a young mother of three, an earlier movement to decriminalize marijuana was in full swing. Between 1973 and 1978, 11 states representing more than one-third of the U.S. population decriminalized possession of up to one ounce of pot. The result? Unprecedented levels of adolescent drug use, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Those were the days when High Times, rolling papers and bongs were available at local record shops and in suburban malls. Kids as young as 11 told researchers at NIDA that marijuana was “easy to get.” By 1979, 1 in 9 high school seniors reported smoking pot every day. Pettigrew’s children did not smoke — she made sure of that — but the family had experienced the dangers of drug abuse firsthand. On Christmas Eve 1976, Pettigrew’s oldest son, Harold, was shot and seriously woundedby a young man high on PCP during an argument over a parking space. In an atmosphere of widespread drug abuse, decriminalizing marijuana sent the wrong message, Pettigrew contended. Rallying to action, she formed a youth group in her home to combat drug abuse and violence. Meanwhile, a young white mother of two in Silver Spring, Md., was also alarmed at the spread of drugs. In 1977, at the invitation of a teenage neighbor, Joyce Nalepka accompanied her two young sons to a Kiss concert at the Capital Centre in Landover, Md., where she was shocked by all the underage kids in the audience blatantly smoking pot, while security guards looked the other way. “Looking out over the arena, there was a cloud of smoke,” she recalls, “and so many of the kids couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13.” Her sons got sick from the fumes, she said, and her battle against decriminalization began. Pettigrew and Nalepka eventually joined forces in a parent-led movement that made preventing adolescent pot and drug use a national concern. The Silver Spring-based National Federation of Parents for Drug Free Youth (now the National Family Partnership) aligned with then-first lady Nancy Reagan in a “Just Say No” campaign that organized marches and brought rallies and conferences to Washington, pushing to overturn lenient drug laws. The organization’s president and public face, Nalepka attended events with Reagan and wrote articles decrying adolescent marijuana use. Pettigrew was the group’s first black board member. *** But 2015 isn’t 1975, and


Eat less meat, a government panel says. Is science on their side?

between diet and disease from population data is tough, because people who eat meat (or almost anything else) are likely to be different from people who don’t in all kinds of ways. And controlled trials, where we feed some people Diet X and some other people Diet Y, can go on for only so long. We can’t hold subjects hostage until they begin to die (or not) of heart disease. Nor can we kill them and autopsy their livers. Which means that all the research on meat, or on just about any other aspect of human nutrition, is necessarily limited. What are public health professionals supposed to do in the face of imperfect information? “The best we can,” says Lichtenstein. “You have an entire panel of scientists with no vested interest trying to look at all the evidence.” And so the answer to the question “how much meat should I eat?” is maddeningly elusive. Mozaffarian says two servings a week. Willett says one, or maybe none. The dietary guidelines committee recommends an overall pattern that includes 3.3 ounces per day of meat and poultry. But there is no optimal level. “And it’s not just meat,” says Lichtenstein. “We can’t know optimal levels of anything.” Customers shop for produce at a Whole Foods market in San Francisco. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) We need to reconcile ourselves to the idea that we simply can’t expect dietary recommendations that are both science-based and very specific. Although the committee looked at all the evidence and concluded that we would be better off if we ate less meat, Lichtenstein emphasizes that that isn’t the top dietary priority (as does Mozaffarian). Two things we do know, from decades of research all pointing in the same direction, is that if you really want to improve your diet, keep your calories in balance and eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Beyond that, cut your sugar intake. Substitute whole grains for refined. Get some exercise. The evidence on meat isn’t iron-clad, but “less meat” seems reasonable given that people need to eat more vegetables and fruits, and less overall. The calories need to come from somewhere, and we’re pretty sure meat — especially processed and fatty meat — isn’t doing us any good, so it makes sense to cut back. That’s the upshot. The reason the dietary guideline committee’s “less meat” recommendation makes sense is not that meat’s so very


Animal Watch: Renovations become a nightmare for 3 cats

STERLING, Among cases received by the Loudoun County Department of Animal Services.


Squirrel chilling out at National Zoo gets its moment in the sun

For Squirrel Week, John Kelly asked readers to send photos of the critters. We received nearly 600. Here are our favorites. The National Zoo is full of wild animals. Many of them are not behind bars. I’m talking about squirrels, those amazingly common creatures whose lives — to them, anyway — are no less dramatic than those of tigers or tamarins. And, certainly, a squirrel’s daily routine is more action-packed than a giant panda’s. Not that the squirrel photographed at the zoo by Angela Napili was engaged in any great life-or-death struggle. It was just chilling in the sun. Angela is the winner of this year’s Washington Post Squirrel Week Squirrel Photo Contest. Her photograph sounds simple — a gray squirrel on a tree — but it spoke to the judges. The squirrel is in that characteristic pose that only creatures with swiveling wrist and ankle joints can strike: hanging facedown from a tree trunk. Its back is arched. Its eyes are closed. The sun is shining. That sun. After this long Washington winter, there was something about the sunlight that just stirred us. The squirrel seemed to be channeling that exact moment when we realize, with relief, that spring really is coming. There were 598 entries in our second annual photo contest, almost twice as many as last year. I’m confident that we’re well on our way to becoming the nation’s leading squirrel photography contest. (Take that, New York Times.) Angela lives in the District and is a reference librarian at the Library of Congress. She likes taking her Nikon and long zoom lens to the National Zoo to capture the animals there. In early March, she was at the zoo shooting the lion cubs. There was still snow on the ground, but the sun was out. She spied a squirrel on a tree about nine feet away and turned her camera away from the charismatic megafauna to focus on the ubiquitous minifauna. “I think they’re adorable,” Angela said of squirrels. “I know that when they bury their nuts or acorns or whatever, they accidentally forget where they are sometimes and [the nuts] end up being trees. That’s nice, right?” Yes, it is. And to me, there’s something fitting about squirrels being responsible for some of the oaks that future generations will live in. What’s that saying? “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they


Guest conductor sets a fast tempo for Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Conductor Peter Oundjian (Sian Richards) It can be a fine line between energetic enthusiasm and manic excess, especially with the sonic resources of the modern orchestra brought to bear. In his guest appearance with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on Saturday evening in the Music Center at Strathmore, conductor Peter Oundjian seemed to aim for the former but sometimes ended up with the latter. Starting with a Haydn symphony, No. 96 in D (“Miracle”), instead of an overture was an idea that should be encouraged. Oundjian helped create an incisive style of articulation in this charming work but often pressed his initially fast tempos even faster, causing some alignment problems across the orchestra. The cadenza of four soloists at the end of the slow movement and the oboe solo in the trio of the Menuet, with a lovely high D from the assistant principal oboist, were particularly beautiful. With Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” in Ravel’s technicolor orchestration, Oundjian drew out every unusual sound, brisk tempo and dynamic extreme. The effect was often thrilling but by the end exhausting, not just for the listener but for some of the musicians, such as the trumpeter, worn just a little ragged in the final movement. High points were the chirping wrong-note grace notes of the woodwinds in the “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks” and the deep sounds of the ox cart in “Bydlo,” more mournful than brawny. The most memorable playing, though, was in the A-Minor oboe concerto of Ralph Vaughan Williams, with the pearl-like tone and flawless intonation of principal oboist Katherine Needleman front and center. The strings-only orchestra, often reduced from the full number of stands, was lush and refined. Needleman floated and tittered every note with confidence, down (or up) to the last one, the same high D played by her colleague in the Haydn, here in a limpid pianissimo. Downey is a freelance writer.


TV highlights: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s talk show ‘StarTalk’ premieres on Nat Geo

GOTHAM: Barbara (Erin Richards, L) meets Jason Lennon (guest star Milo Ventimiglia, R) at a charity ball. (Jessica Miglio/FOX) The remaining eight couples on “Dancing With the Stars” (ABC at 8 p.m.) dance all over winter’s grave with a celebration of spring break, taking on songs like “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas and our century’s masterpiece, “Bootylicious.” The couples are also divided into two competing groups: #TeamTrouble and #TeamYOLO, a signal from the gods that the end is nigh. Dave Stewart, Mark Ronson, Ryan Tedder and Scott Hendricks act as advisers to the Top 10 on “The Voice” (NBC at 8). The Ogre (guest star Milo Ventimiglia) targets someone close to Gordon while Bruce and Selina join forces for the greater good on “Gotham” (Fox at 8). Jane does just about everything she can to mend things with Rafael on “Jane the Virgin” (CW at 9). FINALE WATCH A former acquaintance — who both Callen and Sam thought was dead — shows up and asks for help on “NCIS: Los Angeles” (CBS at 10). SERIES PREMIERE The special “Hubble’s Cosmic Journey” (Nat Geo at 10) is a celebration of the amazing orbiting telescope, which has revealed much about the universe in its 25 years of duty. Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson (of course). SERIES PREMIERE Rapper-actor LL Cool J comes to “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” (NBC at 11:35), with actress Rose Byrne and musical guest Big Sean. “Late Show With David Letterman” — Rachel Lubitz


The power of Moore’s Law

inspired advances in miniaturization and design that kept multiplying chips’ computing power. Companies and engineers “saw the benefits of Moore’s Law and did their best to keep it going, or else risk falling behind the competition,” writes Mack. The resulting explosion in computing power is almost unfathomable. A single chip today can contain 10 billion transistors. In 2014, global chip production was equal to 8 trillion transistors being produced every second, according to Dan Hutcheson of VLSI Research. Prices have collapsed. A single transistor is now worth a billionth of a penny. Even Moore has been surprised at the durability of Moore’s Law. Engineers and scientists have repeatedly defied formidable technical obstacles to expand chip capacity. Of course, the economic, social and political implications are enormous. Information and communications technologies, led by the Internet, are driving widespread change. Here is economist Timothy Taylor, on his blog “Conversable Economist” last week, summarizing the impact of Moore’s Law: “Many other technological changes — like the smartphone, medical imaging technologies, decoding the human gene, or various developments in nanotechnology — are only possible based on a high volume of cheap computing power. Information technology is part of what has made the financial sector larger, as the technologies have been used for managing (and mismanaging) risks and returns in ways barely dreamed of before. The trends toward globalization and outsourcing have gotten a large boost because information technology made it easier.” That’s only half the story. To Moore’s Law’s virtues must be added the increasingly visible vices: rising cybercrime (your credit card may be electronically stolen), the threat of cyberwar (rogue groups and other nations may hack into crucial financial and infrastructure networks) and invasions of privacy. There’s more. As Taylor notes, information technologies have abetted economic inequality by destroying middle-income jobs. Someday the multiplication of computing power will slow or stop, with what consequences it’s hard to say. That’s the point. History is not especially predictable or pliable. Moore’s Law is a parable for its mystifying ways. Read more from Robert Samuelson’s archive. Read more on this topic: Catherine Rampell: The robots aren’t threatening your job Harold Meyerson: Technology and trade policy is pointing toward a job apocalypse David Ignatius: The federal government could use more agencies like DARPA Marcus Brauchli: Book review: ‘The Intel Trinity,’ on the men who built Intel Robert Samuelson: High tech and the long road to ‘full employment’


Ethiopian bloggers on trial in case seen as crackdown on free expression

elections in May. If convicted, the defendants could receive death sentences. Soliyana Shimeles' graduation picture, taken in 2007. She studied law at Addis Ababa University, with a focus on human rights. She has been working with the U.N. and international organizations on human rights issues in Ethiopia. (Simona Foltyn/Washington Post) Members of Ethiopia’s online community say the case has had a chilling effect on freedom of expression. The U.S. State Department criticized the Ethiopian high court’s decision in January to proceed with the trial, saying that it “undermines a free and open media environment.” Ethiopia has been an important American ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the Islamist militant group based in Somalia. But while Ethiopia is a multiparty democracy on paper, its ruling party controls all but one seat in Parliament. The “Zone9ers” hail from a relatively privileged urban educated class in one of the world’s poorest countries. Only 2 percent of Ethiopian households have access to the Internet in this Horn of Africa nation, whose outdated state-run telecommunication infrastructure ranks among the continent’s least developed. The nine bloggers — three journalists, a human rights lawyer and professionals working in business, government and academia —met online while raising money for the family of an Ethiopian maid who died while working in Lebanon. They called their blog Zone 9, a term said to be used by political prisoners in the capital’s Kaliti jail to refer to an outside world they viewed as equally shackled by the lack of civil liberties. The bloggers, part of a generation that came of age after a Marxist dictatorship was toppled in 1991, said they wanted to raise awareness about political and social issues in a society disengaged from civic matters. Their blog posts called on young Ethiopians to demand rights set forth in the constitution and to put into practice the democracy that the government had promised. “I used to think our discussions could transform our audiences into the kind of society we want. I was very naive,” said a close friend of the bloggers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Over the past decade, the Ethiopian government, which controls the country’s main media outlets, has displayed varying degrees of appetite for free political discourse. National elections in 2005 were preceded by a relatively open climate, allowing the opposition to win a third of the seats in the 547-member


D.C. police investigate shooting death of Southeast man

D.C. police are investigating the shooting death of 32-year-old Southeast man. Authorities found the man, Nathaniel Brooks, in the 3600 block of 22nd Street SE around 12:54 p.m. Sunday after reports of a shooting. Police said Brooks, who was shot, was taken to an area hospital, where he later died. Police said the department offers a reward of up to $25,000 to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons wanted for any homicide committed in the District. Anyone with information is asked to call the department at (202) 727-9099. Callers who wish to remain anonymous can text the department’s TEXT TIP LINE by messaging 50411.


Medical Mysteries: Like a slow-motion stroke

to discount Tobin’s accelerating symptoms, focusing instead on test results that proved to be misleading. Facial droop The first sign of a problem occurred in July 2013, when Tobin noticed a droop on the left side of her face, accompanied by slightly slurred speech. Her internist diagnosed Bell’s palsy, a temporary paralysis of the facial nerve that can be caused by a viral infection or Lyme disease. Some cases are mild and require no treatment; the problem simply resolves on its own after several weeks. More severe cases are often treated with prednisone, a corticosteroid that reduces inflammation. After Tobin’s problem did not improve, her internist prescribed prednisone as well as a short course of physical therapy in the form of mouth exercises to improve her speech. But Rapp and several of Tobin’s co-workers grew concerned that her symptoms signified something more serious. Despite PT, she began having problems moving her left hand and her speech did not improve. On her daily walk, Tobin, who formerly worked at The Washington Post, said she noticed that her left foot seemed to be “sticking”; several times she nearly fell. The problem, known as foot drop, can be a sign of a pinched nerve, a stroke or a serious neurological illness, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Her internist sent her to a neurologist. In September, an MRI showed evidence of lesions in the brain’s white matter, which controls overall function, suggestive of a prior stroke. Most strokes are caused by a blood clot, but doctors couldn’t find one. Tobin saw a cardiologist, who ordered tests to determine whether she had atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat that can cause a stroke. Although her heart rate was normal, Tobin began taking a drug to lower her cholesterol, which was elevated, and another to control her elevated blood pressure, which had always been normal but was now rising ominously. The neurologist had prescribed physical and occupational therapy to help her recover from her stroke. But each time she arrived for a session, therapists discovered that she had deteriorated or that new problems had emerged. Sometimes her blood pressure was deemed too high for PT. Most worrisome to Tobin was her inability to function. Although she could move her fingers, she was unable to grasp objects with her left hand. Friends grew increasingly unable to understand her on the phone.


TV highlights: ‘The Americans’ wraps up its third season on FX

Gloria tries to help Haley stand up for herself at work on “Modern Family.” (Tony Rivetti/ABC) (All times Eastern) One contestant is offered a key advantage that changes the game for them entirely on “Survivor” (CBS at 8 p.m.), while another lashes out after their integrity is questioned. It’s arena anthems night on “American Idol” (Fox at 8) with the Top 5 performing before one singer is eliminated from the competition. The special “Operation Orangutan” (Nat Geo Wild at 8) shines a light on a rehabilitation center in Borneo that aims to rescue injured and orphaned orangutans for release back into the wild. Frankie’s uncle (played by Dick Van Dyke) tries to make amends with his brother (played by Jerry Van Dyke) but only makes things complicated for Frankie and Mike when they get stuck between the two on “The Middle” (ABC at 8). Gloria helps Haley stand up to her boss on “Modern Family” (ABC at 9), and Jay gets looped into an all-gay bowling team with Cam. When the three people implicated in a murder all claim they were attacked by a clawed shadow figure at the moment of the crimes, the BAU looks for a suspect who controls minds on “Criminal Minds” (CBS at 9). In honor of the Hubble Space Telescope’s 25th anniversary, “NOVA: Invisible Universe Revealed” (MPT and WETA at 9) tells the story of the telescope that forever changed our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. SERIES PREMIERE FINALE WATCH Teddy hosts a gala for his education initiative, and it brings out the city’s brightest stars — and Juliette — on “Nashville” (ABC at 10). Actor Russell Crowe and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) are on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” (NBC at 11:35), with musical guest Kenny Chesney. Action star Bruce Willis and comedian Jim Gaffigan stop by the “Late Show With David Letterman” (CBS at 11:35), with music from Dawes. Phil McGraw comes to “Jimmy Kimmel Live” (ABC at 11:35), with professional boxer Manny Pacquiao and a musical performance from Chet Faker. — Rachel Lubitz


Still sharp, Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 with a cloudy future

They installed a series of coin-size mirrors that corrected the light as it bounced through the telescope, plus a new camera with the optical corrections already built in. That inaugurated the new era in which Hubble dazzled the world with one spectacular image after another. The telescope became something of a celebrity. When lawmakers threatened to cancel a repair mission, school kids turned over their lunch money to help pay for it. “Hubble gave us beauty in a way that no other telescope had ever done,” said John Mather, the Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at NASA Goddard who is the senior scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in late 2018. Astronomers a couple of decades ago said the universe is 10 billion to 20 billion years old. Thanks to the Hubble and other telescopes, they can now say it’s 13.8 billion years old. The Hubble played a key role in the stunning discovery, announced in 1998, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Astronomers detected this acceleration, which they attribute to a mysterious force they call “dark energy,” in part by using the Hubble to study supernovas in extremely distant galaxies. A long, hard look at the past The deep gaze of the Hubble offers a view into the remote past; all telescopes are time machines of sorts, gathering light emitted long ago. The Hubble, thanks to new instruments, can see deeper into space than anyone had anticipated when the telescope was designed, said astronomer John Grunsfeld, NASA’s top official for science, who as an astronaut visited and repaired the Hubble three times. “Before Hubble, we didn’t know how many galaxies there are in the universe,” Grunsfeld said. The orthodoxy was that there were tens of billions of galaxies. Now, thanks to the Hubble, scientists can say there are roughly 200 billion. That estimate stems from Hubble’s “deep field” images, obtained by training the Hubble on a single point of seemingly empty, dark space, and holding it there for a couple of weeks, collecting the thin stream of photons (particles of light) coming from the farthest regions of the universe. The Hubble might get just one photon per minute from the faintest objects. Some astronomers assumed that, looking far back in time, they wouldn’t see much. “When the Hubble Deep Field pictures were taken, people didn’t expect to see anything. It had thousands and thousands


A chill is already in the air ahead of the next meeting of the Arctic Council

the report’s authors. While Canada focused on economic development during its time as council chair, the United States plans to emphasize climate change and ways to help indigenous inhabitants adapt. The Arctic Circle is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and melting polar ice is opening new shipping lanes for commercial use and increasing opportunities for oil and gas exploration. “As an Arctic nation, we have a moral obligation to use our human, financial, and scientific resources to help those in the region find ways to adapt to these changes, and to significantly reduce the pollutants driving global climate change,” Adm. Robert J. Papp Jr., the State Department’s special representative for the Arctic, wrote in a White House blog. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said at a 2013 Arctic Council meeting in Sweden that the effects of climate change present “one of the most obvious shared challenges on the face of the planet today.” In its first years of existence, the council focused on the environment. It was founded in 1996, with a specific prohibition against taking up military and security issues. That was primarily done to lure a reluctant United States to become a member, overcoming opposition from members of Congress who considered such international organizations suspect. What began as a concession to the U.S. came to be viewed as a strength. Because all the countries had a common interest in protecting the Arctic, it engendered a spirit of cooperation, no matter what was going on to the south. “We believe the Arctic should and will continue to be a region of low tension,” said Martin Lidegaard, the foreign minister of Denmark, which administers Greenland. “Anything else will be a real problem. We can only manage environmental and climate measures together. If it’s not done in a peaceful way, it could lead to new conflicts, which is what we don’t need now.” That cooperative sense began changing with Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine. Ministers from the Arctic countries convene every two years, and this is their first get-together since the crisis in Ukraine. In Canada, home to a large Ukrainian community, officials have been particularly outspoken in denouncing Russia. Last year, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told Russian President Vladimir Putin, while shaking his hand at a Group of 20 (G-20) summit meeting, to “Get out


Amid debate about vaccines, polio remembered as a scourge defeated

Gail Adams Batt, one of the children who received the experimental polio vaccine in 1954, looks at her first-grade school portrait at her home in Arlington. (Kate Patterson/For The Washington Post) Jackie French Lonergan was a second-grader at Franklin Sherman Elementary on April 26, 1954, when her family doctor, Richard Mulvaney, made history with the push of a syringe plunger. “We were called polio pioneers,” said Lonergan, 68, who was among the first children in the United States to receive the vaccine formulated by Jonas Salk to prevent poliomyelitis. At the time, the virus was afflicting tens of thousands of children each year, causing paralysis and sometimes death. “It was nice to know that I was part of that leading edge,” said Lonergan, who lives in Carmichael, Calif. “I did know people who had withered legs and had to use braces and things to walk.” Six decades ago, Lonergan’s elementary school, in McLean, Va., was thrust into the vanguard of a national campaign to eradicate polio, a campaign that answered the pleas of Fairfax County parents — of parents almost everywhere — for a way to protect their children from the disease. Mulvaney emerged as one of the campaign’s heroes, clad in a white lab coat and armed with sterile needles and lollipops for the first subjects in what became the largest medical experiment in history. In all, nearly 1.4 million American children participated in the trial. Sixty years ago this month, the vaccine was declared safe and effective after nearly a year of evaluation. Dr. Jonas Salk administers a trial polio vaccine to David Rosenbloom of Pittsburgh in this 1954 photo from the National Foundation March of Dimes. (Associated Press) On April 12, 1955, the nation rejoiced at the news. Church bells rang. Car horns honked. People wept in the streets. At a hastily arranged White House ceremony, President Dwight D. Eisenhower became emotional as he honored Salk. “I have no words to thank you,” the president said. In the 1940s and 1950s, about 35,000 people a year were debilitated by polio. At its peak, in 1952, more than 60,000 cases were reported in the United States, resulting in 3,000 deaths, according to the 2005 book “The Death of a Disease: A History of the Eradication of Poliomyelitis.” Polio cases are now rare, with 359 cases reported worldwide in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,


The incredible shrinking garlic

furor created by a federal advisory committee’s suggestion that we should be eating less meat. She also explores whether that suggestion might have merit. Tamar, by the way, will be on hand for today’s Free Range chat, so if you want to weigh in on carnivores — or any other culinary topic — please join us. The action begins at noon and lasts just one hour, so arrive on time — or even early; you can always submit a question in advance if you can’t be there for the chat. Unanswered questions become the property of Chat Leftovers. Here’s one from last week’s chat: A few months ago I bought garlic at a regional grocery, and what at first appeared to be large cloves turned out to be clusters of sliver-sized cloves sheathed in an annoying tissue-fine peel. I thought maybe this store had gotten a substandard lot, so I started buying garlic at another chain, but now theirs, too, is a cluster of tiny cloves. A brother in West Virginia says he has had the same experience. Is this just a seasonal aberration? Where can I buy garlic with normal-size cloves? Hardly exhaustive research, but I stopped at one grocery store yesterday to check out the garlic supply, and I can report that Harris Teeter, at least, has normal-size garlic. And I expect that other stores do, too. I buy garlic regularly, a lot of it, and haven’t run into that phenomenon, so I doubt that your experience signaled a trend. That being said, some varieties of garlic do produce smaller cloves, but the regular supermarket specimens are not typically among them. Factors that can cause garlic to produce skimpy cloves include poor soil and flawed planting practices. Small garlic is perfectly fine garlic, though I hear you about the tedious peeling. Our own Food/Dining Editor Joe Yonan shows you five ways to get the job done in this Food Hacks video. And now, what to do with tiny but still eminently usable cloves? First, figure that a regular medium-size clove equals about 1/2 teaspoon minced; that will help you decide how many of your cloves to use for a recipe. And second, visit our Recipe Finder and search for “garlic.” There’s enough there to keep you busy no matter how many cloves you have. More from Food: Weeknight Vegetarian The Immigrant’s Table Smoke Signals Spirits Column Beer Column


Montgomery County Animal Watch

This case was received by the Montgomery County Animal Services Division. For information, call 240-773-5900. This number provides recorded information on topics such as the new animal services and adoption center’s hours and location in Derwood, adoption and licensing procedures, and lost-and-found and field services. Cyclist vs. canine: “Paws in the Park”: Workshop for dog owners: Adopt or foster rescue dogs: Rockville Reduced fees for cat adoption: Germantown Adopt dogs and cats at MCHS no-kill rescue: Rockville Adoptable cats at no-kill shelter: Gaithersburg — Compiled by Lisa M. Bolton


Should Virginia tap the brakes on plans for I-66 HOT lanes?

pay that HOT lanes may become congested despite the efforts of dynamic tolling. One potential solution to alleviate congestion in the HOT lanes is to raise the HOV threshold from HOV2 to HOV3. But this policy may create additional equity issues. It removes only nonpaying users [those unwilling or unable to pay the toll] from the restricted lanes. Thus, the decreased congestion in the HOT lanes may disproportionately benefit higher-income earners. For consumers representing the lowest 20 percent of income earners, “transportation costs account for approximately 32 percent of their after-tax income,” according to the U.S. Department of Transportation “Beyond Traffic” study, Although public transportation offers a solution for some, the DOT study reveals that only a quarter of jobs in low-skill and middle-skill industries in major metropolitan areas are accessible via a transit ride of less than 90 minutes. There are significant counter-arguments to be made. The money collected via HOT lanes translates into funding for highway maintenance, road construction and other transportation improvement projects. Nevertheless, we’re faced with a Catch-22. On the one hand, proponents of HOV lanes can argue that representatives of all income brackets have it in their means to use those lanes. On the other hand, proponents of HOT lanes can argue that the money raised by those lanes benefits the very infrastructure on which commuters rely — especially those commuters who cannot afford to live within city limits. Mark L. Franz, DG: The Metro’s Silver Line, Maryland’s Intercounty Connector and Virginia’s HOT lanes are going to last a long time. The HOT lanes were built through public-private partnerships, which require the state to give the private companies a long-term lease so they recoup their investment. Drivers get extra lanes now, but the private partners get revenue from tolls for most of the century. That longevity is one more reason to pay attention to the issues that Franz and others have raised about the HOT lanes program. I listened last week as Marcia Hook of Dunn Loring made a similar point while protesting the HOT lanes plan for Interstate 66 in a statement to the region’s Transportation Planning Board. The Interstate 495 express lanes “contract has a term of 75 years,” she said. “Now go back 75 years to 1940. Imagine what a deal signed by transportation planners then would look like today. Would that contract make sense today, 75 years later, without the benefit


The U.S. isn't blameless in this tragedy

The April 21 editorial “The merciless sea” took European Union leaders to task for doing too little to address the immense human tragedy of migration from the Middle East and parts of Africa. Yes, the European Union should do more, by providing humanitarian assistance and by making long-deferred political decisions about immigration. But what about the roots of this tragedy: the destruction of the Iraqi state and the utter devastation of Iraqi society, the military intervention in Libya to overthrow a government that posed no threat to Western powers, and now the attempts to overthrow the Syrian government, which are turning Syria into another Iraq? E.U. countries participated in the destruction of Arab states without a clue as to what might replace those states. But who led the effort? Which major power boasted about its ability to assemble “coalitions of the willing” and to impose a new order in the Middle East and North Africa by military means? When will the editorial board call the U.S. government to task for its role in the unfolding tragedy? Clara M. Lovett, Chevy Chase


American hostage devoted his life to helping the world’s poorest people

across the globe and loved the work that he did to make people’s lives better. In Pakistan, where he was working before he was abducted, he loved and respected the Pakistani people and their culture. He learned to speak Urdu and did everything he could to show his utmost and profound respect for the region.” Ribbons and flowers surround a tree outside the Weinstein home in Rockville, Md., on Thursday. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post) According to colleagues familiar with a 40-year career that spanned numerous continents and multiple conflicts, Weinstein cast a far longer shadow than they expected from the 5-foot-4 former professor. He had a knack for connecting with local people, whether shopkeepers or statesman, and was often surrounded by an entourage of co-workers and friends. “He had a grand personality,” said Orzu Matyakubova, a development contractor who worked with him in Pakistan. “He could dominate a room.” When in Pakistan or other Muslim countries, Weinstein fasted during Ramadan even as he secretly practiced his Jewish faith. “It was a form of respect,” Matyakubova said. She keeps a photograph of Weinstein in which, surrounded by a group of Pakistani businessmen, he is the only one wearing a traditional shalwar kameez. There was no answer Thursday at the front door of the split-level home in Rockville where the Weinsteins lived and where yellow ribbons were tied around a tree. After remaining silent for the first 2 1/ 2 years of Weinstein’s captivity, his family kept up an anguished public campaign for his release in response to a video al-Qaeda released in late 2013. Weinstein, who hopscotched around projects in rural Pakistan despite a heart condition and severe asthma, was alarmingly gaunt. His health had deteriorated noticeably from previous videos. He referenced those health issues in a letter to the media dated Oct. 3, 2013, in which he appealed for help “to gain my release and rejoin my family. . . . Given my age and my health, I don’t have time on my side.” The rigors of international life were nothing new for Weinstein, who had abandoned a secure job as a tenured college professor for risky fieldwork in Africa and South Asia. “You could tell he needed something bigger, he needed a sense of adventure,” said Bill Scheuerman, who taught political science with Weinstein at the State University of New York at Oswego. On Thursday, as news spread that


Freddie Gray protest leader: ‘We will not sit quietly until justice is done’

to interfere with an ongoing investigation,” Hogan said. “I have complete confidence that they’re going to conduct their investigation in a complete and fair way, and it’s going to be transparent.” Capt. Eric Kowalczyk, a Baltimore police spokesman, said members of Gray’s family met Thursday with Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts. The family had previously declined offers to meet with Batts and Rawlings-Blake. In the afternoon, in front of City Hall, Bryant led a moment of silence for Baltimore homicide victims, the overwhelming majority of whom are black men. He urged protesters to “not disrespect the memory of Freddie Gray by destroying our own community. Do not do what others think we are going to do.” As the rush hour began, protesters marched several miles through downtown toward West Baltimore, where Gray was arrested. Police blocked some streets, snarling traffic. Two people were arrested after a scuffle broke out about 6:15 p.m., police said. There were conflicting accounts of whether the argument began as a confrontation with police or a dispute between protesters. Television video showed at least one bottle thrown at a police van and hitting the windshield. Police said each person arrested was charged with disorderly conduct and destruction of property. Earlier in the day, at a rally on the corner where Gray was arrested, activist C.D. Witherspoon condemned a statement from the Baltimore police union’s president on Wednesday that likened protesters to a “lynch mob.” “It was racially insensitive, and it was disrespectful,” Witherspoon said. “We are not a lynch mob.” The union president, Gene Ryan, has since walked back the statement, saying he wanted to warn protesters against potentially becoming a lynch mob. Ryan and the union’s attorney say protesters should not call for the suspended officers to be jailed or charged before the investigation into what happened is complete. Witherspoon and other speakers also lashed out at city leaders for erecting concert barricades and metal fences around the Western District police station, where the officers are assigned. There were similar complaints about metal gates and police officers stationed outside City Hall during the demonstration there. Protesters have vowed to keep up pressure, disrupt the daily routines of the city and try to get other residents involved. A larger gathering is being planned for Saturday. Hicks reported from Annapolis. Read more: Having a black mayor, police commissioner doesn’t assuage suspicions U.S. Justice Department launches investigation In


Hubble marks 25 years of glimpsing distant galaxies

the center of most galaxies. It also helped to pinpoint the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years old, by determining the current rate of expansion of the universe with an uncertainty of just 3 percent, according to the Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the space telescope institute. Thanks to Hubble, he noted this week, astronomers now know that cosmic expansion is accelerating because of mysterious dark energy. The space telescope has shown that the birth rate of stars hit a peak in the universe about 10 billion years ago and has been declining ever since, Livio said. Astronomers have published 12,800 scientific papers based on data from Hubble. Some of the research on supernovas, or exploding stars, contributed to a Nobel Prize in physics in 2011. Future NASA’s Grunsfeld said “there’s pretty high probability” that Hubble will keep working until at least 2020. Gravity is slowly lowering the telescope’s approximately 350-mile-high orbit, but the good news is that low solar activity is keeping the atmosphere thinner, which in turn should keep Hubble up until the 2030s. On the last Hubble mission in 2009, Grunsfeld installed a docking adaptor on the bottom of the telescope. The plan was — and still is — to one day launch an unmanned rocket to Hubble so a motor can be installed to guide the telescope toward a Pacific reentry. The eight-foot primary mirror is the main concern: It’s expected to survive the atmospheric plunge. That’s why NASA does not want Hubble coming down, uncontrolled, over populated areas. Successor NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is due to be launched in 2018 to a vantage point 1 million miles away. The Webb will specialize in the infrared wavelength, allowing it to peer into some of the faintest, most distant recesses of the universe. This should enable the telescope — named after the late NASA administrator who guided the Mercury and Gemini programs — to look back even further in time than Hubble and detect galaxies formed a mere 200 million years after the Big Bang. By 2019, Webb should be up and running with the Hubble still in action and powerful, new ground telescopes pointing skyward. “It will just be absolutely the most capability we will have ever had to look at the cosmos and try and understand it,” Grunsfeld said. “I’m convinced there are going to be some big discoveries.” — Associated Press


Think you have no room for a garden? Take another look at that balcony

to the living space: “I can drink in all the blooms, butterflies and birds from my back window,” Fuhrman says. Miriam Settles of Alexandria tends to the container garden on her deck. (April Greer/For The Washington Post) THE CONTAINER DECK GARDEN On summer evenings, the salsa Miriam and Greg Settles serve atop grilled fish tastes farmers-market fresh because Miriam grows her own herbs and tomatoes on their deck. “Last year was my best year ever for Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes — we easily grew hundreds of them,” says Settles, who has been tending her containers-only garden in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County since 2002, babying heirloom roses, strawberry plants and annual and perennial flowers. “Anything you can plant in the ground, you can plant in a pot: broccoli, fruit, veggies.” Settles, who works in communications for the federal government, began blogging in 2008, doling out green-thumb advice while posting photos of her successes, occasional failures (ornamental grasses that craved less sun) and wild visitors. “We get bees, goldfinches and toads,” she says. “And there are hummingbirds who love to stick their beaks into flowers. I try to get them trumpet-shaped blooms.” Settles is also resolutely against pesticides. “Once the garden is in, I don’t fiddle with it.” The growing season starts around Mother’s Day, when Settles heads out to the deck to see how her perennials and shrubs weathered the winter. She’ll prune dead branches, then go shopping. “I get plants from all different places: Merrifield Garden Center, Lowe’s,” she says. “I used to turn up my nose at big-box stores, but they’ve actually gotten hip to the gardening scene. They have more varieties of herbs and a greater selection of flowers.” Settles also orders some specimens, including roses, online. Settles’s dozens of containers — purple snapdragons in a blue ceramic pot, thyme and cilantro in a repurposed wooden wine box — are stacked on risers fashioned from other pots and bricks. This makes the deck feel layered and luxuriant, and it helps her pots drain. “There’s nothing that can kill a plant faster than being waterlogged,” she says. And though there are a lot of things sprouting, Settles says that, after her initial planting, “I probably don’t spend more than an hour taking care of the garden a week. “I don’t have to pull weeds, either. We just love to sit out there. It’s so peaceful.” Anna Furhman


She’d always wanted a rowhouse. Now it was the right time to buy and restore one.

She’d always wanted to live in a rowhouse. And suddenly it was the right time Correction: She’d always wanted to live in a rowhouse. And suddenly it was the right time It was a year of transition. It was something I had wanted for years. As a Manhattan native, I itched to get back into a city so I could walk to things again (not just around with the dog). I had no specific plans to move from the Potomac, Md., house where my husband and I had raised our three children, two of whom had gone off to college. But, I had always envisioned myself in a historic rowhouse, renovated to respect its past and reflect my personality. Then, in August 2013, my son transferred to a school in the District. With my ties to the Montgomery County public school system severed, I devised a plan: I would use the money from the sale of my suburban home to buy a rowhouse, where I would live mortgage-free and, once the kids were on their own full time, turn the basement into a rental property. Unfortunately, the historic Capitol Hill rowhouses I had coveted for years were now unaffordable: Flipped houses large enough for my family were selling for $1.75 million to $4 million, and unflipped houses were hovering at $1 million-plus. I expanded my search and came upon the H Street corridor in Northeast. With restaurants popping up almost monthly amid the new apartment buildings and high-end supermarkets, local bloggers waxed poetic about how this neighborhood was becoming one of the city’s new “it” areas. Front of house before renovations. (Courtesy of Cari Shane/Courtesy of Cari Shane) Newly painted house with orange front door. (Mike Morgan/For The Washington Post) A few blocks north of H Street, I found a 17-foot-wide, painted mud-red brick house with broken windows, two oddly shaped bedrooms, a shallow basement and a sad, old chain-link fence fronting the 1,800-square-foot lot. Sale price: $645,000. Standing in what would become my master bedroom, I imagined how western light from the street side would make me smile in the afternoons and how the back lot would let me enjoy the warmer months outdoors. I knew I’d have to expand it to house my family, but I put in an offer that afternoon. I connected with an amazing husband-and-wife team, Eric and Christal Goetz, owners of design-build firm Blue


15 ideas for going out on a weeknight

An hour after the class has finished, a majority of participants are still hanging out and chatting, even posing for selfies in yoga poses while holding their beers. Combining beer and yoga is a rising trend at local breweries, but : Old Bust Head and Barley and Hops both offer weekend morning classes. But BeerYoga, which began at Port City in November, is the only one to offer a happy hour-style experience. The most common question from new participants, she says, is “Is it going to smell like beer?” Instead, she says, she compares the citrusy smell of brewing Optimal Wit to “beer incense.” She says the location has been good for luring in new participants:some newcomers have tried yoga for the first time just because this class takes place at a brewery. All of the classes have sold out since they began in November, but advance registration is easy: As soon as one Tuesday’s class ends, online signup for the next one begins. Every other week at 7 p.m. (Next session: May 5.) Port City Brewing Company, 3950 Wheeler Ave., Alexandria. 703-797-2739. www.portcitybrewing.com. $15. Cheick Hamala Diabate Few D.C. bars can boast that they host a Grammy nominee every Tuesday, but that’s the case at Bossa. Malian griot Cheick Hamala Diabate, recognized for his 2007 album “From Mali to America,” takes the stage every week with a group of singers and musicians. Diabate plucks the n’goni, an ancestor of the banjo, and a guitar, taking turns with other vocalists. Mostly, though, the music does the talking. There are blues and ballads, but the vibe picks up when the Afropop songs become percolating and insistent, fueled by djembe drums as well as a traditional kit, underpinned by funky electric bass. Some in the audience are moved to get up and shuffle around the dance floor; others sipping Caribbean and Mexican beers at the candlelit bar are content to smile, close their eyes and listen. Weekly at 9:30 p.m. Bossa, 2463 18th St. NW. 202-667-0088. www.bossadc.com. Free. Dram B. Grain Dram and Grain, the basement bar under Jack Rose, has won plaudits for its wildly inventive cocktails and dimly lit speakeasy atmosphere, but the reservations-only policy on weekends can make it difficult to get in. Thankfully, you don’t need to call ahead on Tuesdays, when bartender Lukas B. Smith turns “Dram B. Grain” into his boozy playground. Smith taps his passion


Undercutting our armed forces

Act undercuts all of this. Inadequate training is only part of the problem. Modernization is fast becoming a thing of the past. In the past four years, the Army has canceled 20 programs, postponed 125 and restructured 124. Research and procurement funding has been cut by one-third since 2011. In more practical terms, funding reductions are delaying badly needed combat vehicle and aviation modernization, further jeopardizing what remains of the Army’s technological superiority. Budget reductions are also forcing dramatic cuts to the size of the force. The number of active-duty soldiers in the Army will drop from 570,000 to 420,000 in 2019. This gap cannot be filled by mobilizing National Guard and Reserve forces. Although these forces provide extra depth, the training shortfalls compromising active-duty forces are also affecting the reserves. Army Secretary John McHugh and Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Army chief of staff, have questioned the service’s ability to fight and win even one regional military conflict. The Army is not alone: The Budget Control Act is substantially compromising every service. By the end of the decade, the Air Force will have lost nearly half of its strike and reconnaissance capabilities. Most of the stateside Marine Corps units are not deployable. The Navy will almost certainly shrink from 275 ships to 250, possibly fewer, becoming a regional force. Today’s minimalist approach has supplanted yesterday’s moral obligation to provide adequately for troops with a blind adherence to a law passed by Congress and enacted by the president. The spending cuts that many of these leaders now bemoan and adamantly oppose appear to disregard the soldiers who defend the nation. The budget proposed by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates in February 2011 was the last defense budget driven more by real-world requirements than politics. As the House and Senate defense authorization committees and defense appropriations subcommittees draft their respective bills for 2016, the funding levels recommended by Gates remain the minimal benchmarks that Congress should adopt if our elected representatives actually want the United States’ armed forces to fight, win and come home the next time they are sent into harm’s way. Read more on this issue: The Post’s View: Ashton Carter’s big job at Defense Flournoy and Edelman: Cuts to defense spending are hurting our national security Charles Lane: The U.S. needs to get serious about defense spending The Post’s View: Beijing’s breakneck defense spending poses a challenge to the U.S.


The rise of Amazon Web Services

also has a government-only cloud for storing sensitive data. It may have been a pioneer in the field, but Amazon’s status in cloud computing is not going unchallenged. Competitors such as Microsoft Azureand Google Cloud Computing are making strides. Microsoft reported a 106 percent increase in commercial cloud revenue for the quarter Thursday. The increasing competition could help drive down costs for the government, but Amazon will probably not be unseated anytime soon, analysts say. Amazon holds the largest market share in the government sector, analysts say. Overall, the company’s cloud service capacity is five times larger than the next 14 cloud vendors combined, according to a 2014 report by research firm Gartner. “They are a tough act to follow,” said Lydia Leong, vice president at Gartner’s Technology and Service Provider Group. The company’s rise in the government sector followed a federal directive for agencies to consolidate data centers and move to the cloud several years ago. “We always knew that this was a huge market,” Carlson said. In the beginning, Carlson said explaining the concept of cloud computing to officials was a challenge. For the government, the idea of storing information in a public, shared virtual environment with a pay-as-you-use model was a sea change. A key part of Amazon’s strategy was developing relationships with a network of companies that already had a history of government work. These software and IT companies developed into a mini-industry that specializes in delivering Amazon cloud services to the government. The tech company also teamed with agencies that were open to experimentation, such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an early adopter of the Amazon cloud. “We realized eight years ago that cloud computing would be a game-changer — we could do science in a few days that we would otherwise spend weeks on,” said Tom Soderstrom, the laboratory’s chief technology officer. NASA’s test case for cloud storage occurred when the Curiosity rover touched down on Mars in 2012. The rover’s high-resolution images were hosted on Amazon’s cloud, so they could be consumed by the world in real time, Soderstrom said. The last obstacle to overcome in the government market was security: How do you ensure that sensitive data is protected? In 2013, Amazon took a step that analysts say gave it greater legitimacy in government circles. It became the first vendor to meet the newly defined Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program standards,


Man found shot dead in Northeast D.C.

D.C. Police are investigating a homicide in Northeast Washington. The incident began Thursday about 2 p.m. when police received a report of a man who was unconscious in the 4300 block of Gault Place NE. When police arrived, they found the man suffering from a gunshot wound. He was later pronounced dead on the scene. The man’s identity was not immediately released, pending notification of his family. Police are offering up to $25,000 for any information in the case.


Lives of the cellists

once, one parent simply had to stay home. (Honigberg has two children, now grown; Teie has four.) Violinists and cellists are not created equal. “She thinks more than I do about retiring,” Lee says. “She works harder. . . . The first violin has so much more to play. We’re just sitting there going — ” and he mimes plucking out repeated notes on the cello strings. “And she’s got all this music.” Teie, a third-generation musician who started out as a singer and once swore he would never play in an orchestra, has a lot of music, too — even apart from the cat opus. He has written for musicians as varied as rock bands, the NSO and the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, the Alexandria-based ensemble of NSO members that he took over from its founder, former NSO horn player Sylvia Alimena. Unfortunately, and unexpectedly, he found that he doesn’t like to conduct, preferring to act more as a coach than a leader. “It was a surprising feeling, after my first concert I conducted,” he says. “I didn’t like being the silent member. I thought, ‘Gee, that was a good concert. I wish I’d played it.’ ” As for his book, Teie is a little wistful about the fact that it doesn’t seem to be reaching its intended lay audience — in part because it straddles the line between two worlds. “When I talk to a scientist about the music, they kind of get glazed over,” he says. “And [with] musicians, [it’s] even worse.” The cat music is well and good, and eventually there probably will be a CD for dogs as well. But Teie is more interested in the next experiment. Having broken music down into its component parts, he envisions ways of manipulating those elements to add entirely new dimensions to the music he writes for humans. “I think it can only be done with headphones,” he muses. While Teie looks into the future, Honigberg is a standard-bearer of the past. “I feel I’m carrying on a tradition,” he says. “And that’s the tradition that’s been instilled in me by Rostropovich. He would be proud that three members of the cello section, whom he chose to join the orchestra, are playing this concerto.” The NSO will perform Penderecki’s Concerto Grosso for Three Cellos and Orchestra, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on Thursday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 8.


The Hubble still has work to do

Regarding the April 22 front-page article “After 25 years, the Hubble’s still got it”: It is quite dismaying to think that we would de-orbit the Hubble Space Telescope and send it to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Of the two options NASA is considering for the end of the Hubble’s life, that option would make us look like “punks” to future generations. The much more favorable option is to elevate its orbit for a very long preservation lifetime. Preserving this historic science instrument would give proper respect to the enlightened human perception of the universe it provided. Was the first telescope or the first automobile sent into the Pacific? A third option that should be considered is to develop the capability to maintain and use this time-honored scientific instrument. If we can’t do that, do we have any business thinking we can go back to the moon, or do anything with asteroids, or go to Mars? These are just fantasies compared with maintaining a proven Hubble. The James Webb Space Telescope will surely be better, but it is folly to think that the Hubble will have no more use. Mike Helton, Rockville


After peaceful start, protest of Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore turns violent

until cops stop killin.’ ” At the Western District police station, demonstrators were met by metal barricades with a row of officers behind them. Two rows of police sealed the main entrance to Camden Yards, several hours before the game, and one protester shouted at them, “You should be ashamed of yourselves.” The police remained silent. Police protected the perimeter of the march as it moved through the Inner Harbor, stopped traffic at major intersections and headed to City Hall. A police spokesman, Capt. Eric Kowalczyk, said a police helicopter was watching from above, but otherwise the police were intent on keeping a low profile. Even when a couple of protesters, after moving on from City Hall back toward Camden Yards, lay down briefly at the busy intersection of Pratt and Light streets, police did not move to arrest them. But when the marchers returned to Camden Yards, the police were wearing blue helmets. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), her police commissioner and faith leaders said before the protest that they feared that visitors might try to stir trouble. Gray died April 19, a week after the police chased him down in a project in West Baltimore and arrested him. Police said he suffered a severe spinal injury while in their custody, either during the arrest or during his 30-minute ride in a police transport wagon. On Friday, police admitted serious errors in Gray’s treatment — he wasn’t buckled in the back of the van despite being handcuffs and shackles, and several pleas for medical help were ignored. But Batts said the investigation is far from complete and will continue long after files are turned over to prosecutors May 1. “We know that he was not buckled into the transportation wagon, as he should have been,” Batts said. “No excuses for that. Period. We know our police employees failed to give him medical attention in a timely manner, multiple times. There are still many questions that we still don’t have the answers to.” Batts said the medical examiner’s preliminary report notes a severe spine injury but does not yet list a cause and manner of death. He said doctors are awaiting a toxicology test that could take up to 30 days. He said experts on the spine were being consulted. “We will continue to follow the evidence wherever it goes.” Lynh Bui and Martin Weil in Washington contributed to this report.


D.C. police identify man who died in shooting on Thursday in Northeast

D.C. police have identified the man who died in a shooting earlier this week as Charles David Hatcherson of Southeast Washington. Police say they were called to the 4300 block of Gault Place NE at about 1:50 p.m. Thursday and found Hatcherson, 49, unconscious and suffering from an apparent gunshot wound. The investigation is ongoing. A reward of up to $25,000 is available for information that leads to an arrest and conviction. Anyone with information can call 202-727-9099 or send anonymous information via text to 50411.


After months of scandals, new rules in Mexico to tackle corruption

Demonstrators hold images of some of the 43 missing students from a teachers’ college during a protest to mark the six-month anniversary of their disappearance in Mexico City in March. (Marco Ugarte/AP) MEXICO CITY — After months of scandals and public outcry, the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto has endorsed new anti-corruption measures that many hope will begin to rebuild Mexicans’ lack of trust in their government. Peña Nieto’s popularity has fallen over the past year as public crises have rocked his government and contributed to an impression that Mexico is becoming an increasingly consequence-free zone for political corruption. The new anti-corruption system passed this week by Mexico’s Congress, which must be approved by the majority of the states, is designed to give more authority and independence to investigative bodies. Audits of government spending will be able to occur more frequently and at the state level. The appointment of the head of the Public Administration Ministry will have to be approved by Congress. “Unfortunately, the economy in our country is built on links and relations between men of power,” Graco Ramirez, the governor of Morelos, said in an interview. “And this relationship has to be revised so we have real rules of the market and so regulators can function.” Supporters of the program consider it significant because it puts more emphasis on state spending, which has been less scrutinized than the federal government. There’s still plenty of skepticism about whether the changes on paper will translate into actual investigations and prosecutions of top officials. “This is not a panacea to change corruption. But it touches on something that is very important,” said Viridiana Rios, the founder of Mexico Como Vamos, a think tank. “It’s a beginning of a change of the discourse in this country.” Her organization’s Web site now has a ticking clock counting the time it takes each governor to approve the new anti-corruption rules. It is this type of citizen pressure, she said, that has helped put the issue on the political agenda. “This is the reform of civil society,” Rios said. “It is our job to push them to do what they need to do.” After more than a year of productive constitutional restructuring driven by Peña Nieto that shook up monopolies, revised the tax and educational systems, and opened up the oil industry to foreign investment for the first time in decades, a series


Ukraine’s military mobilization undermined by draft dodgers

Summons are sent to the city where one is registered — normally a birthplace or place of work. But if one has moved or has a job that is not officially registered, it is easy to hide in plain sight, as Andrey and Igor are doing. The military says it has completed about three-quarters of the planned mobilization, now in its fifth wave, with a sixth already proposed. Response rates vary widely across the country, however: Igor’s home region of Kharkiv, for example, has the most abysmal turnout, with only about 17 percent of those receiving draft orders responding. Meanwhile Lviv, in the far west, reportedly boasts the highest response rate, with near full turnout. But even with the majority of draftees turning up for medical checks, the military is worried. Rotating soldiers off the battlefield, they expect only 15-20 percent to return voluntarily. New soldiers get only 26 days of general training, plus a week or two to practice their specialization. So without a steady stream of recruits, they worry that the quality of soldiers could drop. Only 1 in 8 troops is a volunteer, not nearly enough to make up the recruitment gap. “The more people that will respond to the mobilization, the better chance we have of sending the most prepared, motivated and best soldiers to the ATO zone,” Seleznev said, referring to the combat zone. “It’s not right that some go to defend the motherland and others hide in bushes, living their lives and not defending the country.” But military experts say the recruitment system suffers most from bad management; the legacy of years of post-Soviet decimation. “We don’t understand what we are fighting for, and the government does not inform people about the goals of this war,” said Aleksey Arestovich, a military expert based in Kiev, who added that after a year of hostilities, the conflict is still not officially a “war.” Despite the databases the administration is building of soldiers, their skills and their defections, Arestovich pointed out that specialists are often ignored in favor of funneling more people to the front line, and families of slain soldiers often must fight to get their promised benefits. As the Interior Ministry starts to prosecute no-shows, human rights advocates are also speaking in defense of the dodgers. “We can’t win only by the numbers, we have to win by the quality of our soldiers,” said Oleksandra


Baltimore tries to recover after unrest leads to damage, multiple arrests

“be released” and be on their own. Violence erupted during a protest in Baltimore against the death of Freddie Gray, who died from a spinal injury he suffered while in police custody. Both affected areas of the city returned to quiet Sunday, and community leaders said protests were suspended in deference to the wake on Sunday afternoon and funeral on Monday for the man whose death sparked the protests. Freddie Gray, 25, died April 19, a week after he was arrested on a West Baltimore corner, pinned to the ground and dragged to the back of a police wagon. Police said he died of severe injuries to his spine and are trying to determine how the injuries occurred. Six officers have been suspended, and police plan to turn over their cases to prosecutors on May 1. But demonstrators demanding murder indictments have turned Baltimore into the latest in a long list of cities grappling with deaths of young black men at the hands of police. Rage boiled over late Saturday, and on Sunday the city tried to recover from hours of unrest that led to damaged police cars, the trashing of three crowded outdoor bar patios near Orioles Park at Camden Yards and fights that followed six hours of peaceful protest. Business owners covered broken windows as fans filled the downtown ballpark Sunday afternoon to watch the Orioles play the Boston Red Sox. The night before, frightened spectators had to navigate angry demonstrators and police in riot gear before the game and were held after the last inning until police “were absolutely sure it was safe for them to depart.” People living next to the police station in West Baltimore — where Gray was pulled unconscious from the transport wagon April 12 — also spent the morning cleaning up from overnight clashes, in which police said protesters threw rocks and bricks at officers. People there, too, urged calm, but their emphasis was on justice and reform. The city became the new center of demonstrations over police actions after a man’s death. City work crews cleaned the corner of Riggs Avenue and Mount Street, in front of the barricaded police station, and a resident hung a sign on a light pole: “Please protest peacefully for your community.” The streets were empty, but the pews of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church a block away from the station were full. Inside, the Rev.


At George Mason, BBC Concert Orchestra is professional, enjoyable

Charlie Albright (Stan Giske) George Mason University’s fine concert series features an eclectic blend of mainstream and cutting-edge artists. Some of the orchestras it has brought in have been iffy (did they actually exist outside of that tour?), and others have been of lesser quality. But Friday evening, the BBC Concert Orchestra, led by Keith Lockhart, gave a thoroughly professional, enjoyable concert; a shame it wasn’t more fully subscribed. The first half consisted of two Ravel standards, “Le tombeau de Couperin” and the Piano Concerto; the second was an all-British repertoire. London is full of crack orchestra players, and this group played cleanly and accurately. The winds and brass were generally solid throughout, though there were occasionally intonation issues between a solo player and the strings, and group entrances were not as well blended as in the finest U.S. orchestras. The solo oboist handled “Le tombeau” — almost a miniature concerto — without strain, but by the end of the concert I was most impressed with the sound of the principal bassoonist. The percussion was precise and sensitive, world-class. The strings were excellent as well, but as common with many radio orchestras, there weren’t enough of them, so balances in wind-heavy works such as William Walton’s cinematic “Crown Imperial” march and the Benjamin Britten “Young Person’s Guide” were always problematic. Lockhart, well known as the conductor of the Boston Pops, is crisply efficient and likable. He doesn’t do that much musical shaping in performance, but there was plenty to be heard, so he and the orchestra are clearly simpatico. The soloist in the concerto, the young American pianist Charlie Albright, made quite an impression. He is full of ideas — some of which he’ll probably pare off as he gains maturity — and has a dazzling natural keyboard affinity. He does not have an overpowering sonority (fingers more velvet than steel) but a lot of nuance. As an encore, he asked audience members to call out random notes; when he got four of them, he sat down and tossed off what sounded like a well-prepared Chopin waltz with the four notes as the principal theme. Some kind of magic trick, perhaps. Battey is a freelance writer.


Man charged with murder in March slaying in Southeast Washington

A Northwest Washington man has been charged in connection with a murder that took place in mid-March in Southeast Washington, D.C. police said Sunday. Rashad Allen, 33, was arrested Saturday and charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of 32-year-old David Simmons, whose body was found early March 15 in the 2300 block of Hartford Street SE. Police responded to reports of gunfire around 4:50 a.m. that day, and found two men with gunshot wounds. Simmons was taken to the medical examiner’s office where he was pronounced dead. The other victim — who was found in the 3000 block of 24th place Southeast — was taken to a local hospital, police said in a statement. Police spokesman Paul Metcalf said Sunday that police did not have an update on the surviving victim’s condition.


Rioting rocks Baltimore: Hogan declares emergency, activates Guard

clearly took pains Saturday to avoid confrontation during a five-hour protest march, and again on Monday, they attempted to contain the outbreak rather than wade into the crowd. The first group to enter the core area where the violence occurred was a group of a dozen or more religious leaders led by the Rev. Jamal Bryant, members of the Nation of Islam and students from Morgan State University. The groups of men began to engage, press back and disperse youths who had been hurling rocks in the general direction of the police. “This is not what Baltimore stands for,” Bryant, who helped organize protests after Gray’s death, told CNN. “I am asking everyone to go home and clear the streets. This does not represent the Gray family, nor does it represent the last seven days of peaceful protesting.” When looters broke into a cellphone store, members of a religious group chased them out and formed a wall of bodies to block the entrance. A blue armored police riot vehicle broke up one crowd that was trashing a police car — apparently unoccupied — and more than a dozen officers emerged with long guns at the ready, arresting one man as others fled. When firefighters and police reached the burning CVS, some faced stones and bottles thrown by the handful of remaining people. Barbara Taylor, 60, who has lived in the area near the CVS for 15 years, said she spoke to teenagers carrying cases of soda and iced tea away from the store. “All I can see is crime,” Taylor said. “The people doing this don’t live around here. They’re kids coming into our neighborhood and breaking it apart. There is no reason for this.” A neighbor, Darlene Dorsey, said the streets would calm if police take action against the officers involved in Gray’s arrest. “Just arrest the police who did it and all this will stop. They are taking way too long,” Dorsey said. President Obama spoke with Rawlings-Blake earlier Monday and was said to be receiving updates from Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. Hogan canceled his planned schedule for Tuesday. “Today’s looting and acts of violence in Baltimore will not be tolerated,” Hogan said in a statement Monday. “My thoughts and prayers go out to the men and women in uniform who are actively working to stem this violence and several


Local digest

was pronounced dead at the scene, police said. THE REGION Alexandria selects preferred Metro site City staff members in Alexandria have picked a preferred site for the proposed Potomac Yard Metro station. The City Council is slated to vote on the recommendation next month. The preferred plan is to build a $268 million station east of the Potomac Yard retail center on a site that intrudes on the George Washington Memorial Parkway’s scenic easement but “yields the most economic benefit to the city,” a city report said. The site is the best location to leverage the high-density office, commercial and residential development envisioned for the area, officials said. — Luz Lazo VIRGINIA Seized items may aid homicide probe Police recovered hairs that appeared to be clenched in the hands of the woman found slain in her Arlington home on April 17, and they have submitted the hairs for DNA testing, according to a police spokesman and a search warrant in the case. The hairs found with Bonnie Black, 42, could be a significant “starting point” in the investigation into her death, police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said, but investigators have also seized other items from her residence and the nearby home of her estranged husband. — Matt Zapotosky FBI police officer is killed in Stafford An FBI police officer was killed outside his home in Stafford County on Monday morning. The county sheriff’s office charged a Prince George’s County man with first-degree murder soon after the shooting. It was not clear whether the killer’s motive was related to the victim’s job. Jeremy Brown, 29, left his house on Abbey Lane, near Clint Lane, at 5:01 a.m., the sheriff’s office said in a statement. He was in uniform, the statement said. He was confronted by Antoine Gray Johnson, 26, of Upper Marlboro, the sheriff’s office said. The Associated Press reported that the pair exchanged gunfire, killing Brown. A deputy from the King George County Sheriff’s Office saw Johnson in his vehicle 20 minutes later. Johnson had a handgun in his car, and it was the same caliber as the weapon that was used to kill Brown, the Stafford sheriff’s office said. William Kennedy, a spokesman for the Stafford sheriff’s office, said Johnson and Brown knew each other. It was not clear what sparked the shooting. An FBI spokesman said Brown worked as a police officer at the FBI National Academy in Quantico.