Diminishing strings leave Baltimore Symphony Orchestra uneven in opener

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra opened its new season at Strathmore with a “sampler” concert on Wednesday. The house was almost full, and the audience was enthusiastic. This augured well for the group, which (like many others) has struggled of late. One of the ways the orchestra has cut costs is through attrition. For winds, brass and percussion, necessary parts can be covered by subs, but the string sections simply shrink. For its marquee opener, the BSO fielded only six basses and eight cellos — essentially a good-size opera orchestra. In large-scale symphonic works like Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” or the Tchaikovsky “Pathetique” Symphony, the lack of heft in the strings becomes a real liability. The winds, brass and percussion are a fixed quantity for each piece and cannot be downsized; but the composers, particularly the late romantics, conceived of a fair fight, with string sections of sufficient numbers to oppose the others. Time and again, Wednesday’s concert demonstrated (negatively) how important this balance was. In the short run, of course, this can be addressed as a conducting problem; whoever is on the podium simply has to work harder to rebuild balances with his or her unbalanced forces. Guest conductor Andrew Constantine showed little ability in this regard, though I wonder if he was given sufficient rehearsal time. The most exposed virtuoso works — the “Pathetique” march and the Mendelssohn “Midsummer Night’s Dream” scherzo — were scrappy and unsteady, and Constantine was behind soloist Jonathan Carney in both the opening and closing sections of the Saint-Saens B minor Concerto. By themselves, the strings were expressive and shining in the Barber “Adagio,” helped by the Leopold Stokowski trick of free bowing within each section. And in the evening’s last work — the third of Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances” — the BSO displayed wonderful color and concentration. Let us all hope that finances improve to where this worthy group can return to full strength. Battey is a freelance writer. Andrew Constantine. (Courtesy of BSO/Courtesy of BSO)


FTC examining new Facebook privacy policies; number of women working back at 2007 levels

than half the workforce in hotels and restaurants, which has posted the third-largest gain of any industry. — Associated Press Also in Business ●Average U.S. rates on fixed mortgages held steady this week, hovering near two-year highs. Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday that the average rate on the 30-year loan was unchanged from last week at 4.57 percent, just below the two-year high of 4.58 percent reached Aug. 22. The average on the 15-year fixed mortgage held at 3.59 percent. The two-year high of 3.60 percent was hit Aug. 22. ●An Ohio jury rejected a claim by commercial truck dealers that Ford Motor overcharged them over 11 years by offering discounts to other dealerships. The jury returned the verdict Wednesday in the class-action lawsuit filed by Westgate Ford Truck Sales of Youngstown in 2002. Dealers had won a nearly $2 billion award in a 2011 trial. Last year, an appeals court threw out the ruling and said Ford’s defense must have more leeway. ●The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits plummeted last week by 31,000, to a seasonally adjusted 292,000. The Labor Department said Thursday that the less-volatile four-week average fell to 321,250, the lowest in six years. A government spokesman said the steep drop occurred because two states upgraded their computer systems last week and did not process all their applications. The spokesman would not identify the states. ●American Airlines’ plan to exit bankruptcy protection by merging with US Airways Group was approved by a judge, who said a U.S. antitrust lawsuit seeking to block the deal was no reason to delay the plan. The Chapter 11 reorganization plan by AMR, the parent of American Airlines, can’t take effect until the combination gets regulatory clearance, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane said Thursday in Manhattan before approving the deal. ●The U.S. government’s budget deficit in August was $147.9 billion, the Treasury reported Thursday. That brought the annual budget gap through the first 11 months to $755 billion, or 35 percent lower than the nearly $1.2 trillion in red ink for the same period last year. The budget year ends Sept. 30. The Congressional Budget Office projects the government will run a surplus this month, lowering the annual deficit to $642 billion, the first annual deficit below $1 trillion in five years. — From news services Coming Today ●8:30 a.m.: Producer price index and retail sales data for August released.


Cool wine cellars are hot additions to homes

Case Design/Remodeling worked with Walmer Enterprises in Alexandria on the design of the mahogany cabinetry in the Brendleys’ Fall Church wine cellar. (Case Design/Remodeling) Renovating their Falls Church home — a former broom factory built in the 1890s — led Keith and Greta Brendley to add the ultimate luxury: a specially dug basement for a wine cellar. “It allows my collection to grow and allows me to buy deeper, younger reds that need significant time to age,” says Keith Brendley, 55, president of a defense systems analysis company. Lining the walls of the underground room are mahogany racks and shelves, many filled with California wines. Temperature-controlled, dedicated wine storage is becoming more common as the beverage gains popularity among consumers. A recent Gallup poll shows that about as many Americans prefer wine as they do beer, which has dropped over the past two decades as the alcoholic drink of choice. As a result, homeowners are investing in coolers, closets and rooms for their chardonnay, cabernet and other varietals. “A wine refrigerator is something that a lot of our clients add when they renovate their kitchens,” says Jim Wrenn of Bethesda-based Case Design/Remodeling, the firm responsible for the Brendleys’ renovation. Most under-counter fridges hold about 50 bottles, leading serious oenophiles to step up to larger spaces where the temperature and humidity are kept steady to protect their investments. “Many of my clients build wine cellars because they are collecting and buying wine at a rate they can’t keep up with and growing out of their wine refrigerators,” says Lisa Weiss of the Wine Cellar Co. in McLean. Steve Goldstein of Classic Cellar Design in Vienna says the demand for wine cellars is on the rise, particularly in newer spec homes. He notes that the increase has resulted, in part, from “the loosening of the interstate shipping laws over the last few years, providing access to many hard-to-find wines and the ability to ship home wines from vacation experiences in wine country.” With the typical wine cellar costing about $40,000 to $60,000 — the Brendleys spent about $80,000 on their 10-foot-by-13-foot basement room — some homeowners are opting for smaller, less expensive storage spaces, Weiss says. “Closet cellars are hot right now and run about $15,000 to $20,000,” Weiss says. Another trend she sees is to craft the bottle racks out of reclaimed wood from wine barrels and tanks. Most important to


Sterilizing classrooms won’t help allergic children

Linda Hooper-Bui is an associate professor of entomology at Louisiana State University. With the start of the new school year, classrooms all over the country have no doubt been declared nut-free zones. As the parent of a child in elementary school, I’m familiar with the warnings: “Please, no nuts due to allergies!” As the mother of a child with severe allergies, I’d like to suggest a different approach: Don’t restrict allergens at all. School, even elementary school, is a place of preparation. By that I mean not just academics but also learning to behave as a member of a community. And my 6-year-old’s community is not always going to be allergen-free. My daughter is allergic to, among other things, wheat, beef, gelatin, barley, food dyes yellow No. 6 and blue No. 1 and sodium benzoate (a widely used food preservative). Her wheat allergy is such that if another child handles a food that contains flour and then touches my child, she can get hives (urticaria) or swelling (edema) where she was touched. Last Thanksgiving, as we visited a wildlife park and fed animals, my daughter was licked on the arm by a beefalo. She went into anaphylaxisand got hives all over her body. These are severe reactions, and I take her health seriously. I also realize that she will not always have me there to watch what she touches or eats. So, I place all decisions in her hands and allow her to take charge of her health and well-being. She has been taught to read labels and recognize food ingredients that are triggers. A collection of cartoons from around the country. It is important to teach her to function in a world filled with things that make her very sick. It is unrealistic to think that, years from now, my child will be able to tell her co-workers they cannot eat flour in the office. Although well-intentioned, making classrooms allergen-free zones doesn’t teach children how to make safe choices or otherwise manage their health. Similarly, I wish that schools would not require children to wash their hands any more than usual because of a food-allergic child. I want my daughter’s condition to have minimal impact on other students. The children with whom my daughter interacts see the precautions she takes and, sometimes, the medicine on which she relies. I encourage her to talk to her friends about her autoimmune


NASA’s Voyager spacecraft enters interstellar space, heading out of solar system

The craft — one of twin spacecraft sent to explore distant planets — is cruising through interstellar space. The tireless Voyager I spacecraft, launched in the disco era and now more than 11 billion miles from Earth, has become the first man-made object to enter interstellar space, scientists said Thursday. Interstellar space, scientists now know with certainty, is dense with particles, and the place is literally hissing. Or maybe you could say it’s whistling in the dark. “It’s almost a pure tone. Like middle C. But slightly varying, like your piano is not quite tuned right,” said Donald Gurnett, a University of Iowa physicist who has been working on the Voyager mission most of his adult life. Gurnett is the lead author of a paper published Thursday in the journal Science that provides what seems to be the final, incontrovertible evidence that NASA’s Voyager I has crossed into a realm where no spacecraft has gone before. Scientists have long thought that there would be a boundary out there, somewhere, where the million-mile-per-hour “solar wind” of particles would give way abruptly to cooler, denser interstellar space, permeated by charged particles from around the galaxy. That boundary, called the heliopause, turns out to be 11.3 billion miles from the sun, according to Voyager’s instruments and Gurnett’s calculations. Voyager 1 has crossed a new frontier, becoming the first spacecraft ever to leave the solar system, NASA said Thursday. Beyond the boundary, space is — perhaps counterintuitively — much denser with particles. There are 80,000 particles per cubic meter in the region where Voyager I is now, Gurnett said. The sun’s hot ejecta — a plasma of charged particles — forms a vast bubble, known as the heliosphere. In the outer regions of the heliosphere, the particles are relatively few and far between, with just 1,000 particles per square meter in some regions, Gurnett said. But the heliosphere has an edge. Voyager I’s epochal crossing of the boundary, into the cooler, denser plasma, took place on Aug. 25, 2012, according to the new report. This confirms earlier findings, published in three papers in Science in June, that Voyager I on that date in August 2012 had experienced a sudden drop in solar radiation and a spike in cosmic particles coming from all around the galaxy. But the earlier data from the spacecraft had been somewhat ambiguous. The spacecraft continued to pick up magnetic signals


Downtown D.C.: What’s next?

Kann’s and Woodies. The report went largely unnoticed. Crime, however, had begun to take hold, and the District dropped from about 757,000 residents in 1970 to 607,000 in 1990. By 1990 — the year a judge sentenced Barry to six months for cocaine possession — many middle-class residents had scurried to the suburbs. The savings and loan crisis had stifled development, leaving long stretches of Seventh and 14th streets NW abandoned since the 1968 riots. Garfinkel’s, once the pride of Washington, went bankrupt and closed the year Barry went to jail. The next year the District would earn the moniker “murder capital” when 479 people were murdered. Four years after that, 108-year-old Woodies closed. “When I was a kid, Seventh Street was the main street in the city, then it went to 14th Street when I grew up, and then it went to the suburbs,” said Herb Miller, a local who founded a real estate company, Western Development, in 1967. In the 1980s, he said, “nobody lived east of Dupont Circle.” Days after Barry again became mayor in 1995, Abe Pollin, owner of the Washington Wizards, called to say he planned to move his team downtown from Maryland, in a deal that would become MCI (now Verizon) Center. A new task force led by developers, lobbyist David Carmen and philanthropists Sidney and Jane Harman pressed Barry to do more. A few years before, the Zoning Commission had adopted, 3-2, a controversial rule requiring developers in certain cases to include housing, theaters or retail in their developments. Miller, a member of the task force, had already completed one of the city’s first major mixed-use projects, Market Square, which included 220 condominiums, by the Navy Memorial. Ever the promoter, he had the group map out a vision for the rest of downtown that included a baseball stadium along Massachusetts Avenue, a sports museum along New York Avenue, a Washington opera center on 11th Street, an underground “intermodal transportation center” and a Smithsonian arts museum on Mount Vernon Square. He says the point was to draw attention to the possibilities downtown, and it did. “They thought we were nuts,” he said. “ ‘Who wants to live on Pennsylvania Avenue?’ ” When Anthony Williams Chinatown at 7th and H St. has exploded with new bars and restaurants because of the Verizon Center next door, which was build in the mid 1990s. (Lucian Perkins/For The


In Russia, politics and nationalist pride are basis of Putin’s anti-American turn

MOSCOW — The next fall, the Russian president threw the U.S. Agency for International Development out of his country. Then he decided civic groups that get U.S. financing must be foreign agents. By the end of last year, Putin decided Americans had become unfit to adopt Russian children. This summer, he decided to harbor Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency document leaker, despite strenuous U.S. objections. And ever since the Syrian conflict began, Putin has thwarted President Obama’s attempts to get the United Nations to intervene. On Saturday, Russian and U.S. officials agreed on a plan to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, but Putin still shows no interest in dropping his support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad despite U.S. assertions that Assad is destroying his country. Russia’s leader is accustomed to publicly photographed exhibitions of his fortitude. Surely this describes a powerful Russian leader who enjoys nothing more than finding any opportunity he can to land a nasty sucker punch to Obama. That’s not how they see it here. No. For Putin, it’s not personal. On that his defenders and critics agree. Supporters say Putin is simply standing up against a United States that thinks it alone knows what’s best for the rest of the world. Look at Syria. “That is the Americans’ political style,” Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of a foreign affairs magazine, told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper last week, his words laden with sarcasm. “If they decide to go to war, it is always in the name of the most noble and elevated goals.” Putin sees himself standing up for the sovereignty of other nations, checking America’s unilateral use of force around the world. He does not think the Arab Spring made the Middle East a better place. While the United States learned nothing from Vietnam, Lukyanov said, Russia has been made wiser by the lessons of the past. “Russia is one of the most important and influential countries in the world,” Lukyanov said. “But unlike America, it has shaken off the need to be everywhere.” Libya was a major affront. Although Russia allowed the United Nations to authorize NATO intervention there in 2011, Putin was horrified by the death of Moammar Gaddafi and considered Russia betrayed by the West. Regime change, he said, had not been on the agenda. Putin also thinks the Assad regime could very well be replaced by Muslim extremists who are dangerous to


With Wal-Mart veto, DC Mayor puts city’s poor ahead of rally cry for working poor

the Wal-Mart in Landover. Three miles from the District border, Michelle Smith, an unemployed mother of seven from Northeast, loaded a gallon of cooking oil and a 10-pound bag of sugar into her sister’s car — a few of $344 in groceries she needed to stretch for the rest of September. Smith’s 14-year-old daughter, Nicole, sat sandwiched between a wall of 64 rolls of toilet paper and a 48-count box of brown sugar Pop-Tarts. Food stamps covered $304 of the haul, with boxed and frozen foods accounting for most since it would be three to four weeks before Smith’s sister could bring her back. On Thursday, Gray vetoed the so-called Large Retailer Accountability Act, which would have required retailers with corporate sales of $1 billion or more and operating District stores of at least 75,000 square feet to pay their employees a “living wage” — no less than $12.50 an hour in combined wages and benefits. The mayor said the measure would have harmed District residents, depriving them of access to Wal-Mart’s inexpensive groceries and other sale items. He said it would have blocked hundreds of jobs planned for Wal-Mart’s new stores — and turned off other retail chains that might have decided the cost of doing business in the District was too high. Barring a last-minute change by one of five council members who voted against the measure in July, it appears likely to die during an override attempt on Tuesday, sending Washington the way of most other major U.S. cities including Chicago, which after its own existential moment over Wal-Mart wages in 2006, now has nine of the stores and a 10th under construction. For his veto, Gray was lambasted by labor leaders and clergy for bowing to corporate interests and Wal-Mart, which had threatened to walk away from at least three of its six planned District stores. But in an interview following the veto, Gray said the city’s lack of available and affordable groceries and retail — including at the boarded-up Skyland shopping center, where after pressure from Gray, Wal-Mart would put a store near the mayor’s longtime family home — outweighed any urge he had in setting a national precedent. “One city,” said Gray, using his slogan for city unity, “is being able to have reasonable access for people wherever they are, wherever they live, and nobody can make that argument, frankly, about access to some


Alexandria firm moves the music around the world

Classical Movements founder Neeta Helms delivers musicians and singers all over the world with the precision of a Steinway piano tuner. (Jahi Chikwendiu/Washington Post) Music moves people. And then there are the people who move the music. From the corner of her second-story command center in a charming-but-creaky three-story townhouse in Old Town, Classical Movements founder Neeta Helms delivers musicians and singers all over the world with the precision of a Steinway piano tuner. Helms, 53, and her multilingual team of music lovers book jet flights and hotel rooms for the world’s finest orchestras and divas, from Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra to the London Philharmonic. She is troubleshooter in chief, catering to every client’s whim, extravagance and superstition, whether it’s making sure a musician sits in the last row on every jet (he swears it prevents the plane from crashing) or stocking someone’s favorite cherry soda backstage. Helms knows cellist Yo-Yo Ma (“He would recognize me and give me a big hug”), but she also knows concierges at hotels in European capitals who can find a late-night restaurant for a famished opera star. “There are a few difficult clients, but they are all lovely. When they’re practicing their craft and giving concerts, they need to be taken care of. Happy musicians play better, and that’s what our business is.” And one thing you learn about Helms pretty quickly: She ain’t shy. She’s as take charge as they come: ●To overcome a plane delay and get the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to a music festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, Helms persuaded the pilots and crew of another jet to give the plane to the orchestra instead of the holiday travelers who had chartered it. ●Before one performance at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, she borrowed a hotel’s steam press to smooth out a Russian baritone’s tuxedo. ●When a famous conductor and his wife arrived in a European country with their dog unexpectedly in tow, CM staff negotiated a one-day pass for Fido so the conductor could make his evening concert. ●A top Kremlin official penned a permission slip on the back of a napkin at a cocktail party — in Cyrillic script — that greenlighted Helms and 200 musicians for a Kremlin tour. The company bills about $7 million worth of travel and concert tours and works in 140 countries. Classical Movements grosses around $1.2 million, of which more than $1 million


be invited to a secret location where you and a few strangers meet up with recipes and ingredients in hand, and then cook dinner for the entire group. This is the stuff good stories are made of. 8 p.m. Location revealed upon registration. www.chaoscooking.com. Registration required. WEDNESDAY War/Photography Response: Poetry Night Presented in conjunction with the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s “War/Photography” exhibition, this free performance features spoken word and poetry by local activists, writers and journalists as well as Corcoran students, faculty and alumni. 6 p.m. Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW. 202-639-1700. www.corcoran.org. THURSDAY Blue Moon Harvest Moon Celebration Ready for fall? On the night of the harvest moon, swing by Carriage House bar and restaurant in Adams Morgan between 7 and 9 p.m. to pick up a free sample of Blue Moon Harvest Pumpkin Ale. 7 p.m. Carriage House, 2333 18th St. NW. 202-817-3255. www.carriagehouseam.com. FRIDAY D.C. Teen Design Fair D.C. area teens interested in pursuing fashion careers should register for the D.C. Teen Design Fair at the International Gallery. Presented by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the event will allow teens to snag giveaways and speak with designers working in fashion, graphic design, architecture, product design and more. Plus, “Project Runway’s” Tim Gunn will be there for the Design Careers Challenge. 8:30 a.m. International Gallery, 1100 Jefferson Dr. SW. www.cooperhewitt.org. Registration and parental consent form required. SATURDAY Day of the Dog Festival Dog lovers can bring their pooches to the Congressional Cemetery for a day of games, shopping and live music. Known not only for historic grave sites but also as one of the best spots to walk dogs in the city, the Congressional Cemetery will also host pet adoptions, demonstrations and a costume contest. Typically, only members of the K9 Corps group are permitted to walk dogs here — this is the chance for you and your pooch to try it out. 10 a.m. Congressional Cemetery, 1801 E St. SE. 202-543-0539. www.congressionalcemetery.org. SUNDAY ‘Le Joli Mai’ Kick back and take in a screening of Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s 1963 documentary “Le Joli Mai.” Filmed near the end of the Algerian War, the film consists of on-the-street interviews on “the meaning of happiness.” Part of the National Gallery of Art’s “From Vault to Screen” film series. 4:30 p.m. National Gallery of Art, East Building, Fourth and Constitution Ave. NW. 202-737-4215. www.nga.gov. — Lauren McEwen


Bats and snakes are the latest victims of mass killers in the wild

A little brown bat is swabbed during a 2011 white-nose syndrome study at New Mammoth Cave near LaFollette, Tenn. (Amy Smotherman Burgess/AP) Jeremy Coleman was on the trail of a ruthless serial killer, recently studying its behavior, patterns and moves at a Massachusetts lab. The more he saw, the more it confirmed a hunch. He had seen it all before. He was looking at a copycat. The mass killer of bats under Coleman’s microscope, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, has a lot in common with Chytridiomycosis, a mass killer of frogs and other amphibians. The culprits resemble a third killer, Ophidiomyces, which kills and disfigures snakes. They are fungi, and they arrived in the United States from overseas with an assist from humans — through travel and trade. They prefer cold conditions and kill with precision, so efficiently that they’re creating a crisis in the wild. The death toll among amphibians, bats and snakes from fungi represents “potential extinction events,” said Coleman, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife research biologist who coordinates the government’s response to the bat-killing infection known as white-nose syndrome. It’s so large, he said, that it can’t be measured “as far as numbers of dead organisms” and is “decimating populations as we know them.” Together with a little-understood disease that is destroying honeybees, the mass die-offs are a huge concern. “We anticipate there will be direct impacts with the loss of so many animals on a massive scale,” Coleman said. Wildlife researchers say a fungus rarely seen in the wild is killing southern Illinois rattlesnakes that already are in decline. (Seth Perlman/AP) Honeybees pollinate crops, and bats eat billions of pests that ruin them. Frogs and other amphibians help researchers find medical cures, and snakes eat tick-infested rodents that spread Lyme disease. But with little public and private funding, scientists are almost powerless to stop the plague. “The field of fungal research is small, underfunded and often totally overlooked relative to its importance in the environment,’’ said Arturo Casadevall, a professor and chairman of microbiology and immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “To my knowledge, there are no successful precedents for the control of fungal pathogens in the wild.” The pathogens wiping out 10 species of bats, including 93 percent of little brown bats in the Northeast, and at least six snake species in nine states, such as the pygmy rattlesnake and common rat snake, may


species. Like bats, their immune systems are suppressed in hibernation, when the fungus prefers to attack. “There has been a lot of money spent on white-nose syndrome . . . but so far they’ve been unable to stop the spread in bats. Snakes are even less appreciated by the public than bats.” Amphibian killer The amphibian killer Chytridiomycosis — chytrid for short — is thought to have come to America in the 1930s with frogs used in pregnancy tests. In a process that could take hours, a woman’s urine was injected into female African clawed frogs. If the frog ovulated, the woman was probably pregnant. Some frogs escaped or were released. In the late 1990s, clusters of dead frogs in Australia were found to be infected, and in the past decade, infections were found in the United States. One-third of the world’s amphibians could be lost. The problem is so dire that public and private donors, including zoos and conservation groups, established an Amphibian Ark to preserve the animals and raise awareness of their demise. According to the Ark, 165 species are believed to have vanished, including 39 species that are “known to be extinct in the wild but still survive in captivity.” Danger to honeybees Compared with the threats to bats, snakes and frogs, the danger to honeybees has gotten more funding because bee pollination creates $15 billion per year in added crop value, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. From 2008 to 2012, federal and state officials spent nearly $20 million to update research facilities, conduct more studies into the colony-collapse disorder killing the honeybees and take steps to protect them. In spite of that, “survivorship of honey bee colonies is too low for us to be confident in our ability to meet the pollination demands of U.S. agricultural crops,” according to a report last year by the USDA National Honey Bee Health Steering Committee. Six million honeybee colonies existed in 1947; about 2.5 million exist today, vanishing at a rate of about 30 percent per year, the report said. The disorder’s cause is unknown, though some biologists blame fungi, disease and parasites. Scientists in the European Union pointed to insecticides, but the USDA rejected that theory, saying it was a combination of factors. “They’re feeding on crops treated with pesticides,” Blehert said, but that it is just one piece of a “complex problem involving different dynamics.”


Giant pandas are cute to many, but there are some who can’t stand them

This undated handout photograph released by the Taipei City Zoo on Aug. 24, 2013, shows a panda cub at the Taipei City Zoo. The cub, the first panda born in Taiwan, was delivered on July 7 following a series of artificial insemination sessions after her parents — Yuan Yuan and her partner, Tuan Tuan — failed to conceive naturally. (Taipei City Zoo/AFP/Getty Images) “I think it’s hard to be a panda hater and live in Washington,” Nichole Remmert told me when I called her last week. Fortunately for Nichole, she no longer lives in Washington. Last year, after 20 years in the District, she moved to Pittsburgh, whose residents presumably don’t breathlessly follow the fortunes of the National Zoo’s pair of overgrown raccoons, and where the local news outlets do not breathlessly report every squeal and hiccup of the new cub. Not that there is anything wrong in my book with being panda-obsessed. As long as you’re not spending so much time on the panda cam that you’re neglecting personal hygiene, go ahead and enjoy the black-and-white bundle of joy. But I have detected in the last few weeks a growing panda backlash, backlash from people such as Nichole, who takes to Twitter to puncture peoples’ infatuation with our Chinese visitors. “Whenever I bravely state my dislike for the pandas on Twitter — I’m joking about the ‘brave’ part — I get a lot of favorites and occasionally a retweet,” Nichole said. “It’s like they secretly support the position, but no one wants to come out as a panda-hater. I think there are more of us out there than like to admit it.” This undated handout photograph released by the Taipei City Zoo on Sept. 15, 2013, shows giant panda Yuan Yuan holding her baby panda, Yuan Zai. (Taipei City Zoo/AFP/Getty Images) Are you a panda-hater? Take this simple quiz to find out: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. If you answered “Yes” to two or more of these questions, you may be suffering from what I call “pandamosity.” Why the pandamosity? The media is partially to blame, both mainstream media and social media. The Washington Post and other news outlets report endlessly on the pandas. We’re able to do so because National Zoo scientists are better able to track the reproductive health of our pandas. They can now pinpoint fluctuating hormone levels, for example. And we can tell you about


Herbalife is stepping up lobbying efforts to counter attacks on its business model

Herbalife, the Los Angeles-based seller of diet and nutritional supplements, is stepping up lobbying efforts to counter attacks on its business model by billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. The contentious battle between Ackman and Herbalife went public last year, when the billionaire shorted 20 million shares of the company’s stock — betting on its decline — and accused Herbalife of running a pyramid scheme. The company has steadfastedly denied any impropriety, and billionaire investorCarl Icahn has stepped in, defending Herbalife and buying 16.5 percent of the company’s outstanding shares — a move that he said last month has made him $500 million when the stock rose. Since then, calls have been made by consumer and Hispanic groups to have the Federal Trade Commission investigate Herbalife’s business practices and whether they hurt the company’s network of mostly Hispanic distributors. In the latest twist, Herbalife has added the help of the firm run by power broker Tony Podesta to its roster of star lobbyists that already includes Moses Mercado and Dean Aguillen of Ogilvy Government Relations, and Thomas Downey and Ray McGrath of Downey McGrath Group. They are largely playing defense against the lobbying and public relations offensive launched by Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management — which has hired lobby firms Wexler & Walker and Moffett Group, in addition to its longtime PR agency Global Strategy Group. “We’re meeting with a number of people on the Hill who we happen to know that Pershing Square’s lobbyists are meeting with,” said Diane Turpin, Herbalife’s vice president of government and industry affairs. “We’re mainly talking to members of Congress about the company, our business model, our products and the people who consume and sell the products.” Turpin compared the Herbalife’s structure to that of Avon and Mary Kay. Herbalife, founded in 1980, sells its products exclusively through independent distributors — more than half of whom in the United States are Latino — who buy Herbalife products and sell them to customers and other distributors they’ve recruited. Nearly 48 percent of distributors who reached the level of supervisor earned between $1 and $1,000 in 2012, averaging $292 in gross payments from their work with Herbalife. Critics argue that this an example of targeting low-income minorities, but Mercado said many distributors sell Herbalife to supplement their earnings, rather than using it as their primary source of income. Mercado likens the efforts by his firm and


Preservation group takes a pass on Washington Post building

The District’s top advocacy group on behalf of historical buildings has decided against trying to declare The Washington Post building on L Street Northwest a historical landmark, removing a potential hurdle should it be sold to a developer. The seven-story building at 1515 L St. NW was completed in 1950 when The Post relocated from E Street NW, a few doors down from the National Theatre. Construction was financed using loans provided by the family of late publisher, Katharine Graham. The Washington Post Co. is a few weeks away from closing a deal to sell the newspaper to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, but the parent company plans to retain its interest in the real estate at 15th and L Streets NW. The properties include 1150 15th St. NW, 1515 L St. NW and 1523 L St. NW, as well as the land beneath a building on the corner, 1100 15th St. NW. The company put the properties up for sale before the Bezos deal was announced, and it also offered for sale two Robinson Terminal warehouse sites on the Alexandria Waterfront. Selling the downtown real estate may have proven more difficult had 1515 L St. NW been considered a historical landmark, a designation that could have protected all or part of it from demolition. But a panel of advocates from the nonprofit D.C. Preservation League decided in late July that the building’s mid-century modern design did not rise to a level worth preserving, despite the fact it served as the workplace for journalists who pursued stories such as the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. Rebecca Miller, executive director of the league, said the argument for saving the building was built around its role in history, not its architecture. “It’s about what historically happened there, the news stories and events,” she said. “From an architectural perspective, it leaves a little bit to be desired.” A Preservation Leaguepanel issued a report on the property: “While the committee was willing to accept the intellectual proposition that the building could be significant as an example of a rare Washington modernist industrial structure and for its role in the Watergate scandal, most thought that it was aesthetically lacking and therefore was not a high priority for landmarking.” The preservation league is not the only entity that can nominate a building for protection, but it is by far the most active. David Maloney,


Full transcript: President Obama’s Sept. 16 speech on the economy and the navy yard shooting

in the world failed, stock markets plunged, banks stopped lending to families and small businesses, our auto industry -- the heartbeat of American manufacturing -- was flat-lining. By the time I took office, the economy was shrinking by an annual rate of more than 8 percent. Our businesses were shedding 800,000 jobs each month. It was a perfect storm that would rob millions of Americans of jobs and homes and savings that they had worked a lifetime to build. And it also laid bare the long erosion of a middle class that for more than a decade has had to work harder and harder just to keep up. In fact, most Americans who’ve known economic hardship these past several years, they don’t think about the collapse of Lehman Brothers when they think about the recession. Instead, they recall the day they got the gut punch of a pink slip or the day that a bank took away their home, the day they got sick but didn’t have health insurance, or the day they had to sit their daughter or son down and tell him or her that they couldn’t afford to send their child back to college the next semester. And so those are the stories that guided everything we’ve done. It’s what those earliest days of the crisis caused us to act so quickly through the Recovery Act to arrest the downward spiral and put a floor under the fall. We put people to work, repairing roads and bridges, to keep teachers in our classrooms, our first responders on the streets. We helped responsible homeowners modify their mortgages so that more of them could keep their homes. We helped jump-start the flow of credit to help more small businesses keep their doors open. We saved the American auto industry. And as we worked to stabilize the economy and get it growing and creating jobs again, we also started pushing back against the trends that have been battering the middle class for decades, so we took on a broken health care system, we invested in new American technologies to end our addiction to foreign oil, we put in place tough new rules on big banks, rules that we need to finalize before the end of the year, by the way, to make sure that the job is done, and we put in new protections that crack down on the worst


Drug-resistant bacteria pose potential catastrophe, CDC warns

the amount of antibiotics given to animals, though Frieden suggested Monday that the most urgent threat still involves medical treatment. “Right now, the most acute problem is in hospitals,” Frieden said. “The most resistant organisms in hospitals are emerging in those settings because of poor anti-microbial stewardship among humans.” While Monday’s report detailed growing threats in the United States, the CDC reiterated that the problem is not defined by borders. “New forms of antibiotic resistance can cross international boundaries and spread between continents with ease,” Monday’s report stated. “Many forms of resistance spread with remarkable speed.” Steve Solomon, the CDC’s director of antimicrobial resistance, said in an interview that, while the agency is concerned about the 17 bacteria and one fungus detailed in Monday’s report, the most troubling are those on the brink of resisting all current treatments. “The ones at the edge of pan-resistance, we’re sounding an urgent alarm,” Solomon said. “We need to act now. We do not have antibiotics in the pipeline that are going to be available soon enough to address those problems.” For those microbes and others that are increasingly resistent, the search for new antibiotics is essential. But according to CDC officials and Monday’s report, that pipeline has all but run dry in recent years, with few new antibiotics on the horizon. If new drugs aren’t developed to replace the ones that have lost effectiveness, patients will face a dire predicament, said Michael Bell, deputy director of the CDC’s division of health-care quality promotion. “We’re getting closer and closer to the cliff,” Bell said. “When we no longer have that second-line drug to rely on, that’s when it’s a life or death matter.” Beyond developing new treatments for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the CDC on Monday detailed an array of actions that local communities, government officials and public health professionals should take to reduce the sickness and deaths caused by the problem each year. Those include more aggressive work to prevent infections, closer monitoring of resistant bacteria and additional steps to ensure that antibiotics are used more judiciously and wisely in humans and in animals. “Only through concerted commitment and action,” the CDC wrote, “will the nation ever be able to succeed in reducing this threat.” More health and science news: The international space station is one of humanity’s great engineering triumphs. But what is it for? Taking antibiotics you don’t really need might kill you


Poll: Americans say Washington, Wall Street haven’t done enough to thwart financial crises

The 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse and ensuing financial cataclysm have left a lasting mark on the public and shaken confidence in the country’s ability to avoid another crisis, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. More than six in 10 Americans say they are not confident that the country will be able to avoid another collapse, with a majority saying Washington and Wall Street have not done enough to thwart one. The pessimistic outlook is colored by a dour take on progress: 54 percent of Americans say they sense little or no economic improvement since the worst of the financial crisis, and only one in 10 believe the economy is “a great deal” better. Despite sweeping action by lawmakers and the Federal Reserve to stabilize markets and banks, roughly two-thirds say the federal government has not taken adequate measures to prevent another crisis. Almost as many, 62 percent, say U.S. banks and financial institutions have fallen short in protecting against a repeat of what happened in 2008. A majority, across the partisan spectrum, say government and banks have not taken necessary steps to stop a future crisis, though Republicans were far more critical of government’s role than Democrats. Seventy-nine percent of Republicans say the federal government has not taken adequate measures, compared with 55 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of independents. By contrast, roughly six in 10 Democrats and Republicans alike view banks as delinquent in their prevention efforts. In a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the financial crisis, President Obama acknowledged that not enough has been done to lift the middle class. “We’ve cleared away the rubble from the financial crisis, and we’ve begun to lay a new foundation for economic growth and prosperity,” he said. “But that’s not the end of the story. As any middle-class family will tell you or anybody who’s striving to get into the middle class, we are not yet where we need to be.” In addition, Obama chided Republicans for threatening to create another crisis over government spending. Unless Congress acts, the government could shut down Sept. 30. Separately, the Treasury could run out of cash to pay its bills as soon as Oct. 18, unless Congress raises the government’s limits on borrowing. “This country has worked too hard for too long to dig out of a crisis just to see their elected representatives here in Washington purposely cause another


Chipmunks, dogs and shopping carts: Delving into the reader mail bag

I couldn’t resist an e-mail that came with the subject heading “A Chipmunk Saved My Life.” I imagined a chipmunk surgeon repairing a torn aorta or perhaps a chipmunk good Samaritan pushing a person out of the path of a speeding bus. In Susan Trout’s case, it was closer to the latter than the former. Susan was late for work one morning. In her haste, she sped down the Rosslyn ramp that merges with Route 50 on the way to the George Washington Parkway. “Suddenly, just as I was about to merge onto the highway, I saw a chipmunk running, crossing the road in front of me,” Susan wrote. “I screeched to a halt — I brake for animals — just as a huge truck zoomed past me at the exact moment I would have merged onto the highway. My car shook from the rumble of the truck at the same time that I screamed at the chipmunk, ‘Get back where you belong!’ ” The chipmunk did just that, scampering to safety. Susan feels that if it weren’t for the chipmunk, she would have been fatally T-boned. It was probably a lucky coincidence. Or perhaps it’s just the start of a chipmunk campaign to make up for all those deer who launch themselves into our vehicles. Dog years While we’re on the subject of animals, some readers may wonder what ex-junkie panhandler Glen Hilbrand should have done when he discovered a dead dog in the road in Arlington, the subject of my columns last week. Glen himself wonders. He suggested I find out (and, as is Glen’s style, he used very colorful language to encourage me). Kerry McKeel The dog in question — an elderly miniature schnauzer named Ms. Winter — had wandered away from home. Reader Ed Druy said his miniature schnauzer, Huff, occasionally does the same thing. Ed’s house backs up to a golf course in Fort Washington. “The golf course offers many opportunities for our schnauzer to schmooze with the golfers,” Ed wrote. “Unfortunately, they don’t appreciate his attention.” It used to be that when Huff escaped he would eventually be found by neighbors or make his way home on his own. But now the pooch wears a GPS unit on his collar. It’s called a Tagg. Users can set it up to send an e-mail or text should the canine leave his designated zone. And if


U.N. inspectors’ findings come closer to linking Assad to sarin attack

times as much liquid as other commonly used munitions — could account for the unexpectedly large number of deaths from the Aug. 21 attack, in which more than 1,000 people are estimated to have died, diplomats and weapons experts said. Moreover, the 330mm rocket and its Iranian-built launching system are known to be tightly controlled by Syrian forces. Since the conflict began, there have been only a handful of accounts of government forces using such rockets and no reports of rebels acquiring either the weapons or the specialized launching tubes required to fire them, experts say. Syria How the intelligence stacks up “The U.N. report provides solid confirmation as to the . . . rockets used in the attack, and its evidence provides even greater proof that the government was responsible,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies program director at Human Rights Watch, which last week issued a study that also pointed to the rockets as vital clues linking the Syrian regime to the attack. Although the U.N. report does not explicitly assign blame, Bouckaert said, its findings “point even more convincingly towards Syrian government responsibility,” citing not only the rockets’ remnants but also their flight path and the military-grade quality of the sarin that they contained. “It points the finger directly at them,” he said. The U.N. team’s report was the first official document to confirm the use of the unusual rockets, which have been cited in several reports by human rights activists and weapons experts who analyzed images of rocket motors and other parts found in neighborhoods hit by toxic gases in the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 21. Chemical warheads typically contain only a small amount of explosives — enough to disperse, but not incinerate, their toxic contents — and several of the rockets were relatively intact when U.N. investigators toured the affected neighborhoods last month. In the Moadamiya suburb, inspectors found the remains of several Russian-made 140mm rockets, many of them bearing identification plates and engravings in the Cyrillic script, according to the U.N. report. It said the larger, 330mm rockets were found in Zamalka and Ein Tarma, two southeastern neighborhoods that recorded the highest numbers of casualties. The report included photographs and drawings of the 330mm rockets’ barrel-shaped warhead, which it described as being about 14 inches wide and 30 inches long. At those dimensions, the weapon’s carrying capacity would have been about 120 pounds of liquid sarin,


Navy Yard rampage likely to renew debate over security at U.S. military installations

industry pose a more serious threat. After an Army psychiatrist killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 during a rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009, the Pentagon asked the service commanders to review security protocols and identify vulnerabilities. But experts say that standards and procedures continue to vary widely at the country’s nearly 500 military installations. “There’s complete lack of uniformity,” said John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org, an Alexandria-based outlet that tracks and studies military infrastructure and national security threats. “The difficult part of the problem in all these things is getting agreement on the threat level.” On Monday, with many key questions about the latest attack unanswered, lawmakers and defense officials vowed to move swiftly to determine whether new safeguards are needed. Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.), who called for enhanced training for first responders after the shootings at Fort Hood, which is in his district, said there is no foolproof way of keeping military facilities safe from lone gunmen. “Unfortunately, we don’t live in the sweet world of the 1950s,” he said. “There are a lot of bad people doing a lot of bad things.” Pentagon spokesman George Little said the Defense Department has taken several steps to “harden our facilities” and train the military to respond swiftly to mass shootings on bases. “While every DoD installation has its own unique requirements, each military service has established protocols to improve collaboration with federal and local law enforcement to respond to these situations,” Little said in a statement. “In the days and weeks ahead, we will evaluate how those lessons might apply to the incident at the Washington Navy Yard and take additional steps as necessary.” In January 2010, the Defense Department issued a report, titled “Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood,” that recommended expanding the use of an FBI-run suspicious-incident notification system that enables local and federal law enforcement officials to communicate with defense personnel in real time during emergencies. The report also called on the Pentagon’s various law enforcement agencies to share data more seamlessly to identify personnel who could pose a threat. It said the department’s “force protection policies are not optimized for countering internal threats,” calling it a “key deficiency.” The issue resurfaced last fall after four U.S. soldiers stationed at Fort Stewart, Ga., were charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Authorities said the men belonged to an anti-government militia. In


Military’s background check system failed to block gunman with a history of arrests

a second stint with the contracting firm, people familiar with his hiring said. Instead, the company hired an approved background screening firm that confirmed with the Defense Department that Alexis’s security clearance remained valid. A secret-level clearance requires far less-intensive digging than one for top-secret clearance, and involves only a check of the FBI database, military records and data from law enforcement agencies where an applicant has lived, worked or attended school during the past five years. It does not require interviews with family members, co-workers or employers. Hoshko told The Washington Post that he would not have hired Alexis if he had known about his arrests. “Anything that suggests criminal problems or mental-health issues, that would be a flag,” he said. “We would not have hired him.” No one in the company was made aware of the past incidents, he said. “If there’s not full disclosure on this, how do they expect us to make good decisions about who to trust and hire?” Hoshko said his company and other contracting firms rely on the military to approve the security clearances of their employees, and he fears that budget crunches have led to faster and less thorough checks. His company hired a private firm — in September 2012, when Alexis first came to The Experts, and in June 2013, when he returned for another stint — to conduct a criminal background check of Alexis. As part of the company’s standard procedure for hiring new employees and rehiring old ones, the company also verified with the Defense Department both times that Alexis’s security clearance remained in force and conducted new drug tests. Congressional leaders on Tuesday called for investigations and hearings into how the military screens contractors for classified work and entry to its bases. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) asked the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to hold a hearing into contractor hiring practices at military installations, while Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) wrote to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus seeking answers about oversight of contractor access and flaws in security clearances. A report released Tuesday by the Defense Department’s inspector general also found serious deficiencies in a Navy screening program for people who didn’t have standard credentials. The program does not apply to contractors such as Alexis, but congressional staffers say it indicates another serious deficiency in the screening system. Auditors found 52 convicted felons who received routine,unescorted access to


Washington Post food calendar

THURSDAY BEER TASTING AND DINNER: DC SHORTS FILM FESTIVAL: WINE CLASS: FRIDAY 30TH ANNUAL MIDDLE EASTERN BAZAAR AND FOOD FESTIVAL: FALL FESTIVAL: SATURDAY ANNAPOLIS CRAFT BEER AND MUSIC FESTIVAL: BEER, BOURBON AND BARBECUE FESTIVAL: COOKING CLASS: COOKING CLASS: MARYLAND WINE FESTIVAL: PARK HYATT MASTERS OF FOOD AND WINE: PICKLING DAY: SLIVOVITZ FESTIVAL: SUNDAY BASICS OF PREMIUM TEAS: FARM DINNER: OYSTERSTOCK: PAELLA CLASS AND DINNER: SNAIL OF APPROVAL AWARDS PARTY: WINE DINNER: MONDAY TASTE OF LETTUCE: TUESDAY BEER DINNER: BEER DINNER: COOKING CLASS: WINE AND CHEESE TASTING: WINE DINNER: RESERVE NOW SEPT. 25 COOKING CLASS: FUNDRAISER DINNER: WINE DINNER: WINE TASTINGS: — Becky Krystal SEND NOTICES to: To Do, Food, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, or e-mail food@washpost.com, 14 days in advance. To find more calendar items, go to www.washingtonpost.com/gog/dc-events.html and click on "Food Events."


One way to fight food waste: Revive wilted produce

to the grocery store or wait a few days for the next farmers market to open. I wish I had the time and lifestyle to shop for food every day. But even if I did, a one-person household takes longer than a family of four to go through a head of lettuce or a bunch of carrots. Even when I’m trying, vegetables often wilt before I can manage to get to them. With a firm resolve to save money and be respectful of the farmers who grow the produce I eat, I’ve been on a mission to extend the “fridge life” of my vegetable staples. So I turned to the experts to learn more about how to revive what I’ve got and better store what I buy. “Water is everything.” That’s what Bernard Boyle of Garner’s Produce tells me at the 14th and U Farmers Market on a sunny Saturday morning. He’s right. We all learned in high school biology that the human body is about 60 percent water. What I’ve discovered in my let’s-try-not-to-be-so-wasteful vegetable research is that plant foods have us beat: Most fresh vegetables in the typical American diet are more than 90 percent water by weight, according to Nathan Myhrvold and the team that wrote the epic food science and technology tome “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” (The Cooking Lab, 2011). For example, they found that a carrot is roughly 88 percent water, nearly the same proportion found in milk. A fresh cucumber contains a higher proportion of water than some mineral-rich spring waters. Swiss chard is 94 percent water. In “Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes” (Hodder and Stoughton, 2010), food science expert Harold McGee writes that fresh vegetables and herbs gradually deteriorate as they use up their limited water reserves after harvesting. That makes sense. But can you give them a little boost before they cross over to the rotten side, and if so, how? Consumer advice about reviving vegetables runs the gamut: room-temperature water vs. ice water; submerging the whole vegetable or soaking just the ends; adding salt, sugar or vinegar to the water. Chefs, food companies, scientists and food bloggers offer a variety of methods juggling time, temperature and those additives, with the one commonality being water. Kathleen M. Brown, professor of plant stress biology at Penn State University, teaches a


Why perfect-looking produce can be less than ideal

special needs. He says he is thrilled that some food and cooking magazines are eschewing the classic hero shots in favor of images of less-than-perfect produce. John Navazio, a plant breeder in Washington state, also sees a new trend in how we choose our produce. “We still want beautiful food,” he says, “but as we understand the story behind that food, we begin to look for a different kind of beauty.” No one can tell that story better than Navazio, who began his career at a commercial seed company and now works for the Organic Seed Alliance, a nonprofit organization that helps farmers develop seeds best suited for organic farming. According to Navazio, after decades of preferential breeding for yield, transportability and uniformity, our standard produce has lost much of its flavor and, in some cases, some of its nutrients. Initially, his goal was to improve upon these commercial breeds. But in 2002, when he started working with organic farmers at the seed alliance, he realized most modern crop varieties were simply not suitable for most organic farming. “The available commercial seed stock was developed for a high-input industrial model where the land is flat, irrigated and treated with pesticides and fertilizers,” Navazio says. “Organic fruits and vegetables need to resist pests naturally by having more genetic diversity within each breed and by having a structure that wards off pests. They also need to be great nutrient scavengers, because their fertility is not handed to them on a platter.” In addition to prizing hardiness, Navazio found, organic farmers had other priorities that were different from those of big conventional growers. First and foremost, they wanted fruits and vegetables that had great taste, and preferably ones that packed a bigger nutritional punch. On the other hand, Navazio found that shelf life and transportability were less essential to most organic farmers because they sold locally and had less lag time between field and plate. A high yield was less important, because local customers accept more imperfections and so less of the harvest needed to be discarded. Mitcham told me that as much as 30 percent of all produce on some larger farms is relegated to animal feed or canned food or is left to rot in the field. To meet this new set of standards, Navazio realized, he needed to bring back a whole series of characteristics that have been lost with


Tanger Outlets brings new jobs, and a chance to boost Prince George’s retail profile

contracting firms handed out applications and held one-on-one interviews for part-time and full-time positions that need to be filled in the next two months. “In order to get the stores up and running, the hiring is going to be a critical piece,” said Christi M. Wallace, general manager at Tanger Outlets at National Harbor. There is growing demand for employment in the area after years of a struggling economy. The unemployment rate in Prince George’s stood at 7.1 percent in July. The retail jobs could increase the county’s employment base and reduce its standing as a bedroom community where six out of 10 working residents leave the county for work. Janea Cook, 18, a District Heights resident and student at the Art Institute of Washington, was applying for a part-time job to earn some money while in school. Her cousin, Alycia Drummond, 19, of Suitland, who attended college in North Carolina for a year but left because of financial difficulties, said she has been looking for a job all summer. “This is a great opportunity. If I don’t qualify for one or two, I still have a chance to get in five others,” Drummond said as she filled out several applications. “I have to be able to provide for myself while I am here,” she said. “My mama is not going to be able to help me forever.” The $100 million, 350,000-square-foot shopping center is 100 percent leased, Wallace said, and most stores will be ready to open the weekend before Thanksgiving. It will be one of 45 Tanger outlet centers in the United States and Canada and the closest to an urban center, said Bruce E. Fry, assistant vice president of operations at Tanger. “We expect it will be one of our top-performing locations,” he said. The shopping center, just outside the Capital Beltway on Oxon Hill Road, will give Washington area shoppers another alternative for bargain shopping and offer county residents retail options they have long been asking for. Shoppers looking for outlet bargains now travel to centers in Loudoun, Prince William and Anne Arundel counties. “The county is prepared to elevate its retail profile across the region,” said Aubrey Thagard, a top economic development aide to Baker. “For us, it represents the fruition of a lot of dreams and aspirations . . . of improving the commercial tax base and bringing the type of quality retailers to


Energy Department was right to approve Cove Point for natural gas exports

SOME BUILDING projects may be shovel-ready. Others are shovel-desperate: they are reasonable proposals that make economic sense and boast private backers but are being slowed or blocked by interest groups leaning on the government. One that belongs in the second category is a plan to convert a natural gas import plant, an expensive facility in Cove Point, Md., that’s sitting idle, into one that can handle exports to gas-hungry Japan and India. The Energy Department approved the plan last week, but in Baltimore on Tuesday, a coalition of environmentalists and citizens groups promised to prevent the project from getting the 60 or so additional signoffs it needs. They should find a better use for their time. According to projections distributed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the price of natural gas at Cove Point next month will be $3.22. The price in Japan will be $15.35. The economic opportunity is obvious. True, liquefying and transporting American gas on tankers will push up the price for Asian buyers, but it still will be an attractive option. High transport costs limit how much gas American companies will be able to sell abroad, so, contrary to a major argument from critics of the project, domestic gas prices will stay low. American manufacturers would have an edge against overseas competitors who have to pay shipping costs for access to cheap U.S. natural gas. The bottom line, according to a recent study commissioned by the Energy Department, is that allowing natural gas exports would result in net benefits to the country in every scenario analysts considered. Though environmentalists cite a range of concerns about the project, the big one is that they oppose fracking, the drilling technique used to obtain natural gas trapped in shale rock formations, and anything that encourages the practice. But natural gas burns cleaner than coal and could aid the transition to a greener economy. The fracking business calls for serious regulation, not unsparing opposition. It’s true that natural gas that is liquefied and shipped abroad leaves a bigger emissions footprint than that which stays in this country. That’s all the more reason to regulate the emissions at liquefaction facilities like Cove Point instead of refusing to supply countries such as Japan, which are desperate for fossil fuels — and will readily use coal, which is far more harmful, if natural gas isn’t available. The Energy Department was right to approve


Use by. Sell by. Doesn’t help us get by.

and beef jerky (which probably never goes bad). In its place, manufacturers might put the more useful “best within XX days of opening,” which would better guide consumers on how to judge the food’s freshness. The authors emphasized that any language should undergo consumer testing before being placed on packages. “These ambiguous dates are a clear failure of the law which has led to a proliferation of labels that mean nothing,” says Emily Broad Leib, the director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and a co-author of the report. “Helping consumers to make better decisions is a tangible thing we can do” to reduce food waste. New technologies could help solve the problem. Smart labels, which change color when a product has been stored improperly or for too long, could tell consumers whether a food is no longer safe to eat. Quick Response, or QR, codes, the square bar codes that can be scanned with a smartphone, could be used to give consumers more information about how to store products to protect shelf life. Food-waste experts are hopeful that a growing public discussion on food waste will prompt regulatory action. Both the USDA and the FDA have the implicit authority to regulate date labels. Lowey says she plans to reintroduce her bill. “Date labels come up a lot when I talk about food waste,” says Jonathan Bloom, the author of “American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (And What We Can Do About It).” “Everyone seems to have the same concerns and confusion.” But even the best system of rules and definitions can’t always tell consumers when or whether to throw food away. “Having a date on a package of food is reassuring,” says Bloom. “But you should always trust your senses before that arbitrary date on the package. Look, smell and, if it comes to it, taste it before you throw it away.” This is Black’s last Smarter Food column, but she will continue to write occasional feature stories for Food. She is a former Food section staffer based in Brooklyn. On Twitter: @jane_black. She will join today’s Free Range chat at noon: live.washingtonpost.com. More from Food: ‘Supermodel’ produce, less than idea Give your wilted vegetables a drink of water Does big farming mean bad farming? Green Carts puts fresh produce where the people are What Paula Deen didn’t bring to the table


D.C. news in brief

Great Zucchini and Ian Harding, star of the ABC Family network’s “Pretty Little Liars.” Registration is $45 for the race and $10 for the children’s dash. To register, go to www.raceforeverychild.org before Oct. 3. For information, call 301-565-8577. Open house on Franklin Park renovation plan is Oct. 2 The D.C. Office of Planning is having an open house on the revitalization of Franklin Park from 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 2 at the Four Points by Sheraton, 1201 K St. NW. The 4.79-acre park — one of the city’s largest — between K and I streets NW and 13th and 14th streets NW is owned by the National Park Service. The population of the surrounding neighborhood, Center City, has increased by nearly a third since 2003, resulting in greater demands for open space. The park is in disrepair and primarily serves nearby office workers during their lunch hours and the area’s homeless population. The D.C. government, the park service and the Downtown Business Improvement District are partnering on a long-term plan for the park. Options under consideration include adding amenities such as food services and restrooms, increasing public events and programs, enhancing the adjacent streetscape, restoring the park’s historic resources, incorporating green practices, and using a public-private partnership to maintain and manage the park. The planning office has contracted the landscape architecture firm OLIN Studio to develop a design for the park. An environmental assessment by the National Park Service will follow their proposals. The open house will include a project overview, an initial report on park conditions and a workshop from the project team on desired park uses. For information, go to planning. dc. gov. Museum hosts Big Build family event Saturday The annual Big Build, a hands-on introduction to the building trades for children and families, will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW. This year’s program will highlight conservation through green building practices. The event will include workshops with plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, landscape architects and woodworkers; a nail-driving contest; brick wall and log-cabin constructions; a class in making hardware wind-chimes; and activities for children 4 to 12. The event is free. For information, go to www.nbm.org. Art sought for Chuck Brown Memorial Park The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities has issued a request for public art proposals for an installation at Chuck Brown Memorial Park


Local food purveyors find eager audiences at gyms

on for its paleo offerings. Over the summer, Power Supply merged with Mindful Chef, a local company that specializes in vegetarian dishes and caters to yoga studios. So as of last week, customers can choose from three meal plans: paleo, mixitarian (“paleo-inspired,” but with legumes and grains) and vegetarian. CrossFitters and yogis may seem very different, but their cultures are more similar than many people realize, Morton says. They’re both invested in what he calls “intentional fitness.” And they both nurture a community culture that helps spread the word when there’s something members want to support. In the yoga world, for instance, they really like Goûter, a line of tonics made with alkaline water, organic lemon, coconut nectar, spices and herbs. Steve Mekowski and V Orban set out to create something like fresh juice, but with better nutritional value and a slightly longer shelf life. The couple live in Columbia Heights and frequent Buddha B Yoga on U Street, so co-owner Valerie Grange suggested they try selling the drinks there. That was last summer. Now, Goûter is available at more than a dozen locations — mostly yoga studios, but also Pilates, barre and cycling gyms. The growth has kept Mekowski and Orban too busy to even put up a Web site. “Their stuff is a magic elixir. It’s yoga in a bottle,” says Grange, who’s eager to introduce students to raw, vegan foods. That passion persuaded Julia Gerard, 26, to spend the $6 on her first tonic. “I knew thought and care went into anything Buddha B would associate with,” Gerard says. She now knocks back four bottles a week. Her favorite flavor: Stretch, which is packed with anti-inflammatory turmeric. (“It’s the new kale,” Orban promises.) Debuting at grocery stores, where a product has to compete with everything else on the shelf, would have made it much tougher to reach customers, Mekowski says. The same goes for the breads and treats from Out of the Box Bakery, says founder Jennifer Lassiter. The CrossFit athlete and coach was an avid baker before jumping on the paleo bandwagon, and she wasn’t about to give that up. When her experiments with almond and coconut flour turned out to be pretty tasty, pals at District CrossFit begged to be her first customers. Soon, she had orders at several CrossFit boxes around town — hence the name of her business. “It’s a natural relationship because


supermarket, proving perhaps that not all supermarket tomatoes are flavorless. Carly Scaduto, a spokeswoman for Monsanto, said the company is considering making it available to consumers. Researchers are evaluating whether Seminis 9137, a variety developed for carefully controlled greenhouse cultivation, will perform well outdoors in gardens and climates across the United States, she said. If it is distributed to retailers, it won’t be before 2015, and it probably would have a more engaging name than Seminis 9137. “If this does make it to the home gardener, they’ll work on the naming strategy,” she said. Okay, so if we can’t get Seminis 9137, what about Rutgers No. 11, or the other grape varieties under development by Rabin’s colleagues? There are no promises there, either. “They’re early selections,” he said. “They may never be released.” Flavor is not the chief criterion for a commercial variety; it has to ship without bruising, it has to yield well, it can’t split, it has to ripen at a certain time and so on. Don’t worry: Rabin says most small-fruited varieties hold the promise of superiority. Sungold is a classic cherry tomato that is pretty foolproof — sweet, tangy and fruity. Currant and grape tomatoes also tend to be inherently better. “They’re just born that way,” he said. “Maybe the small-fruited varieties are putting the same amount of energy into fewer pounds of tomatoes,” he said. But this is more than just speculation. He took a dozen varieties grown at the Snyder Farm and analyzed them in the laboratory. The three grape tomatoes scored highest in three key areas: in a volatile compound named Furaneol; in Brix, a measure of sugar content, and in total acidity. The highest-scoring was Seminis 9137, but two consumer grape varieties — Jolly Elf and Smarty — were close behind. In fact, Jolly Elf scored the highest for Furaneol, a compound that recalls the pleasant aroma of a ripe strawberry. So, when you’re compiling your tomato variety lists this winter, include one or two grape tomatoes among them. I have grown or tasted Juliet, Napa and Yellow Pear, and commend them all. I would also consider some newer varieties that I haven’t tried but that have won in national garden trials, namely Sugary Hybrid and Solid Gold. But if Seminis 9137 makes it to the gardener and under a fancy name, I’ll let you know. @adrian_higgins on Twitter Also at washingtonpost.com


Defense Department orders review of security clearance procedures

clearances, the government’s overburdened security clearance system struggles to keep track of those with classified access, according to current and former government officials. Agencies rely heavily on individuals or their supervisors to report disturbing behavior, tangles with law enforcement or mental-health concerns. They have few other ways to know if someone requires a second look. An Army pilot program that began last year found that 20 percent of military and civilian personnel it scrutinized had serious issues that demanded a review of their security clearances. Some had been arrested or charged with crimes, made threatening comments about President Obama on social media, or expressed depressed or suicidal feelings. The program relied largely on law enforcement records and public Web sites. In the past year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the agency that oversees the government’s security clearance system, has been studying how to more regularly screen people who have passed background checks. “We all realize the security clearance process is terribly broken,” said Charles Sowell, a former senior adviser to Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who helped lead the effort. “The current system of checks are ineffective and unreliable.” Gene Barlow, a spokesman for the ODNI’s Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, acknowledged that the agency sees room for improvement. “We do act on derogatory information that we receive, with regard to security clearances,” he said. Anthony Roman, head of a New York risk-management and investigations firm, called the system “a house of cards.” “It’s built with a weak foundation, and that would be a compliment,” he said. Defense officials said Wednesday that they are developing a mechanism that would alert the Pentagon in a systematic way to troubling information about its employees from a range of sources, including local law enforcement databases. A senior defense official said such a system would automatically “push” out relevant information about potentially dangerous employees. “The problem we have is there is no consistent across-the-board mechanism for recording arrests around the country,” the official said during the briefing, which the Pentagon held on the condition that officials not be identified. Mental-health issues generally come to the attention of investigators doing background checks only when people first apply for clearance and are asked to report any treatment they have received. Those who sought help for post-traumatic stress resulting from combat, or for marital or grief counseling, are exempted. Once


Cargo ship rockets from Virginia to international space station

On its way to the international space station, an Antares rocket lifts off a NASA launchpad on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. (Steve Helber/Associated Press) A commercial cargo ship rocketed toward the international space station Wednesday in the first resupply mission from Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Cygnus, a capsule created by a Virginia-based company, Orbital Sciences, is carrying 1,300 pounds of food, clothing and goodies for the astronauts. It is due at the orbiting outpost Sunday. The unmanned Antares rocket blasted into a clear sky from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. The rocket exhaust plume could be seen from Washington. The three space station residents watched the launch live with the help of a satellite link. “Great launch! Excited for Cygnus arrival on Sunday!” space station astronaut Karen Nyberg said in a tweet. She’s expecting a fresh stash of chocolate. After a month-long visit, Cygnus will be filled with station trash and cut loose for a fiery destruction upon reentry. Orbital Sciences hopes to launch another Cygnus in December. — Associated Press


purity. A Congressional Research Service report in August identified some of the activities and services that were hit by previous shutdowns: ●●The National Institutes of Health did not accept new patients for clinical research. ●The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped disease surveillance. ●Health care and other services for veterans were curtailed. ●Recruitment by federal law enforcement agencies halted. ●Border Patrol agencies’ hiring was placed on hold. ●National parks closed, as did museums and monuments. ●About 200,000 applications for U.S. passports were delayed, and up to 30,000 applications for visas to the United States went unprocessed each day. But not all of government would close, and not all federal employees would lose pay. If history is a guide — and that’s not a certainty — about 800,000 employees would be furloughed. That figure comes from the five-day shutdown in November 1995. There were about 2 million federal employees then, approximately the same as today. So if a shutdown comes, many — perhaps most — feds would continue working. Agency leaders were told Tuesday to “ensure that only those activities that are ‘excepted’ . . . would continue to be performed,” according to a memo sent by Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia M. Burwell. Quite a few employees are considered excepted. “Several types of executive branch officials and employees are not subject to furlough.” says the CRS report. Quoting Office of Personnel Management guidance on shutdowns, the CRS said excepted employees work through shutdowns “because they are performing work that, by law, may continue to be performed during a lapse in appropriations.” According to the CRS, operations that would continue during a shutdown include national security, payment of benefits, medical care, food and drug safety, air traffic control, border protection, care of prisoners, law enforcement, emergency and disaster assistance, protection of federal facilities, tax collection, maintenance of the power distribution system, and preservation of the money and banking system. Despite everything that would continue, agencies must take time to prepare for the activities that would not. “Agencies making shutdown plans is a huge waste of time and energy,” said Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union. “All of that is so distracting and counterproductive.” Two things the Republican strategy is producing now: uncertainty and anxiety. Said Obama: “That can’t be a recipe for government.” Twitter: @JoeDavidsonWP Previous columns by Joe Davidson are available at wapo.st/JoeDavidson.


Montgomery County Animal Watch

This was among cases received recently by the Montgomery County Animal Services Division. For information, call 240-773-5054. That number provides recorded information on topics such as the Montgomery County Animal Shelter hours and location, adoption and licensing procedures, rabies clinics and low-cost neutering. Two huskies with rap sheets impounded Shelter has adoptable cats Gaithersburg Reduced fees for cat adoption: Germantown — Compiled by Lisa M. Bolton


In Philadelphia, finding intriguing museums, restaurants and bars that hide in plain sight

with long hot peppers, broccoli rabe and/or sharp provolone at Stogie Joe’s, a local tavern also on Passyunk. Or pop over to the nearby Italian Market, a colorful traditional stall market, to a hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop called Paesano’s. My favorites there include the Paesano, a messy but delicious combination of beef brisket, horseradish mayo, roasted tomatoes, pepperoncino and sharp provolone, topped with a fried egg. Across the street from Pat’s and Geno’s in the former Satellite Auto Body is a new beer-focused bar, Garage. It’s no-frills — the roll-up door from its former incarnation is still in place — but offers some 200 canned brews, as well as skeeball, pinball and a pool table. For entertainment on a quirkier scale, I might pop into the nearby Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar for its boisterous karaoke, cheap drinks and smoky atmosphere. (The bar has an exemption from the city’s smoking ban.) The Avenue, as locals call it, is now a happening retail and restaurant district, with vintage and other boutiques and upscale restaurants complementing its traditional school-uniform shops, pizza joints and cheese shops. But one of my go-to BYOB spots usually looks shut down. Open only for dinner on weekends, the cash-only Mr. Martino’s Trattoria is like visiting someone’s antique-filled home, and the food is prepped with equal care. I always bring a bottle or two of red and plan to settle in for a leisurely evening of polenta and sausage, pasta fagiole, tiramisu and other home-style dishes. On the way from my rowhouse to the Italian Market, I pass another quirky gem tucked inside a former church rectory. The Mario Lanza Institute and Museum pays homage to a local son and opera singer who was a crossover star decades before the Three Tenors and Josh Groban. Born in 1921, Lanza was touted as the next Enrico Caruso and became an unlikely MGM heartthrob before dying (operatically) at age 38. The free museum is carefully maintained by some remaining devotees, who celebrate his life via posters, photos, costumes and other memorabilia. One of my regular destinations of late isn’t really hidden, but soon will disappear for good. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which organizes the city’s popular Flower Show each March, has created a pop-up beer garden on a vacant lot on Broad Street in Center City, across from the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. I can’t get enough of this playground


Dana Milbank: What’s superbugging you?

the deadly coronavirus coming from Saudi Arabia. To help me keep track of these threats, my Post colleague Alan Sipress, author of a book on pandemic flu, suggested that I subscribe to ProMED, a daily e-mail update from the International Society for Infectious Diseases. This week, ProMED informs me that there have been four new cases of MERS (the Middle East respiratory syndrome), and that there’s a potentially problematic development with H7N9 influenza in China (not to be confused with H7N7 in Italy or H5N1 in Cambodia). The trouble is, ProMED also introduces me to all kinds of threats I never thought to worry about. As I write this, the daily bulletin includes news of a paralytic shellfish poisoning in Australia, E. coli in Canadian cheese, waterborne diarrhea in Armenia, a superbug in Brazil, hemorrhagic fever in Uganda, hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome in Russia, cholera and dysentery in Africa, something called “Meloidogyne enterolobii root knot” involving South African potatoes, and the dread “lumpy skin disease” related to bovines in Turkey. Lest you think these are other countries’ problems, ProMED has word of salmonellosis at a North Carolina church barbecue, toxic algae in Ohio drinking water, people catching the flu from pigs in Arkansas and equine encephalitis from mosquitoes in Maine. There are contaminated oysters in Massachusetts and the bubonic plague in New Mexico. Still, I’d take those over the case in Bangladesh involving monkey-to-human transmission of “simian foamy virus.” ProMED is a must-read for a hypochondriac like me, and I intend to keep reading about these exotic contagions until I succumb to the ravages of mad cow disease, which the government seems to think I have. (Regulations prohibit me and anybody else who lived in Britain between 1980 and 1996 from giving blood, out of concern that we may be carrying the mind-wasting illness.) Reading about all the infectious threats actually eases the symptoms of germaphobia because you realize that, though there are lots of things out there that can kill you, they rarely do. Beneath the headlines about the CDC superbug catastrophe, for example, you learn in smaller print that only about 1 in 14,000 Americans will be killed by them in a year, and these people often have other health problems. You also realize there’s not a whole lot an individual can do about all the infectious threats, other than washing your hands, cooking your food, getting


How to bring farmers markets to the urban poor

industrial agriculture — pollution; animals’ ill health, masked by antibiotics in concentrated feedlots; insupportably low farm wages; and the carbon generated by transporting food to the East Coast from California and South America — are not registered in the prices at Shoppers. The Sunday market is a good place to begin thinking about how to better reach those in need. After all, some of its members founded Crossroads, and in 2007 it joined Crossroads as one of the first markets in the D.C. area to accept food stamps. Many Sunday vendors accept WIC and other benefits, but the market isn’t easily accessible for people without cars, and its prices are relatively high. For the moment, philanthropy has to be part of the solution. Since 2008, the national nonprofit Wholesome Wave has introduced programs like those at Crossroads to double the value of government food vouchers in more than 300 “farm to retail” sites in 28 states and the District of Columbia. GrowNYC, a New York nonprofit that sponsors more than 50 markets, has developed weekly food shares that can be purchased by food stamp recipients, and supports immigrant farmers. The Sunday market provides an opportunity to raise money among customers for programs of the sort that are used effectively at Crossroads and across the country. This approach is promising but also precarious. It depends on Congress to maintain and expand nutrition and food assistance, and to encourage healthy food choices through farmers market vouchers. It also depends on continuing charitable support from patrons who today believe that everyone should have access to good food but whose attention might turn elsewhere tomorrow. The local-food movement is in its infancy. It will continue to expand as more people give priority to knowing where and how their food is grown, and as the hidden costs of industrial agriculture become more evident. The Crossroads Farmers Market shows that the advantages of buying local food can be shared widely. We can work toward the day when Wednesday’s shoppers can afford Sunday’s prices, too. mlipsky@demos.org Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter. 15 % Share of Americans lacking enough money for food, at least some of the time, as of 2011. More than $250,000 Funds raised by Crossroads to help low-income customers buy fresh food — and, in turn, help make it worthwhile for farmers to sell at the market.


Washington area kids get down to business

Four kids in the Baltimore-Washington area have used their creativity to start businesses. They are getting experience in research, product testing, marketing and sales — and they’re still having fun. Have you ever heard someone call an activity “a labor of love”? That means that even though something takes a lot of work, you love doing it. Do you love reading? Playing baseball? Working with animals? How about building or growing things? All of these activities take work, but if you love doing it, time flies. Here, we meet a few kids who have made their passions “work” for them. They’ve turned things they love — creating art, baking cupcakes and giving a dog a bone — into moneymaking opportunities. A budding CEO Brett Burch says a kid can do anything if he puts his mind to it. What has he put his mind to? Selling his artwork — on mugs, ties and T-shirts — to make money for college. He calls his online boutique Brett’s Trove. “I guess you could say my art is like cartoonish and fun,” Brett says. He gives the artwork on his items for sale such names as “Huh?” “Whoa!” or “Really?” In addition to saving money for college, he donates a portion of the money he earns to charity. He also donates merchandise to the annual fundraising auction at Hyde-Addison Elementary School in Northwest Washington, where he is in the fourth grade. What’s the hardest part about running a business while juggling homework? Quality control. (Brett works with the online company Zazzle to turn his designs into clothing, accessories and gifts.) “Once, a tie came back with the art printed sideways,” he says. “I like everything to be just right.” This month, Brett’s busy getting ready for DC Fashion Week. Models will wear his ties Thursday evening. “I love being able to show my art,” says the 9-year-old CEO (that’s chief executive officer, or the person who’s in charge). “The ties are my best seller. Plus, I want to be famous.” Check out Brett’s online boutique at www.zazzle.com/brettstrove. (Always ask a parent before going online.) Cupcakes for Literacy At Krissa Hillman’s school book fair last year, the girl from Savage, Maryland, found a glossy dessert cookbook that she loved. “I begged my mom to get me that book, but it cost a lot,” says 11-year old Krissa, who loves to read and bake. “My


A month after chemical attacks, Syrian residents of Ghouta struggle to survive

BEIRUT — In more than a dozen Skype interviews, field-hospital doctors and activists in the area known as Ghouta described what they called a dire humanitarian situation, with residents struggling to survive under a continuing siege from government troops. Most victims of sarin attacks die within the first 24 hours, according to experts; the United States and its allies have said 1,429 Syrian civilians died in the Aug. 21 attack, which they blame on the Syrian government. A number of other sarin-related deaths have followed, doctors say, mostly in the days immediately after the attack. But scores of survivors suffering from side effects continue to require medical attention for persistent symptoms that include respiratory problems, nausea, weakness and blurred vision, the doctors say. Meanwhile, they say, explosive shells continue to fall, leaving little way of evacuating the wounded and only limited medical equipment to treat them. An estimated 300 survivors of the chemical attack are contending with side effects in the Eastern Ghouta towns of Ein Tarma and Zamalka, doctors said. An additional 150 are suffering from the effects in Moadamiya, a town to the west of Damascus that was also targeted Aug. 21, doctors said, and oxygen supplies there are low. But even before last month’s attack, the worst chemical strike in decades, rebel-held areas of the Damascus suburbs had long been a target of government assaults. And now, the side effects from sarin are just one among a sea of concerns. “This siege is what we call a slow death,’’ said an activist who gave his name as Anas al-Dimashqi. For about 10 months, he said, government forces have maintained what amounts to a blockade by erecting checkpoints that prohibit food and supplies from entering the area. The activist, who is based in the Eastern Ghouta town of Kafr Batna and volunteers in field hospitals, was using a pseudonym adopted to protect against retaliation by government forces. With hospitals lacking even the most basic medical supplies, neighborhoods have become breeding grounds for communicable diseases, doctors and activists said. With food supplies scarce and proteins and fresh vegetables lacking, malnutrition, particularly among children, is increasingly common. Majed Abu Ali, a spokesman for the medical office in Eastern Ghouta, said there have been outbreaks of diseases such as brucellosis, scarlet fever and hepatitis. Child malnutrition is increasingly common, said the doctor, adding that about 100 children are treated for malnutrition


THE REGION THE DISTRICT Arrest made in K Street corridor killing A 33-year-old Suitland man has been arrested and charged in a homicide that occurred in March near Washington’s K Street corridor, D.C. police said. They said Michael A. Smith has been charged with first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of Paul Aime Tanoh Danzo, 24, of Laurel. Police have said Danzo was killed March 21 in a car parked near the door of the Balletto nightclub at 17th and L streets NW. Police have said they thought Danzo had been a patron of the club. — Martin Weil MARYLAND Whole Foods project clears a major legal hurdle A Prince George’s County Circuit Court judge has dismissed an appeal to the rezoning of a 37-acre site in Riverdale Park where a developer plans to build a Whole Foods Market. The ruling clears one of the biggest hurdles for the development of the property, where county and town leaders envision the construction of a mixed-use community anchored by the high-end grocer. Some University Park residents filed the appeal last year, arguing that the District Council — the name the County Council takes when it reviews land-use matters — committed due process violations during the course of approving the rezoning. The $250 million project is now back in the District Council for another appeal, and the panel’s decision will determine whether the project can move forward. — Luz Lazo VIRGINIA Minor injuries in Loudoun school bus accident A Loudoun County school bus veered off the road in Purcellville and hit a tree Friday morning, causing only minor injuries to some of the students and the driver, according to authorities. The bus was taking 37 students to Mountain View Elementary School about 7:30 a.m. when it went off the road, according to Wayde Byard, Loudoun County schools spokesman. Sixteen students and the driver were evaluated by medical personnel and taken to Inova Cornwall Hospital as a precaution, Byard said. Authorities said it was not immediately clear what had caused the bus to leave the road. — Caitlin Gibson


Children cross Mexican border to receive a U.S. education

ride or the hospital bill. The financial impact on the Mimbres Memorial Hospital in Deming has been significant. The 49-bed facility lost more than $1 million a year from 2007 to 2010, said Dulin, director of the New Mexico Office of Border Health. Three years ago, with financial losses mounting, New Mexico officials negotiated a new policy with their Mexican counterparts — only life-threatening cases would be allowed to cross the border to go to the hospital; all other cases must be handled by a public health clinic in Palomas. Mexican officials agreed to renovate and staff the small clinic so it can operate 24 hours a day. As a result, the number of Mexican women delivering babies in Deming dropped by half, from 143 in 2009 to 72 in 2011, according to the Office of Border Health. Ambulance runs from the U.S. border to the hospital also have been cut in half. Though the change has eased the financial pressure on his ambulance service, Columbus Fire Chief Ken Riley worries that some Mexicans are not getting adequate medical care. In the past year, two women in labor were rejected at the border and referred to a hospital in Ciudad Juárez, an hour and a half away, according to medical staff at the Palomas clinic. Both women miscarried. Earlier this year, a pregnant woman was turned away at the border and sent to the clinic in Palomas. Finding the clinic closed, she returned to the border and delivered the baby on the floor of the port, Riley said. Settling in the States On a recent morning in Mr. Rubio’s second-grade classroom at Columbus Elementary, the children stood to face a small American flag protruding from the whiteboard. They recited the Pledge of Allegiance in memorized English. To reach Mr. Rubio’s classroom, Octavio Ortiz, 7, rises before dawn in the cluttered bedroom he shares with his mother and grandfather in a low-slung concrete house on a dirt road in Palomas. His grandfather is already gone, up at 4 a.m. to work in the nearby fields, picking onions. Roosters crow, and several dogs roam the rubble-filled street. Octavio changes out of his Spider-Man pajamas and gets his backpack and a goodbye kiss from his mother. There is no breakfast at home. Like all children at Columbus, Octavio eats free breakfast and lunch at school — the only meals that some will get.