U.S. and Japan must seal the deal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership

THE TRANS-PACIFIC Partnership has been described as the centerpiece of President Obama’s attempt to “pivot” U.S. foreign policy toward Asia, and with good reason. A proposed trade liberalization agreement among 12 nations, the TPP would, in binding the United States more closely with a portion of the world, collectively account for 40 percent of global output. At the same time, it would ensure that this huge area, including giants such as Japan, Canada, Mexico and Australia, conducts business according to U.S.-style rules on tariffs, regulation and intellectual property. China would be left on the sidelines, along with its mercantilist model of international commerce — unless and until it modifies that approach. The net effect would be a better balance of power, money and ideas between the United States and its allies on the one hand and China on the other. To reap these strategic benefits, of course, the United States and the other 11 would-be members of the TPP must first cut a deal. As a practical matter, that means everyone is waiting for a “yes” between Washington and Tokyo, the two biggest economies in the group, and the two with the most divergent approaches, historically, to trade. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed last year to pursue a TPP deal , he seemed to be making an historic decision to open his country’s long-closed domestic markets — not only to satisfy long-standing U.S. complaints about Japanese protectionism but also to subject Japan’s stagnant economy to the bracing effects of competition. Lately, however, talks have stalled over age-old issues such as Japan’s high tariffs on U.S. meat and its non-tariff barriers (regulations and such) against U.S. autos. Now, as President Obama embarks on an Asian trip, the highlight of which will be a state visit to Japan, pessimism about the two countries’ ability to reach a TPP deal is growing. Japan alone is not to blame: Congress has failed to grant Mr. Obama “fast-track” authority to speed lawmakers’ approval of a deal once it’s negotiated. That ostensible sign of flagging U.S. interest weakened the U.S. negotiating team’s position and reinforced deep-seated resistance to trade liberalization among Japan’s political interest groups. Mr. Obama and Mr. Abe must use this state visit to shore up U.S.-Japan relations and to refocus their respective publics on what’s really at stake. The world remains fraught with geopolitical risks. China’s rise is not the only


2014 Boston Marathon: Larry Chloupek a marathoner like no other

A little more than a year after a tragic bombing, runners return to Boylston Street with purpose for the famous race. Rita Jeptoo of Kenya set a course record, and Meb Keflezighi became the first American man to win since 1983. BOSTON — “I was blown away,” said Chloupek, 53, from Potomac. “The crowd support, from mile one until the end, the clapping that went on — it was absolutely incredible.” The reactions of the spectators and his fellow racers were understandable. It isn’t every day you see a man completing a marathon on crutches. It isn’t every Boston Marathon that sees one either. It is rare enough that race organizers don’t even keep precise records on it, but a race spokesman said Chloupek’s feat was not unprecedented. In any case, as he lined up for the 8:50 start to the mobility-impaired portion of the marathon Monday morning in Hopkinton, Chloupek looked around and saw wheelchair racers, hand-cycle racers and several amputees with prosthetic legs — but no one else but him about to race 26.2 miles on crutches. Chloupek, a management liaison director for the National Institutes of Health, lost his left leg to bone cancer at the age of 7. The amputation was near his hip, which has made prosthetics difficult for him to use. So he gets around primarily with forearm crutches. Despite his disability, he has had a remarkably full athletic career, having completed five half-marathons, played seated volleyball in the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics and coached baseball at Churchill High. Over the past 12 months, of course, Boston — and all of America — had gotten to know more about amputees than it ever cared to learn. Sixteen people lost limbs in last April’s Boston Marathon bombing that also left three people dead. Some of them were escorted to the course Monday near the end to cross the finish line along with the competitors running in their honor. Of all the years for Chloupek to qualify for Boston — based on his time in the 2013 D.C. Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon — it seemed somehow fitting, even fateful, that it would be this year. And once he got in, he made it his mission to use his platform to send a message to those injured by the bombing. “I wanted to give them some strength,” Chloupek said. “They’re new amputees. I wanted to prove a point


Neopol Savory Smokery, where wood and heat work magic on salmon and more

pheasant. “My mom,” says Brown, “is not like other people.” Indeed, her approach to cooking reflects her free-spirited, willful approach to life. Shortly after she moved to Baltimore and gave birth to Dorian, her husband left her. Lahnstein’s English wasn’t great. She didn’t know anybody. To say that she was a stranger in a strange land is an understatement. “But I didn’t want to go back to Germany,” Lahnstein, 54, says through a thick accent. “I didn’t want to hear ‘I told you so’ from my mother.” She befriended a neighbor, Odessa Dunson, who became Dorian’s godmother. The friendship was all the support Lahnstein needed. The two women taught themselves to smoke salmon, kebabs, shrimp, chicken and the aforementioned pheasant. (Not herring, though. She couldn’t get the same quality here as they have in Germany, she says.) They sold their smoked foods at farmers markets and, in 1993, opened a cafe/art gallery in Baltimore called Metropol. When Metropol lost its lease and closed in 1997, Lahnstein and Dunson returned to farmers markets. In 2003, with backing from a Baltimore developer, Lahnstein went out on her own and opened Neopol in the Belvedere Square Market, where the business remains. Eventually, Neopol began also operating at Washington’s Eastern Market weekend flea market. Representatives of the then-fledgling Union Market in Northeast Washington asked Neopol to open a pop-up. It sold in one day what Lahnstein had hoped to sell in two. That success led to the opening of a permanent outlet at Union Market. Brown, 31, whom Lahnstein made majority partner in 2009, admits to being “hesitant” about the move to Washington and credits general manager Jeni Paik for the new outlet’s success. The Union Market location doesn’t have an on-site smoker, and Paik transports the food daily from Baltimore and oversees the operation. It has been a hit: Sales at Union Market have more than doubled since it opened. Neopol is expanding its Belvedere store, adding a pantry of smoked items and a second J&R wood-fueled smoker. Under consideration is an outlet at a farmers market in Philadelphia, and mail-order. In the kitchen, Brown smears salmon with orange marmalade, preparing the fish for its varying-heat treatment. “We’re always open to new ideas,” he says. Shahin will join today’s Free Range chat at noon: live.washingtonpost.com. Follow Shahin on Twitter: @jimshahin. Recipes: Smoked Salmon BLT Neopol’s Smoked Salmon Salad More from Food: Smoke Signals


Craig Saffoe: Managing the care of the National Zoo’s large cats

(Ellen Perlman) In a maze of indoor cages located beneath the lion and tiger yards at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, Craig Saffoe paused while the ungodly roar of a lion named Luke reverberated around the building, drowning out conversation and creating vibrations underfoot. It didn’t faze Saffoe, whose job is managing the zoo’s lions and tigers and bears—no lie. But the job involves more than just keeping animals healthy and on view. Saffoe also helps educate the public about conserving these animals, many of them endangered, and supports worldwide efforts to sustain them. “It’s a dream job. Most folks who work here would say the same thing,” said Saffoe, curator of the zoo’s great cats, Andean bears and the Kids’ Farm. When working with a collection of live animals, there’s no such thing as a routine day, Saffoe pointed out. One day, an animal might act as though it’s interested in breeding. On another day, an animal might be imported to live at the zoo or one will be shipped out. Who is Craig Saffoe? POSITION: Curator of great cats, Andean bears and Kids' Farm, Smithsonian's National Zoo RESIDENCE: Springfield, Va. AGE: 39 EDUCATION: North Carolina State, three years studying animal science with a pre-veterinary focus HOBBIES: Playing soccer, video games and spending time with family “I really get pulled,” he said. “It keeps it exciting, keeps it from getting stagnant. I have to make snap decisions.” Recently, Saffoe helped lower two of the zoo’s four newest African lion cubs into a moat in the lion’s yard, one by one, during their first time outside. Playful cubs who roughhouse and swat one another could wind up in the water, he said, and it’s important to make sure they know how to get out. The cubs passed the test swimmingly. Saffoe also helps the zoo as it works to save threatened species worldwide. With fewer than 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild, for example, Saffoe represents the National Zoo in a cooperative arrangement with an American zoo association and other zoos’ representatives, to share input as they create survival plans for maintaining the population and health of the tigers and other rare species. “If we do that well, we maintain a genetic safety net of animals,” he said. The zoo was rewarded in August when a tiger gave birth to two cubs. Juan Rodriguez, a keeper for the Giant Pandas,


Beer Madness: Devils Backbone Vienna Lager takes the title

streamlined and more approachable,” says Oliver. “There’s no heavy body and sweetness.” It also has less alcohol than its stylistic cousins. Gordon Biersch Marzen, a beer that Oliver brewed during his 61 / 2-year tenure with the downtown D.C. brewpub, measures 5.7 percent alcohol by volume. Devils Backbone Vienna Lager, by comparison, clocks in at 4.9 percent. Expert panelist Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) hit the nail on the head when he remarked that our winner was the beer he’d easily choose “if I was drinking a 16-ounce.” Oliver likes to push the envelope with new styles. As of this writing, the Devils Backbone brewpub in Roseland was serving his New World Pilsner, a golden lager flavored with a native American hop variety called Neo-Mexicanus, which, according to Oliver, imparts a distinctive “peach-mango” character. Devils Backbone Vienna Lager (Deb Lindsey/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) But the Vienna Lager is the brew that pays the bills. It’s the most popular beer at the brewpub, says Oliver, and accounts for 65 percent of off-premise sales. “We cannot keep up with this beer,” he sighs. To allow the beer to mellow, the brewer needs to age it for five weeks, reports Oliver; it’s an extravagant amount of time compared with the quicker-fermenting ales that small breweries tend to specialize in. It’s one of the reasons that Devils Backbone recently installed eight new 240-barrel fermentation tanks at its satellite brewery in Lexington, Va. (dubbed the Outpost), and has four more such vessels on the way. Devils Backbone rolled out about 25,000 barrels of beer last year, making it the Old Dominion’s largest craft brewery as well as its most decorated. Owner Steve Crandall said he hopes to double the output this year. Incidentally, the Beer Madness championship is the second honor bestowed this month on the Vienna Lager. At the most recent World Beer Cup judging, held in conjunction with the Craft Brewers Conference in Denver, the Vienna grabbed a silver in the Vienna-Style Lager niche. When a group of industry experts backs up your verdict, you can hold your head up and revel in a job well done. Kitsock is editor of Mid-Atlantic Brewing News. More from Food: Beer Madness Round 4: And then there were 2 Beer Madness Round 3: The Final 4 Beer Madness Round 2: The Elite 8 Beer Madness Round 1: The Sweet 16 Beer Madness: We unveil the bracket


Police search for suspects, motive in shooting outside National Zoo

still resonates in Woodley Park, as does the stabbing. Both were violent reactions to petty grudges involving young men and women who visited the zoo during the family day that has brought black families to the zoo for a century. While police officials Monday cautioned that they still were gathering information about the circumstances, D.C. Police Cmdr. Michael Reese, head of the 2nd District station, said he had poured officers into the neighborhood Monday because of the two previous incidents at the zoo. “There was a heightened level of urgency,” Reese said. He said his officers were in “constant communication” with zoo police to coordinate the hand-over of the ejected youths. Other police officials said they are investigating whether gangs or neighborhood crews were involved. Those officials said they do not know whether the shooter had been inside the zoo or was among the group kicked out. Police officials and family members Tuesday struggled to piece together the chaotic events. The grandmother of one of the victims, a 16-year-old who was shot in the elbow, said he had gone to the zoo to look at girls. She said he told her that he never got into the zoo and was shot with an 18-year-old friend at the zoo’s entrance. She said the shooting could have been over a year-old dispute at a club or a prior stabbing. “I think they were targeted,” said the woman, 51. “My grandson saw them turn, and that’s when all the shooting started.” She said the victim did not recognize the shooter but thought that he was part of a group he and his friends had confronted in a club weeks or months ago. She also said that one of his friends had been stabbed recently in Southwest Washington and that she feared the shooting may be linked. The victim, who was resting at his grandmother’s house Tuesday, did not want to talk to a reporter. “I'm not going to let him out of my sight,” she said. The 18-year-old friend, who was shot in the hand, could not be reached for comment. Reese, the police commander, said he could not say whether the grandmother’s account was accurate. Zoo officials Tuesday were also trying to sort out how the events pieced together. Spokeswoman Annalisa Meyer said the rowdy group was ejected shortly after 5 p.m. She described them as disruptive, possibly pushing and shoving, but


Chat Leftovers: Cooking with bitters

It’s official: The 2014 Beer Madness champ is a proud product of Virginia. Devils Backbone Vienna Lager rose to the top of our 32-beer field, taking out Victory Brewing’s Swing Session Saison in the final leg of the competition. Beer columnist (and Beer Madness panelist) Greg Kitsock wraps it up here. Even if you’re not a beer fan, you have to admire District resident Gene Bonventre, who is poised to enter his 10,000th brew review on RateBeer.com. Not many people on this Earth can match that record; read Tammy Tuck’s story to find out how he did it. Also in Food this week, Smoke Signals columnist Jim Shahin pays homage to Neopol Savory Smokery, a family-run business that recently expanded into the District; and Pati Jinich talks to Guadalupe Rivera Marin , daughter of Diego Rivera and stepdaughter of Frida Kahlo, about culinary life in Kahlo’s famous blue house. Greg Kitsock, Gene Bonventre and Jim Shahin will all be on hand today for our Free Range chat, so tune in at noon, and bring questions! Even though we have an hour to field them, sometimes we can’t make it through the entire stack. That’s where I come in. If your question doesn’t get answered, maybe it’ll show up here next week. Speaking of which, here’s a leftover question from last week’s chat: I’ve managed to amass a somewhat large collection of cocktail bitters (well, like 12 to 15 bottles, which seems like a lot to me). Besides cocktails, do they have other culinary uses? I thought about mixing some in with salad dressing, but I wonder if they could work in other dishes, even desserts. A great question! Who doesn’t have one or more of those little bottles sitting around, probably 95 percent full and opened just a few times a year? My own personal use of bitters is confined to drinks, so to answer this question I figured I was going to have to dig in and do a lot of research. Not so. The folks at Angostura, makers of probably the best-known bitters, have devoted a chunk of their Web site to appetizer, entree and dessert recipes using their product. A few examples: fondue, chowder, hamburger, grilled seafood, rice pudding, muffins, custard and sponge cake. From there, you can probably extrapolate and think of many others. The Web site explains that “Angostura aromatic bitters is not bitter when


Russia threatens retaliation as Kiev orders military moves in eastern Ukraine

they try to reassert their authority in a region where government buildings remain in pro-Russia separatist hands a week after Russia and the West agreed on a plan to end the occupations. In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said it was “ludicrous” for Lavrov to claim “that the United States has anything to do with Ukraine’s counterterrorism operation or that . . . we’re running the show or funding it.” She called Lavrov’s remarks “counterproductive and inflammatory” and noted that he gave no indication of a Russian plan to implement last week’s Geneva agreement to use Moscow’s influence to disarm the separatists and push for occupied buildings to be vacated. President Obama said last week that he hoped to see Russia follow through “over the next several days” on the agreement, reached with the United States, Ukraine and the European Union. After White House meetings this week, officials said they anticipated that U.S. asset freezes and visa bans would be announced against a new set of prominent Russians by Friday. Lavrov’s declaration, which echoes warnings given by Russia before its annexation of Crimea last month, followed the discovery in eastern Ukraine of the body of a local politician who supported Ukrainian unity. He had been tortured and dumped in a river after being abducted last week, Ukrainian authorities said Wednesday. “The terrorists who effectively took the whole Donetsk region hostage have now gone too far,” Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said after officials identified the stabbed and bruised body of Volodymyr Rybak. His corpse and that of an unidentified man were found Saturday near Slovyansk, a city that international observers say is controlled by armed pro-Russian activists. “These crimes are being committed with the full support and connivance of the Russian Federation,” Turchynov said. A politician’s killing Rybak was kidnapped last Thursday by four men in military uniforms who hustled him into a vehicle outside City Hall in Horlivka, a depressed industrial and mining city about 26 miles northeast of the regional capital, Donetsk. Rybak, a local council member, had tried to lower the flag of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” at City Hall and replace it with the Ukrainian flag. Rybak’s wife, Elena, said in an interview soon after her husband was taken that she feared the worst. “He was a police and knows how to defend himself,” she said. “He would not have gone anywhere without a fight.”


D.C. news in brief

Correction: Public meeting with architects on King library is Thursday The D.C. Public Library is having a presentation and discussions on the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library renovation at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, 901 G St. NW. Representatives from Martinez + Johnson and Mecanoo, the library’s architect team, will give a short presentation. There will be roundtable discussions with the public on library services for children, teens, adults and the disabled; special collections; the use of technology; community spaces; and shared, mixed uses for the library. For information, go to www.dclibrary.org. DMV will open service center in Georgetown on Tuesday The D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles will open its Georgetown Service Center at a new location, the Shops at Georgetown Park, 3222 M St. NW, Canal Level, on Tuesday. The center will operate from 8:15 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and will be a full-service facility. A temporary location at 301 C St. NW closed March 22. For information, go to dmv.dc.gov. Public defender office will hold legal summit for ex-offenders The D.C. Public Defender Service will hold a legal services program Saturday at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, 801 Mount Vernon Pl. NW. At the event, D.C. residents with criminal records can receive consultations on record sealing, expunction and federal pardons. Participation does not establish an attorney-client relationship with the Public Defender Service. The program is part of the annual Community Reentry and Expungement Summit. The other events in the summit are a fall social services resource fair and workshops and community forums in the winter. Registration is free. To register, call 202-824-2835 or go to www.pdsdc.org. D.C. Central Kitchen receivesgrant to provide fresh produce D.C. Central Kitchen, a nonprofit provider of produce, recently received a $250,000 grant for Healthy Corners, a program that delivers affordable produce to neighborhood corner stores and mobile produce carts in the District. The program started as a six-month pilot program in wards 5, 7 and 8. The money from the D.C. Department of Small and Local Business Development will increase the number of participating stores from 33 to 63 and expand the program’s reach to wards 2, 4 and 6. In Wards 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, according to the D.C. Department of Health, obesity rates exceed 20 percent, with five of the top 10 causes of death directly related


Q&A: Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun interviews President Obama

Trans-Pacific Partnership has prompted debate in Japan, as it has in the United States, and I’ve made it clear that any agreement has to include strong protections for labor and the environment. As this debate goes forward, I believe our citizens will recognize the important benefits the TPP can deliver for all our countries, including the United States and Japan. By reducing tariffs and other barriers, it would open more markets to our goods, boost our exports, and help make our businesses more competitive in the global economy. TPP will also help protect our businesses against unfair competition from state-owned enterprises and it will improve the protection of our intellectual property in a digital world. Put simply, TPP will help support jobs and growth in all our countries and give an added boost to America and Japan’s economic revitalization. Of course, in order to realize the Trans-Pacific Partnership, all our nations will have to live up to our commitment to reaching a high-standard agreement and make important decisions, some of them difficult. It won’t be easy. But I’m absolutely convinced that the benefits to our workers, businesses and our economies as a whole make TPP a clear win for all our countries. In addition, TPP will reinforce the important structural reforms that Prime Minister Abe is pursuing and thereby help unleash greater growth in Japan over the long term. TPP can be a foundation for more jobs and growth in our countries for decades to come.” QUESTION: PRESIDENT OBAMA: This doesn’t only do a disservice to women, it hurts us all. In the United States we’ve seen that businesses with more women managers often do better and boost profits. Around the world, countries that create more opportunities for women are more successful and more prosperous. It makes sense. A nation cannot truly thrive if it denies itself the extraordinary potential of half our citizens. I often say that when women succeed, America succeeds, and it’s true for other countries as well. That is why I believe in doing everything we can to make it easier, not harder, for women to succeed in the workplace. We’ll be hosting a summit on working families at the White House in two months to discuss what more we can do in the United States, and I’m pleased that we’ll be joined by several participants from Japan and South Korea. Here in Japan, Caroline Kennedy


President’s Obama’s response on Ukraine is worse than useless

The April 22 editorial “The Ukraine dither” has it right. The Obama administration’s nuanced, carefully targeted and, above all, reactive approach to the Ukraine crisis is worse than useless. The existing sanctions are a mockery of justice. Waiting for the worst to happen before imposing new, significant ones essentially allows the worst to happen. It is time for a new, active style of diplomacy. The United States should specify distinct, concrete and verifiable actions the Russian government must take by a certain date and time, as well as what the United States will do if Russia does not act. For example, within 48 hours, Russia must publicly renounce the armed insurgents in Ukraine, call for them to surrender their arms and vacate government buildings, and move Russian armed forces from the Ukrainian border. Failing this, the president should indicate that the United States will freeze all Russian assets in the United States, boycott certain strategic Russian economic sectors (hydrocarbons, minerals) and suspend all U.S. government-funded cooperative activities with the Russian Federation. Simultaneously, NATO should announce plans to hold a joint naval exercise in the Black Sea and its intention to create a safe maritime channel to Ukraine. Is this an ultimatum? Yes. It is time for us to act as the great power we at least used to be or to be counted out. Gerson S. Sher, Washington


Navy investigates ex-Blue Angels commander after complaint he allowed sexual harassment

grounded that year for performing a dangerous barrel roll too close to the ground during a show in Lynchburg, Va. Upon leaving the team in November 2012, he told the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal that he had no regrets. “If being with the Blue Angels was the last time I fly a Navy plane, that’s a pretty good way to go out,” he said. In the face of several ethics scandals over the past 18 months, the Pentagon has repeatedly pledged to hold commanders accountable for their actions. At the same time, however, the military has tried to suppress details about many embarrassing episodes. For example, the Army announced in June, without elaboration, that it had suspended its top general in Japan for allegedly mishandling a sexual assault case. On Tuesday, after obtaining a copy of the investigative report under the Freedom of Information Act, The Post disclosed that the general was given a plum job at the Pentagon even though he had violated regulations by failing to refer the sexual assault complaint to criminal investigators. In January, after obtaining another batch of investigative documents, The Post reported that the Pentagon had disciplined three other generals for personal misconduct. One was found guilty of assaulting his mistress. A second joked in e-mails that he sexually gratified himself after meeting a member of Congress whom he described as “smoking hot.” The third kept a bottle of vodka in his desk and was investigated for having an affair, according to the documents. At the same time, it appears that some military leaders have become highly sensitive to the issue and are quick to launch investigations at any hint of sexual impropriety or ethical misbehavior in the ranks. In February, the Army announced it had suspended a brigade commander at Fort Carson, Colo., and in a highly unusual move, would not allow him to deploy with his soldiers to Afghanistan. Again, Army officials did not divulge what had prompted the decision. A copy of the investigative report in that case, however, shows that the commander was suspended after three female soldiers alleged that he had made insensitive comments during a meeting to discuss sexual assault policies. The commander, Col. Brian Pearl, was later cleared of wrongdoing and allowed to join his troops in Afghanistan. A copy of the investigative report was first obtained and published Tuesday by the Gazette newspaper of Colorado Springs.


Neighbors seek answers after shooting near National Zoo

Zoo and police leaders and neighbors discuss the violence on Connecticut Avenue and security at the zoo’s traditional Easter Monday events. Some Woodley Park residents are calling for an end to Easter Monday events at the National Zoo after an outbreak of violence near the zoo marred a century-old tradition. About 75 people packed a conference room in Woodley Park on Wednesday night, looking for information about shootings near the zoo Monday afternoon and April 14. Blessed Chuksorji-Keefe, a seven-year resident of the Northwest Washington neighborhood, said the annual family day event should be abolished, citing its origin in segregation and three violent episodes in the past 15 years. “Sometimes things outlive their usefulness,” she told the crowd. Others said improving security would be a better option than doing away with the Easter Monday event, which has been popular among African American families since 1891. (The Washington Post) “Terminating this event would send a terrible message to the city,” said Woodley Park resident Nan Aron. Two male teenagers were shot — one in the left elbow and one in the left hand — just after 5:15 p.m. Monday, about an hour after the family day event ended and visitors were streaming out of the zoo and onto Connecticut Avenue. Several residents at the meeting asked why zoo officials don’t use metal detectors or bag searches upon entry. Some suggested restricting groups of teenagers who don’t have adult supervision. Ruth Ellis, 43, said she is searched at other Smithsonian museums and cannot figure why the zoo is different. “Search my bag. Pat me down. I don’t care,” Ellis said. National Zoo Director Dennis Kelly said that officials would “go back to the drawing board” and consider such options, but he added that such moves would fundamentally “change the zoo.” Law enforcement officials had planned for months to provide a heavy presence at the zoo Monday, Kelly said. The zoo’s police chief, Terrell Wilson, said his officers were supplemented by D.C. police officers on bikes and horses and positioned in cruisers and by Metro transit officers. Zoo officials had expelled about three dozen rowdy youths minutes before the shooting Monday, and D.C. police said a crowd of about 100 young men and women had converged near the front gate about that time. Within minutes, two shots were fired, injuring a 16-year-old and his 18-year-old friend. The shots scattered frightened bystanders and forced


World Digest: April 23, 2014

SYRIA Assad forces accused of new gas attacks Syrian government forces have attacked rebel-held areas with chlorine gas in recent weeks and months, leaving men, women and children coughing, choking and gasping for breath, according to Associated Press interviews with more than a dozen activists, medics and residents on the opposition side. Syria flatly denied the allegations, and they have yet to be confirmed by any foreign country or international organization. But if true, they would highlight the limitations of the global effort to rid President Bashar al-Assad’s government of its chemical weapons. Witnesses near Damascus and in a central rebel-held village told the AP of dozens of cases of choking, fainting and other afflictions from inhaling fumes that some said were yellowish and smelled like chlorine. Some of those interviewed said they believed the gas was responsible for at least two deaths. They said the fumes came from grenades and helicopter-dropped “barrel bombs.” Activists have posted videos similar, though on a far smaller scale, to those from last August’s chemical attack near Damascus that killed hundreds of people and nearly triggered U.S. airstrikes against Syria. The new footage depicts pale-faced men, women and children coughing and gasping at field hospitals. — Associated Press TURKEY Condolences offered in Armenian killings Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday offered an unprecedented, conciliatory message to Armenians on the eve of the anniversary of the massacre of Armenians almost a century ago. Erdogan called the events of World War I “our shared pain” and acknowledged that the deportation of Armenians in 1915 had “inhumane consequences.” Erdogan released a statement in Turkish, Armenian and seven other languages expressing hope that those killed are at peace and offering Turkey’s condolences to their descendants. The message came a day before Armenians mark the 99th anniversary of the killings in 1915 by Ottoman Turks. The episode is considered by many historians as the first genocide of the 20th century. They estimate that about1.5 million Armenians died. Turkey rejects the term “genocide,” saying that those figures are inflated and that there were deaths on both sides as the Ottoman Empire collapsed. Armenian President Serge Sarkisian accused Turkey of “utter denial” of what Armenia sees as the genocide of Armenians, but added that his country does not consider Turks its enemies. — From news services NEPAL Dozens of Sherpas leave Mount Everest Dozens of Sherpa guides packed up


Montgomery County Animal Watch

These were among the cases received recently by the Montgomery County Animal Services Division. For information, call 240-773-5900. This number provides recorded information on such topics as the new animal services and adoption center’s hours and location in Derwood, adoption and licensing procedures, lost-and-found and field services. Collie attacked by neighbor dog: “Paws in the Park Dog Walk Fest” registration: Reduced fees for cat adoption: Germantown No-kill shelter has adoptable cats: Gaithersburg New location for Montgomery County Humane Society: The organization, which now operates a private rescue and adoption facility, is at 1300 E. Gude Dr., Rockville. Foster dogs and other animals available for adoption can be viewed at www.mchumane.org. The new general phone number is 240-252-2555. An MCHS off-site adoption event this week will be held at the following location. Potomac — Compiled by Lisa M. Bolton


Prince George’s and Southern Maryland Going Out Guide, April 24-30, 2014

THU 24 “The Colored Museum” Bowie State’s Spring Arts Festival continues with this interactive presentation of monologues that portray the African American experience of the 1980s. Thursday at 11 a.m., Friday at 11 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Bowie State University, Fine and Performing Arts Center, Main Stage Theatre, 14000 Jericho Park Rd., Bowie. 301-860-3769, tickets 301-860-3717. www.bowiestate.edu. $10, seniors and students $5, children $3. Adventures in the Field FRI 25 “ART” Better Block Night “A Raisin in the Sun” The Ballet Theatre of Maryland presents “Edges and Dimensions of Contemporary Dance,” a showcase of new, contemporary American dance works, Saturday in Bowie. (Nick Eckert) “Andrew Lippa’s Wild Party” Big Daddy Stallings Dallas Black Dance Theatre: The Nina Simone Project District5: Transcribed The Kenny Barron Platinum Quintet SAT 26 Cultural Arts Expo Glass show and sale Maryland House Garden Pilgrimage Montpelier Festival of Herbs, Tea and the Arts “Edges and Dimensions of Contemporary Dance” Golden Gloves regional championships “Exchanged III” “Natural World” SUN 27 “Joseph Sheppard: On a Grand Scale” “Ballets Russes” UMD Japanese Koto Ensemble Riversdale Chamber Music Society Concert Series “Jazz at Five” fundraiser Sugar Pie MON 28 TEMPO: The Experimental Music Performance Organization TUE 29 “Flying Force: The Prince George’s County Police Aviation Unit” WED 30 Big Band Finale “The Prophet” — Compiled by Jillian S. Jarrett from staff reports Adventures in the Field 3Archaeologists Ruth Mitchell and Timothy B. Riordan give updates on archeology projects happening around St. Mary’s City. Mitchell will discuss excavations happening at the Anne Arundel Hall site at St. Mary’s College, and Riordan will offer findings from work at the Calvert House site. Thursday at 6:30 p.m. Historic St. Mary’s City Visitor Center, 18751 Hogaboom Lane, St. Mary’s City. 240-895-4990, www.hsmcdigshistory.org. Free.


Police say victims shot outside National Zoo were targeted

Zoo and police leaders and neighbors discuss the violence on Connecticut Avenue and security at the zoo’s traditional Easter Monday events. Two teenagers who were shot in a crowd outside the National Zoo on Monday were targeted, according to D.C. police, who also said they had been monitoring reports on social media that violence might break out that day. D.C. police Capt. Melvin Gresham said authorities had high visibility in and around the zoo before Monday’s shootings. Police officials had information that some groups may have arrived at the zoo with the intention to fight, he said. “I think we had enough units in the area,” Gresham said during a community meeting Wednesday night in Woodley Park, in which residents who live near the zoo voiced concerns over safety and whether an annual Easter Monday event should continue. “It seems like only those two individuals were targeted,” Gresham said. “These were not random shots.” Blessed Chuksorji-Keefe, a seven-year resident of the Northwest Washington neighborhood, said the annual family day event should be abolished, citing its origin in segregation and three violent episodes in the past 15 years. (The Washington Post) “Sometimes things outlive their usefulness,” she told the crowd. Others said improving security would be a better option than doing away with the Easter Monday event, which has been popular among African American families since 1891. “Terminating this event would send a terrible message to the city,” said Woodley Park resident Nan Aron. Two male teenagers were shot — one in the left elbow and one in the left hand — just after 5:15 p.m. Monday, about an hour after the family day event ended and visitors were streaming out of the zoo and onto Connecticut Avenue. Several residents at the meeting asked why zoo officials don’t use metal detectors or bag searches upon entry. Some suggested restricting groups of teenagers who don’t have adult supervision. Ruth Ellis, 43, said she is searched at other Smithsonian museums and cannot figure why the zoo is different. “Search my bag. Pat me down. I don’t care,” Ellis said. National Zoo Director Dennis Kelly said that officials would “go back to the drawing board” and consider such options, but he added that such moves would fundamentally “change the zoo.” Law enforcement officials had planned for months to provide a heavy presence at the zoo Monday, Kelly said. The zoo’s police chief, Terrell Wilson,


Fresh reports of sexual misconduct undercut Pentagon’s argument for internal fix

For more than a year, U.S. military officials have admitted they have a serious problem with sexual assault and harassment in the ranks. They’ve pleaded with the White House, Congress and the public to trust commanders to fix it on their own terms. But the Pentagon’s argument has been undercut badly by fresh reports of senior commanders bungling cases or coming under investigation themselves. On Wednesday, the Navy acknowledged it had reassigned the former commander of its elite Blue Angels flight squadron after it received a complaint that he had tolerated sexual harassment, hazing and lewd behavior. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that a two-star Army general had been suspended because he had failed to notify criminal investigators, as required, of a sexual-assault complaint against a colonel with whom he worked closely. Last month, the Army was forced to cut a plea deal with a brigadier general being court-martialed on sexual-misconduct charges after a judge found evidence that political pressures may have influenced the case. The embarrassing episodes surfaced soon after the Senate narrowly defeated a bill in March that would have stripped commanders of their authority to oversee the prosecutions of sexual-assault cases and other major crimes. The Pentagon had lobbied heavily against the measure. The close vote delivered a warning that lawmakers’ patience with military leaders was wearing thin. “We’ve had a constant cry from the military saying, ‘Trust us,’ ” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the lead sponsor of the bill, which would have given military prosecutors the power to press charges and ended commanders’ ability to influence cases. “But there is no standard under which commanders are being held accountable, and it’s amazing.” Gillibrand said she would try to bring her bill to another vote this year, but she added that she wished the White House would intervene. “I also hope the president’s paying attention,” she said Thursday in a phone interview. “He could make this change all by himself.” President Obama has stood by the Pentagon but also has told military leaders that they need to “step up their game exponentially” on the issue. He has said the Defense Department must show progress by December or he will consider “additional reforms,” an allusion to Gillibrand’s proposal. Nancy Parrish, president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group that represents sex-crime victims in the military, said the recent scandals could easily sway votes in Congress. “We


Touring Replacements Ltd., a china lover’s, and loser’s, dream

even a pot-bellied pig. After Oliver explained the drill, she cut me loose to play. I followed the yellow tape on the floor down a long corridor in a warehouse toward the retail showroom, passing row after row of floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with china, crystal and some collectibles. (Hummels, anyone?) From there, I inched through a hall of fame, marveling at the media coverage and the dozens of awards that the 69-year-old Page has received since he grew Replacements from a flea-market hobby to an attic business in 1981 and now an industry with more than 430 employees and $80 million in revenue. Stories detailed the former state auditor’s community philanthropy, his adoption of infant Vietnamese twin boys (now 14 years old) with his partner, workplace accolades, and of course, Replacements’ expertise in tracking down missing tableware. Half the photographs seemed to spotlight dogs, including Page’s now-deceased short-haired miniature dachshunds (my breed of choice, too!). I landed in the sparkling showroom just as a tour was starting up. On this frigid weekday morning there were only a few people in the showroom, and I was thrilled to have guide Phyllis Gorman all to myself. “Let me start by telling you a bit about Bob Page,” she said, not knowing that I’d just digested his life story. “Is he here now?” I asked, hoping to snag a glimpse of my new hero. “I saw him earlier, but I’m not sure,” she said. “Believe it or not, he still goes to yard sales and brings in things.” That’s our Bob. Although many old and new items in the showroom are affordable, part of the stock is high end, like Royal Copenhagen’s botany-inspired Flora Danica, which Gorman led me to see inside its shiny and secure case. “This is our most expensive line. That tureen is around $14,000.” My mouth gaped open to the size of a $1,000 saucer. We stopped at the “Great Wall of China,” long glass-fronted cases holding Replacements’ 500 most popular china patterns, out of 265,000 active and discontinued patterns from 5,500 manufacturers. That case was followed by two more, holding the top 150 crystal and silver patterns. From there, we popped by the packing department, which ships out around 2,500 orders a day, double during the holidays. Then we passed the call center, the research department, the restoration and polishing stations, and the artisan station, where craftspeople will


Saudi Arabia’s MERS virus outbreak demands transparency

ON SUNDAY, the Saudi health minister, Abdullah al-Rabiah, struck a reassuring tone as the kingdom reported a surge in cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome, a novel coronavirus known as MERS. The minister said he didn’t know why the case count had spiked but maybe it was seasonal. He said he didn’t think it necessary to change preventive measures and insisted that authorities were taking all due precautions. On Monday, he was fired by King Abdullah. This was a rare public acknowledgment that all is not well. In recent days, the number of people infected has continued to rise. The number of cases in the first third of this year is the same as in all of 2012 and 2013 combined, according to virologist Ian M. Mackay at the University of Queensland in Australia. Most of the cases, but not all, have been in Saudi Arabia. No antiviral or vaccine is known to be effective against the virus, which has killed about one-third of those who have become infected. The new, acting Saudi health minister, Adel Faqih, immediately struck a different tone. He visited a hospital in Jiddah that has been the epicenter of an outbreak this month and pledged to adhere to “the principles of transparency and disclosure.” For Saudi Arabia, this could be a turning point — none too soon — or it could be another rhetorical flourish. For the sake of global public health, let’s hope that Mr. Faqih means what he says. Saudi Arabia has a largely closed society, one that won’t be easy to change. Reports about infections have lacked details, and the kingdom does not encourage a free press to poke around. Major uncertainties about the MERS virus persist, including how it spreads, whether it has efficiently begun human-to-human transmission and whether its genetic makeup has evolved. The Saudis must throw open their doors to international scientific inquiry. They are reportedly consulting experts from Germany, Great Britain, the United States and France. We recommend to Saudi leaders the experience of China, which learned painfully in the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic a decade ago about the high costs of secrecy to human health and welfare. The World Health Organization reaffirmed Wednesday that “critical information gaps remain” about transmission of the MERS virus and the route of infection. In the recent surge, the WHO estimated that 75 percent of the cases are secondary, meaning


Montgomery County police arrested head of Md. swim club on child sex abuse charges

Christopher Thomas Huott (Montgomery County Police/Montgomery County Police) A Maryland swim coach was arrested on child abuse and sex offense charges Thursday morning after a former student accused him of engaging her in “sex acts” when she was a child, authorities said. Police have charged 53-year-old Christopher Thomas Huott, founder and owner of the Maryland Suburban Swim Club, in connection with the allegations. A woman approached police last month alleging that Huott had “engaged her in sex acts on numerous occasions while she was a minor in his care,” according to a statement by Montgomery County police. The abuse started in the mid 1980s, when the victim was 7, and continued for several years, according to police allegations filed in court records. Detectives are worried that there may be more victims “due to Huott’s position . . . and his access to children,” Montgomery police said. Huott founded the Maryland Suburban Swim Club in 1986, according to the organization’s Web site. USA Swimming, the governing body for many swim clubs across the country, has been working to enact reforms since five years ago, as reports of young athletes being abused began emerging more frequently, said Tom Ugast, chief executive of Nation’s Capital Swimming Inc. in the District. “Back in the 1980s, there weren’t a lot of protections in place for coaches in terms of background checks,” said Ugast, whose swim organization is one of the largest in the nation with about 1,500 athletes and 70 coaches. But now, coaches for clubs sanctioned by USA Swimming must undergo annual background checks and take athlete protection courses “to make sure all of them know what is proper and how to look for any predators that may be around us,” Ugast said. USA Swimming first learned of Huott’s arrest Thursday, said Karen Linhart, the organization’s spokeswoman. The group has a “Safe Sport Program” aimed at increasing awareness and reducing the risk of abuse in the sport, and the organization has “no tolerance for violations” of USA Swimming’s code of conduct, Linhart said. “We had no prior knowledge of any inappropriate behavior but we are looking into the matter,” Linhart said in a statement. “USA Swimming is deeply committed to the safety and welfare of all its members.” Huott is being held on a $50,000 bond. Montgomery police are asking anyone with information on this incident or possible others to call 240-773-5400. Liz Clarke


Michael Gerson: The strange tension between theology and science

In the late 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble established that the light we detect from galaxies is shifted toward the redder colors of the spectrum, indicating that they are moving away from us at enormous speeds. And the farther away galaxies are, the faster they are fleeing. Rewinding that expansion through mathematics — dividing distance by speed — indicates that something extraordinary happened about 14 billion years ago, when the entire universe was small, dense and exceedingly hot. Scientists such as Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaitre had anticipated the big bang — which Lemaitre described as a “Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of creation.” Others theorized that such an event would have left a detectable residue of hydrogen plasma grown cold over time. In the 1960s, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson duly detected it — finding microwave background radiation in every direction they pointed their telescope. The whole sky glows faintly at a temperature of about 3 degrees above absolute zero. Part of the static between channels on broadcast television is an echo of the big bang. These are some of the most regularly confirmed, noncontroversial findings of modern science. Yet a recent poll found that a majority of Americans are “not too” or “not at all” confident that “the universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang.” Some of this skepticism, surely, reflects the inherent difficulty of imagining unimaginable scales of time and space. And some fault must lie with American scientific education, which routinely transforms the consideration of wonders into a chore and a bore. But the poll also found that confidence in the big bang declines as belief in a Supreme Being increases. This is not easy to explain. The predominant cosmological picture that predated the big bang — a static universe without beginning or end — would have pleased the ancient Greeks, who preferred their cosmos orderly and eternal. People influenced by the book of Genesis should feel more at home in a universe with a dramatic, cataclysmic beginning. Lemaitre, in fact, was a priest, whom some suspected of sneaking theological assumptions into his science. He didn’t, and carefully (and correctly) insisted that the big bang is consistent with both materialist and religious convictions. But the idea of a universe that began in a flash that flung stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies across the vast canvas of space is, to put it mildly,


Conductor Osmo Vänskä and the NSO stumble a bit at the Finnish line

The conductor Osmo Vänskä resigned his post as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra in October, during the musicians’ 16-month lockout. On Thursday, three months after the musicians returned to work, the orchestra board voted to return him to the music director post with a two-year contract. And on Thursday night, he conducted the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. It was an eventful day — and an oddly anticlimactic night. Labor disputes, though they have their own theatrical elements, are not a natural fit for the performing arts. Most of Thursday night’s audience probably didn’t yet know that Vänskä had reclaimed his former job. Indeed, you could argue that the fact was hardly relevant to his appearance in Washington, although it was cause for general joy across the country. Many in the audience, though, might have remembered Vänskä from his frequent past visits to the NSO’s podium, often with music by Sibelius and Kalevi Aho — two Finnish composers particularly dear to Vänskä’s heart, whose music he led here yet again on the first half of Thursday’s program. And the conductor’s signature energy has been abundantly on display with the Minnesota Orchestra, documented on a number of recordings, including this year’s Grammy Award winner for Best Orchestral Performance: two symphonies by Sibelius. It would have been nice to write the story of a triumphant return. But the night’s performance, though likable and energetic, wasn’t winning any awards. Vänskä certainly brings understanding and engagement to the table, particularly when it comes to Sibelius, whose Third Symphony opened the program. He also plumbs the extremes of sound. He pulled the orchestra back in the second movement, to a sound so distilled it was almost homeopathic, the merest tinge of affect on the ear; he extended the moment and then, gradually, allowed the music to regain its color and return to the realm of the clearly audible, but in a different musical terrain than the one from which it started out. But the orchestra sounded consistently fuzzy — not quite together, not quite in focus. This was even more pronounced in the Mendelssohn “Italian” Symphony, which seemed on paper like a perfect piece for a major conductor on a happy occasion, but in which the ensemble playing — best described as woolly — left a lot to be desired. The evening’s three works were about the same length, hovering between 25


European official said. The United States, which has its own target list, held off announcing new sanctions as President Obama called the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy to confirm they were on the same page. Ukraine’s army said Friday that a rocket-propelled grenade destroyed a chopper near the rebel-held city of Slovyansk. No one died in the incident, the latest event in a series of escalations. “We will have to act,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “and I think this will be a common European action and a joint action of the G7 states.” The Group of 7 leading world economies also includes Canada and Japan. In Moscow, officials steeled themselves against possible further sanctions, saying that their economy could handle anything the West threw at it. They continued to warn that they reserved the right to send troops into Ukrainian territory as a matter of “self-defense” if they felt Russian interests were being threatened, comparing the situation to Georgia in 2008, when Russia invaded to defend pro-Russia separatists in a breakaway province. “There are relevant provisions of the U.N. Charter,” said Russia’s envoy to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, in an interview Friday on a Russian news program. Even before new sanctions hit, Russian markets were in turmoil after the Standard & Poor’s rating agency cut the nation’s credit rating to one notch above junk, citing the political situation. The Russian Central Bank hiked its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point to 7.5 percent to combat rising inflation, and the ruble, which has plummeted 8.9 percent against the dollar this year, sank further. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a forum of young diplomats on Friday that the Ukrainian government needed to halt its attempts to dislodge the separatists who have taken over several cities in the country’s east, saying only then would those militants lay down their arms. President Obama, who has commented on Ukraine at virtually every stop during a week-long tour of Asia, said that “additional targeted sanctions” against Russia are “ready to go.” At a news conference in Seoul with South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Obama said the new measures would be imposed “assuming we don’t see any drastic changes in behavior on the part of the Russians.” In addition to more “targeted” sanctions, he said the groundwork was being laid “so that if and when we see even greater escalation,


Why FDA’s proposed changes to Nutrition Facts label are problematic

Burkey Belser is the president and co-founder of Greenfield Belser, a brand-strategy and design firm. He designed the FDA’s Nutrition Facts label in 1992. There is very good reason to support Michelle Obama’s push to revise the Nutrition Facts label. If nothing else, a successful redesign would support the first lady’s effort to reduce obesity in the United States. But it’s worth examining whether the label itself can help fight the epidemic, as research shows that about one-third of Americans regularly rely on it when buying food. The original label, which I designed in collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration more than 20 years ago, was born out of concern about obesity. Before that, the label was not really a label at all. Its Nutritional Information Per Serving, an undistinguished hard-to-find collation, was created when memories of the Great Depression were still with us. In the 1930s, hunger was bad enough but the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables led to vitamin-related diseases such as rickets and scurvy. Almost overnight, the American diet changed from one of scarcity to one of abundance. Food manufacturers responded by fortifying products with the long list of vitamins and minerals you still see on cereal boxes. To give these vitamin-packed foods appeal, Corn Flakes became “Sugar Frosted Flakes.” As the processed-food industry grew, meats were more broadly distributed. Refrigerated trucks were already on the roads, but the real problem was the roads themselves — they were tortuously narrow, slow and disconnected. With the building of the interstate highway system, suddenly fresh foods from California and Florida hit grocery store shelves still plump and gleaming. The gaunt figures in Dorothea Lange portraits became the roly-poly figures in today’s news photographs deploring or, more to the point, gawking at obesity. Enter Nutrition Facts. I was tasked with designing a food label for the FDA that would capture the detail that the transformed marketplace required. Four thousand pages of regulations had to be reduced to a few square inches, flexible enough to appear on a candy bar wrapper or a cereal box — and on wax paper and cellophane, which tend to blur small print. The label had to be digestible for Americans with low literacy, for non-native English speakers and older Americans with failing eyesight. The food label assumes that all readers are familiar with the metric system, and that they understand nutrients and their


After 33 years, Washington’s last video store closes its doors

trip to Antarctica. He had read a story in the New York Times about a coming revolution in home entertainment, he said. Movie rental shops had begun cropping up in Los Angeles, and Fogle thought it would be a good way to catch up on films he had missed during his trips to the South Pole. When he returned to Potomac in the spring, Fogle rented a small storefront and ordered 4,000 movies. He invested $75,000 into the company — money he’d made buying, and then selling, defunct gold mines in Colorado — and got started. He opened on April 1. It was an April Fool’s joke of sorts, Fogle says: He made a bet with his employees that the store would last five years, tops. The business was an instant hit. “Immediately, it took off,” said Fogle, 78. “I never would’ve thought it could be so easy to open a business.” Within 18 months, the company’s first store doubled in size, expanding to 1,650 square feet and 8,000 movies. “People were buying [VCR] machines at a rapid pace in those days,” Fogle said. “That was the Christmas present everyone wanted.” A few years later, Fogle quit his job at the National Science Foundation and opened his second shop, on MacArthur Boulevard. Erol’s, a regional chain, and Blockbuster had also begun cropping up in the area, but Fogle said demand was so steady that it didn’t matter. Potomac Video kept expanding: To Chevy Chase and Georgetown, and into Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia until there were two dozen stores. Fogle took the profits from his business and invested in local real estate. But in 2004, that growth began to slow as Netflix’s DVD-in-the-mail and Red Box’s vending-machine kiosks gained ground. All of a sudden, Fogle says, instead of opening new locations, the company pivoted. By the summer of 2010, Potomac Video was down to a handful of stores. Blockbuster, founded in Dallas in 1985, filed for bankruptcy that same year. In 2011, the national chain sold off all remaining stores. “Once Internet-based distribution hit, that’s when the steady hemorrhaging began,” said Joshua M. Greenberg, a program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and who has written a book about the video rental industry. Greenberg added that the rising popularity of television shows hasn’t helped matters. “It is a lot easier to binge-watch something when you can stream 12 hours


The aftermath of Easter Monday shootings at the National Zoo shootings

A day after the Easter Monday shooting at the National Zoo, Courtland Milloy’ s April 23 Metro column, “Pandas prove more valuable than the poor?,” largely attributed the crime to the poor economic circumstances of the people, some of them kids, involved. But many kids in this region and across the country come from poor families and don’t find themselves involved in violence. Mr. Milloy actually hit on the root of the problem when he noted that “there didn’t appear to be any chaperons around on Easter Monday” when these throngs of kids converged on the zoo. Declan Leonard, Falls Church ● David Rubenstein contributed $4.5 million to the panda exhibit, which attracts millions of visitors to the District each year, bringing in revenue that funds programs that help youth. His contribution helps the zoo engage millions of children in understanding the importance of animals and conservation — money well spent. Mr. Rubenstein has pledged to contribute half of his fortune to charitable causes, and he endows numerous cultural and educational institutions in places he feels will have the most impact. All that said, it’s his money to do with what he wants. The next time Courtland Milloy decides to slam someone who is actively supporting his community, he might take a little time to think through the impact of that person’s contributions instead of insinuating that the choices he makes indicate a disregard for anybody. Maxine Hillary, Takoma Park


A floating train from New York to Washington, via Japan

Thursday. “Tonight I just want to get home fast. I’ve had a long week.” The prime minister has touted the “dream technology.” “It would free people from the congested roads that frazzle their nerves while saving not only 443,000 gallons of gasoline but also 682,000 hours of time that are now wasted annually,” Abe said last year at the New York Stock Exchange. The prime minister took America’s ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, for a 300-plus-mile-per-hour spin on the duck-nosed train earlier this month. Japan has a 27-mile initial maglev line outside of Tokyo, and is slated to begin construction later this year on the rest of a privately financed 178-mile line between the capital and Japan’s third largest city, Nagoya, according to Yoshiro Taguchi, transportation counselor at Japan’s Embassy in Washington. Much of it will be underground and it is set to be completed by 2027, Taguchi said. Plans also call for the line to be extended to Osaka by 2045, though there is pressure for that portion to be speeded up, Taguchi said. It will cost $54 billion to Nagoya, and another $36 billion to reach Osaka, Taguchi said. Once completed, the American line would have a super express version – making one stop in Philadelphia and reaching New York in an hour. There would also be a slightly more local version with traditional East Coast stops in places like Baltimore, Wilmington and Newark. Each way, up to six trains can run per hour, with 1,000 people per train, Taguchi said. The Northeast Maglev YouTube video from The Northeast Maglev. Wayne Rogers, a Naval Academy graduate and Maryland businessman who heads the Northeast Maglev, the Washington firm developing detailed plans for the line, said the United States should embrace maglev technology its scientists invented decades ago. “It’s time to deploy our ideas at home,” Rogers said. The Central Japan Railway Company has agreed to transfer the technology — in which powerful magnetic forces lift and propel a train four inches above a U-shaped guideway that acts as an extended channel — “without charge,” Rogers said, adding that construction costs are only part of the picture. “Many times we focus on the cost of doing something but ignore the cost of inaction,” Rogers said. “At $14.5 billion in lost productivity per year in our corridor and growing, these hidden costs need to be considered. . . . Can we


powerful magnetic forces lift and propel a train four inches above a U-shaped guideway that acts as an extended channel — “without charge,” Rogers said, adding that construction costs are only part of the picture. “Many times we focus on the cost of doing something but ignore the cost of inaction,” Rogers said. “At $14.5 billion in lost productivity per year in our corridor and growing, these hidden costs need to be considered. . . . Can we afford to do nothing?” Rogers has sought to build bipartisan support with an advisory board that includes Rendell and former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (S.D.) as well as former Republican governors Christine Todd Whitman (N.J.) and George Pataki (N.Y.), among others. He declined to offer a range of maglev ticket prices, though he said they “will be competitive with existing transit options.” The route is also yet to be determined. Robert J. Puentes, director of the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative at the Brookings Institution, said the maglev train offers a concrete way to explore the realities of big, creative, and difficult ideas at a time when traditional U.S. government funding is tightly limited. “We’ve talked about infrastructure in the abstract for too long,” Puentes said. Brookings is organizing a session next month with key American and Japanese players to wrestle with issues raised in the effort. “This represents a way to think about what kind of transportation infrastructure projects we need in the future. . . . There’s lots of interest in private sector investment in traditionally public-sector infrastructure.” Amtrak says its Acela train travels at an average of speed of 83 miles per hour between Washington and New York, hitting a high of 135 mph and reaching Manhattan in about 2 hours, 45 minutes. Officials said the government-backed train system is working to purchase 28 new higher-speed trains, and has long-standing, multi-decade plans to build new rail-lines along the Northeast to ramp up train speeds. “As the most knowledgeable and successful intercity passenger rail operator in the U.S., Amtrak is prepared to operate maglev trains as part of a coordinated intercity passenger rail system” whenever such a system exists, said spokeswoman Kimberly Woods. She added that Amtrak is “mindful” that such an effort “will face major funding and logistical obstacles that only a new paradigm in support for public transportation can address.” Get updates on your area delivered via e-mail


Charles Krauthammer misses the mark on climate change

the relationship between climate change and specific episodes of extreme weather is the subject of intense research, it is well established among experts that our changing climate is leading to changes in the frequency, intensity, extent, duration and timing of extreme weather and climate events. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general science membership organization, states it clearly: “Climate change is already happening. More heat waves, greater sea level rise, and other changes with consequences for human health, natural ecosystems, and agriculture are already occurring in the United States and worldwide. These problems are very likely to become worse over the next 10-20 years and beyond.” There is plenty of room for reasonable disagreements about climate change, many of which play out on The Post’s opinion pages. How can we best plan for the uncertain outcomes of a changing climate? What are the costs and benefits of strategies to reduce our carbon pollution? But Krauthammer’s quarrel with well-established scientific conclusions is not only unreasonable but also built on misinformation that should have no place in a space intended to further an informed debate. Brant Olson, Berkeley, Calif. The writer is campaign director of Forecast the Facts. ● For the second year in a row, we’ve had peak cherry blossoms later than the average date of March 31. In 2013, they were nine days late; this year they were 10 days late. That’s not a big surprise; after all, the usual peak date itself is just an average. But what is curious is how The Post’s coverage of cherry blossoms veers into discussions of global warming in some years but not in others. In 2012, when the blossoms peaked on March 20, one front-page article was ominously headlined, “Much-too-early bloomers? As temperatures rise, scientists speculate that cherry blossom times could advance by a month .” A Capital Weather Gang blog post that month was headlined, “D.C.’s cherry blossoms have shifted 5 days earlier: What about global warming and the future?” Why enjoy an early spring when you can turn it into a teachable moment? Needless to say, this news angle wilted a bit in the past two years. When it comes to global warming, the recent late blossoms don’t prove much. But for that matter, neither did the early blossoms of years past. Sam Kazman, Washington The writer is general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.


Elon Musk’s SpaceX to sue government over space launch contract

engines, who praised ULA for launching 68 successful missions. “I believe we must ensure that the program’s record of success is maintained,” Shelby said at the hearing. “And while the goal of competition is to lower the cost of access to space, which I think is good, combined with the need to maintain performance and reliability, such as we have today, competition may not actually result in a price reduction for the federal government.” Discoveries in our solar system and beyond. Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said that given the complexity of launching national security satellites into space, the government isn’t just interested in the low bidder. “The government has stressed the importance of reliability. Launching a satellite payload, particularly a national security payload, is something that really, really has to work. It cannot fail,” he said. “That focus on mission assurance is something the government has prioritized over cost alone.” But Musk said his rockets are reliable and proven, as well as cost efficient. He said his company could have delivered the contract to the Defense Department for $1 billion less per year. SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to fly resupply missions to the international space station. “It just seems odd that if your vehicle is good enough for NASA . . . there is no reasonable basis for it not being capable of launching something quite simple like a GPS satellite,” Musk said. “This doesn’t seem right to us.” Musk also criticized ULA for using Russian engines in some of its rockets, which he said was possibly a violation of U.S. sanctions and unseemly at a time when Russia “is the process of invading Ukraine.” SpaceX plans to file the protest by Monday at the Court of Federal Claims. Musk said that even though the contract was signed in December, he was not aware of it until March. “The contract was negotiated and executed outside of public view and has never been made public,” the company said in a statement. Musk said that company officials tried to discuss its concerns with the Air Force but ultimately decided it had no choice but to file the suit. More from The Washington Post: SpaceX makes Easter delivery Incredible footage of the SpaceX reusable rocket Destination Unknown: A space exploration series Future of space travel may hinge on SpaceX and others


D.C. students explore Mars from Earth at science festival

build Curiosity, the nuclear-powered robot equipped with lasers than can zap rocks more than 20 feet away. Barber and students from around the world were able to join together online through a Google video chat, and they examined astronaut’s gloves, played with models of robots and rovers, and pored over photographs of Mars and images of Earth from space. Barber said he wants to visit Mars some day and said he’d take along one thing: a dove. “I’d bring a dove with me to keep in mind that Earth is still my home,” said Barber, 14. “It’s a symbol of peace.” NASA engineer Lisa May said the agency’s latest efforts seek to broaden scientific understanding of Mars, the fourth planet in line with the sun and Earth’s closest planetary neighbor. May, a leader of NASA’s Mars program, said that early in her career, Mars was known as little more than “a formless ball of red stuff.” During the past decade, scientists have uncovered significant evidence suggesting that Mars might have been habitable to life as we know it. May said that analysis of data from Curiosity show that lakes on Mars once had water so pure that humans could drink it through a straw. Jim Green, NASA’s planetary science division director, said that such findings make scientists confident that they one day will prove life beyond Earth could exist or has existed in our solar system. “We’re on the precipice of discovery,” Green said. “I think our best bet is at Mars.” On the trail are two rovers operating on the Martian surface, including Opportunity, which landed in 2004, and Curiosity, which touched down in 2012. Standing seven feet tall and weighing 2,000 pounds, Curiosity is equipped with state-of-the-art sensors and cameras that capture the landscape in fine detail. The robot, which cost $2.5 billion to develop, already has covered more than five kilometers of Mars in its exploration of the dry and arid planet, which is about half the size of Earth. The students on Friday learned that Curiosity’s recent measurements indicated a maximum temperature of 6 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, relatively mild considering that the coldest days on Mars reach 225 degrees below zero. Green said that what surprised many NASA scientists about Mars is its similarities to Earth. Mars once had clouds and weather. There were once vast bodies of water. “If we had microbes from Earth


Skywatch: Prime views of the planets in May

an hour, but skygazers always see fewer. This shower (produced by the debris stream of Comet Halley) favors the Southern Hemisphere and Earth’s equatorial region, but viewers in the Northern Hemisphere may see straggling shooting stars. Down to Earth events: ● Saturday — Space Day: The “Space-Earth Connection.” Hands-on activities for children. Learn about space and meet NASA astronauts. National Air and Space Museum, the Mall. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. airandspace.si.edu. ● Saturday — “Star Stories.” Find something ancient and something new about the constellations, at the Montgomery College planetarium, Takoma Park, 7 p.m. www.montgomerycollege.edu/Departments/planet. ● Saturday — Live from Washington, it’s your nightly heavens. “Exploring the Sky,” hosted by the National Park Service and the National Capital Astronomers. At Rock Creek Park, near the Nature Center in the field south of Military and Glover roads NW. 9 p.m. www.capitalastronomers.org. ● Monday — “Stars Tonight” at the David M. Brown Planetarium, 1426 N. Quincy St., Arlington. 7:30 p.m. $3. friendsoftheplanetarium.org. ● Monday — Astrophysicist Michael Boylan-Kolchin talks about the cosmos at the University of Maryland Observatory, College Park. View the night sky through telescopes, weather permitting. 9 p.m. www.astro.umd.edu/openhouse. ● May 10 — Craig Markwardt of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center explains current findings of NuSTAR, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, at the National Capital Astronomers meeting, University of Maryland Observatory, College Park. 7:30 p.m. capitalastronomers.org. ● May 13 — “How Skylab Changed Solar Astronomy into Heliophysics,” a lecture by Richard Fisher, scientist emeritus, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. At the Lockheed Martin Imax Theater, National Air and Space Museum, the Mall. 8 p.m. airandspace.si.edu. ● May 20 — Astronomer Leah Cheek talks at the University of Maryland Observatory, College Park. Scan heavenly objects through telescopes, weather permitting. 9 p.m. www.astro.umd.edu/openhouse. ● May 31 — Astronomy Day, hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club, at Sky Meadows State Park, near Paris, Va. Learn about the sun, the planets and other sky objects. Stay for the afternoon into the evening for sweet sky views. 3-11 p.m. Free event but $5 state park parking fee. Details at www.novac.com. ● May 31 — Star party featuring astronomers from the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club and Sean O’Brien of the National Air and Space Museum to guide you. At Sky Meadows State Park near Paris, Va. Parking $5. Arrive before dark. 8-11 p.m. Park phone: 540-592-3556. airandspace.si.edu. Blaine Friedlander can be reached at postskywatch@gmail.com .


Shootings outside National Zoo came amid rising tensions in Southeast Washington

behavior. Metro Transit Police later tracked the groups as they continued a path of rowdiness along Metro lines in Northwest and Northeast. Groups of kids traveled to Gallery Place, Union Station and then H Street — and were disruptive along the way, Ware said. A group of 30 to 50 young people jumped the gates at the U Street/Cardozo Metro station more than two miles away. “Basically, they went from one end of the city to the other carrying on,” Ware said. “It was a tough day.” On Monday, Terrell Wilson, chief of the zoo police, said his officers “embedded” D.C. officers on horses and bikes and again ejected large groups of unruly people who were pushing, shoving and cursing. After the shootings outside the gates, Ware said groups walked to Dupont Circle and to Foggy Bottom, but police kept them off Metro trains because of their rowdy behavior. Ware said the people boarded eastbound buses and left. The gunman who shot the two teenagers Monday escaped amid the chaos. Police say the victims were targeted. But authorities have been unable to determine a motive or whether they or the shooter are members of rival groups. At least two people attended both meetings — Ronald Moten, a longtime outreach activist and co-founder of the defunct Peaceoholics, and Woodley Park resident Sonya Hochevar. Moten said he was surprised by how many in Woodley Park supported continuing family day at the zoo, but he warned residents in Southeast that mayhem will not be tolerated. “They don’t want that in their neighborhood, and I don’t blame them,” Moten said at Thursday’s meeting at the Anacostia Library sponsored by the Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative. “But there were a lot of people there advocating for us, to make sure we don’t shut down African American day at the zoo.” Moten said it’s not about Southeast vs. Northwest, or Ward 3 vs. Ward 8, or even about the zoo. “We have to start engaging the entire community,” he told the group, adding later in an interview that people need to learn why violence ended up at their doorsteps — issues of neglect, lack of engagement and mediation with young people to offer alternative paths and outlets for fun. “If people have conflicts with each other, see each other, it doesn’t matter what the place is. It’s going to happen.” Hochevar said she was disappointed that


In Mr. Putin’s Russia, the lights of liberty are flickering

has been forced out, and he reports that VKontakte has fallen “under the complete control” of two close allies of Mr. Putin. In his farewell posting, Mr. Durov said he was proud of what he had accomplished in seven and a half years and “part of what’s been done can’t be turned back.” That’s true. The spark of free expression that fired imaginations in Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost era and flowered in Boris Yeltsin’s roaring ’90s led to an explosion of places like VKontakte — and it will not be extinguished easily. A whole generation has lived without fear. When Mr. Yeltsin died, seven years ago last week, it was observed correctly that he had given rise to a society freer than any in Russian history. But his successor, Mr. Putin, and Mr. Putin’s friends are working overtime to dismantle this legacy, and therein lies a second tragedy of the Ukraine coercion. In the hysteria, Mr. Putin continues to tighten the noose. On April 22, Mr. Navalny, now an opposition leader, was hit with a court ruling that he libeled a governing party politician, which he denied and which appeared to be another in a string of politically motivated efforts to silence him. The same day, the State Duma voted to approve a bill that requires bloggers who have more than 3,000 readers to register with the state as a formal news organization and follow Russia’s restrictive press law. According to a dispatch from Post correspondent Will Englund, other legislation would make it a crime punishable by five years in prison to take part in an unsanctioned protest or to publish information that puts the government or military in an unfavorable light. Equally as disturbing, Mr. Englund described reports that Russian authorities are planning to restrict travel abroad, as was done often in Soviet times. The rollback of democracy in Russia is not a new story. It began under Mr. Putin more than a decade ago. But it is no less painful now to see the final lights begin to flicker. Hopefully, the VKontakte generation will persist and resist. And hopefully, the United States will do more to help that generation get the information that Mr. Putin does not want it to hear. Read more: David Ignatius: The cost of Putin’s adventurism in Ukraine Robert J. Samuelson: Russia’s big bet on Putinomics Vladimir V. Kara-Murza: Ukraine is Putin’s, not Russia’s, war


Baltimore Symphony Orchestra brings expansive, impressive show to Strathmore

Music Director Marin Alsop. (Grant Leighton) When composer Gustav Mahler premiered his first symphony in 1889 in Budapest, the audience reacted to the music in bewilderment, with some listeners clapping at the end and some booing. On Friday evening at the Music Center at Strathmore, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s treatment of the Symphony No. 1 in D Major prompted the audience to rise in a lengthy and well-deserved ovation for a performance that was as expansive as it was expressive. Conducted by Music Director Marin Alsop, the BSO approached Mahler’s “Titan” symphony as a cohesive whole imbued with character and emotions. Rather than exploiting the composer’s ideas in the episodic way in which they are often construed, Alsop ensured that each section and every musical statement was played deliberately with transitions that flowed and coalesced into the work’s overarching structure. Her efforts meant that the 55-minute symphony unfurled in layers, from the first note to the last triumphant chord. Though the work’s opening bars sounded uncharacteristically tentative for the BSO, which wavered on the unison pitches, the orchestra settled quickly into its hallmark sonority after the initial muted trumpet call. Alsop allowed the BSO to flirt with a touch of melodrama throughout the symphony, especially in the second movement’s stately peasant dances and in the third movement’s sweetly somber melodies. She kept the musicians well under control, even through the shrieking introduction of the finale, but gradually relented to the movement’s inevitable momentum and unleashed a grandiose concluding fanfare. Jean is a freelance writer.


QinetiQ sells most of its North American business for $215 million

British defense technology contractor Qinetiq has agreed to sell most of its North American business to the SI Organization, a Chantilly-based tech company that does engineering work for the Defense Department and other federal customers, SI announced last week. SI said it would pay about $215 million in cash. SI will acquire Qinetiq North America’s services and solutions group, which is based in Reston and employs about 2,800 engineers, scientists and other professionals. “This transaction creates an opportunity to greatly scale our presence in market adjacencies such as DoD, DHS, NASA and federal civilian agencies,” Mac Curtis, SI’s chief executive, said in a statement. The deal excludes the Qinetiq’s cybersecurity division, called Cyveillance, a Reston-based company that Qinetiq acquired in 2009. Verizon’s Federal Network Systems to be acquired Verizon Communications Terms of the deal, expected to close in the summer of 2014, were not disclosed. With about 750 employees, FNS provides communication, IT and data security services to the Defense Department and civilian agencies. “We expect our acquisition of FNS to significantly enhance our capability in the growing Intelligence Community industry; allowing us to augment our service offerings to government clients for whom we currently provide mission critical operations, facility design, commissioning and technical services,” Jacobs Vice President Robert Norfleet said in a statement. Secure Missions Solutions to be acquired by Parsons Parsons Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Secure Mission Solutions’ more than 550 global employees will become part of Parsons’ government services business unit, according to Parsons. IBM to expand Federal Health IT offerings IBM is expanding investments in its federal health care division, the company announced last week. The tech giant is offering new technology services to federal clients, including some based on Watson, the IBM project made famous by its success on the game show “Jeopardy.” New offerings include Watson software that helps researchers mine large volumes of medical literature or that process patients’ electronic medical records to provide summaries for caregivers. Lockheed Martin to leave its Alexandria office Bethesda-based defense contractor Lockheed Martin plans to leave its office in Alexandria by the end of September, according to the company. About 150 employees will be relocated to other offices in the Washington area; Lockheed will not renew its lease for the Alexandria building. In an conference call with analysts on its earnings, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Bruce Tanner said the company is


A tech company that helps teachers learn from each other

LearnZillion lesson plan. (Jeffrey MacMillan/Jeffrey MacMillan) One school day a few years ago, Eric Westendorf, then-principal at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in Northwest Washington, realized he didn’t fully understand a basic middle-school math concept: What it really meant to divide whole numbers by fractions. Westendorf was sitting in on a sixth-grade math class, where a teacher was explaining the idea to her students. Dividing 4 by 2 is like saying “how many sets of 2 are there in 4?” she explained. Dividing 4 by 1/2, is like saying “how many 1/2’s are there in 4?” It was an elegant explanation, Westendorf said — one he wanted to share with other teachers who might be struggling to explain the same notion to their students. So he decided to build a Web site stocked with videos of teachers explaining basic math and English concepts — especially the ones students are required to learn under statewide curriculum standards — that other teachers can use supplement their lesson plans. “There’s a particular pain point in elementary school math,” Westendorf said. “An elementary school teacher probably didn’t go into teaching because he or she loved math specifically — they probably love kids and they’ve had amazing experiences with kids ... [teaching math can be] very daunting for teachers who may have anxiety about their own understanding.” LearnZillion has free and premium options; teachers can access free video lessons, and practice problems, and can also use the system to track student assignments. A math video might describe “ratios,” and an English one might explain “imagery” in literature. For a fee — of roughly $5,000 per school, usually paid by the district — teachers can create their own content and compare student progress across classrooms, among other features. Founded in 2011, LearnZillion began when Westendorf asked three teachers at the charter school to record their own lessons. Initially, he cobbled together a site using a combination of YouTube, Google docs and Web hosting service Weebly. Today, LearnZillion is a 28-person tech company based near Dupont Circle, with more than 200 teachers contributing video lessons. LearnZillion employees include several engineers, who develop the site technology, an academic team of former teachers to make the site more user-friendly for teachers, and a sales and marketing team. About 375,000 users are registered on the site; customers include the District of Columbia Public Schools. LearnZillion has raised about $9.4 million


A happy marriage between Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, 21st Century Consort

21st Century Consort. (Aaron Clamage/For Smithsonian American Art Museum) The 21st Century Consort’s collaboration with the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum is a happy marriage. The museum gets a distinguished concert series, and the Consort gets a fine hall and ready-made subjects to build programs around. Saturday’s concert (this season’s last) celebrated the museum’s “Modern American Realism” exhibit with a program of folk-inspired pieces by Shulamit Ran, Luciano Berio, Evan Chambers and Aaron Copland, and, if the link to American realism was a little tenuous, the program itself was terrific. It opened with the sweet, plaintive lyricism of Ran’s “Perfect Storm,” a set of reflections for solo viola on Berio’s setting of the folk song “Black Is the Color,” in which a viola interlude introduces each verse. Berio’s setting (and the 10 others in his folk-song collection, scored for voice and seven instruments) followed, and violist Dan Foster strung out his lines in both with a quiet absorption that seemed to slow down the passage of time. Soprano Lucy Shelton was the soloist in this set. Still the consummate musician, she uses her voice wisely, but at this point in her career it seems at its best when used very quietly. Berio’s instrumental accompaniments are delicate and transparent and the Consort played with generous consideration, but there were times when a broader dynamic range and a dollop of sensuousness would have been welcome. Chambers explores a whole range of emotions in his setting of the Scottish folk song “No Winter, Wi’ His Cloudy Brow” — now hopeful, now dark, now humorous — but always lyrical. With the dependably vivid scene-setting of pianist Lisa Emenheiser’s accompaniment, Shelton sketched these moods dramatically (although with some strain on top) and with evident pleasure. With artistic director Christopher Kendall conducting, the Consort, 14 strong, ended the program with a masterfully articulated account of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” that was as involving in the slow unfolding of its sunny daybreak as in the edge-of-the-seat-paced momentum of its dance interludes. Reinthaler is a freelance writer.


At Natural History Museum, a crowded farewell to the Fossil Hall

It was once called the Hall of Extinct Monsters for its displays of dinosaurs. Now, the popular hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is closing for a five-year overhaul. When it reopens in 2019, it will have its own T. rex. Rest in peace, dear Diplodocus. So long, Stegosauruses, you strange, beautiful beasts. The Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is now closed for a long-planned — and, officials say, long-overdue — five-year, $48 million renovation. Most of its specimens won’t reappear until 2019, when the massively popular exhibition space is scheduled to reopen at the world’s second-most-visited museum. “Five years feels short, to be honest,” said Siobhan Starrs, the Natural History Museum’s exhibition project manager, whose team will start taking down the first of more than 2,000 specimens Monday morning. Before closing time Sunday, a few thousand final visitors squeezed through the hall amid much paleobiological pageantry: “red carpet” photo ops with the fossils, a dino-themed film festival and experts posted everywhere to discuss all things Dinosauria. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is closing its doors for a major renovation and won’t reopen until 2019. “Stand there and look up at his mouth,” a father told his daughter, who obliged by staring — mouth dramatically agape — at the banana-sized teeth of a T. rex cast. She pulled in her arms to mimic the king carnivore. Click. “It’s an iconic, favorite space,” museum director Kirk Johnson said. “People have made a lot of memories here.” The Fossil Hall — actually a suite of smaller halls, including the one dedicated to dinosaurs — was “mobbed” on Sunday, according museum officials. As the clock wound down on the dated hall’s final day, Johnson snapped photos of a soon-to-be-(temporarily)-extinct species. “Tomorrow, when people come here and try to see the dinosaurs, they’ll wish they came today,” he said. “This is a historic moment.” And a necessary one, he said. “We’re moving forward and building an amazing new exhibit. You should never dwell on the past — unless you’re a paleontologist.” Just after 7:30 p.m., it was last call for the old hall. “Folks, we’re closing,” a security officer said, ushering the final few visitors out. The closing comes as interest in the Smithsonian’s paleobiology department is surging: Two weeks ago, the Natural History Museum took delivery — via a 53-foot-long FedEx trailer —


Efforts to zap bacteria in food are slow to catch hold

that have been irradiated for the most part. They don’t want to introduce possible pathogens that could spoil the food. Food companies reduce risk any way they can,” said Jeff Barach, former vice president of science policy at the Grocery Manufacturers Association. The federal government does not keep track of the amount of food that is irradiated. One source for that information is a food industry consultant, Ronald T. Eustice, who also publishes the monthly newsletter Food Irradiation Update. By Eustice’s estimates, which are backed by other industry tallies, spices represent the largest proportion of irradiated food products in the United States — more than 175 million pounds — which is about one-third of all commercial spices. (Spices are often treated because they can have high levels of salmonella and other contaminants, sometimes introduced in foreign countries where they are harvested and dried outdoors.) Irradiated hamburger totals about 18 million pounds and is sold at Wegmans supermarkets and by mail from Schwan’s Home Service and Omaha Steaks. The only large expansion of irradiated food in recent years — and a big driver behind Benso’s and two other irradiators’ decision to start operating — is with imported fruits and vegetables. In 2007, 10 million pounds of fruits and vegetables that are imported or from Hawaii were being irradiated, typically to kill invasive insects that could harm domestic crops. Now, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture and industry estimates, it’s closer to 40 million pounds. The treatment, called phytosanitation, is beginning to replace fumigation and other chemical methods that can be used without consumer notification. Food irradiation must carry a label because federal law treats it as a food additive, which requires that it be treated like other ingredients. Other processes such as chemical washes for chickens and fumigation for strawberries do not have to be disclosed on packaging. Which is part of why irradiation advocates have fought to remove the label. Professor Christine Bruhn of the University of California at Davis and others are pushing for ways to get consumers to view irradiation in a positive light. “I would like to change the label to say ‘Irradiated to Protect your Family’ or ‘Irradiated for Maximum Safety,’ ” said Bruhn, who has been studying consumer attitudes toward irradiation for 30 years. “But a lot of people — they just want to get rid of the i-word.” Alice Crites contributed to this report.


Big-picture climate predictions

I want to take issue with Randal S. Scott’s suggestion [“Climate’s cloudy crystal ball,” letters, April 25] that climate change prediction is harder than hurricane forecasting. The latter involves the place and time of specific events while the former requires only averaged behavior over long time spans and the whole Earth. It’s like predicting what will happen when you spill some water in a sandbox. You know it will eventually run downhill to wind up in one or at most a few low-lying locations, but predicting exactly which paths it will follow is beyond scientific capability. We know that the Earth will heat up as a result of energy trapped from continued greenhouse gas emissions and that this will cause major disruptions to climate — exactly what they will be is not that relevant to putting out the fire. Bernard P. Zeigler, Potomac