Did someone try to assassinate Ethiopia’s new prime minister? Here’s what you need to know.

Desalegn, EPRDF announced political changes that included releasing thousands of political prisoners. But on Feb. 15, Desalegn announced his resignation — followed by jockeying within EPRDF over who would replace him. Until now, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) — representing the minority ethnic group that helped end an earlier civil war — has effectively dominated EPRDF, making other parties within the coalition less relevant. But the Oromo Peoples Democratic Organization (OPDO) and Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), two of four parties that make up the ruling coalition, had been pushing for changes. The two parties won the coalition’s chairmanship for Abiy, who chairs OPDO, effectively making him the new prime minister as of April 2. His election is viewed as the end of the TPLF’s dominance of EPRDF — and therefore of the country. Despite being part of the establishment, Abiy had been pushing for a new political direction. In his inaugural speech, Abiy called for reconciliation and apologized that peaceful protesters had been killed. Since taking charge, Abiy has freed most of Ethiopia’s remaining political prisoners. He has attempted to overhaul the security sector, which remains controlled by the TPLF. Abiy forced out long-serving EPRDF elites, and enabled young public servants and technocrats to rise into key posts within his administration. In an attempt to improve relations between the government and the people, Abiy has also traveled throughout the country, listening to grievances. As a longtime critic of the practice of evicting ethnic groups from different parts of the country, Abiy has suggested establishing a council of experts to study the federal arrangement, which is designed according to ethnic and linguistic lines. My research has shown this federal arrangement has ensured EPRDF’s survival as an authoritarian party. Beyond Ethiopia’s borders, Abiy has been trying to mend relations with neighboring countries in the hopes of facilitating trade and economic integration. The old guard isn’t happy, however. In a parliamentary session called by TPLF and its allies, parliamentarians representing the unhappy elites accused the prime minister of releasing “terrorists.” In a surprising response, Abiy acknowledged the terrorist acts committed by the government itself — and insisted that only through coming together and forgiveness could Ethiopia move forward. After the explosion, the prime minister addressed the nation, saying, “Those of you who planned and executed such an attack against your own people have failed yesterday, failed today and will fail tomorrow.”


Polio virus treatment increased survival in patients with deadly brain tumors, study shows

A genetically modified polio virus improved the longer-term survival of patients with a lethal type of brain tumor, according to the results of an early-stage clinical trial published Tuesday. Twenty-one percent of the patients treated with the virus — all with disease that had recurred — were alive after three years, compared with just 4 percent of those who had undergone standard chemotherapy. The trial at the Duke Cancer Institute involved patients with glioblastoma, the kind of tumor that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is battling. The results were published online in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented Tuesday at an international brain tumor conference in Norway. Glioblastoma, a difficult-to-treat disease that is the most common of all malignant brain tumors, can cause seizures, headaches, blurred vision and confusion. Even with aggressive treatment, people who are newly diagnosed typically survive less than 20 months, while those with a recurrence usually die within a year. Duke researchers opened the Phase 1 trial in 2012 to test the safety of the modified-virus treatment and try to determine the right dose. After surgeons implanted a catheter in each patient's brain, a small amount of a genetically modified form of the polio virus was infused directly into the tumor. The virus is designed to target the tumor cells and trigger a response by the immune system. The approach got widespread attention in 2015 when it was covered by the CBS program “60 Minutes.” The first participant in the trial was a nursing student who has since gotten married and become a nurse, according to Duke officials. Tuesday's results were welcomed by experts who were not involved in the study. Yet those scientists strongly urged caution, saying it was too early, and the number of patients in the trial too few, to know just how effective the approach is for glioblastoma. The polio treatment is one of several “oncolytic viruses” being investigated as anti-cancer agents. While researchers have long viewed such viruses as potential tools for directly killing cancer, they now suspect that the viruses might be more effective at marshaling the body's immune system against malignancies, according to the National Cancer Institute. The Duke researchers said the median survival for the 61 patients in the trial was 12.5 months, compared with 11.3 months for the “historical control group.” The latter is a group of patients, used for comparison, who were treated earlier with


was infused directly into the tumor. The virus is designed to target the tumor cells and trigger a response by the immune system. The approach got widespread attention in 2015 when it was covered by the CBS program “60 Minutes.” The first participant in the trial was a nursing student who has since gotten married and become a nurse, according to Duke officials. Tuesday's results were welcomed by experts who were not involved in the study. Yet those scientists strongly urged caution, saying it was too early, and the number of patients in the trial too few, to know just how effective the approach is for glioblastoma. The polio treatment is one of several “oncolytic viruses” being investigated as anti-cancer agents. While researchers have long viewed such viruses as potential tools for directly killing cancer, they now suspect that the viruses might be more effective at marshaling the body's immune system against malignancies, according to the National Cancer Institute. The Duke researchers said the median survival for the 61 patients in the trial was 12.5 months, compared with 11.3 months for the “historical control group.” The latter is a group of patients, used for comparison, who were treated earlier with standard chemotherapy and met the criteria for the polio virus trial. A subset of patients who received the treatment and survived at least two years got a much bigger boost. Debra Puffer, a 61-year-old resident of Rome, N.Y., was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2014 and was treated with surgery, chemo and radiation. When the cancer came back, she got the polio virus therapy at Duke and went 2½ years without a recurrence. When the cancer returned again, she got a “booster” infusion of the polio virus last August. She wound up in the hospital with severe side effects. But now, “everything is looking much better,” including her brain scans, she said. “I am enjoying my summer.” Annick Desjardins, a Duke neurologist who is one of the lead authors of the study, said the polio virus treatment appears similar to other immunotherapies in that the majority of treated patients don't respond. However, those who mount “an active immune response” have the real possibility of becoming long-term survivors, she said. To try to increase the percentage of such responders, scientists opened a Phase 2 trial at Duke and three other medical centers to test the polio virus treatment plus a chemotherapy drug,


World Digest: June 26, 2018

ETHIOPIA Eritrean officials visit for 1st time in decades Ethiopia on Tuesday welcomed top officials from longtime rival Eritrea for peace talks in the first such visit in two decades, with Ethiopia’s prime minister declaring that the separation between the neighbors “is shattered down.” “We have tried war and found it useless,” Abiy Ahmed said at a dinner reception for Eritrea’s foreign minister and others. The two countries have not had diplomatic relations since a border war broke out in 1998. “We want our brothers and sisters to come here and visit us as soon as possible,” Abiy added, saying that the two countries will celebrate the Sept. 11 new year together and that Ethiopian Airlines will “soon” start flights to Eritrea’s port city of Massawa. “This is the time for reconciliation and love,” he said. The delegation from Eritrea, one of the world’s most reclusive countries, came after a surprising exchange of goodwill that began this month with a gesture to end one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts: Abiy, a reformist who took power in April, announced that Ethiopia would fully accept a 2000 deal ending the border war. Although outright fighting stopped, the two countries have skirmished in recent years and the peace agreement has not been implemented. Days after Ethiopia’s announcement, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki noted the “positive signals” and announced that he would send a delegation to “gauge current developments directly and in depth” and plan future steps. — Associated Press LIBYA Government urges U.N. to block 'illegal' oil sales Libya’s U.N.-backed government based in Tripoli on Tuesday urged the U.N. Security Council to block what it described as “illegal” oil sales by a rival administration based in the country’s east. The appeal comes a day after the self-styled Libyan National Army, led by Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter and based in eastern Libya, said it handed over management of vital oil terminals to a firm controlled by the interim government in the east. The Tripoli-based government said Hifter’s move was “an irresponsible action and a serious threat to the interests of the Libyan people.” “We urge the Security Council and the Sanctions Committee [on Libya] to track and block any illegal sales” by the new management of the oil facilities, it said. The National Oil Corp., tied to the internationally recognized government, said Hifter’s army has “no legal authority” to hand over the facilities to its rival


The U.S. once again has the world’s fastest supercomputer. Keep up the hustle.

sequences to narrow the cause of an infant’s liver failure to two possible genetic variants, produced an accurate diagnosis that helped save the baby’s life. Engineers at General Motors used supercomputers to simulate crash tests from every angle, to test seat belt and air bag performance, and to improve pedestrian safety. A Philadelphia consortium dedicated to energy efficiency used supercomputers to create more efficient and “greener” buildings by simulating thermal flows. The current supercomputing speeds, known as “petascale,” are staggeringly fast compared with what was available only a few years ago, but they will seem plodding beside the “exascale” supercomputers that are on the horizon. They will exceed a billion-billion operations per second — a decidedly new breed. Reaching exascale speeds will not be easy. Even for today’s supercomputers to be useful in a wide range of applications, they need to have enormous memories and the ability to store and read vast quantities of data at high speed. The supercomputers must also have a software environment that facilitates the efficient and productive use of the hardware and its underlying architectures. The centers that host them are laying the groundwork for exascale systems. The quest for exascale is driven by the realization that it will provide even more capability in a broad range of industries, including energy production, pharmaceutical research and development, and aircraft and automobile design. National economic competitiveness relies on the ability to quickly engineer superior products — and supercomputing often has a spillover effect in consumer electronics. Today’s smartphones still have a lot to learn. And you can bet that the Chinese are working as industriously toward exascale as computer scientists are in the United States, in Japan and in the European Union, which are also serious competitors in supercomputing. The Summit might have brought the “world’s fastest” honors back to the United States, but China — which in 2001 had no supercomputers — still dominates the field, holding the majority of entries in the TOP500 rankings. Beyond exascale supercomputing, scientists dream of quantum computing using principles of physics for calculations at speeds far beyond anything possible today. But there are many challenges to overcome before quantum computers are a reality for practical computations. The United States and its competitors are of course working intensely on overcoming those challenges. In the shorter term, the race is on to try to surmount the Summit as the world’s fastest supercomputer.


Transcript: Tax Reform in America – The Six-Month Report

taxes twice because AMT, the Alternative Minimum Tax, is no longer hanging over their heads. And for a lot of our local businesses who use the individual tax code—that’s where they file—today, they spend almost $23 billion and almost half a billion man hours and women hours to figure these complex depreciation schedules. They no longer have to do that, because they’re writing off those investments in the year they buy it. It’s a complexity that has burdened especially startup businesses for a long time. That’s gone. So for families and local businesses, especially small ones, the postcard-style system is a simpler and better way to file. Costa: What are the economic costs to the president’s immigration policies that have caused so much controversy recently on separating parents from their children? Brady: You know, I don’t know that there’s an economic cost there. Here’s sort of addressing maybe the larger picture here. So now, the big question facing the country is where are the workers? We’re leaving economic growth on the table, because now we have a competitive tax code—the opportunities to invest and grow and expand. But everywhere I travel in the country, especially back home where we live, businesses of all sizes are just starved for more workers. I think the solution is an all of the above strategy. So, one, getting immigration policy right, including the four pillars bill we are going to vote on this week— Costa: Is that going to pass? Brady: You know, I hope so. Because it is— Costa: But probably not? Brady: —unprecedented border security. [LAUGHTER] It is—and the optimism of our local folks. Look, this is tough stuff. No doubt about it. It’s eluded this country’s solution for 20 or 30 years. We have an opportunity here—I hope we take it—to do it. But back to the all of the above. So you’ve got to get immigration policy right, to make sure it works for the economy long term. Secondly, you’ve got to get your workforce right. Look, we have all these myriad of job training programs, apprenticeships, all this, but they’re just not turning out the numbers we need. That has to change. And then thirdly, Ways and Means Committee’s already acted on this, but in welfare, we have millions of Americans sort of trapped on the sidelines that I think the government’s sort of given up on. We are


National Zoo on the watch for a baby panda

The National Zoo closed the indoor panda exhibit this week to provide quiet for Mei Xiang (pronounced may-SHONG), who is showing signs of pregnancy. The zoo reports that she is nesting, sleeping more and eating less. Zookeepers also have noted changes in Mei Xiang’s hormones, chemicals that can affect behavior. Urine tests have shown a rise in a hormone related to pregnancy. But those behaviors and hormone changes are also signs of what’s called a pseudopregnancy (SOO-doh-preg-nan-see). That means that although Mei is acting pregnant, she may not be. Last year, zookeepers observed similar changes, but it turned out the giant panda was not pregnant. Humans usually get a test called a sonogram to show a picture of their unborn baby. A panda fetus is very tiny until the last few weeks of pregnancy, so it’s difficult to spot. No baby has been spotted on Mei Xiang’s recent sonograms. So panda-watchers may get a surprise baby in the next few weeks or months — or not. Mei Xiang and Tian Tian are parents to surviving cubs Tai Shan, Bao Bao and Bei Bei.


The ‘Jurassic World’ effect: How the dinosaur franchise’s overseas dominance signals a new era

the most quintessential of American franchises, conceived by Michael Crichton and initiated by Steven Spielberg, has made 80 percent of its box office so far outside the United States. The domestic percentage will of course climb in the weeks ahead, since “Fallen Kingdom” is earlier in its North American run than its overseas one. But don’t expect the ratio to flip too much. “Fallen Kingdom” is still going strong in many foreign territories, including China, where it was in just its second week. And it hasn’t opened yet in Japan, the second-largest foreign market in the world. In the end, “Fallen Kingdom” may not rise above 25 or 30 percent domestically—well below that healthy floor. How unusual would that be? “Fallen Kingdom” is the 20th movie in history to open to at least $150 million in North America. Every single film except one has reached at least 33 percent domestic (the only one that didn’t was the eighth and final “Harry Potter” movie, which by that point had become an insane global juggernaut .) Yet “Fallen Kingdom” may not hit that. And it could mark a kind of unofficial beginning of a new phase in the global film business. In some ways, this moment has been coming for a while. International box office has been growing for years, while domestic box office, well, hasn’t been. To wit: Overseas revenue has jumped 18 percent since 2013, powered by Asia, which has gone from $11.1 billion in receipts to $16 billion over this time period. There are more theaters in many of these emerging markets and more people willing to pay to visit them. Meanwhile, sales in the United States and Canada, according to the same MPAA study, increased just 2 percent over the period. In 2017, sales stalled at $11.1 billion — basically the number that Asia sat at before its turbocharging. Americans are simply going to the movies less. Admissions — the overall number of ticket sales — last year came in at 1.24 billion, the lowest since 1995. So “Jurassic World”—and perhaps plenty more franchise films to come—may see a much bigger chunk of their revenue come from international box office. We are entering the era of America Not First cinema. There are plenty of consequences to this shift. Most directly, it has an impact on profits. Studios generally take home about 50 percent of total domestic receipts but


Up to 80,000 Maryland voters will have to file provisional ballots, state says

State officials said Monday that as many as 80,000 voters — nearly quadruple the original estimate — will have to file provisional ballots Tuesday because the state Motor Vehicle Administration failed to transmit updated voter information to the state Board of Elections. State officials originally said that 18,700 Maryland voters would be affected by what they called a programming error. They said late Monday that they recently learned the problem was more widespread. “In our sense of urgency to inform the public given the close proximity of the primary election, the numbers that were initially reported did not accurately reflect the total scope of the people impacted,” MVA Administrator Christine Nizer said in statement. “Upon further review and analysis, we discovered that the initial data provided did not include all those impacted.” The state’s announcement of the increased number of voters that could be affected at the polls Tuesday resulted in a swift response from the two state lawmakers who chair committees that deal with election law. Sen. Joan Carter Conway (D-Baltimore City), chairwoman of the Senate Education, Health and Environment Committee, and Del. Anne R. Kaiser (D-Montgomery County), chairwoman of the House Ways and Means Committee, issued a joint statement demanding the immediate resignation of Nizer and “anyone else who was part of the Hogan administration’s attempt to sweep this under the rug.” Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. (D-Montgomery), a candidate in the gubernatorial race, also called for Nizer’s resignation, calling the incorrect registration of thousands of voters a “catastrophic failure.” “The chaos being created by this failure subjects real harm to our most cherished democratic values,” he said in a statement. On Sunday, Conway blamed the issue on the Hogan administration and called for a hearing in July to investigate. She accused state officials of creating a situation that will “confuse voters, suppress turnout, and disenfranchise thousands of Marylanders.” Amelia Chasse, a spokeswoman for Gov. Larry Hogan (R), rejected any idea that the glitch was deliberate and noted that the state Board of Elections runs independently. Chasse said in a statement late Monday that the administration was “incredibly disappointed” that this happened. She said Hogan has directed the auditor for the state Department of Transportation to conduct a review and ordered leadership to participate in legislative hearings. “What matters most is that every single voter will be able to vote, and every vote will be counted,” she said.


A newly discovered film shows Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had polio, walking

in December by Richard Hill. He is a lawyer in Reno, Nev., and Fred Hill’s grandson. The film was digitized for the library at a private laboratory in Rockville, Md. Richard Hill said his grandfather was the bookkeeper for the family business — Hill and Sons, in Brooklyn, which had been founded as a horse wholesaler in New York — and later got into real estate in Nevada. The family wound up running a dude ranch in Reno, where his grandfather made dozens of home movies. He said he discovered the Roosevelt clip in the 1980s by accident when a local TV station was seeking historical footage of old Reno. Hill, 66, said in a telephone interview that he had offered the clip to the library in the 1980s, but he lost interest and didn’t follow up. He said he made the donation last year because he is getting older and it seemed like the right time. “I’ve kind of jealously guarded this stuff,” he said. Now, it “needs to go where it belongs . . . It’s an important part of history that almost got away.” Roosevelt was a rising figure in Democratic Party politics in 1921. He was 39 and had been assistant secretary of the Navy and a candidate for vice president. But that summer he was stricken with polio and lost most of the use of his legs. His courageous recovery, and efforts to conceal the extent of his disability, are rich chapters in American history. He mostly used a wheelchair to get around, although he often had to be carried by aides and sometimes crawled from one room to another on the floor, according to biographer Ward, who also was stricken with polio. Roosevelt fought to be able to walk. “I must give principal consideration for at least 2 years more to getting back the use of my legs,” he wrote a friend in 1926 about his political future. “Up to now I have been able to walk only with great diff. with steel braces and crutches, having to be carried up steps, in and out of cars, etc. etc. Such a situation is, of course, impossible in a candidate,” he wrote. It took him seven years but he eventually managed to master a stiff, ungainly walk. He returned to public life, was elected president four times, brought the country out of the Great Depression,


Northwest Washington man arrested in fatal 2017 shooting

A Northwest Washington man was arrested in an attempted robbery that turned fatal in Lanham, Md., in 2017, authorities said. Benson Thorne, 26, has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting of Troy Foster, 24, of Southeast Washington, according to Prince George’s County police. Foster was found suffering from gunshot wounds on a footpath along a wooded area shortly after 9 a.m. on Aug. 11 in the 7000 block of Palamar Turn, police said. Thorne and Foster were acquaintances, and Thorne shot Foster during an attempted robbery, police said. Thorne is being held without bond. lynh.bui@washpost.com


It’s a comet! No, it’s an asteroid! No, it’s an alien spaceship! (Actually, it’s a comet.)

A mysterious, strangely elongated object streaking through our solar system is probably a comet. That's the conclusion of astronomers who used the Hubble Space Telescope and 27 ground-based telescopes to scrutinize the interstellar visitor, which was first detected Oct. 19. It is the first object ever seen that originated beyond our planetary neighborhood. Their new report, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, will not close the book on what has been named 'Oumuamua, for the Hawaiian word meaning “scout.” Even if it is a comet, it's a weird one. After astronomers spotted 'Oumuamua with a telescope in Hawaii, they struggled to classify it. A comet seemed the best guess, because such things are predicted by theorists to arrive from deep space routinely. But it didn't look like a comet. It lacked a visible atmosphere. It had no coma, no tail. Astronomers quickly changed the classification from comet to asteroid, and then changed it again to “interstellar object.” It is the only member of that exclusive club. Predictably, the mystery object invited speculation — at least among those with a speculative bent — that it could be artificial. Science fiction fans noted that Arthur C. Clarke's 1973 novel “Rendezvous With Rama” centers on an alleged asteroid from interstellar space that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a giant alien starship. Although conjectured aliens are a recurring nuisance to serious scientists, in this case there was sufficient weirdness to 'Oumuamua that some astronomers used the big radio telescope in Green Bank, W.Va., to see if it might perchance be emitting signals. It didn't look like a comet at any point in its journey. But its motion through the solar system suggested it was emitting gas from its interior when heated by the sun, according to the report in Nature. By observing the object for many weeks from multiple telescopes, astronomers were able to pick up the signature of a subtle change in acceleration that's consistent with cometary outgassing. “We explored a variety of possible physical mechanisms to explain the acceleration we detected, and we found that comet-like outgassing works well, while the others can be ruled out," lead author Marco Micheli, an astronomer at a European Space Agency center in Frascati, Italy, said via email. So why didn't it appear cometary? One of the paper's co-authors, Karen Meech, a University of Hawaii astronomer, said tiny dust grains that are typically on


Oklahoma voters just approved one of the most progressive medical marijuana bills in the country

Oklahoma voters approved a medical marijuana bill on Tuesday, making the state the 30th in the nation to permit the use of marijuana with a doctor’s recommendation. The measure is notable for reflecting one of the most permissive medical cannabis policies in the country. While most states specify a narrow list of medical conditions for which doctors can recommend the plant, in Oklahoma doctors will be able to recommend it for any condition. Last year the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine reviewed the evidence on medical marijuana and concluded that it is effective at reducing chronic pain in adults, as well as nausea and vomiting in cancer patients. Oklahoma patients with a medical marijuana license will be able Additionally, Oklahoma’s measure reduces penalties for the possession of up to 1.5 ounces of marijuana for any individual with a medical condition, regardless of whether they have a medical marijuana license. With 98 percent of precincts reporting as of 10 p.m. Central time, the medical marijuana measure was leading with the support of 57 percent of voters, with 43 percent opposed. That level of support is striking for a primary election in a deep red state that voted for President Trump by a greater than a 2-to-1 margin in 2016. Members of the state’s Republican establishment had lined up in opposition to the measure. U.S. Sen. James Lankford recorded a TV ad urging voters to reject the measure, arguing that “our families won’t be better if more parents and grandparents smoke more marijuana.” Gov. Mary Fallin said the measure “basically allows recreational marijuana in the state of Oklahoma.” Tuesday’s results suggest that Oklahoma Republicans largely shrugged off those concerns. About 53 percent of voters cast ballots in the GOP gubernatorial primary this evening, suggesting the medical marijuana measure won over a majority-Republican electorate. Fallin said in a statement that she “will be discussing with legislative leaders and state agencies our options going forward on how best to proceed with adding a medical and proper regulatory framework to make sure marijuana use is truly for valid medical illnesses.”


Road trips, pool parties and other ways to have a splendid summer in D.C.

and accessible place to watch this patriotic and dramatic ceremony. For the best views, be as close to the base of the steps as possible: Crowds make it harder to see as you go closer to the memorial. Tuesdays from 7 to 8 p.m., through Aug. 14. 2 Lincoln Memorial Circle NW. barracks.marines.mil. Free. Spend time outdoors at a farm brewery When the sun is shining on a Saturday afternoon, where would you rather be: a brewery tucked away in an industrial park, or one set among rolling hills and adjacent to a horse farm? Thankfully, Montgomery County is home to one of the region’s most scenic brewery crawls. Start your tour at Brookeville Beer Farm: Find a seat on the shady patio and grab a sampler of beers (5 for $11) — make sure you include the crisp Goldenrod kolsch or the easy-drinking Yellow Finch summer ale. When you’ve finished your beers, cross the parking lot and take a look at the hop vines and beehives. Head north on Georgia Avenue and make a pit stop at the cash-only Sunshine General Store, which looks like an abandoned gas station but holds an old-school lunch counter where you’ll find some of the biggest and best burgers in the area, cooked to order on a flat-top grill and topped with handfuls of bacon. Get yours to go and bring them to Waredaca, a horse farm that opened a brewery in 2015. Waredaca’s beers incorporate ingredients including farm-grown hops, honey and local malt. The 3-2-1 Gose, with local strawberries, is the seasonal standout, although the hoppy Haymaker rye ale matches well with the burger. Beers are sold in half pints ($4) and flights (5 for $10) to encourage sampling. Settle in at a picnic table with a view of the horse pasture and a lake, and you might not want to go home. As a bonus, both breweries have plenty of space for kids to play. Brookeville Beer Farm: 20315 Georgia Ave., Brookeville, Md. brookevillebeerfarm.com. Sunshine General Store: 22300 Georgia Ave, Brookeville, Md. Waredaca Brewing Co.: 4017 Damascus Rd., Laytonsville, Md. waredacabrewing.com. Take a dip at an exclusive rooftop pool If you’re not a member of the Penthouse Pool Club, or friends with someone who is, the weekly Twilight Tuesdays pool party is your best chance to experience the rooftop pool atop U Street’s Vida Fitness. Take a dip in the heated


Water Can Be Just As Thick as Blood

teams, who use the pool in off-hours, when space is more widely available. In the Washington region, 8,000 youths are year-round competitive swimmers, and some of the summer leagues are among the nation’s largest. “You know it could’ve been your kid,” said Steve Duesterhaus, a swim team official at the Greenbriar summer pool at which the Aull girls were members. “Just imagining what the Aulls are going through. . . . People want to do something. They so desperately want to do something.” Olivia’s friends helped her family choose what to put in her coffin: a Hannah Montana CD, Harry Potter novels, “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” books, an Archie comic book, her favorite “Gilmore Girls” episode, peanut M&Ms, a Barbie doll, a Care Bear, a Maryland Terps jersey and a Ravens cap -- and her swim gear from the Greenbriar and York teams. Because Olivia did not get to read the newest Harry Potter book, her family has decided to read it to her at her grave. The teenager was buried this past Monday after a service that drew more than 400 people. Everyone was then invited to a reception at the Aull home, where swim families worked with friends and neighbors to organize food, drinks, tables, chairs and tents. The group set it up, cleaned it up, then drove away with 20 bags of garbage. The swim family had been coming together for days. Olivia’s death came amid the summer season, when swimmers are at the pool almost daily, not only for practice and meets, but also for Friday pep rallies, pasta dinners and movie nights. For six or eight weeks, swimming can become more than a sport. It can become a way of life. Word of the tragedy spread quickly. In Olivia’s memory, several Virginia teams have donated to a scholarship fund administered by the Northern Virginia Swimming League. At meets the day Olivia died, teams from 18 divisions honored her with moments of silence. Afterward, at 10 p.m., her summer pool held a vigil that drew 300 to 400 mourners. One parent brought hundreds of candles from her church. “It struck me that Olivia had 500 best friends,” said Maureen Choudhury, a close family friend. Three days later, when the Greenbriar team competed again, its opponents from Dunn Loring decorated a banner in Olivia’s memory and wore green memorial ribbons on their shirts. When it


The FDA just opened the door to transforming marijuana policy

Pharmaceuticals’ assessment of the drug’s abuse potential — demonstrating it to be low — Epidiolex may be rescheduled from Schedule I to Schedule III or IV. This historic drug approval, however, came after a long and sometimes bureaucratic road for the drugmaker. GW Pharmaceuticals is a British firm, which is fitting, given that the barriers to conducting research into the medical efficacy of cannabis are so numerous in the United States. A combination of bureaucracy and politics has meant that researchers abroad are beating U.S. researchers in studying this plant. In fact, most of the cannabis that GW uses for research is grown by a private British firm. That’s not surprising, as research-grade cannabis in the United States typically leaves scientists unsatisfied. Under our current system, cannabis used in research is typically supplied by a single domestic source: a farm at the University of Mississippi. That monopolistic control over the supply was ostensibly broken in 2016 when the Drug Enforcement Administration signaled that it was open to expanding the number of domestic producers. However, since that time and despite dozens of applications from legitimate institutions, the Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions has refused to approve a single one. This political and bureaucratic hurdle signals something broader in American policy when it comes to cannabis: Despite the FDA’s statement Monday that it will “continue to support rigorous scientific research on the potential medical uses of marijuana-derived products,” other entities within the government constantly and purposefully stand in the way. Given the expansion of state-level medical cannabis programs, the federal government should strongly encourage such research. In approving Epidiolex, the FDA has signaled to the rest of the government — specifically the DEA — that cannabis-based medicines can have medical value and can be regulated for safe medical use in this country. This moment of liberation is long overdue, and the Justice Department should see this historic step as an invitation to stop letting politics guide the department’s choices on federal cannabis policy. Now is the time for the government to join the legions of medical and scientific realists who believe that cannabis has medical potential. When federal regulators stand in the way of high-quality, serious research, they are standing between patients and treatments that could improve or save lives. Epidiolex must mark the beginning of a new policy conversation that breaks down the numerous barriers facing medical cannabis research.


A super-bright Saturn coincides with the Strawberry moon. Here’s where to see it.

rare coincidence — the full “strawberry” moon and Saturn right alongside it. Each full moon has a name rooted in various cultures and traditions. The strawberry moon happens in June, when strawberries are ripe for picking. It’s also named the “honey moon,” the “rose moon” or the “mead moon” because of its warm hue. This hue is typical of June full moons because they rise so low in the sky, which allows the light to be filtered by the atmosphere such that the orange and red become more visible. The full moon happens Wednesday at exactly 11:53 p.m. Eastern, and it will be high in the sky at that point. Also at that moment, Saturn will be right next to the moon. The ringed planet was at opposition Wednesday morning, which means from our perspective on Earth, it was exactly opposite the sun in the sky. Think of it as a “full Saturn,” in the same way the moon is full when the sun lights up the entire disc. As you look at the pair, remember that Saturn is 35 times larger than the moon, but it’s 3,400 times farther away, which is why it looks so small. Even small telescopes should allow you to see Saturn’s rings. With very still, clear viewing conditions, you might even be able to see the Cassini division — the dark gap between the A and B rings, according to Sky & Telescope. If you miss the Strawberry moon on Wednesday because of clouds, you can see it (just short of full) on Thursday evening, with Saturn just above the moon, to its upper right, at dusk. Skies will be clear for most of the country, but not most of the population. The view on the Eastern Seaboard will be almost entirely obscured by clouds, which are expected to be thick as far west as the Ohio River Valley. Areas in the Central United States, will have a much better viewing Wednesday evening, though the Denver-Boulder area may have overcast skies. West Coast viewing will be mixed; California looks clear, but the Pacific Northwest looks pretty cloudy, including Portland and Seattle. Boston — 7:58 p.m. New York City — 8:06 p.m. Washington — 8:13 p.m. Atlanta — 8:30 p.m. Miami — 7:56 p.m. Chicago — 8:07 p.m. Denver — 8:11 p.m. Houston — 8:07 p.m. Seattle — 8:48 p.m. Los Angeles — 7:51 p.m.


Inside country music’s complex — and increasingly lucrative — love affair with alcohol

ARLINGTON, Tex. – As the temperature inched toward 92 degrees in the parking lots outside Kenny Chesney’s concert in May, the beer cans were icy, the Jell-O shots were melting, and the T-shirts were direct: “Country Music and Beer, That's Why I’m Here.” “Pour Me Something Tall and Strong.” “Make America Drunk Again.” Brightly hued bottles of Blue Chair Bay Rum, the country superstar’s popular beverage brand, lined the tables at tailgates around AT&T Stadium, where fans gathered hours before the first opening act went on at 5 p.m. When the crowd of about 46,000 started streaming into the venue, some friendly patrons near an entrance offered a beer bong funnel to passersby, and cheers erupted whenever anyone took on the challenge. “Tequila, baby!” one man yelled nearby. Across the street, participants in a mother-daughter tailgate ticked off why summer Chesney concerts are so appealing: “Beer, songs, sunshine.” That night, Chesney, who has found immense success in the past two decades selling the idea of island-style relaxation, would reference alcohol in 18 out of his 23 songs. Although fans imbibe copiously at concerts of every genre, all of which boast songs about drinking, it’s possible that no slice of American life has embraced alcohol with the enthusiasm of country music. The two have gone hand-in-hand for decades, thanks in part to the so-called “tear in your beer” songs that helped make the format famous. But today, country music and alcohol are inextricably linked as never before. Not only has the genre become known (and sometimes mocked) for its sheer amount of drinking-themed songs, but an increasing number of country acts have created their own brands of booze, including Chesney’s rum, Blake Shelton’s Smithworks vodka, Miranda Lambert’s Red 55 wine and Toby Keith’s Wild Shot mezcal. In June, Shelton and Jason Aldean opened bars in downtown Nashville. They join recent establishments from Florida Georgia Line, Alan Jackson and Dierks Bentley, each of whom has a musical catalogue that pairs naturally with a few drinks. “I know what’s going on at my shows. People are coming out to blow off steam and have a great time,” said Bentley, whose current tour is sponsored by Twisted Tea. “I’m kind of like the lead bartender: Jumping up on the bar table, drinking shots with you and singing ballads with you like at an old Irish pub somewhere.” Every artist — even those who don’t


Inventor who made ballpark beer flow freely pulled lifeless from cooler at Atlanta Braves stadium

Few traditions are more intimately associated with baseball than beer-swilling. Not the seventh-inning stretch. Not the national anthem. Not the World Series. Each of these hallmarks of the treasured American pastime emerged after 1882, when Chris von der Ahe purchased the bankrupt St. Louis baseball club ― and shepherded fans to his nearby beer garden. It was at that moment, still in the sport’s infancy, that baseball and beer were bound. The profits reaped by the German immigrant and entrepreneur confirmed that it was a match made in heaven. Fast-forward 136 years to a modern-day prophet of the marriage between baseball and beer: Todd Keeling. Like von der Ahe, a denizen of America’s Midwest; like von der Ahe, an entrepreneur. Keeling had developed a beer tap, the “Quick Draw” faucet that was expected to make beer flow three times faster at SunTrust Park, the major league home of the Atlanta Braves. Within five seconds, Budweiser or Coors would brim from the cups of Braves die-hards, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The 48-year-old from White Bear Lake, Minn., worked an overnight shift Monday installing the new technology. At some point, he went into a beer cooler behind a concession area in Section 331 of the stadium, north of Atlanta. The walk-in cooler was large enough to hold plenty of beer, and the temperature inside never fell below 40 degrees. Keeling’s body was dragged lifeless from the cooler on Tuesday afternoon, hours before the Braves faced off against the Cincinnati Reds. CPR failed to revive him. His aunt, Fran Kuchta, told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution that he had been trapped inside the insulated container. The medical examiner’s office performed an autopsy, but findings had not been released Wednesday. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration also was investigating the death. A co-worker discovered his body in the cooler just before the Braves home game Tuesday afternoon, according to Fox 5 in Atlanta. “The Atlanta Braves are deeply saddened by the passing of Todd Keeling,” the team said in a statement. “We admired the passion he had for both his company and his product. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.” Delaware North Sportservice, the vendor managing concession services at the park, said Keeling had “dedicated his life to elevating the draft beer experience.” His innovation had already graced Target Field in Minneapolis and the Chicago White Sox’s Guarantee Rate Field. Kuchta told


1st-quarter GDP growth downgraded; Starbucks CFO Maw to retire in late November

target. Economists, however, caution that the administration’s “America First” policies, which have heightened fears of trade wars, are casting a pall over the economy. Meanwhile, a report from the Labor Department showed that new applications for state unemployment benefits rose 9,000, to a seasonally adjusted 227,000, for the week that ended June 23, a level that remains consistent with a robust job market. — Reuters RETAIL Kroger to test delivery with driverless cars Kroger is about to test whether it can steer supermarket customers away from crowded grocery aisles with a fleet of diminutive driverless cars designed to lower delivery costs. The test program announced Thursday could make Kroger the first U.S. grocer to make deliveries with robotic cars that will not have a human riding along to take control in case something goes wrong. Cincinnati-based Kroger is teaming up with Nuro, a Silicon Valley start-up founded two years ago by two engineers who worked on self-driving cars at Google. That Google project is known as Waymo, which plans to introduce a ride-hailing service that is supposed to begin picking up passengers in fully autonomous cars by the end of this year. Kroger said its self-driving delivery service will start by the end of this year. The location of the delivery service has not been determined yet, although it probably will involve Fry’s supermarkets in California or Arizona, said Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson. Customers will be able to order groceries from a mobile app. After the order is placed, a driverless vehicle will deliver the groceries at a curb, requiring the customers to be present to fetch the items. The vehicles will probably be opened with a numeric code. — Associated Press Starbucks' CFO to retire in November Starbucks Corp. said Thursday that Chief Financial Officer Scott Maw will retire at the end of November. The company said it has launched an external search for a new chief financial officer to replace Maw, 50, who has been in the role since February 2014. After his retirement, Maw will become a senior consultant with Starbucks until March 31, the Seattle-based company said in a regulatory filing. Maw is the second high-profile departure announced in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz announced he would be stepping away from the company, effective this week. — Reuters Also in Business CVS Health Corp Toys R Us — From news services


The Daily 202: Five times Anthony Kennedy was the fifth vote shows the significance of his retirement

Helsinki. “Finland, officially neutral during the Cold War and not a NATO member, shares a border with Russia, and its president, Sauli Niinisto, has fostered a relationship with Putin. The date falls after previously planned stops during a trip to Europe by Trump for a NATO summit meeting July 11-12 in Brussels and a visit to Britain on July 13. It also allows Putin to be in Moscow for the World Cup final on July 15. Plans for the Trump-Putin summit were finalized on Wednesday by national security adviser John Bolton, who held marathon meetings in Moscow that included talks with Putin himself at the Kremlin.” GET SMART FAST: THE IMMIGRATION WARS: -- The House soundly rejected an immigration bill that tried to reconcile the differences between conservatives and moderates. -- Moderate House Republicans felt betrayed by the Freedom Caucus, who helped craft the compromise measure and then opposed it. -- Between the House vote and a federal judge’s decision to bar family separations at the border, Trump’s immigration crackdown appears to be at a standstill. -- Federal officials have launched two reviews of the Trump administration's handling of migrant children separated from their parents. -- Protesters gathered at ICE headquarters in Washington. -- Demonstrators in Portland, Ore., have even set up a camp outside the city’s ICE building. THERE’S A BEAR IN THE WOODS: -- A newly unsealed court document found that Paul Manafort obtained a $10 million loan from Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch and Putin ally who was offered private briefings by Manafort during the 2016 campaign. -- Former FBI official Peter Strzok told lawmakers his decisions were not swayed by his political beliefs. -- The House is slated to vote on a measure today that would effectively “chastise” DOJ for failing to provide it with sensitive documents connected to Mueller’s probe Mark Meadows told reporters that if the department “fails to comply with the resolution,” Congress should either impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — who is overseeing the special counsel investigation — or hold him in contempt of Congress. THE MIDTERMS: -- Nancy Pelosi is fighting off reinvigorated calls for her to step aside after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory over Joe Crowley. -- “The worst thing to be in many Democratic primaries? A white male candidate,” -- The next Ocasio-Cortez? -- “An Upset in the Making: Why Joe Crowley Never Saw Defeat Coming,” by the


There’s momentum for peace in Afghanistan. Here’s how to use it.

let’s stipulate a few things up front. First, there will be more bloodshed. The Islamic State in Khorasan (ISK) and corrupt Afghan and Pakistani war profiteers are likely to be among the biggest spoilers in any peace process. Second, as the dialogue with the Taliban progresses in the coming years (and yes, it will take years), a sustainable peace deal will depend on our ability to distinguish the important from the urgent. In the important category, two interrelated issues stand out: the need to address the transitional justice problem and the multiple dysfunctions of the Afghan justice system under the current constitution. The Taliban needs to give up its long-held demand for a side deal with the White House that results in a full and immediate U.S. exit. The United States and the Taliban are both direct parties to the conflict, as evidenced by the pending war crimes inquiry at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. With some 1.17 million Afghan citizens’ war crimes claims now under ICC review, neither the Taliban nor the United States is in a position to cut a bilateral peace deal. Afghans are demanding not only peace but also accountability from all sides. The ICC could make an announcement about the status of the pending request to open a formal investigation before going into recess on July 20. Whatever the response from any of the relevant parties to any ICC action or inaction, we should expect a few detours on the road to peace as a result. Kabul’s leaders need to acknowledge that the Afghan judiciary is not well positioned under existing laws to expeditiously and fairly handle war crimes claims. Unless constitutional reforms are undertaken to correct the imbalances between the Afghan judiciary and executive branch, there are no alternatives to an internationally led transitional justice process. In the related and urgent category, all parties must be made to understand that by continuing the fight, they are only worsening the suffering and despair of the people they purport to defend. In the first quarter of this year, Afghanistan sustained 2,258 civilian casualties. Nearly 20 percent were caused by pro-government forces. There are encouraging signs that U.S. and Afghan forces are now beginning to take accountability for civilian casualties much more seriously. Not so are their Taliban counterparts, who account for the vast majority of casualties. Taliban leaders have not done enough to address


Ivy League student known for fighting sexual violence is charged with child sex crimes

challenge again is to see how we end sexual violence in areas of post-conflict, and we know it’s not just armed groups perpetrating sexual violence.” In a 2014 article in HuffPost, Davis specifically wrote about young people victimized by sexual violence. “In so many conflicts across the globe, children’s bodies are quickly becoming sites of violence, where rape is used to terrorize and degrade entire communities,” he wrote. After graduating from high school in Port Charlotte, Fla., Davis spent a gap year working at the United Nations, he said in a student-newspaper article. He claimed to have attended American University in Washington before transferring to Columbia University, where he studied in the School of General Studies, according to the Columbia Spectator. According to his LinkedIn profile, he also studied classical piano at the prestigious Juilliard School through an exchange program with Columbia. The Post could not independently verify this and other claims. In 2015, he was one of more than 200 individuals and organizations nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, according to a Florida NBC affiliate that reported the news at the time. The source of that information, other than Davis, wasn’t clear from the article. While anyone can be eligible for the prestigious award, only certain people can submit nominations, according to the Nobel Peace Prize’s website. These include members of national governments and international courts, university professors, former Nobel Peace Prize winners, and members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. As a columnist for the Columbia student newspaper, Davis opened up about overcoming his own experiences with sexual assault. “When news broke that I was being considered for a Nobel Prize, I had a psychological breakdown — tormented by the recollection of my childhood sex abuse — and withdrew from Columbia,” Davis wrote in the Columbia Spectator. “It was another year before I attended my first class.” In another piece, Davis said he was working on an upcoming novel about the effects of trauma on a relationship. He planned to title it “Benevolence.” He even wrote about grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder through therapy sessions with a psychologist. “She dubbed my behavior ‘extremely self-destructive’ and explained that I was putting myself in precarious situations to assert some sense of control,” Davis wrote of his psychologist. “Sometimes, when you feel like your life is falling apart, quickening the inevitable descent into pariahdom seems like the only thing left to do.”


The James Webb Space Telescope is — wait for it — delayed again

staff from NASA, designating a commission manager with systems engineering experience to oversee the remainder of the spacecraft's development, and conducting a thorough audit of the flight hardware drawings and procedures to uncover any problems that haven't yet been detected. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said NASA agreed with the recommendations and many were already being implemented. Asked whether Northrop Grumman would be penalized for the problems at its facility, NASA said the delays are factored into biannual evaluations of the contractor's performance, which determine whether it will earn awards on top of the cost of the project. “Make no mistake, I’m not happy sitting here having to share this story,” Zurbuchen said. “But t The James Webb, which has cost more than $7.3 billion to develop, was a top priority in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's 2000 Decadal Survey. Designed to work in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, its gold-covered 20-foot-wide mirror will collect the oldest light in the universe, allowing scientists unprecedented insight into the time known as “cosmic dawn.” It will also probe the mysteries of black holes and seek out signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars. But much of the technology required for such a fantastic instrument didn't exist when the telescope was first conceived. The new report chides NASA's “excessive optimism” in estimating how much time and money it would take to build the telescope, noting that “JWST is among the most complicated scientific experiments ever attempted.” Seven major aspects of the mission have never been tried before — including the telescope's massive sun shield and honeycomb-like segmented mirror, the transport to and launch from a European Space Agency port in French Guiana, and the flight to and operation from a spot a million miles from Earth — far more distant than the Hubble Space Telescope. This last point is crucial. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which underwent repairs while in orbit, JWST cannot be fixed after launch. The ongoing problems have NASA considering whether it may have bitten off more than it could chew with the telescope. “We want to take leaps, otherwise we’re not NASA,” Zurbuchen said. “But h Read more: Launch of NASA’s new flagship space telescope is delayed — again NASA's new gold-covered telescope will put the Hubble to shame Ingredients for life discovered gushing out of Saturn’s moon


Search warrants give details about Paul Manafort’s financial entanglement with a Russian oligarch

Two search warrants partially unsealed in Alexandria federal court in the past two days reveal new details of Paul Manafort’s complicated financial dealings with a Russian oligarch, including evidence of a $10 million loan. Prosecutors with the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election unsealed redacted versions of the warrants to search Manafort’s Virginia condominium and storage unit in advance of a Friday hearing, at which the ex-lobbyist hopes to have the seized evidence thrown out. Manafort told the FBI he had done work for aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, and an unidentified source told agents Deripaska helped fund Manafort’s work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, according to the court papers. Manafort, who served as President Trump’s campaign chairman for five months, faces trial on bank and tax fraud charges in the Eastern District of Virginia next month related to his work in Ukraine. He is accused of illegally hiding millions of dollars that prosecutors say he made from that work in offshore bank accounts and failing to pay taxes on it. On his 2010 tax returns, Manafort reported a $10 million loan from a “Russian lender” to a company he owned with his wife. When searching his storage unit last year, agents say they found records identifying the lender as “Derapaska.” Deripaska, one of Russia’s richest men, is widely seen as an important ally of President Vladimir Putin. While serving as Trump’s campaign chairman, Manafort offered through an intermediary to give Deripaska “private briefings” about the race, according to correspondence, portions of which were read to The Washington Post. Deripaska has said he was never offered the briefings and did not receive them. The search warrants also describe questions concerning Manafort’s finances that date back several years. In 2015, Manafort wrote to First Republic Bank objecting to the bank’s determination to close all accounts associated with him “based on its anti-money laundering policies and concerns about incoming international wires,” according to one search warrant affidavit. Millions of dollars came to Manafort through bank accounts in Cyprus, which he told the FBI were used to pay for his work in Ukraine, although he claimed not to know who had set them up, according to the court papers. His former business partner, Richard Gates, told the FBI he was directed to open the accounts by the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff. According to the affidavit, Manafort told the


Interior Department plans to let people kill endangered red wolves

and killed the moment they cross that boundary.” Other conservationists agreed. “Not only is this proposal indefensible, based on the science and the basic ecology of wolves, but it amounts to a cruel disregard for red wolves that is an absolute shame and should not be tolerated,” said Ben Prater, director of the southeast program for Defenders of Wildlife. “We’re very frustrated that the agency has continued to ignore the will of the American people on the red wolf issue. In 2016 conservation groups worked together to deliver a petition with half a million names calling on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to do more to save the red wolf,” said Ron Sutherland, a conservation scientist for the Wildlands Network. The decision to maintain such a small population of wild red wolves means that the vast majority of the 200 captive wolves held in zoos across the nation will never live outside a cage. “This is heartbreaking for us,” Sutherland said. Red wolves roamed the entire southeastern United States before government-sanctioned hunting programs all but eliminated them. The animals were so desperate to survive that they started breeding with smaller coyotes that they once chased away or killed. Fish and Wildlife Service recovered a few red wolves that remained in Texas and Louisiana in the 1970s and made an arrangement with zoos to breed them in captivity. In 1987, an experimental population of captive wolves was released into the North Carolina refuge in a bid to recover the animals. The two breeding pairs expanded to nearly 140 in the early 2000s before hunting accidents and automobile collisions led to a steep decline. Once again, red wolves also started breeding with coyotes, which are thriving in the absence of competition from species such as gray wolves, red wolves and mountain lions. The calculus for relocating red wolves in their historic habitat is daunting. More than a quarter of it is now made up of farms. Thirteen percent is either developed urban space or timber plantations, with 147 million people living there. But half of it is still grassland, forests, shrub land and wetlands. About 10 percent is owned by taxpayers, according to a study that identified potential sites for Fish and Wildlife. At least one state, Arkansas, was identified as a place where red wolves could exist. Red wolves “may be capable of successful reintroduction to both human altered and


A North Korean defector paid smugglers to get her family out. China sent them back.

China has resisted international calls to end the repatriations, despite international pressure. A 2014 U.N. report said those returned could face being “forcibly ‘disappeared’ into political prison camps, imprisoned in ordinary prisons or even summarily executed.” For many years, Heo and her husband, Choi Seong-ga, and their son, Choi Gyeong-hak, lived in relative comfort in Hyesan, near the Chinese border. Heo, a talented singer, was a professor at the city’s University of Arts. Her husband played trombone in the Ryanggang musical performance group, which appeared at regional festivals. He playfully called Heo “older sister” because she was two years his senior. She once performed in front of the North’s first leader, Kim Il Sung, who would summer in mountains near Hyesan. During the famine of the 1990s, the family took some solace in thinking that everyone in the country was suffering. To gain a little extra money, Heo began to make home-brew alcohol from rotting corn. The profits would buy rice. About this time, Heo’s husband stumbled across sheet music for “Danny Boy.” It became their private tune because the song was virtually unknown in the North. “To others, it probably seemed like I was living a comfortable life while there were people starving around me,” she said. “I lived alongside those dying of starvation. So I began to think, ‘How should I be living my life in this type of world?’ ” It took a sharp turn five years ago. The Ministry of State Security asked her to monitor one of her students, a young woman who came under suspicion because of a sister in China. Heo balked. “They tried to scare me,” Heo said. “They said, ‘Is your son more important than a student?’ ’’ Heo was shaken. She pulled the student aside and suggested she try to flee North Korea. It was only a matter of time before authorities arrest you, Heo confided. Security agents found out, and Heo and the student were sent to a detention facility. It would be 76 days for Heo. She said she was never beaten or interrogated but was left in a cell with others around the clock. Thirst became so bad that some prisoners drank the urine of others. “They wanted to intimidate me, educate me into knowing what they were capable of,” she said. “For me, seeing [the prisoners] was like torture, listening to them being beaten and crying


Her doctor said she had the flu. It took years to find the real, and strange, illness.

during which he had been involved in the care of several dozen patients with a similar profile: recurrent sinus infections, asthma and high eosinophil counts. After he learned that Bates had developed asthma and sinus problems in her 40s and that she became congested after drinking alcohol, he realized “she had all the symptoms.” Feng strongly suspected that Bates had a poorly understood condition called Samter’s triad — also known as aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease, or AERD. AERD, which is believed to affect about 9 percent of adults with asthma, is a chronic condition marked by a sensitivity, which can be life-threatening, to NSAIDs. Some sufferers lose their sense of smell. Most do not respond to traditional treatments for sinusitis, which they typically develop in middle age. “The immune system becomes overactive,” Feng said, “but nobody really knows what causes it.” Some people undergo sinus surgery to remove nasal polyps, which then grow back because the underlying problem remains unresolved. One treatment, pioneered in recent years, involves administering aspirin in progressively larger doses under medical supervision. Called aspirin desensitization, the outpatient procedure typically takes two or three days and can alleviate the symptoms of AERD, reducing the frequency of sinus infections and improving asthma control and a patient’s quality of life. Scripps and Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital are known for their AERD treatment programs. (Desensitization is also often used to treat environmental allergies.) But this treatment also requires that patients take a daily dose of aspirin. Some cannot tolerate it because aspirin causes gastrointestinal bleeding. Bates said she was initially taken aback when Feng proposed the treatment, fearing it was potentially dangerous. But after undergoing sinus surgery in April 2016, she changed her mind. “I felt so much better,” she said, and she worried that the improvement might be temporary if she did not address the root cause. Bates said she also spoke with a friend who had successfully undergone desensitization for another condition, which allayed her fears. After her insurer approved the treatment, Bates scheduled it for December 2016. She was initially given a baby aspirin, which caused no reaction. That was followed an hour or so later by two baby aspirin, which triggered an asthma attack that Feng quickly controlled. Over the next two days, Feng proceeded to increase the dose until Bates was able to tolerate two 325-milligram aspirin tablets with no adverse reaction. She continues to


Mattis seeks to allay Japanese concerns in North Korea denuclearization effort

TOKYO — The United States will uphold its commitment to Japan’s security while it seeks to implement President Trump’s nuclear deal with North Korea, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday. “We’re in the midst of very unprecedented negotiations right now with North Korea, but in this dynamic time, the long-standing alliance between Japan and the United States stands firm,” Mattis told reporters at Japan’s Defense Ministry in Tokyo. “We are not going to take our alliance with another democratic and free nation into account in this separate negotiation, so it stands firm,” he said. Mattis spoke at the end of a tour of Asian nations that stand to be affected by Trump’s June 12 deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. For Japan, the agreement, while welcome in its goal of stripping Pyongyang of its nuclear arsenal, has also generated anxiety about what concessions the United States may make to achieve that objective. Tokyo’s alliance with Washington, including a U.S. military footprint of about 50,000 troops, is a cornerstone of Japan’s security strategy. But Trump has repeatedly questioned long-standing alliances, including with South Korea and NATO. The Trump administration, as part of its negotiating strategy with North Korea, has halted military exercises it conducts with South Korea, another key Asian ally, and has suggested that its future troop presence in that nation could be reduced if the threat from North Korea subsides. The Japanese government meanwhile has expressed concerns about North Korea’s reliability in its commitment to denuclearize, pointing out that it has reneged on previous agreements. Speaking before a meeting later in the day with Mattis, Foreign Minister Taro Kono said U.N. resolutions against North Korea should remain in place until the country shows progress in ending its nuclear weapons program and takes other steps to reduce the threat it poses to its neighbors. “There was some step forward in North Korean issues, but I think we really need to keep our relations tight,” he said. “There are a lot of things that still need to be worked on there.” For Japan, those steps must include North Korea’s giving up not just its nuclear weapons but also its biological and chemical weapons and ballistic missiles of all ranges — not only missiles that could reach the United States. Mattis did not specifically address chemical and biological weapons in his public remarks but said the United States would maintain


SpaceX is flying an artificially intelligent robot named CIMON to the International Space Station

CIMON looks like an oversized head. It will be guided by cameras and voice commands, able to hold a conversation, and relay information to commanders on the ground. “We never plan to replace the crew member with the artificial intelligence,” said Philipp Schulien, Airbus’s lead system engineer. “We are just there to support the crew. In the end, the human crew will always be required. The AI is not self-training.” CIMON flew on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that blasted off at 5:42 a.m. Friday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, part of 5,900 pounds of cargo and supplies headed for the station. Leaving a stunning contrail in the predawn sky, the launch was a significant one for SpaceX, the California space company founded by Elon Musk in 2002. It was its 12th of the year and the last one of its so-called “Block 4” version of the rocket. SpaceX plans to fly its future flights on its next-generation iteration, the “Block 5,” a configuration that the company says will be suited to fly astronauts as soon as this year. While SpaceX has been flying cargo to the station for years, it has not yet flown humans. SpaceX hit a series of milestones with the launch. It was its 15th mission to resupply the station, the 14th time SpaceX reflew one of its boosters, and the fourth time it had reflown one of its Dragon capsules. But it was the first time it flew anything like CIMON. The robot is still very much in the early stages of development, officials said, an experiment in itself to test how the technology works in space, and how the astronauts would react to it. Though it was designed specifically for German astronaut Alexander Gerst — it interacted with him during training to recognize his face and speech patterns — CIMON would work with any of the astronauts, officials said. Gerst helped pick CIMON’s voice and the design of its face. He would be able to summon it by simply saying its name. It would then detect what direction his voice was coming from, orient itself toward him and cruise to him on its own. One of its tasks aboard the station will be to help Gerst go through the steps of a specific science experiment. But it will also be tested to see how helpful it can be. Gerst will attempt


Special counsel’s team pushes back on Paul Manafort leak claims

his case. Ellis said that he accepted pleas only from defendants who admitted guilt and that he remembered the history differently. Ellis added that he could still decide to hold a hearing on whether grand-jury material was improperly disclosed but that it would take place after the July 25 trial. He made clear that he would not delay the trial further unless required to for personal reasons. A change of venue is “really the only remedy,” he said, and only if Manafort shows it is necessary. “You’ve used the word ‘saturated’ many times — prove it,” he said. “Leaks don’t determine a transfer.” Ellis also shot down Friday a request from Mueller’s team for a jury questionnaire, saying he would question all potential jurors himself. He also asked the government to cut down its current estimate of a three-week trial. The search warrants at issue at the hearing also detail the extent to which Manafort found himself in debt and dependent on money from pro-Russian interests. The records the FBI found, Pfeiffer said, include evidence that Manafort lied to obtain millions of dollars in loans and to obscure the money he was paid by Yanukovych’s party. On loan applications over a three-month period in 2016, Manafort variously represented his net worth as $15 million, $17 million, $21 million and $36 million, according to the court documents. In 2016, the same year he spent five months as Trump’s unpaid campaign chairman, according to the court documents, Manafort got at least $28.5 million in loans. “He is so in debt,” an unidentified person wrote in an email regarding a $3.5 million loan to Manafort from a real estate company on Sept. 27, 2016, the documents state. Six years earlier, Manafort reported on his tax returns a $10 million loan that appeared to come from Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin, according to the filings. The court documents also detail more of Manafort’s spending, including $49,000 to stay with his wife at a villa in Italy and $21,000 for a limited-edition titanium “Royal Way” watch from the luxury men’s store House of Bijan. Manafort faces related charges in D.C. federal court, where a judge recently ordered him jailed until trial. Attorneys challenged his detention order and late Thursday requested his immediate release pending appeal. They said Manafort’s 24-hour lockdown — except for attorney visits — at a Virginia jail


After Ellicott City, good news for the environment

flooding events in our area can be caused by a perfect storm of issues, created by decisions that were made a long time ago. Over the years, thousands of acres of mature forests that would normally have absorbed the rain were replaced with paved surfaces. These areas increase the rate at which water flows into local rivers and streams, creating fast-moving and destructive conditions. Also, our changing climate, because of overuse and dependence on fossil fuels, is increasing the severity of rainfall events. These and other factors are the result of human impact, and while these flooding events are destructive in and of themselves, they also are a pathway for pollution and bacteria to enter our waterways. Under a bill passed in 2012, Maryland began requiring its 10 most populous jurisdictions to enact local dedicated fees as a way to fund projects that would help prevent pollution and reduce disastrous flooding. Opponents viewed them as a government ploy to increase state revenue, and misleading slogans such as calling the fees a “rain tax” eventually resulted in a repeal of this legislation. The funding created on-the-ground projects that reduced pollution and flooding from paved surfaces. These projects include rain gardens, permeable pavers and bioretention cells. You may see them in your neighborhood, as more and more are being installed across Maryland. A few projects like these in Ellicott City would not have prevented this catastrophic flood, but they are a piece of the larger flood-management puzzle and are necessary if we are to have any chance of controlling flooding in our region. We know projects such as these are reducing the amount of polluted water reaching the Chesapeake Bay because we are seeing the results. The annual Chesapeake Bay report card from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science brought good news: Overall bay health is showing positive trends for the first time since the report cards have been calculated. The report also showed many of the major rivers that feed into the Chesapeake are improving. Aquatic grasses, one of the bay’s most important habitats, are rebounding. And rockfish (also known as striped bass), blue crab and bay anchovy populations are healthy. These projects are not only helping to improve the health of the Chesapeake Bay, but they also better the communities where we live, even ones far from the bay. They can help keep water out of everyone’s basement,


USA Gymnastics names new women’s team high-performance coordinator

USA Gymnastics has taken the next step toward preparing its national women’s team for the 2020 Tokyo Games, naming veteran coach Tom Forster as high-performance team coordinator. That’s the post that Martha Karolyi held from 2001 until shortly after the conclusion of the 2016 Rio Olympics and, before that, was held by her Romanian-born husband, Bela. Under the Karolyis, U.S. women’s gymnastics became a global powerhouse, winning the coveted Olympic team gold medal in 1996, 2012 and 2016. But under their watch, national team doctor Larry Nassar sexually preyed on young athletes, including six Olympic medalists, under the guise of medical treatment. He is now serving a decades-long prison sentence. As a congressional subcommittee investigates how the sport’s governing body handled the allegations of abuse, USA Gymnastics this month elected a new board of directors. That followed the resignation of its president, Steve Penny, in March 2017 and the resignation of key executives this year. Filling the post vacated by Martha Karolyi has proved difficult. Her successor, two-time Olympian Valeri Liukin, who coached his daughter, Nastia, to the all-around gold at the 2008 Olympics, resigned in February after less than two years on the job. Forster was named to the post on an interim basis soon after. In discussing Forster’s hiring during a conference call Thursday, Kerry Perry, who was named president and CEO of USA Gymnastics in December, stressed the importance of creating and nurturing a “culture of empowerment” in the women’s program. To that end, Perry said, the interview process reflected input from three national team members (one current and two former), as well as three elite coaches. In the end, Perry said, Forster was “the obvious choice.” Forster, 58, is a longtime gymnastics coach and owner of Colorado Aerials, based in Colorado Springs. A Penn State graduate, he is well known to USA Gymnastics, having served as a member of the elite development national staff since 2010. Forster said he will stress the importance of open communication with national team gymnasts. “The athletes have to feel supported and that they have the right to speak about issues and concerns that they have,” Forster said. He was then asked about his approach to coaching and leadership. “My style is to try to inspire and motivate athletes using positive reinforcement versus negative reinforcement.” With roughly two years to go before the 2020 Olympics, Forster is charged with developing the


Rep. Maxine Waters cancels events after ‘very serious death threat’

individuals are leaving threatening messages and sending hostile mail to my office.” “There was one very serious death threat made against me on Monday from an individual in Texas which is why my planned speaking engagements in Texas and Alabama were canceled this weekend,” Waters said in the statement. A Waters spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation. Waters had been scheduled to speak Friday morning at the annual legislative conference of the National Organization of Black Elected Legislative Women in Birmingham, Ala. In a statement Friday, the group said that Waters would not be participating in the conference “due to unforeseen circumstances.” “We regret that Representative Waters will not join us this year,” Karen Camper, national president of NOBEL Women, said. “Maxine Waters’ strength, determination and spirit always inspires us and will permeate throughout this conference.” The details of Waters’s Texas event were not immediately known. Waters has been rebuked by Republicans and Democrats after calling at a Los Angeles rally last weekend for demonstrators to harass Trump’s Cabinet officials wherever they go amid an escalating debate over immigration policy. Taking to Twitter, Trump fired back by calling Waters “an extraordinarily low IQ person” and warning her to “be careful what you wish for.” According to CNN, Waters said in the statement that Capitol Police are investigating several other threats in which people have vowed “to shoot, lynch, or cause me serious bodily harm.” Eva Malecki, a Capitol Police spokeswoman, said the department does not comment on ongoing investigations. The news came on the same day that a gunman opened fire in the offices of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, killing five people and gravely injuring several others. On his radio show Thursday afternoon, Fox News host Sean Hannity appeared to suggest that Waters was partly responsible for the shooting. “I’ve been saying now for days that something horrible was going to happen because of the rhetoric,” he said. “Really, Maxine?” Waters has been subjected to death threats. In April, a San Pedro, Calif., man pleaded guilty to a felony charge of threatening a U.S. official after he called Waters’s Washington office last year and left a voice mail in which he called the lawmaker a racist slur and threatened to kill her. The man, Anthony Lloyd Scott, had called Waters’s office in anger over her criticism of Trump, the Los Angeles Times reported. felicia.sonmez@washpost.com


How TV has brought the western into the 21st century

In the new Paramount Network series “Yellowstone,” the Dutton family owns the largest contiguous ranch in the United States, a swath of Montana wild that’s comparable in size to Rhode Island. They monitor their territory on horseback and in helicopters. They wear cowboy hats and business suits. They seek justice through court orders and by the pistols they keep holstered around their waists. In the pilot episode, they carve up a mountainside with sticks of dynamite to stop a developer from accessing a river coursing through their property. As John Dutton, the patriarch of the family, Kevin Costner embodies an American contradiction: You can take the frontiersman out of the Old West, but you can’t take the Old West out of the frontiersman. Created by Taylor Sheridan, “Yellowstone” is the latest play on the western from a screenwriter and director who specializes in 21st-century twists on the genre. His scripts for “Sicario,” “Hell or High Water” and “Wind River,” the latter of which he also directed, are all about lawmen and outlaws squaring off in an unsettled expanse, whether they’re cartels infiltrating the Mexican border, bank robbers peeling through West Texas or government agents seeking a killer on an Indian reservation. A Texas native who resides in Wyoming after a 15-year stay in Los Angeles, Sheridan is uniquely attuned to how western values seep into present, especially in the prairies he’s called home. While the western, traditional or otherwise, has been left for dead by Hollywood movie studios, neo-westerns such as“Yellowstone” are finding a home on television, which can better accommodate a niche genre than risk-averse blockbusters. No matter whether these shows are set in the past, such as the Netflix limited series “Godless,” or the future, such as the HBO mind-bender “Westworld,” western themes of identity, enterprise, power and violence are made newly relevant, shot through with the gun-toting brio that once enthralled audiences in the genre’s heyday. “The overarching conflicts that westerns have explored since the ’30s still exist today in those regions,” Sheridan said. “You still have massive land developers doing everything they can to buy out ranches and develop them. You still have the consequences of settlement in that region to Native Americans. You have issues with government and oversight, and an influx of people into an area that continually change it. You have a small population that’s trying very hard to resist change. All of


Facebook’s fight against fake news has gone global. In Mexico, just a handful of vetters are on the front lines.

of a big election there. Critics argue that Facebook may have developed too-cozy relationships with candidates and governments in weak democracies, opening the door to bad actors who abuse its service, said Monika Glowacki, a researcher for the Oxford Computational Propaganda Project, who is writing a case study about Mexico. “They invited them in,” she said. And executives are aware that a broader crackdown can create thorny political questions when Facebook also cultivates relationships with officials, a strategy the company has doubled down on since the U.S. election. Unlike in the United States, where Facebook’s AI systems automatically route most stories to fact-checking organizations, Facebook relies on ordinary people in Mexico to spot questionable posts. Many people flag stories as false simply because they disagree with them, executives said. Fake news operators, experts said, get a boost from deep-seated cynicism born out of the fact that major newspapers and TV stations in Mexico have long been allied with the government. Officials, political campaigns and even drug cartels frequently pay journalists to write positive stories. One reason social media has exploded in Mexico — a country where every adult with an Internet connection is on Facebook — is because it is seen as a venue for alternative sources of information, an antidote to the climate of distrust. Facebook, Google and the local branch of Al Jazeera have funded Mexico’s first independent fact-checking organization, Verificado 2018, which means “verified.” Launched in March, it has roughly a dozen employees, mostly in their mid-20s, who so far have debunked 310 Facebook posts. (In late May, Facebook announced a new fact-checking partnership with the Agence France-Presse news agency in Latin America.) Facebook has given checkers around the world customized software to input questionable stories, which are routed to Facebook’s data scientists in Menlo Park. But it wasn’t until this month that the company enabled Verificado to feed content other than news articles, such as memes and images, into the system. That’s critical to evaluating bogus information, because many falsehoods have evolved past text and links to images accompanied by extended captions, a format that is harder for software to spot. With stories Verificado is able to check, such as the fabricated one about López Obrador’s wife, its team writes an article disproving the story. Facebook’s technology then blocks the made-up story from going into the newsfeed, decreasing its reach by 80 percent. In such a


Skywatch: July is the month of Mars

Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game will be played in Washington on July 17, and the cosmos presents a formidable planetary lineup to celebrate. Rocking a red uniform, Mars rises now in the southeastern heavens around 10:30 p.m., crosses south near 3:15 a.m. and sets the following morning after sunrise. But by the end of the month, the planet will ascend the southeastern sky around 8:45 p.m. and cross south around 1:20 a.m. Mars reaches opposition — when Earth is directly between Mars and the sun, think “full” Mars — on July 27 at about 5 a.m., according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. The Red Planet reaches its closest approach to Earth on July 31. It’s been 15 years since it has been this close, and the planet will get very close again in 2035, according to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. As July begins, our neighboring Red Planet will be a -2.2 magnitude (very bright) object, but it will dazzle skygazers at -2.5 magnitude by mid-month. By July’s waning days, catch Mars at a brilliant -2.8 magnitude. The July 27 full moon hangs out with the Red Planet. The waxing gibbous moon approaches Mars on July 26 but appears to loiter near the planet the next day. As we swelter in the summer heat, Earth reaches aphelion (point furthest from the sun) July 6 on its annual orbital journey around the sun. We will be a mere 94.5 million miles from the sun. Venus Jupiter Find Saturn in the southeast after dark, just above the constellation Sagittarius’s teapot shape. It’s a zero magnitude (bright) object, less bright than Jupiter. The ringed planet now rises near 8 p.m. and sets around 5:30 a.m., but at month’s end it ascends the southeastern heavens close to 6 p.m. and sets near 3:30 a.m. On July 13, a duly noted partial solar eclipse will occur between Australia and Antarctica. Observers in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia will be able to see the total lunar eclipse July 27. For those of us not able to directly witness the deep copper lunar eclipse — where we see the moon cross through Earth’s shadow during the afternoon hours in the Eastern time zone — catch the eclipse at goo.gl/C8bQxp. Down-to-Earth events: ● July 2 — ● July 5 — ● July 8 — ● July 14 — ● July 14 — ● July 20 — ●


The practically cost-free way to slow global warming that Trump won’t adopt

WHAT IF there were a way to slash planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions at little to no net cost? Opportunities such as these exist because knowledge about them has emerged gradually and the government has failed to require the simple changes needed. An example is curbing methane emissions from the nation’s booming natural gas industry. A new study in the journal Science suggests that the industry can easily do much better, driving immediate emissions benefits while extracting and transporting a fossil fuel that, if handled correctly, is substantially cleaner than coal. The application of fracking and horizontal drilling technologies to natural gas production revolutionized the U.S. energy industry over the past decade. Once a major importer of natural gas, the country is ramping up exports and burning more and more in its power plants. A steadily low price of natural gas has kept energy prices in check and helped American manufacturing. This revolution has the potential to be good for both the economy and the environment, because burning natural gas produces none of the toxic ambient air pollution that burning coal does, and only about half the greenhouse emissions. The Obama administration made switching from coal to gas a cornerstone of its plans to slash emissions from the power sector. But that only makes sense if enough gas makes it to power plants to be burned. In its pre-combusted state, natural gas is mostly methane, which is itself an extremely potent greenhouse gas. If a molecule of natural gas leaks into the air before combustion, it traps 84 times as much heat as a molecule of carbon dioxide does over 20 years. During production and transportation, some leakage is inevitable. But if too much seeps into the atmosphere, it negates the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. The question of how much methane is leaking out of the country’s booming gas fields, compressors, storage tanks and pipelines has been controversial. The Environmental Protection Agency has relied on a relatively benign estimate of 1.4 percent. The Science study suggests that is far too low. Relying on extensive measurements on the ground and from the air, an army of researchers assembled direct observational data suggesting that the rate is more like 2.3 percent. The difference seems small, but if true it would cut drastically into natural gas’s climate advantage over coal. And there is some reason to believe their estimates might understate


A personal perspective on Mexico’s mass exodus to the United States

Jill Leovy is the author of “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America” and a senior fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy. Beneath the current headlines on family separation, a larger story of long-term population shifts is unfolding. Alfredo Corchado, a reporter with the Dallas Morning News, addresses what was once the most conspicuous portion of that shift — the diaspora from Mexico into the United States — in his timely new book about immigration. Though migrants from Mexico have lately been overshadowed by their counterparts from countries farther south, who are bearing the brunt of new “zero tolerance” policies at the border, Corchado offers broad insight into the arc of immigration over the years. His narrative makes clear that U.S. immigration policies have long been rife with contradictions and prone to backfire, and that migrations tend to proceed regardless, following their own highly complex logic. They are events with their own story line, with a beginning, middle and, perhaps, an end. The latest story of Mexican migration spans about four decades, and this roughly coincides with Corchado’s career reporting from both sides of the border. In “Homelands” Corchado tells two stories at once — that of his life as a bicultural, naturalized American reporter and the larger saga of a migration surge that occurred at the same time. The approach mostly works because Corchado’s personal reflections genuinely inform the broader issues. He rises in his profession as the exodus of migrants from Mexico into the United States hits its peak, and as he reaches middle age, we sense that the migration phenomenon is aging with him. Birthrates in Mexico plunge and the border tightens, reducing the flow of people moving north. Toward the end, Corchado returns to the Midwest meatpacking plants where he once met scores of Mexican laborers and finds Middle Eastern and African refugees instead. “We just ran out of Mexicans,” a poultry plant worker tells him. Corchado was brought to the United States in 1966, when he was 5, from the Mexican state of Durango. His father picked cantaloupes in California’s Central Valley as part of the bracero guest worker program, which, for more than two decades, beginning in the 1940s, allowed Mexican men to work in the United States legally on temporary contracts. Exploitative as the arrangement was — with its poor housing and dawn-to-dusk work


Community deaths

Obituaries of residents from the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia. Peter Condliffe, NIH scientist Peter Condliffe, 95, a National Institutes of Health scientist who retired in 1997 as chief of a section that facilitated visits of research scientists from around the world to NIH, died May 16 at an assisted living facility in Kensington, Md. The cause was complications from dementia, said a son, Jack Condliffe. Dr. Condliffe was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. His father was an international economist, and his family moved around the world when he was growing up. He joined the NIH staff in the 1950s as a specialist in endocrinology. He was a scientific administrator from 1966 until his retirement 31 years later. James Benson, FDA official James Benson, 79, a 24-year veteran of the Food and Drug Administration who retired in 1992 as director of its Center for Devices and Radiological Health, died May 16 at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, said his wife, Cynthia Benson. Mr. Benson, a resident of Rockville, Md., was born in Upperco, Md. He worked eight years for the U.S. Public Health Service before joining the FDA, where he served as deputy commissioner and acting commissioner. In retirement, he was executive vice president of technology and regulatory affairs at AdvaMed, or Advanced Medical Technology Association. He retired from that position in 2002. He was a scuba diver, an amateur aircraft pilot and a saxophone player. Roderick Jellema, professor, poet Roderick Jellema, 90, a 35-year member of the faculty at the University of Maryland in College Park who wrote and taught poetry and literature, died May 11 at a hospital in Washington. The cause was a heart attack, said a son, David Jellema. Mr. Jellema, a Washington resident, was born in Holland, Mich. He served on the Maryland faculty from 1956 to 1991. He was a founder and director of a creative-writing program and ran poetry workshops. At the Writers Center in Bethesda, he also ran poetry writing workshops from 1973 to 1993 and in 2006 and 2007. He was author and editor of several books of poetry. Visitacion 'Betty' Lepesqueur, teacher Visitacion “Betty” Lepesqueur, 85, a Prince George’s County elementary school teacher who spent 22 years with the county public schools, died May 17 at a retirement community in Washington. The cause was Alzheimer’s disease and cancer, said a daughter, Eloise Lepesqueur. Mrs. Lepesqueur


Crash and burn: Watch Japanese entrepreneur’s unmanned rocket launch end in a huge fireball

TOKYO — Talk about crash and burn. A rocket developed by a controversial Japanese entrepreneur burst into flames and crashed to Earth in a fireball during the weekend. The MOMO-2 rocket was developed by Interstellar Technologies, a start-up that was partially crowdfunded and aims to lower the cost of spaceflight. Its founder is Takafumi Horie, a colorful Internet entrepreneur and convicted fraudster, who says he wants to start by putting small satellites into space and ultimately, like U.S. entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Jeffrey P. Bezos, send private citizens into space. But his second major launch ended in spectacular failure on Saturday morning, according to Kyodo News. The 30-foot rocket was supposed to reach 60 miles into space: instead, it barely managed to lift off before flames started to shoot from its base and it crashed back down to Earth. The crash, at a test site near the town of Taiki on Japan’s Hokkaido island, caused no injuries. It was the second failure for the start-up after engineers lost contact with the first rocket 66 seconds after it launched last July. MOMO-1 fell into the sea after reaching a height of about 12 miles, the Nikkei Asian Review reported at the time. In a Facebook post, Interstellar Technologies apologized for failing to meet the expectations of the hundreds of people who had traveled to Taiki to watch the dawn launch, but said it would continue to “challenge the universe.” Horie’s career achieved spectacular liftoff when he dropped out of college to launch the Internet portal Livedoor in 1995, becoming a symbol of a new, modern entrepreneur in Japan and an icon for many young people. He flouted convention by wearing T-shirts rather than the conventional shirt and tie but also raised eyebrows with his flashy lifestyle, driving a silver-blue Ferrari and owning a racehorse carrying his nickname Horiemon — based on his supposed resemblance to the manga-anime robotic cat Doraemon. He is the author of several best-selling books with titles such as “The One Who Makes Money Wins.” He once branded Japan’s establishment a “club of old men,” but his attempts to shake up the status quo were often thwarted — a bid to buy a baseball team and a hostile takeover of a major media conglomerate were both blocked, and his attempt to stand for parliament as an independent reform candidate in 2005 ended in defeat. Horie’s career eventually crashed