Israeli military opens its own criminal investigations into Gaza war

the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is investigating possible war crimes by Israel during the fighting in Gaza, which killed more than 2,100 Palestinians. Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said the army’s fact-finding assessment team has received 44 complaints based on information from human rights organizations, the media and army commanders. He said that in addition to the two cases to be investigated by military police, seven had been closed and three were still pending a decision by the Military Advocate General. In addition to the killings on the beach and the strike at the Beit Hanoun school, other incidents still being examined include the killing of a woman in Dhaniyeh, who had coordinated her movements with the army; the Israeli military’s alleged use of a Palestinian youth to catch a wanted militant; and the looting of Palestinian homes by Israeli soldiers. Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), which manages many U.N. facilities in Gaza, said Thursday that UNRWA would monitor all investigations and “raise concerns along the way.” Bill van Esveld, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, called the opening of criminal probes a “positive step.” “However, we just hope it will result in a real credible investigation,” he said. “We have a lot of concerns because the record of internal Israeli army investigations has shown they do not take real accountability for their actions.” HRW on Thursday released it’s own findings into three separate strikes on UNRWA shelters, indicating Israel had violated the laws of war, causing numerous civilian casualties, and calling for further investigations. In a report published this week on the Israeli army’s internal investigations of offenses against Palestinians, two Israeli human rights organizations concluded that the military law enforcement system is “a complete failure.” “Years of research and monitoring of the military law enforcement system have proven that the mechanisms in place cannot carry out effective investigations as a matter of course, not to mention during wartime,” said Neta Patrick, executive director of Yesh Din, which wrote the report along with the organization B’Tselem. “Carrying out an investigation in order to prosecute is a legal process that needs to be complete, it cannot be based on assumptions,” said army spokesman Lerner. “We take this very seriously and that is why we have already opened an investigation within two weeks of reaching a cease-fire.”


Dana Milbank: Dick Cheney, still blindly beating the drums of war

Former vice president Dick Cheney shared criticism of President Obama's foreign policy during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday, ahead of the president's speech on America's role in the fight against the Islamic State. It was just like the good old days. Scooter Libby was in the front row. Paul Wolfowitz was in the second. And on the stage was Dick Cheney, beating the drums of war. “The situation is dire, and defeating these terrorists will require immediate, sustained, simultaneous action across multiple fronts,” the former vice president proclaimed in a pre-buttal to President Obama’s prime-time speech on fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. “We should immediately hit them in their sanctuaries, staging areas, command centers and lines of communication wherever we find them,” Cheney told the audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “We are at war,” he said, and “we must do what it takes, for as long as it takes, to win.” This means “we should halt the drawdown of our troops in Afghanistan,” that we should “take military action if necessary” in Iran, and give “full backing and support” of those fighting the Muslim Brotherhood. Former vice president Richard B. Cheney speaks on the state of foreign policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Wednesday. (Cliff Owen/AP) In summary: War, war and more war. Cheney, five years out of office and two years after a heart transplant, looked and acted like his old self: Back to his former chunkiness, he flashed his crooked grin — and dismissed any information contrary to his martial thesis. AEI’s Marc Thiessen, the moderator, pointed out a report by The Post’s Robert Costa about “young and dovish” House Republicans who disagreed with Cheney’s position when he spoke to the caucus Tuesday. “Don’t we have to convince a lot of people in our party first?” Thiessen asked. Cheney at first accepted the premise, but then reconsidered. “I’m sure there were probably a few in the audience who disagreed,” the former vice president said. “I think The Washington Post found two of them.” There is agreement across the political spectrum on some of what Cheney said: that Obama has been disengaged and too hesitant to use military power. Even as he announced an expanded campaign against the Islamic State on Wednesday night, Obama reminded Americans that combat in Afghanistan will end this year,


A roundup of D.C.-area news briefs

THE DISTRICT Officer shoots man in arrest attempt A D.C. police officer shot and wounded a man Wednesday during an attempted arrest in Northeast Washington, officials said. Police released few details about the incident, but they said the shooting occurred about 5:30 p.m. when 5th District officers tried to arrest a motorist near 31st Street and South Dakota Avenue. The driver reversed the vehicle and struck an officer, who fired one round as the driver sped away, police said. The driver was captured a short distance away, and he had been wounded by the officer, a police spokesman said. The suspect and the officer suffered injuries that were not considered life-threatening, police said. City man, 38, dies after stabbing in SE A Southwest Washington man was fatally stabbed Tuesday night, D.C. police said. Edward Eugene Hall Jr., 38, was stabbed at 11:07 p.m. at First and Brandywine streets SE, police said. He died of his injuries Wednesday. — Julie Zauzmer Man charged in 2013 city slaying A 20-year-old man was arrested Wednesday in connection with a 2013 slaying in Southeast Washington, authorities said. D.C. police charged Darious Antonio Scales with second-degree murder in the Aug. 21, 2013, killing of Timothy Delonte Dawkins of Southwest. Two days after Dawkins, 24, was shot to death in the 4200 block of Fourth Street SE, 22-year-old Todd Green was charged with the slaying. On Wednesday, police said they had charged Scales in the same killing. — Julie Zauzmer THE REGION Rubenstein donates $5 million to center Local philanthropist David M. Rubenstein has given the White House Historical Association $5 million for the upkeep of the newly renovated White House Visitor Center, which is set to reopen Saturday, the association said Wednesday. The association made the announcement as first lady Michelle Obama, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis took part in a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the center Wednesday afternoon. The association had chipped in $7.5 million of the center’s $12.6 million renovation cost. The center is operated by the Park Service on Pennsylvania Avenue just east of 15th Street NW. — Michael E. Ruane


Metro riders will use smartphones, special cards to pay fares in pilot program

Metro riders board a train in this file photo. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) For 3,000 Metro riders who agree to take part in a pilot program, the transit authority plans to offer a glimpse of the future, allowing them to board trains and buses with just the wave of a smartphone or plastic card in a six-month test of new fare-collection technology, the agency said. “Near-field communication,” or NFC, it’s called. Using a credit or debit card with an embedded NFC computer chip, or with an NFC-enabled smartphone, people are already able to make “contactless” purchases in some stores. Now, Metro intends to bring the technology to the transit system, starting with the January-to-June test program. In the first step of a multiyear, nearly $200 million revamping of Metro’s fare-collection system, one NFC fare gate will be installed in each of 10 rail stations, officials said, and new NFC fare receptacles will be added to 50 buses on six routes. And, in a recruitment effort that is set to begin soon, Metro will enlist 3,000 volunteers to use the gates and receptacles for six months. The agency has not announced how it will go about recruiting participants. Early this year, the technology company Accenture was awarded a $184 million contract for the long-term installation of NFC gates and receptacles throughout Metro’s subway and bus systems. In the pilot program, prototypes designed by the company will be put to the test. “Before we commit to a systemwide rollout, Accenture needs to demonstrate to us that the technology works,” Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said. “They need to show us that in our environment, to our satisfaction, that the [NFC] fare transactions can be processed accurately and with appropriate speed.” In another move that is part of overhauling the fare-collection system, Metro plans to eliminate the use of paper Farecards by rail passengers at the end of next year. About 500 fare-dispensing machines in the subway system will sell only SmarTrip cards. NFC technology isn’t new to rapid-transit systems: It’s already in use in Chicago. “And several transit agencies in Asia have been well ahead of us in implementing NFC, most notably Seoul and Hong Kong,” Stessel said. In the Metrorail system, the test will be conducted at the Shady Grove, Eisenhower Avenue, Bethesda, Pentagon City, Pentagon, Ballston-MU, Gallery Place, Farragut West, Navy Yard and Suitland stations, Metro said. In each station,


Action against Islamic State is a ‘legacy issue’ for President Obama

combat troops to the fight, but 1,043 U.S. service personnel are supporting the effort in Iraq and 475 more are on the way — three years after Obama withdrew the final U.S. troops and declared an end to the war there. “You are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan,” Obama told West Point graduates during a commencement speech in May that aimed to define his foreign policy as one that employs lethal force in strategic ways but avoids drawn-out campaigns on foreign soil. Obama has announced that all but a residual force of 9,800 U.S. troops will leave Afghanistan after this year. Obama’s challenge in persuading the American public to support his strategy against the Islamic State group has less to do with how many troops are in the fight than answering the question, “What are the strategic objectives of the United States?” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution who worked at the State Department from 2009 to 2012. “You can say ‘no boots on the ground,’ but that does not really solve their anxiety,” she said. “They want to know what defines the end of our engagement.” The president and his advisers have acknowledged in meetings with congressional leaders and foreign policy experts that the campaign to defeat the Islamic State will take years and will probably extend, in one form or another, beyond the day Obama leaves office in January 2017. President Obama said the U.S. will work with a "broad coalition" of foreign partners to combat the Islamic State in his public address on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2014. It is not a legacy the president expected to leave. Less than a year after taking office, Obama delivered an address in Oslo as he accepted a Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for what the prize committee called “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people.” The president spoke about the search, among philosophers and statesmen, for the terms that would define a “just war” — but concluded that such a conflict was “rarely observed.” “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war,” Obama said. “What I do know is that . . . it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives


China a finalist for 2022 Olympics but facing human rights criticism

the host city affects the Games. And third, how the city will be affected by the Games.” DeFrantz, a former Olympic rower, took issue with the suggestion — in light of this year’s dropped bids — that only authoritarian countries have the capacity to host anymore. “We just finished Vancouver, London and are now heading into Brazil. Each bidding race is different, and you select from the pool you’re given,” she said. “And as far as human rights, I’ve been told there were positive effects in China, such as child labor laws and a loosening of rules about where you can live and work,” she said — although experts argue that problems persist in both areas. There are signs that IOC members are paying increasing attention to political factors such as human rights, said Robert Orttung, author of a forthcoming book on the Winter Olympics in Sochi and Russian President Vladmir Putin. Orttung pointed to the seeming front-runner status of Turkey before protests last year appeared to sway the award of the 2020 Summer Games to Japan instead. During a media tour this week of potential venues for a Beijing-hosted Winter Olympics, organizers stayed far away from sensitive topics such as human rights and focused largely on logistics. Lacking large amounts of snow, Beijing plans to divide events among three locations — with ice sports in the capital, luge and bobsled events in mountains 55 miles away and most skiing events in another city altogether, Zhangjiakou, 136 miles away. It took three hours to get to Zhangjiakou this week, through barren, dry terrain. Guides herded journalists into small neighboring towns to talk to villagers about how much economic benefit the Olympics might bring. Although the 2008 Olympics were aimed at showing off the impressive national power of China, the tour on Wednesday and Thursday suggested that 2022 could involve a more pragmatic approach — using the Olympics to increase tourism and local economies. Given the vast amount of money spent in 2008, and anticipating domestic grumbles about yet another vanity project, Chinese officials said they would use many of the existing venues and infrastructure from 2008 as a foundation for 2022. A high-speed train route and highway, however, are planned to connect the three venues. And because of the problematic smog in 2008, Chinese officials say they are tightening regulations to reach acceptable levels by 2022. With the official IOC


E.U. tightens sanctions against Russian banks, defense companies and individuals

The European Union’s new economic sanctions against Russia will go into effect Friday, for the country’s involvement in the Ukraine crisis. The U.S. is scheduled to outline to outline a new series of sanctions Friday. MOSCOW — The sanctions, which go into effect Friday, take aim at Russia’s energy sector and further constrict the country’s vital financial and defense industries’ access to global markets and resources. They strengthen measures that the United States and the E.U. instituted in late July to target key engines of the Russian economy after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. Western leaders threatened to step up sanctions in recent weeks after Russia was accused of sending military vehicles, weapons and troops into Ukraine to bolster separatist forces fighting the Ukrainian army in the eastern regions. Russian leaders have denied the accusation. But the United States and the E.U. stressed that they stand ready to reduce or even undo the sanctions if Russia shows it is committed to the peace process in Ukraine and the continued implementation of a cease-fire agreement, struck last week in Belarus. “We have yet to see conclusive evidence that Russia has ceased its efforts to destabilize Ukraine,” President Obama said in a statement announcing the new sanctions. “As I said last week, if Russia fully implements its commitments, these sanctions can be rolled back. If, instead, Russia continues its aggressive actions and violations of international law, the costs will continue to rise.” A customer browses packets of fresh meat at a Metro Cash & Carry store in Moscow Friday. The tougher U.S. E.U. sanction on Russia are likely to hit shoppers’ pockets. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg) The U.S. sanctions, which will be detailed Friday, are expected to reinforce Europe’s measures. The E.U.’s list of actions includes a blanket ban on services for deep-water and Arctic oil exploration and production, as well as for all shale oil projects in the Russian Federation. The sanctions also reduce Russian access to European capital markets by cutting from 90 days to 30 days the maximum maturity period of new loans and credits that Russian banks and businesses can obtain. The E.U. also is adding five major state-owned banks, three defense companies and three energy companies to the list of Russian entities banned from obtaining financing in the European Union. The E.U. also plans to publish a list of 24 people involved in actions


Book review: ‘The Terrorist’s Son: A Story of Choice,’ by Zak Ebrahim with Jeff Giles

on children. His tale speaks to the suffering of children everywhere — in Gaza, Israel, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria — who are caught up in the raging intolerance of adults. In emotional detail, the terrorist’s son takes us through the traumas of his life — school bullying, social withdrawal, feelings of suicidal worthlessness — that dogged him from the moment his mother awakened the boy in his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas to inform him that something was horribly wrong and they had to flee immediately from their home in Cliffside Park, N.J. His mother — a Catholic schoolgirl from Pittsburgh who had converted to Islam — tried to protect the family: Ebrahim, his sister and brother. But the father’s infamy was of a new kind. The murder of Kahane was the first known terrorist killing in America by an Islamic jihadist, and Nosair had been supported by an overseas terror cell that eventually became known as al-Qaeda. In time the family changed its name. But the killing, Ebrahim writes, “tipped us into a life of death threats and media harassment, nomadic living and constant poverty, a thousand ‘fresh starts’ that almost always led to something worse.” Ebrahim wanted badly to believe in his father’s innocence, even after he was convicted and imprisoned. Ebrahim was a kid, and he couldn’t think the worst of Baba, who, after all, protested vehemently when the family visited him at Rikers Island. “After a melee of hugs and kisses — after he’s bound the four of us up in his arms like one giant bundle — my father assures us that he is innocent,” the son writes. As his father sat in prison, Ebrahim withered in his absence: “There is the nonstop emptiness of missing my dad.” “The Terrorist's Son: A Story of Choice” by Zak Ebrahim with Jeff Giles. (TED) But years later, when he was old enough to read the details of the police raid of their home after the killing, Ebrahim realized “that my father was lying when he told us he was not a murderer. The police carted away forty-seven boxes of suspicious materials suggesting an international conspiracy — bomb-making instructions, a hit list of potential Jewish targets, and references to an attack on ‘the world’s highbuildings.’ ” When the attack on one of those high buildings occurred in 1993, Ebrahim was nearly 10 years old, home from school to avoid


Fairfax County authorities set up cameras after possible cougar sightings on Old Mount Vernon Road

will decide Monday whether it is again safe for children to play outside on school grounds. Martin Miller, chief of the endangered species division for the Northeast region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said many reports of cougar sightings turn out to be false. Agencies must balance the need to protect the public in case a sighting is accurate, against the risk of needlessly scaring people or disrupting their routines, Miller said. “Everyone who saw it, swears they saw one,” Miller said. But even if an animal has really been spotted, it is not necessarily a cougar. “A bobcat or a house cat or a dog or even a white-tailed deer — things like that,” Miller said. Katherine Edwards, wildlife management specialist for the Fairfax police, said video footage from Thursday night revealed only “white-tailed deer, animal control officers and school security” personnel. Most often, officials said, a confirmed cougar sighting turns out to be an escaped or released mountain lion. Miller said authorities can tell if an animal has lived in captivity by its diet, the pads on its feet, tattoos in its mouth or neck fur missing because of a collar. Washingtonians seem to have a special place for wild animals. Eastern cougars, a subspecies of the animal, were last seen around the 1920s and confirmed extinct in 2011. But other subspecies roam the nation. In fact, the population of western cougars has increased so much in recent years that young males are often forced out of their territories by competing males, Miller said. They travel great distances to find a new territory or mate. One walked as far as Connecticut from South Dakota a few summers ago. He was eventually struck by a car and killed. Edwards said even though occasional sightings occur in Virginia, sightings are rare within Fairfax County. In 1998, a Fairfax County wildlife official tracked reports of a cougar for months. Last October, a woman in Southeast Washington said she spotted a mountain lion in her back yard. “We do take it seriously, and we’re trying to get the word out in an abundance of caution,” said Lucy Caldwell, a Fairfax County police spokeswoman. She added that officials plan to keep cameras posted in the area until they believe the animal has left. If you see what you believe to be a cougar, authorities ask that you do not approach it.


Jeff Gordon in NASCAR Chase for the Cup: once more, with feeling

Ken-doll handsome, and those who worshipped Earnhardt and Rusty Wallace couldn’t connect with the new kid’s plastic-like persona. Gordon was well marketed and well spoken and expanded the reach of NASCAR in unprecedented ways, appearing on magazine covers and hosting “Saturday Night Live.” Jeff Foxworthy, the popular comedian who built a career on explaining rednecks, described it this way in his act: “I figured out why a lot of NASCAR fans don’t like Jeff Gordon. A lot of fans don’t like Jeff Gordon because Jeff Gordon enunciates. And there really ain’t a place for that kind of stuff in NASCAR.” In a sport that cherishes its tradition, Gordon represented the future: tech-savvy, refined, polished. He was loved and hated and had to somehow process both those reactions every week at the track. “You can say it doesn’t bother you, but it does,” Hendrick said. “It’s so much neater to win and have all the fans involved.” But lose a few races and a funny thing happens. Gordon no longer is the young hot shot, and the sport now has plenty of drivers who lack Southern pedigrees. Meanwhile, fans either forgot what they hated about Gordon or finally found something in there worth liking. “I think people like to pull for somebody who climbs to that top but then gets knocked off and has to find a way back,” Gordon offers. “When I was on the fast rise that we talked about in the mid-90s, I gained a lot of fans. But I gained a lot of detractors as well. Over time you get knocked off that mountain, you struggle a little bit, you go through some personal things, like the divorce, people go, ‘Oh, he’s human, maybe he’s not that much different than me or you.’” In the Dogfish Head Brewery, Gordon met the bubbly owner, Sam Calagione, and ordered a drink before receiving a private tour. He requested a brew that’s actually 49 percent wine and 51 percent beer. Gordon’s not a big beer guy. He not only enjoys wine, he owns his own winery. After his sip, Gordon said, “Yeah, okay, it’s hard to imagine it until you taste it.” “Yeah, beer and grapes can get along pretty well,” Calagione said. Jeff Gordon prepares to pose for photos with a group of workers at the Dogfish Head Brewery. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post) Pacing himself The brewery owner led


U.S., E.U. toughen Russian sanctions to pressure Putin

The Obama administration on Friday imposed new, punitive sanctions against Russia, taking aim at the nation’s largest bank and prohibiting U.S. technology exports for shale oil projects, deepwater exploration and drilling in Russia’s Arctic. Also, in what appeared to be a major concession to Russia, the European Union and Ukraine said Friday that they would put off completion of a free trade deal until the beginning of 2016. The deal was an early catalyst for the Ukrainian crisis, provoking an uprising by protesters in Kiev after then-President Viktor Yanukovych rejected it in favor of a pact with Russia. The E.U. has already granted reduced tariff status for a host of Ukrainian goods. The second half of the deal involved Ukraine cutting duties on imports coming from the E.U. and implementing a series of economic revisions. The sanctions from the Treasury and Commerce Departments were taken in concert with the E.U., which unveiled parallel restrictions on Friday. The measures are tailored to turn up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to abide by the terms of a tenuous Sept. 5 cease-fire signed between Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine and the Kiev government. “Given Russia’s direct military intervention and blatant efforts to destabilize Ukraine, we have deepened our sanctions against Russia today, in concert with our European allies,” Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said in a statement. “These steps underscore the continued resolve of the international community against Russia’s aggression.” The Russian Foreign Ministry called the new sanctions a “hostile step,” according to Interfax. The new measures add Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, to the sanctions list and tighten earlier restrictions on debt financing for five others. The measures may also force Exxon Mobil to shelve plans to explore the Russian Arctic; it is drilling its first exploratory well in the Kara Sea. The Treasury said that U.S. firms “have until September 26, 2014, to wind down applicable transactions with” five Russian energy companies, including Rosneft, Exxon Mobil’s partner in the Arctic. “We are assessing the sanctions,” Exxon Mobil spokesman Alan T. Jeffers said. “We comply with all laws.” The sanctions represent a major step for the E.U., whose members rely on imports from Russia for a third of their oil and natural gas consumption. On Friday, Poland’s largest oil and gas company, PGNiG, said that Gazprom had curtailed natural gas exports to Poland, supplying 20 percent to 45 percent less than PGNiG requested


Brother of British hostage: He ‘will be missed terribly’

The following statement is issued by the British Foreign Office on behalf of Mike Haines, the brother of David Haines: “My name is Mike Haines, I am brother to David Haines, who was recently murdered in cold blood. “David was like so very many of us, just another bloke. Born in 1970 to parents who loved us both, our childhood was centred around our family. Holidays in caravans and tents, days away as a family which we remember fondly. David and I were brought up to know right from wrong, although we might not with the innocence of youth have always chosen right. David was a good brother, there when I needed him and absent when I didn’t. I hope that he felt the same way about me. He was, in the right mood, the life and soul of the party and on other times the most stubborn irritating pain in the ass. He would probably say the same about me. “After leaving school he worked with the Royal Mail before joining the RAF as an aircraft engineer. He married his childhood sweetheart Louise and in the due process of time had a wee lass Bethany. He was - and no doubt wherever he is - exceptionally proud of Bethany. “David served with the UN in the Balkans, helping people in real need. There are many accolades from people in that region that David helped. He helped whoever needed help, regardless of race, creed or religion. During this time David began to decide that humanitarian work was the field he wanted to work in. “David left the RAF and was employed by Scotrail. As with every job, David entered into it with enthusiasm. David met and married his second wife Dragana and they have a four year old daughter Athea. “David was most alive and enthusiastic in his humanitarian roles. His joy and anticipation for the work he went to do in Syria is for myself and family the most important element of this whole sad affair. “He was and is loved by all his family and will be missed terribly.”


Career Coach: Helping military veterans succeed

regardless of all their military training, education and certifications, they still have to show the value of these credentials to potential employers. A Pew Research Center survey noted that 44 percent of veterans who served in the past decade called the transition back to civilian life difficult. While it may be more difficult for veterans to land jobs, once they have those jobs, they are viewed in a positive manner. Veterans are often rated strong in leadership and other qualities highly valued by employers. These qualities include communications skills, executive presence, discipline, high work ethic, motivation, perseverance, loyalty and adaptability. The same skills also make them ideal candidates for additional education or graduate degrees, which might prove highly beneficial in broadening their skill set or enabling them to switch career tracks. Thus, it is critical that employers and educators learn to value the skills and experiences acquired in the military. Hiring managers and college recruiters can take some lessons from the top employers for veterans. These military-friendly firms, as rated by Forbes and others, include Amazon, AT&T, BAE, Bank of America, Booz Allen, Capital One, CSX, General Electric, JP Morgan Chase, PepsiCo, USAA, Union Pacific and Verizon, among others. Examples of innovative practices abound at these companies. The financial services company USAA offers a Junior Military Officer Program, which gives veterans the knowledge and skills needed for a leadership career. USAA also has specialized recruiting programs, such as Combat to Claims, to attract veterans interested in insurance claims positions. Similarly, Verizon believes veterans have strong leadership skills and meet the company’s values of integrity, respect, accountability and performance excellence. Verizon has created a Web site that allows veterans to enter their branch of service and specialty code to find job openings that match their backgrounds, experiences and education levels. Despite these examples, many organizations could do more to recruit and support veterans. For starters, they should keep interview questions focused on the job itself, rather than asking about war or deployment experiences. They also should help veterans who have been out of the civilian workforce for some time find support juggling work, family and academic commitments. They should provide clear expectations and goals. And they should use vets to assist other vets. This is something we do at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, where we hired a veteran to help recruit and support active duty and veteran students.


Schools move toward ‘Bring Your Own Device’ policies to boost student tech use

Katie Martinez, left, and Genesis Delcid talk with their teacher, Ginger Berry, about their project which requires them to use their personal smartphone cameras during Project Success class at Argyle Middle School. (Kate Patterson/For The Washington Post) His iPhone is on his desk, out in the open, and Joshua Perez’s teacher does not take it away. Instead, she asks the eighth-grader and his classmates in honors geometry at Argyle Magnet Middle School to Google the words “vertex form parabola.” In seconds, Joshua finds what he needs for the day’s lesson and homework. “It’s way better and faster than looking it up in a textbook,” he says. The 13-year-old’s enthusiasm is matched in other Montgomery County classrooms as educators take their first steps into a practice known as “BYOD”: bring your own device. The idea of allowing students to use their own technology in schools to enhance academic instruction is a significant departure from the cellphone bans of old. But it has increased in a number of school systems, including those in Fairfax and Prince William counties, as educators look for ways to embrace the digital world. In Fairfax, where BYOD began in 2011, Maribeth Luftglass, assistant superintendent for information technology, points out that students have carried devices in their backpacks for years. “It just wasn’t necessarily official,” she said. Part of the changed thinking, she said, has been to “acknowledge what was happening and embrace it.” Angel Zelaya, Jimmy Benitez-Calderon and Devin Downer work together using personal smartphone cameras during sixth grade. (Kate Patterson/For The Washington Post) Such approaches come as many school systems are investing heavily in laptops and tablets Montgomery recently adopted a technology initiative that aims to provide 40,000 computing devices to students this school year, the first phase of a plan to bring 100,000 laptops and tablets into schools by 2017-18. Montgomery’s chief technology officer, Sherwin Collette, said school leaders are revising regulations for mobile devices and drafting guidelines for responsible use in schools. The schools plan to engage their communities on BYOD practices, and there is a ballpark goal of formalizing the practice in Montgomery when the second semester begins in January. But in some places, there are signs of change right now. Argyle Middle, with its mission as a digital design and development magnet school, is among the early adopters. BYOD is now common in its independent-reading period and on the rise in classrooms.


Unraveling the mystery when a plane falls from the sky

to the final words of pilots who are about to die is treated as a sacred duty at the NTSB laboratory. For a major disaster, a handful of people are called together — a lab chief, someone from the airline (often a person who can identify the voices in the cockpit), a representative of the plane’s manufacturer and other key parties. They slip on headphones, sit before individual computer screens and begin to listen, not just to voices, but to every noise that was recorded. No one is allowed to take a copy of the recording from the room. Notes are taken on color-coded slips of paper that are collected before anyone leaves the room. The NTSB will issue transcripts in its final report, but release of the audio by the agency is forbidden. “If there ever was a leak, there are only about five people who have listened to this thing, so it has to be one of the five,” Kolly said. The mystery of Flight 370 The airplane that disappeared in March — Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — mesmerized world attention, and more than a little of the focus fell on the failure of its black box to provide more help in the search. When planes go down in the ocean, a pinger attached to the black box sends out a signal that sounds like a grandfather clock ticking for about 30 days before its battery dies. Kolly wants to see the battery life extended, and he likes a new type of black box designed to break from the plane and float, sending out a signal, when a plane crashes. The NTSB has scheduled a public forum in October to explore new ways of locating black boxes. It’s not clear that any of those things would solve the mystery of Flight 370. There has been speculation that a cabin depressurization knocked the crew and passengers unconscious for most of their long detour somewhere into the Indian Ocean. Will just the last two hours of flight on the voice recorder provide enough to say what caused the crash? And if the plane had no problems other than depressurization, will it tell more than it was flying on auto pilot and ultimately ran out of fuel? “There’s a high probability if they find it, it will be usable,” Kolly said. “Whether or not it contains usable information, we don’t know.”


Obama push to hire veterans into federal jobs spurs resentment

resent the perception that they are grunts unqualified for civil service. “I’ve heard people say, ‘I’ve applied for a job, but some veteran’s just going to get it,’ ” said Mark Butler, 56, a Navy veteran who investigates fair-housing violations for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Boston. “I think veterans bring so much to the table,” he added. “The military is not all screaming, yelling [at] people to charge up the hill and kill, kill, kill.” By law, veterans who meet certain criteria related to where, when and how long they served and whether they were injured go to the head of the line when they are considered for civil service jobs. Troops with combat injuries or those disabled during their service get higher preference. Butler, for instance, developed bad knees and suffered from a degenerative disk disease during his 30 years in the Navy, qualifying him as disabled. For some open positions, a veteran can be hired without the job being advertised to the public. And veterans who are already in the federal workforce continue to receive preferential consideration when they apply for other government jobs. In some federal offices, seasoned employees are welcoming former service members as motivated go-getters who bring new energy to places where old-timers seem as if they are punching a clock until retirement. But in many others, interviews show, ill will is smoldering, and two very different cultures are clashing. The strains are deepening as the Defense Department cuts spending and sheds troops at the same time that federal budget pressures have shrunk the hiring of civilians to a five-year low. There are fewer jobs to go around. It’s the same anxiety and resentment that came with the government’s affirmative-action policies for African Americans. “I say to vets, ‘When you apply for a government job, if you are qualified, you should get the job,’ ” said Walter Elmore, 63, a drill instructor during the Vietnam War who set up an affinity group for veterans at HUD. He said that veterans suffer from a widespread misconception because “most people think if you’re a vet, you don’t have to be qualified.” Some veterans are also frustrated that they are landing jobs that do not reflect their experience. Many of them had a lot of responsibility while still in their 20s, leading units into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ebony Rankin supervised 50 sailors


New ‘cool videos’ from NIH look at Alzheimer’s, heart attacks, MS, coral reefs

NIH Director, Dr. Francis Collins, draws a parody video of "Breaking Bad," as one of the “NIH Selected” videos from a competition this summer. Research into treatments for multiple sclerosis is illustrated with this parody from the University of New Mexico, where Walter White and Jesse Pinkman bring basic science to clinical practice and enable an MS patient to walk again. Francis Collins, physician and geneticist, is widely known as director of the National Institutes of Health, former director of the Human Genome Project and an outspoken advocate of reconciling science with belief in Christianity. He’s less known as a blogger, but he’s been posting fairly regularly for almost two years at directorsblog.nih.gov. Mostly he highlights new research into a wide range of topics: childhood asthma and teen depression, obesity and brain research, and, recently, the genomics of and potential vaccine against Ebola. For the past few weeks, he’s also been posting a series of “Cool Videos,” drawn from a competition sponsored this summer by NIH. They’re short, usually funny, and comprehensible — to varying degrees — to the nonprofessional viewer. One, from the University of Florida, Research into treatments for multiple sclerosis is illustrated with the University of New Mexico’s parody of “Breaking Bad,” where mild-mannered professor “Walt White” puts on a porkpie hat and tough attitude to bring science into clinical practice because, as Walt’s teen sidekick says, “Some of these people can’t walk, yo.” A “stop heart attack” refrain echoes through Rockefeller University’s “molecular biomedicine music video” featuring some flashy animation and seriously geeky dancing. And Alzheimer’s researchers at the Weiner Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wearing matching white coats and blue latex gloves, do clapping routines at the lab bench to highlight a hypothesis about the cause of the disease.


A smart look at the climate-change debate

warning that emissions from Midwestern power plants, borne by prevailing winds, would irretrievably poison thousands of East Coast lakes. The threat, Allitt argues, was cheaply neutralized by a cap-and-trade mechanism set up by amending the Clean Air Act in 1990 and was probably never much of a problem in the first place. Mann explains the data we rely on for climate-change numbers, then contrasts how those data are interpreted by “eco-campaigner” Bill McKibben in his memoir “Oil and Honey” in contrast to French philosopher Pascal Bruckner in “The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse.” He introduces us to Tony Horwitz’s “Boom,” about the Keystone XL pipeline, William Nordhaus’s “The Climate Casino” and “Reason in a Dark Time” by Dale Jamieson. Then Mann, with typical deftness, quickly lays out the problem we face today, focusing on coal and oil. “Although coal and oil are both fossil fuels, they are used differently,” he explains. “In this country, for example, the great majority of oil — about three-quarters — is consumed by individuals, as they heat their homes and drive their cars. Almost all U.S. coal (93 percent) is burned not in homes but by electric-power plants; the rest is mainly used by industry, notably for making cement and steel. “Cutting oil use, in other words, requires huge numbers of people to change their houses and automobiles — the United States alone has 254 million vehicles on the road. Reducing U.S. coal emissions, by contrast, means regulating 557 big power plants and 227 steel and cement factories.” Retrofitting such plants, he says, is “less mind-boggling” than changing lifestyles. “It is, at least, imaginable.” What seems unimaginable is the last idea Mann reports: fighting climate change with climate change. David Keith, a Harvard professor of public policy and applied physics, has written a “succinct, scary” book, “A Case for Climate Engineering,” that argues that we might halve global warming by spraying the atmosphere with “tiny, glittering droplets” of sulfuric acid. These would theoretically bounce the sunlight back into space, and reduce the global temperature. Ta-da! Mann calls this “planet-hacking,” and says the good news is it would be cheap. The bad news: It’s so cheap that “a single country could geo-engineer the whole planet by itself.” That’s a pretty frightening thought, as Mann warns, but “unless we find a way to talk about climate change, planes full of sulfuric acid will soon be on the runway.”


People with paralysis explore therapeutic effects of scuba diving

really spectacular now is that, scientifically, we’re seeing positive measured health results on those who psychologically and physically could really benefit from it.” The researchers believe the results they found are due to more than just exercise, which people with paralysis ordinarily must perform for months before seeing even the slightest benefit, Becker says. The changes in the Cayman Islands happened in days. And the sun and the sand can’t account for the 80 percent reduction in symptoms of PTSD, Kaplin says, because the disorder doesn’t go away when the environment changes. “If all you had to do was take people to the Cayman Islands [to alleviate PTSD symptoms], then the military would be flying all of the people with PTSD from the Iraq and Afghanistan war to these islands,” Kaplin says. “But it doesn’t help at all. They bring their PTSD [home] with them.” So what is it? The researchers speculate that the physical improvements may have something to do with an interaction between nitrogen, which is pumped into a diver’s bloodstream at a high rate, and serotonin, a neurotransmitter well known for its feel-good effects but less known for its role in the spinal cord. The theory, Becker says, goes like this: “The increased levels of nitrogen will translate in your nervous system into increased levels of serotonin, and these increased levels of serotonin act on the cells in the spinal cord and the brain, which seems to improve their function.” Those high levels of serotonin may play into the veterans’ improved moods, too. The psychological benefits might also be explained in part by scuba divers’ controlled breathing and mastery of a fearful situation; both of these are used to cope with PTSD symptoms such as anxiety, Kaplin says. ‘An extreme pleasure’ But until researchers replicate the results of the pilot study on a large scale and control variables such as depth, location and type of paralysis, the connections are a stretch, says Peter Gorman, chief of the division of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Maryland Rehabilitation and Orthopaedic Institute. “There’s no doubt about it that . . . it’s an extreme pleasure for a person with a spinal cord injury just simply to go in the water and be weightless and not worry about a chair; that environment is very liberating in both physical and psychological ways,” he says. “But then to make the jump that


A big dispute behind a tiny tick bite: What to call the lingering effects of Lyme disease?

don’t know what would help, so we take information from other conditions that overlap or have similarities,” he said. For many patients, Auwaerter says, the best treatment for symptoms that mimic chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia includes low-impact exercise, diet changes and cognitive behavioral therapy — but no antibiotics. It’s important for people to press on, even if a doctor dismisses them. When I told Spector what my doctor had said, he exclaimed, “If you see a doctor who tells you something never happens, you need a new doctor. No one is that omnipotent; no one has the knowledge of human biology and pathology to make a statement like that. Saying that is the antithesis of what medicine is about.” “The issue is emotionally charged on both ends — from established, ivory-tower academics who believe there is overtreatment in the Lyme community to the charlatans preying on patients,” he said. “The community says that the academics don’t see their real-world experience. Neither side sees the shades of gray in medicine, where nothing is black and white.” Wormser suggests that Lyme advocates should push for more federal funds to research the symptoms patients describe. In the meantime, Spector said, “we have people like your daughter, like me, people who feel lousy from all sorts of things, who don’t fit into algorithms that have a bar code associated with it. They fall between the cracks. People like us defy medicine as an exact science.” For now, the best strategy is prevention. If you are in the woods or tall This version has been corrected.grass, wear long pants and sleeves. Check for ticks. Wear light clothes so that ticks are easier to spot, and use insect repellent. If you find a tick on your body, use tweezers to pull it slowly out, and save it in a jar. Watch for symptoms of Lyme and, if they occur, take the tick and see a doctor. Early treatment is very effective — and long delays may cost you for years. Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled the first name of Gary Wormser, an infectious disease expert in New York, and the last name of Paul G. Auwaerter, clinical director for infectious disease at Johns Hopkins University. This version has been corrected. Lynch Schuster is a freelance writer who lives in Maryland. Related: Doctor diagnosed chronic Lyme disease, but many experts say it doesn’t exist


Flooding from storm surge would threaten D.C. infrastructure, report says

infrastructure. And last year, a Maryland commission recommended adopting an official forecast of two feet of sea-level rise by 2050 — at the high end of the scientific spectrum. “Here in this region, Hurricane Isabel was a big wakeup call. Then [Hurricane] Sandy. And then these heavy precipitation events over the last year,” said Zoe Johnson, program manager for climate change policy at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. “There’s been a lot of interest in this type of planning.” By contrast, Virginia, which has 3,400 miles of coastline, has been struggling to reach political consensus since at least 2012, when Republican state lawmakers refused to fund a study on “sea-level rise,” but consented to a study of “recurrent flooding.” The resulting report, by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, nonetheless predicted that tides along the Virginia coast would rise by three to five feet by 2100. Since then, Republican governor Robert F. McDonnell has been replaced by Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who last week convened his own statewide commission on climate change. McAuliffe gave the group a year to come up with some “big ideas” that could be implemented before his four-year term is over. In the District, planning for sea-level rise is just getting underway. While local officials have long had strategies for combating historic flooding, District officials earlier this year hired a consulting team for the first time to start assessing the city’s future risks, not only from higher ocean tides but also from other effects of climate change, including extreme heat and more frequent and heavy precipitation. The team includes Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. An evangelical Christian, Hayhoe gained national fame after appearing on the Showtime documentary about climate change, “Years of Living Dangerously.” The city is also consulting with federal agencies, such as the National Park Service, which manages the Mall and other big chunks of vulnerable land in the District. The Pentagon is conducting its own assessment of vulnerability to climate change at the nation’s military bases, including those in the District. Meanwhile, any change in the city’s flood-risk assessment that makes building more expensive could draw the wrath of developers. “It’s going to be an interesting few months as this discussion progresses, particularly as you have more concrete numbers,” Shane said. “With Climate Central, there’s one map that shows risk levels. But there’s another map for


NATO troops killed in Afghanistan

KABUL — The violence, the deadliest aimed at NATO troops in more than two months, underscores the continued vulnerability of international forces serving in Afghanistan. At about 8:15 a.m., a car packed with explosives detonated near a convoy of armored vehicles in Kabul. The blast occurred as the convoy left a heavily fortified area near the U.S. Embassy and other government buildings, witnesses and Afghan officials said. “It was a very powerful blast and happened just as the vehicles sped out of the embassy,” said Taj Mohammad, one of the witnesses. Television footage showed mangled vehicles and coalition troops providing first aid to two soldiers lying next to the road. At least 13 Afghan civilians also were wounded, said Hashmat Stanekzai, a Kabul police spokesman. Afghan security forces keep watch at the site of a suicide attack in Kabul on Sept. 16, 2014. A large blast ripped through central Kabul, shaking buildings and setting off the siren alert at the U.S. embassy. (Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images) The Taliban asserted responsibility for the attack. The assault was the deadliest for coalition forces since July 8, when five soldiers from the Czech Republic were killed during a Taliban attack on Bagram air base, north of Kabul, according to iCasualties.org, which tracks coalition casualties. Although there has been a rapid drawdown of coalition forces this year, about 41,000 troops from 44 nations remain in Afghanistan. About three-fourths of them are Americans, and President Obama announced this summer that he plans to keep up to 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan into 2015. The coalition did not reveal the nationalities of the slain soldiers. The blast, which could be heard for miles, occurred less than 24 hours after a coalition soldier died in an “insider attack” in western Afghanistan. NATO officials said the soldier was shot by a man wearing an Afghan army uniform. It is thought to be the first such attack since Aug. 5, when an Afghan soldier fatally shot a two-star U.S. general. Army Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene was shot during a joint training exercise. Greene was the highest-ranking U.S. service member killed in the war. About a dozen other coalition soldiers, including at least five Americans, were wounded in the attack. According to the Long War Journal, In a recent interview, Afghan army spokesman Mohammad Zahir Azimi said combating the threat has been a chief priority of the country’s military. “We


Obama reneges on his foreign-policy promises

proxy wars, decide the violence must end. The United States can’t create peace by military force. We can only add to the destruction. Instead, the president is surrendering to three forces: first, a media lathered into a war fever, parading an endless array of armchair warriors to inflate the threat, demand military response, and scorn patience and diplomacy. The Islamic State’s gruesome beheadings of two American journalists helped increase the drumbeat for war, finally moving public opinion to support bombing — but not troops. “We’re going to war because we’ve been spooked,” Joshua Landis, a Syrian specialist at the University of Oklahoma, noted. Second, he is yielding to the “indispensable nation” crowd of liberal interventionists, seized with moral outrage at the horrors of terrorists like the Islamic State, but blind to the innocents killed and displaced in our military response. They drove us into Libya to forestall a humanitarian disaster and left a spreading violent sectarian and tribal conflict in their wake. And finally, the president is capitulating to the mindless bellicosity of his opposition. The neo-conservatives who drove us into Iraq and learned nothing from the debacle lead the chorus for war. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his wingman, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who have a terrible track record on foreign policy, now accuse Obama of “reactive half-measures,” while ruling out “unilateral invasion, occupation or nation building,” suggesting that Afghanistan — the United States’ longest war, which will leave chaos behind — should be our model. We are ill served by Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who preposterously accuses the president and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton of advocating “isolationism,” while saying we should “not rule anything out” in the fight against the Islamic State. To accuse this president of isolationism after he has deployed drones to bomb in eight countries, increased troop levels into Afghanistan, intervened in Libya, and dispatched ships to police the South China Sea in Asia exhibits the mindless macho posturing that the president rightly warned us against. Needless to say, this decision to wade back to war in Iraq and Syria should be debated and voted upon by the Congress. Sadly, the arrogance of the imperial executive has too often been reinforced by the cowardice of the Congress. The decision to postpone deliberation until after the election, for a lame debate in a lame duck Congress, is a sad testament to that.


Dempsey raises possibility of involving U.S. combat troops in fight against Islamic State

one yet,” Dempsey said. By openly suggesting that U.S. ground combat forces will be needed, Dempsey was walking a fine line between questioning the judgment of Obama, the commander in chief, and sharing his own professional military opinion with lawmakers and the public. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, asked Dempsey whether he supported Obama’s strategy. Dempsey said he did. But he added that if the current approach were to falter, he might recommend a different one, possibly including “the use of U.S. military ground forces.” Later, he also said he might recommend that U.S. troops provide “close combat advising” to Iraqi forces if they were to attempt a complex mission, such as retaking the northern city of Mosul from the Islamic State. Obama is scheduled to meet with Austin and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Wednesday at the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa. Earlier this month, Obama ordered an expansion of airstrikes, adding that it was time to “start going on some offense” against the Islamic State. After Dempsey finished his testimony, the White House reiterated that Obama remained opposed to sending U.S. ground troops into combat in Iraq or Syria. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters that Dempsey’s remarks referred to “a hypothetical scenario” and that it was the military’s responsibility to plan for a wide range of contingencies. The debate about whether to send U.S. troops back into combat in Iraq — and possibly into Syria — is sensitive politically but in some ways a matter of semantics. Air Force and Navy pilots already are firing missiles and dropping bombs on Islamic State fighters in Iraq. And although the 1,600 U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq have not engaged in firefights with the Islamic State, they are armed and authorized to defend themselves. But the issue also cuts to the heart of Obama’s military strategy for fighting the Islamic State — and whether U.S. forces should take a leading and visible role on the ground or leave the fighting to Iraqi and Kurdish troops, as well as proxy forces in Syria. Dempsey said the Obama administration’s plan to train and equip 5,000 Syrian rebels would take time — up to five months to establish the program and as long as a year to recruit, vet and train the fighters. Much of the training is expected to take place in Saudi Arabia.


Britons gather stones at Scotland-England border to support the union before vote

from all over — some have been carried across rough seas from remote Scottish isles, others mailed from the far reaches of England. A fragment of the Berlin Wall, and a bit of rubble from a Glasgow house bombed during the Blitz have been added to the pile. On Sept. 18, voters in Scotland decide whether or not to end their 307-year union with England and become the newest independent nation in the world. Truth Teller puts campaign ads for and against Scottish independence to the test. “I’m English, but I’ve lived in Edinburgh for 40 years. I was married to a Scot. My children were raised in Scotland — one is voting ‘yes,’ the other would vote ‘no,’ but is living in London,” said Bethune, the library assistant. “I understand Scottish pride. I’ve lived with it for a long time. But I think it’s possible to be proud of your country without dividing the union.” The line of division, if it becomes a true border again, can be hard to find. With no natural geographic features to partition this island, the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall — but much of it is gone. The River Sark, which forms today’s western boundary between England and Scotland, is little more than a stream that can be forded with a couple of hops. Drivers crossing into Gretna on an old stone bridge may not even notice they have entered a new nation. Nationalists say that won’t change if the union is dissolved and Scotland achieves independence. Much like another island to this one’s west — Ireland — Britain, they say, can be divided without border controls. But British officials say that they are not so sure, and that differing security and immigration policies may force them to set up checkpoints at the crossings. That could fundamentally change this area, which always has thrived on the flow of people and goods across the border. “You don’t solve your problems by cutting yourself adrift and floating off into the North Sea,” said Benet Allen, a 47-year-old helicopter pilot who grew up on the Scottish side of the border and had his first job at a hotel on the English banks of the Sark. “The secessionists want to keep the pound. They want to keep the queen. They want to keep NATO. That’s not independence. There’s no such thing as independence in the modern world. We’re


Georgetown University student dies of apparent case of meningitis

A Georgetown University student died Tuesday after apparently contracting meningitis, the university said. Andrea Jaime was a sophomore in the school of nursing and health studies, Georgetown said in a statement. She had been undergoing treatment for the infectious disease at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. “Andrea died from apparent meningitis,” Todd A. Olson, the university’s vice president for student affairs, wrote in an e-mail Tuesday afternoon to the campus community. “We are awaiting test results to confirm the exact cause. As we shared in a message to the community earlier today, proper medical precautions have been taken and members of the campus community do not need to take additional action at this time.” Meningitis is caused by inflammation of protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord known as the meninges, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease is usually caused by bacteria or viruses. Bacterial meningitis can spread through kissing or other physical contact that exchanges respiratory and throat secretions, according to the CDC. Viral meningitis is most often spread through fecal contamination, but it also passes from person to person through other bodily fluids. There was no information immediately available about the form of meningitis that apparently struck Jaime. A Facebook page indicated that Jaime was originally from Bogota, Colombia. Rachel Pugh, a university spokeswoman, said there were no reports of any further cases of meningitis on campus. She said officials believe it has been many years since someone at the university died of the disease. The CDC said that Princeton University and the University of California at Santa Barbara have been affected recently by outbreaks of meningococcal disease, a severe illness caused by bacteria. This illness can be manifest as meningitis or as an infection of the bloodstream. Thousands of students at the two universities have been vaccinated in an effort to contain the outbreaks, which began in 2013.


A new Washington rat race: Fitbit-wearing power walkers vie for step supremacy

60 percent of U.S. adults who say they track their weight, diet or fitness, just 9 percent use an app or online tool to keep up with stats, according to the Pew Research Center. Analysts project that number will grow considerably next year with the introduction of Apple’s new watch. Unveiled last week, the watch will track fitness and, as with many Apple products, could turn a new idea mainstream. Studies show that using pedometers and other devices to track activity can improve health by motivating positive behaviors. When competition or teamwork is involved, walkers are less likely to relegate their tracking devices to a drawer, in the same way that many people turn their treadmills into expensive clothes hangers, experts say. In a competitive sense, Washington — a city filled with people who abhor losing — is perfect for a bit of political Fitbit fisticuffs. Those who tout their performance can prompt others to jump in. This summer, Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Fla.) began posting his walking results on Instagram from an iPhone app called Moves. He notched an all-time record on July 23: 4.9 miles, or about 10,000 steps. Staffers in the office of Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) saw his posts and downloaded the app. Samantha Slater, Israel’s communications director, became obsessed soon after. To avoid missing out on recorded steps, she takes her phone to the bathroom, despite the water hazards for expensive electronics. On vacation in France, she sent her Moves-using colleague Kyle Hill an e-mail boasting about the 15.1 miles she walked in one day. In some offices, tracking is a behavior that comes from the top. Stacey McClure, Boozman’s state director, said she began using a tracking bracelet after the senator did. “If it’s important to the boss,” McClure said, “it’s important to the staff.” She quickly found out how important it was when, instead of dropping him off at an event, he asked her to park far away. “It’s 98 degrees out, I have heels on, but yes, let’s go park far away,” McClure recalls thinking. “Great idea.” But she adjusted well. While working in Arkansas, she often monitors her colleagues in Washington online and, when appropriate, sends messages such as: “Were you off all week? Were you sick all week? Did you break a leg?” Meanwhile, Boozman said other senators have asked about his bracelet. He has encouraged them to (ahem) follow in


D.C. news in brief

Chavez has served on the board since January 2012. Chavez is the assistant field director at the Education Trust, a nonprofit academic organization, and is a founding officer of the Columbia Heights Day Initiative board. She has a bachelor’s degree in sociology, history and African diaspora studies from Tulane University and a master’s degree in social policy from the University of Chicago. For information, go to policecomplaints.dc.gov. DDOT to hold meetings on disabled access plan The D.C. Department of Transportation is having two meetings on its Americans with Disabilities Act Transition Plan. The plan will offer a framework for making the District’s public rights of way, such as crosswalks, sidewalks, pedestrian paths and transit stops, accessible to people with disabilities. The meetings are scheduled for 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Sept. 30 at Mt. Pleasant Public Library, 3160 16th St. NW, and 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. Oct. 2 at the lecture hall of Matthews Memorial Baptist Church, 2616 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE. DDOT will give a presentation describing the plan and then solicit public input. For information, go to ddot.dc.gov. For special accommodations or language assistance services, call 301-424-6133 or e-mail shelley@sharpandco.com, 72 hours in advance of each meeting. The department also seeks community members, including people with disabilities, parents of disabled children and senior citizens, for an advisory group on the plan. DDOT anticipates that the group will meet about three times in the next 10 months. To apply for the group, send a brief write-up by Sept. 26 to Cesar Barreto, DDOT ADA Coordinator, 55 M St. SE, fifth floor, Washington, D.C. 20003; call 202-671-2829 or e-mail info@ddotadaplan.com. Catholic Charities reopens dental clinic Catholic Charities D.C. Dental Clinic, 1618 Monroe St. NW in Mount Pleasant, recently reopened after a two-month renovation. The clinic, in operation since 1975, underwent more than $200,000 in renovations to modernize its space and allow its dentists to see an estimated 20 percent more patients. The cabinetry and flooring were overhauled and upgraded, a new dental chair was added and several design changes were made to create a more calming atmosphere for patients. In 2013, the clinic treated more than 2,100 people, all of them uninsured. Ninety-five percent of the patients had incomes below the federal poverty level. Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, a nonprofit social services agency, administers the program. For information, go to www.catholiccharitiesdc.org. — Compiled by Terence McArdle


Leesburg brewpub wins the support of the Town Council on its rezoning application

With a unanimous vote of support from the Leesburg Town Council last week, MacDowell Brew Kitchen in Leesburg has moved closer to securing its long-term future and ending a drawn-out controversy sparked by an anonymous complaint filed against the brewpub last year. At a meeting Sept. 9, council members voted to approve a rezoning application that will allow the popular restaurant to operate its business on property that was previously designated for residential use. The approval is an important step toward resolving the zoning violation, Leesburg officials said, but there are more hurdles to clear before the brewpub is fully in compliance with town rules. After opening on Harrison Street in Leesburg’s historic downtown in 2011, MacDowell Brew Kitchen quickly drew crowds of loyal patrons to its bar and sprawling outdoor patio, blanketed in a thick layer of white sand and adorned with palm trees and other tropical-themed decor. The brewpub became a go-to spot for those in search of locally brewed ales and live music. The town, which has made a point of positioning itself as business-friendly, celebrated the restaurant’s arrival by naming it Best New Business at Leesburg’s annual business awards ceremony in 2012. But not everyone was thrilled with the new addition to Leesburg’s night life. An anonymous resident filed a complaint against MacDowell Brew Kitchen last year, noting that the brewpub had not received required approval from the town’s Board of Architectural Review for alterations made to the building’s exterior, a concern that has since been echoed by other residents who say that the brewpub’s popular outdoor “beach” clashes with Leesburg’s Colonial aesthetic. An investigation of the complaint revealed other problems, according to town officials, who soon discovered that the restaurant’s beach had expanded onto a lot that was not zoned for commercial use. Inspectors also found that a 1,100-square-foot section of the outdoor patio was zoned as a public right-of-way owned by the town. That piece of property was sold to the brewpub in July for $24,000. At the Town Council meeting, Leesburg environmental planner Irish Grandfield told council members that reactions to the brewpub have been mixed: Some neighbors have voiced concerns about the restaurant’s appearance, its effect on property values and the noise that comes from crowds and music. But other neighbors wrote letters in support of the restaurant, and more than 2,100 residents signed an online “Save Our Beach” petition. Despite lingering


Montgomery County Animal Watch

These cases were received recently by the Montgomery County Animal Services Division. For information, call 240-773-5900. This number provides recorded information on topics such as the new animal services and adoption center’s hours and location in Derwood, adoption and licensing procedures, and lost-and-found and field services. Abandoned in a gully: 3500 block, Legend Oaks Rd., Silver Spring, Aug. 26. Animal services found a Chihuahua-type dog tied to a tree in a gully. The officer questioned local residents but no one knew who owned the dog or how long it might have been tied to the tree. The animal was taken to the adoption center. No owner has come forward to claim the dog. Horse bites man, dog bites horse: Board members wanted: Reduced fees for cat adoption: Germantown Adopt or foster rescue dogs: Rockville Adoptable cats at no-kill shelter: Gaithersburg — Compiled by Lisa M. Bolton


Protecting fragile bird species, one garden at a time

them to linger longer than is good for them, says Pete Marra, director of the Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center. He has been thinking a lot lately about the welfare of all the bird species in North America. He and other experts from government and conservation agencies have issued a State of the Birds Report that examines bird population trends in seven habitat types. The survey has a special poignancy this month, which marks the centenary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, a bird once so numerous that flocks would darken the sky for days on end. Habitat destruction and relentless hunting doomed the bird. The results of the report are mixed; some habitats are seeing alarming drops in bird numbers, others are remaining level or improving. And within habitats, some species are faring better than others. Eastern meadowlarks are disappearing but other grassland species are holding their own. Most freshwater birds that live in wetlands have rebounded, due in large part to the North American Wetlands Conservation Act. The cerulean warbler is an uncommon wood warbler that breeds in Eastern forests but spends the winters in the tropics. It has benefited from habitat conservation. (Gerrit Vyn) The biggest single threat to birds remains the loss of the environments they need to flourish and reproduce, but habitats can be restored by protecting public land and adopting policies that encourage private conservation and ecologically sensitive farming. The steepest drop was in Western aridlands — desert, sagebrush and chaparral — where bird populations have declined by almost half since 1968. Birds that visit the Mid-Atlantic as migrants, including my little hummingbird, live their winter lives not only in different climates and regions, but also in different countries. This makes protecting their habitats more difficult, but not impossible. The cerulean warbler is a rare wood warbler that breeds in Eastern forests but winters in the tropics. It has benefited from conservation efforts in the United States and also in the coffee-growing regions of Colombia. The warbler is one of 233 species that the report’s authors — the U.S. Committee of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative — have placed on a watch list of birds that are endangered or will be without significant conservation efforts. Separately, the National Audubon Society this month released a study of the future effects of climate change on birds and predicted that 314 species could lose most of


the factors that have harmed birds — the effects of overfishing on ocean birds, for example — but many of us with a little patch of land have a chance to give birds a helping hand. Washington’s urban forest is a vital asset. Marra said the mature tree canopy of Takoma Park, where he lives, has done much to harbor such beloved bird species as the Baltimore oriole, great crested flycatcher and eastern wood-pewee. Although the major habitat gains are made in the preservation of large areas of land, “there are lots of ways that individuals can help these birds,” said Ken Rosenberg, a conservation scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. What can we do in the residential landscape? First, keep cats indoors. Cats kill an astonishing number of birds in this country, as many as 2.4 billion a year. The mere presence of a cat can affect the breeding success of a nesting bird. “A parent bird reduces the rate at which it feeds nestlings when it glimpses a cat,” writes John Marzluff in a new book, “Welcome to Subirdia,” in which he argues that suburban landscapes can offer vital habitat for beleaguered bird species. We can choose to grow plants that foster abundant insect life (oak trees are much commended), or provide winter berries, or simply offer cover from predators and a place to roost. Bird feeders help (keep them away from windows to avoid collisions). Fresh water acts as a magnet for birds. If you have birdbaths, change the water regularly in summer to thwart mosquitoes, and in winter to replace ice. Water to drink and for bathing seems even more attractive than bird seed. “I can’t believe how many birds come to my pond, said Marra. “During migration, birds are dehydrated.” And the idea that the hummingbird or the oriole nests in our gardens for just a few weeks and then travels many hundreds of miles to its other existence is sort of magical. As Marra puts it: “Our back yards are connected to a whole other world.” That idea alone should be enough to make us want to nurture our feathered friends. If they seem fragile, perhaps it’s because they are. As the loss of the passenger pigeon has taught us, surely the worst thing we could do for our birds would be to take them for granted. @adrian_higgins on Twitter Also at washingtonpost.com


Tech firm tries to pull back curtain on surveillance efforts in Washington

powerful criminals. “Their approach is definitely one of the best we could take, but I wouldn’t say it’s 100 percent conclusive,” said Ravishankar Borgaonkar, a telecommunications researcher at Technical University of Berlin who has also developed a free app that purports to do the same thing. “We only can see one side of the activity, not the other side.” The CryptoPhones carried by Turner frequently reported one or two of the three indicators of suspicion as he drove Wednesday afternoon with several Washington Post journalists. But not once in the 90-minute drive were all three detected simultaneously. Experts in surveillance gear say that sometimes an IMSI catcher will simply “scrape” the data from nearby phones to determine their locations but not actually intercept the voice or data transmissions being made. Researcher Adrian Dabrowski, a graduate student at the Vienna University of Technology who last month co-authored a paper on developing “IMSI catcher-catchers,” said that when all three indicators happen at the same time, there’s a very good chance that an IMSI catcher is responsible. “There are rare occurrences when all these indicators are present without an IMSI catcher,” Dabrowski said. “But it’s a situation where you might say, ‘Let’s now be careful and not talk about sensitive things on the phone.’ It’s not a perfect indicator.” He also warned that the makers of IMSI catchers will probably adapt their technology to defeat the new IMSI catcher-catchers, triggering “an arms race” in surveillance technology and the tools intended to defeat it. Goldsmith said there has been a surge of interest in the CryptoPhone since an article in Popular Science purporting to reveal 17 IMSI catchers around the country triggered a rush of news coverage, including on Glenn Beck’s conservative talk show. The marketers intend to soon begin searching New York and Silicon Valley for IMSI catchers — and release those maps as well. The company, said Goldsmith, has sold 30,000 CryptoPhones in the United States and 300,000 globally. Among those interested in the technology, Goldsmith said, is the FCC, which already has met with the CryptoPhone’s marketers. He said its devices are more sophisticated than the commission’s own technology for finding IMSI catchers. “If they can’t see the espionage, maybe they need more money and equipment to detect it,” Goldsmith said. Soltani is an independent security researcher and consultant. Follow The Post’s tech blog, The Switch, where technology and policy connect.


Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to supply engines for national security space launches

on the Russian hardware. At one point this summer, a top Russian official suggested that the supply of engines would be cut off. That threat appears to have been mere bluster, and ULA recently obtained two RD-180s, with more on the way. But Congress and the military are eager to see ULA develop alternatives to the RD-180. “I think the U.S. needs to have an American-made booster engine. And, finally, I think, for humanity, we need access to space,” Bezos said in an interview after the news conference. “This will move all of those things forward. And I feel great about it.” Asked about his overarching goal, he said, “What we want to have happen is millions of people living and working in space.” The partnership would not preclude ULA’s using other rocket engines. But Bezos said, “Our goal is to make the engine so operable, so low-cost and so reliable, that ULA would be crazy to use anything else.” An Atlas V rocket will carry the U.S. government's classified CLIO satellite into space following a successful launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The deal delicately inserts Blue Origin into NASA’s plans to launch American astronauts once again from American soil. Since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, NASA astronauts have had to ride on Russian rockets at a cost of $71 million a seat. On Tuesday, NASA announced that it had awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX, totaling $6.8 billion, to carry astronauts to the International Space Station as early as 2017 under the new “commercial crew” program. Boeing’s space capsule will launch on the Atlas V. That means that, at some point, American astronauts could be blasted into space using rockets equipped with Blue Origin engines. Tuesday’s announcement that SpaceX would be one of the two companies delivering astronauts to orbit represented a triumphal moment for the New Space movement led by Musk, who in barely a decade has turned SpaceX into a major player in aerospace. But Musk had to share the spotlight Tuesday with Bezos after the Wall Street Journal reported on the surprising Blue Origin-ULA deal and the companies revealed that Bezos would join Bruno on Wednesday at the National Press Club news conference. Bezos made his fortune turning Amazon.com from a start-up bookseller into an all-purpose retailer and Internet hosting service. But he has been fascinated by space


Georgetown says student’s meningitis death is ‘isolated case’

Georgetown University in an e-mail to students and staff Wednesday said the meningitis that killed a college sophomore on Tuesday is not considered a risk to other students. The e-mail, sent from James Welsh, assistant vice president of student health services, said that Andrea Jaime, a student in the School of Nursing and Health Studies, died of “an isolated case of meningitis.” Welch said that the university had consulted with the D.C. Department of Health and did not recommend preventive antibiotics for anyone else. He did remind students of standard hygiene tips, including washing hands regularly and avoiding sharing cups, toothbrushes, cosmetics and other items that touch the mouth. And he told students to come to the health center if they experience symptoms of meningitis, which include fever, headache and stiff necks. Welsh wrote that all tests for bacterial meningitis have so far proved negative in Jaime’s case, and more testing is underway. Meningitis, a disease caused by inflammation of membranes around the brain and spinal cord, is usually caused by either bacteria or a virus. Bacterial meningitis spreads more easily than the viral form, through kissing and other contact with respiratory and throat secretions. According to the university’s Web site, freshmen are required to be vaccinated against meningitis when they enroll at Georgetown but can enroll without the vaccination if they sign a waiver. The vaccine that is offered by the university, Menactra, is formed of inactive bacteria and protects students from the four types of meningitis that cause most cases in college students, according to a university Web site.


Giving preference to veterans

Regarding the Sept. 15 front-page article “Obama’s drive to hire veterans for federal jobs sows resentment”: As a retired federal human resource specialist with 34 years of experience, I was and am against veterans’ preference. I always applied the policy with the utmost accuracy when I was working but, from the day I started work to the day I retired, I thought it was a bad idea. We should want the best and the brightest to serve in our federal civil service. That may very well be the veteran, and it may very well not be the veteran. Let’s give everyone an equal chance. Grace Schmitt, Alexandria ● I was a federal employee for 30 years before retiring nine years ago. I knew, as did all federal employees, that a veteran who was found to be minimally qualified for a federal job would be hired before me even if I was rated as highly qualified. If the veteran needed additional training that I or others did not, it was readily available, and no one was upset by it. Since I did not put my life on the line for my country, I believed that this was fair and proper. Federal employees complain a lot to each other, but never once did any of the hundreds of employees I worked with resent the veterans’ preference. The examples in the article are not the norm among federal employees. We are proud Americans, but we are especially proud of our veterans. Jan Kirby, Rockville


Virginia has 7 confirmed cases of rare respiratory illness

Medical Center in Denver on Sept. 5 from what doctors suspect is enterovirus 68. The illness has appeared in 16 states, including Virginia. (Cyrus McCrimmon/DP) The rare respiratory virus that has sickened children in 16 states has now been confirmed in Virginia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The illness, known as enterovirus 68, is related to common cold viruses, but this strain is rarely seen and can cause severe breathing difficulty in children. The illness was confirmed in seven children in Virginia, all in the central region of the state. Twenty-eight more children, from the central, northern, and eastern parts of the state, are being tested for the virus. Laurie Forlano, the state epidemiologist, said that the test to identify enterovirus 68 takes from 10 days to several weeks to complete, so more cases may be confirmed in Virginia even after those who were sickened recover and leave the hospital. Identifying a child’s illness as enterovirus 68 rather than another respiratory virus does not change the course of treatment, Forlano said. Hospitals stabilize the breathing of affected children, who can experience severe respiratory distress within a day or two of becoming sick, and provide other supportive care. Forlano said that children typically recover within days. Thus, the state department of health only tests for the illness when it observes clusters of children possibly affected by the virus at one hospital, not when just one patient at a facility displays symptoms that may indicate enterovirus 68. Forlano said that the state’s lab has received specimens from six such clusters, reported at hospitals in three of the state’s five health districts. After the state lab tests the specimens, it hands them over to the CDC for further testing. The samples confirmed as enterovirus 68 by the CDC on Wednesday came from seven children treated at St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, out of 10 patients treated there who were suspected to have the illness. Forlano said that the seven confirmed enterovirus 68 patients were all 12 years old or younger, with a median age of 6, and that all 38 patients tested for enterovirus 68 in Virginia are children. Staff at St. Mary’s Hospital said they could not confirm whether the children were still hospitalized or discuss their conditions. A total of 140 cases of enterovirus 68 have been confirmed across the country. No one has died of the virus.


DC Harvest, where wholesome is on the agenda

folks, Arthur comes to DC Harvest from Hank’s Oyster Bar in Dupont Circle, where he was executive chef. His brother managed several Homemade Pizza Company locations in Northern Virginia. Without preaching, the menu encourages diners to eat mindfully by playing up vegetables and grains. Thus, pan-roasted scallops line up beside a hedge of corn, cherry tomatoes and beans, and the chef’s house-made pastas include linguine made with spelt. The thin noodles benefit from Swiss chard, mint and crumbled lamb sausage in the bowl. Other good-for-you entrees include sauteed turkey breast and quinoa cakes with a yellow tomato sauce. “Daily Plates” highlight recurring specials. A recent Monday night rendezvous with fried chicken tempts me to start every workweek dinner at DC Harvest. The chef cuts up the chicken, marinates the pieces in a buttermilk bath, dusts them with Old Bay and fries them to a pleasing shade of gold before sending them to the table with cabbage salad. Spiked with a vinegar dressing, the slaw picks up color from whatever vegetables Ringel has on hand. Other nights celebrate smoked brisket (Wednesdays) and whole fish (Fridays). A hedge of corn, cherry tomatoes and green beans accompanies an entree of pan-roasted scallops. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post) On the dessert list: a honey-walnut tart served with fresh fruit and fromage blanc. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post) Fancy is not necessarily better. An appetizer of sliced fluke arranged on cucumbers marinated in red wine and cumin still manages to taste flat. But I appreciate a kitchen that offers a walnut tart laced with wildflower honey, and garnished with fromage blanc to balance the sweetness, for dessert. Pre-existing brick walls and dark wood, in tandem with modern brass lights and wallpaper that suggests tapestry, give the 1899 structure an updated farmhouse look. Inside the entrance is a curved marble bar that dispenses three local beers on tap and made-in-the-USA wines. The owners’ mother inspired the Bolognese that flavors the Sunday night special, which is also a pasta option on the kids’ menu. Arthur says he has brought her version, which relies on ordinary ground beef and dried herbs, up to 2014 expectations: Patrons at DC Harvest, in other words, will taste in his meat sauce braised short ribs and fresh basil. 517 H St. NE. 202-629-3296. www.dc-harvest.com. Entrees, $19 to $25. More from Food: First Bite Other Tom Sietsema reviews/Ask Tom Smoke Signals Spirits Column Beer Column


It’s going to be a long fight

from bin Laden — but in a simpler, bloody way — how he could get the attention of Americans and the world. Now what? Such a terrorist group “will only be defeated when moderate Arab and Muslim populations in the region reject it,” Dempsey told the Senate panel Tuesday. “And therefore, the way forward seems to me to run clearly through a coalition of Arab and Muslim partners and not through the ownership of the United States in this issue.” The plan is to get the new Baghdad government to reach out to Sunni areas where the Islamic State, according to Dempsey, has either “coerced or co-opted or driven away” about 48 to 54 Sunni tribes. U.S. military teams have assessed that 26 of 50 Iraqi army brigades “are capable of partnering” with U.S. air support. Getting forces on the offensive in the west and north of Iraq, while the Kurds, with U.S. support, press from the north to the south, “I think will place [the Islamic State] in an untenable position,” Dempsey said. Syria is much harder. First, there is no central party to work with there. The Syrian moderate military units that the United States hopes to develop need “a chain of command responsive to some Syrian political structure, not responsive to us,” Dempsey said. “These can’t be simply surrogates and proxies; they have to be tied, linked to some political structure that ultimately could assist in the governing of Syria when finally the Assad regime is either overthrown or, through the negotiation, is changed.” Another problem is that the U.S. plan envisions training just 5,000 fighters a year, in small groups that go through in eight-week cycles. The first three to five months, however, will be devoted to setting up training facilities primarily in Saudi Arabia, then recruiting mostly among refugees outside Syria. “We think we’ll be recruiting mostly from displaced populations, and therefore it won’t be as though they’re giving up the security of their families to come and train with us,” Dempsey said. This fighting force’s task is to go after Islamic State targets in Syria, aided by U.S.-directed air power. “The number that our military planners were considering was about 12,000,” Dempsey said at the hearing. The U.S.-trained Syrians would not be the only forces on the ground, according to Dempsey. “If you’re asking me how does the opposition in Syria finally prevail against


Thomas Boggs Jr. death comes as Squire Patton Boggs faces critical juncture

government. Boggs and Patton envisioned a new kind of lobbying operation — one that was integrated into a major law firm, staffed with lawyers well-versed in the areas of law that lobbyists were looking to change. Today, that model dominates the lobbying industry: Six of the top 10 firms by revenue are lobbying groups housed within corporate law firms. Boggs is credited for pioneering that change, and his firm has long benefited from the brand recognition that comes with having his name on the door. The industry, though, began to move away from that one-man approach to lobbying, and Patton Boggs tried to adapt. In 2010, Patton Boggs acquired Breaux Lott-Leadership Group, the lobby shop run by former U.S. senators John Breaux and Trent Lott. The move boosted the firm’s lobbying revenue by about $12 million. But after becoming part of Patton, they continued to operate somewhat separately from the rest of the firm’s lobbying group. It was not until June, following the Squire deal, that the firm publicly indicated it was transitioning leadership duties in the lobbying group to Breaux and Lott. That plan will continue unchanged, leaders at Squire Patton Boggs said. “Tom was a guiding light, but in terms of the real nuts and bolts of the practice, over the years, Tom has really caused that to be picked up by other people,” said Jim Maiwurm, chairman of Squire Patton Boggs. “The structure is there already, so the succession has already been carried out. You’re not going to see any change in direction in the policy practice. It’s going to be lively and a leader in its field on an ongoing basis. Nothing is going to change.” The next few months could be critical for the future of the firm, as partners usually decide by the end of the year whether they plan to leave for other firms. Breaux and Lott are rainmakers with an established brand and a solid reputation for being the rare former members of Congress who have turned their tenure in government into big business on K Street. It remains to be seen whether it will be enough to replace the business the firm has lost over the past 18 months, when top lobbyists in health care, telecommunications, antitrust and other policy areas took their clients to other firms. Some former Patton lawyers say Squire has lost the most valuable part of Patton


D.C. community calendar, Sept. 18-25, 2014

Thursday, Sept. 18 Walking club, Garden tour and kids in snugglers, National Cathedral behind the scenes, Climate change on Mars, Jared Espley, a space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center with the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission, discusses “Climate Change on Mars: The Case of the Missing Martian Atmosphere.” 11:30 a.m., Library of Congress, Madison Building, Mary Pickford Theater, 101 Independence Ave. SE. Free. 202-707-5664. Irish step dancing, Face to face: Cornelius Vanderbilt, “America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community, ” Panel discussion, Lincoln-Douglas: debates that made a president, Memorials on the Mall, a National Park Service ranger leads a walking tour of a selection of memorials. 2-4 p.m. daily through Sept. 30, Lincoln Memorial, 23rd Street NW and West Potomac Park. Free. 202-426-6841. Beading for teens, learn to bead as you hang out with and meet new friends, create key chains, animals, jewelry; all materials provided, ongoing projects may be stored at the library, snacks served. 3:30 p.m. Thursdays, Georgetown Library, 3260 R St. NW. Free. 202-727-0232. “Here Trust Your Eyes: Visual Illusion and the Early American Theater,” Chess for teens, learn how to play and master strategies. 4 p.m., Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Teen Space, 901 G St. NW. Free. 202-727-0321. HIV/STI testing, for ages 13-24, hosted by Metro TeenAIDS. 4:30-7:30 p.m., Dorothy I. Height/Benning Library, Meeting Room 2, 3935 Benning Rd. NE. Free. 202-281-2583. Take 5! Grant Green on Blue Note, Music on the lawn, Art signs: gallery talk in ASL, Pilates on the square, Wii dance-off, Anacostia Library chess club, for ages 10-16. 6 p.m. Thursdays, Anacostia Library, 1800 Good Hope Rd. SE. Free. 202-715-7707 or 202-715-7708. Indian classical music, Strathmore Artist-in-Residence and violinist Nistha Raj performs music with elements of jazz, rock and beat box. 6 p.m., Kennedy Center, Millennium Stage, 2700 F St. NW. Free. 202-467-4600. “Good Will Hunting,” Guitars not guns, Darkest temptation: a celebration of chocolate, food historian and author Francine Segan discusses its evolution from a bitter, grainy brew to today’s universally loved treat, shares the little-known role Casanova played in its history, story of 17th-century high-society chocolates and how rationing during World War II led to the creation of Nutella. 6:45-8:45 p.m., S. Dillon Ripley Center, 1100 Jefferson Dr. SW. $52. 202-633-3030. www.smithsonianassociates.org . Hear Now! NPR Berlin — Concept, Audience, Experience, Job seekers support group, Blackout poetry, Meditation and mindfulness,a facilitator teaches


What will become ‘Broadway’s Next Hit Musical’? It’s up to you.

The cast of ‘Broadway’s Next Hit Musical.’ (James Shubinski) “Broadway’s Next Hit Musical” is about the baby panda, Bao Bao. It’s about a tangled-up slinky. It’s about your awkward, fumbling first kiss. It’s about cronuts. Basically, it’s about whatever you want it to be: The show is an audience-directed, improvised musical. When you enter, you’re asked to write a suggestion for a song title on a slip of paper, and cast members will randomly draw four of those slips. In teams, they’ll come up with one song each based on those suggestions, and, in an award-show format that mocks the Tonys, the audience will vote on which one they’d like to see as a full-fledged musical. The second half of the show is devoted to producing that musical, which is made up on the spot. “Sometimes people think we have a set selection of templates for songs, [for which] we know the chord progressions, and it’s going to kind of sound like something from ‘Cabaret,’ ” says Deb Rabbai, one of the show’s founders and performers. “We don’t do that. We really live in the moment of inspiration.” Every show is different. The actors can create a musical from scratch using such improv and musical skills as rhyming, harmony and syncopation, which they practice constantly. That goes for the pianist, too. “We’re listening to each other at such a deep level,” Rabbai says. “Each one of them is making offers and accepting those musical offers in the moment. . . . They don’t know exactly where I’m going, and I don’t know exactly where I’m going either.” And they want to make it up from scratch, which means that you should give them an original idea. One of Rabbai’s biggest pet peeves is when someone writes down the name of an existing song, like “Over the Rainbow,” or alter the name of a song just slightly. “We like people to really take that risk and mine their imagination,” she says. Another pet peeve: messy handwriting. And, suggestions that are too salacious for the family-friendly show get thrown out. When Rabbai can’t read the title out loud, she says, “then the audience thinks we somehow are preplanning. . . . It’s not a fun moment to have to reject something.” So what works? “We definitely prefer things that are more poetic and simpler,” Rabbai says, “not because we can’t rise to