Local Digest: D.C. man charged with murder in fatal 2006 shooting

THE DISTRICT A D.C. man was charged with murder in connection with a 2006 shooting, police said. On May 1, 2006, around 8:45 p.m., officers responded to a report of a shooting in the 1400 block of First Street NW, D.C. police said. Marcus Johnson, 35, of Northwest Washington, was found shot. He was pronounced dead at a hospital. On Thursday, police said Levon Williams, 32, of Northwest Washington, was charged with second-degree murder in the shooting. — Justin Wm. Moyer Green Line service was suspended and apartments were evacuated in the area around the Navy Yard-Ballpark Metro station after a gas leak Thursday, officials said. Around 12:30 p.m., D.C. fire officials said, a two-inch, high-pressure gas line was struck by a construction crew in the 1200 block of Half Street SE. Vito Maggiolo, a spokesman for the D.C. fire department, said there were no injuries or fire but that officials established a one-block “safety perimeter” and that “several” apartment buildings were evacuated. There was no evidence of gas in the buildings or in the Metro, he said. Metro service was temporarily suspended between Anacostia and L’Enfant Plaza. Shortly before 3 p.m., fire officials said the leak was contained and that buildings would be checked for residual gas. — Justin Wm. Moyer MARYLAND Prince George’s County police said a man from Riverdale was killed in a single-car collision early Christmas morning. Jose Galvan-Montesinos, 37, was driving an SUV south on Kenilworth Avenue in Greenbelt when the car veered off the road and struck a tree around 2 a.m., police said in a news release. Paramedics found Galvan-Montesinos, who had not been wearing a seat belt, dead at the scene. A passenger, who was also not wearing a seat belt, was hospitalized with critical injuries. Police said in their initial investigation “that excessive speed and intoxicants were contributing factors, however the investigation is ongoing.” — Rachel Chason


D.C. man charged with murder in 2006 shooting, police said

A D.C. man was charged with murder in connection with a 2006 shooting, police said Thursday. On May 1, 2006, around 8:45 p.m., officers responded to a report of a shooting in the 1400 block of First Street NW, D.C. police said in a statement. There Marcus Johnson, 35, of Northwest Washington was found shot. He was pronounced dead at a hospital. On Thursday, police said Levon Williams, 32, of Northwest Washington was charged with second-degree murder in the shooting. No further information about the incident or arrest was immediately available. justin.moyer@washpost.com


Americans’ near-record levels of credit card debt help bolster banking industry

Americans have accumulated near-record levels of credit card debt over the past year as card companies have increased interest rates and fees. The booming market is helping drive record banking industry profits but could become increasingly costly for consumers who don’t pay off their bill every month or miss a payment, industry experts say. JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank by assets, and Citigroup reported that credit card sales were up 10 percent and 5 percent respectively in the third quarter. Profits at Visa were up 17 percent in its most recent fiscal year, while Mastercard reported an 11 percent profit jump in its most recent quarter. “People like their credit cards. They use their credit cards far more than they use their debit cards,” Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said in July. “I don’t remember the last time I used my debit card.” To be sure, despite increasing debt loads, delinquency rates remain relatively low. About 6 percent of consumers were late on a payment this year compared with 15 percent in 2009, according to WalletHub. And consumers have yet to balk at the relatively high interest rates, industry experts say. Credit card debt as a share of disposable income has been flat for the past six years, and many consumers pay off their bill every month, the American Bankers Association said in a November report. “Consumers appear to be well-positioned to meet their financial obligations in the months ahead,” Dan Smith of ABA said in a statement. The industry has thrived despite the 2009 Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act, sweeping legislation that, among other things, limited the number of fees consumers could be charged. But card companies are again facing scrutiny from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Bernie Sanders (I), the Vermont senator running for the Democratic nomination for president, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation earlier this year to cap credit card interest rates at 15 percent, a steep reduction from current levels. The proposal met immediate resistance from the banking industry, which brought in $113 billion in interest and fees from credit cards last year, up 35 percent since 2012, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. A record 182 million Americans have credit cards compared with 147.5 million in 2010, according to TransUnion, and are carrying more than $1 trillion in debt. Consumers will add $80 billion to their tabs this


Alex Ovechkin spends Christmas Eve with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago resort

Alex Ovechkin and his wife, Nastya Ovechkina, spent Christmas Eve at President Trump’s personal holiday dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. The Washington Capitals captain shook hands with Trump and posed with the president and a white No. 8 Capitals sweater. The Ovechkins spent time at the party with Oleg Kouznetsov, a luxury auto salesman in Boca Raton, Fla., and his girlfriend. The Christmas party was closed to White House pool reporters. Trump commended Ovechkin, who won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the Stanley Cup playoffs, in remarks during the Capitals’ celebratory White House visit in March after they won the franchise’s first Stanley Cup the previous spring. “You were led to victory by a very special athlete, a great player, captain, team captain, Alex Ovechkin,” Trump said then. “Alexander the Great, they call him, has spent his entire 13-year NHL career with the Washington Capitals, and his hard work and his loyalty paid off last season. He outscored every player in the league. Wow, that’s not bad, right? With 64 goals — it’s like Babe Ruth — he had more than every player in the league. … 64 goals, 114 points, and was named the playoff MVP, and that was easy. Nobody did more to deserve the Conn Smythe Trophy and, Alex, congratulations.” While some members of the team skipped the visit for political reasons, Ovechkin told Trump in the Oval Office that it was a “huge honor for us to be here and meet you personally.” Ovechkin has mostly avoided talking politics during his time with the Capitals, but he is a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He founded an online political campaign for Putin, “Putin Team,” in 2017. “Be a part of this team — to me it’s a privilege, it’s like the feeling of when you put on the jersey of the Russian team, knowing that the whole country is rooting for you,” he wrote on Instagram, accompanied by a photo of him and Putin embracing, when announcing the movement. He also posted a photo casting a ballot in Russia’s 2018 election, ostensibly for Putin because Ovechkin tagged the post “#PutinTeam.” During Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki in July 2018, Trump presented Putin with an Ovechkin jersey and a hockey puck. Read more: How to describe a decade in D.C. sports? These 10 moments are a start.


Coach and his wife accused of embezzling more than $50,000 from Virginia soccer club

A Northern Virginia couple has been accused of embezzling over $50,000 in funds over a three-year period from a youth soccer club in Loudoun County, officials said. Jeffrey J. Kern, 40, and his wife, Berkeley C. Kern, 46, of Aldie, face several charges of embezzling from the Old Dominion Football Club. Jeffrey Kern was a coach for several travel teams for the club, according to officials with the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office. Authorities said the pair had “access to each team’s bank accounts” and Berkeley Kern “volunteered with the club and was an authorized user of one of the accounts.” In a statement, sheriff’s office officials said “irregularities in the accounts were discovered by the club and led to an investigation” done by the office financial crimes unit. In that investigation, officials said they figured out the couple “accessed monies in the accounts on multiple occasions for personal use.” They allegedly embezzled from the accounts between 2015 and December 2018. Jeffrey Kern faces five counts of embezzlement, and Berkeley Kern faces two counts. They were using the embezzled money to pay for “personal/entertainment items,” Colin Whittington, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, said in an email. He did not provide any details. Whittington said the case remains under investigation. Officials said the couple turned themselves in to authorities and were both released on bond from the county jail. Both were unable to be reached for comment. Stephen Graeff, a lawyer for Jeffrey Kern, said on Dec. 24 that he had “no comment at this time” on the allegations. William Fitzpatrick, a lawyer for Berkeley Kern, did not return a call and email. In an email, Andy Vera — who founded the soccer club in 2002 — said Jeffrey Kern had left the group in December 2018. Vera said Kern “departed approximately at the same time that our oversight committee” on the group’s board of directors started an “internal investigation.” He said he was proud that the board of directors had done “their due diligence over the past year” and that he was “humbled by their tireless work on behalf of all our parent members and players that continues to this day.” The club is based in the South Riding area of Loudoun County and, according to its website, is affiliated with the Cesena FC, a 70-year-old Italian soccer club based in Cesena, Italy. In Loudoun, the club started with roughly


I served in Afghanistan. No, it’s not another Vietnam.

essential. So we built roads. Unfortunately, we didn’t identify or set aside funds to maintain them. Corruption was, as The Post’s article indicates, a huge problem in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is hardly a revelation — the Kabul Bank scandal, involving the pilfering of about $1 billion, was public knowledge within months of the bank’s collapse in 2010. The hard truth here is that when major resources flow into a country without institutions, rule of law or accountability mechanisms, corruption is virtually guaranteed. The solution? Slow the flow of resources to a level where controls are possible. But that is difficult, too. Much of the logistical support for the U.S. military is outsourced to contractors. We may be able to go to war without them, but we can’t sustain a war that way. One problem with the effort in Afghanistan is the critical issue of structure and organization on the U.S. side. Much has been said over the years about civilian-military cooperation, but little has been done to institutionalize it. In the field, I was fortunate to have as military counterparts some of the finest men ever to wear the uniform: Army Gens. David H. Petraeus and Ray Odierno in Iraq and Marine Gen. John R. Allen in Afghanistan. But our cooperation was a function of personalities, not playbooks. And, sometimes, the personalities don’t work out. Let’s be clear. We came to Afghanistan and remain there now for one essential reason: the United States’ national security. These SIGAR interviews are about what contributes to that end and what doesn’t. I have argued that a better life for people in a misgoverned country is an essential part of that effort. It is also about American values. What is it, exactly, about nation-building that we must avoid at all costs? Does it extend to looking in the eyes of a hopeful Afghan girl of kindergarten age and saying, “Sorry, kid. You’re on your own”? The Post has assembled a significant set of documents. It is an amazing exercise in investigative journalism. Perhaps a next step could be analyzing the hard lessons so many of us have learned in that hard place. I have mentioned just a few. That could be the start of a national conversation on the proper role of the United States in dealing with extraordinarily complex contingencies. Those would be Afghanistan Papers well worth reading from beginning to end.


A program protecting us from deadly pandemic is about to expire

facilities will be shut down, and — as staff members move on to other jobs and opportunities — all Americans will be at greater risk. A related program was established shortly after the anthrax attacks of 2001, when Congress funded a small number of highly specialized facilities to cope with “special pathogens.” But that effort funded only three facilities nationwide, none of them located in the 15 most populous cities. By 2014, when the Ebola epidemic raged in West Africa, the U.S. system was capable of treating a handful of patients specially brought from overseas — but it was not ready for someone to walk into a hospital off the street with the disease. The plan that the government put in place that fall had four tiers. First, most health-care facilities around the country were prepared to identify patients who might have a dangerous infectious disease like Ebola and refer them for testing. Second, in almost every major city, at least one “assessment center” was established to accept and test suspected cases. Third, more than 60 treatment facilities for Ebola and similar diseases were set up within existing hospitals from coast to coast, to treat patients with such a diagnosis. And at the apex of the system, 10 Ebola & Other Special Pathogen Treatment Regional Centers were established to handle the hardest cases. Right now, Congress is considering funding for these most advanced facilities, but not the full network that protects our country. If it does not renew this entire program in the next five months, the system will begin to disintegrate. Equipment will get out of date or be cannibalized for other purposes. Drills and simulations will cease. We will return to nearly the state of unpreparedness that we had five years ago. That would be disastrous. Why? Because the day will come when a dangerous pathogen will arrive in the United States once again. Besides the lingering threat from a current Ebola outbreak in Congo, there are numerous other highly infectious disease outbreaks happening around the world today — Lassa fever in Nigeria, Middle East respiratory syndrome in Saudi Arabia, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever in Pakistan, to name a few. Preparedness efforts developed for Ebola will aid the response to other diseases like these. Just as it takes only one patient to cause an outbreak, so too does it take only one unprepared health-care facility, in one city in


America’s marijuana growers are the best in the world, but federal laws are keeping them out of global markets

DENVER — In a large warehouse, LivWell Enlightened Health feeds its cloned cannabis plants a custom blend of nutrients, sprays them with filtered water and pumps extra carbon dioxide into the air, and releases three types of insects to clear unwanted pests without the use of toxic pesticides. Every part of the growing process is meticulously documented and evaluated to refine the process. After 20 years of experience, legal marijuana growers in the U.S. have a reputation for creating the best product in the world, scientifically grown and tightly regulated for quality and safety. The crop would be in high demand internationally — perhaps the centerpiece of a new U.S. industry — if not for the regulatory conundrum in which growers operate. Because marijuana is legal in many states but still illegal federally, marijuana growers are unable to ship their products to other countries or even other American states that have legalized the drug. So while U.S. cannabis firms have driven product innovation and mastered large-scale grow operations, they restlessly wait for the export curtain to lift. Instead Canada has emerged as the dominant exporter in the burgeoning global marijuana trade, which ArcView Market Research and BDS Analytics estimated at $14.9 billion in sales for 2019. Companies are raising capital and building international trade ties despite Canada’s unlikely climate to be an agricultural pot haven. “Canada has a huge advantage because they can fill a gap,” said Rezwan Khan, vice president of global corporate development for cannabis seed supplier DNA Genetics. Best in the World California’s growers have been developing legal marijuana products since 1996, longer than everywhere but Amsterdam. Khan describes the state as "the epicenter of cannabis culture." California’s cannabis seeds have been distributed all over the world, and many foreign firms are trying to reproduce the quality of West Coast marijuana. The genetics and sophistication underlying the U.S. cannabis industry lead to better-quality and higher-potency flowers and innovations in oils, tinctures and edibles. “The world wants that technology,” said Michael Sassano, chief executive of Solaris Farms, the largest cannabis hybrid greenhouse in Nevada. “The Netherlands had a big jump; they could have done anything. But the U.S. is the one that turned the industry into what it is today, with all the products we make, not Canada.” The other draw of American-grown cannabis, according to Denver-based cannabis law expert Bob Hoban, is that foreign customers value the


internationally. While the market remains limited, at least 30 countries — including Mexico, Germany and Italy — have legalized medical marijuana. And the numbers are growing as scientific studies have demonstrated its utility for pain control, nausea and glaucoma. “There’s more than enough time for American companies to catch up,” said Kris Krane, president of 4Front Ventures, which grows and sells marijuana in nine states. “But the longer that we wait, the longer we continue to maintain this unsustainable prohibition, the more difficult it’s going to be for American companies to catch up.” Ready to export Changing public sentiments about marijuana in the United States have many American cannabis firms readying for the day they can legally sell their products elsewhere. “If the state borders do break open, we’re preparing for that,” said Sassano, who also is board chairman at Somai Pharmaceutical, a holding company based in Dublin that distributes medical cannabis products to pharmacies across Europe. That means an industry that began mainly as small mom-and-pop growers and retailers must now consider its corporate hygiene and whether it’s meeting legal requirements to sell in these new markets. LivWell is building large-scale indoor cannabis growing rooms in Colorado and Oregon designed to scale up production for interstate or international commerce. The new rooms have 30- to 40-foot-high ceilings and state-of-the-art LED lighting cool enough to sit close to the plants. “Then you farm vertically,” said Dean Heizer, LivWell’s chief legal strategist. “We learned that from the microgreens that people are farming in old cities and in old skyscrapers. If you can cultivate in cubic meters, you can scale. If you’re cultivating in square feet, you can’t.” With 11 states plus the District approving recreational use and 33 states legalizing medical marijuana, industry insiders believe marijuana may be legalized nationally in the near future, greatly expanding its market. In November, the House Judiciary Committee passed a bill with more than 50 co-sponsors that would effectively make marijuana legal in the United States. Though unlikely to pass Congress immediately, it is seen as a sign of hope for the future. “It’s just a matter of time,” Krane said. “How much time is very much a question of debate.” Kaiser Health News Correction An earlier version of this story used an outdated name for a Dublin-based holding company that distributes medical cannabis products to pharmacies across Europe. It is now called Somai Pharmaceutical.


As Guatemala pursues war criminals, a dark secret emerges: Some suspects are living quiet lives in the U.S.

to emails and calls seeking comment. Another alleged Guatemalan war criminal worked as a martial-arts instructor in Riverside, Calif., before being detained. Another worked in a sweater factory in Santa Rosa, Calif. Guatemalan human rights lawyers suspect that several more fugitives fleeing prosecution for war crimes are hiding in the United States. Nancy Artola, a Guatemalan lawyer working on war-crimes cases, believes that Edgar Justino Ovalle, linked to a major massacre in the city of Coban, is hiding in the United States. Neither Ovalle nor a representative could be located for comment. “In the 1990s to the mid-2000s, Guatemala was the land of impunity,” Burt said. “There were very few investigations into war crimes, and there was no sharing of information with the United States government about who was accused of what.” It was during that period that many alleged Guatemalan war criminals fled to the United States. Some, such as Cuxum Alvarado and Samayoa Cabrera, applied for asylum and were denied but remained in the United States illegally afterward. The United States backed the Guatemalan military during the civil war, which raged from 1960 to 1996, viewing it as a nearby front in the Cold War. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans were killed. When the conflict ended, Washington did little to support nascent efforts to create a war-crimes tribunal. In 1979, the U.S. Justice Department created an office of special investigations to locate and deport former Nazis. The unit expanded to search for other alleged war criminals who had entered the United States. But information about the Guatemalans remained limited until the 2000s, when the Central American country began holding its own trials of former military commanders. By then, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had created its own unit to hunt down foreign fugitives in the United States, including Cuxum Alvarado. It is unclear exactly when he first entered the United States, but he was convicted of illegal reentry in Arizona in 2004. He managed to avoid deportation and made his way to Waltham, which was known by Guatemalans across the country for its large Guatemalan population. In 2017, the American Community Survey found there were 2,349 Guatemalans in the town of 62,000. They were the largest foreign-born population. “He was there and living a quiet, uneventful, unremarkable life,” Michael Ronayne, assistant special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations, told NBC Boston. But while Cuxum Alvarado worked


Even as the U.S. and China agree to trade truce, they are edging toward partial economic divorce

has set in motion an anti-China train that will not be derailed just because the Trade War has been temporarily settled,” Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research, said via email. Aftershocks from the trade conflict are encouraging multinational corporations to shift portions of their supply chains from China to other low-cost countries, including Vietnam and Malaysia. Continuing uncertainty about future tariff rates may chill business investment “at the expense of global economic growth,” wrote Collier, a Hong Kong-based adviser to institutional investors. The tougher stance toward China enjoys bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. In a recent speech, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned that China was seeking to replace the United States as the “world leader in industries such as aerospace, quantum computing and industrial machinery” and needed to be stopped. “For the first time in three decades, we are confronted with a near-peer rival that seeks to displace us militarily, economically, technologically and geopolitically,” Rubio said. The Senate’s top Democrat, Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York, meanwhile, attacked Trump’s limited trade deal as a “surrender to China.” Yet moves to decouple the two countries’ technology sectors are being resisted by U.S. industry and its Washington allies. The Commerce Department was expected to make public its export control regulations in August, but officials have been stalling, according to Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute, who supports tighter controls. The agency last year began work on draft regulations designed to limit exports to China of 14 technologies, such as robotics, biotechnology and quantum computing. Now, nongovernment analysts who are tracking the regulations say the first installment, which is expected soon, will focus on just a handful. “Commerce’s export control draft is so bad. They’re going to get attacked for it,” Scissors said. “It’s a blatant undermining of the will of Congress. They’re not doing what they’re supposed to.” A department spokesman said only that the rulemaking process was “ongoing.” The export control regulations help inform the Treasury Department-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which lawmakers gave new powers last year to reject even non-controlling foreign investments in American companies if they affected national security. Previously, CFIUS could act only if foreign buyers attempted to gain control of a U.S. enterprise. The focus now is to prevent China from buying knowledge it can’t


Parts of Asia and Africa witnessed a stunning annular eclipse Thursday

sunrise. Those within the narrow path of annularity experienced a ring-shaped sun that had completely swallowed the moon. Elsewhere, it was a croissant-shaped partial eclipse. Southern India and Sri Lanka took their turn midmorning, the path then crossing Indonesia, Malaysia, and portions of the Maritime Continent later in the day. Singapore fringed the path of annularity; the country’s southern extremities were treated to about two and a quarter minutes of an eerie ring in the sky, while northern stretches 10 or so miles away missed out on the full display. Annular eclipses are cool, but they’re not safe to look at. That’s because the sun’s direct, harmful rays are never fully shielded. Enjoying the spectacle requires ISO-certified glasses or welding goggles. And unlike during total eclipses, during which all the sun’s light is briefly extinguished by the show-stealing moon, it doesn’t get dark during the time of maximum eclipse. Moreover, the sun’s atmosphere, or corona, never appears. Annular eclipses present their own assortment of remarkable phenomena that make it a worthwhile experience even for veteran total eclipse chasers. They’re especially spectacular during sunrise or sunset — especially over ocean seascapes. Temperature profiles near the water’s surface can make for trippy and mesmerizing mirage effects close to the horizon. Likewise, when clouds pass overhead, they can briefly filter out some of the most dangerous rays from the sun. It’s still not safe to look at but can make for some cool photo-ops. There will be another annular eclipse next year, but it will be much shorter in duration along the centerline. The summer solstice display (depending on time zone) will persist for 38 seconds at the most. A total solar eclipse will plunge parts of South America into darkness, bringing an abrupt nightfall to the volcanoes of Chile and Argentina on Dec. 14. Occurring near the peak of the Geminid meteor shower, emerald-green meteors may punctuate totality. (Dear WaPo: I will be in Chile that week.) The pair of countries was also graced by a remarkable eclipse on July 2 this year: On rare occasions, a “hybrid” solar eclipse can appear as an annular eclipse at the ends of its path, and a total eclipse near the center. That will happen in 2023. An annular eclipse will take place in the western United States on Oct. 14, 2023, before a total solar eclipse sweeps across North America on April 8, 2024.


What Rudy Giuliani’s version of reality looks like from Ukraine

sources in the documentary are former Ukrainian prosecutor generals Viktor Shokin and Yuri Lutsenko and Ukrainian member of parliament Andriy Derkach. Shokin is the former prosecutor who allegedly died twice without anyone in Ukraine noticing. For anyone who was reporting on Ukraine when Shokin was prosecutor general, Giuliani’s claim that Shokin was an anti-corruption crusader is ridiculous. Civil society groups tried for months to have him removed because of his failure to go after corrupt officials. Then-President Petro Poroshenko fought to keep him because in Ukraine prosecution is politicized, and you want a loyal prosecutor who can bring charges against your enemies that you can use as leverage in political negotiations. What finally stopped the deadlock was Biden threatening to block aid. The second prosecutor is Yuriy Lutsenko, known as Ukraine’s first prosecutor general without a law degree. He has a record of making baseless statements to grab headlines and attention; if the backlash in response to his provocative statements starts to get too big, he then rolls them back. This is exactly what happened when he falsely claimed that former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch gave him a “do not prosecute” list. Now in the documentary he is making the same claim again. Derkach is a member of parliament formerly of the party of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, who is now in exile in Russia after losing power in a popular uprising five years ago. Derkach, a graduate of the KGB academy in Moscow, is known for peddling conspiracy theories. In short, none of these people are credible. And what about all those statements and legal documents Giuliani has been collecting? I’ve seen a lot of others like them during my nearly six years in Ukraine, handed out by corrupt officials trying to dismiss allegations against them. There are rarely any repercussions for even the most outlandish of statements, and an official government letter denying or alleging wrongdoing can be either forged or obtained from a prosecutor who has nothing to do with the case. Few Americans are aware of this context. Commentators and journalists tend to assume that all Ukrainian officials and institutions are equal and give them the same weight as American officials and institutions. That lack of knowledge makes it easy for people like Giuliani to project their version of reality onto Ukraine. Corruption and politicized prosecution are still big problems in Ukraine. The irony is


China’s top quantum scientist has ties to the country’s defense companies

The head of China’s quantum-technology program has links to Chinese defense contractors, even as he and his team maintain research ties with Western universities, according to documents identified by a U.S. security company. Pan Jian-Wei, a physicist known in China as the “father of quantum,” helps oversee the country’s efforts to harness quantum particles to build powerful computers and tools for processing information. Western countries are also hotly pursuing quantum research, which has potential commercial and military applications. In an email exchange with The Washington Post this summer, Pan suggested that he and his university research team don’t assist Chinese military efforts to develop quantum technology. But Strider Technologies, a Washington-area security company that does corporate intelligence work, has identified publicly available Chinese-language documents that connect Pan to large Chinese defense contractors. Strider found that a state-owned shipbuilder of military and civilian vessels appointed Pan as deputy director of its science and technology committee in 2017. Strider also found that Pan last year signed an agreement committing his institution, the University of Science and Technology of China, to conduct quantum research with a state-owned defense contractor. MIT Technology Review first reported details of Strider’s findings. Bill Priestap, a member of Strider’s board who was assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division from 2015 to 2018, said the research should serve as a warning to Western universities that collaborate with Chinese institutions. “Not everyone recruited understands the full extent of how China will use their contributions,” Priestap said in an interview. “No matter how China represents a research partnership, it will use the knowledge gained however it desires — economically, of course, but also in a military and intelligence sense.” In an email, Pan downplayed the significance of the documents, saying they did not mean that he or his researchers were supporting the development of military technology. “We are focused on the development of quantum information technology itself. Whether these technologies would be used in the military field is not my business and out of our control,” Pan said. “As quantum information technology still has a long way to go for applications to benefit all humans, we believe that extensive and open international cooperation is necessary,” he added. Scientists are using quantum technology to develop new kinds of computers and communications networks, and new sensors for imaging and measuring objects. In the commercial world, quantum computers could one day solve intractable


publications include photos of Pan attending meetings with one defense contractor and signing a research agreement with another. Eric Levesque, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Strider, said his company’s findings show “the threat to open academic collaboration posed by China’s long-term, intentional strategy of exploiting Western innovation systems to achieve its national objectives.” Pan disputed the accusation of exploitation, saying that cooperation across borders is an accepted norm in science these days. Strider was founded this year with $2 million in funding from investors including DataTribe, a Maryland incubator that specializes in start-ups with experience in the intelligence community. China’s growing military ambitions, and its repression of ethnic minorities at home, are causing some U.S. officials and lawmakers to question aspects of U.S. research cooperation with China, despite the benefits it has brought. Research ties have deepened as the United States has hosted a growing number of Chinese graduate students — 133,000 in the last academic year, a tripling from 20 years ago, according to the Institute of International Education — and as China has recruited Western scientists to its labs through its Thousand Talents program. In April 2018, Pan signed a strategic cooperation agreement committing USTC to work with a large state-owned defense contractor, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, or CETC, according to an article posted on USTC’s site. The article said USTC and CETC would cooperate on a variety of science projects, including jointly establishing labs to research quantum detection and quantum communication devices. The report includes a photo of Pan signing the agreement alongside Wu Manqing, deputy general manager of CETC. Behind them stands Wang Xiaomo, a radar expert known as the father of China’s early warning aircraft system, according to the USTC article. Pan, who is also executive vice president of USTC, in addition to running his quantum-research group, said he signed the agreement “on behalf of USTC as the executive vice president, not on behalf of my research team.” “According to the agreement, the cooperation between USTC and CETC is mainly in talent training and scientific consultation. As a university, this is very normal,” Pan said. CETC declined to comment. In September 2017, a state-owned builder of military and civilian ships hired, Pan as deputy director of its science and technology committee, according to a 2018 report published by state-controlled media. At the same time, the company, China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, or CSIC, signed


2020: The year in preview

out in excess of $15 billion in 2020 — isn’t easy without ad revenue. Services have to charge, whether that’s the $5 a month for Apple TV Plus or the $15 for HBO Max. For consumers, that means piling on to a monthly entertainment bill or making tough choices about what to forgo. But don’t get too despondent. If some of the recent sitcoms you seek are too unwieldy or costly to find on streaming services, there’s a suddenly appealing option: traditional television. Many shows, after all, will continue to air in syndication. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, fresh off an election victory, has vowed to “get Brexit done.” Brexit will probably not be “done” in 2020, but it will — finally — get started. In January, 3 1/2 years after voting narrowly in favor of Brexit, Britain will officially split from the European Union. Expect a big party and fireworks, but don’t expect a big rupture in relations between London and Brussels. The status quo will largely continue as the country enters an 11-month transition period, during which Britain will attempt to negotiate a trade deal with the E.U., its largest trading partner, as well as come to agreements on issues including security and law enforcement. Analysts think this is a crazy tight timetable, especially if Johnson wants to diverge substantially from E.U. rules. If a deal isn’t completed by the end of the year, it’s possible Johnson could break his pledge and seek to extend the transition period. Alternatively, Britain could crash out of the E.U. without a trade pact, reviving anxieties about an abrupt, chaotic and economically damaging “no-deal” Brexit. One reason it’s tricky to predict how Johnson will tack in the upcoming negotiations — Does Britain stay closely aligned with the E.U.? Or does it tilt toward less regulation, in the spirit of Margaret Thatcher? — is that the prime minister is hard to pin down politically. But he could be tempted to keep Britain more in lockstep with the E.U., not least because his whopping majority means he won’t be beholden to Euroskeptics in his party anymore. Plus, closer alignment could help with his political problems in Scotland and Northern Ireland: As the reality of Brexit sinks in, nationalist movements could gain momentum outside England, and a closer relationship with the E.U. could help head off those threats. Plant-based meat was so 2019. Big Beef st(e)aked


2020: The year in preview

out territory, demanding legislation that put this interloper on the defensive, mostly in anticipation of what will surely be the food world’s biggest game changer in the year to come: Cell-cultured meat, poultry and seafood products derived from muscle tissue grown in a lab with cells harvested from a living animal. It is unclear which U.S. company will be first to market — chicken and duck from Memphis Meats in Berkeley, Calif., with investors such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Tyson Foods; Wagyu beef or chicken nuggets from Just (formerly Hampton Creek), whose investors include Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund; or bluefin tuna from Finless Foods — but Barclays analysts say “alt meat” could in the next decade capture 10 percent of the $1.4 trillion global meat industry. Much of it hinges on rates of adoption. The numbers of vegans and vegetarians aren’t growing much. These new products are geared toward omnivores and “flexitarians,” but as with genetically modified organisms more than a decade ago, some consumers distrust food that has been tinkered with in a laboratory. As it happens, that will also be an issue with another trend this coming year: grocery store foods that are gene-edited with CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Romaine and white potatoes that don’t brown or bruise, and a gene-edited farmed tilapia that grows quickly, are among the foods improved via tiny DNA snips, essentially accelerating the selection of desirable traits that Gregor Mendel achieved via crossbreeding his peas. Whether consumers will embrace these new foods is unknown. For now, the Food and Drug Administration has proposed overseeing gene-edited animals as drugs, something the meat industry thinks will disadvantage American producers. If Russian President Vladimir Putin suspects that President Trump has been irretrievably weakened or distracted — and especially if he thinks Trump will be replaced by a more mainstream alternative — expect him to redouble his efforts to secure a deeper Russian role in the Middle East while he still has a chance. Russia has been on a roll in the region, with a winning military intervention in Syria; a strengthening of diplomatic and commercial ties with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Israel; a mercenary involvement in Libya; and a toe in the waters of the western Mediterranean through joint naval exercises with Algeria. But Moscow’s gains have come through craft, stealth and a large measure


On land, Australia’s rising heat is ‘apocalyptic.’ In the ocean, it’s even worse.

“You liken it to smoking,” he said. “If you smoke cigarettes, you increase the likelihood of getting lung cancer.” The marine heat wave left something behind when it finally ended: disease. A sickening smell at the shallow Pipe Clay Lagoon is how Pacific oyster mortality syndrome introduced itself to Steve Calvert. The syndrome, known as POMS, turned his small oyster farm in the lagoon into a mass grave, and the smell of the dead stretched for miles. Calvert lost 75 percent of his oysters in 2016. Other farmers in the region’s five major farming areas lost nearly 100 percent of their stock. Oyster mortality disease had stricken France, China, the United States, New Zealand and even Sydney, but never pristine Tasmania. “We’ve got a reputation in Tasmania of having pure water and some of the freshest air in the world,” said Calvert’s son, Liam, a manager at the farm. “So that’s part of why there’s an attraction to the Tasmanian oyster, because people think pristine-forest freshness and all that kind of thing.” Climate change had raised the region’s water temperatures to an ideal level for the contagion. POMS joined warm-water toxic algal blooms as a new threat to the region’s aquaculture and fisheries. In an encouraging sign that Tasmania’s aquaculture can adapt, scientists had prepared the Calverts and other farmers for the possibility that POMS would strike. “We’ve been working with industry for quite a long time, and we’ve always had the philosophy that scientists need to know how to farm and farmers need to know how to do science,” said Sarah Ugalde, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania. Ugalde and her team persuaded the farmers to buy oysters from other areas that survived a disease outbreak. They used that stock to cultivate a disease-tolerant oyster. The Calverts lost about a million oysters but rebuilt the stock with spat — oyster babies — recommended by scientists. Tasmania’s $25-million-per-year oyster farming industry is thriving. The product price, driven up to $1 per oyster from demand during the disaster, stayed the same, helping the Calverts to increase revenue. “It’s good performance work, and there’s a good return for the hard work,” Steve Calvert said. “We still love this ocean.” It’s a matter of adapting to a warming world. “Generally, there’s been a lot of work that’s gone into trying to estimate how fisheries production . . . will change with


The most disappointing technologies of the decade: Face computers, space tourism and Juicero

instead of venture capitalists (though still manufactured in Shenzhen, China). Despite some notable successes — Oculus, Peloton, Boosted Boards — it turns out getting an idea from your cocktail napkin to market is pretty tough. Notable failures include the disappointing Coolest Cooler, which featured both Bluetooth and a blender and raised more than $13 million on Kickstarter in 2014. It failed to deliver products to a third of its backers; many that shipped didn’t work. Others never materialized, such as iBackPack, which was supposed to produce a WiFi hotspot. The people behind it raised more than $800,000 and were accused by the Federal Trade Commission of using those funds to buy bitcoin and pay off credit cards. Skarp Laser Razor, a razor with dubious hair-removal technology, managed to get more than $4 million in pledges from interested customers before Kickstarter suspended its campaign for violating policies on working prototypes. (Kickstarter said the vast majority of its products make it to production and that it aims “to be quite clear about the fact that not all projects will go smoothly.”) Consumer 3-D printers also failed to live up to the hype. We were supposed to have a printer in every home, spitting out replacement Legos and screws, art projects, and even food. The high cost of the devices and the skills needed to use them could not compete with overnight shipping. “Could it be, you know, four, five years? I think so. It will work, and it will happen, and it’s gonna be a lot of fun,” Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said. The year was 2013, and Bezos was on “60 Minutes” to unveil the next big thing in package delivery: drones. He said that within that time frame, quadcopters would be able to drop packages from warehouses at customers’ doors within 30 minutes. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) In 2016, Amazon showed off its first commercial drone delivery in a rural area of the United Kingdom, a 13-minute delivery of an Amazon Fire TV streaming device and a bag of popcorn. Its latest drone iteration was on display earlier this year at MARS, its weird tech conference, again promising that drone deliveries were coming soon. But as of the end of the decade, Amazon packages are still being delivered by humans. In fact, Amazon announced in 2018 that it was adding 20,000 delivery vans via third-party delivery partners to


Officials in Maryland and Virginia report rise in flu-like illness

So far Washington’s winter has not seemed abnormally cold, but another chronic source of seasonal discontent has appeared less benign: the flu. In the most recent data available, flu was described as widespread by health officials in both Maryland and Virginia. In the week ending Dec. 21, the most recent for which data was available, the Maryland Department of Health said the state was experiencing a high intensity of flu-like illness. The proportion of outpatients who went to emergency departments in the state rose to 6.4 percent, the health department said. The Virginia Department of Health said 5.8 percent of visits to emergency rooms and urgent care centers were made for influenza-like illness. The figure appeared to be well above those for both last year and the year before In the District, 181 new flu cases were reported in the latest week, more than nine times the number for last year at this time. martin.weil@washpost.com


Local digest: Man fatally shot in Northeast Washingto

The District A 28-year-old man was fatally shot early Saturday in Northeast Washington, police said. Police found Tarriq Childs, of Silver Spring, suffering from gunshot wounds in a car on Riggs Road between Blair Road and 1st Street, said D.C. police spokeswoman Alaina Gertz. Childs, who was unconscious and unresponsive when police arrived, was transported to a hospital before his death, Gertz said. Police were called to the scene at 3:18 a.m. for the sounds of gunshots and found no other victims at the scene, Gertz said. No arrests have been made, she said, and police are offering a reward of up to $25,000 to anyone with information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible. Late Friday night, there was a shooting in the 4600 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE and a stabbing in the 600 block of M Street SE. Neither of those incidents resulted in fatalities, Gertz said. — Rachel Chason


World digest: Dec. 28, 2019

THAILAND A year and a half after a youth soccer team was rescued from a flooded cave in Thailand, one of the divers who helped save lives has died of an infection he contracted during the operation. Petty Officer 1st Class Beirut Pakbara was receiving treatment for the infection, but his condition worsened when it spread to his bloodstream, according to a Facebook post from the Thai navy. A Royal Thai Navy spokesman told the Bangkok Post that Beirut will be posthumously promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Beirut is the second diver to lose his life as a result of the cave rescue. Saman Kuman, a retired Thai navy diver, died during the mission in July 2018 while staging oxygen tanks along the 2.5-mile route to the 12 boys and their coach. — Katie Mettler Protesters shut down oil field in Iraq: Protesters broke into southern Iraq's Nassiriya oil field and forced employees to cut off electricity from its control station, taking the field offline until further notice, people close to the situation said. The oil field produces 90,000 barrels a day of crude. Mass demonstrations against the government have gripped Iraq since Oct. 1, and more than 450 people have been killed, but this is the first time protesters have shut down an entire oil field. Police, protesters clash in Hong Kong: Italian premier insists his coalition will survive: Honors recipients' home addresses posted: — From news services


Senator urges regulators to take action on ingestion of magnets

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is asking federal safety regulators to address what she called an “alarming increase” in injuries from rare-earth magnet ingestion by children, according to a letter the senator sent Friday to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The letter from Klobuchar, who is running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, is in response to a Washington Post article published Thursday that detailed a surge in magnet ingestions since a federal court struck down a CPSC ban on the products in 2016. That allowed the powerful magnets back on the market. Nearly 1,600 ingestion cases were expected to be reported to the nation’s poison control centers this year. Rare-earth magnets are usually found in popular desk toys made up of hundreds of BB-sized balls. Doctors said the magnets pose an unusual risk because just two magnetic balls can cause permanent internal injuries. The Post article explained how, with the CPSC sidelined by the courts, magnet companies are using a voluntary safety standards process to largely regulate itself. “Given the seriousness of this issue, I urge the CPSC to revisit this issue and take action to protect children from the dangers of small rare-earth magnets,” Klobuchar wrote in her letter. The senator also asked the agency to list what it is doing to investigate the number of injuries and whether the agency needed additional resources to protect children from the products. “We have received the letter and are looking into it,” CPSC spokesman Joe Martyak said, “and we will respond to the members of Congress.”


With cannabis use an open secret in the NBA, this ex-player is pushing the league to allow CBD

of the Indiana Pacers, Harrington started a hemp-derived CBD brand, Harrington Wellness. Their product carries less than 0.3 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is the main compound in cannabis that gets a person high. Harrington said NBA players are ready. He estimates “90 percent” of current players he speaks to support cannabis as a whole, and their backing would be the impetus for change. “I know that — in order to get things done because I’ve played in the league so long — it has to start at the players,” he said. “That’s when barriers can be broken down.” National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Michele Roberts projects there could be a league policy change by the 2020 presidential election. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has expressed a willingness to reconsider the ban as the league examines the science behind medical marijuana. For now, marijuana and its byproducts, which include CBD, remain banned, along with more than 225 other substances, by the NBA/NBPA Anti-Drug Program. “We think that athletes use cannabis to get high, and that’s not the case,” said Antonio Harvey, another former NBA player-turned-advocate who founded Terra Mater Cannabis Company. “Our bodies are beat to s--- every single night. … And a lot of guys use cannabis to cope with that. They don’t get high to get high. They get high to feel better.” Harrington, 39, said cannabis allows him to walk around pain-free after he underwent 13 surgeries over his 16-year playing career, which ended in 2014. There was a time when Harrington thought he would retire from basketball and go into coaching. But through his cannabis and CBD brands, Harrington believes he has found his calling. “I have a bigger purpose in my life,” he said. After Harrington experienced a surgery gone awry while with the Denver Nuggets in 2012 and spiraled in a cycle of painkillers, he was introduced to CBD to help relieve his pain. Harrington still applies about 25 milligrams of CBD oil from a tincture onto his tongue every morning. Harrington later turned to THC. Or to put it plainly: He started smoking weed. By the final year of his career in 2013-14, when he signed with the Washington Wizards, Harrington said he was open about his use. So open, in fact, that he owned a marijuana greenhouse in Denver, where he grew plants under 80 lights. When the Wizards traveled to play the


What to expect from U.S. soccer in 2020

Calif., will head to Tokyo. The United States and Canada are heavily favored. New coach Vlatko Andonovski called 22 of the 23 World Cup players into a 28-strong training camp starting next week. The exception was Alex Morgan, who is pregnant. Twenty players will report to the qualifiers, and assuming the Americans advance, Andonovski will have to narrow the roster to 18 this summer. 3. While the U.S. women should advance to the Olympics without trouble, the men face a tough road to Tokyo. Unlike the women, Olympic men’s soccer is for ages 23 and under, with three exceptions in the final tournament. The men have qualified once in their previous four attempts (2008). The qualifying tournament will take place March 20 to April 1 in Guadalajara, Mexico. The hosts are big favorites, followed by Honduras and the United States. Two teams will qualify. Missing the Olympics is not nearly as bad as missing the World Cup, but every failure reflects poorly on the program at large. 4. Euro 2020 is the ultimate European competition, and Copa America is South America’s venerable tournament. In the United States, though, the two summer competitions allow expats and unaffiliated fans alike to enjoy the show. Both will run June 12 to July 12. The Euros will use venues in 12 countries; Copa is in Colombia and Argentina. The Euros will feature 24 teams; Copa has the usual 10, plus Australia and Qatar as guests. ABC, ESPN and Univision platforms will show the Euro matches. Copa America broadcast rights have not been announced. 5. MLS’s 25th season is scheduled to kick off Feb. 29, but with the collective bargaining agreement set to expire Jan. 31, that is no certainty. After months of serious talks, negotiations between the league and the players’ association will intensify soon. These things typically go down to the wire or beyond. Don’t be surprised if the current terms are temporarily extended to buy additional time. 6. Off-field issues remain a sore point for the U.S. women’s national team, which is due in court May 5 regarding its gender discrimination suit against the U.S. Soccer Federation. Mediation broke down in August, though the sides have said they hope to reach an out-of-court resolution before trial. It seems unlikely to affect Olympic preparations. 7. The video assistant referee system was introduced with good intentions, and for the most part it serves its


Skywatch: What’s happening in the heavens in January

moon on Jan. 20. The next morning, the very thin moon has leapfrogged Mars, toward the horizon. Just above the southeastern morning horizon, the large gaseous Jupiter begins to emerge above the trees in mid-month. Through the rest of January, Jupiter rises earlier and climbs a little higher in the morning sky. On Jan. 20, look to the southeast before sunrise to find the big planet at -1.9 magnitude (very bright), according to the Naval Observatory. The full moon is Jan. 10, but you will not be able to view the penumbral lunar eclipse on the same date from the United States. If you happen to be traveling, the event will be visible from Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia, according to eclipse expert Fred Espenak (eclipsewise.com). A penumbral lunar eclipse occurs when the moon travels through the outer portion of Earth’s shadow and looks a little darker than usual. ●Jan. 5 — Learn about the starry, starry winter nights at the open house at the University of Maryland Observatory. Delight in the cold heavens through telescopes afterward, weather permitting. 8 p.m. astro.umd.edu/openhouse ●Jan. 11 — “Uranus and Neptune: The Ice Giants,” a talk by Amy Simon, a NASA planetary scientist, as she explains how understanding these distant solar system planets can help humanity’s knowledge of exoplanets — which are planets beyond our own solar system. Lecture at the National Capital Astronomers’ regular meeting, held at the University of Maryland Observatory. 7:30 p.m. capitalastronomers.org ●Jan. 12 — “Pulsars and Gravitational Waves,” a talk by astrophysicist Megan DeCesar of Lafayette College. At the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club meeting, 163 Research Hall, George Mason University. 7 p.m. novac.com ●Jan. 16 — “Back on Earth,” a talk by NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nick Hague, who spent four months together on the International Space Station. They will explain living, working and walking in space. At the Moving Beyond Earth gallery, National Air and Space Museum, Washington. 11 a.m. Presented online: airandspace.si.edu ●Jan. 20 — Listen to a cosmic talk at the open house at the University of Maryland Observatory. Observe the night sky through telescopes afterward, weather permitting. 8 p.m. astro.umd.edu/openhouse ●Jan. 24 — “Venus — Our Hothouse Neighbor: Returning to Study Atmospheric Evolution,” a lecture by Ellen Stofan, director of the National Air and Space Museum, at the Philosophical Society of Washington. Powell Auditorium, Cosmos Club, 2170 Florida Ave. NW. 8 p.m. pswscience.org


Honor the fallen in Afghanistan

Another soldier dies in Afghanistan, his body returned on Christmas Day. The Post’s coverage of Michael J. Goble’s death was a brief item from news services [“Taliban attack on Afghan checkpoint kills 7 troops,” World Digest, Dec. 25, and “Body of U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan returns home,” National Digest, Politics & the Nation, Dec. 26]. If The Post wants to cover Afghanistan, it should do a better job of honoring the Americans who die there. Mary Nell Bryant Read more letters to the editor.


Instagram influencers partied at a Saudi music festival — but no one mentioned human rights

On social media accounts of the followed and famous, the MDL Beast music festival was a rave true to form: fluorescent face paint, flashing lights and a star-studded lineup of DJs who spun dance music into the wee hours. Officially What didn’t make it into their captions and tweets, however, was any reference to reports that document the human rights abuses of the festival’s host, the government of Saudi Arabia. The event — along with the stars who were invited and possibly paid to attend — was organized by the kingdom’s entertainment authority and is part of its sweeping public relations strategy to showcase cultural changes. But critics say it also serves a much more insidious purpose: to rehabilitate Saudi Arabia’s damaged international image after the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The CIA concluded last year that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s October 2018 assassination inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, contradicting Saudi Arabia’s insistence that the crown prince had no advance knowledge of the plot. On Monday, the kingdom announced that five people had been sentenced to death in Khashoggi’s killing. The two most senior officials implicated in the case, including an adviser to the crown prince, were cleared of wrongdoing. The people who attended the festival have abetted that effort, according to journalists, human rights experts and influencers who chose not to go. Posts from MDL Beast’s high-profile revelers were accompanied by the visual cues that often indicate a paid partnership. Some used the hashtags #ad, #MDLBeast partners or #MDLBeastbrandambassadors. Many tagged the festival’s Instagram account @mdlbeast in all their flattering photo captions. Festival organizers did not respond to a request from The Washington Post to confirm whether they paid influencers to promote their event. American actor Armie Hammer posted photos to Instagram, where he has 1.2 million followers. “What I just witnessed was truly special,” he wrote. “It felt like a cultural shift. A change. Like Woodstock in the 1960′s.” But in the days since the event ended, others have been quick to point out the kingdom’s ongoing restrictions of women’s rights and the crackdown on political dissent that Mohammed has overseen — even as the government pursues projects like MDL Beast, which would have been unthinkable only several years ago. The country just recently began to allow women to drive, and in August, a royal decree for the first time allowed


Pompeo set to visit Ukraine amid impeachment drama on Capitol Hill

abruptly under pressure from Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. Taylor’s appointment had a time limit, but he did not have to leave until Jan. 14. The State Department official declined to directly answer two questions from reporters about why Taylor was returning home the day before Pompeo’s arrival. Instead, the official reiterated that Pompeo aims to show continued U.S. support for Ukraine’s independence and a series of Zelensky’s reforms, primarily strengthening the rule of law and combating corruption to foster more international investment. Ukraine has emerged as the epicenter of a House inquiry that led to Trump’s impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has so far declined to transmit the articles of impeachment as Democrats try to seek assurances about the scope of an expected trial of Trump in the Republican-led Senate. At the heart of the Democrats’ case is the allegation that Trump tried to leverage a White House meeting and military aid, sought by Ukraine to combat Russian military aggression, to pressure Zelensky to launch an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a probe of an unfounded theory that Kyiv conspired with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The official speaking Monday declined to answer questions about whether Pompeo would talk with Ukrainian officials about pursuing a Biden investigation, as Giuliani was pushing as a precondition for U.S. security assistance. Giuliani has continued to press Ukrainian officials for information that could benefit Trump politically. Giuliani’s latest trip to the country was earlier this month. Though the United States has been focused on foreign policy involving Ukraine, Moscow is likely to be more attentive to Pompeo’s trip to Minsk, in Belarus. The United States has not had an ambassador in Belarus since 2008, when most U.S. diplomats were expelled after Washington announced sanctions on the country over human rights abuses. Now, the United States is preparing to restore diplomatic ties with Belarus, sometimes referred to as “the last dictatorship in Europe,” as Russian President Vladimir Putin tries to “integrate” it closer to the Russian Federation. Following his visit to Ukraine and Belarus, Pompeo plans to stop in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Cyprus. “Excited to travel to Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Cyprus in the new year to meet with counterparts and affirm U.S. priorities across #Europe and South Central Asia,” Pompeo said in a tweet Monday. john.wagner@washpost.com carol.morello@washpost.com


The lessons of Y2K, 20 years later

drove the idea that Y2K was all just an expensive hoax: that anticipated and much-hyped international failures did not happen, and that nothing went wrong. But actually, Y2K remediation efforts revealed that many other countries were not as computer reliant as the United States, which reduced the chance of failures. Furthermore, thanks to the sharing of information and expertise, other nations were able to benefit quickly from solutions to Y2K that had been devised in the United States. And while many believed that “nothing happened,” there were actually hundreds of Y2K-related incidents. These included problems at more than a dozen nuclear power plants, delays in millions of dollars of Medicare payments, ATM issues worldwide and problems with the Defense Department’s satellite-based intelligence system. That problems were fixed quickly is largely attributable to the small army of programmers who spent the first hours of the year 2000 monitoring sensitive systems. Y2K was a technological problem, but it revealed that as societies became heavily reliant on complex computerized systems, technological problems became a matter of concern for everyone. Faced with a potentially catastrophic problem, experts, businesses and the government mobilized the resources necessary to mitigate the risks before they could trigger a disaster. Most estimates suggest that $100 billion was spent in the United States, $8.5 billion of that by the federal government, to squash the millennium bug, and though it is impossible to say that every cent was well spent, that amount still dwarfs the estimated cost of doing nothing. Twenty years after the successful navigation of the Y2K crisis, few of us worry that a date rollover is going to cause the world’s computer systems to crash. However, we do worry about the pervasiveness of misinformation online, the spread of corporate surveillance, the ways racist and misogynistic biases are reproduced in algorithms, about massive data breaches and about a deluge of other problems that seem to have been exacerbated as computerized devices have become ubiquitous. Y2K revealed the ways we expose ourselves to new risks as our lives and societies become entangled with complex computer systems the inner workings of which we often fail to understand, and that is a problem that is still very much with us today. But it also showed that addressing these challenges is possible when there is close cooperation among researchers, government and businesses, both nationally and internationally. People rose to the challenge in 2000.


In the past decade, at least 554 journalists have been killed worldwide

widespread impunity. Still, the overall drop in deaths is significant, Radsch said, because particularly high numbers of journalists were killed in the past several years, with many being murdered. She said she hopes that intensive media coverage of two high-profile journalist killings sent a signal to potential perpetrators that the international community will not tolerate attacks on journalists. In 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese investigative journalist, was killed when a bomb attached to her car detonated close to her home. Two years later, Jorgen Fenech, a high-profile businessman, was charged with complicity in the murder, and street protests over the slow-moving investigation and alleged implication of some of Malta’s elite in the crime led to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announcing that he would resign in January. Muscat’s chief of staff also resigned and was briefly held by police in relation to the case. “It was so unacceptable that a journalist should be murdered so brazenly in a country that is a member of the E.U. and purports to be a democracy,” Radsch said. Then, last year, Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist and critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was killed inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, prompting global uproar and widespread condemnation of the prince. The CIA concluded that Mohammed ordered the killing, but last week, after a long trial, Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor announced that five unidentified people would be sentenced to death in the case. Two senior officials, including one of the crown prince’s advisers who is alleged to have planned and overseen the killing, were cleared of wrongdoing. “It trained so much attention on Saudi Arabia that one can only hope that sent a signal to other countries that the world is watching,” Radsch said. And impunity in other lesser-known cases remains widespread. Many of the journalists killed in the past decade were local journalists targeted for covering conflict, corruption or gang violence in their own communities. According to the committee’s annual Global Impunity Index, published in October, at least 318 journalists were murdered because of their work between Sept. 1, 2009, and Aug. 31, 2019. In 86 percent of those cases, the committee found, the perpetrators still had not been fully prosecuted. And even if fewer journalists were killed in 2019 than in years past, attacks on press freedom remain rampant. Governments have cracked down on the free press, charging journalists


People thought tactical voting was a big deal in Britain’s general election. It wasn’t.

see this by looking at how many additional seats the pro-remain side could have picked up had all the parties pooled their votes. For example, in the constituency of Warrington South, the Conservative Party candidate won with 28,187 votes. Labour came second with 26,177, just 2,010 votes short. The Liberal Democrat candidate came third with 5,732 votes. If those votes had been cast for Labour, then the pro-remain side would have won. If we undertake the same exercise for every constituency in the country, 65 seats would change hands: Labour would get 43 more seats, the Liberal Democrats would get 17, and the Scottish National Party would get 5. This would have given the pro-remain side 331 seats and a majority in Parliament, reducing the Conservative Party’s seats to 300. This makes the implausible assumption, however, that all the voters for pro-remain parties engage in tactical voting while none do on the pro-leave side. If 75 percent of pro-remainers vote tactically, the number immediately drops to 45. This would have created a hung Parliament with the Conservatives on 320, having to rely on the Northern Ireland party, the Democratic Unionist Party, as it did in the previous period. If 50 percent vote tactically, the pro-remain side would only gain 34 seats, leaving the Conservatives with a majority of 331. And if the pro-leave side also engaged in tactical voting, the pro-remain’s chances of a majority drop even further. Returning to the hypothetical scenario of 100 percent of pro-remain voters engaging in tactical voting, by assuming that pro-Leave voters also come together so that all Brexit Party and U.K. Independence Party votes go to the Conservatives, the net increase for the pro-remain camp falls to just 31 seats, leaving the Conservatives with 334 seats. In sum, the pro-remain side’s failure in the 2019 elections does not seem to be a failure for tactical voting. Only under very unlikely assumptions could tactical voting have led to a pro-remain victory. Other factors drove the huge electoral shift toward the Conservatives. These plausibly included Labour leadership, fatigue with Parliament’s inaction on Brexit and an increasingly discontented lower class. The irony is that in an election in which Brexit was the primary issue, the 53 percent in favor of remaining in the E.U. were unable to transform that majority into a parliamentary majority. Joel Selway is associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University.


What Saudi Arabia’s sham Khashoggi verdict means for Arab dissidents

pleased to see the tweet. Jamal quickly responded, “Please send my regards to his Highness and tell him that it is only my duty as a patriot to compliment the positive reforms taken by the government.” Jamal could have easily stopped there, capitalized on the rapport he just built with the most powerful man in the kingdom and asked for his son’s travel ban to be lifted, but he didn’t. He continued as his hand shook uncontrollably and his voice trembled, “and when there are transgressions, we will critique.” Despite the overwhelming fear he was feeling, Jamal used the rest of the call to selflessly advocate for the release of political prisoners, intellectuals, writers and preachers. He named them hurriedly and pleaded for their release. Qahtani’s voice quickly turned aggressive, cutting Jamal off: “These are traitors, and a threat to national security.” Jamal challenged, “I can testify to their patriotism and love of country.” Qahtani frustratingly ended the call by saying, “The evidence will be revealed in due time.” Social psychology explains Jamal’s murder did not happen in a vacuum. It was an ugly manifestation of all the crimes committed against the people of the Arab region since the Arab Spring and the utter lack of accountability that followed. Now, with such a blatant crime followed by stunning impunity, it begs the question: Moving forward, what more should dissidents expect from the crown prince and his cronies? This is not just about the justice Jamal deserves, or even closure for his friends and family. This is also about deterrence, so another critic is not killed in London’s Hyde Park, abducted from a Toronto suburb or assaulted in a D.C. bar. When we seek justice and accountability, we are not seeking to avenge Jamal’s murder. We are attempting to secure an immediate future where we can live without constant fear of assassination and dismemberment. If we close the book on the Khashoggi murder without proper accountability, it will no longer be an anomaly, but a new norm. Read more: Agnes Callamard: The Khashoggi verdict is exactly what impunity looks like. It must be denounced. David Ignatius: We still don’t have answers on Khashoggi’s murder The Post’s View: Saudi Arabia’s Khashoggi verdict is a mockery of justice Madawi Al-Rasheed: Saudi Arabia cracks down on writers challenging MBS and his narrow vision Hatice Cengiz: My quest for justice continues. It’s not too late.


Why are these mosquitoes still thriving indoors — in the winter?

vases, pet water bowls, flowerpot saucers, dehydrator pans and that refrigerator drip pan might not be enough. You may need to scrub them out, and repeat that every week because that’s about the time it takes for an egg to hatch into a larva, pupate and become a flying and biting adult. Where there is standing water that you can’t drain, such as P-traps or that sump you mention, it can be helpful to add something that kills any mosquito larvae that hatch. But read the labels: You might need to repeat the treatment more often than you’ve done in the past. Mosquito Bits, which consists of corn cob granules impregnated with the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, does all of its killing within 24 hours; the manufacturer recommends reapplying it every seven to 14 days. InVade Bio Drain also contains a bacterium, along with citrus oil, although it’s not clear whether the bacterium is the same. The product’s safety sheet identifies it only as “nonpathogenic bacillus bacteria.” Bio Drain is a gel designed to cling to the sides of containers and pipes, but it clearly doesn’t cling for long. The instructions say to reapply it every other day for the first week and then one to two times a week for ongoing maintenance. Also, if you haven’t already done so, it might help to eliminate mosquito breeding habitats outdoors. Discarded tires, buckets, tree holes, birdbaths, trash cans, rain barrels and tarps bunched up in a way that allows water to collect all give mosquitoes places to lay their eggs. Eliminating breeding habitats outdoors won’t directly eliminate breeding indoors, but it will reduce the chance that a new swarm will follow you inside through an open door, which might explain why a problem you thought you’d licked came back. If you have a birdbath that you don’t want to get rid of, scrub it out each week and put in fresh water. If you have a rain barrel, which needs to have an opening to collect water, consider adding a product such as Mosquito Dunks, made by the same company that produces Mosquito Bits, using the same bacteria, but formed into doughnut shapes that take longer to dissolve. Finally, you might try calling yet another pest-control expert. One laughed and did nothing to help, but the other was a good sleuth. Who knows what a third set of professional eyes might spot?


Dave Barry’s Year in Review 2019

being tested on a focus group of voters, half of whom were senior citizens and the other half of whom were dead. The runner-up slogans were “You’re Darned Tooting He Can Cut the Mustard!” and “Stay Off His Lawn!” Kamala Harris drops out of the race, reducing the number of leading Democratic contenders to 58, an estimated one-third of whom are billionaires. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton continues to hint that she may run again at the urging of many highly respected voices that only she can hear. In Iowa voter polling, the front-runner remains Pete “Pete” Buttigieg, followed closely by a surging Baby Yoda. In foreign affairs, President Trump attends a meeting of NATO leaders in London, where, using his unique diplomatic skills, he is able to unite America’s crucial European allies in the belief that he is a buffoon. And let’s not forget about “Brexit.” In entertainment news, millions of Netflix users are watching Martin Scorsese’s film “The Irishman,” a sweeping epic that begins in the 1950s and ends at some point after you fall asleep on the sofa, because the running time is longer than veterinary school. Nobody, including Scorsese, has ever actually made it to the end of “The Irishman,” which takes place in the distant future and is rumored to feature an intergalactic battle between alien space Teamsters. In other TV-related news, people are outraged about a Peloton ad, because in this day and age people need things to be outraged about. Finally, mercifully, this highly eventful year draws to a close. As New Year’s Eve approaches, the nation pauses to look back on 2019 and throw up a little bit in its national mouth. But then the nation looks forward to 2020, and it feels faint stirrings of hope in its national heart. Because America has been bitterly divided before. There was the Civil War, for example, and that time we could not agree on the color of that dress on the Internet. If we got through those troubles, we can get through the current ones. Because in the end, despite our political differences, we’re all Americans, and we care about each other and want the best possible future for everyone. Right? Nah. But happy new year anyway. Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist and author. To comment on this story, email wpmagazine@washpost.com or visit wapo.st/magazine. Illustrations by Alexander Wells. Design by Michael Johnson.


Why fast-casual restaurants became the decade’s most important food trend

Talk all you want about avocado toast, plant-based meats, small plates and milk alternatives, but the biggest food trend over the past decade was the fast-casual. Nothing had a larger impact on American dining than these counter-service restaurants. They changed the way people ate and how ingredients were sourced at chain restaurants. They also forced the competition to adapt or watch their customer base shrink faster than a cotton shirt in the wash. Fast-casuals predated the 2010s, of course. Launched in the 1990s with the promise of healthful food prepared with better ingredients than those at fast-food chains, fast-casuals became the darling of the last decade, driven in part by the effects of the Great Recession, skyrocketing rents and rising food costs. The numbers give you a glimpse into their dominance: In 2009, there were about 17,300 fast-casuals in the United States with sales of $19 billion, according the market research firm Technomic. By 2018, the last year for which statistics are available, fast-casuals had more than doubled their locations (34,800) and sales ($47.5 billion). Yet, the numbers alone don’t begin to explain the influence that fast-casuals had over the past 10 years. If you’ll recall, the aughts were the decade of the chef as benign dictator, the chef as auteur, every bit as controlling as Alfred Hitchcock on set. You ate what the chef put before you, exactly how the chef told you to eat it. You ordered the tasting menu, only the tasting menu, a multicourse affair that could drag on for hours, long after your appetite and attention span had been satisfied and/or exhausted. You were not allowed substitutions, special requests or even a salt shaker. You were there to do one thing: savor the genius of the chef. Fast-casuals turned that relationship on its head. The diner was, once again, in charge. Customization was not only encouraged but often built right into the business model as customers walked the line, engineering their own burritos, rice bowls, conveyer-belt pizzas or whatever other dish served as the focal point of the concept. Chefs may have helped design a fast-casual menu, but they were relegated to corporate kitchens, where the collective will of the people (and the poor economy) had deflated their ambitions and their egos. But more than that, fast-casuals split the difference between chef-driven restaurants and multinational fast-food outlets. Chains such as Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Pei Wei


Md. zoo appeals after court says animals suffered in ‘fetid and dystopic conditions’

A roadside zoo in Western Maryland where at least four endangered animals died appealed its case Sunday after a federal court ruled that two surviving lions and a tiger must be surrendered to a sanctuary. In the past three years, two tigers, a lion and a lemur died at Tri-State Zoological Park in Cumberland. In 2017, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sued the zoo in U.S. District Court in Maryland after conducting undercover inspections. PETA asserted in court documents that owner Robert Candy housed animals in an unsanitary habitat and offered poor veterinary care, among other allegations. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis sided with PETA, writing in an opinion that the facility engaged in “flagrant and persistent violations” of the Endangered Species Act, and ordered that the zoo no longer keep endangered species. Xinis found that the zoo, located on a 16-acre site that was once a campground, housed animals in “fetid and dystopic conditions” where “filth and feces dominate.” “The uncontroverted testimony reflects that every animal at issue suffered under Tri-State’s living conditions,” Xinis wrote after a six-day trial. “Rotting vegetables spilled over large receptacles, decaying meat sat in piles outside the kitchen and in the furnace room under the nearby reptile house, and decomposing carcasses were left for days in the enclosures for the tigers and lions.” On Sunday, the zoo appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. Nevin Young, an attorney for the facility, said it planned to challenge PETA’s standing to bring the case. The animals remain at the facility while the case is under appeal, Young said, and the zoo planned to a file a motion to stay the lower court’s order to remove them. “I agree that the judge’s finding of facts don’t look good based on the unopposed testimony from PETA experts,” he said. “I think a lot of statements they made are false.” In a statement, Brittany Peet, the PETA Foundation’s director of captive animal law enforcement, said the “landmark ruling sends Tri-State and every other roadside zoo a clear message that keeping social species in isolation and sentencing sick animals to slow, painful deaths will not be tolerated.” “For more than a decade, PETA has fought tooth and nail for the animals at Tri-State, and we’re pleased that the court has given these survivors a new lease on life,” the statement


Here’s evidence that 2019 wasn’t as bad as you thought

continuing to keep his promises to reduce taxes and regulations. Many of you, however, found good news far from our political strife. Several found inspiration in Simone Biles becoming the most decorated gymnast of all time. “Simone shows what grit and determination can do,” Marti wrote from Houston. Others cited scientific and engineering advances, such as “solar energy capture maximization utilizing computer controls”; advances in “wearable biosensor technology”; and, as John wrote from Florida, “the amazing progress in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and astronomy” that “will have an outsize impact on our future.” Arun in Mumbai rejoiced that in India homosexuality is no longer a crime. “This ban was a carry over from colonial times,” he wrote. “It was a long, difficult struggle for the Gay community. But they persisted with the majority of the people and they finally won.” Breakthroughs for women met with applause. Several readers cheered the number of women taking their seats in Congress, the number of women running for president and the elevation of women to the statehouse speakerships in Maryland and Virginia. Karen wrote from Britain to celebrate Karen Uhlenbeck, a retired University of Texas at Austin professor who became the first woman to win the prestigious Abel Prize in mathematics. Congress banning animal cruelty Readers cited items we had missed during the year, such as Panama becoming the first Central American nation to ban single-use plastic bags, and items that we also had celebrated, such as Congress authorizing research into gun violence for the first time in two decades. One reader celebrated the law allowing hearing aids to be sold over the counter; another, progress in the development of an anti-malaria vaccine. Ken from New Jersey cited a milestone: Renewable sources surpassed coal as a source of energy in the United States. Rebecca in Arizona hailed a groundswell of help for asylum-seekers in her hometown of Tucson. “It’s so heartwarming to realize that good generous people still exist in this world and are willing to help others,” she wrote. We agree. And we also are grateful to the readers who reminded us that often the best news is found close to home. A woman in Kansas told us that, thanks to DNA testing, at age 78, she found her birth mother, “still alive at 101, and an extended family I didn’t know I had.” David in Honolulu wrote, “We became grandparents!” Why was


Zoo director takes monkeys and pandas home to save them from deadly wildfires

As the sky turned dark and a thick haze choked the air below, bush fires closed in on a small coastal town in southeast Australia. Chad Staples and his staff at Mogo Wildlife Park were running out of options. The local zoo, home to the country’s largest private collection of exotic animals, resembled the fiery front lines in an end-of-times battle. With evacuation orders in place and flames burning everything in their path, zoo workers stayed behind, coaxing lions and orangutans into areas of the park they knew would be safe. But there were others — red pandas, monkeys, a tiger — that still needed someplace to ride out the deadly fires ravaging Victoria and New South Wales. So the staff took some of the animals home with them, converting houses into wildlife refugee camps. They rallied to save a number of beloved creatures that would have otherwise added to a death toll that already includes at least three people, legions of livestock and possibly thousands of koalas. As of early Wednesday morning, local time, every one of the roughly 200 animals was safe. Staples, the zoo’s director, described an Ark-like scene: “Right now, in my house, there’s animals of all descriptions in all the different rooms so that they’re safe and protected,” he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “No one is hurt, not a single animal,” Staples said. Staples is housing several species of small monkeys and some of the pandas. Another staff member is keeping a tiger in their backyard, a spokeswoman for Featherdale Wildlife, which owns the Mogo zoo, told the BBC. “Incredible effort by amazing team of passionate keepers today,” the zoo said in a tweet. “Every animal is safe and in wonderful care.” The zoo’s larger animals — its giraffes, zebras and rhinos — could not be relocated. Instead, zoo staff sheltered them in place and defended the park. Staples told the Illawarra Mercury newspaper that his employees had spent the past week planning for the worst. When it came this week, they sprang into action, spraying down grass and animal shelters to stop the blaze from spreading. Volunteers flocked there, too, helping zookeepers stamp out spot fires that cropped up around the property, working from early Tuesday into the night, until winds changed and a once-dire forecast turned more favorable. “A couple of hours ago, it felt like Armageddon here,” Staples told ABC. “It was


2019 was a year of deadly health crises. These were some of the worst outbreaks.

to a colleague scream as the armed men “chopped her with the machete outside the room. The attackers did whatever they wanted for hours, as if they knew no one would stop them." The United States declared measles eliminated in the country nearly two decades ago. But as misinformation about a measles vaccine spread, more and more cases began to pop back up in the past year. Hundreds of people came down with the disease in New York, forcing the city to declare a state of emergency. By the time it was finally declared over, 654 people had been diagnosed with measles, and the city had spent $6 million trying to stem it. Elsewhere in the world, efforts to control measles may have been even more complicated. In October, Samoa declared a measles outbreak. It spread quickly across the Pacific island nation, killing dozens and sickening thousands. Many of the dead were children, leading the government to implement drastic measures to try to slow it down. It shut schools across the country, banned children younger than 17 from public gatherings and asked families that had not yet been vaccinated to hang red flags outside their doors to alert health workers going house to house to vaccinate people. Measles is dangerous not just because of its immediate threat of illness. As The Post’s Lena Sun reported last year, new studies show that measles can also make your body forget how to fight other dangerous diseases. When hundreds of children in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province began manifesting HIV symptoms last year, doctors were confused. Babies typically contract the virus from infected parents during breast-feeding, pregnancy or birth. But these children’s parents were HIV-free. Officials then traced a number of the children back to a single doctor in the area, and they began investigating whether he had used unsafe syringes, infecting children instead of protecting them. The outbreak stoked fear and anger in Pakistan, which has long battled distrust toward health workers, particularly vaccinators working to stamp out polio. “The use of unsafe syringes might be one of the causes for spread of the disease, but the government is making all-out efforts to ascertain the exact cause,” Zafar Mirza, Pakistan’s top health official, said in a news conference at the time. The doctor’s attorney told CNN at the time that his client “has been made into a scapegoat for the larger crisis in


The signal of human-caused climate change has emerged in everyday weather, study finds

the research alters what we can say about how weather and climate change are connected. “We’ve always said when you look at weather that’s not the same as climate,” he said. “That’s still true locally, if you are in one particular place and you only know the weather right now, right here, there isn’t much you can say.” However, on a global scale, that is no longer true, Knutti said. “Global mean temperature on a single day is already quite a bit shifted. You can see this human fingerprint in any single moment. “Weather is climate change if you look over the whole globe,” he said. The research uses the techniques applied in other “detection and attribution” studies that have sought to identify the signal of human-caused climate change in longer-term changes at the global level such as the seasonal temperature cycle of the planet or heating of the oceans. The authors, from research institutions in Switzerland and Norway, use machine learning to estimate how the patterns of temperature and moisture at daily, monthly and annual time scales relate to two important climate change metrics: global average surface temperatures and the energy imbalance of the planet. Increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing Earth to hold in more of the sun’s energy, leading to an energy surplus. The researchers then utilized machine learning techniques to detect a global fingerprint of human-caused climate change from the relationships between the weather and global warming metrics, and compare it with historical weather data. By doing this, scientists were able to tease out the signal of human-caused global warming from any single day of global weather observations since 2012. When looking at annual data, the human-caused climate signal emerged in 1999, the study found. In what one outside expert, Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, termed a “profoundly disturbing” result, the study found that the global warming fingerprint remained present even when the signal from the global average temperature trend was removed. “This ... is telling us that anthropogenic climate change has become so large that it exceeds even daily weather variability at the global scale,” Wehner said in an email. “This is disturbing as the Earth is on track for significantly more warming in even the most optimistic future scenarios.” According to Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, the new study advances our understanding of climate change’s effects. Diffenbaugh


Everyday weather is linked to human-caused climate change in new study

. . . is telling us that anthropogenic climate change has become so large that it exceeds even daily weather variability at the global scale,” Wehner said in an email. “This is disturbing as the Earth is on track for significantly more warming in even the most optimistic future scenarios.” Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, who was not involved in the study, said it advances our understanding of climate change’s effects. “The fact that the influence of global warming can now be seen in the daily weather around the world — which in some ways is the noisiest manifestation — is another clear sign of how strong the signal of climate change has become,” he said in an email. “This study provides important new evidence that climate change is influencing the conditions that people and ecosystems are experiencing every day, all around the world.” The research may provide a bridge between two approaches to detecting the human fingerprint on the changing climate. One of these techniques focuses on long-term trends, while another looks at regionally specific, shorter-term extreme weather events. Until this new study, there was no way to integrate these two specialties. “Because it’s not possible to disentangle the fingerprint of climate change from natural internal variability for any particular extreme event, these studies use model simulations to estimate how the probabilities of such ‘class of events’ may have changed under anthropogenic climate change,” said study lead author Sebastian Sippel, of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich. “Our study could be seen also as linking these two sides of the same coin,” he said. The study contains uncertainties, particularly when it comes to the accuracy of computer models in simulating various climate cycles. It also does not tease out the importance of other factors that influence the climate, such as land-use change and human-made and volcanic aerosols. Knutti notes that the use of machine learning techniques, which can help tease out patterns in large data sets, can introduce uncertainties as well, although he’s confident those were minimized here. While the new study does not attribute the climate change trends they found completely to human activities, Sippel said it’s unlikely there is another plausible explanation. “We know from many other studies that the warming in the last 40 years is almost entirely human,” he said, adding that this is the subject of follow-up work. andrew.freedman@washpost.com


A 19-year-old Olympic runner’s premature celebration at the finish line ends in defeat

An Olympian was reminded mere steps from the finish line of a New Year’s Eve race that, when it comes to running, it’s best to hold off on celebrations. Jacob Kiplimo, a teenager who represented Uganda in the 2016 Olympics, was about to win the 95th San Silvestre de Sao Paulo Road Race with a record-setting pace Tuesday in Brazil when he raised his arms as he neared the finish. But he failed to hear the footsteps of Kenya’s Kibiwott Kandie, who zoomed past him with a last-second burst, winning by a half-stride. Kandie became the first to win the 15k event in under 43 minutes, finishing in 42:59. Each of Kandie’s wins (in a half-marathon in Lille and a 10k in Casablanca) was a personal best. Kiplimo, the 2017 IAAF junior cross-country world champion, was second in 43 minutes flat, and both he and Kandie broke the record for the race. The disappointing finish capped a year in which Kiplimo won silver in the cross-country world championships, finishing behind Joshua Cheptegei (31:40 to 31:44). This past fall, the 19-year-old was one of the pace-setting runners who helped Eliud Kipchoge run a marathon in under two hours. He finished 26th in the 5,000 meters at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016. Brigid Kosgei, the Kenyan runner who broke the marathon world record this past fall in Chicago, was the women’s winner Tuesday in 48:54. The victory for Kandie was his third in a major road race in 2019, and the Sao Paulo race, like other Saint Silvestre races in Spain and Portugal, attracts a strong field. Paul Tergat previously held the record in the race, with a time of 43:12. He set the mark in 1995 during the first of his five wins in the race. Tergat, a two-time Olympic silver medalist from Kenya, held records in the marathon, half-marathon and 10,000 meters during his career. More sports coverage from The Post: Eliud Kipchoge is the first to run a sub-two-hour marathon Eliud Kipchoge to again try an “almost superhuman” sub-2-hour marathon It’s the heat AND the humidity: Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic marathon will begin at 6 a.m. Lawrence Cherono wins Boston Marathon Extreme heat is changing sports, from the Olympics to local events