Use this tool if you don’t want to be broke in retirement

(iStock) I was not surprised. The Post’s Abha Bhattarai reported this week on a study that found of the nearly 80 percent of American employees who have access to a workplace retirement plan such as a 401(k), only 32 percent of them sign up for such accounts. “The researchers studied W-2 tax forms from 2012 from 155 million American workers for their findings, which help shed light on just how ill-prepared many Americans are for the future,” Bhattarai wrote. Manisha Thakor, a financial adviser in Portland, Ore., interviewed by Bhattarai, sums up why so many people aren’t saving: “By the time people see how much they need, it seems so horrific and out of bounds that they just freeze and do nothing.” I think part of the problem is that we have scared people into thinking they need millions of dollars to retire. Even if you can only spare $20 a paycheck and keep adding to that 401(k), that’s something and better than nothing. Color Money question of the week ATM: Always taking money But I think it should mean, “always taking money.” How often have you withdrawn cash from an ATM and a few days later can’t even remember how you spent the money? When it comes to the banks, it means always taking money — fees — from people who want access to their cash fast. And people want their money so quick that that they are willing to pay a price. Just three banks, Bank of America — JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — earned more than $6.4 billion last year from ATM and overdraft fees, according to recent analysis by CNNMoney. “Despite public outcry, banks show no sign of scaling back on fees,” reported Heather Long for CNNMoney. There are two ways people pay ATM fees. A 2016 study by Bankrate.com found ATMs on average charge $2.90 to let non-customers withdraw money. Your own bank also may charge you a fee for using an out-of-network ATM. That fee is on average $1.67. So it will cost you on average $4.57 to withdraw from an out-of-network ATM, a record high for the 10th consecutive year, according to Bankrate.com. I hate ATM fees. Once, after church, my husband and I decided to stop by a mall and get something to eat. But once there, we realized we didn’t a lot of any cash. (And we didn’t want to


The Daily 202: Will anti-Trump backlash let Democrats win the Georgia special election to replace Tom Price?

the newsletter. Astronomers found a new solar system just 39 light years from ours, full of Earthlike planets. Here’s what you should know about the TRAPPIST-1 system. GET SMART FAST: - Astronomers have discovered a new solar system just 39 light-years from our own. Scientists say it contains seven “Earthlike” planets orbiting a single star. Researchers say the system is an ideal laboratory for studying distant worlds and could be the best place in the galaxy to search for life beyond Earth. (Sarah Kaplan) - The Supreme Court said race-based testimony discriminated against the sentencing hearing of a black inmate on death row, voting 6-to-2 to reopen proceedings after ruling that the case was infected with a “particularly noxious strain of racial prejudice” that may have unfairly tainted a jury’s decision. (Robert Barnes) - A British suicide bomber who blew himself up near Mosul this week was identified as a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, prompting questions about the handling of his case, after lawmakers and the media lobbied hard for his release. (Karla Adam) - The U.S.-backed Iraqi coalition fought its way into a sprawling military base outside of Mosul and onto the grounds of the city’s airport, wresting control of the runway amid fierce fire exchange with Islamic State militants. The two-part offensive comes as part of a major assault to push militants from the western half of Mosul. (AP) - One of Antarctica’s most rapidly melting glaciers has shed yet another large block of ice. The event was captured by a NASA satellite and has prompted new concerns from scientists. The glacier, if melted, has the potential to raise global sea levels by an estimated two feet. (Chelsea Harvey) - Ole Miss announced it has imposed a one-year postseason ban on itself, hoping to avoid a possibly harsher penalty after receiving a revised notice of allegations about its football program from the NCAA. (Des Bieler) - United and American Airlines have jumped into the “basic economy” market, announcing — within hours of each other — lower fares that allow travelers to fly on a budget. While the cheaper fares come with caveats (boarding last, no seat pre-selection options), it’s an attempt to go after the success of upstart low-fare companies such as Spirit and Frontier airlines. (Thomas Heath) - A wrought-iron gate that was stolen from a Nazi concentration camp was returned years after being mysteriously stolen. The


In 6 months, the moon will block out the sun, and social media will explode

Here's how the Earth, moon and sun move during a solar eclipse. On Aug. 21, a total solar eclipse will occur over the United States for the first time in more than 20 years. The last time a total eclipse was visible across the entire Lower 48 was 1979, and the next time it happens is 2045, so the excitement level is high. NASA is giving free party-planning advice. The Exploratorium in San Francisco and Slooh.com already have their live-streaming Eclipse 2017 sites set up. It’s going to be a huge deal. Notably, it also might be the day social media finally explodes. “This will be the most photographed, the most shared, the most tweeted event in human history,” said one astronomer at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Granted photography has only existed for about 200 years, so it’s a short history. But in general, we agree — the Internet won’t have bandwidth for anything other than the solar eclipse on Aug. 21. It begins around 9 a.m. Pacific on the West Coast and will be seen over 11 states before it ends on the East Coast around 4 p.m. Eastern. From coast to coast, the event will last a little more than an hour, but only for 20 seconds to about 2 minutes in any given location along the path of totality. (Fun to think about: If you were able to fly across the United States along the path in two hours, you would be able to see eclipse totality the entire time.) There will be countless ways to see the eclipse online, and from any location in the Lower 48 you will be able to see at least a partial eclipse. You need to be in that highlighted path to see the moon cover the sun completely. If you really want to see it in person, start planning now. Hotel rooms are almost totally booked along the path of totality and just outside that path. Flights into airports near the path are filling up, and I’m guessing they will get pretty expensive. There are a few lucky major cities that just happen to be in the path where the sun will be 100 percent covered by the moon. Half of Kansas City and St. Louis, most of Nashville and all of Columbia and Charleston, S.C. It will be close enough to Portland,


9 things to do in the D.C. area the weekend of Feb. 24-26

Haikan, a ramen shop from the same owners as Daikaya and Bantam King, is participating in Ramen World 3 on Sunday at Mess Hall. (Photo by Deb Lindsey For The Washington Post) Here are this weekend's best bets in nightlife, comedy, music and much more around the Washington area. - Snap a selfie: The Hirshhorn's Yayoi Kusama exhibition opens - Mardi Gras: Celebrate with king cakes and cocktails - Bust out your shorts: Near-record warmth over the next two days Friday, Feb. 24 Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis at the Strathmore: Atlas Intersections Festival at Atlas Performing Arts Center: ‘Intelligence’ at Arena Stage: Saturday, Feb. 25 ‘Anacostia Delta’ sneak preview at Amp by Strathmore: LoCo Ale Trail FeBREWary Finale at Vanish Farm Brewery: D.C. Distillers Festival at Long View Gallery: Pastrami Reuben dumplings from Laoban Dumplings. (Courtesy Laoban Dumplings) Sunday, Feb. 26 Laoban Dumplings pop-up at On Rye: Ice Yards at Yards Park: Ramen World 3 at Mess Hall: -- Fritz Hahn, Maura Judkis, Camille Kilgore, Becky Krystal, Nelson Pressley, John Taylor Read more: - Where to celebrate Mardi Gras with king cakes and cocktails - The $20 Diner’s 10 favorite Chinese restaurants in the D.C. area - Sick of loud bars? Here are D.C. haunts where conversation is on the menu.


Why cities are increasingly reluctant to host the Olympics

The Olympic rings. Budapest, Hungary recently dropped its bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. CNN reports that this is part of an increasing trend of cities refusing to bid for the Games because of the economic damage they inflict: Budapest has abandoned its bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics, a move that leaves Los Angeles and Paris as the only potential host cities…. There’s one big reason support drained away: the high cost of hosting the Olympics…. Budget concerns have led city after city to abandon their Olympic dreams in recent years. Rome and Hamburg, Germany, previously bailed on 2024. Stockholm and Krakow, Poland, pulled the plug on bids for the 2022 Winter Olympics, which were later awarded to Beijing. An Olympic host city has to plan, pay for and construct massive sporting venues and infrastructure projects. Security costs can run into the billions of dollars. Thousands of hotel rooms must be built for athletes and tourists. Most of it happens on the taxpayer dime — with little discernible economic benefit. Researchers at Oxford’s Saïd Business School estimate the cost overrun for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro was $1.6 billion. Local governments and the general public in potential host cities are starting to realize what economists across the political spectrum have long known: public subsidies for sports events and stadiums routinely create far greater costs than benefits for communities. In addition, host governments for the Olympics and the World Cup often resort to such cruel tactics as forcibly displacing large numbers of people in order to make way for sports facilities. Many thousands were displaced for the 2008 Beijing Games and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, among others. Afterwards, the facilities built for the games often turn into “white elephants” that provide little if any benefit or even lie empty and abandoned. Stadiums built for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil are now severely underutilized to the point where some are being used as parking lots or rented out for children’s birthday parties. In addition to their negative humanitarian and economic effects, large-scale international sports events are also often used as propaganda showcases by authoritarian host governments, such as China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That just adds political insult to economic injury. The Olympics and the World Cup do not have to be this way. We should be able to showcase the talents of


My country had its own Trump. Here’s how we beat him.

Hungary and the Czech Republic. Paradoxically, the fallout from the Meciar years created a sense of urgency in the realms of economic reform and foreign relations. When Dzurinda became prime minister in October 1998, the country faced a currency crisis and much of the banking sector was insolvent. Dzurinda’s two successive governments turned things around. Slovakia joined NATO in 2004 and caught up with its neighbors in the E.U. accession process. Due to bold reforms, the country’s high-performing economy earned it the nickname of the “Tatra Tiger.” Slovakia was also the first country in East Central Europe to join the euro zone, in 2009. Even so, Meciar’s attack on the nascent rule of law in the 1990s continues to haunt the country. Corruption, which reached gigantic proportions under Meciar, has never gone away. Meciar took pride in his crony privatization, which created what he called a “Slovak capital-owning class,” loyal to him. Today, politically connected businesses are enriched through overpriced procurement tenders or tax fraud. Meciar’s infamous amnesties for what were widely believed to be acts of political violence have left a traumatic legacy too, creating an ominous sense of impunity for those in power. His years also entrenched a generation of communist-era judges, many of them in cahoots with the political class. According to a recent survey, only a third of Slovaks trust the court system. The resulting sense of nihilism about the trustworthiness of Slovakia’s government has contributed to a worrying rise in political extremism and growing support for anti-establishment, conspiracy-touting movements, all the way to outright neo-Nazis. It all goes to show that, in Slovakia as in the United States, nurturing the institutions of liberal democracy requires much more work than simply keeping aspiring authoritarians at bay. It requires ensuring that liberal democratic governments are seen as legitimate and effective at delivering key public goods, including justice and security. Overall, however, Slovakia’s story is an optimistic one, as it shows that creeping authoritarianism can be defeated — even in a vulnerable society. In the early 1990s, Slovakia had just woken up from 40 years of communist rule: Its democratic institutions, rule of law and civil society were weak. Yet it succeeded in fighting off Meciar’s abuses of power. Surely Americans will not let their traditions of democracy and limited government be destroyed by a hyperactive and unstable reality TV host — at least not without a fight.


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White House hints at ‘greater enforcement’ of federal marijuana ban in states where it’s legal

— like keeping marijuana out of the hands of adolescents — were met. That unofficial policy was established by a 2013 memo, which the Justice Department under the Trump administration can easily ignore. However, the administration is bound by legislation passed in 2014 prohibiting use of Justice Department funds to impede medical marijuana laws in the 28 states that have legalized it and D.C. Seven states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational marijuana. The comments come on the same day a Quinnipiac poll shows that 71 percent of American voters — including 55 percent of Republicans — say that they oppose “the government enforcing federal laws against marijuana in states that have already legalized medical or recreational marijuana.” That poll, which surveyed 1,323 voters nationwide last week, also showed that 59 percent of voters say they support fully legalizing the use of marijuana in the United States, and that 93 percent of voters support the medical use of marijuana under a doctor's supervision. At the news briefing, Spicer appeared to tie the question of recreational marijuana use to concerns about the nation's opioid epidemic. “When you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country,” Spicer said, “the last thing we should be doing is encouraging people — there's a federal law that we need to abide by when it comes to recreational marijuana and other drugs of that nature.” Researchers have consistently found that access to medical marijuana is associated with lower rates of opioid abuse and mortality. A similar relationship may exist between recreational marijuana and opioid use, although not as much research has been done on that front. “Spicer has it exactly backwards,” said Ethan Nadelmann of the drug policy reform group Drug Policy Alliance in a statement. “Greater access to marijuana has actually led to declines in opioid use, overdoses and other problems.” “Trump seems insistent on throwing the marijuana market back into the hands of criminals, wiping out taxpaying jobs and eliminating billions of dollars in taxes,” Nadelmann added. Legal marijuana, recreational and medical, was a $1.3 billion industry in Colorado in 2016. Independent consultants estimated the industry supported 18,000 new jobs in the state in 2015. Voters in California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada just approved recreational marijuana use. Here's what they can learn from Washington, Colorado and Oregon, states where marijuana use has already been legalized.


Spicer: Feds could step up enforcement against marijuana use in states

At the White House briefing, Feb. 23, press secretary Sean Spicer responded to questions about the Trump administration's stance on enforcement of federal marijuana restrictions. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday that he expects states to be subject to “greater enforcement” of federal laws against marijuana use, a move that could undercut the growing number of jurisdictions moving to legalize the drug for recreational purposes. Spicer, speaking at a White House press briefing, said that President Trump sees “a big difference” between use of marijuana for medical purposes and for recreational purposes. “The president understands the pain and suffering that many people go through who are facing, especially terminal diseases, and the comfort that some of these drugs, including medical marijuana, can bring to them,” Spicer told reporters. Spicer said that state’s allowance of marijuana for recreational purposes “ is something the Department of Justice, I think, will be further looking into.” The Department of Justice declined to comment on Spicer’s remarks on Thursday afternoon following the briefing. As of the beginning of the year, seven states and the District had adopted laws legalizing marijuana for recreational use. In 2013 — as states took up the issue of legalizing marijuana — then-Deputy Attorney General James Cole issued a memo reiterating that the Justice Department would continue to enforce federal drug laws. But Cole said that in places that legalized marijuana, federal officials should look to the regulatory systems of states to determine whether they should intervene. In states with robust systems, Cole wrote, federal officials should continue to leave the matter to local law enforcement. But states without such systems might face challenges from the federal government, he said. Cole said the federal government’s priorities would include preventing distribution of marijuana to children and preventing cartels from getting their hands on revenue from marijuana sales. Advocates of liberal marijuana laws have eyed the arrival of Attorney General Jeff Sessions with unease. The former Republican senator from Alabama has a long track record of speaking out against marijuana use. In his confirmation hearings, Sessions acknowledged that disrupting states marijuana markets by enforcing federal marijuana laws could create a strain on federal resources. But he said he “won’t commit to never enforcing the law.” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, whose state was among the first to authorize recreational use of marijuana, said in a statement Thursday that he was “deeply


Sean Spicer seemed to tie marijuana use to opioids. The evidence isn’t on his side.

epidemic “will not be helped by a renewed law enforcement focus on marijuana.” “To the extent that DOJ chooses to reallocate anti-drug resources,” he said, “we encourage it to work even more closely with the states to combat the opioid scourge.” Little evidence exists linking marijuana use to the opioid crisis. Indeed, a growing body of research suggests that decriminalized marijuana is associated with lower rates of opioid abuse and fewer opioid-related fatalities. A recent study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health involving data from 18 states found that those with medical marijuana laws experienced a reduction in opioid involvement in fatal car accidents, as The Post reported. Researchers said the conclusion was straightforward: “In states with medical marijuana laws, fewer individuals are using opioids.” A more exhaustive study published in the JAMA Internal Medicine in 2014 found that annual overdose rates were nearly 25 percent lower in states with medical cannabis laws than those without them. The analysis of more than a decade of cause of death data showed that “such laws were associated with a lower rate of overdose mortality that generally strengthened over time,” the study found. Some advocates have even gone so far as to propose using medical marijuana to treat opioid addiction. Last year, Maine considered allowing cannabis therapy for people experiencing opioid withdrawal. The state’s health department ultimately decided against it, saying there wasn’t enough scientific evidence to support the process. But the notion that marijuana could help alleviate the opioid epidemic is still on the table elsewhere. In his news conference, Spicer said President Trump saw a “big difference” between using marijuana for medical and recreational purposes. “The president understands the pain and suffering that many people go through who are facing, especially terminal diseases,” he said, “and the comfort that some of these drugs, including medical marijuana, can bring to them.” To Spicer’s credit, the evidence is thinner when it comes to the potential benefits of recreational marijuana. For one, it’s harder to research recreational use because marijuana remains a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law. And though the idea of marijuana as a “gateway drug” is often ridiculed among advocates, the National Institute on Drug Abuse says it may have some merit. But there’s almost no evidence showing recreational marijuana use could drive up opioid abuse. A 2016 review of academic studies related to cannabis use dating back


Hiring-freeze confusion hits military parents

with their servicing Civilian Personnel Advisory Center to on board childcare workers for the exceptions granted. Selections to fill vacant positions have already been made in many cases, but background checks and pre-employment requirements must still be carried out prior to working at the Child Development Center. It is therefore too early to know at this time when the full range of childcare programs will resume, but it will be as soon as staffing levels allow for all associated services to be performed at the proper standards.” Exemptions for “positions providing child care to the children of military personnel” and other categories were allowed in a Feb. 1 memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. Commanders must request exemptions, which go through layers of Pentagon bureaucracy before being granted “sparingly, consistent with the President’s objectives,” according to the Work memo. It makes clear there needs to be a good reason for each, individual waiver: “Officials to whom exemption authority has been granted must be prepared to justify their exemption decisions to me on a position-by-position basis.” Meanwhile, Mom Bewley is worried about Lainey losing out on a program that is good for her. Bewley likes Lainey’s socialization with children of various cultures and the curriculum covering art, the alphabet, numbers and other lessons on things such as fire safety. “I love it,” Bewley said in an interview. “Her teacher is wonderful, and my daughter is happy.” What more could a parent ask? How about less confusion and more clarity? Speaking of hiring-freeze confusion, nine senators (including one Democrat, so it’s officially bipartisan) sent a letter to the Office of Personnel Management to complain that the Pentagon’s implementation of the hiring freeze doesn’t comply with “practical concerns about our national security.” The senators urged across-the-board exemptions to the Defense Department freeze instead of “waivers for civilian hiring at military depots, shipyards, plants and arsenals . . . being issued by service secretaries on a job-by-job basis. This practice is extremely inefficient, impractical, and should be changed immediately . . . to adapt to the constantly fluctuating demands of the warfighter.” Read more: Outgoing OPM chief hits incoming GOP policies on hiring and firing feds Democrats seek thaw in Trump plan to freeze federal hiring The faulty logic behind Trump’s plan to freeze federal hiring Trump links federal hiring freeze to fighting corruption


Maryland open houses Feb. 25-26

156 Moore Rd 139 Moore Rd 970 Lynch Dr 830 Nancy Lynn Lane 756 Dividing Creek Rd 118 Cresston Rd CHURCHTON 20733 5660 Battee Dr CROFTON 21114 2012 Cambridge Dr EDGEWATER 21037 3429 Pocahontas Dr 679 Loch Haven Rd 324 Riverside Rd GAMBRILLS 21054 822 Sebastian Lane 1770 Holladay Park Rd 2204 Noble Way 1760 Holladay Park Rd 826 Sebastian Lane 2205 Noble Way 2216 Noble Way 980 Annapolis Rd 2216 Noble Way GLEN BURNIE 21060 7703 Abrams Lane 519 Pebblebrook Lane Furnace Retreat Lane 7812 Spencer Rd 2760 Fredericksburg Rd 8156 Hickory Hollow Dr 8174 Hickory Hollow Dr 8332 Eagle St 8334 Eagle St 7726 Hartwell Rd 7647 Timbercross Lane 7707 Gaston Pl 207 Warfield Rd 21061 8009 Crownsway 859 Bentwillow Dr 859 Bentwillow Dr HANOVER 21076 7744 Duncannon Lane 7868 Patterson Way 7852 Patterson Way 1909 Simonson Ct 2517 Cherry Tree Rd 2800 Fredericksburg Rd 7803 Patterson Way 7009a Starwort Way 7604 Tifton Lane 1915 Simonson Ct LAUREL 20707 14423 Sandy Ridge Lane 20723 9406 Riverbrink Ct 10007 Calla Ct 10010 Rowan Ct 10111 Calla Ct 10025 Calla Ct 11076 Birchtree Lane #55 9818 Deer Run 10009 Rowan Lane 10081 Wincopia Farms Way 9734 Peace Springs Rdg 10018 Bluebell Way 9904 Loch Less Lane LINTHICUM HEIGHTS 21090 303 Jerome Ave LOTHIAN 20711 6174 Fishers Station Rd MILLERSVILLE 21108 8292 Highglade Ct 676 Cog Ct 126 Merlot St 8203 Chardonay Dr ODENTON 21113 2993 Levee Dr 3019 Levee Dr 3011 Sunny Ridge Dr 3017 Sunny Ridge Dr 3015 Sunny Ridge Drive PASADENA 21122 1208 Rock Hill Rd 8031 Flora Lane 7906 Meridian Dr 210 Clear Sky Way 1463 Westcliff Dr 4634 Mountain Rd 8007 Outing Ave 7782 Catherine Ave 56 Johnson Rd 736 Powhatan Beach Rd 7740 Central Ave 7717 Midway Ave 60 George Rd SEVERN 21144 901 Beech Tree Rd 1310 Grand Canopy Dr 8127 Orchard Blossom Lane 8505 Pine Springs Dr 8503 Pine Springs Dr 7949 Innkeeper Dr 252 Constant Ave 1272 Thompson Ave SEVERNA PARK 21146 58 Boone Trl 631 Cypress Rd 817 Dunfer Hill Rd 813 Dunfer Hill Rd 815 Dunfer Hill Rd 823 Dunfer Hill Rd SHADY SIDE 20764 4827 Avery Rd CALVERT COUNTY HUNTINGTOWN 20639 1424 Carlon Ct NORTH BEACH 20714 952 Walnut Ave 3792 Bedford Dr PRINCE FREDERICK 20678 430 English Oak Lane 339 English Oak Lane CHARLES COUNTY ACCOKEEK 20607 2718 Medinah Ridge Rd 18101 Glover Ct N 14212 Hidden Forest


Yes, the Endangered Species Act should be reformed

that they will restrict what they can do on their own property. Because such species are heavily regulated under the ESA, the presence of, for example, a red-cockaded woodpecker can devalue property and encourage landowners to destroy natural habitats before the government steps in to protect them. This practice — often referred to as “shoot, shovel and shut up” — severely threatens our conservation efforts. There’s no way of getting around it: The incentive structure of the ESA needs to be reconsidered. Neal Wilkins, president and chief executive of the East Wildlife Foundation in Texas, has studied these problems for years and has found that landowners are an underutilized resource in conservation. He argues that the federal government should consider offering forms of compensation to those who contribute to the cause. “We need to turn the presence of endangered species into an asset,” Wilkins said. “If it becomes an economic advantage, people will overproduce. That’s the story of land use in this nation.” Small-scale compensation systems have already shown to be effective. One program carried out by the Army at Fort Hood successfully protected the habitats of golden-cheeked warblers by creating a credit system with private landowners that helped offset the cost of conservation. An evaluation of the program found that landowners who contributed to it saw the program as efficient and beneficial. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: Landowners often see themselves as stewards of their property and want to preserve its legacy and resource value. For too long, the federal government has used the ESA as a powerful legal stick — pitting the environment against private interests. But we’re in need of some effective carrots as well. Congress may need to allocate more resources for compensation programs, but it’s clear plenty of landowners are willing to contribute to the effort. Half a century ago, a Republican administration under President Richard Nixon committed the nation to protecting organisms from being wiped off the face of the planet due to human activities. Today we face what scientists have begun calling the “sixth mass extinction” event in world history. It’s up to a Republican administration now to decide if we’re willing to continue taking its role in protecting wildlife seriously. Read more: I was EPA administrator. Advice for the next one: Don’t walk back environmental progress. Here’s the secret to making people care about climate change To support cheetahs, support conservation


A ‘ring of fire’ solar eclipse occurs Sunday morning — here’s how to watch

(NASA) You’re gonna need a bigger mug of coffee. This Sunday morning, when the moon gets between Earth and the sun, enjoy breakfast with an annular solar eclipse. This eclipse’s path stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic and Africa, through Chile, Argentina, Angola, Zambia and the Congo, according to Fred Espenak, a retired NASA eclipse expert. Go online to the astronomy website Slooh.com, if you have hopes of catching this “ring of fire” cosmic event. The live stream begins at 7 a.m. ET. The “greatest duration” of the eclipse — west of Chile in the South Pacific Ocean — occurs at 8:16 a.m. ET, which lasts about 1 minute and 22 seconds, when the eclipse ribbon is 59 miles wide. The “greatest eclipse” part, when the moon shadow’s axis passes closest to Earth’s center — east of Buenos Aires in the Atlantic Ocean — happens at 9:54 a.m. ET, and that lasts about 44 seconds, according to Espenak. Thanks to perfect celestial mechanics, a total solar eclipse covers the entirety of the sun’s disk. Sunday’s event is an annular eclipse (derived from Latin, the word annular means ring-shaped). Since this eclipse occurs about five days before the moon’s perigee (when it is at its farthest this month away from Earth, March 3) the moon covers most but not all of the sun, leaving a smidgen of the sun uncovered — the effect is a “ring of fire.” In a moment similar to that of the "double rainbow" viral video, an astronomer on an Alaska Airlines flight is overcome with glee while witnessing a total solar eclipse on Mar. 8. Alaska Airlines adjusted its flight schedule by 25 minutes to allow 'eclipse chasers' onboard the perfect view. If you are fortunate enough to see it in person, please be cautious. Do not look at the sun directly or through binoculars or a telescope (unless there is proper solar filtration) at the sun. As always, the eclipse has a family. It belongs to Saros 140, a series that started April 16, 1512. We saw an eclipse from this series on Feb. 16, 1999. We are long past the total eclipses from Saros 140, as the last one was Nov. 9, 1836 — the day after board game maker Milton Bradley was born. The next eclipse in this series will be March 9, 2035 — another annular eclipse. Of course, this annular


Listen, technology holdouts: Enough is enough

are largely older consumers who long ago gave up trying to keep up with the latest and greatest. Many are perfectly happy with worse and more expensive products; perhaps even take pride in still knowing how to use them. I was slow to embrace smartphone technology myself, and I still resist upgrading to the newest models even when it’s clear they offer better value and more features that I’d likely use. But like me, legacy customers are often wrong about both the costs and benefits of embracing disruptive new products and services. As recently as 2010, 80 percent of profits at AOL came from subscribers, many of them older, paying $25 a month for dial-up service they no longer used, but who thought the fee paid for (free) email service. Worse, data recently issued by the Commerce Department finds that 13 percent of Americans still don’t use the Internet at all, even though it’s now available nearly everywhere. (More homes have access to Internet service than indoor plumbing.) You might think the holdouts just can’t afford it, which certainly remains an important factor despite programs that subsidize both wired and wireless broadband. But the real holdup is that non-adopters — mostly older, rural and less-educated — just aren’t interested in Internet access, at any price. As other factors such as price and usability fall, a perceived lack of relevance now dominates. Public and private efforts to overcome that perception are crucial for two important reasons. The first is that the resisters are wrong — the Internet has become the starting point for government services, news, employment, entertainment and, increasingly, health care and education. Life without it is increasingly and unnecessarily isolated. The second is that non-adopters ultimately cost more to serve. Printing information is increasingly a waste of scarce resources as digital alternatives continue to get better and cheaper. And all of us pay for the waste. A few consumers may prefer standing in line at the bank branch to using an ATM or banking app, but the higher cost is spread over all customers. To overcome the inertia of legacy customers, it may be appropriate for governments to step in. The United States has long had programs aimed at making broadband more affordable for lower-income Americans and more accessible for those living in sparsely populated areas. On Thursday, the FCC unanimously approved the allocation of up to $2 billion


Think you know how many days are in a year? Think again.

out to about 365.259636 days per year. But Earth's orbit doesn't stay the same each year. The large, looming presence of Jupiter in our solar system means that the ellipse that Earth circumscribes around the sun is distorted. If you're trying to do calculations across long time spans, or keep a telescope pointed at the same spot in the galaxy, then this measurement might lead you astray. “Everything moves in the universe,” explained Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It really causes problems.” Astronomers' solution is to measure time by the largest, most fixed frame they can find: the entire cosmos. They abide by the sidereal year, the amount of time it takes for the sun to return to the same position relative to the fixed (most distant) stars. This year is 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 9 seconds, or about 365.26 days long. Since this is the measurement most useful to astronomers, it makes sense that NASA used it to compare Earth to the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets. McDowell and his colleagues also live by the sidereal day, which is the amount of time it takes Earth to complete a single rotation relative to the fixed stars. This day is four minutes shorter than our 24-hour one, but astronomers don't mind. “We don’t care about the sun — we’re never out when it’s up,” McDowell laughed. “We just want our observatories to point to the same spot in the sky they did yesterday.” Weirdly, the days in a sidereal year are ordinary days, not sidereal ones. This is why people think astrophysics is hard. (Okay, maybe there are a few other reasons.) But even the sidereal year is imperfect, McDowell said. After all, the so-called fixed stars aren't really fixed — everything in the universe is moving away from everything else at an accelerating rate. If you take the theory of general relativity into account, you'll find that time passes differently on Earth than it does elsewhere in space. “Every aspect of time, from the very small to these big scales … a “Sure, w Read more: Science societies have long shunned politics. But now they're ready to march. Here's what you should know about the newfound TRAPPIST-1 solar system Dear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die? We thought New Zealand was an island nation. Scientists say it's the tip of a 'hidden continent.'


Just in time for Metro’s collapse: the hoverbike

and the Beltway and speed to work like a Jedi fighter instead if these designers get their way. Several companies are working to develop personal flying machines known as hoverbikes. This is an image from the PR video posted last week by Hoverbike showing its Scorpion-3. Just in time for Metro’s skid into bankruptcy, another futuristic mode of transportation seems to be moving closer to reality: the hoverbike. It’s the sort of personal flying machine that every sci-fi cowboy or “Jetsons” fan might love. Think of a cross between a motorcycle and a drone. Hoversurf Hoverbike Scorpion-3 TRAILER 2017 Alex Atamanov, the venture’s founder, said in an email that the hoverbike is his “lifelong dream.” He became interested in flight through his father, who also devoted himself to engineering and aviation. Atamanov set up his business — which has offices in Moscow and Los Angeles — about 10 years ago. But this year, he said, he sees more promising signs than ever that market for personal air travel is here. He cited efforts by Uber and Airbus to build an air taxi. Why not hoverbikes? Other companies have been working toward a flying motorcycle for some time, too. Malloy Aeronautics Malloy Aeronautics Hoverbike / UAS Other models use a basic design that is to the two-wheeler what the flounder is to a fish: a motorcycle frame lying on its side with fans instead of wheels that power it upward. In California, a closely held Los Angeles company called Aerofex has produced a hoverbike called the Aero-X that, the company says, can fly up to 10 feet off the ground at speeds up to 45 miles per hour. It looks like a flying sandal. The company — which says its aircraft can be used for surveying, search and rescue, border patrol, ranching — has patents in Japan, China and the United States. It may still take a while, however, before any of these things are zipping riders past the top of the Washington Monument like Jedi knights. It’s been almost five years since autoblog.com asked whether Aerofex had “perfected” the hoverbike after the company rolled out footage of test flights in the Mojave Desert. Aerofex's Aero-X Hoverbike Still, just maybe the Aero-X or another model of hoverbike will offer a workaround to the subway and Beltway, too. If you live to tell about it. (Next week: wingsuits.) Read more of Tripping:


The worst-case scenario of the apparent nerve toxin murder of Kim Jong Nam

to an involatile oil and is therefore classified as belonging to the group of persistent CW agents.” A suitcase sitting on the tarmac in the rain could have a drop of VX washed off, for example, but in other places it could linger for some time. It works quickly. “Its effect is mainly through direct contact with the skin,” the OPCW indicates. Poisoning using a gas leads to a more rapid effect than through contact with the skin, because in the latter case it can take 20 to 30 minutes for the agent to reach deeper blood vessels. When it does, however, the effect is to essentially paralyze respiratory functions — the victim suffocates. Because persistent agents don’t evaporate, it requires a smaller amount to kill. In the case of VX, the OPCW says, the amount of the agent required to have a fatal effect in 50 percent of victims is 10 milligrams. An amount the size of three snowflakes. One-ninth of a grain of sand. “I think the investigation now — if this is confirmed to be nerve agent — is going to be massive because it is in an airport,” Vestergaard said. “You’re going to have to track those people that were in that area. What planes were being checked in. You have to have a hotline, if anyone gets sick. All those people will have to be tested.” “If you have VX, you have a massive undertaking of an investigation happening now,” she added. Or so you’d think. On Friday, the authority in charge of the airport released a statement indicating that there were “no anomalies” among those who sought medical care in the airport’s clinic. What’s more, Malaysia Airports said, the airport is cleaned six times a day and “the cleaning staff are in good health.” That said, the terminal where Kim was murdered — KLIA2 — will be swept Saturday night for indicators of the presence of VX, according to Reuters. Bear in mind that one of the women who was detained vomited while in police custody. It’s not confirmed that she was suffering the effects of the agent, but it suggests that she may have been exposed to it — at the airport or somewhere else. Speculation that the North Korean regime was behind the assassination is rampant, reinforced by the manner of the killing — and that the woman who put the cloth


Congress could pump the brakes on these new retirement plans

funds may be going the other way.” The state-run plans would lack some of the benefits offered through workplace accounts. For instance, employers cannot make matching contributions. Savers also cannot save as much in an IRA, which caps contributions at $5,500 a year, as they can in a workplace plan such as a 401(k), which has an annual limit of $18,000. (Those contribution limits grow for people 50 and older.) Still, some consumer advocates say the state plans would help to fill gaps in the current retirement saving system. About 55 million Americans don’t have a way to save for retirement through their regular paychecks, according to AARP. Although anybody can open an IRA on their own, workers are 15 times more likely to save when they have access to a plan through their jobs, the group found. The groups advocating for the plans say that even if the accounts are not subject to ERISA, the states organizing the plans would offer oversight and consumer protections. For example, some of the states are creating boards that would choose the investment options and offer consumer protections — though management of the savings would be outsourced to a third-party investment firm. “They would have better oversight than a traditional IRA, because each of these state plans has a board of trustees with public hearings and an open record,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economics at the New School for Social Research in New York. “You don’t have such promises from banks.” More than 30 states are looking into creating retirement saving accounts, and at least seven states have passed laws to authorize the programs, according to AARP. The states working to offer the accounts also have a fiscal incentive for boosting retirement savings. Consumers who don’t set aside enough money during their working years could face poverty in retirement, which may force them to rely on state-based aid programs such as Medicaid. “Every dollar that isn’t saved is a dollar that is going to have to come out of the state budget,” said Tobias Read, the state treasurer for Oregon, which is on pace to launch its state-run IRA this summer. Oregon intends to move forward with the retirement plan regardless of how the Senate acts, Read said. John Chiang, the state treasurer for California, said his state would continue to “fight back” the efforts to halt the accounts. Both men said


Trump says that classified leaks are devastating America. Here’s the real issue with secrets and leaks.

President Trump with FBI Director James B. Comey. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News) The continuing explosive revelations about private contacts between Trump administration officials and Russian officers have led to two competing narratives. One sees commentators praising those in the intelligence establishment responsible for the unauthorized disclosures of classified information, whom they see as brave government employees risking punishment to alert their fellow citizens to wrongdoing. The other is deeply skeptical about the leakers, seeing them as part of a deep-state or deliberate campaign by Democratic appointees to sabotage the Trump administration. Without a public investigation, we are hard pressed to know which assessment is correct. Though leaks create holes in the veil of secrecy, it is essential to recognize that they provide only partial glimpses of what is really going on. Citizens may be misled by selective disclosures, especially if they approach these disclosures blindly, using them to confirm preexisting biases. The secrecy surrounding the intelligence establishment creates dilemmas for democracy because it leads to irresolvable doubt about who has done what, and why. Secrecy is not a threat to democracy Some people see secrecy as a threat to democracy, because democracy requires transparency. They’re wrong. Secrecy can benefit democracy when it allows policy measures that are beneficial but would be impossible if carried out under the full glare of public visibility. For example, dealing with drug-related violence involves tackling gangs that operate secretly. This might require the police to use secret informants, unmarked cars and wiretaps. If citizens approve of these covert means in general, they don’t have to know everything about how they are applied in a particular situation. If they did, the information would probably leak back to the criminals, making the policy unworkable. Secrecy and democracy are not intrinsically opposed, then. Complications arise, however, when citizens want to know what is happening behind the veil of secrecy. This might be because people who have passed behind the veil claim that alarming things are happening. Citizens then have to decide whether to trust that everything is okay behind the veil of secrecy or, alternatively, look for themselves, tearing away its protections. They could, of course, send someone else behind the veil to check on their behalf. But then what should they do if the people they send disagree among themselves on whether wrongdoing has occurred — as overseers in Congress almost always do? The problem is: Whom do


How the Oscars put Syria in the spotlight

BEIRUT — Sitting 7,000 miles from the fuss and frills of Sunday's Academy Awards, it was Raed Saleh, dressed in a simple T-shirt, who delivered one of the most powerful messages of the night. In a short acceptance speech — posted online after a documentary about his Syrian White Helmets rescue force won an Oscar — the former electrical equipment salesman appealed to governments around the world “to stop the bloodshed of the Syrian people.” “I ask everyone who is listening and seeing me now across the world to take a stand. Stop the killing of civilians,” he said, speaking from southern Turkey. The 2016 “The White Helmets” was one of two films about Syria nominated in this year's category for Best Documentary Short. The other, “Watani: My Homeland,” focuses on the voyage of one family from war into exile. Taken together, the films offer glimpses of Syria's broader tragedy, sending a strong message as to why the country's exodus continues, and why for many, the decision to leave their homeland is among the hardest they will ever make. Watani - My Homeland (Trailer) The White Helmet volunteers have operated for years in rebel-held zones in Syria, helping pull survivors from the rubble of buildings hit by airstrikes and bombardments. The group has won several humanitarian awards and was thought to be in the running for last year's Nobel Peace Prize, which went to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos for his role in helping negotiate a peace deal to end a civil war of more than 50 years. The Oscar-winning documentary follows a White Helmets team from the northern city of Aleppo as it struggles against the exhausting pace of barrel bombs and airstrikes. “We are not happy to do what we do. We abhor the reality we live in,” Saleh said in a separate statement late Sunday. It is traumatizing work. Almost six years into Syria's brutal war, more than 150 White Helmets have been killed in the line of duty. Some were bombed at the site of an earlier blast. Last fall, the Aleppo headquarters seen in “The White Helmets” film was hit twice in the same day. White Helmets | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix But as the film shows, leaving the war zone isn't easy, either. In a sequence filmed in southern Turkey, where the Aleppo team has been sent for a training course, the men


Scientists have long been afraid of engaging in ‘advocacy.’ A new study says it may not hurt them

in other variants, the faux researcher goes further, arguing that “we should make a strong effort now to avert the worst impacts of climate change” or even that “the best solution would be to set strict limits on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants” or to “build more nuclear plants.” In other words, the scientist’s stances ranged from simply describing what we know and what it means — advocating, you might say, for facts and their significance — all the way to advocating for specific policy positions targeting specific polluting industries. The latter form of advocacy, in particular, has long worried researchers. (A still more dramatic form of advocacy — taking a partisan political stand — was not included in the study.) So what did the research subjects think of this? The results were pretty surprising: When respondents were asked about the researcher’s credibility after reading the Facebook posts, none of the stances seemed to produce a significantly lower credibility rating for the scientist, except for the stance advocating nuclear power. This was unexpected — nuclear power is controversial on the political left and that may have dragged down the scientists’ credibility rating overall. But opposing coal did not have the same effect, nor did standing up for strong but unspecific climate change action. “To us what it suggests is that contrary to conventional wisdom, at least members of the American public are not quite as discerning as members of the scientific community are in terms of where the ethical boundary lies,” Kotcher said. However, the study also found that political conservatives rated Wilson as having less credibility than liberals did. But this didn’t vary depending on the stance he was taking — conservatives were just more dismissive period. “Conservatives just across the board tended to evaluate him more negatively,” Kotcher said. This comports with research suggesting those on the right have a lower trust in scientists, particularly on environmental issues. So what are the implications of this for the coming March for Science, which describes itself as “a diverse, nonpartisan group to call for science that upholds the common good and for political leaders and policy makers to enact evidence-based policies in the public interest” and that is just as clearly drawing energy from people’s concern about the Trump administration? That’s not entirely straightforward — the research was actually conducted back in 2014, before anyone was proposing a demonstration


Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year

CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon next year using a spaceship under development for NASA astronauts and a heavy-lift rocket that has not yet flown. SpaceX said Monday it plans to fly two private citizens on a mission around the moon by late 2018 as part of a lunar journey that would last about a week and travel deeper into space than any human has ventured before. SpaceX founder Elon Musk would not name the two individuals, who he said approached the company and would pay for the flight. The announcement is yet another bold declaration by SpaceX, the leader of a host of other entrepreneurial commercial space ventures that have ended governments’ long-standing monopoly on space. Musk is famous for laying out ambitious timelines and goals—he ultimately plans to colonize Mars, for example— that often get pushed back. SpaceX has never flown people before, and has had two of its rockets blow up in the last two years. Some think this mission, aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket, which has yet to fly, could be delayed as well. But Musk has also had a string of successes that have upended that traditional space industry. The company has had a long running partnership with NASA, which has pumped millions of dollars into SpaceX, hiring it to fly cargo and eventually crews to the International Space Station. While President Trump has yet to name a new NASA administrator, there are signs that his administration also wants to continue to work with the private sector, and companies are sensing a huge opportunity on a potential lunar mission. In a call with reporters, Musk said he is not in competition with the government space agency, and that if NASA wanted to partner on the lunar mission that would take priority over the two private individuals. “What matters is the advancement of space exploration and exceeding the high-water mark that was set in 1969 with the Apollo program,” he said. “And having a really exciting future in space that inspires the world.” In a blog post, he said the mission “presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years, and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them.” Musk has met with Trump or his associates several times, first in New York and


Walmart’s plan to get you in and out of stores faster

A Walmart store in Dallas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez) NORTH BERGEN, N.J. — Walmart is making yet another bid to speed up its in-store shopping experience. The big-box chain is creating express lanes in its pharmacy and money services areas, in which customers will be able to use new functions in the Walmart app as part of the transaction process. By allowing shoppers to do some things in the app instead of at the counter, and by letting them bypass the main queue, the theory is that customers should get in and out of the store more quickly. This move dovetails with other efforts by the nation’s largest retailer to win over customers by making it less time-consuming to hit up a Walmart store — an urgent mission at a moment when online shopping is changing consumers’ definitions of convenience. This November and December, Walmart had a special team of so-called “holiday helpers” whose primary job was to keep lines moving quickly during the seasonal rush. The retailer is now testing “scan and go” capabilities, in which you could effectively ring up your own purchases with your smartphone and skip the checkout line altogether. At a Walmart store in North Bergen, N.J., an example of what the chain’s new express lanes will look like in its money services areas. (Sarah Halzack/The Washington Post) Long lines can be a particular frustration at Walmart’s money services counter, executives explained to reporters on Monday at a Walmart store in this New York suburb. On average, they said customers in the chain’s money services areas are waiting in line for 11 minutes. At peak times, such as around the 1st or the 15th of the month, when many people receive paychecks, waits can swell to 55 or even 70 minutes. Speeding up a visit to the money services desk could have impact for a significant share of Walmart shoppers: Daniel Eckert, senior vice president of Walmart Services, said about one in five customers to that come into Walmart stores conduct some sort of money service transaction, including cashing a check, paying a bill, and so on. In the new set-up, customers can input key information directly to the app before coming to the store. This eliminates a tedious in-store process in which they filled out paperwork by hand, only to stand by as a Walmart employee keyed all that information into a computer. Similarly, in


‘There is no other medicine’: Texas father breaks law to treat self-harming autistic daughter with marijuana

to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. It was somewhat effective. Slowly Kara had what her parents called “good hours” in which she wouldn’t self-harm, then “good days.” But it didn’t stop the fits, and the medication left Kara slower, foggier. She stopped making eye contact, couldn’t use the restroom on her own. When she was about 11, a neighbor approached Zartler with an idea: cannabis. The drug isn’t legal in Texas, not even in medicinal form save for one small caveat — some people with “intractable epilepsy” might be eligible for low-THC cannabis, according to the Marijuana Policy Project. In all other instances, possession of the drug carries a hefty sentence, often years in prison. But Zartler felt he was out of options. “Kara likes the beach, but it’s hard to get there. In the car, at that time, she would last two to three hours before going into these episodes,” Zartler said. “The problem with the car is you can’t restrain her, and she fights back.” Before one such trip, he fed Kara part of a marijuana brownie his neighbor baked. “She made it the whole way,” Zartler said. “It was a tremendous success.” A young Kara walks along the beach. (Courtesy Mark Zartler) He was new to the drug but learned how to extract the THC into oil and bake such brownies. “Slowly over several years, we introduced it to her life,” he said. Eventually he began using a vaporizer, which allows for quick consumption of the THC. Now, Kara is 17. He weaned her off the high doses of Risperidone, and noticed Kara making “huge developmental strides.” She began making eye contact again and can use the bathroom on her own. “We’re not doing this instead of other options. Kara has had teams of doctors, and it’s always been this way. But there’s no other medicine that relieves her fits once they start,” Zartler said. “There were lingering doubts for years, but I don’t doubt what we’re doing any more.” Zartler and his wife use the “medicine” less than in the past, but during “high-stress situations,” he’ll still administer it. The day before speaking with The Post, in fact, Kara had a fit. Zartler held her in his strong bear hug for an hour, but “finally enough was a enough” and he gave her “a treatment.” “And she had a great day,” he said. “And she’s not


Man seriously injured in explosion at Virginia home under construction

A man was seriously injured after an explosion at a home that is under construction in Manassas, Va., authorities said. It was not immediately known what caused the explosion just before 7 a.m. Tuesday in the 11600 block of Kahns Road, fire officials said. The cause is under investigation, according to Matt Smolsky, a spokesman for the Prince William County Fire Department. #Manassas: HOME UNDER CONSTRUCTION EXPLODES on Kahns Rd, one person air-lifted to burn center @nbcwashington… https://t.co/W6oWrs8i1D Smolsky said the man was airlifted to the burn center at Washington Hospital Center. He also said it was not clear what had exploded at the site.


The Daily 202: Republican governors divided on Obamacare replacement

Ross as secretary of commerce last night, voting 72-to-27 in favor of the former banker and investor. -- But trouble is lurking for Trump's nominee to be deputy secretary of commerce: CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon next year using a spaceship under development for NASA astronauts and a heavy-lift rocket that has not yet flown. GET SMART FAST: - SpaceX announced plans to fly two private citizens around the moon in a spaceship in 2018, as part of a week-long lunar journey that would travel deeper into space than any human has ventured before. Company founder Elon Musk declined to release the names of the two individuals, who he said “approached the company” and will be footing the bill for the flight. (Christian Davenport and Joel Achenbach) - A federal judge granted a temporary injunction to a group of three Pennsylvania transgender students -- including the sister of Trump inauguration singer Jackie Evancho -- allowing them to use the public school bathroom corresponding with their gender identity. (Moriah Balingit ) - Samsung scion Lee Jae-yong will be indicted on charges including bribery and embezzlement, South Korean prosecutors announced, the latest development in a spiraling corruption scandal that has already toppled the country’s president. The indictment of Lee, who has been effectively running the conglomerate for three years, comes as another blow to the tech giant that is still reeling from the embarrassing recall of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. (Anna Fifield) - Two Jewish schools in the Washington region received bomb threats, prompting major disruptions as police moved to sweep both campuses. The threats, which were delivered to both schools by way of an automated voice messaging system, come as dozens of Jewish community centers, schools, synagogues and cemeteries have faced hate messages and other discriminatory acts. (T. Rees Shapiro) - A plane crashed into two homes in Riverside, Calif., killing at least four people and sparking a large fire in the area. The plane’s passengers – a husband, wife, and three teenagers -- were returning from a weekend cheerleading conference at Disneyland. At least one teenager from the plane escaped with minor injuries, but officials said they are still working to determine how many victims were from the plane and how many were from the homes. (AP) - Japanese airbag maker Takata pleaded guilty to fraud on Monday, agreeing to


Once Time’s ‘Person of the Year,’ an Ebola fighter dies in childbirth due to stigma of virus

The covers of the Dec. 10, 2014, issue of Time magazine are shown in this photo provided by Time. Salome Karwah is shown at top left. (Time via Reuters) As the chaos and tragedy of the Ebola outbreak engulfed parts of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea in 2014, a more insidious ill took root: distrust of all who had come into contact with the disease. The suspicion was certainly not without reason. Whole countries looked on as the disease erased entire family trees. Doctors and aid workers dressed in protective gear akin to spacesuits to fend off the highly contagious disease. Those brave people who fought against the spread of the disease were collectively given Time magazine’s 2014 Person of the Year award. Among the medical workers featured on Time’s cover was a Liberian nurse, Salome Karwah, who lost her parents to Ebola, beat the sickness herself and went on to provide care to scores of others. Last week, Karwah died as a result of complications from childbirth, and the lingering suspicions of Liberians toward Ebola survivors was partly to blame. A writer for Time magazine who met Karwah in 2014 reported on her recent death: “On Feb. 17 she delivered a healthy boy, Solomon, by Caesarean section. She was discharged from hospital three days later. Within hours of coming home, Karwah lapsed into convulsions. Her husband and her sister rushed her back to the hospital, but no one would touch her. Her foaming mouth and violent seizures panicked the staff. ‘They said she was an Ebola survivor,’ says her sister by telephone. ‘They didn’t want contact with her fluids. They all gave her distance. No one would give her an injection.’ Karwah died the next day.” Her fourth child “will grow up never remembering their mother’s face,” said Karwah’s sister, Josephine Manley. More than 11,000 people died in the Ebola outbreak, although 17,000 who contracted the virus survived. The outbreak was officially declared over by the World Health Organization less than a year ago. Karwah’s father had run a clinic that had to close when he died. Once Karwah recovered, she reopened her father’s clinic. Although doctors are hesitant to say that those who survive Ebola can never contract the disease again, very few do. As such, Karwah saw that she could provide care to those suffering with greater ease. “I can do things that other people can’t,” she


With aging jets and a shortage of pilots, the Air Force weighs buying throwback ‘light-attack’ planes

The U.S. Air Force is facing a potentially protracted air war against the Islamic State. Aging fighter jets and a shrinking pilot corps is forcing the Air Force to look at using “light-attack” propeller planes. The U.S. Air Force, faced with a potentially protracted war against the Islamic State, aging fighter jets and a shrinking force of pilots, is examining the adoption of a new fleet of “light-attack” planes that are both a throwback to earlier U.S. operations and a current staple of militaries in South America and the Middle East. The aircraft would be able to carry out airstrikes against the Islamic State and other militants for less money than the F-16 Fighting Falcon or the F/A-18 Super Hornet. Options available could include Embraer’s A-29 Super Tucano propeller plane, which the United States has delivered to Afghanistan and other allies, and Beechcraft’s AT-6, a version of which the U.S. military already uses in pilot training. Air Force generals have discussed the proposal several times in recent weeks, saying that the planes could supplement existing aircraft, including drones, in regions where there is no enemy capable of shooting down U.S. planes. Gen. David L. Goldfein, the service’s top officer, said the proposal is part of an ongoing dialogue that dates back years and could soon include an experiment in which private companies demonstrate what the planes can do. “I’m not interested in something that requires a lot of research and development here,” Goldfein said during a recent appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I’m looking for something that I can get at right now, commercial, off the shelf, low-cost, that can operate in an uncontested environment, that can deliver the capabilities that we need, that can also be something that perhaps our allies and partners that are in this fight with us” use. Goldfein added: “If you assume this fight will be going on for a little bit of time, there is room and time for us to get after this.” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein addresses commanders at the Eaker Center for Professional Development on Feb. 2. (Melanie Rodgers Cox/Air Force) The experiment will follow related efforts in Iraq and the United States. In the most recent, U.S. Central Command deployed two Vietnam-era, twin-engine OV-10G Broncos on loan from NASA to Iraq in 2015, flying them in missions against the Islamic State


Attorney General Sessions wants to know the science on marijuana and opioids. Here it is.

is associated with less prescription painkiller abuse, and fewer overdose deaths. A 2015 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the presence of medical marijuana dispensaries in a state was linked to a 15 to 35 percent decrease in admissions to substance abuse treatment centers, along with a similar decline in overdose deaths. This study was somewhat more rigorous than the previous paper, drawing on a larger data set that stood up to greater statistical scrutiny. As one of the authors told me at the time, “If this is for real, it means that there are other ways that are less dangerous [than prescription painkillers] for people to deal with chronic pain.” Medical marijuana is associated with fewer opiate-induced car crashes. A 2016 Columbia University paper zeroed in on a different facet of the substance abuse problem — auto accidents. The researchers found that after a state passes a medical marijuana law, fewer drivers in those states test positive for opioids after fatal car crashes. The take-home here is pretty simple: “in states with medical marijuana laws, fewer individuals are using opioids,” the authors conclude. Painkiller prescriptions fall sharply after medical marijuana laws are introduced. A novel study conducted last year looked at what happened to Medicare Part D painkiller prescriptions after states passed medical marijuana laws. It found that the typical physician in a medical marijuana state prescribed 1,826 fewer painkiller doses for Medicare patients in a given year. Why? Some seniors don't need painkillers if they have access to medical pot (related: seniors and people in late middle age are among the fastest growing marijuana use demographics). Among chronic pain patients, marijuana use is associated with less opiate use. A study published last year in the Journal of Pain found chronic pain patients who reported marijuana use were 64 percent less likely to report opiate use, more likely to report good quality of life, and less likely to report negative side effects from their medication. “This study suggests that many chronic pain patients are essentially substituting medical cannabis for opioids and other medications for chronic pain treatment, and finding the benefit and side effect profile of cannabis to be greater than these other classes of medications,” the authors conclude. “More research is needed to validate this finding.” * * * “More research is needed.” Researchers universally say they need to do more studies


Out of curiosity, President Trump, which of these 500-plus positions aren’t worth filling?

undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Principal deputy undersecretary (comptroller) - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for Asian and Pacific security affairs - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for strategy, plans and capabilities - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for homeland defense and global security affairs - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for international security affairs - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for Special Operations/low intensity conflict - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for acquisition - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for logistics and materiel readiness - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for nuclear, chemical and biological defense - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for energy, installations and environment - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for research and engineering - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for health affairs - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Deputy chief management officer - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Director, Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, logistics - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary for financial management and comptroller, Department of the Air Force - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Air Force for Installations, Environment, and Logistics - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Army for civil works - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Army for financial management and comptroller, Department of the Army - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics, and technology - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, installations, and environment - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Navy for financial management and comptroller, Department of the Navy - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Navy for manpower and reserve affairs - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: Assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development, and acquisition - DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION: Deputy secretary - DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION: General counsel - DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION: Chief financial officer - DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION: Assistant secretary for legislation and congressional affairs - DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION: Undersecretary - DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION: Assistant secretary for civil rights - DEPARTMENT OF


The problem with Trump’s plan to boost Wall Street: Banks are more profitable than ever

the next few years. The bank's assets could reach about $2.6 trillion this year from $2.49 trillion at the end of 2016. The bank projects net income to reach $30 billion in the next few years, beating the record it set last year, at $24.7 billion The industry is achieving those profits despite having to comply with hundreds of new regulations called for under 2010’s financial reform law, known as Dodd Frank. Profits have also been hampered by the Federal Reserve keeping key interest rates low, which has made it more difficult for banks to make a profit on loans, industry analysts say. “Hard data on bank earnings and lending should lay to rest any notion that financial regulations are holding back the American economy, or getting in the way of American banks making money,” Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, said in a statement. “These claims are just an excuse to dismantle hard-won protections for consumers and financial stability.” Since the financial crisis, the banking industry has largely thrived, according to the FDIC data. There are fewer bank failures, fewer institutions labeled “troubled banks” by regulators and fewer unprofitable institutions. The FDIC found that of the country’s 5,913 banks, only 248 were unprofitable last year. That is lower than pre-financial-crisis levels and down significantly from the more than 2,000 banks that were losing every year in 2007 and 2008. Five banks failed in 2016, the smallest number since 2007, the government data showed. Full-year 2016 net income was $171.3 billion. (Source: FDIC) The number of institutions on the FDIC's “Problem Bank List” fell to 123 — the smallest number since 2008. (Source: FDIC) But, industry officials say, the industry's health does not tell the entire story. While the industry may be strong, there are also fewer banks as some smaller institutions merge after struggling under new regulatory burdens, they say. “Regulatory pressures and greater capital requirements were challenges that helped drive 251 banks to merge in 2016,” James Chessen, the chief economist of the American Bankers Association, said in a statement. “While the industry’s solid performance as a whole demonstrates a very resilient banking system, the underlying regulatory pressures driving community banks to sell or merge can’t be ignored. A tailored system of regulation would go a long way toward allowing banks of every size to be successful in their communities.” Trump has said he wants


Everything is awesome for the Women of NASA Lego set

LEGO set!… https://t.co/4QawdfkEr9 The proposed Women of NASA Lego lineup also includes: • Nancy Grace Roman: Also known as “Mother of Hubble,” a nickname she earned for her role in the Hubble Space Telescope • Mae Jemison: The first African American woman in space • Margaret Hamilton: A pioneering computer scientist, pictured here next to a tower of Apollo Guidance Computer source code books that is as tall as she is. (That stack is also part of the Lego set.) Margaret Hamilton. (Courtesy of Maia Weinstock) In an email to The Washington Post, Weinstock wrote that this was not the first time she had offered a project for the Lego Ideas contest. With Women of NASA, though, she was able to combine two of her passions: space exploration and the history of women in STEM, she wrote. “Among other things, both subjects have healthy social media presence, and I figured combining the two could leverage those similar passions in others,” she wrote. “There are a number of books and documentaries on women at NASA that I've read and seen, but also a couple of photos — the two I re-create as vignettes of Katherine Johnson and Margaret Hamilton — I knew I wanted to do in Lego anyway, so this just pulled them all together.” Personally, Weinstock wrote, she doesn't have a favorite figurine in the set, but she did note that Ride — someone Weinstock looked up to when she was growing up — was the first that she created. “What she did to support women and girls in the STEM fields is remarkable. … I knew I wanted to include her because she's already fairly famous, so that would help the set gain some traction, but also because of all of the work she's done post-NASA, to encourage young people to go into science and [engineering],” she wrote. This project is dedicated to the memory of Sally Ride, who tirelessly encouraged children to "reach for the stars." https://t.co/ZaIRGaacDh Weinstock wrote in her email that it is “critical to have toys that girls can look at and play with and think, ‘that's me!'’ or ‘that could be me!’ ” When people read about or see the set, she wrote, Weinstock hopes that they will learn about the women portrayed in it and their stories and contributions. “But I also just hope that girls *and* boys will take away from


After a shooting and a cross-country trip, orphaned grizzly bear sisters make their zoo debut

“Does anyone have room for two grizzlies?” A few facilities responded, including the Maryland Zoo. One of the grizzly bear cubs at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. (Photo by Jeffrey F. Bill/Maryland Zoo) In December, Maryland officials flew to Helena to help transport the bears, but a blizzard delayed their journey. Once they got on the road, it took three days to get them to Maryland. Officials said they had considered using a cargo plane, but getting one before the busy holiday season proved difficult. “The weather was getting worse and worse and we didn’t want to wait until after Christmas,” Ballentine said. One of the bear cubs that’s been nicknamed “Little Bear.” (Photo by Jeffrey F. Bill/Maryland Zoo) After the cubs arrived at the zoo on Dec. 21, they were quarantined and moved to the Polar Bear Watch exhibit to get used to their new environment. Over the winter when the zoo was closed for three days a week, zookeepers got the bears used to the outdoor yard and worked with them away from public view. The bears had to learn to respond when called. Two sister grizzly bears are now at the Maryland Zoo. (Courtesy of the Maryland Zoo) “They have to be trained to come running when you ring a triangle, for example,” Ballentine said. “They have to realize what the cue is and when to come to a certain area.” Keepers said they still need to get the grizzlies used to their neighbor, a polar bear, in the outside area where their enclosures are about 30 feet apart. For now, they’ll split the day with the grizzlies outside in the morning and the polar bear out in the afternoon. Soon, officials said, they expect all of the bears to be outside at once. “While the bears know each other is there, they haven’t been adjacent in the exhibit yard, so slowly we have to get both species to realize they’re there,” Ballentine said. Officials are still looking for who shot the cubs’ mother. The Consolidated Tribes and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are offering a reward of up to $4,000 for information that leads to a conviction in the shooting. “Although no one likes the tragic circumstances that led to the cubs coming here to the zoo, we are pleased that we can offer a permanent home to these sisters,” Maryland Zoo president and chief


Virginia Republican introduces bill to end federal marijuana prohibition

In this Sept. 23, 2014, photo, a tractor cuts a small plot of hemp at a University of Kentucky research plot near Lexington, Ky. (Dylan Lovan/Associated Press) A freshman Republican representative from Virginia introduced legislation this week that would end the federal prohibition on marijuana use and allow states to fully set their own course on marijuana policy. The bill seeks to remove marijuana from the federal Controlled Substances Act and resolve the existing conflict between federal and state laws over medical or recreational use of the drug. It would not legalize the sale and use of marijuana in all 50 states — it would simply allow states to make their own decisions on marijuana policy without the threat of federal interference. “Virginia is more than capable of handling its own marijuana policy, as are states such as Colorado or California,” Rep. Thomas Garrett (R) said in a statement. Currently neither the recreational or medical uses of marijuana are allowed in Virginia. The bill does specify that transporting marijuana into states where it is not legal would remain a federal crime. Marijuana is currently a Schedule 1 controlled substance at the federal level, meaning the federal government considers the drug to have a “high potential for abuse” and “no medically accepted use.” But more than half the states have set their own policies allowing either medical or recreational use of marijuana. Garrett's bill is identical to legislation introduced in 2015 by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). That bill didn't receive any co-sponsors, nor did it get a Senate hearing. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has already signed on to Garrett's bill, as have Rep. Scott W. Taylor (R-Va.) and Rep. Jared Polis (D.-Colo.). Law enforcement But the freshman lawmaker frames the issue as both about states' rights, and creating jobs: “This step allows states to determine appropriate medicinal use and allows for industrial hemp growth, something that will provide a major economic boost to agricultural development in Southside Virginia,” he said in a statement. One group that provides data services to the marijuana industry estimates that the legal pot industry could be worth $24 billion by 2020 and create 280,000 jobs. In Colorado alone, marijuana sales topped $1.3 billion last year. In 2016, the Drug Enforcement Administration reviewed the federal classification of marijuana and declined to loosen restrictions on the plant. Congress has shown increasing interest in tackling marijuana policy issues in


Is Sweden reintroducing conscription because of refugees? No. It’s Russia.

small riot broke out in a suburb of Stockholm that is home mostly to immigrants. No one was seriously injured, though some shops and cars were vandalized. Acolytes of Trump have latched on to Sweden's troubles with refugee assimilation as a supporting example for Trump's travel ban and other draconian immigration measures. So when Sweden's defense minister announced a reintroduction of army conscription Thursday, it might have seemed at first like yet another vindication — things are getting so bad there that they need to call in troops. But what's really happening is a harking back to the Cold War era. “We have a Russian annexation of Crimea, we have the aggression in Ukraine, we have more exercise activities in our neighborhood. So we have decided to build a stronger national defense,” Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told Reuters. In recent years, Sweden has been caught underprepared in a number of incidents, including near misses between Russian aircraft and civilian airliners, and airspace violations by Russia. Speaking to Swedish television, Hultqvist said that the “security environment in Europe and in Sweden’s vicinity has deteriorated.” Conscription was discontinued in 2010. It will restart in 2018. The Swedish armed forces are relatively small. A government investigation last year, cited by Reuters, found that about 2,500 soldiers were recruited annually. The Defense Ministry is hoping to raise that number to 4,000, which it will choose out of the 13,000 men and women soon to be called in for enrollment. Before 2010, Sweden only conscripted men. Sweden has roughly 29,000 active armed service members to Russia's 831,000, meaning its military is about 3 percent the size of Russia's, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Voluntary enrollment has dropped as wages for professional soldiers dip further and further below the average earnings for young Swedes. Youth unemployment is near zero in Sweden. Unlike Norway, Denmark and all the Baltic states, Sweden is “unaligned,” and not a member of NATO. But with growing Russian aggression in the region and the United States signaling a hands-off attitude toward its defense posture in Europe — not to mention the Trump administration's reputed ties with Russian interests — Scandinavia is headed back into a period of heightened war readiness. Read More: Trump says German crime levels have risen and refugees are to blame. Not exactly. German police say suspected Islamist extremist accused of plot was once a neo-Nazi


America is pretty sure that it needs a stronger military and is (somewhat) willing to pay for it

a brand-new naval vessel Thursday — the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford — and promised again to expand the U.S. military. Polling released the same afternoon by Gallup suggests that Americans are perfectly comfortable with that. Trump has promised a 10 percent increase in defense spending, about $54 billion in total. Speaking from the Gerald Ford, he pledged an overhaul and expansion of the U.S. air and naval fleets and an expansion of the number of aircraft carriers to 12. (There were 10 before the launch of the Gerald Ford, and another is under construction. The Gerald Ford cost about $13 billion.) What Trump didn’t mention is that the U.S. military is consistently rated the most powerful in the world. But Americans generally agree with the president, Gallup reports. Forty-five percent of respondents told the pollsters that the military is not strong enough, a figure that has held steady for several years. It also nearly matches the all-time high in Gallup polling, which came in 2010. Only about 1 in 10 Americans said the military is stronger than it needs to be. The percentage willing to pay for that stronger military is slightly smaller than the percentage saying the military is not strong enough. But the percentage of those willing to pay is higher than it has been in recent years. A bit over a third of respondents said we’re spending too little on our military, a bit more than those saying we spend about the right amount or too much. Unsurprisingly, there’s a broad partisan split on the question. More than 6 in 10 Republicans think the United States is spending too little, while 15 percent of Democrats say the same thing. The biggest surge in concern that the country wasn’t spending enough on its military came shortly after the inauguration of another Republican president. On Jan. 27, 1981, shortly after President Ronald Reagan was sworn in, more than half of respondents to Gallup said they thought the country was spending too little. With the end of the Cold War a decade later, though, the military was pared down significantly. It’s probably not a coincidence that between 1990 and 1999, Gallup measured a big uptick in the number of people who thought the military needed to be stronger. If Trump is true to his word — and Congress agrees — they’re about to see their wishes fulfilled.


The deadly connection between prescription painkillers and the economy

people since 1999, have become a crisis in their own right. The rise of prescription painkillers enabled the opioid epidemic, but the economy may have also played a role, according to a new study from economists at Indiana University and the University of Virginia. In a draft of their research released Monday, Alex Hollingsworth, Christopher J. Ruhm and Kosali Simon find that rates of opioid deaths grew faster in countries where the unemployment rate climbed faster than average. They analyzed health records from 1999 to 2014, comparing how overdose rates changed in places where the unemployment rate ticked upward unexpectedly, and places where it ticked downward unexpectedly. A one percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate, above and beyond the trend, was associated with an approximate 3.6 percent increase in the rate of fatal opioid overdoses, and a 7 percent increase in emergency room visits related to opioid overdoses. (The data on emergency room visits was scarcer, limited to five states: Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey.) Because of the way the study was designed, it couldn’t measure the overall effect of national changes in the economy, like the Great Recession and the subsequent recovery. Instead, the research tells us that places that weathered the Great Recession more gracefully were better able to resist the opioid epidemic, while places that suffered during the Great Recession were harder hit by opioid deaths. This is more surprising than it seems. As Ruhm points out, alcohol use actually behaves the opposite way. People tend to buy less alcohol in bad times, and more alcohol in good times. In fact, there’s a well-documented correlation between economic growth and higher death rates. When the economy is booming, people tend to behave in more risky ways, and pollution also increases. When the economy is in recession, both those risk factors abate. Ruhm was one of the first to point out this relationship back in 2000. But in the United States, at least, it seems recessions are no longer saving as many lives as in the past. Ruhm and his colleagues believe the explanation might lie in the rising incidence of opioid addiction and suicide, which both tend to spike during stressful times. And, while overall alcohol use doesn’t increase during an economic downturn, researchers have found that people are more likely to engage in binge drinking. Another piece of evidence for this view comes from economists


10 beer tastings, tappings and events to check out in March

This is how the Flying Dog tasting room looks after a brewery tour. The crowd will be much different during this month's Tom Selleck-Con. (Photo by Mark Gail/The Washington Post) March isn't a particularly busy time for beer events, with many breweries and beer bars saving their big events for mid-April, when the Craft Brewers Conference brings more than 10,000 thirsty industry professionals to Washington for a week of tap takeovers and meet-and-greets, and the end of May, when bars host out-of-town breweries in the days leading up to the annual Savor craft beer festival. Still, there are plenty of chances to raise a glass this month. Girl Scout Cookies and Beer Brewers Ball Portner Brewhouse grand opening Great Lakes Turntable Party Washington Nationals Quiz Night at Port City Brewing 6th Annual St. Patrick's Day Celebration at Mad Fox Brewing Company Fantome St. Patrick's Day Extravaganza at the Sovereign Tom Selleck-Con at Flying Dog Brewery Maryland Day Beer Festival at Downtown Crown East Coast vs. West Coast at Pizzeria Paradiso


Surge in human cases of deadly bird flu is prompting alarm

human infections. But this winter, the number of cases is greater than any of the previous four seasons. This year's infections account for more than a third of the 1,258 H7N9 cases that have been reported since 2013. Most human infections involve exposure to live poultry or contaminated environments, especially markets where live birds have been sold. During the previous four waves of H7N9, 88 percent of patients developed pneumonia, 68 percent were admitted to an intensive care unit and 41 percent died, according to a report from the CDC. “This is the virus we were concerned about in 2013, and now we're seeing these increasing number of cases,” said Daniel Jernigan, who heads the CDC's influenza division, in an interview this week. “This year it came back much stronger, so the numbers of cases we're seeing has already surpassed all the other waves, and the season isn't even over yet.” In addition, the virus has become more deadly to poultry, which might lead to more severe infections in humans, he said. For all those reasons, officials are watching developments closely. “This is a virus you don't want to take your eyes off,” he said. Among a dozen animal and bird viruses that are not yet circulating widely in people, the H7N9 virus has the greatest potential to cause a pandemic, according to the CDC. That assessment is based on the virus's ability to spread easily and efficiently to people from animals and its ability to cause serious disease. On Wednesday, WHO officials in Geneva said the risk of sustained human-to-human transmission of H7N9 remains low. The characteristics of the infections and case fatality rate remain similar to previous waves, officials said. But “constant change is the nature of all influenza viruses,” Wenqing Zhang, who heads WHO's global influenza program, told reporters during a media briefing Wednesday. “This makes influenza a persistent and significant threat to public health.” One change already underway is that the virus has split into two distinct genetic lineages, with a new branch of the virus family now emerging in the current epidemic, officials said. That has rendered the H7N9 vaccine stockpiled by the United States less effective against the newly emerging branch, officials said. The CDC is developing an influenza seed virus that can be used by vaccine manufacturers to produce another H7N9 vaccine to match a newly emerging H7N9 strain. It will take several


Afternoon links: 7 Baltimore cops indicted on federal charges

- Seven Baltimore police officers have been indicted on federal racketeering charges, including “shaking down citizens, filing false court paperwork and making fraudulent overtime claims.” This all went on as the Justice Department was investigating the department for systemic civil rights violations — an investigation Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested was unnecessary and demoralizing to police officers. - One in 11 Kentucky citizens has lost voting rights due to a felony conviction. - Good news from Tucson: The city’s police chief says immigration status won’t affect police-citizen interactions. - Bad news from Tucson: this video of a police officer assaulting two elderly female protesters. - Colorado student expelled for raping his girlfriend, even though both he and his girlfriend both deny the charge. - Chicago’s police department deploys copyright law to avoid releasing its 35-year-old instructional film on use of force.


White House proposes steep budget cut to leading climate science agency

(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration via AP) The Trump administration is seeking to slash the budget of one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post. The proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would also eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs, including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and “coastal resilience,” which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas. NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, which would be hit by an overall 18 percent budget reduction from its current funding level. The Office of Management and Budget also asked the Commerce Department to provide information about how much it would cost to lay off employees, while saying those employees who do remain with the department should get a 1.9 percent pay increase in January 2018. It requested estimates for terminating leases and government “property disposal.” The OMB outline for the Commerce Department for fiscal 2018 proposed sharp reductions in specific areas within NOAA such as spending on education, grants and research. NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would lose $126 million, or 26 percent, of the funds it has under the current budget. Its satellite data division would lose $513 million, or 22 percent, of its current funding under the proposal. The National Marine Fisheries Service and National Weather Service would be fortunate by comparison, facing only 5 percent cuts. The figures are part of the OMB’s “passback” document, a key part of the annual budget process in which the White House instructs agencies to draw up detailed budgets for submission to Congress. The numbers often change during the course of negotiations between the agency and the White House and between lawmakers and the administration later on. The 2018 fiscal year starts Oct. 1. A spokesperson for the Commerce Department declined to comment. A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the process was “evolving” and cautioned against specific numbers. The official would not respond to questions about the four-page passback document. The biggest single cut proposed by the passback document comes from NOAA’s satellite division, known as the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, which includes a key repository of climate and environmental information, the National


Trump, citing no evidence, accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ plot to wiretap Trump Tower

President Trump accused former president Barack Obama of wiretapping his calls in Trump Tower. Here's a timeline of their relationship since inauguration. President Trump on Saturday angrily accused former president Barack Obama of orchestrating a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election. While citing no evidence to support his explosive allegation, Trump said in a series of four tweets sent Saturday morning that Obama was “wire tapping” his New York offices before the election in a move he compared to McCarthyism. “Bad (or sick) guy!” he said of his predecessor, adding that the surveillance resulted in “nothing found.” Trump offered no citations nor did he point to any credible news report to back up his accusation, but he may have been referring to commentary on Breitbart and conservative talk radio suggesting that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team. The Breitbart story, published Friday, has been circulating among Trump's senior staff, according to a White House official who described it as a useful catalogue of the Obama administration's activities. Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, said in a statement early Saturday afternoon: “A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.” Senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the wide-ranging federal investigation into Russian interference in the election said Saturday that there had been no wiretap of Trump. Officials at Justice and the FBI declined to comment. Trump has been feuding with the intelligence community since before he took office, convinced that career officers as well as holdovers from the Obama administration have been trying to sabotage his presidency. He has ordered internal inquiries to find who leaked sensitive information regarding communications during the campaign between Russian officials and his campaign associates and allies, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn. Washington Post reporter Adam Entous breaks down Friday’s intelligence report on Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Some current and former intelligence officials cast doubt on Trump's assertion. “It's highly unlikely there was a wiretap,” said one former senior intelligence official familiar with