An overlooked Bill Taylor revelation hints at worse to come from Trump

William B. Taylor Jr.'s explosive testimony illustrated with smoking-gun force that President Trump did indeed use hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to leverage a foreign leader into helping corrupt our election on his behalf. But there’s a forward-looking dimension to Taylor’s revelations, too. The testimony from Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, also contains a key revelation about Attorney General William P. Barr — one that provides an occasion to revisit his role in this scandal, and hints at how Barr will likely continue perverting the U.S. government machinery to help Trump get away with it. Taylor’s key mention of Barr comes in a very damning passage. Taylor recounted that he’d learned that Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, had informed Ukraine that the frozen military aid would be conditioned on launching the “investigations” Trump wanted. Taylor then testified that on a call, Sondland stated that Trump told him he wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to “publicly” pledge investigations — which would undercut the fact of Russian sabotage of the 2016 election and help smear potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden. Taylor claimed Sondland told him the money was dependent on this. Taylor then adds: Two senior U.S. officials seriously discussed a plan in which the attorney general of the United States would publicly coordinate with a foreign government to help Trump absolve Russia of culpability for an attack on our political system, by helping to repudiate our intelligence services’ conclusion about that culpability. That’s the goal of Trump’s demand for Ukraine’s investigation into 2016 — to validate a conspiracy theory which holds that Ukraine hacked Democrats’ emails and set up Russia to get blamed for sabotaging the election for Trump. To understand why this matters — and why it’s so ominous — we need a quick recap. On his July 25 call, Trump pressured Zelensky to help validate the 2016 Ukraine conspiracy theory and to help smear Biden — and instructed Zelensky to work with Barr to get it done. After the partial call transcript was released, the Justice Department denied that Trump had directed Barr to do this. Then acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney also implicated Barr. Mulvaney defended Trump’s demand for Ukraine to investigate the 2016 conspiracy theory by suggesting it was legitimate to ask Ukraine to help with an “ongoing investigation” by the Justice Department. That was


He weighed 650 pounds in 2016. Now 475 pounds lighter, he completed his first marathon.

— the post-race, prerace, just how supportive all of the participants and everybody out there watching were,” he told The Post. “It was a great thing to be a part of, and that’s really what got me hooked on it.” 5K races turned into 10Ks, and then 10-milers. In October 2018, Orosco ran his first half-marathon, and he completed his fifth two weeks ago as a tune up for the full 26.2 miles at the Detroit Free Press/TCF Bank Marathon on Sunday. “It was the most difficult — mentally, physically, emotionally — thing that I have ever done in my life,” Orosco said of the Detroit marathon, which he completed in an official time of 6 hours 31 minutes 14 seconds. Katelyn Trepkowski, an experienced runner and friend, helped Orosco make it to the finish line, an act he described as “incredibly selfless.” The longest Orosco had run in training was 18 miles, and he was worried about how he might fare once he pushed past that distance. Sure enough, “the 18-through-22 monster jumped up and got me,” Orosco said, recalling how he began to experience symptoms of dehydration, including blurry vision and feeling lightheaded. The surgery Orosco went through left him with another issue: he wasn’t always able to keep down the cups of water offered to him along the route. At around mile 20, he “started not to feel too well,” so Trepkowski ran ahead and corralled a gallon jug of water from an aid station. She and Orosco took turns carrying it as he sipped from it over the next couple of miles, at which point, combined with some food another friend provided him at mile 21, he felt better. “Miles 23 through 26 were definitely better than 20 through 22,” he said. With about a quarter-mile to go, Trepkowski asked Orosco if he had anything “left in the tank,” and — upon being informed he did — she told him it was time to empty it. “We went all-out for the finish, and crossed the line, and it was an overwhelming experience,” he said. Orosco and Trepkowski shared an embrace at the finish line, but he soon discovered there were others also lining up to give him a hug. Several members and staffers from his gym in Saginaw, Mich., had made the trip to Detroit to cheer him on. “We call him our Saginaw sensation,” a


Boris Johnson claims he’s going to ‘get Brexit done.’ That’s a lie.

and thus alienate the nationalists. So he welched on a solemn pledge he had made only last year and supported a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain instead. Businesses in Northern Ireland (one part of Britain) will need export forms to send their goods to England, Scotland and Wales. It will be as if Maryland and Pennsylvania were in separate countries. Anyone with the smallest knowledge of Irish history will see the potential for strife. Elsewhere, support for independence in Scotland may not be overwhelming. But Brexit has given Scottish separatists an impressive argument: Scots voted to stay in the E.U., and the English are taking them out. An extraordinary level of public ignorance prevails about the consequences for the rest of the country. Most people don’t know that, even if Britain agreed to leave the E.U. tomorrow, there would be years of bitter negotiations and a repeated danger of Britain crashing out without a deal with its largest trading partner. Pollsters speak of a “crucial misunderstanding among many voters.” When they tell their focus groups the hard reality that we will need to make multiple compromises in trade talks stretching to the mid-2020s, the response is often “horrified silence.” Perhaps, as I and millions of others hope, Britain can yet reverse the most needlessly self-harming decision it has taken since 1945. But Johnson’s opponents should fear that chaos of Brexit suits the radical right rather than the center-left. The greater the chaos, the louder the right can claim that it, and it alone, is the true defender of the country against elitist enemies. It can rouse its base by saying that the Brexit “the people” voted for is being betrayed by foreigners abroad and quislings at home. Johnson will continue to pose as the strongman who can enact the people’s desires, even as he fails. The British right is going to give its stab-in-the-back myth its best shot. For as all the promised benefits of leaving the E.U. vanish, that is the only shot it has. Read more: Sebastian Mallaby: What will happen on the next episode of Brexit? Stay tuned! Ian Dunt: Boris Johnson is discovering that Brexit only works when it’s a fantasy Sebastian Mallaby: Brexit, lies — and a new birth for British democracy? Ryan Bourne: Underestimate Boris Johnson again at your peril Megan McArdle: Boris Johnson is presiding over Britain’s stupidest hour


Impossible Burger: Here’s what’s really in it

Plant-based meat burst onto the international stage this year, with a dramatic IPO from Beyond Meat and the Impossible Burger making its way into 17,000 restaurants in the United States, Hong Kong, Singapore and Macao, and retail outlets such as Wegmans, Gelson’s and Fairway Market. The product label is a long list of tough-to-pronounce ingredients — which meat advocates have seized on to assert that plant-based meat is highly processed. This month, the Center for Food Safety, a watchdog group that opposes genetically engineered foods, called on the Food and Drug Administration to recall the Impossible Burger product from grocery stores, citing safety concerns because of its use of genetically engineered heme, an iron-rich molecule found in meat and plants, for use as a color additive. Impossible Foods’ chief communications officer, Rachel Konrad, called the allegations “false and frankly ridiculous.” She added: “The FDA has acknowledged multiple times that the Impossible Burger’s key ingredient is safe to eat. The FDA has also acknowledged multiple times that Impossible Foods’ rigorous safety testing meets or exceeds extensive federal requirements.” There seems to be consensus that a pivot to plant-based meat would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the animal cruelty associated with traditional animal agriculture. But is the Impossible Burger, which is kosher- and halal-certified but not organic, good for you? Here’s how it compares to an average same-size beef hamburger that is 80 percent lean beef and 20 percent fat. Price: Financials: Greg Wank, leader of the Food and Beverage Industry Practice of the accounting firm Anchin, Block & Anchin, does some back-of-the-envelope math, estimating Impossible Foods probably spent over $100 million in research and development. “When you’re innovating from scratch a brand new product that’s never existed before, that in and of itself takes years and countless millions. Then you’ve got to mass produce it, you’ve got to figure out what machines can make it and then you’ve got to train employees how to do it — that’s many millions more.” Top five ingredients: Calories: Cholesterol: Fat: Sodium: Protein: Heme: The rest: Read More Impossible vs. Beyond: We tested cook-at-home versions to see who make a better vegan burger Veggie burgers were living an idyllic little existence. Then they got caught in a war over the future of meat. Shalt thou eat an Impossible Burger? Religious doctrine scrambles to catch up to new food technology.


The world needs more of this gratitude in action

tortured. After her reports helped free some of the prisoners, her car windows were smashed and she was personally threatened, but she didn’t stop. She told the Aurora committee that her goal was to establish the rule of law in Yemen, so that even al-Qaeda suspects could be detained and interrogated legally. I heard these gripping personal stories while serving as master of ceremonies for the awards presentation. I’ve performed this role since the awards began in 2016, as a way of supporting Aurora and the vision of its founders, Vartan Gregorian , the head of the Carnegie Corporation of New York; Noubar B. Afeyan , founder of a life-science company called Flagship Pioneering in Boston; and Ruben Vardanyan , a brilliant Russian Armenian businessman and philanthropist who had the original vision for Aurora. One reason the Aurora idea of “gratitude in action” appealed to me is that my father’s family is Armenian, and some of my relatives perished in the 1915 genocide. I liked the idea that Aurora would look outward to the world rather than inward, praising modern-day activists who save lives today in the way that Armenians were saved during their persecution. I don’t know how the judges made their decision among these three remarkable finalists. The selection panel included Nobel Peace Prize laureates Oscar Arias from Costa Rica, Shirin Ebadi from Iran and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia, and it was chaired by Lord Ara Darzi, a prominent British physician and humanitarian. Before a thousand people gathered in Freedom Square here on Saturday night, Aurora announced the selection of Dinnayi, the Yazidi activist. This was partly a recognition by Aurora that genocide continues in our world, even after the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews and the vow “Never again.” The previous three winners had also saved lives amid genocides — in Rwanda, Sudan and Myanmar. On a clear day in Yerevan, you can see the peak of Mount Ararat, where legend has it that Noah’s ark came to rest after the flood, and mankind had a second chance to repair the world. We all have small versions of that second chance every day to affirm our common humanity against hatred and injustice. Gratitude in action is a good slogan for a world that’s far too burdened with rage and intolerance. Read more from David Ignatius’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.


Super El Niño events may become more frequent as the climate warms

even Australia, where it can lead to precipitation extremes. Super El Niños, like the ones that occurred in 1982, 1998, and 2015-2016, can vault global temperatures to new heights, killing coral reefs worldwide and flooding parts of Africa and Asia while starving other parts of the globe of moisture. In short, they can lead to lasting extreme weather events affecting hundreds of millions and costing billions of dollars in damage. How El Niño will change in a warming world has been an elusive but important question for researchers, and there remain many uncertainties. However, the new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses statistical methods as well as eight different computer models to uncover previously unseen trends in El Niño occurrences to date. The study finds the key may lie in the increasingly mild ocean waters of the western tropical Pacific Ocean — an area known as the West Pacific Warm Pool. The West Pacific warming, the study’s authors propose, is altering trade winds across the equatorial tropical Pacific, triggering El Niño events that propagate from west to east with time. “I think the main point [of the study] is that El Niño’s onset processes has been changed since the 1970s,” said lead author Bin Wang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Hawaii, in an interview. One difference between the western Pacific El Niños and eastern Pacific events, Wang says, is that the western-based events can begin to affect global weather patterns during the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, rather than reserving the most significant impacts for the winter months. This can lead to long-lasting drought and heat waves in the Western United States, for example. The new study comes as scientists are seeking new ways of understanding and predicting climate variability in the tropical Pacific Ocean. “I think this is a major message ... what determines the future change in El Niño intensity is the temperature change in the West Pacific relative to Central Pacific,” Wang said. Study co-author Mark Cane of Columbia University, who is a pioneer in El Niño forecasting, says computer models have failed to accurately simulate changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean during the past few decades. He says if the West Pacific heats up faster than the East Pacific, it’ll cause more El Niño events to be centered toward the international date line, rather than farther east.


House committee grills Metro on ethics, safety

including the 2015 L’Enfant Plaza smoke incident, which resulted in the death of a passenger. Connolly praised Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld for leading the transit authority out of a period that included the unprecedented federal takeover of safety oversight for the rail system, and he noted the year-long SafeTrack maintenance program, a more than $110 million maintenance overhaul that included temporary station and line-segment shutdowns. “Some of these initiatives have not been popular,” Connolly said, “but these improvements coincide with increases in on-time performance, customer service ratings and ridership — trends we must strive to continue.” House members’ issues remain, however, citing a train crash this month that remains under investigation. The crash probe is the first major test of the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission, the new independent oversight agency. But among House members’ chief concerns was how Metro leaders were addressing the fallout from the handling of the ethics scandal involving Evans. Connolly dubbed Metro’s ethics code “a walking billboard for the ethically challenged.” Evans, a D.C. Council member (D-Ward 2), resigned from the Metro board in June after the panel’s ethics committee found he committed a violation by failing to disclose private consulting work for Colonial Parking. Colonial, the District’s largest parking company, was paying Evans’s consulting firm $50,000 a year. The investigation into Evans began in January 2018, just as the transit authority launched its Rush Hour Promise money-back guarantee program to win back riders and rebuild trust after SafeTrack. The probe, undertaken by the board’s Ethics Committee, was conducted in secret and its findings were not made public until The Washington Post published leaked findings of the investigation and elected leaders in Maryland and Virginia pressured the board to make the information public. At Tuesday’s hearing, Paul C. Smedberg, a former Alexandria City Council member who replaced Evans as Metro board chairman, told House members that the panel has revised its ethics code, clarifying disclosure requirements for board members. New guidelines also require board members to discuss ethics investigations or allegations in public and make written reports of findings and decisions accessible. The code also requires board members under investigation to recuse themselves from any official discussions or decisions related to their own case. Connolly, however, said the policy should go further. “I guess I want to be reassured that, God forbid, that if it be the chairman of the board, for the sake


We need a bar exam for politicians

can BS their way through will prove valuable in coming years. More important are the academic disciplines that proto-politicos need to avoid: Mathematics — One look at the federal budget would make a mathematician’s head explode. Logic — Putting a logical person in politics is like putting an astrologer in charge of the Hubble Space Telescope. Literature and English Composition — Have you read the memoirs by successful politicians after they’ve left office? They didn’t achieve preeminence by knowing how to recognize a competent ghostwriter. The most promising candidates in the making will concentrate on campus social life, especially in the dining hall. A vital skill in running for office — especially during presidential primaries — is the ability to eat six pancake breakfasts and five spaghetti dinners a day at town halls, volunteer fire departments, VFW Posts, Elk Lodges, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions Club, American Legion, Knights of Columbus and B’nai B’rith. Between meals, students can gain additional experience in practical politics by standing on a chair and reciting the same 20-minute piece of rote gibberish over and over, then taking questions from classmates. (One of which is sure to be “Why don’t you sit down and shut up?” — an existential query that anyone who wants to be a politician should ponder deeply.) And the advantages of the fraternity and sorority system should not be neglected. Some day, a secret handshake could be worth millions in campaign fundraising. An embarrassing pledge stunt photo could be even more valuable (as long as it’s of another pol at a rival frat). Then again, one shudders to think what a “political” “Animal House” would be like — “Toga! Toga! Toga!” except practicing to be a real Brutus, with real knives, in a real Senate. On the other hand, political students should avoid student politics. Student politics consist of either donning black ski masks and chasing guest lecturers off campus or finding big black Barry Goldwater horn-rims to wear to Young Americans for Freedom meetings. This is excellent training to be a lousy voter. But the point is to be a lousy politician. The country has a long history of lousy politicians. The United States wouldn’t be the nation that it is today without the likes of — to name just a few — Aaron Burr, Millard Fillmore, Warren Harding, Huey Long, Richard Nixon and James Michael Curley


As waters rise, so do concerns for sports teams along coast

$500 million, the team will have to dig down and build up. It will have to confront the site’s industrial past to plan for an uncertain future, the unpredictable realities of climate change dictating much of the project. “It’s obviously expensive,” Kaval said during a recent tour. “But these are investments that need to be made or these areas will not be usable both in the medium term and the long term.” Coastal cities across the country face a variety of threats, but no area is as vulnerable as South Florida, which is expected to see more storms, rising sea levels, increased flooding and storm surges. While that puts communities around Florida in serious jeopardy, it’s also a major threat to a bustling sports economy. The Florida Sports Foundation estimated in 2017 that the economic footprint of the sports industry in the state tops $57.4 billion and accounts for 580,000 jobs. Florida is home to 10 top-level professional sports teams, two international tennis tournaments and two NASCAR tracks. It hosts 15 baseball teams for spring training and is home to 26 minor league teams. Plus, there are 60 colleges and universities that field at least one sports program and some of the top high school athletic teams in the country. Nearly all of it could be in jeopardy. “It’s just a wonderful place to live,” said Harold Wanless, chair of the University of Miami’s department of geological sciences, “but we’ll be moving on some time this century. … We’re going to enjoy this place as long as we can. But it’s not a long-term option.” While most scientists agree that sea levels are rising, many climatologists — with a better understanding of how quickly ice sheets are melting in Greenland and Antarctica — now think earlier projections might have been too conservative. “I always feel like I’m the doctor who’s giving bad news to a patient,” said Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “But we are starting to understand the reasons and the processes more, and there is a much larger consensus that many of the previous estimates were underestimated.” Last month, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report noting that sea level rise is accelerating, that waters across the planet could rise by 3.6 feet by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase and that


The Technology 202: Mark Zuckerberg struggles to defend Facebook’s civil rights record

than 1,100 people in Bangladesh, just as Amazon was launching its own clothing retail strategy. Walmart spokeswoman Marilee McInnis told the Journal the company was looking into the items for sale directly by Walmart; Target removed its listing after the Journal flagged it but declined to comment. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. -- The White House praised Google for a breakthrough the company claims allows its quantum computing processor to complete a task that would take a traditional supercomputer about 10,000 years in just 200 seconds. The breakthrough, which Google calls “quantum supremacy,” could revolutionize medicine, artificial intelligence and encryption one day, my colleague Sarah Kaplan reports. The Trump administration has made a strong push for quantum research and private-public partnerships in order to compete with China. “This critical milestone verifying quantum computational supremacy shows America’s unparalleled innovation ecosystem at work,” Michael Kratsios, Chief Technology Officer of the United States said in a statement. “We will continue to embrace the strong public and private partnerships that produce incredible innovations and make America the world leader in technology,” Kratsios points out that the Google team built on federally funded research and used resources from the Department of Energy and NASA to verify its results. The White House signed a law dedicating $1.2 billion in quantum research funding over the next five years in December and recently launched an advisory committee to push U.S. quantum research forward. Ivanka Trump, daughter of President Trump and White House Advisor, tweeted about the breakthrough: IBM has alleged that Google’s claims of “quantum supremacy” are based on a false comparison and that it’s supercomputer, Summit would take 2.5 days not 10,000 years to complete the same equation. — More news from the public sector: — News from the private sector: Zuckerberg wasn’t the only big tech name on the Hill yesterday. Reddit co-founder and venture capitalist Alexis Ohanian was there with a group of “dadvocates” advocating for paid family leave. The group spent the day meeting with House and Senate lawmakers, Roll Call reported. Ohanian posted about the visit on Instagram: — More news about tech workforce and culture: — Tech news generating buzz around the Web: — Today — Coming up: Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg explained Facebook’s policy of not fact checking politicians’ speech in a House hearing on Oct. 23. 2020 candidate Beto O’Rourke makes his Washington Post TikTok debut:


A man died in a burning Tesla because its futuristic doors wouldn’t open, lawsuit alleges

court. Shortly after the February crash, a Tesla spokeswoman told the Florida Sun-Sentinel that “We are deeply saddened by this accident” but that “Tesla vehicles are engineered to be the safest cars in the world and Tesla drivers have driven more than 10 billion miles to date.” Awan’s death is one in a string of recent incidents that have been blamed on Tesla’s innovative technology. A lawsuit stemming from a May 2018 crash that killed two teens also blamed a battery fire for at least one of the deaths. (Grossman represents the car’s third passenger, who survived the accident after being thrown from the vehicle.) In April, surveillance footage from a Shanghai parking garage showed smoke billowing from a Model S moments before the car burst into flames. The widely shared video prompted Tesla to open an internal investigation. Several other suits have attributed deaths to Tesla’s “Autopilot” system, an automatic driver-assistance feature. “There are a number of these cases,” Grossman said. “What the hell is going on?” In Awan’s case and others, the carmaker has argued that high-speed crashes can result in fires whether the car is powered by gasoline or batteries. But Awan survived the crash, and he could have escaped the smoke and fire, too, Grossman said — if only the police officer who arrived on the scene could have opened the car’s doors. The lawsuit asserts that the features rendered the car “defective” and “dangerous” — the door handles compounding the problem of an “inherently unstable” battery. “Tesla failed to warn users about the scope and extent of the defective and unreasonably dangerous conditions of the Model S,” the complaint says. The Broward County autopsy report, obtained by The Washington Post, lists Awan’s cause of death as “inhalation of products of combustion with a contributory cause of death of thermal injuries.” The medical examiner who responded to the crash wrote that Awan “was not identifiable on scene.” His clothes and hair were burned and a yellow metal ring was found on his left ring finger. After the crash, and after firefighters extinguished the blaze, Awan’s Tesla was transported to a tow yard. Once there, it reignited and burned again. Read more: California’s power outage means problems for electric cars. Tesla says charge up, quick. Tesla and CEO Elon Musk violated federal labor law, judge rules Federal safety regulators scolded Musk over ‘misleading statements’ on Tesla safety


The Daily 202: Mexico isn’t paying for Trump’s border wall. But it is footing the bill for a historic surge of asylum seekers in the country.

Mexico deported an average of 727 migrants daily in the first six months of 2019, which totaled about 130,995 migrants. So far this year, Mexico has received over 54,000 asylum requests, up from 29,631 in 2018. “There’s never been this number of asylum requests,” said Adrián Meléndez Lozano, founder and director of Proyecto Habesha, Incidents sparked by the massive influx have engendered international coverage. Then came reports of Mexico’s National Guard blocking migrants from reaching the northern border, including a caravan of approximately 2,000 people from Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. The group was broken up and sent to a migrant camp in the Mexican southern border city of Tapachula. And this week, a Tijuana newspaper reported the director of a migrant shelter there accused the National Migration Institute and the National Guard of racially profiling Haitian and African migrants and asylum seekers, going as far as detaining some who had the right documentation. And the new stance could be fundamentally changing the fabric of Mexico. But the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to deal with the challenges they pose. “I’ve worked in the past in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Lebanon,” he said. “What I saw in those countries is similar to what I see here in Mexico." The U.N. refugee agency has increased its presence in Mexico to adapt to the influx of asylum seekers. “It is known that COMAR doesn’t have the staff to respond to this challenge,” Giusti said. “It was this way since even before this flow of asylum seekers began.” COMAR has also upped its presence in border towns and major cities across the country. But that’s still not enough, according to its director, Andrés Ramírez. Currently, Ramírez’s office is working to hire and train more staffers with the legal power to process and approve asylum requests. “... We need to have more help from the Mexican government," he said. “We’ve had minimal support this year, support that’s yet to be materialized because the administrative processes take time.” Ramírez doesn't know the precise causes for Mexico’s explosive growth in asylum applications “We know very well that the United States’s asylum approval rates, particularly for Central Americans, are very low. Mexico, on the other hand, has higher approval rates,” Ramírez said. “You don't need to be Einstein to conclude that, if Mexico, with its higher rates, rejected some of these asylum seekers, the


D.C. has places to see and be seen. These are 14 spots where you can escape.

of the first floor, the part of the building that’s farthest away from the busy street and affords the best view of the woods, and curl up with a book or your thoughts. — Angela Haupt Find it here: 3660 Alabama Ave. SE. Tucked between a Vietnamese restaurant and a trendy clothing store on Georgetown’s main drag, the ever-bustling M Street NW, is the oldest standing building in the District. The Old Stone House was built in 1765, and the National Park Service opened it to the public in 1960. There’s a charming English garden behind a white picket fence, and the almost always unoccupied benches offer an ideal place to pause. Find a spot in the back, where you’re surrounded by flowering plants and trees. It’s like relaxing in someone’s well-manicured — and deserted — backyard, worlds away from the buzzing city. — Angela Haupt Find it here: 3051 M St. NW. In the early 20th century, world leaders frequently traveled by ship. So when Washington’s Commission of Fine Arts approved plans for the Memorial Bridge in 1923, the proposal included a pier and a dramatic set of ceremonial marble steps leading to the Lincoln Memorial, perfect for welcoming a visiting head of state. The advent of air travel, however, rendered them useless for diplomatic arrivals. They were the site of summer concerts and firework displays from the 1930s through the ’60s, with musicians playing on an anchored barge. The scene is more prosaic now, with CrossFitters running up and down the 40 rows of steps in the morning, and traffic whizzing past at rush hour. But at the right time, these all-but-forgotten set of marble bleachers, with views of the river, Memorial Bridge and Arlington Cemetery, feel like a trip to a past Washington. — Fritz Hahn Find it here: Ohio Drive SW, between the Lincoln Memorial and Potomac River. Booth No. 1 at Martin’s Tavern is the most singular restaurant seat in Washington. The table has a hard wooden bench only on one side, meaning the diner (or two skinny diners) sitting at “the rumble seat” is essentially facing a worn, nicked-up partition. From this seat, tucked inside the front door of the Georgetown restaurant, the occupant has a view of the bar and the dining room, but the one-sided arrangement makes a strong, unspoken request to be left alone. Perhaps that’s why the booth was favored


E.U.’s Sakharov human rights prize awarded to jailed Uighur intellectual, probably angering China

BEIJING — The European Union on Thursday awarded its highest human rights prize to the imprisoned Uighur intellectual Ilham Tohti in a move that pointedly rebuked China’s treatment of the Muslim ethnic minority and may draw a reprisal from Beijing. Tohti, an economist who advocated greater autonomy for the Uighurs of Xinjiang in western China, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014 on separatism charges. He had spent years criticizing Chinese government restrictions and crackdowns on Uighur culture and calling for dialogue between his people and the Han ethnic majority in China. In a statement announcing the 2019 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, European Parliament President David Sassoli called Tohti “a voice of moderation and reconciliation” and noted that China has detained more than 1 million Uighurs in internment camps since 2017. “By awarding this prize, we strongly urge the Chinese government to release Tohti and we call for the respect of minority rights in China,” Sassoli said. The award is likely to anger the Chinese government, which has reacted furiously in the past to international institutions recognizing Chinese dissidents with human rights awards. China punished Norway with years-long, unofficial restrictions on salmon imports and visas after a Norwegian committee awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to the writer Liu Xiaobo, who died in Chinese government custody in 2017. In recent years, however, Chinese officials have appeared to tolerate a degree of criticism from Europe, a region they have sought to woo amid a withering trade war with the United States. Beijing has bristled at Western criticism of its sprawling internment network in western Xinjiang, which it defends as a cultural integration and job training campaign for Muslim Uighurs. The Chinese government has introduced policies in Xinjiang encouraging Uighur to intermarry with Han and study Chinese language and classics. Meanwhile, other prominent Uighur intellectuals such as Rahile Dawut, an expert on Uighur folklore at Xinjiang University, also have been detained under murky circumstances for years. Tohti’s daughter Jewher Ilham, who lives in Washington, said the award was a recognition of the plight facing Uighurs. “I hope this award will motivate other countries to speak up and take actions against the atrocities the Uighur people are facing today,” she said in a text message, adding that she hoped to travel to Strasbourg, France, to accept the award on her imprisoned father’s behalf. In a faxed comment, the Chinese Foreign Ministry


Transcript: The Opinions Forum

our society, by race or by ethnicity or by gender or by faith, that has exacerbated the issue. And there will be a day after. This administration, there will be a day after, and for those who would seek to lead our people, seek to help to govern this democracy, need to be thinking about what are the conditions in this country which, in part and in aggregation, created an environment where this kind of government could emerge. And if you don't like it, then we need to decompose why and begin, systematically, as I know many would like to, to begin to address those issues. MR. IGNATIUS: You were our commander in Afghanistan. I can remember visiting you in Kabul. GEN. ALLEN: Mm-hmm. MR. IGNATIUS: I think a lot of Americans ask themselves, as you must, how much longer do we do this? It's now 18 years that we've been involved in this war, and a lot of Americans think, "What have we gotten out of this?" We have active negotiations now with Zalmay Khalilzad speaking directly to the Taliban, and it's infuriated the President of Afghanistan-- GEN. ALLEN: Sure. MR. IGNATIUS: --Ashraf Ghani, who you know well-- GEN. ALLEN: I do. MR. IGNATIUS: --who feels that we are abandoning him. Are we abandoning him, and do you think the kind of deal that Ambassador Khalilzad is pursuing, keeps faith with the men and women who lost their lives there under your command and the command of your colleagues? GEN. ALLEN: David, not a day goes by that I don't think about those troops, those who lost their lives, the thousands who were physically wounded, the thousands who have suffered thereafter from PTSD; not a day goes by. So, for me, keeping faith with their sacrifice is very important to me, and the sacrifices of their families, Gold Star families, Blue Star families. And I can't tell you how long we need to be in Afghanistan. But the advances that have been made in Afghanistan, which is often not depicted, it's often not pointed to, the advances that have been made in the social environment, life expectancy, child mortality, access to health care, improvements in education, the earliest moments of democracy. All of those things were utterly absent on the 10th of September in 2001. In the aftermath of the attack, the United States and the global community went


Transcript: Chasing Cancer

would pay billions of dollars for this. If I create it, I'd win the Nobel Prize. Yet, it's very difficult to convince my patients to begin an exercise program. MS. Cunningham: How intense do you think the exercise should be? Are we talking about walking? Do you need to like run a marathon every day? DR. VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, this is age-dependent, but our sort of standard recommendation is 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week. MS. Cunningham: Okay. Let's talk about alcohol for a minute because younger people are drinking more. It's very popular to, you know, enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. Cocktails are very popular. But what should people know about alcohol consumption and risk of cancer? DR. McTIERNAN: Right, alcohol consumption has gone up. Part of it is people can afford it more, and part of it is social. But alcohol use does increase risk for several cancers--colorectal, breast, esophagus. You know, again, I could give a long list of things, but there's definitely association of increased risk. And alcohol is also listed as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization. So the goal there is even if somebody chooses to drink to really moderate how much their drinking. And the guidelines that most health organizations are saying: one drink a day for women, two for men. That's something where we don't have gender parity. Women tend to metabolize alcohol different than men and they can't handle as much. So that's why we're supposed to keep our intake lower than the guys. DR. VARSHAVSKI: And something I've noticed that some of my younger patients do is when we give a recommendation like this, where we say one drink a day or two drinks a day depending on your gender, they say, okay, well, that means seven a week or 14 a week. So I'll do that on the weekends. I'll have seven tonight or seven tomorrow. And that's binge drinking, and when we're doing that, we're actually increasing risks of not only cancer but other illnesses. And myself, as a family medicine provider, I think cancer foremost in a lot of these cases, but we also have to think about cardiac deaths, obesity, making bad choices when you're drinking alcohol. So really when you're overindulging in alcohol, there's a lot of bad effects that happen, and they happen in a dose-dependent relationship. So the more


Transcript: The Mueller Report

Russian officials and imposed sanctions on Russia in response to their interference in the 2016 election. The big question was: Did this question of sanctions arise in that call? Did Flynn make any‑‑say anything about sanctions or possibly lifting them to Kislyak? And right after that report surfaced, Sean Spicer, who was then the transition campaign spokesman and would later become White House spokesman, told reporters publicly, "Oh, no, it was just a phone call to talk about Christmas greetings and set up a presidential phone call between Putin and Trump, and the issue of sanctions never arose." And then the Vice President, Mike Pence, went on Sunday morning TV and said, "Yes, Flynn personally assured me the issue of sanctions never arose." Well, after that, me, a couple of other colleagues, Greg Miller and Adam Entous, started to get wind from our sources that, in fact‑‑that there is something not right about all of that reporting, and we were, as Ros mentioned, very interested in connections between Russian officials and the Trump administration, Trump campaign. So we were starting to run that down when we got‑‑Adam actually got a breakthrough. He went to coffee with a source, and he had his typed list of ten questions he wanted to put to his source, and a copy of the Logan Act, which was this 1799 law that has never been prosecuted but that criminalizes any unauthorized person negotiating with a foreign government that's in a dispute with the United States. And he had been told by his source that this was key, and the source he had coffee with said, "This is really the key to understanding this, and you should know that the statement by Mike Pence that the subject of expulsions of diplomats never came up with Kislyak is just flat out untrue." That was sort of the breakthrough moment that Adam understood, "Okay, Kislyak was being monitored by U.S. intelligence"‑‑he's a Russian diplomat, and intelligence, usually keeps tabs on what foreign diplomats are saying--and picked up phone calls between Kislyak and Flynn. And from there, we started to understand that he probably spoke about sanctions on the call, and we started to try to confirm that, Greg and I, from sources as well as Adam, and we were able to eventually get to the point where we did. Another colleague took it to Flynn in the White


The Supreme Court could fundamentally redefine the 2020 election

to retire during President Barack Obama’s tenure, Ginsburg has always been more distant from the Democratic Party than Thomas is from the GOP. Thomas was a political appointee in the Reagan administration. His wife, Ginni, is a conservative activist with close ties to key GOP figures; she has lobbied the Trump White House on conservative legal issues. These ties could put pressure on Thomas to step down, or another justice, perhaps conservative Samuel A. Alito Jr., could choose to leave. How would this impact the 2020 race? In recent times, the Supreme Court has been an electoral issue that has favored the Republicans. In 2016, Trump won voters who rated the Supreme Court as their No. 1 issue by a 60-40 margin. In 2018, the controversy over the Brett M. Kavanaugh nomination probably helped Republicans expand their majority in the Senate. Republicans might believe that a Supreme Court confirmation battle could work to their political advantage. But things may be different in 2020. History provides a guide. In late June 1992, Bill Clinton was in third place in the general election contest, trailing George H.W. Bush and independent Ross Perot. Then, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which stopped short of overruling Roe but cut back on constitutional protections for abortion rights. Both sides then “rushed to declare defeat,” warning voters that the next election would decide the future of the court’s abortion decisions. The Clinton campaign put abortion rights and the Supreme Court front and center. Just 30 days later — in part fueled by a galvanizing of pro-choice suburban support behind Clinton — Clinton took a lead in the race and never looked back. Less than a year later, Clinton named Ginsburg to replace longtime Roe opponent Byron White. Pro-choice advocates and Democratic senators need to work together to lay the groundwork for the kind of public opinion explosion that followed the Casey decision in 1992. They should be quietly approaching the swing votes in the Senate — Democrats and Republicans — seeking commitments to oppose action on any Supreme Court nomination late in the election year; if Merrick Garland’s nomination was too late in March 2016, a pick in late June clearly should be out of bounds. And they should emphasize the enormous risk of giving Trump four more years — and more Supreme Court picks: If that were to happen,


None of these 195 countries — the U.S. included — is fully prepared for a pandemic, report says

found that a number of middle- and low-income countries scored higher than some wealthy countries. Thailand, for example, is the only non-high-income country to rank in the top tier overall — sixth highest overall after the United States, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and Canada. And some very affluent countries, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where experts expected to find better preparedness funding, score below 50 out of a possible score of 100. The average score among all 195 countries is 40.2 The index is a project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a D.C.-based nonprofit organization, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. It was developed with guidance from an international panel of experts from 13 countries, with research by the Economist Intelligence Unit. More than 100 researchers spent a year collecting and validating publicly available data. Organizers hope the rankings will galvanize action amid an ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo that has killed more than 2,000 people. “Health security is a collective responsibility,” said Beth Cameron, vice president for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and one of the index’s leaders. “Countries need to know how prepared they are. And they need to know how prepared their neighbors are. Otherwise we’ll never improve.” Over the past two decades, decision-makers have focused only sporadically on health security despite concerns after the 2001 anthrax attacks, the emergence of viruses that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, and the looming threat of a pandemic caused by a novel strain of influenza, the report said. Since the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic killed more than 11,000 people, many countries — especially in Africa — have been more willing to report their level of preparedness, said Cameron, formerly senior director for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council in the Obama administration. “But in terms of financing to fill the gaps, not enough has been done,” she said. There needs to be a fundamental shift in understanding that biological catastrophes are a major peace and security risk, Cameron said. While health experts have long recognized those risks, finance ministers, heads of states and other decision-makers have not. Biological threats are catastrophic, yet responsibility for them is “buried in the bowels of health ministries around the world,” Cameron said. During the 2014 Ebola crisis, the Obama administration


Transcript: Taking Flight

civilian purposes. In the Chinese model, what that means is there are very narrow corridors that commercial aircraft need to operate within, and that represents a constraint for the growth of air services in China. Now, you know, that market forecast that I gave you a little bit earlier has an important qualifier around it: The qualifier is that it is a relatively unconstrained regulatory climate to see those levels of growth. And if China is going to be able to accommodate the growth that the market would dictate that they have--that they're going to have--they're going to need to deal with this question of managing the airspace. And that means that the government is going to need to find ways to accommodate more civilian traffic. And so, that's a tension that exists between industry, the private sector, if you will, and larger government interests. MS. CASEY: Are the rules outdated when it comes to accepted law, accepted rules of having a carrier in a foreign country that carries the flag of, let's say, a U.S. carrier going into China and doing puddle jumpers--doing place to place. MR. BOYD: That's not going to happen. MS. CASEY: Why not? MR. BOYD: I mean, well, you hear the stuff about, "Why don't we let foreign carriers fly in the United States. Then we'll get more service between Lansing and Chicago?" You think anybody's going to fly Lansing from Chicago--a foreign airline? Not in their right mind. The point is, we have-- MS. CASEY: And it may depend on the cost and legroom and everything else. If you think about what the consumer is looking at versus what you're looking at. MR. BOYD: Well, let's talk about the consumer. MS. CASEY: Yeah, please. MR. BOYD: The consumer has changed. Every communication channel has changed. You know, 40 years ago, if you had IBM Correcting Selectric, you were at the top of the technology pole. Today, not only are they gone, but the stuff they were putting out is gone. I don't have to type out a memo now to the accounting department to get the last month's numbers. They're already online. So, the whole communication channel has changed. I mean, like we were talking earlier, today, between Hartford and LaGuardia, that was a big market with an airline I worked with. No flights today because people aren't going. Albany-Boston used to have 40,000


Transcript: Taking Flight

stop at every whistle stop. And not only that, people--it's in markets where people won't use it, anyway. High-speed rail is a dog for the United States. MS. CASEY: So, that's Mike's opinion. Administrator, let's get you two cents on this. MR. HUERTA: Climate is an important issue and the industry is doing a lot, and I think needs to continue to do more. I talked-- MS. CASEY: Is that going to come because consumers are demanding it? Is it going to be-- MR. HUERTA: Oh, consumers want it. Consumers want it. There is no question that consumers want to see a reduction in our nation's carbon footprint, generally. And so, you know, the airlines, yes, have a powerful economic incentive to fly more fuel-efficient planes, but there is a lot of consumer support for things like cleaner fuels. There is a lot of consumer support for things that can be done in the operation of the aircraft: electric ground vehicles at airports or reductions in uses of single-use plastic aboard aircraft. And so, it is something that the whole industry is thinking a lot about, and it is something that our consumers expect of us and we need to respond to it. MS. CASEY: Before we go, as we look at a potential boom in regional market traffic around the world, what does the U.S. have to worry about? MR. BOYD: I don't think any--look, let's start with this: We have the best airport system in the world--the best airport system. MS. CASEY: By system, you mean infrastructure, you mean-- MR. BOYD: Infrastructure. Worland, Wyoming, Akron, Canton, all these places, no country in the world is as ready for the next generation of UAS and other things as the United States is. So, we have that infrastructure. Can it be improved? Yes. The Port Authority is doing it here in New York. We're doing it in Salt Lake City. It's being improved, so we are moving ahead with the kind of infrastructure we need to improve air transportation where it's going to need to be improved. MR. HUERTA: We need to, I think, increase the investment in infrastructure overall in order to support the growth of this industry, but also a different kind of infrastructure to support these new entrants, whether they be unmanned aircraft and others that are in the system. And I think that we need to


Transcript: Taking Flight

is created, how much of this is catch up and how much of it is looking forward to the future and saying we're going to need places to put drones, cargo planes, we're going to need places to bring in the high-speed rail coming from a place like New York City? MR. NANCE: Well, we have of course in the United States a lot of infrastructure problems, and this is what you're talking about, is rebuilding the bus while you're driving it. The bus is already there. We already know what is needed, just in an expansive way. But we also are going to have to look at where we're going to go with quadcopters, as that comes about; automated cars and trucks. A lot of stuff is going to be changing, and it depends on the public's willingness to get in something that may or may not have a pilot, as Michael Huerta said, may or may not be something that you're familiar with. So it's a combination. We're trying to increase the level of utilization of the infrastructure, decrease the impact on the passenger, et cetera, while we're trying to look for where do we go in the future. Are we going to have shopping centers, as now suddenly heliports? You know, we tried to do this with helicopters originally, and it didn't work for many, many different reasons. The idea that everybody was going to have an airplane in their garage, everybody was going to have a helicopter, there were going to be all sorts of city transportation elements, and the tiltrotor. So we're going to be seeing this change as we're going along. But building that basic infrastructure back up is very important. MS. CASEY: So what are some of the advantages in technology that you're trying to implement in these upgrades? MR. COTTON: Well, it's from the basic building blocks which have not existed. For example, we now have mobile-friendly websites where people can obtain not only their flight information but also understand, as they arrive at the airport, if they're going to face a wait at security, how long is that going to be. But what we're trying to do--and looking to the future--is to simply make that experience much more fluid. So very soon you will see biometric check-in at airlines. You'll see biometric security screening. The arrival at the gate, in terms


Transcript: Taking Flight

especially we finally realized the cause of accidents is about 92 percent human factors. And we have to know why we make mistakes. We have to know why these accidents occur. And then we have to understand, humans are never going to be perfect. And we're never going to get to zero defect. But if we build a system that can absorb the failures that we can't otherwise stop, then we can build a system that can get to zero. And that's what we have essentially done. I've been 27 years now working in medicine to bring those same lessons across, and they are still decades away from understanding that basic. But we mustn't forget this as we design new interfaces between the carbon-based human being--old Star Trek term, I'm sorry, I just love it-- MS. CASEY: I'm a fan. It's okay. MR. NANCE: The carbon-based human and the silicon based. I think one of the most brilliant constructs ever for that has been the heads-up display. But there are going to be other things in the future that will give us the capability of still being interactive with the machinery and with the computers. We use the best that we can bring to it as human beings and we use the best that we can bring to it as computers. Are we ever going to get to giant pilotless airliners? Not in the next 20 or 30 years in terms of public acceptance. But that's going to be the key. When you get down to one pilot being accepted to everybody in the back, then we're kind of like, for those of you who remember the old days where you had a fire extinguisher behind a pane of glass and a little hammer, it said in case of trouble break glass--you're not going to have a pilot behind a pane of glass with a hammer. But by the same token, we are going to get to the point where public acceptance is going to be tested, and that's 20 years in the future. MS. CASEY: Let's talk about that, that question of public acceptance. Director Cotton, as you think about the future and you prepare the infrastructure of these airports for what's to come, what is your sense of the public's willingness to accept everything from cargo planes without pilots to passenger planes without pilots? MR. COTTON: Well, I


Hold on to your honey buns: American vending machines are getting healthier

Roman says the industry is aware that tastes are changing. “The entire population would like to eat better food products — truck drivers want a chance to eat better food, millennials and Gen Z are leading the way. It’s the vending industry positioning itself for tomorrow’s consumers. It will make a meaningful change in the food culture and drive shifts in food production.” NAMA chief executive Carla Balakgie sees this next initiative as part of something that started in 2005 when the industry put in place a labeling program to identify “better-for-you” products. NAMA defines “better for you” as a food or beverage that meets at least two of the healthy food standards established by Partnership for a Healthier America, Center for Science in the Public Interest, American Heart Association, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or USDA’s Smart Snacks. The Partnership for a Healthier America will retain outside auditors to verify vending machine changes, says Roman. The new healthier options will replace sugar-based beverages with water and non-sugary beverages, and will include apples and bananas, fresh food prepared in USDA-certified kitchens, baked (not fried) chips, string cheese, nuts, dried fruits and sealed sandwiches, according to Josh Rosenberg, the former chief executive of Accent Foods in Pflugerville, Tex. Accent Foods operates 21,000 vending machines, 1,300 “micro-markets” (unattended convenience stores) and 4,000 pantry services operations. Rosenberg’s company moves 750,000 individual food and beverage units each day, in places like the House and Senate, the Smithsonian Institution, and Johns Hopkins Healthcare. Some of this push is because of innovations in equipment. Shelf-weighted, sensor-based coolers allow customers to walk up and swipe a credit card, opening the cooler, and through sensors and cameras the equipment determines what you bought and charges you accordingly. The operator is sent real-time restocking information electronically without anyone having to be on-site. “Tech has allowed us to reach beyond our boundaries,” Rosenberg says. “This is about investing in new technology, retrofitting existing equipment and product changes in existing equipment.” Vending machines, Balakgie says, are one of the lowest price-point parts of the food industry, so it’s important to maintain a range of options to avoid pricing out low-income people. For Rosenberg, this shift is an opportunity to compete with the world’s advanced vending machine countries. “We want to become Japan in unattended retail,” he says. That said, he doesn’t think the honey bun is going away anytime soon.


Britain’s Brexit drama has achieved new highs of absurdity

With plot twists worthy of a binge-deserving Netflix series, Britain’s Brexit drama has achieved new highs of entertainment and absurdity. The central character is the bleached and bumbling Conservative prime minister who is known, like a Brazilian soccer star, by a single name: Boris. He is unscrupulous, plagued by personal scandal and yet, to a large fraction of the viewers on the couch, irresistible. In the supporting role is the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, who is also frequently referred to by his first name. He is plodding, possessed of antique leftist notions and yet, by virtue of extreme fecklessness and unpredictability, useful for generating that gripping sense that anything might happen. Every day, surrogates and pundits appear on BBC Radio’s marvelous news shows. “Boris has promised this . . . ” “Jeremy has made it clear that . . . ” Cue hysterical giggles from listeners at home, who know that Boris Johnson’s promises are for naught and that Jeremy is never clear on anything. In Season One of the Brexit drama, a sensible prime minister, Theresa May, negotiated a Brexit deal that Boris and his buddies scuppered. It was a bad deal, to be sure, but the exquisite tragedy of May was that the deal was also the best one possible. By keeping Britain in the European customs union, it avoided introducing destabilizing border checks between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. By enabling just-in-time delivery of auto parts, the deal also avoided throttling Britain’s car industry. It was far less good than remaining in the European Union, but May’s deal was respectable. No matter. The Brexity right wing of the ruling Conservative Party wants out of the European customs union. They have a witty rationale for this: They wish to exit the deepest trade deal in the world so that they can negotiate less good ones. Up is down, more is less, and the Ministry of Truth does propaganda. Anyway, the right defenestrated May and installed Boris. Now, in Season Two, the plot thickens. Boris arrives in office with a bang. A neighbor records him and his lover in a shouting match. There are press stories about an apparent ex-lover. To silence his opponents, he hoodwinks the queen into illegally suspending Parliament, but then the courts slap him down. He loses his majority in Parliament. Even his brother-cum-campaign manager deserts him. But don’t count


Top Chinese official misses space conference amid U.S.-China tensions

Diplomatic tensions between China and the United States continued to climb Wednesday, when Chinese officials accused the United States of having “weaponized” the visa process after a top Chinese official was unable attend a major international space conference being held in Washington. A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry told reporters in Beijing that Wu Yanhua, the deputy head of the China National Space Administration, was not able to obtain a visa, and therefore was not able to attend, according to the Associated Press. In a statement released Thursday morning, State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said the U.S. “rejects the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s unfounded and baseless characterization of U.S. visa policies toward China. We cannot discuss individual visa cases since visa records are confidential under U.S. law, but we can confirm that the Chinese delegation is in attendance at the conference.” In an interview with The Washington Post, Vincent Boles, the co-chair of the local organizing committee for the conference, known as the International Astronautical Congress, said organizers had been working with officials from China for two years to make sure their officials would be able to navigate the various bureaucracies needed to receive the proper clearances. Working with the U.S. State Department, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), which also helped organize the conference, reached out to Chinese officials very early in the process, asking them to submit the names of officials who would want to attend, said Daniel Dumbacher, the institute’s executive director. Knowing how difficult gaining the visas would be, the group followed up repeatedly, but China did not forward the first group of names until late spring, some six months after the AIAA local organizing committee had asked for them. And the last group of names did not arrive until just a few weeks ago, Dumbacher said. Despite the delays, the organizers said that a top Chinese official, Tian Yulong, and a delegation of five staff members were granted visas and planned to arrive for the conference on Wednesday, according to an email reviewed by The Post that was sent to conference organizers by Chinese officials. “We work very hard to ensure the international involvement, participation and flavor of the International Astronautical Congress,” Dumbacher said. The group “took these requests very seriously. We took the challenge very seriously." Boles said that the delay was caused when the conference received required paperwork “extremely, extremely late.


Boris Johnson is discovering that Brexit only works when it’s a fantasy

LONDON — Brexit is a rose with a lot of thorns. It offers politicians a precious resource: the ability to claim they are representing the will of the people, as expressed in the 2016 referendum. But it carries a price. It is almost impossible to deliver while keeping the whole disparate coalition of people who support it on board. Whenever it moves from rhetoric to policy reality, it pricks their fingers. Boris Johnson is currently discovering this firsthand. He managed this month, despite rock-bottom expectations, to secure a new deal with the European Union — one that allows Britain to distance itself from the continent and seek trade deals elsewhere, especially with the United States. It would slice the United Kingdom’s customs territory in two, leaving Northern Ireland behind in a customs ecosystem with Europe. That meant Johnson lost the support of the Democratic Unionist Party, the fiercely pro-Union, fire-and-brimstone Northern Irish party that had put the Conservatives in power after they failed to win a majority in Parliament on their own. There were other advantages, though: He could persuade the hard-liners in his own party, who had opposed all previous incarnations of Brexit as insufficiently radical, to go along. So with a deal in hand, Johnson unleashed the full rhetoric of the “will of the people” against his opponents. To oppose the deal, raise concerns about it or even ask for it to be properly scrutinized was to undermine the electorate. To support him was to support Britain. This is the populist register in which the Brexit debate is conducted. And it is still punishingly effective against many members of Parliament, even three and a half years after the referendum. With an Oct. 31 deadline looming as a threat — that Britain would leave Europe with no deal if Parliament did not approve Johnson’s plan — Johnson expected to get his way. Instead, Parliament rebelled again. Johnson wanted them to vote on just a one paragraph motion saying they would accept his plan. Instead, they demanded to see the full legislation of what it entailed. And this was the nightmare scenario for Johnson: Not only would it delay matters, it would also force him to reveal the details of his plans. Johnson is not really a details man. When he was foreign secretary, he inadvertently reinforced the Iranian case against an imprisoned British citizen, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, telling a Commons


‘Premarital exams’ for women are popular in Utah. Some experts say they send a bad message.

problematic.” University of Utah Health has revised its main website page about premarital exams since Gunter published her blog post. The page now calls the consultations “sexual health visits” and states that the health-care system does not recommend that women take antibiotics before sexual activity if they do not have an infection. The information about dilators has been removed. Officials and doctors at University of Utah Health declined an interview request from The Post but said in a statement that staff members seek to offer relevant, accessibly worded medical information to a variety of communities with different health-care needs. “Our objective in serving the segment of our patient population that requests ’premarital visits’ is to inform and educate — and in so doing build lifelong relationships as their trusted health care partner,” Kathy Wilets, a spokeswoman for the health-care system, said in the statement. Wilets told the Salt Lake Tribune that although the medical term for the consultation is “sexual health visit,” the health-care system started using the phrase “premarital exam” after noticing that women were using that name to ask for the consultations and search for them online. The website pages about premarital exams were targeted toward “heterosexual women who have remained abstinent from sexual activity, are about to get married and who have questions/concerns about their first sexual experience,” Wilets told the Tribune. The health-care system plans to update its website soon to include information about sexual health visits for men after seeing an increased interest in the topic, Wilets said. Tiffany Weber, an OB/GYN at University of Utah Hospital, told the Tribune that many women who seek premarital exams “have misinformation and misconceptions.” The consultations are meant to ensure the patients’ safety as they begin having sex, she said. The patients only need physical exams if they have particular worries or symptoms, Weber told the Tribune. She said the health-care system’s website previously mentioned dilators and getting prescriptions for antibiotics in case of UTIs even though they are “actually not evidence-based procedures” because patients frequently wanted to talk about them. Read more: Schools now letting students stay home sick for mental-health days Special garments ease an agonizing ailment for women. But insurance may not pay. New research on the menstrual cycle and athletic performance helps women compete Women are more than twice as likely as men to suffer from PTSD. Studies are underway to find out why.


Tired of long lines? A Canadian grocery chain debuts Smart Carts with self-checkout.

Enduring a lengthy checkout line is a potential annoyance each time you set foot inside a busy grocery store. That’s particularly true during the evening rush, when shoppers descend on grocery stores for last-minute dinner items. Instead of opening more aisles and hiring more cashiers, a Canadian grocery chain says its introducing an innovative pilot program for helping customers bypass lines altogether. On Wednesday, Sobeys — a Nova Scotia-based grocery chain — unveiled Smart Carts, a fleet of 10 intelligent grocery carts that scan and weigh products as customers place them in the cart. The carts feature touch screens that resemble the kind you might find in a self-checkout line. The screens display a running tally of purchases while customers shop and allow them to pay on the spot once they’re finished shopping, according to the company. In a video released by Sobeys, a customer scans and places food items in grocery bags inside the cart instead of going to a checkout line and having purchases bagged by a human employee — a process that Sobeys labels the "greatest point of customer friction.” “While products and customer eating habits have evolved, the in-store grocery shopping experience has remained relatively static for the last 100 years,” Mathieu Lacoursiere, Sobeys vice president for retail support, said in a company statement. “This is a unique way for us to test innovative new technologies aimed at enhancing the customer shopping experience and learn how best to make it faster and easier. "The carts will also give our in-store teammates more time to interact with customers and answer questions about food and new products,” the statement added. In recent years, grocery stores have become an unlikely hotbed of tech innovation. Though the industry’s business model had changed little over the past century, as Lacoursiere noted, a customer-driven demand for convenience is forcing the industry to adapt to remain competitive. Now, as the industry finds itself in the midst of a technological upheaval, experts say, local grocery chains are suddenly providing the public with a glimpse of a future far beyond self-service kiosks and online shopping. Over the past year, Kroger, the nation’s largest grocer, has introduced a fleet of autonomous delivery vehicles, and Giant Food Stores has rolled out a series of robotic assistants named “Marty” that scan shelves and identify hazardous spills. Last year, Kroger introduced a system called “Scan, Bag, Go” that allows


findings to the cloud and setting a supply-chain in motion. For much of this year, Walmart customers have been able to order groceries using a Google assistant, joining Amazon-owned Whole Foods, which partnered with Amazon’s Echo last year so that customers can shop using voice commands. By next year, Walmart — which also sells $200 billion worth of groceries each year and remains the world’s largest private employer, with 1.5 million Americans on its payroll — plans to have autonomous floor-scrubbing robots at nearly half of its 4,700 U.S. stores, part of a major effort to upgrade its business by harnessing the convenience of intelligent machines. Sobeys owns or franchises more than 1,500 grocery stores across Canada, including stores in the Safeway, IGA, FreshCo, Foodland and Thrifty Foods chains, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Sobeys says their Smart Carts — which were developed by Caper, a retail technology start-up based in New York City — will only grow more intelligent with use. The grocery chain says the carts are equipped with AI and machine learning technology. As the carts improve, the company says, the carts’ screens will be able to help customers navigate grocery stores, complete shopping lists and make product suggestions for recipes. The Smart Cart is already equipped with multiple high-resolution cameras. Sobeys says those cameras — in conjunction with the cart’s sensitive scale — will eventually make it possible for customers to toss items into their cart without having to enter information or scan bar codes at all. Lacoursiere told the CBC that the new technology is not being introduced to replace human workers, a promise many grocery chains have made in recent months as new innovations arrive. “We’re actually able to free up some employees … to be on the floor answering customers’ questions, talking about the food, helping them choose a recipe or a product,” he said. “It’s not about cutting.” Early customer reviews have been positive, according to the CBC. “It’s better than the self-checkout,” Stuart Eddy told the outlet after adding a bag of bulk almonds to his smart cart full of groceries. “It’s fantastic.” MORE READING: Amazon’s autonomous robots have started delivering packages in a new location: Southern California Domino’s will start delivering pizzas via an autonomous robot this fall Istanbul’s new airport is one of the world’s largest. A fleet of humanoid robots is helping passengers find their way around.


Enough is enough. Europe needs to show Britain the door.

squander any more time and energy on a country that has its own political priorities. The U.K. is a distraction. If the British want to focus on defining their post-European future — let them. Europe has already shown ample patience and goodwill: The U.K. was originally supposed to leave on March 29 and has been since granted two extensions. At British request, the withdrawal agreement was renegotiated. The clock has run out. As for the British, it’s already clear that Brexit entails politically brutal choices. Faced with unpalatable alternatives, British parliamentarians will always prefer to kick the can down the road rather than settling on a clear plan forward. But that’s their problem, not the E.U.’s. There is no “right” way of leaving — all the options involve trade-offs. Ending free movement means ending U.K. access to the single European market. Scrapping E.U. standards means erecting new trade barriers between the U.K. and the continent. Pursuing an independent trade policy means placing a customs border somewhere: either between Ireland and Northern Ireland, or between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The result is a circular debate that has brought policymaking to a standstill. In a Brexit-less world, the ruling British Conservative Party would be pursuing pro-market reforms, balancing the budget, and adapting foreign and defense policy to the world’s changing geopolitics. But as things stand now, the British political class continues to be preoccupied with one thing only: Brexit. Anguished confrontation over the terms of Britain’s departure is exacerbating political polarization, fanning a new culture war that keeps bringing up the temperature in British politics up to dangerous levels. This has to stop. Johnson has many flaws, not least his penchant for shameless demagoguery, but his slogan about the need to “get Brexit done” carries a dose of truth. It is indeed better to endure a painful end than pain without end. Without a clear break, it is hard to see how the current high temperature in British politics can come down. An early election will not solve the problem since both major parties are internally divided over Brexit. A repetition of the plebiscite would likely pour more gasoline on the fire. And if a second referendum contradicts the result of the first one, it will give birth to a myth of a stab in the back of the British electorate and ensure that the Brexit betrayal is still debated 10


Freedom of the press in Maryland is challenged by judges skirting state rules

Andrea Conte, a writer, researcher and filmmaker, is suing the Charles County Circuit Court of Maryland for denying a request to access copies of courtroom recordings and for denying a request to listen to courtroom recordings. When Judge W. Michel Pierson ordered an illegal shutdown on public access to Baltimore courtroom recordings earlier this year, the strike-down of his order exposed deeper problems in Maryland law that have restricted the freedom of the press for decades. Public access to copies of courtroom recordings is state-mandated under Maryland Rule 16-504(h). Trial-court recordings are vivid historical records that allow public hearings to be relived, as they occurred. Their use in podcasts and documentaries has been central to the changing cultural landscape of how stories about law and the justice system are created, communicated and consumed by the public. Recordings from Baltimore criminal cases have been featured in some of the most popular podcasts ever, such as “Serial” and “Undisclosed.” These shows are in many ways responsible for the shift toward “serialized” and series-based formats in radio, film and television and for the global revival of the investigative “true crime” genre. What is not commonly known is that when news outlets, documentaries or podcasts use Maryland courtroom recordings in their storytelling, their creators are violating Section 1-201 of Maryland’s Code of Criminal Procedure and could be held in contempt of court. In 1981, the Maryland General Assembly enacted legislation to ban the “recording or broadcasting” of any criminal court proceeding. Although the ban remains in effect, the state has never enforced it. The penalty for violating the ban, to be “held in contempt of court,” has remained undefined for nearly 40 years. With a federal lawsuit now challenging the Maryland broadcast ban for the first time, multiple incidents of media outlets brushing up against the ban were documented in the lead-up to Pierson’s unlawful court order. In 2016, Pierson publicly considered the producers of “Serial” to be in contempt of court for playing audio of criminal trial proceedings on their show; in March of this year, Pierson sent a letter to HBO to demand it cease the broadcast of audio/video footage of Maryland criminal trials in its documentary “The Case Against Adnan Syed”; and in April, Pierson was notified that journalist Amelia McDonell-Parry planned to air courtroom audio recordings for an upcoming season of “Undisclosed,” citing First Amendment protections. On April 24, two


Bravo for Google’s ‘quantum supremacy.’ Here’s what needs to happen next.

the cloud. The more machines we can make available to users, the better the opportunity to catalyze a burgeoning U.S. industry around this technology. Finally, because quantum computing will eventually have staggering capabilities, the United States must ensure that it maintains another kind of quantum supremacy: over rival nations. The United States has made significant efforts in the past two years to help advance quantum computing through new legislation and funding. The National Quantum Initiative, signed into law late last year, provides more than $1.2 billion to advance the research and development of quantum technologies. And the appointment on Tuesday of two quantum computing leaders to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology signals how important this technology is to national security and economic growth. The pace of progress in quantum computing will depend on improvements in the manufacturability and reliability of quantum chips and other specialized components. Many lessons can be adapted from the existing semiconductor industry, but quantum technologies present fresh challenges that the industry is moving steadily to address. But government has a role to play in advancing the technology. Policy should aim at ensuring U.S. companies have every possible advantage to remain global leaders in quantum computing while also protecting the technology from global threats and competitors. One way to achieve this is to separate customer access for computing — which can be delivered with little risk over the cloud — from access to core technology and components, whose export is best limited to close partners and allies. This will ensure that the international scientific collaborations that have brought us to this point continue to flourish while also translating U.S.-led scientific breakthroughs into economic leadership. The physicists who formulated quantum mechanics in the early 20th century could never have predicted what it would lead to. Similarly, the scientific achievement of quantum supremacy and the ability to compute with quantum states opens a new frontier in computing technology. Even those of us working in the quantum computing industry cannot imagine what innovations and insights lie ahead. As with the development of the transistor and integrated circuit in the 20th century, quantum computing might well give rise to a vibrant industry and become a critical driver of economic development in the 21st century. The goal in the United States should be to make it happen here first. Google’s researchers have made a good start. Read more:


The 44th annual Marine Corps Marathon is Sunday. Here’s what you need to know.

The 44th annual Marine Corps Marathon, one of the biggest street events in the Washington region, is Sunday and whether you plan to participate or watch, there are lots of things you need to be aware of — from street closings to parking restrictions to Metro hours. About 30,000 people will participate in 26.2-mile race that starts and ends in Arlington and takes runners across the Potomac River into Georgetown, Rock Creek Park and the Mall area. Thousands of supporters are expected to cheer them on from the sidewalks. The event will make driving and parking challenging Sunday. Anyone who drives near or within the marathon’s perimeter Sunday should consider other alternative transportation or routes. Metro will open two hours early to accommodate marathon crowds, and it will have extra trains. See more details below. Runners and spectators should prepare for some unsettled weather Sunday morning. The Capital Weather Gang is forecasting temperatures in mid-50s to start the race, and cloudy conditions with intermittent showers, with temperatures rising into the 60s by mid-to-late morning. Keep an eye out for a more detailed forecast closer to Sunday. This map will help you explore the 2019 Marine Corps Marathon racecourse. Keep reading for more travel tips and a full list of the street closings. The marathon officially starts at 7:45 a.m. The start line is on Route 110 in Arlington County between the Pentagon and Arlington Memorial Drive. The course remains open until 3 p.m. The Finish Festival, where runners meet up with their supporters, is in the area around Wilson Boulevard and North Lynn Street in Rosslyn. This is close to the Rosslyn Metro station. The Finish Festival ends around 4 p.m. Organizers have added an ultramarathon this year, the MCM 50K, for racers willing to complete an extra 4.87 miles on top of the marathon’s 26.2. Ultramarathoners will start at 7:30 a.m. and will cover the entire MCM course with the addition of a 4.87-mile diversion at mile 4.5. Other events include a 10K that will take participants from the National Gallery of Art to the Marine Corps War Memorial. There also is a 1-mile “just-for-fun running challenge” that attracts about 3,600 children each year. The Kids Run on Saturday is held at the Pentagon parking lot. A packet pickup and health and fitness expo will be held at the Gaylord National Resort starting Friday. This will add traffic to


White House delayed Ukraine trade decision in August, a signal that U.S. suspension of cooperation extended beyond security funds

The White House’s trade representative in late August withdrew a recommendation to restore some of Ukraine’s trade privileges after John Bolton, then-national security adviser, warned him that President Trump probably would oppose any action that benefited the government in Kyiv, according to people briefed on the matter. The warning to Robert E. Lighthizer came as Trump was withholding $391 million in military aid and security assistance from Ukraine. House Democrats have launched an impeachment inquiry into allegations that the president did so to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the business activities of former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter. As part of the inquiry, lawmakers are closely scrutinizing the White House’s actions between July and September. The August exchange between Bolton and Lighthizer over the trade matter represents the first indication that the administration’s suspension of assistance to Ukraine extended beyond the congressionally authorized military aid and security assistance to other government programs. It is not clear whether Trump directed Bolton to intervene over Ukraine’s trade privileges or was even aware of the discussion. “It was pulled back shortly before it was going to POTUS’s desk,” one administration official said, referring to the Ukraine paperwork and using an acronym for the U.S. president. “Bolton intervened with Lighthizer to block it.” In response to questions from The Washington Post, another administration official said the presidential proclamation about the trade status of Ukraine and two other nations had been held up for several weeks in the office of the White House staff secretary as part of a routine “country review process.” One former U.S. government official said the president wanted “the total elimination” of the global trade program at issue. Known as the “generalized system of preferences,” or GSP, it allows 120 countries to ship roughly 1.5 percent of total U.S. imports without paying tariffs. But in March 2018, Trump signed legislation reauthorizing the program through 2020, and Lighthizer in recent weeks has been negotiating with India over restoring its GSP status, which was suspended in March. Bolton resigned Sept. 10, one day before the administration released the military aid under pressure from lawmakers. In early October, nearly two months after withdrawing the initial effort to restore Ukraine’s trade privileges, Lighthizer sent the necessary paperwork to the White House for a second time. He later withdrew it again, on Oct. 17, amid an intensifying storm over the president’s policy toward


Long before the World Series, this ragtag group of D.C. property owners was evicted to make way for baseball

near bankruptcy in the 1990s, it was only just reaching the outer edges of this isolated pocket when then-Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and Major League Baseball announced a deal in 2004 to bring baseball back to Washington more than three decades after the Senators departed. Flush against South Capitol Street SW, a five-minute drive from the Capitol dome on the west edge of the Navy Yard, the 21-acre tract in Southeast featured the asphalt plant, a trash-transfer station, car repair shops, warehouses, towing operations, a stonework restoration studio, and several adult nightclubs — a mix of businesses that, due to zoning regulations, had virtually no other place to go. For years, the occupants of this urban underbelly operated in a part of town where city services were scant and crime was rampant. Trash piled up in vacant lots. Drug dealers and prostitutes roamed the streets. In 1998, Kenneth Wyban, an Army officer at Fort McNair, a few blocks west, bought a home dating to before the Civil War, with six fireplaces and views of the Capitol, near the intersection of N and Half streets — now the center field entrance to Nationals Park. Determined to renovate the property into a bed-and-breakfast, Wyban was confident that redevelopment was on the way, having noticed construction cranes nearby. It wasn’t happening quickly, however. He recalls discovering syringes in his yard and a car riddled with bullet holes parked out front. “Let’s face it — it was not a great neighborhood,” said Wyban, the only homeowner who lived on the site. Now 70, Wyban lives in Waite Hill, Ohio, where he relocated to take care of his ailing father. He still keeps two bricks he salvaged before his historic house was bulldozed. If the area was one that most in the city avoided, those who arrived each day to ply their trade sought to create a sense of community. Calvin Reid, the owner of Atlas Manufacturing, a steel fabrication firm that leased office space at 1339 Half Street SE, built a fence around the property to prevent break-ins. But he fondly recalled a man named Alton Majette, who lived in a rental unit on N Street and tended to an unlikely “garden of love” in an empty lot, lavishing his neighbors with bags of collard greens, lima beans and yellow squash. Across from Reid’s offices, Patricia Ghiglino and Reinaldo Lopez, a married couple,


The U.S. has stopped Ebola before. But it may never repeat that success.

epicenter of the current outbreak, the twin cities of Katwa and Butembo, for fear of their safety. The State Department won’t allow American first responders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the U.S. Agency for International Development into the area, for the same reason. The region is completely beyond Washington’s reach. This time, in other words, the U.S. Army is not coming. And it may never ride to the rescue again. The Liberia triumph seemed like a template on which future responses to public health emergencies could be based. In truth, it was an outlier. “We were able to divide the load between three Western countries. That’s like a coalition-building fantasy game,” Ron Klain, the White House Ebola coordinator who oversaw America’s response, told me when I reported a book about the event. “That’s never going to happen again. The disease broke out in one of the few countries on Earth where the arrival of 3,000 U.S. troops was seen as a happy event, was seen as a blessed event.” The outbreak today offers a better look at global pandemics to come — ones that begin in regions where international public health workers are unable to move freely to contain the spread of a virus, where the U.S. Army would not be welcomed with open arms. “The most likely places where this is going to happen are not places where you can send the 101st Airborne without fighting their way in,” Klain says. Conflict zones around the world have become the loci of some of the deadliest outbreaks we face today. In Yemen, a vicious civil war has led to a widespread cholera epidemic that is infecting about 10,000 people every week, according to World Health Organization statistics. The proxy battle there, between the nation’s Saudi-backed government and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, makes the failed state inhospitable to all but the bravest emergency medical workers. Hundreds of people in Myanmar have been afflicted with schistosomiasis, an acute disease caused by parasitic worms in freshwater snails. Last year, thousands of members of the ethnic Rohingya minority were struck by diphtheria. Western governments have spent recent years criticizing ethnic-cleansing efforts against this group, making aid workers from developed nations unwelcome. Myanmar’s government has blocked international aid workers and humanitarian assistance from accessing Rohingya refugee camps. Polio, a disease that once was near eradication, has broken out this year


China has arrested yet another activist for speaking up

village near Shanghai. She was beaten up by thugs and police, and sent to a labor camp for 15 months. Undeterred, in 2008 she began a broader advocacy for the rights of grass-roots activists and citizen petitioners. She has been a thorn in the side of the ruling party-state and on March 20 was detained. Ms. Chen has been held incommunicado ever since and is being charged with “subversion of state power,” which can lead to a long prison term. This is yet another in a string of cases since China began six years ago to silence the lawyers and activists who support the struggling human rights movement. It is further evidence that China’s system of justice is a fiction — laws and courts exist, but, at the end of the day, they serve the whims of the party-state above all and offer little protection to the individual. Ms. Chen, 49, is a protege of Cao Shunli, also a well-known activist. According to Amnesty International, they worked together seeking grass-roots participation in drafting China’s report for the U.N. Human Rights Council’s periodic review in 2013. Ms. Chen and Ms. Cao staged a sit-in along with other activists outside the foreign ministry in Beijing. Then, in September of that year, China prohibited them from leaving China to attend a human rights training session in Switzerland. Ms. Chen was released after a brief detention, but Ms. Cao died from organ failure in a hospital on March 14, 2014, after six months in Chinese detention. Ever since, Ms. Chen has been under surveillance and banned from traveling abroad. This year, Ms. Chen wrote an essay to mark the fifth anniversary of Ms. Cao’s death. She was soon detained and disappeared into the Chinese penal system. She was later charged with subversion and remains locked up in a Shanghai detention center. In an open letter, several human rights groups declared Monday that Ms. Chen has been denied the right to a fair trial, not allowed to meet with the lawyer of her choice, and it is “unclear if she has received any legal counsel in custody.” Ms. Chen should be released and the charges dropped. Helping people claim their rights and raise their voices, to express themselves freely and to protest is not a crime or subversive, except in a system that puts the party on a pillar and the people under a boot.


The White House didn’t like my agency’s research. So it sent us to Missouri.

I joined the Economic Research Service in 2016. I wanted to use my academic training to do something in the public interest, but I didn’t really expect to get involved in agriculture. Then I got absorbed in the subject: Humanity’s dependence on the environment is made explicit through our food systems; without the right combination of weather, soil and labor, nobody eats. Most people don’t need to think frequently, or ever, about the economics of honeybee pollination routes or the cost of the Federal Crop Insurance Program. But if they eat almonds (which are pollinated by bees) or pay taxes (which subsidize farm insurance), they need experts to make sure that food systems work efficiently and public funds are spent effectively. At ERS, we studied all aspects of food production, occupying an obscure but important niche: Many of our research topics wouldn’t make for an exciting academic tenure file but had huge implications for policy. Out of the blue, in August 2018, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced that my agency and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture would relocate from Washington to some yet-to-be-determined location. He claimed this would lower costs and bring us closer to “stakeholders.” That stated justification was a fig leaf for the administration’s true intentions. We didn’t need to sit next to a cornfield to analyze agricultural policy, and Perdue knew that. He wanted researchers to quit their jobs. The administration had demonstrated its hostility to our agency. Their proposed 2020 budget would halve our staff from 329 to 160, slashing “low priority research” areas like food assistance programs and conservation efforts. The department had started requiring us to add disclaimers to our scientific journal publications, even those that passed peer review, undermining the authority of our own work. I didn’t take the threat seriously at first: Federal relocations tend to be incredibly complicated, and I basically believed that the Trump administration’s incompetence would get in the way of its malevolence. But apparently, the political appointees in the Office of the Secretary were motivated. They didn’t like it when our research was at odds with the administration’s narratives. (The Agriculture Department wanted to restrict access to food stamps, for example. According to our models, however, food assistance programs were often a positive multiplier for local economies.) They certainly didn’t appreciate my colleagues’ paper showing that the 2017 tax cut would give the biggest benefits to