When commemorating D-Day, don’t forget the dark side of American war efforts

around the world today in places like Okinawa. Rape is not ancillary to war, but inherent to war-making. After American troops landed on the shores of Normandy, complaints of rape committed by GIs began to spike. They soared again in the spring of 1945 as the Allies crossed the Rhine and advanced into Germany. Omar Bradley, commander of the largest group of armies on the continent, warned Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower in April 1945 that “certain conditions of looting, pillaging, wanton destruction, rape and other crimes” were widespread in enemy territory. Alexander Patch, commander of the Seventh Army, wrote that “the situation is one in which it is believed emergency action is required.” A postwar Army report confirmed these concerns: The situation was “ripe for violent sex crimes,” it concluded, “and the avalanche came.” But instead of bringing soldiers to trial, most rape cases concerning white soldiers were swept under the rug, dismissed as a consequence of the war’s chaos. When one combat soldier was convicted of raping three women in the midst of the battle for the German city of Dessau in 1945, army legal advisers referred him for psychiatric testing. They believed that the only explanation for the “extraordinary lasciviousness” of the soldier’s “violent and lustful course of conduct” was that he had lost his mind. The incident, the military judges stressed, was decidedly “not the case of a soldier going out to have intercourse to ‘get it out of his system,’ " the usual explanation, and justification, for white soldiers’ sexual violence. But black soldiers were not afforded the same benefit of the doubt. Military authorities described a rape case concerning black soldiers as “a scene of brutal and lustful savagery which found few equals in the whole annals of American legal history.” This was reflective of broader problems. Neither military courts nor disciplinary policy were designed to cope with the volume of cases that arose. Legal and police institutions exhibited a level of disorganization that reflected shortsightedness and crippling biases. Guided by the belief that black soldiers were more prone to crime, especially sexual crime, military police arrested black soldiers for minor infractions while they were unable or unwilling to take action in cases that involved white soldiers. This was especially true for elite troops, whose privileged status often conferred a certain bravado and promoted cultures of impunity. When soldiers of the renowned 101st


Why it’s time to bring back the citizen-soldiers who won World War II

the Pennsylvania countryside and spend the remainder of my life in quiet and peace.” Citizen-soldiers such as Winters are vanishing from our military. When the Cold War opened, many believed that a new era of war-fighting had dawned. A highly volatile international scene with the possibility of war at any moment, coupled with a more interventionist America required easily deployable, trained troops. Then the Vietnam War became so unpopular that scrapping conscription for an all-volunteer army became a political necessity. While politicians have occasionally raised resurrecting the draft in recent decades, it’s usually more an attempt to spotlight the uneven burdens of defending America, not a proposal that many Americans take seriously. Killing for country is now primarily the job of professionals and volunteers. A recent study by the Rand Corp. explains some of the consequences of this shift. Civilians exercise less control over the military because so few now serve. The militia ideal of the founding era, or even the citizen-soldiers who won the world wars, has disappeared. As a result, military service is less obligatory, less universal and less civilian than it has ever been in U.S. history. It would appear we have abandoned the constitutional vision that defined who we are and served us so well for over two centuries. Historically, republics suffer when they do not expect their citizens to fight or cannot find enough of them willing to do so, which has been a recent problem as most branches of the military struggle to meet their recruitment goals. Historically, this is symptomatic of a debilitating disease — a lack of civic commitment — that could kill the republic. In ancient Greece, city-states such as Athens and Sparta that created republics defended by average citizens devolved into a mercenary culture, then were conquered by the Macedonians. The Roman Republic conquered the Mediterranean with citizen-soldiers. The republic decayed, however, and when tyrants turned it into an autocracy, the first Roman emperor transformed the army into a professional corps loyal to him alone. Citizen-soldiers were just too dangerous for an autocrat. When Americans shook off the professional and mercenary armies of Britain, they swore to rid their new country of what they saw as the pernicious evil of warrior classes. The sentiment explains why the Declaration of Independence denounces standing armies and the Constitution prioritizes militias for national defense. To reimplement their vision, Americans must undertake four changes:


Hundreds of children in Pakistan have been infected with HIV. Used needles could be to blame.

easily spread viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C between patients. Although it’s considered malpractice, syringes are often reused in Pakistan, “especially among the poor,” said Quaid Saeed, HIV/AIDS adviser to Pakistan’s National AIDS Control Program. In late May, at the request of the Pakistani government, the World Health Organization deployed a team to the region to investigate the cause of the outbreak. The group will announce its findings later this month. In the meantime, Mirza, the government official, said Pakistan has requested an additional 50,000 screening kits and plans to set up three new treatment centers in Sindh province, where the outbreak began. Even before this outbreak, Pakistan lagged far behind the United Nations’ ambitious “90-90-90” goal for HIV treatment and prevention globally. By next year, UNAIDS aims to have diagnosed HIV in 90 percent of infected people, provided 90 percent of them with antiretrovirals, and suppressed the virus in 90 percent of those treated. But the agency has warned that the epidemic is expanding in Pakistan, with cases among young people increasing by 29 percent between 2010 and 2017. Mirza said that a conservative estimate for the number of people infected with HIV/AIDS in Pakistan is about 163,000. But only a small fraction of them are registered with state-run assistance programs, in large part, he said, because the illness is “taken here as a big stigma, a shame.” That most of the diagnoses in recent weeks have been in children poses another challenge: Limited amounts of child-friendly antiretroviral drugs are available because HIV is less common in children than in adults. Before this outbreak, the WHO had documented only 1,200 cases of children being treated with antiretrovirals in the entire country. The uptick in HIV cases will come as a setback for Pakistan’s health officials. For decades, Pakistan has battled the misconception that immunization for polio causes paralysis and infertility. Much progress has been made in acclimating once-resistant communities to that vaccine, which is administered through a mouth drop, with the number of polio cases decreasing from 20,000 in 1994 to 12 last year. But earlier this year, panic broke out after rumors swirled that polio vaccinations were causing children to become sick. Over three weeks this spring, six vaccinators or their guards were shot dead, forcing officials to temporarily suspend their immunization efforts. And at least 15 new cases of polio have been reported this year. siobhan.ogrady@washpost.com


Virginia health officials warn of possible exposure to measles-infected child at Dulles airport, other locations

The Virginia Health Department issued an advisory Thursday, cautioning the public that they may have been exposed to a measles-infected child at Dulles International Airport on Sunday and in several other places in Northern Virginia a few days later. Alison Ansher, health director for the Prince William Health District, said the case was not related to a current outbreak in several parts of the United States. She said the child, who was sick and infectious, had left the United States, contracted the highly contagious disease, and returned. Ansher, citing confidentiality rules, also said she could not identify the exact flight the child was on or give the child’s sex and age. The agency said it is trying to identify people who came into direct contact with the infected child and urged any unvaccinated people who may have crossed paths with the child at those locations to get in touch with a health-care provider. The agency said the infected child was at the following locations at the following times: Ansher said the virus that carries the potentially fatal disease can remain in an area for up to two hours after the infected person has left. People who have been infected could develop symptoms as late as June 25, Ansher said. The agency’s warning — which was reported earlier by WTOP — comes as the United States has experienced a sharp increase in measles cases. The outbreak has been spurred at least in part by the anti-vaccine movement that claims that there is a link between vaccines and autism, despite repeated studies showing no such correlation. There have been more than 1,000 reported cases of measles in the United States. The total for just the first five months of 2019 was the highest since 1992, when 2,126 cases were reported for the entire year. Measles is a highly contagious but preventable disease. It can be spread through coughing, sneezing and contact with droplets from the nose, mouth or throat of an infected individual, the agency said. Symptoms begin with a fever of more than 101 degrees and other cold- or flulike symptoms such as a runny nose, watery red eyes and a cough. A rash appears three to seven days later, appearing first on the face and spreading to the rest of the body. People who have had a documented case of measles are immune for life, Ansher said. People who received


As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines

jostling mom-and-pop shops, reshaping small towns and transforming how millions work and shop. But the superstore titan’s latest gamble is an entirely new kind of disruption — the biggest real-world experiment yet for how workers, customers and robots will interact. The nation’s largest private employer has unleashed an army of robots into more than 1,500 of its jumbo stores, with thousands of automated shelf-scanners, box-unloaders, artificial-intelligence cameras and other machines doing the jobs once left to human employees. The swarm is already remaking how the retailer’s more than 1 million U.S. “associates” go about their daily work. Given the chain’s ubiquity across the country, the local Walmart store also is likely to become the first place millions of Americans meet a real-life, working robot. Walmart executives have promised the all-hours robot workhorses will let employees endure less drudgery and enjoy “more satisfying jobs,” while also ensuring shoppers see cleaner stores, fuller shelves and faster checkouts. But the rise of the machines has had an unexpected side effect: Their jobs, some workers said, have never felt more robotic. By incentivizing hyper-efficiency, the machines have deprived the employees of tasks they used to find enjoyable. Some also feel like their most important assignment now is to train and babysit their often inscrutable robot colleagues. Customers, too, have found coexisting with machines to be confusing, if not alarming. Some shoppers have been spooked, for example, by the Auto-S scanner, which stands six feet tall and quietly creeps down the aisles, searching for out-of-place items by sweeping shelves with a beam of light. Other shoppers, store workers said, have made a game of kicking the things. Employees at a half-dozen newly automated Walmarts said the machines at times are helpful, even charming. Some talked about the robots’ personalities and said they had adorned them with employee name tags. But others also felt this new age of robotics had accelerated the pace of work and forced them to constantly respond to the machines’ nagging alerts. Some said it made them doubt the company valued their work. This awkward interplay of man vs. machine could become one of the defining tensions of the modern workplace as more stores, hotels, restaurants and other businesses roll in robots that could boost company reliability and trim labor costs. Many Walmart workers said they had long feared robots would one day take their jobs. But they had not expected this


A new old home for the nation’s dinosaurs

“We want to leave people interested and urgently hopeful,” Wing said. That message is interwoven through the myriad hands-on displays. You can touch the surface of a rock that is billions of years old. You can stand in a fossil-filled replica coal mine and learn how climate change helped form coal millions of years ago and how burning that coal contributes to climate change now. You can play an interactive game to see clever, Earth-friendly ways to grow chocolate, make pizza or tend soccer fields. You can stand in a simulated ice core that looks like a sci-fi transporter tube and shows 800,000 years of temperature changes. But if you’re just passing through, you get the point in just a few words. “We went through all of our content for each area, and we said, if a visitor reads nothing else, what do you want them to know?” said Siobhan Starrs, the project manager for the hall. “And we printed it really large, right in front of a charismatic fossil.” Starrs said curators want to convey to visitors that “we don’t live in a vacuum. We live on a planet that’s constantly changing, and we’re connected to it. Everything’s hitched to everything else.” Better preservation: No drilling through bones! In 2014, museum staff and conservators from the fossil restoration specialists Research Casting International (RCI) took apart the museum’s huge specimens, some of which had stood for more than a century. They encountered some known problems and a few surprises. The woolly mammoth’s pelvis had been sawed apart to accommodate supporting hardware. Metal rods and wires ran through tunnels that had been drilled through long bones. A mastodon kneecap, painted to look like a fossil, was actually made of wood and beeswax. What appeared to be shocking disregard for rare bits of history was actually just a reflection of a different philosophy, said Matt Carrano, the museum’s curator of dinosauria. “When I look back on the old mounts, you know, it’s really easy to sort of think, why would they do these things?” he said. “I have to remember it’s 100 years ago. … They were inventing techniques as they went along.” Before the early 1900s, natural history museums displayed fossils individually, Sues said, a giant femur here, a tooth over there. Around the turn of the 20th century, curators decided to show people what a whole animal may have looked


Trump thinks that Ireland wants a border wall. Good grief.

— between Northern Ireland and the Republic would have massive political and economic consequences, undermining peace, and damaging an economy that now spans the whole island of Ireland. It is likely that Trump got some of his misunderstandings from talking to pro-Brexit politicians in the United Kingdom just before coming to Ireland. Pro-Brexit politicians have been highly frustrated with the Irish border situation, because resolving the problem is one of the preconditions for a basic deal on Brexit. The deal Theresa May tried and failed to get through the British Parliament included a “backstop” — a commitment by the United Kingdom that it would agree to a special arrangement for the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic in the event it could not reach a full deal. Pro-Brexit politicians hated this arrangement because this would require the United Kingdom to stay subject to E.U. rules, leading them to vote down the proposed deal. Trump’s comments were embarrassing for the United States because they revealed that Trump did not really understand the issues between the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. However, they are probably not going to do significant damage to relations among Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Irish and British politicians have already priced in Trump’s inability to understand the nuances of Brexit. Indeed, his comments about the wall were more ambiguous and hence less obviously wrong than his previous suggestion that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union and then sue it. Indeed, it is possible that Trump officials and family members have come away with a positive impression from the visit. While Trump is highly unpopular in Ireland, the official meeting with the Taoiseach took place in an airport VIP lounge, making protest difficult. Trump is now staying in his private golf course in the western part of Ireland. The inhabitants of the local village nearby are unlikely to make a ruckus, since they view his visit as an opportunity for profit. Ireland’s priorities during the Trump visit were not to get Trump’s support in negotiations with Britain. They were to secure smaller concessions on issues such as immigration (Ireland has many undocumented citizens living in the United States) and to avoid major diplomatic catastrophe. Irish politicians and diplomats are probably breathing a quiet sigh of relief that the official part of the visit is over and that nothing terrible has happened.


Elon Musk’s satellites threaten to disrupt the night sky for all of us

sure Starlink has no material effect on discoveries in astronomy. We care a great deal about science.” But if SpaceX really did care that much, why didn’t anyone bother thinking more about what Starlink might do to observational astronomy, radio astronomy and the sky in general? Even with a redesign and altered orbits, bright satellite flares and the reflection from their solar panels will still be an issue for those outside of major urban areas, McDowell says: “You’ll still see them just at the limit of your vision — it will look like the whole sky is crawling.” * * * We all have a relationship to the night sky, whether we realize it or not. It is something that we share in memory with our ancestors. It is perhaps the one constant over generations. We know that the people who came before us saw the planets and stars rise and set in the sky at the same time every year. That steady starlight has been used for navigation around the world; many fishermen still use the stars this way. The North Star was a guidepost for enslaved people escaping through the Underground Railroad: It was the one constant mark of light that pointed their direction toward freedom. And for many of us, simply reveling in the beauty of the darkness is enough to warrant value. Sometimes those bright beacons are not just stars on fire in other parts of our galaxy — some are entire worlds. Whole planets. The first time I realized this, I was 7. My grandpa bought a small silver telescope from an astronomy catalogue and took me out to our front lawn, where we planned to stargaze through a smoggy Los Angeles sky. I’d always looked up as a reflex when I went outside. For a child, those bright spots garner a lot of wonder. This small, dinky silver tube with skinny wooden legs barely leveled on our lawn, but he knew exactly which bright dot he was trying to show me — and it was no dot at all. He turned to what seemed to be a random point in the sky and told me to put my eye to the viewer, and a tan, hazy world with rings appeared. “That is the planet Saturn,” he said. I pulled back from the viewer, and looked back at the sky. Without the telescope, Saturn was


Weather radar may have detected a gigantic swarm of ladybugs in Southern California

Sometimes when it’s not raining and skies are clear, weather radar senses all sorts of unexpected things suspended in the air. On Tuesday night, about 110 miles north of San Diego, it may have seen a gigantic “bloom” of ladybugs. Over an area 10 miles wide and 15 miles long, the National Weather Service’s radar reportedly detected the insects. At first, meteorologists at the Weather Service’s San Diego office didn’t know what they were looking at. “We were trying to figure it out ourselves,” said Mark Moede, a meteorologist at the office. “It looked like echoes reflecting off raindrops, but we weren’t seeing any clouds.” Moede said the office called one of its volunteer weather observers in Wrightwood, Calif., where the radar displayed deep shades of green. The observer reported “ladybugs everywhere.” Based on this report, the Weather Service tweeted that the radar signature came from “a cloud of lady bugs." But in an interview, Moede added a caveat to that explanation. He cautioned that the swarm was so big that “it does raise the question of whether it could be something else.” He said it’s possible the radar was displaying chaff, bits of aluminum dispersed by the military to fool and overwhelm radar signals that may be tracking aircraft. In December, a mysterious radar signature appearing over Illinois and Kentucky turned out to be chaff. But massive swarms of bugs have been picked up by radar before. In July 2014, radar revealed a “bug derecho” from “an epic Mayfly hatching event” in Wisconsin. Other non-precipitation things routinely sensed by weather radar include bats, birds, butterflies and wildfire smoke. For now, the working explanation for Tuesday’s cryptic radar signal is ladybugs, but it’s not necessarily the final word.


Can an American running legend out-race 60 horses? He’s ready to find out.

Michael Wardian has finished the Boston Marathon 18 times. He holds the world record for the fastest 50-kilometer run on a treadmill. This year he raced 631 miles across Israel in barely 10 days’ time. He has twice completed seven marathons on seven continents in seven days, and he holds a world record for that, too. This year, when he got back to the United States, he decided to tack on three more marathons in three days, giving him yet another record: fastest completion of 10 marathons in 10 days. Oh, and he holds the fastest mark for running a marathon while dressed as Spider-Man. And also Elvis. Needless to say, Wardian, 45, is an accomplished distance runner who has no problem getting creative to scratch his competitive itch. Which is why he is in Wales this week. Preparing to race 60 horses. The Arlington, Va., runner will be one of 650 or so humans and five dozen horses racing against each other in the annual Man Versus Horse Marathon on Saturday. “Like many things that I do, I’m just kind of curious to see if I can do it,” Wardian said in a recent interview. “The chances are probably not good that I’m going to beat the horse. But it’s possible.” The quirky event started in 1980, according to race lore, when a pair of pub patrons became involved in a bar stool debate: Could distance serve as an equalizer and allow a man to actually outrun a horse? The race has been contested 39 times since then, 22 miles over the Welsh countryside in a tiny town called Llanwrtyd Wells. A horse has won all but two of the events. “I just randomly saw a picture of it or a story about it, maybe 15 years ago,” Wardian said. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, I have got to do that someday.’ It’s been a bucket list item since then.” Wardian wouldn’t be running if he didn’t think he had a chance to win. He knows a human would never out-sprint a horse, but Wardian’s body has been trained over years of marathons and ultramarathons to excel at long distances. The longer the race, he figures, the better his odds. He has tried to understand the terrain and has crunched numbers from the past races. If he can finish in around 2 hours 10 minutes — a manageable six-minute-mile


Here’s how to watch the full flower ‘blue moon’ Saturday night

to rise Saturday at 8:10 p.m., according to the Naval Observatory. Sky conditions should allow for good viewing in most of the eastern United States, but clouds will obscure the night sky in much of the western two-thirds of the nation. Brian Murphy While the sun is setting in the western sky, the full moon will be rising in the eastern sky, then the atmosphere scatters blue light and we can see the red wavelengths, Murphy said. “That’s why you see the sun or the moon — when rising or setting — taking on an orange hue,” he said. “When the sun or the moon go to their higher places in the sky, they take on their normal colors.” For much of Saturday night, it will appear as a normal full moon. “There is not going to be anything odd about it,” Murphy said. “There won’t be color, as the moon will be its typical grayish white.” If you can, find a clear eastern horizon, such as a beach. Look to the east-southeast to see the full moon rising at the horizon. By 9 p.m., the moon will be several degrees above the southeastern horizon. There will be more than one reason to look up into the evening sky Saturday night. At about 9:27 p.m. Saturday in Washington (check NASA’s Spot the Station website for times at other locations), you might be able to spot the International Space Station. It will look similar to an airplane crossing the sky, but it will be a moving bright dot — lit by the sun. It will not have the telltale blinking lights of a jetliner. Look just above the horizon in the northwest sky. The space station should be visible for about six minutes before setting in the eastern part of the northern sky. The space station will also make a lengthy pass over Washington on Friday night starting at 10:17 p.m., rising in the west-southwest sky and setting six minutes later to the northeast. Chester said that Saturday is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 10 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. With astronauts Thomas P. Stafford, John W. Young and Eugene Cernan, the Apollo 10 mission conducted NASA’s dress rehearsal for the lunar landing of Apollo 11 in July 1969. They tested in lunar orbit how to rendezvous and dock the command module Charlie Brown and the lunar module Snoopy.


Virgin Galactic Space Tourism

the engine, and they were off. Then Alsbury unleashed a device known as the “feather,” allowing the wings of the spacecraft to rise above the crew cabin. In space, it would stabilize the vehicle, and orient it for reentry into the atmosphere. But now, as they were screaming across the sky at more than 600 mph, it was like throwing the gearshift into reverse. Siebold heard grunting noises, a jolt and bang and then the sound of the spacecraft ripping apart, like “paper fluttering in the wind.” He blacked out. When he came to, he was outside the spacecraft in a free fall, hurtling toward the ground, unconscious. When he woke up, his pilot training kicked in and he tried to extend his arms and legs to create drag before his parachute deployed. But his shoulder hurt. Maybe it was dislocated, Siebold thought. So he tried to shove it back in the socket. He’d need it to steer the parachute. Siebold landed in a creosote bush, his arm broken in four places, a piece of fiberglass in his left eye, but otherwise okay. Alsbury was not so lucky. The cause of death, according to the coroner: “blunt force trauma to the head, neck, chest, abdomen, pelvic area and all extremities and internal organs.” Virgin’s test pilots didn’t need Alsbury’s death to remind them that they had chosen a dangerous profession. Many had come up through the military and had lost friends or even had close calls themselves. They flew the same airspace where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, and many others had died pushing the envelope. Moses, Virgin’s president, was working at NASA when space shuttle Columbia came apart on reentry, killing all seven on board, and became one of the leaders in the recovery effort. “Mike is not the first person I’ve known that has lost his life in pursuit of a goal,” said Todd Ericson, Virgin’s vice president for safety and test. “We all recognize that we are taking a risk in this business. . . . And I think all of us would say that the ultimate goal of making space accessible for humankind and what that impact will have on humanity is certainly worth some personal risk and sacrifice.” But the death had humbled them, and they came back slowly, vowing to move deliberately through the test program. “The test program is all


Why NASA’s next rockets might say Budweiser on the side

million for 60 days, or more than $416,000 a day. It noted that companies pay between $8 million and $13 million to sponsor golf tournaments, and some corporation have paid as much as $20 million for naming rights for sports stadiums. A NASA economic adviser once suggested a boxing match in space — a “Brawl in Free Fall,” he called it — that could become a pay-per-view event. Other countries have been more willing to cash in. Pizza Hut paid to paint its logo on a Russian rocket in 1999. In the mid-1990s, an Israeli milk company filmed a commercial on the space station Mir, and a pair of Russian cosmonauts even appeared on QVC to sell a pen able to write in a weightless environment. “Is this a pen you would recommend to use in space?” the host asked. “Yeah, they said they love this pen,” the translator said on the live broadcast. In 1993, a Georgia company called Space Marketing proposed putting a billboard in space so big that it would be visible from Earth. But the plan was met with disapproval from some in Congress, who derided the idea, saying space was a commons that should stay free of advertising. Edward J. Markey, then a Massachusetts congressman, lamented the possibility of children wishing “upon a falling billboard.” “Every sunrise and sunset would beam down the logo of Coke or GM or the Marlboro Man,” he said. “That would turn our morning and evening skies, often a source of inspiration and comfort, into the moral equivalent of the side of a bus.” Still, companies have found a way to include space into their marketing campaigns, and brands such as Tang have benefited from their affiliation with the space program. When Mir de-orbited, Taco Bell put a huge floating tarp into the Pacific Ocean and claimed that if any piece of the space station hit it, the company would give everyone in the country a free taco. More recently, Budweiser announced its plans to be “the first beer on Mars,” as part of a plan to study barley in the weightless environment of the International Space Station. “While socializing on Mars might be in the near-distant future, Budweiser is taking steps now to better understand how its ingredients react in microgravity environments so that when we get to Mars, Budweiser will be there,” it said in a press release.


NASA trained, Boeing employed: Chris Ferguson hopes to make history as a company astronaut

chief executive Dennis Muilenburg boasted that the first rocket to take humans to Mars would be built by his company. To which Musk replied on Twitter: “Do it.” Boeing confirmed last week that its emergency abort system suffered a significant problem during a test in June: Propellant leaked as the engines shut down. While Boeing officials said “we are confident we found the cause and are moving forward with corrective action,” the issue is likely to cause a further delay in its launch schedule. In a recent report, the Government Accountability Office also said it was concerned that in the event of emergency, Boeing’s abort system may force the spacecraft to “tumble, which could pose a threat to the crew’s safety.” Boeing has said it has fixed the problem and would “meet or exceed all NASA requirements.” SpaceX has also faced delays, as it has worked to correct a problem that caused its Falcon 9 rocket to explode into a spectacular fireball while being fueled on the launchpad in 2016. In its corner, Boeing has Ferguson, a secret weapon of sorts, a polite and polished pilot with an unblemished résumé. On the final shuttle mission, he left an American flag on board the International Space Station, with “the goal that the next crew that launches from American soil gets to bring it home.” The race is like a “sort of grown-up capture the flag,” Ferguson said. “It probably has a lot more significance to me than it does to, say, somebody from our competition.” Being among the last to launch from U.S. soil “doesn’t entitle me to get it,” he said. “But we’re in a pretty good position.” This spring, Ferguson was back in the cockpit of the simulator, training to fly again. It’d been years since he’d flown, and he was a little bit nervous that he’d gotten rusty. He was an executive now, who wore the corporate uniform of pressed slacks and dress shirts more often than flight suits. He has a fancy corporate title: Boeing’s director of crew and mission operations. The shuttle had wings, like a plane. His new spacecraft was a thimble-shaped capsule, far more difficult to control. In this particular test, he’d be facing a worst-case scenario: Every computer of the autonomous spacecraft would be out, meaning he’d have to fly it manually, hitting the atmosphere at Mach 25, or 25 times the speed


What does it mean to be a NASA astronaut in the celebrity space age of Elon Musk and Richard Branson?

can be famous. John Glenn and his fellow Mercury astronauts were pioneers in the truest sense — the first Americans to go to space, and then to orbit. Then came Gemini and Apollo. Men on the moon, and another ticker-tape parade. “Everyone knows who Orville and Wilbur Wright were,” Kelly says. “But no one knows the second or third person to fly an airplane.” Their names are Robert Behnken, Eric Boe, Doug Hurley and Sunita Williams. They are the ones chosen for NASA’s next big missions. But instead of flying on rockets designed and operated by the space agency, their rides will come courtesy of a pair of contractors — SpaceX and Boeing — hired to provide a taxi-like service to the International Space Station. Even the spacesuits are new and sleek, far different than the traffic-cone orange “pumpkin suits” worn by the shuttle astronauts. Boeing’s are ocean blue and comfortable; SpaceX’s are white and black, right out of a sci-fi flick. With the first flights scheduled for later this year — a timeline that will probably slip — NASA is expected to soon announce which astronauts are flying when. That would mark a definitive step for its “Commercial Crew” program, which has been delayed again and again, as the companies have struggled to get their new spacecraft ready and as the ever-cautious NASA overcomes the scarring memories of the shuttle Columbia explosion in 2003. Astronaut Sunita Williams has flown in the shuttle and the Soyuz. She is one of four chosen for NASA’s next human missions. Astronaut Robert Behnken remembers watching the C-SPAN hearings after the Challenger explosion in 1986. (Photos by Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post) NASA has already offered a glimpse of four members of the first crews to fly, some of the best and most experienced in the astronaut corps. They have served as high-ranking officers in the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy who grew up wanting adventure. Combined, they have spent 74 years at NASA. Three have children. All are married. Two, Hurley and Behnken, are married to other astronauts. At 53, Boe is the oldest, with a vague memory of being nearly 5 years old “when my parents came in and said, ‘Come watch this.’ ” There were men walking on the moon on the black-and-white television. At 47, Behnken, is the youngest, with no memory of Apollo but a vivid one of when


Ethiopia plans to release some imprisoned politicians in bid for national dialogue

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Ethiopia’s prime minister shocked the country Wednesday by announcing the release of all political prisoners and closing down a notorious detention center to promote political dialogue. The move comes after the country has been hit by years of social unrest among its largest ethnic communities as well as rising differences within the ruling party. At a joint news conference with leaders of the four parties making up the ruling coalition, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn said “political prisoners” under prosecution will be released and those convicted will be pardoned to “improve the national consensus and widen the democratic platform,” according to the state-run Fanabc news portal. It is the first time the existence of political prisoners has been acknowledged. The notorious Maekelawi detention center in downtown Addis Ababa will also be closed and turned into a museum, the report added. The closure of the prison and the release of the prisoners — many of them prominent opposition figures — have long been opposition demands. “It is a time defying institution which has been around for more than half a century and has been used [and abused] for the same purpose: to detain, without due legal process, people alleged to have committed grave crimes against the state, the people and the constitution,” said a 2016 editorial in the Addis Standard. The paper described the site as a state-run “torture chamber” unbefitting a government that nominally describes itself as democratic. The Ethiopian government has been under extreme pressure since 2015 when demonstrations erupted among the Oromo community, the country’s largest ethnic group, protesting their marginalization and the lack of political influence. At least 1,000 died and foreign businesses were attacked prompting a 10-month state of emergency that ended in August 2017. The United States, a close political ally, has repeatedly expressed concerned about the violence and the government response and urged greater democracy. New protests erupted in the last months in the universities and there were reports of security forces killing more people in parts of the country. At the same time, there were clashes between the Oromo and neighboring Somali communities that claimed hundreds of lives and left hundreds of thousands displaced. The government has been holding a dialogue with the opposition. But most of the opposition parties were seen by many as too close to the government, and some of the most prominent politicians such as Merera


Yasmeen Abutaleb joins National Desk as a health policy reporter

Announcement from National Editor Steven Ginsberg, Deputy National Editor Lori Montgomery, Health/Science/Environment Assignment Editor Laura Helmuth and Deputy Health/Science Editor Carol Eisenberg: We are delighted to announce that Yasmeen Abutaleb will be joining the National Desk's Health/Science team as a health policy reporter to help expand our coverage of the inner workings of the Department of Health and Human Services, health legislation on the Hill and the evolution of health policy in the coming 2020 election. Yasmeen comes to us from Reuters, where she has covered health policy and the delivery of health care for most of the past five years. In 2016, she was a lead reporter on a five-part series that examined the rising threat of antibiotic-resistant infections and the inability of the government and health care industry to address the problem. Yasmeen has also covered the many attempts by Republicans in Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration’s initiatives on drug pricing, the role of health care in the 2018 midterm elections, and Vice President Pence's influence on faith-based health policies in the U.S. and abroad. Before joining Reuters’ Washington bureau, Yasmeen covered Facebook and Twitter in San Francisco for Reuters. A Potomac, Md., native and graduate of the University of Maryland, she also interned at the Boston Globe. When she’s not in the newsroom, Yasmeen loves to cook and is currently working with her mom to learn more Egyptian recipes. Please join us in welcoming her to the newsroom; her first day is June 17.


‘Don’t poke the bear’: European leaders refine their approach to Trump

French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump marveled at the might and grit of American fighting forces, and at the seemingly unending whorls of crosses and Star of David markers at the Normandy American Cemetery. In between there was a rush-job meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who resisted Trump’s request to hold the session at a Trump-owned golf club in Ireland, and brief greetings with European, Canadian and Australian leaders who attended another D-Day commemoration Wednesday in Portsmouth. Throughout, European leaders who had once tiptoed around the mercurial nationalist and his “America First” agenda, or were thrown by his outbursts and insults, were matter-of-fact and friendly. When Trump said that Britain’s National Health Service would be “on the table” in a potential U.S.-Britain trade deal — a prospect that would be highly unpopular there — May did not directly contradict him. “But the point about making trade deals is, of course, that both sides negotiate and come to an agreement about what should or should not be in that trade deal for the future,” May said during a news conference in London. (Trump later backed off the idea that health care should be part of a trade deal during a friendly interview with British broadcaster Piers Morgan.) Trump couldn’t resist mentioning that he had advised May to “sue” the European Union to give effect to British voters’ decision to leave, advice she didn’t take. But he pivoted almost immediately, praising May for her efforts on Brexit, the issue that was her political downfall. “She’s probably a better negotiator than I am,” Trump offered. The queen used one of her brief public remarks with Trump, at the banquet where all his adult children scored invitations, to deliver a mild but unmistakable lesson about international cooperation and the arc of history. “After the shared sacrifices of the Second World War, Britain and the United States worked with other allies to build an assembly of international institutions, to ensure that the horrors of conflict would never be repeated,” said the 93-year-old queen, who was 18 on D-Day. “While the world has changed, we are forever mindful of the original purpose of these structures: nations working together to safeguard a hard-won peace.” When Trump suggested that Ireland have a “wall” to mark its border with Northern Ireland — a prospect that ginned up memories of bloody clashes between the two neighbors — Varadkar offered


Unhappy with HBO’s ‘Chernobyl,’ Russia is planning its own series — blaming the CIA

the Chernobyl plant outside of the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, then part of the Soviet Union. More than 30 people died in the initial aftermath of the accident, which raged for 10 days, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. Radiation spilled into the atmosphere, forcing 115,000 residents to be relocated by the government in 1986, with an additional 220,000 residents moved out in the subsequent years. The Soviet government eventually quarantined an area stretching 18 miles in radius from the explosion, creating a radioactive ghost town that stood out as a stark symbol of dark risks of the nuclear age. The United Nations determined in 2018 that nearly 20,000 cases of thyroid cancer among individuals under the age of 18 at the time of the accident could be traced to the contamination. Memories of the disaster are particularly ego-bruising for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government, which attempts to project a Teflon-like reputation as a world power. Writing this week in the Moscow Times, columnist Ilya Shepelin noted a number of pro-Kremlin media figures have used their columns or state television programs to chip away at the HBO production’s credibility or to gripe about its portrayal of Russian leaders. "If Anglo-Saxons film something about Russians,” Anatoly Vasserman, an “ultra pro-Soviet columnist,” according to Shepelin, wrote in response, “it definitely will not correspond to the truth.” The Russian series apparently is part of this patriotic pushback. According to the Times, the production will be anchored in the premise that a CIA operative was at Chernobyl conducting sabotage. The series follows a group of KGB officials working to track down the infiltrator. “One theory holds that Americans had infiltrated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and many historians do not deny that, on the day of the explosion, an agent of the enemy’s intelligence services was present at the station,” the director, Alexei Muradov, told the Times. The idea does not match reality. Experts from the United Nations and the Nuclear Energy Institute have determined the explosion was probably the result of a faulty reactor design and human error — an assessment that Soviet officials agreed with in their own 1986 report on the explosion, according to the Los Angeles Times. Shepelin, the columnist, points out the gripes in Russia over the HBO blockbuster have less to do with accuracy than national pride. “The fact that an American, not a Russian, TV channel tells


Huawei ban threatens U.S. national security, tech companies warn Trump administration

U.S. technology companies have told the Commerce Department that the Trump administration’s ban on selling to the Chinese tech giant Huawei could significantly harm their bottom lines and might damage their ability to develop new technological innovations, including those needed by the U.S. military. The companies are making the claims in applications for licenses that would let them do business with Huawei after the prohibition goes into effect in August, according to people familiar with the licensing process. Huawei is the second largest cell phone maker in the world and a leading maker of telecommunications equipment crucial to the rollout of the next generation of wireless technology known as 5G. It is also the third largest buyer of U.S.-made computer chips, according the Semiconductor Industry Association. The Trump administration placed Huawei on the Commerce Department’s entity list in May for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, prohibiting U.S.-based companies from doing business with it. It then granted a 90-day reprieve of the effective date to soften the blow to U.S. companies. Under Department of Commerce rules, U.S. companies that want to continue to sell to Huawei must apply for licenses, and the chip makers and software providers who depend on Huawei as a customer are already beginning to argue why they should get one. According to people briefed on the matter who asked not to be named because they feared going public might make it harder to obtain licenses, the companies, especially chip makers, have included detailed financial projections and other data in their applications showing the potential for significant harm. Companies have argued that the ban already has harmed the outlook for U.S. chip makers by prompting Chinese companies to reduce their reliance on the United States and develop alternative suppliers outside the U.S. Some chip makers have argued that the loss of revenue from Huawei and its affiliates could force them to cut back on research and development, slowing down the development process for new computer chips. That even could hurt U.S. military technology, they say, because the military relies on faster and more capable chips. Critical infrastructure, which also relies on computer chips, could become more vulnerable to failure and attacks, some companies have argued. It’s unclear whether the arguments have resonated with the Department of Commerce or the White House, where a final decision is likely to be made on the licenses. A rejection is the assumed


World Digest: June 7, 2019

Iran’s missiles and regional influence. In 2017, Iran rejected Macron’s call for talks on its ballistic missiles, saying that they were purely defensive and that U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which enshrined Iran’s nuclear deal, “does not prohibit missile program and missile tests by Iran.” On Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted: “a. UNSC 2231: “Iran is CALLED UPON” not prohibited; b. “Not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles DESIGNED to be capable of delivering NUCLEAR weapons. Our missiles are not “designed” for nukes, which we’re not developing.” — Reuters VENEZUELA U.N.: Over 4 million have fled the country The number of Venezuelans who have left their country in recent years has surpassed 4 million, the United Nations said Friday ahead of a visit to the region by U.N. refugee agency envoy Angelina Jolie. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said the number of Venezuelan refugees and migrants rose by 1 million after November, indicating a rapid escalation as the economy deteriorated and a conflict between the government of President Nicolás Maduro and the opposition intensified. “These alarming figures highlight the urgent need to support host communities in the receiving countries,” said Eduardo Stein, the U.N.’s joint special representative for Venezuelan refugees and migrants. “Latin American and Caribbean countries are doing their part to respond to this unprecedented crisis but they cannot be expected to continue doing it without international help.” — Associated Press SUDAN Ethiopia's Abiy talks to generals, protesters Ethiopia’s prime minister urged “courage” as he met separately with Sudan’s ruling generals and protest leaders on Friday in a bid to revive negotiations amid a crackdown on demonstrations that has killed more than 100 people since Monday. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a young reformist who assumed office a year ago, has been at the center of high-profile diplomatic efforts in the Horn of Africa region, including a surprise restoration of diplomatic ties between Ethiopia and rival Eritrea. He arrived in Sudan as the crisis following the overthrow of longtime autocrat Omar Hassan al-Bashir turned increasingly violent. The military removed Bashir from power in April after months of mass protests, but has resisted the protesters’ demands for an immediate handover of power to civilians. On Monday, security forces violently dispersed the main sit-in outside the military headquarters in Khartoum, and similar clashes have erupted in other cities and towns. — Associated Press


Prominent investigative journalist detained in Russia

ST. PETERSBURG — A prominent Russian investigative journalist was detained on drug-related allegations, his editors said Friday, in a case that his supporters described as fabricated and that had the potential to augur a new, more dangerous phase for journalists working in Russia. The journalist for online news outlet Meduza, Ivan Golunov, was taken into custody in central Moscow on Thursday after police searched him and found five packets of mephedrone, the authorities said. More of the illegal drug, as well as a scale, were found in Golunov’s apartment, the police said. Golunov managed to let friends know that the drugs were planted, Meduza said in a statement. “We are convinced that Ivan Golunov is innocent,” said the statement by Meduza chief executive Galina Timchenko and editor in chief Ivan Kolpakov. “Moreover, we have reason to believe he’s been targeted because of his work as a journalist.” Independent journalists in Russia often deal with threats and harassment, but arrests of prominent reporters in Moscow — even critical ones — are rare. Despite the Kremlin’s control of the television airwaves, Russian journalists often publish splashy investigative reports spotlighting government corruption via a fast-evolving panoply of online news start-ups. “Pressing drug charges against inconvenient voices is nothing new in today’s Russia,” wrote Tanya Lokshina, Europe and Central Asia associate director at Human Rights Watch. “But Golunov’s case is the first time it’s been done to a journalist from a high-profile media outlet.” Working for the Russian-language outlet Meduza, which is based in Latvia, Golunov wrote about predatory microfinance, corruption at Moscow City Hall, and shady dealings in the funeral industry. “The number of people whose interests were affected by Golunov’s articles — both business executives and officials — is likely in the hundreds,” the newspaper Vedomosti said in a commentary on the arrest. Golunov was beaten in detention and at first denied access to a lawyer, Meduza reported. The Moscow police denied that he was beaten and said proper procedures were followed in giving him access to a lawyer. Moscow Police Chief Oleg Baranov has taken the case under his personal supervision, the police said. One by one, journalists and other backers of Golunov stood before the Moscow police headquarters and held up signs of support Friday. The one-person protests were meant to avoid detention by police. “We call on our colleagues and our readers not to stay silent,” said an editorial


The Baltimore Symphony needs a much larger endowment

Regarding the June 5 letter “The Baltimore Symphony’s leadership must resign”: The issues facing the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra are daunting. Typical of large orchestras in the United States, ticket sales cover only a third of operating costs. Annual losses have been between $1.5 million and $3 million. These figures take into account the maximum annual support allowed by law from the Baltimore Symphony Endowment Trust, of which I am a member. I have been deeply involved with the BSO for many years. The current management is the best the BSO has had in a long time. However, average attendance at classical concerts is less than 60 percent of capacity. Just ask the musicians. They see it every night from the stage. Another major contributor to the deficit is that the musicians annually receive nine weeks of paid vacation, two weeks of relief pay and 120 sick days. Nothing can bridge the annual BSO deficit except a much larger endowment. For the BSO to survive in its current form, the endowment needs an additional $40 million — now. The Meyerhoff family offered a $4 million challenge grant to raise funds for the endowment. We met with or called every large foundation in Baltimore and at least two dozen of Baltimore’s wealthiest citizens. We came away empty-handed. No one was interested in investing more than $250,000 in the BSO. The BSO’s house is on fire. Who is going to come to the rescue? Joseph Meyerhoff II The writer is a trustee of the Baltimore Symphony Endowment Trust.


Mexico aims to avoid tariffs with potential deal limiting migrants going north, allowing U.S. to deport Central American asylum seekers

countries said they did not know whether the terms would assuage Trump and remove the tariff threat; Trump plans to charge a 5 percent tariff on Mexican goods entering the United States unless Mexico can show it will take steps to reduce the flow of migrants to the U.S. border. The asylum modifications are likely to face challenges in U.S. courts, but legal efforts have thus far failed to stop the Trump administration from sending thousands of Central Americans to Mexico to await their asylum hearings outside U.S. territory. “Any change to the asylum system that does not provide the safeguards required by domestic and international laws will not survive a legal challenge,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. Word of the emerging deal comes amid escalating warnings of the tariffs’ potential toll. Approximately 406,000 U.S. jobs would be eliminated if the president proceeded with the measures, according to the Perryman Group, an economic consultancy in Waco, Tex. Implementing the levies will be impossible by “June 10 or even before the increase planned for July 1,” the Pacific Coast Council of Customs Brokers and Freight Forwarders Associations warned in a letter to administration officials, saying it felt “grave concern, even alarm” at the prospect. Under existing trade rules, the vast majority of U.S.-Mexico trade is duty-free. A sudden shift to tariffs on “all” Mexican products, as Trump has threatened, would overwhelm the companies that move imports through U.S. customs checks, according to Eduardo Acosta, vice president of R.L. Jones Customhouse Brokers in San Diego. The U.S. government last month automatically debited R.L. Jones’s bank account for roughly $700,000 in duties owed by its clients. That monthly tab will swell to an estimated $19 million in June if the tariffs take effect, outstripping the firm’s resources, he said. Though the tariff threat is aimed at spurring action in Mexico, significant disagreements remain about how quickly and how much Mexico can reduce unauthorized migration through tougher enforcement measures, the U.S. official said. Last month, U.S. authorities made more than 144,000 arrests along the southern border, the highest monthly total in 13 years. Mexico has told the United States that its national guard deployment — along with promises to build more migrant detention centers and checkpoints to catch Central Americans and deter their passage — will quickly reduce migration flows to the levels of last fall, when arrests


Federal investigators to examine equipment from 2016 N.C. election amid renewed fears of Russian hacking

concerned about this issue.” Last July, the FBI indicted 12 Russian government agents for allegedly interfering in U.S. elections. The documents once again referred to a company that matched the description of VR Systems, stating that “in or around August 2016” the accused “hacked into the computers of a U.S. vendor that supplied software used to verify voter registration information for the 2016 U.S. elections.” 'A right to know' Shortly after the release of Mueller’s final report, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and one of the most outspoken U.S. lawmakers on issues of election security, sent VR Systems a letter asking for assurances of the security of its network. “Given the voting problems caused by the failure of electronic poll books manufactured by your company in November 2016, the American people have a right to know if there was any connection to the Russian cyber attack against your company three months earlier,” Wyden wrote. In response, VR Systems said a cybersecurity firm it hired to review its computer network in 2017 found no evidence of a hack. A subsequent review by DHS also found no issues, the company said. VR Systems declined to give Wyden documentation of those reviews, citing the need to protect proprietary information. Wyden in a statement to The Post accused VR Systems of “stonewalling congressional oversight.” A senior U.S. official confirmed DHS’s review of VR Systems’s network to The Post and noted that by the time agency investigators arrived, a commercial vendor had already “swept” the networks. “I can’t tell you what happened before the commercial vendor came in there,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. The official said DHS has no information about the malware mentioned in the Mueller report. Today, VR Systems continues to operate in many North Carolina counties. To avoid future court battles, state lawmakers explicitly granted the Board of Elections the power to“halt the use of electronic poll books.” The law also says that companies must agree to cover the cost of a new election if their products fail. Voting machine vendor Election Systems & Software has agreed to pay $17 million in the event of failure, while VR Systems and the state are still negotiating over a number, board spokesman Patrick Gannon said. North Carolina officials say they’ve made progress in securing the state’s


Curtis Blake, co-founder of the Friendly’s ice cream chain, dies at 102

to burgers. In 1950 they began selling take-home ice cream containers. Decades later, Friendly’s products, with the winsome script of the Friendly’s name emblazoned across their red cartons, are immediately recognizable in grocery stores. By 1951, the brothers had 10 locations in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1974, according to the company, there were 500 Friendly locations across the northeastern United States and the Mid-Atlantic. Susan Blake said that the $547 her father and uncle borrowed from their parents was the only loan that they took out until the 1960s. Their caution, she said, was born of the Depression. But as the company expanded, the brothers weathered disagreements about how to manage its growth. Mr. Blake credited his brother with excellent stewardship of the company in its early years. “I never could have done it alone,” Mr. Blake told the Springfield Republican. But “then as the company grew, he just couldn’t think big enough.” In 1979, the brothers sold Friendly to Hershey Foods, the maker of the eponymous chocolate bar, for about $164 million. The Tennessee Restaurant Co. then purchased the business in 1988 for $375 million and took Friendly’s public in 1997. In the early 2000s, amid declining fortunes for Friendly’s, Prestley Blake bought enough stock to own a 12 percent stake in the company — making him its largest shareholder — in an effort to regain influence on its direction. An affiliate of Sun Capital Partners bought the company for $337.2 million in 2007. Four years later, amid heavy debts and a decline in business that the Globe attributed in part to slower service, an increasingly “dingy” look to many locations and cuts in portion sizes and quality, Friendly’s declared bankruptcy. As of April, after the shuttering of 23 locations, the company had 77 corporate restaurants and 97 franchises, according to the publication Restaurant Business. About a quarter of the company’s locations have closed since 2017, the publication reported. Curtis Livingston Blake was born in Springfield on April 15, 1917. His father was employed by the Standard Electric Time Co., which manufactured electric clocks, and his mother was a homemaker. Mr. Blake and his brother closed the original Friendly ice cream shop during World War II, when Curtis Blake served in the Army Air Forces in England. They posted a sign advising visitors that they would return “when we win the war” — and they did. Mr. Blake’s first


SpaceX failure dims NASA’s hope for a quick U.S. return to launching its own astronauts into space

push their first flights with crews into next year, three years later than initially anticipated. The setbacks forced NASA recently to purchase two more seats on Russian spacecraft for about $170 million total. Those will ensure that the agency doesn’t have to face the embarrassing prospect of not having an American astronaut on board the station — the orbiting laboratory that has cost American taxpayers about $100 billion. “Past experience has shown the difficulties associated with achieving first flights on time in the final year of development,” the agency said in a solicitation announcing the intent to purchase the additional seats. “Typically, problems will be discovered during these test flights.” SpaceX and NASA are at the beginning stages of investigating what caused SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to fail Saturday during a test fire of the engines designed to propel the spacecraft away from the rocket booster in the event of an emergency. Neither have released much information about what happened, the extent of the damage or what impact it will have on SpaceX’s schedule. On Thursday, during a meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Patricia Sanders, the chair of the committee, said it would take time to determine what happened, as investigators examine the data and establish a timeline of what went wrong. But even before the failure, SpaceX still “had a large body of work yet to be completed” before it could fly crews, said Sandra Magnus, a former NASA astronaut who also serves of the safety advisory panel. She said it was too early to speculate what impact the failure would have. SpaceX is leading the investigation, with NASA’s support. “NASA has full insight into the results of the mishap investigation,” NASA said in a statement. Investigators are “reviewing all of the data collected during the test, including high speed imagery and detailed spacecraft telemetry data and will include analysis of the recovered hardware from the test. We have full confidence in the SpaceX and NASA team working the investigation to determine the cause of the mishap and design updates should they be required.” Last year, Boeing also faced a significant setback when during a test of the emergency abort system of its capsule, it discovered a propellant leak. It is currently planning to fly a test mission without anyone on board in August and a mission with crews by the end of the year. But NASA warned


Trump’s big win leaves critics sputtering

conventions are required for genuinely free trade and tariffs may be necessary to achieve those conventions” is accurate. And widely understood. “Alliances are good” is simplistic. “Alliances in which allies actually do what they promise with regard to percentage of GDP spent on national defense while not increasing dependence on Russian natural gas” is complex but accurate. Hard as it is for the Manhattan-Beltway echo chamber to believe, sounding sophisticated isn’t actually being sophisticated. Trump’s record is mixed, but not this week. This week, even as Joe Biden began to melt (the headline in Saturday’s Times of London online edition was “Democrats raise doubts over Joe Biden’s stamina for presidential nomination race” — never a good sign when the neighbors notice these things), Trump put together back-to-back big successes. Historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson speculates that Trump’s enemies are so addicted to hating him that, in a classic addict pattern, all behaviors are bent in service of the addiction. This weekend and next week will separate the outrage addicts from the serious journalists. Trump would be very well advised to take this tariff weapon off the table with regard to Mexico. It probably wouldn’t work a second time unless the Mexicans failed to deliver even a halfhearted effort. It’s not the sort of threat you can use twice, and doing so would undo the enormous win he can rightfully paint this to be at rally after rally as Campaign 2020 gets underway. If Trump invited Democrats back to the White House for immigration reform and border security talks right now, urging them to be as serious as the Mexican government has been about the border crisis, it might actually work. House Democrats passed an immigration bill last week. Senate Republicans could quickly pass their own version to get a joint House-Senate conference with White House participation. Everyone could win: the United States and Mexico, the president and the House speaker, both parties, the undocumented in this country seeking regularization, and the desperate and easily exploited poor of Central America. Read more: The Post’s View: How Trump and Congress can really fix our immigration problems Carla A. Hills: You can’t stop migrants with tariffs Fareed Zakaria: Trump is destroying three decades of hard work with Mexico Robert J. Samuelson: There is a sheer nastiness to Trump’s Mexico tariffs The Post’s View: How both Trump and Democrats can win on immigration


Why it’s important to say something if a relative exhibits signs of Alzheimer’s

are at first subtle, then less so. Bringing up cognitive decline with a loved one can be so fraught with pain, embarrassment and denial that many are reluctant to broach the topic until far into dementia’s progression. A survey released this week by the Alzheimer’s Association finds that nearly 90 percent of Americans say they would want others to tell them if they were showing signs of memory loss or other symptoms of dementia. And yet, nearly three quarters of Americans say having that conversation would be “challenging” for them. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s, but talking about it early in the disease’s progression is crucial, said Ruth Drew, director of information and support services at the Alzheimer’s Association. Talking about the disease in its early stages gives people time to take care of legal and financial issues, make a long-planned trip, participate in their treatment plan or join a medical trial, Drew said. “It gives you a voice,” she said. “If you know early on, you have a voice on how things go and who’s going to make decisions on your behalf.” Talking about symptoms can even help rule out Alzheimer’s. “There are a lot of conditions that can manifest as cognitive-decline symptoms, but it may be another disease” that could be curable, Drew said. An estimated 5.8 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s dementia, and that number is projected to more than double to 13.8 million by 2050, barring the development of medical breakthroughs to prevent, slow or cure it. Patients cannot always rely on their doctors to notice Alzheimer’s or test for it. Only half of seniors are assessed for thinking and memory issues, and only 16 percent receive regular cognitive assessments, according to the 2019 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures report by the Alzheimer’s Association. Even when doctors do diagnose it, only 45 percent of patients and their caregivers are told the diagnosis, according to the organization’s 2015 report, which also found that when people were told, often it was only after the disease had become more advanced. “A lot of physicians, even when they’re prescribing Alzheimer’s medication, are not using the word Alzheimer’s or sharing the information about Alzheimer’s with their patients,” Drew said. “We know that early detection doesn’t start in the doctor’s office; it starts with conversations families are having with each other.” This week the organization launched an ad campaign with


An unlikely winner in the China-U.S. trade war? A French businessman’s book about his battle with the DOJ.

A new book is climbing the bestseller lists in China. Originally published in French under the title “Le Piège Américain,” or “The American Trap,” the book is a work by Frédéric Pierucci, a former executive of French energy and transport giant Alstom who spent two years in a U.S. prison for his role in a bribery scandal. Since publishing in China on May 1, the Chinese-language version of the book has topped the “new book” list on Dangdang, a popular Chinese e-commerce site, and come in first on the overall sales list on Amazon’s Chinese website. It has also ranked second among business-management books on JD.com, another popular site, where it has 17,000 customer reviews as of this week. But Chinese readers aren’t necessarily interested in a tale about French rail transport or energy systems. Instead, the book’s success seems to be related to the critical view Pierucci presents of American legal influence abroad. The book’s sales in China seem to have risen since it was spotted last month on the desk of Ren Zhengfei, the founder of the embattled telecom company Huawei, currently at the center of U.S.-China hostilities. Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen has been giving out the books as gifts to recent visitors. On Dangdang and JD.com, booksellers have made the parallel between the two cases obvious with a blurb calling Pierucci the victim of the “French version of the Huawei incident.” Pierucci’s book opens with his arrest upon his arrival in New York in April 2013 on accusations of financial crimes by the Justice Department under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The French executive eventually pleaded guilty to his role in a worldwide bribery scandal, and his company agreed to pay $772 million in fines. Bloomberg News reported earlier this year that the book, co-written with French journalist Matthieu Aron, is a “cautionary tale for globe-trotting executives at multinational companies increasingly facing the threat of litigation when they are allegedly on the wrong side of U.S. law.” In the book, Pierucci describes two years of life in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island prisons and the backroom battles that influenced his case. Pierucci’s case may seem familiar to Ren. His company is not only in the midst of a trade war with the United States, but his daughter and Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada on Dec. 1 and is facing extradition to the


Man killed his wife and then himself at home in Northwest Washington, police say

Old Central Avenue and Whist Place in the Capitol Heights area around noon Friday, said police spokesman Nicholas Clayton. The driver was ejected from the car and pronounced dead at a hospital. A county officer had “unsuccessfully attempted to stop the driver for numerous traffic violations,” the department said in a message on Twitter. The driver’s identity was not immediately released. — Lynh Bui Man sentenced in prescription drug case A Maryland man has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for plotting to steal and resell millions of dollars in prescription drugs from federal military hospitals. U.S. District Judge Paul Grimm also on Thursday ordered 45-year-old Daniel Mark Wilkerson, of Fort Washington, to pay more than $4.4 million in restitution. Wilkerson will be on supervised release for five years after his prison sentence. U.S. Attorney Robert Hur’s office said in a news release that Wilkerson conspired with two pharmacy technicians to steal more than $2.1 million worth of human growth hormone from the now-closed Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Prosecutors say Wilkerson and one of the technicians also stole more than $850,000 worth of pharmaceuticals from Fort Belvoir Community Hospital in Virginia. — Associated Press VIRGINIA Homicide victim identified as juvenile Fairfax County police have identified a body that was found in what appeared to be a fresh grave in May, but said a Virginia law prevents them from publicly naming the juvenile victim of what could be a gang-related killing. Police exhumed the body from a wooded area in North Hill Park in the Hybla Valley area on May 23 after receiving a tip that remains were located there. The tip resulted from a spring push to interview gang members in the county, police said. At the time, police said they did not recover weapons from the scene and did not know how long the body had been buried there. Fairfax County Police Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. said at a news conference on May 23 that there was a “high probability” that the killing was gang-related but declined to say what gang might have been involved. Police said they were barred from naming the victim by a 2017 law that prohibits police from providing identifying information about juvenile victims of crime without parental consent. The family has declined to provide consent in this case, authorities said. — Justin Jouvenal and Michael E. Miller


BSO bids a reluctant farewell with Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at Strathmore

Marin Alsop led an expansive, complicated rendition of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony under difficult conditions Saturday night in the Music Center at Strathmore. The last time she conducted the work, in 2009, she made the mistake of pairing it with an inferior work by Leonard Bernstein. This time around it stood alone, suffused with regret and nostalgia. Anxiety about the future has hovered over the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra all season. Management has insisted the orchestra become a part-time ensemble by cutting back the season from 52 weeks to 40 weeks. At the end of May, after an extended contract dispute, management abruptly canceled the orchestra’s summer season, suspending musicians’ pay as of June 16. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is a leave-taking, composed after the death of the composer’s young daughter. Much of the first movement obsesses over the three-note motif “Lebewohl” (Farewell), taken from Beethoven’s piano sonata “Les Adieux.” After an ethereal opening in cello and harp, Alsop wrung as much pathos and urgency as she could from this music — and those emotions seemed to resonate with the orchestra’s situation. The rough-hewed second movement plodded along somewhat rudely, the second violins hacking away unceremoniously at the first statement of the Ländler. The third movement darted and bit even more bitterly, the viciously maintained counterpoint interrupted by a crystalline, mournful trumpet solo around the midpoint. The entire violin section, one of the BSO’s greatest assets, sang their hearts out in the opening of the concluding Adagio, marked “grosser Ton” (with big tone) in the score. The plush string section, including heart-melting solos from concertmaster Jonathan Carney, sustained the time-stopping tempo set by Alsop, complemented by gorgeous horn solos. One early flute entrance aside, quickly righted, it was a moment to glory in the sound of the BSO, just before its likely dismantlement at the hands of its own management. At the start of the concert, the entire orchestra took the stage together, in a gesture of solidarity. The devoted Strathmore audience responded with standing ovations both at the beginning and end of the concert. The affection in the hall was palpable, but it may not be enough to save this esteemed ensemble from diminishment. style@washpost.com


ICE deported veterans while ‘unaware’ it was required to carefully screen them, report says

official procedures is negligent and unacceptable.” Margaret Stock, an immigration attorney who represents recruits and veterans in deportation proceedings, said Pentagon and Homeland Security policies enacted in recent years have accelerated the problem. The military, until recently, quickly naturalized soldiers before they could deploy, and possibly die, for the country without being a citizen. A soldier from Trinidad was killed in Iraq on his way to gather paperwork for his citizenship, which led to legislation to expedite the process. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices on Army installations previously fast-tracked naturalization paperwork. But those offices were shuttered in 2018. The process has been offloaded onto commanders following a recent Pentagon policy that requires sign-off from colonels in a recruit’s chain of command. Some are not especially well versed on the process because it applies to an agency outside the military, Stock said, and they often make mistakes on forms. Other policies have paralyzed the system and increased chances of immigrants leaving the service without naturalizing or being cut loose early by extraordinarily stringent screening methods, Stock said. The Pentagon has now said recruits must have served 180 days to apply for naturalization if they are on active duty or one year in the reserves, or for one day if they are in combat. Previously, immigrants were naturalized within weeks while at basic training. “I’m inundated by people who can’t get their paperwork signed,” Stock said. “We’re seeing people in deportation proceedings who wouldn’t have been there before these policies.” In a response to the GAO report, ICE officials said they would follow the guidelines on screening for veterans and elevating their case files. ICE did not return a request by The Post for comment. In its letter, ICE said “100 percent” of veterans removed in the study were deported because of drugs, sexual abuse, firearms, explosives, kidnapping and other charges, though it did not mention veterans outside the scope of the report. And not all veterans in danger of deportation are convicted of crimes. One Army veteran, Xilong Zhu, a native of China, was honorably discharged in 2016 after DHS officials alleged he was given a real student visa through a fake school the agency created to catch fraudulent visa brokers. Immigration officials approved his application to enlist before the allegation. Zhu said he was unaware the school was fake. Zhu has not been convicted of a crime and is accused


was killed in Iraq on his way to gather paperwork for his citizenship, which led to legislation to expedite the process. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices on Army installations previously fast-tracked naturalization paperwork. But those offices were shuttered in 2018. The process has been offloaded onto commanders following a recent Pentagon policy that requires sign-off from colonels in a recruit’s chain of command. Some are not especially well versed on the process because it applies to an agency outside the military, Stock said, and they often make mistakes on forms. Other policies have paralyzed the system and increased chances of immigrants leaving the service without naturalizing or being cut loose early by extraordinarily stringent screening methods, Stock said. The Pentagon has now said recruits must have served 180 days to apply for naturalization if they are on active duty or one year in the reserves, or for one day if they are in combat. Previously, immigrants were naturalized within weeks while at basic training. “I’m inundated by people who can’t get their paperwork signed,” Stock said. “We’re seeing people in deportation proceedings who wouldn’t have been there before these policies.” In a response to the GAO report, ICE officials said they would follow the guidelines on screening for veterans and elevating their case files. ICE did not return a request by The Post for comment. In its letter, ICE said “100 percent” of veterans removed in the study were deported because of drugs, sexual abuse, firearms, explosives, kidnapping and other charges, though it did not mention veterans outside the scope of the report. And not all veterans in danger of deportation are convicted of crimes. One Army veteran, Xilong Zhu, a native of China, was honorably discharged in 2016 after DHS officials alleged he was given a real student visa through a fake school the agency created to catch fraudulent visa brokers. Immigration officials approved his application to enlist before the allegation. Zhu said he was unaware the school was fake. Zhu has not been convicted of a crime and is accused only of failing to attend classes, said Stock, his attorney. He is eligible for naturalization, she said, but Zhu remains in deportation proceedings. Read more: A Sikh airman petitioned the Air Force to let him wear a turban and beard. He just won. At least one dead, nearly two dozen injured in tactical vehicle accident near West Point


A cautionary tale about medical marijuana and opioid deaths

the nation is in the grip of a deadly opioid epidemic or because there is money to be made by offering possible solutions. The nation’s opioid crisis, now more than two decades old, has taken more than 400,000 lives, according to government data. “A lot of people interpreted the first study as causal because it’s congenial to their goals,” said Chelsea L. Shover, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry who was part of the Stanford research team. “It did not say that one is causing the other.” She added: “I wish it were true. I wish that passing medical cannabis [laws] would solve the opioid crisis. But the evidence doesn’t support that.” In the 2014 study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Montefiore Medical Center and elsewhere looked at the period from 1999 to 2010. They found 24.8 percent fewer deaths after states passed laws legalizing medical marijuana. The Stanford research team replicated the earlier work in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For the period from 1999 to 2010, they came up with very similar results — a 21.1 percent reduction in opioid overdose deaths. But once they extended the analysis to 2017, and even when they controlled for new laws allowing recreational use of marijuana and other factors, the data reversed. Two of the researchers in the initial study did not return requests for comment Monday. Shover noted that for the initial study, only 13 states had medical marijuana laws, and many of them were in the West, where the opioid epidemic arrived later. That may have accounted for some of the results, she said. By the final year included in the Stanford analysis, 47 states had approved medical marijuana. As they nearly ran out of states that had no such laws, researchers looked at deaths in each state before and after passage, studying what happened over time. There have been other studies of the issue, and there are lots of conflicting claims about marijuana and opioid deaths. But Shover said the “big takeaway for me here is, if policymakers are pursuing cannabis legalization as a way to address the opioid crisis, it’s probably going to be disappointing.” More effective measures, she said, are well known: wider availability of treatment for addiction and increased distribution of naloxone, the antidote to opioid overdoses, among others. leonard.bernstein@washpost.com


Gravely ill Gabriele Grunewald hailed by fellow runners for her ‘bravery, heart and smile’

Emotional messages of support and love poured in from fellow runners as decorated American middle-distance runner Gabriele Grunewald was moved to comfort care Sunday, then to her home Monday. The messages came at the behest of her husband, who asked supporters who had followed her long fight with cancer to post “one last message” using the #bravelikegabe hashtag. “Thank you for showing me what bravery looks like,” American marathoner Kara Goucher tweeted. Paula Radcliffe, the world marathon record holder, thanked Grunewald for the lives she enriched with her “bravery, heart and smile.” Deena Kastor, the 2006 London Marathon winner, tweeted, “wishing you peace and wings you so deserve.” Kastor wrote to Grunewald’s husband, Justin, that "thousands of people are grateful for your own courage and are sending you love. Feel it overflowing in your big, big heart.” Known as Gabe, Grunewald, 32, was diagnosed in 2009 with adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare form of cancer that usually originates in the salivary glands. She underwent surgery and radiation treatment and continued to run for the University of Minnesota, finishing second in the 1,500 meters at the 2010 NCAA championships. She kept up the pace through 2017 even as she underwent treatment for cancer in her thyroid and liver. She finished fourth in the 1,500 at the 2012 Olympic trials and was the U.S. indoor champion in the 3,000 in 2014. Last week, the Minnesota native was hospitalized in intensive care because of septic shock. Justin sought to prepare her for dying, only to have her respond with a robust “not today” as she rallied and left the ICU. Although she was given a new drug in an attempt to extend her life, her husband, an internal medicine physician who also ran for the Gophers, wrote on Instagram on Sunday that her condition had deteriorated. “It breaks my heart to say but overnight Gabriele’s status worsened with worsening liver function causing confusion,” Justin wrote. “Wanting to do her no harm we have made the difficult decision to move her to [comfort care] this afternoon. I wanted to let you all know while she is still alive so you can send her one last message here or on her wall or on her phone before she heads up to heaven.” Justin also shared a note he had written to his wife a couple of years ago. “I know you have been given the


Sightings of these rare, shimmering clouds on the edge of space are on the rise. No one knows why.

may resemble the high, wispy cirrus clouds that we often see over the Lower 48. They resemble pale brushstrokes against a blue sky, and often are bathed in an amber hue as daylight dwindles. But noctilucent clouds are different. “They were kind of a bright, light blue,” Charboneau said. “They were brilliant.” SpaceWeather.com described a “huge outbreak” of the clouds over the weekend with sightings in nine states, in addition to Oklahoma, and parts of Europe. Because they soar so high, noctilucent clouds catch sunlight well after dark. It’s the same reason the sun sets several minutes later at the top of a skyscraper, compared with the bottom. If you pretend a noctilucent cloud is anchored atop a 50-mile-high building, it’s easy to see why they shine a brilliant blue up to two hours after sunset or before sunrise. It’s thought that the clouds are instigated by meteor smoke. Any time you see a shooting star, the instigating space pebble deposits a thin veil of fine dust behind it as it burns up. These tiny particulates may serve as “nuclei” around which ice can form. The source of water that high remains a mystery, however. After all, ordinary clouds are made of condensed water vapor or ice crystals, but noctilucent clouds form at heights thought to be nearly devoid of moisture. Temperatures at that level dip below minus-190 degrees, and the colder the air gets, the less moisture it can hold. Noctilucent clouds are most common near the poles. They’re rarely seen below 50 degrees latitude, but they’ve been venturing outside of their usual bounds much more frequently in the past decade. A potential reason? Climate change. It’s not just carbon dioxide that humans pump into the atmosphere. It’s methane, too. James Russell, principal investigator of a NASA mission tasked with studying these electric-blue clouds, warns that the increase in noctilucent episodes could be a “canary in a coal mine” for climate change. "When methane makes its way into the upper atmosphere, it is oxidized by a complex series of reactions to form water vapor,” Russell said in a 2012 NASA interview. In other words, more methane means more moisture high up. “This extra water vapor is then available to grow ice crystals for [noctilucent clouds].” The rise in noctilucent cloud sightings has been known for decades. In a 2001 paper published in Advances in Space Research, researcher Gary Thomas


Family’s dogs attack 5-year-old in Southern Maryland, state police say

This story has been updated. A 5-year-old child was attacked Friday by two dogs in a house in Southern Maryland, the state police said. The child’s injuries were not life-threatening, the police said. They said the attack occurred about 7 p.m. in a house in the 48000 block of Leeward Circle in the Lexington Park area of St. Mary’s County. According to police, the child was playing when attacked by a family Rottweiler, and then by a Shar Pei mix that also belonged to the family. Members of the community went into the house and rescued the child from the two dogs. The child was flown by state police helicopter to Children’s National Medical Center in the District. Police said Saturday that they were continuing to investigate. Originally the police identified the dogs as pit bulls, but on Sunday they sent a new news release correcting the identification of the dogs’ breeds. martin.weil@washpost.com


Couple who mysteriously died in Fiji texted family that they’d been ‘throwing up for 8 hours’

The Texas couple had been planning a trip to Fiji — relaxing on palm tree-lined beaches, perhaps swimming with manta rays or hiking in Koroyanitu National Heritage Park. Excursions like this one had become tradition. The couple, who posted previous vacation photos on Facebook from Cabo San Lucas and Hawaii, tried to travel — just the two of them — about once a year, relatives told The Washington Post. Late last month, David and Michelle Paul, from Fort Worth, boarded their dachshund, named Zooey, and said what they thought was a temporary goodbye to their 2-year-old son. Then the Pauls hopped a plane bound for a South Pacific adventure. But soon after the couple arrived in Fiji on May 22, they became gravely ill. Despite medical treatment, their symptoms continued to worsen. David’s mother, Marsha Paul, wrote in a May-27 Facebook post that the couple contracted a virus and, days later, both had died. “David has gone on to Heaven,” she wrote. “We are so thankful the Lord has provided him eternal life thru Jesus Christ his Saviour. David is smiling in Heaven, I am sure. His and Michelle’s smiles would light up any room and I am sure you who knew him, knew that . . . Love you all. We will cry, but we are alright.” A U.S. Department of State official confirmed the deaths of David and Michelle Paul in Fiji and offered condolences to the couple’s families. But the circumstances surrounding their vacation and the mysterious ailment that turned their trip to tragedy remain mostly a mystery. Where did they go? What did they do? Perhaps most important — what disease could the couple have been exposed to? Fiji’s Ministry of Health and Medical Services told ABC News on Sunday that the investigation into the couple’s deaths could take weeks. Not long after David and Michelle arrived in Fiji, David, 38, began messaging his mother picturesque photos from the island. On May 23, he told her the place they were staying was “very calm” and that he wished she was there, his mother told The Post. Then on May 24, Marsha Paul said she got a worrisome message from her son. “We were at hospital all morning," he wrote. "We both caught a nasty virus. I‘ve never thrown up so much my whole life. I still feel pretty bad.” His wife, Michelle, was texting her mother


Tamer El-Ghobashy named assignment editor for Foreign

Announcement from Foreign Editor Douglas Jehl, Deputy Foreign Editor Eva Rodriguez, and Middle East Editor Alan Sipress: We’re thrilled to announce that Tamer El-Ghobashy, the outgoing Baghdad bureau chief, will become an assignment editor on Foreign, overseeing early-morning operations as well as the Today’s WorldView newsletter. In this role, he will lead a Foreign-desk team whose mission is to fill gaps – in coverage and understanding – by producing timely, nimble, accessible journalism that complements on-the-ground reporting from The Post’s correspondents around the world. Tamer will bring to the job a distinguished track record that includes eight years as a Middle East-based foreign correspondent and ample evidence of digital savvy, a collaborative spirit and a commitment to excellence. His coverage from Iraq and Syria has demonstrated courage, initiative and also versatility, including the extraordinary video footage he shot during a reporting trip to the former ISIS stronghold of Raqqa in Syria and his entertaining tale about pigeon-racing in Iraq. Tamer joined The Post in 2017 to take charge of Baghdad; he had covered the Middle East since 2011 for The Wall Street Journal, focusing on North Africa and Iraq. He was previously a local and national reporter, based in New York, for The Journal and the New York Daily News, and he honed his digital skills as a national-news editor at NBC. He grew up in New York, speaks Arabic and some French, and graduated from New York University. Tamer will be moving to DC from Toronto where he lives with his wife and a 10-week-old son. He will start work in the newsroom on June 24.


The Daily 202: Here’s the soundtrack of 2020. What presidential candidates’ walk-up songs say about them.

officials at first felt relief that the CIA’s interaction with Mr. Kim wasn’t exposed in the immediate aftermath of his killing ... But three months after his death, in May 2017, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported that while in Malaysia, Kim Jong Nam met with a Korean-American whom Malaysian officials suspected was a U.S. intelligence officer. Mr. Kim’s role as a CIA source also is described in a book about Kim Jong Un, ‘The Great Successor,’ written by a Washington Post reporter [Anna Fifield] and due to be published on Tuesday, according to news reports citing excerpts of the book.” -- A human rights group said it has identified hundreds of spots where witnesses claim North Korea carried out public executions and state killings. GET SMART FAST: THE TRADE WARS: -- New details emerged about how Mexican officials persuaded Trump to back down from his tariff threat by agreeing to a stringent crackdown on Central American migrants, -- The preparedness of Mexico’s newly created national guard is unclear as it heads to the Guatemalan border. -- Trump seems emboldened by his economic brinkmanship with Mexico, setting his eyes on China next. -- China has hinted it will choke off U.S. access to its “rare earths.” But that wouldn’t be so easy. -- More tariffs from China could push the U.S. into a “Trump recession,” said Gary Shapiro, the CEO of the Consumer Technology Association. -- Trump’s next tariff target might be French wines, a move that could benefit him personally. -- A real estate company co-owned by Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, has quintupled in value since he joined the White House staff. THERE’S A BEAR IN THE WOODS: -- Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, the only Republican who’s called for Trump’s impeachment, quit the House Freedom Caucus. -- The Justice Department’s announcement it reached a deal allowing lawmakers to view some of the underlying documents from Bob Mueller’s investigation upstaged the House’s first hearing on the special counsel’s report. “But committee Republicans repeatedly mocked Democrats for bringing in Dean -- Yesterday's deal represents a victory for House Democrats in their quest to focus public attention on Mueller’s report and the alleged presidential abuses of power they say the report documents. But it is a limited triumph, -- The House Oversight and Reform Committee still plans to vote tomorrow on whether to hold Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in