Is a rabid fox ‘a really good sign’ for the city?

indoors at night. Christina Ryan, who has worked in the neighborhood for 20 years, wondered if foxes were responsible for the disappearance of rabbits, which she used to see regularly. Others welcomed foxes because they believe they keep deer with Lyme-disease-carrying ticks at bay. But urban wildlife experts said these are all misconceptions. John Griffin, director of Humane Wildlife Services, part of the Humane Society of the United States, said dogs or other larger animals are much more likely to attack cats. Foxes don’t keep away deer. And as for disappearing rabbits, “rabbit populations fluctuate pretty widely from year to year,” he said. Griffin, who said his service gets about 20 to 30 fox-related calls a year from across the region, took issue with District officials’ assertion that the presence of a rabid fox had anything to do with the size of the population or the health of the environment. He said warm winters could just as easily explain a spike in numbers. Higher temperatures ensure that more young survive. From record-setting fish to unscooped poop, animals are making headlines in the Washington area. Scott Giacoppo, a spokesman for the Washington Humane Society, said suburban sprawl could be driving foxes into the city. “Foxes don’t know the District boundaries,” he said. “For all we know, these are Maryland or Virginia foxes.” But fear not, Giacoppo and Griffin said. Foxes are ideal city dwellers. They like the anonymity of city living: When they see people, they run away. They prefer small quarters. And best of all, Griffin said, “they really do eat a lot of rodents.” Urbanites should enjoy the chance to live in close proximity with wildlife, Griffin said. And that is the attitude many have in Crestwood, where there are at least three dens nearby. Dog owners said they see foxes daily, darting along 17th Street or Blagden Avenue around dawn or dusk. A few residents feed them, which wildlife experts warn against and which irks neighbors who fear foxes may attack their pets. Others, such as Debra McDonald, delight in the sight of kits frolicking in the grass. She posted a picture of some on the neighborhood Web site. “We need to practice a little tolerance and patience with them,” Giacoppo said. “We are forcing them to live in our world. They don’t want to be with us. If they had their way, we would not be around.”


Woman loses her life and then her privacy after an abortion

posters of her photo and grim details about her medical history and procedures. “It was a perfectly healthy young woman that died,” said Michael Martelli, executive director of the Maryland Coalition for Life, an antiabortion advocacy group. And how would you know that, Mr. Martelli? Do you know her? No, he doesn’t, he told me. So how on earth did protesters get all of her medical records? How did they get enough detail to make huge posters of her face, give details about her marriage and employment, and make claims about what went on inside her body? “I can’t reveal our sources. These are confidential and anonymous,” Martelli said. Relatives of the young woman didn’t talk to them. They told me they have said “No comment” to anybody who has called. Unless someone inside the clinic contacted the antiabortion groups, the only other possible source of such sensitive information is the hospital. Of course, the hospital can’t even confirm that she was there or that she died there. “We maintain a fierce commitment to protecting the privacy of our patients and their care,” said hospital spokeswoman Marissa Levine. If there is a violation of HIPAA laws, hospital officials investigate and discipline. They have fired people for such violations. So are they investigating this one? “I can tell you, whenever we see information in the public domain about patient care, we absolutely look into it, internally,” she said. The activists who target the Germantown clinic have had respectful, legal vigils outside of it year-round. They have even rented space across the street for a pregnancy counseling service. Nothing wrong with any of that. But they have also bombarded the neighborhood of the landlord who leases space to the clinic, Todd Stave, with gory, Nazi-themed fliers. And they tracked down the school that Stave’s children attend and picketed the back-to-school nights. They harassed his in-laws at their home and stood outside his brother-in-law’s dental office with gory abortion posters. So it’s not surprising that they seized on this poor woman’s death last week. Martelli said that his group did not name her in their news conferences, news releases or rally and that whoever did that was acting on their own. “We understand how horrible this situation is,” Martelli said. “And really, we can’t imagine what the family is going through. The family is in no way any type of target. “We view


Danai Gurira’s ‘Convert’ and the long view of Zimbabwe’s history

Writer-actor Danai Gurira wrote the play "The Convert," about religious collisions in 1895 Africa. (Rob White) Danai Gurira from A to Z: well, mostly Z. As in Zimbabwe. That’s where the increasingly visible, Iowa-born Gurira was raised, and it’s the subject of her new historical drama currently at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, “The Convert.” The story takes place in 1895, exploring seven African characters grappling with the rise of colonialism and Christianity in what was painfully becoming Rhodesia. “It’s a tricky thing, Zimbabwe,” Gurira says, but she doesn’t want to say much more. From original colonizer Cecil Rhodes to current President Robert Mugabe, the politics are complicated. She dreads oversimplifying. On this, at least, she’s almost as taciturn as Michonne, the character she plays in the splattery AMC cable hit “The Walking Dead.” Right: Z is also for zombie killer. Gurira is a formidable figure on “Walking Dead’s” blasted landscape, coolly slicing the heads off zombies with her samurai sword even though during a recent interview with Larry King, Gurira laughed that she’s always hated slasher tales. As Michonne, Gurira burns with suspicion, hacks through the undead and sloshes through spilled guts, yet she insists that the show is not a mere gore-fest. Sitting in Woolly’s lobby, Gurira – 35, imposingly fit, and a swift, smart talker – toggles back to playwright mode as she outlines the literary theme. “It was about who do you become?” Gurira says of the TV show that she has unexpectedly come to love. “And that reminded me of ‘Eclipsed,’ the idea of a war zone, like Liberia. Everything just shut down, like an apocalypse. And it was a free-for-all about what society was.” “Eclipsed,” Gurira’s drama about the captured “wives” of an oppressive rebel leader in 2003 Liberia, premiered at Woolly three seasons ago before being staged in New York. It marked Gurira’s transition from writer-performer to dramatist. “I said, ‘I want to be the playwright,’ ” she recalls. “Let’s see if I can do that.” Gurira first emerged with “In the Continuum,” the two-person drama she created with co-star Nikkole Salter while they were in the graduate program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Salter played a woman in Los Angeles, Gurira played a woman in Zimbabwe; the two never met, but their stories were linked as both suffered from AIDS. In 2006, Salter and Gurira won Obies for their


Donald Rumsfeld: Enough with the Kumbaya Olympics. Let’s keep wrestling.

It is you vs. one other person. There is nothing to hide behind; there are no time-outs. It is all up to you. Yet, precisely because of those conditions, few other sports create such remarkable camaraderie among their participants. In response to the Olympic committee’s decision, members of the international wrestling community have been reaching out to one another. They are finding common purpose to create a compelling argument for readmission. While I have tremendous respect for athletes of every Olympic sport, it is difficult to understand why wrestling was singled out for exclusion. I would imagine that it has at least as many fans across the globe as ribbon twirling, trampoline and speed-walking. No wonder the decision has been met with bafflement in many quarters. U.S. Olympic Committee chief executive Scott Blackmun was among those who were surprised, “given the history and tradition of wrestling, and its popularity and universality.” To exclude wrestling from the Olympics would be a tragedy for the sport, for the athletes and for the proud tradition of the Games. Over thousands of years, wrestling has spread to every continent. It is practiced in hundreds of countries and expressed through a multiplicity of cultures. It has thrived through war, depression, social changes and globalization. But the Olympic committee panel didn’t see fit to include it in the 2020 Games. Something is wrong with that picture. Over my eight decades, I’ve collected a list of maxims and life lessons that I’ve found meaningful and instructive. These eventually became dubbed “Rumsfeld’s Rules.” One of the more recent additions comes from one of the most successful wrestlers in the world, Dan Gable, who won the gold medal in the 1972 Olympics without giving up a single point. “Once you’ve wrestled,” he said, “everything else in life is easy.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine many other sports that require such focus, discipline and second-by-second attention to the movements of an opponent. My firsthand experience gives me a greater appreciation for the sport. Wrestling had a positive impact on my teammates, my opponents and me. The sport develops self-reliance, discipline, perseverance and strategic thinking. But it also encourages civility, integrity and self-restraint. These qualities certainly reflect the proud tradition of the Olympic Games, which is why I fervently hope the committee will reconsider its unfortunate decision. outlook@washpost.com Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.


Google, Intuit push small business owners to create web presence

(FILES)A Google+ logo is seen at Google's annual developer conference, Google I/O, at Moscone Center in San Francisco on June 28, 2012. (KIMIHIRO HOSHINO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) Harold Goffney has owned A & A Athletic Sporting Goods, his Capitol Hill sports store, since 1973. For the past 40 years, the Washington, D.C. native has relied mostly on his personal connections for business leads. He attended Dunbar High School in Northwest D.C. and Morgan State University after that, where he established connections with the public school coaches and athletic directors who comprise the bulk of his customers today. But Goffney wants to expand the scope of his business. When he recently applied to be on Baltimore County’s vendor’s list, county officials suggested he get a Website.“They tell me I’m missing the boat,” Goffney said. Goffney was one of hundreds of small business owners hoping to build a Website at Google’s “Get Your Business Online” initiative this week, providing owners with free sites, Google AdWords credit, and tutorials. Goffney was concerned the sessions might be too technical — one class described Google’s AdWord’s program and how to construct search-engine driven ads — so he brought Karl Caton, a younger, more tech-savvy helper with him. The initiative, driven by Google and a few other partners including Mountain View, Calif.-based software company Intuit, allows D.C. area businesses to secure a free Website, Google business listing, and free Web-hosting for the next one year at gybo.com/washington-dc/. Google also gave out $75 AdWords coupons. The company has offered similar seminars around the country for the past couple of years, including in D.C. last year. Getting small business owners online is in Google’s best interest, said Google director of small business engagement Scott Levitan. More than half of small business owners don’t have a Website, meaning all their information is invisible from Google’s search capability, he explained. For the 42 percent of small businesses who do have Websites, only a small minority have sites specifically designed for mobile access, Levitan added. Google partnered with DudaMobile, a Palo Alto-based software company helping desktop sites transition to mobile-friendly versions. The service normally costs $9 a month, but DudaMobile staff helped business owners transition for free during Google’s event. Business owners from across the country attended the event’s “Digital Bootcamp”, a more intensive set of sessions held in D.C. helping them fine-tune sites they’d already built. Detroit, Mich.-resident Christine Fitzpatrick, a freelance


Obama’s music to futurists’ ears

is, why are we debating this issue — why aren’t we launching a Manhattan Project-style initiative to bring manufacturing back to U.S. shores. This is a trillion-dollar market opportunity that can boost the U.S. economy, create many high-paying jobs, and increase the country’s global advantage. As I wrote in my column predicting the innovations for 2013, robots are rapidly changing the cost-benefit of manufacturing goods in the U.S. But who or what is working in the factory is just as important as where the factory is. Locating manufacturing next to engineering fuels innovation and even produces cost advantages. GE found that it could profitably manufacture appliances once again at Appliance Park in Louisville, Ky., by automating its production lines. It saw great synergy in having its engineers and plant managers work side by side. Tesla is building its electric car, the Model S, in Fremont, Calif. and Apple recently announced its intention to start manufacturing computers in the United States again. But there’s a snag to bringing more manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Entire supply chains are now located in China and elsewhere abroad, creating a chicken-and-egg problem. It is also very hard to find workers with the skills needed to operate and maintain sophisticated computer-based equipment. And large capital investments are required in order to set up manufacturing plants. This is where the government can help: by retraining the workforce and helping businesses with new factory setup. Even as robots are beginning to disrupt traditional assembly-style manufacturing, other technologies are being developed that will, in the next decade, put the robots out of business. New materials such as carbon nanotubes and ceramic-matrix nanocomposites (and their metal-matrix and polymer-matrix equivalents) are enabling designers to create products that are stronger, lighter, more energy-efficient and more durable. And there is 3D printing, which promises to change the process of manufacturing itself. Rather than producing products with power-driven machine tools that physically remove material, the new “additive manufacturing” produces goods by melting successive layers of materials based on 3D models-adding materials rather than subtracting them. This allows manufacturers to create complex objects without any tools or fixtures-“laser printing” goods rather than assembling them. More research to accelerate the creation of advanced materials and to standardize the processes, materials, and equipment for additive manufacturing is needed. The most critical need, however, is for the university lab-to-industry pathway be unclogged. These are all


Monarchs’ massive migration

Monarch butterflies cluster on a tree in the Pedro Herrada butterfly sanctuary on a mountain in Mexico. (Felipe Courzo/REUTERS) In the world of insect migration, monarch butterflies rule the sky. Every fall, hundreds of millions of these black, orange and white insects migrate thousands of miles from the eastern United States and Canada to the mountains of central Mexico, where they spend the winter. By late February, they begin their return journey north. “We’re estimating that many of these butterflies fly more than 5,000 miles in their lifetime,” said Chip Taylor, who runs the Monarch Watch Program at the University of Kansas. He and his team place small tags on monarchs’ wings to monitor where they fly. “Monarchs have a biological clock in their brain, but also one in their antennae that tells them when the sun rises and sets,” Taylor said. By keeping track of the sun’s location in the sky, these two body parts act like a calendar and compass for the butterflies. Monarchs that spend the winter in Mexico live eight or nine months, longer than any other monarchs. They begin their migration in late summer or early fall and reach Mexico in late fall and early winter, covering an average of 25 to 30 miles a day (about the distance from Washington, D.C., to Annapolis, Maryland). They begin their flight back to the southern United States in late February and March. Along the way, each female lays a few hundred eggs. As the migrating generation dies off a month or two later, the new generation continues the springtime migration north and reaches the eastern United States and Canada in late spring and early summer. They have children and grandchildren of their own, and the cycle continues. (Jordan McCullough) Migrating monarchs face many dangers, including storms and predators. But according to Taylor, their biggest threat is habitat loss. Like all living things, monarchs need food, water and shelter to live. Adult monarchs eat nectar from flowers, and their larvae (the caterpillar stage) eat milkweed plants. In the United States, about 6,000 acres of land are paved over each day for roads and buildings, leaving less space for for butterfly habitats. But kids can help. You can raise the caterpillars to butterflies, then release the adults. “Monarch Watch provides monarch caterpillars to hundreds of schools,” Taylor said. Kids also can plant milkweed and other butterfly-friendly plants in their


Obama reaches out to a repressive Putin

will hit Moscow in the middle of a Putin-directed campaign against both his domestic political opposition and the United States, which in his mind are linked. In recent months Mr. Putin has expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development, placed new restrictions on local nonprofit organizations receiving foreign funds, bumped U.S.-funded Radio Liberty from domestic airwaves and overseen a propaganda campaign that accuses the United States of orchestrating anti-government demonstrations. The regime, meanwhile, has steadily escalated a campaign against the leaders of the peaceful, pro-democracy demonstrations that erupted in Russia in late 2011. For Russians, the cynical tactics are bone-wearyingly familiar: Transparently trumped-up criminal cases are being brought against the activists, with the promise of lengthy prison terms. Alexei Navalny, the founder of an anti-corruption organization, has himself been charged with corruption. Last week leftist firebrand Sergei Udaltsov was placed under house arrest ahead of his upcoming trial on charges of organizing an anti-Putin rally in May. Some Russian analysts believe that the regime is well on its way to crushing the opposition movement, which attracted the support of much of the urban middle class. Others regard the repression as the death spasms of an exhausted autocracy. “There are classical criteria of a dying regime and its key signs are evident in Russia,” Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow office wrote recently, citing “the Kremlin’s inability either to preserve the status quo or begin changes.” Either side might be right, though our bet is with Ms. Shevtsova. What’s strange is that the Obama administration would seek to undertake a major new piece of business with Mr. Putin without regard for this ugly climate. New U.S.-Russian nuclear warhead reductions, while welcome, are hardly urgent: The big challenges of nuclear weapons lie elsewhere in the world. At the same time, the survival of a pro-democracy movement in Russia is an important and pressing U.S. interest, just as Mr. Putin’s growing hostility to the United States threatens U.S. initiatives in the Middle East and elsewhere. Maybe offering Mr. Putin a new nuclear weapons deal is the best way to counter his noxious policies — but it is hard to see how. Read more on this from Opinions: Stephen F. Cohen: How Obama can avert another Cold War Fred Hiatt: Putin turns back the clock in Russia Vladimir Putin: My vision for a better Russia Jackson Diehl: Static at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty


We’re on notice to plan for the next meteor

could approach the earth. As of this week, about 10,000 near-Earth objects have been discovered, including nearly 900 with a diameter of roughly a kilometer or larger. None is expected to hit Earth anytime soon, but many large objects are believed to remain undetected. In 2005 Congress set a 15-year deadline for scientists to find 90 percent of the near-Earth objects greater than about 500 feet in diameter — those large enough to cause regional or global devastation. But the mandate has been chronically underfunded. The project would require several more dedicated telescopes. Last year the project received about $20 million, far less than the $50 million that the National Research Council estimated in 2010 was needed to reach the congressional goal by 2030, a decade late. Even when this goal is met, most small asteroids and comets — too small to cause global devastation but still large enough to cause damage far worse than just occurred in Russia — will remain undetected unless funding is significantly increased. Another danger is that even if a meteor does not itself cause major damage, any resulting chaos or confusion could lead nations to overreact. In 2002, for example, a meteor exploded over the Mediterranean at a time when India and Pakistan were facing off over the disputed Kashmir region. The U.S. Space Command’s deputy director for operations warned a congressionally mandated commission that the meteor might have been misidentified as a nuclear attack, had it come apart over South Asia. Many countries lack the United States’ sophisticated sensors that can help determine whether a large explosion is nuclear in nature. The damage that could occur if a nation were to misidentify a meteor explosion and launch a counterattack is chilling. Washington should do more to establish an international warning system that can provide credible, near-instant information to countries across the globe whenever a major explosion is detected. More broadly, Congress should continue to invest in day-to-day disaster planning, including improving coordination among first-responders. Such investments would help us respond to relatively frequent events such as hurricanes or earthquakes, as well as infrequent events, such as meteor strikes and terrorist attacks. When something explodes or falls from the atmosphere, the world needs to know what it is. Impacts like what occurred in Russia on Friday are certain to occur. More on this topic: Alexandra Petri: Han Solo and other depressing reminders of mortality


As asteroid whizzes by, surprise meteor makes an impact over Russia

rock. As it exploded, the meteor briefly blazed brighter than the sun. And no one saw it coming. A weather satellite’s camera snapped the meteor’s dive, but a global network of asteroid-spotting telescopes funded by NASA failed to detect it. The sun was in the way, the telescopes blinded by a dayside approach. “An asteroid such as this is virtually impossible to see ahead of time,” said Paul Chodas of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The twin asteroid encounters on Friday — one benign, the other malign — laid bare both the uncertain reality of life in the cosmos — you never know when a space rock might come crashing down — and our planet’s lack of defense against such threats. NASA, the world’s lead agency for detecting asteroid hazards, boosted its budget for the task from $6 million in 2011 to $21 million last year. And a NASA effort launched in 1998 has found 95 percent of potential “planet killers” at least a mile wide; none is headed for Earth. But still, many say the agency, and the world, are not doing enough. Two congressmen seized the moment to promise hearings on the planet’s space-threat readiness. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, said in a statement that developing technology to track asteroids “is critical to our future,” while Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) called asteroid impacts the “only true preventable natural disaster.” Even if we find one that will hit us, he said, “we might not be able to deflect it.” A private effort by two former astronauts to build a space telescope to spot smaller Earth-bound asteroids has raised a few million dollars, but is years away from launch — if it ever gets off the ground. Plans to deflect asteroids are even more nascent. Proposals range from the sublime — spraying an asteroid with reflective paint so the sun nudges it — to the extreme — nuking it. With early detection and a few decades of lead time, even a tiny nudge could push an asteroid out of the tiny “keyhole” in space that would otherwise send it crashing to Earth. The European Space Agency and NASA are in the early stages of plotting a mission to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if humans can, in fact, push around a sizeable space rock. The project, called AIM-DART, has


Olympics wrestling: For Good Counsel’s Kyle Snyder, IOC decision was punch to gut

secrets to dominating his opponents. On the message boards of wrestling Web sites and at meets across the United States, the IOC’s gut-punch is all anyone talks about. “Wrestling is the ultimate test of a man’s strength, courage, discipline — everything,” said Phil Brown, a former all-ACC wrestler at the University of Maryland, now an assistant coach at Good Counsel. “You take out a sport that has been there since the very beginning, and add something like wakeboarding? That belongs in the X Games.” Still, few are as personally affected by the IOC’s decision as Snyder, for whom the Olympics had been both a lifelong dream and, increasingly, a tangible and realistic goal. Of course, he can still qualify for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games — and he was focused on that even before the IOC’s decision ratcheted up his urgency — but it is rare that a 20-year-old, as Snyder will be at the time, makes it onto the U.S. squad in wrestling. According to Saar, a wrestler’s prime competitive years are the mid- to late-20s. Simple math tells you that Snyder will be 24 in the summer of 2020, 28 in the summer of 2024. “If this stands, he’ll get cheated out of his prime Olympic years,” Saar said. “He’ll still be able to compete in the world championships every year, and he’ll still compete for NCAA championships — and those are meaningful goals that he talks about. But it’s different than saying you’re an Olympic champion.” Holding out hope An Olympic gold medal being the absolute best thing one can get out of a wrestling career — riches and fame being out of the question — no one, after Tuesday’s news, would have begrudged Snyder had he hung up his singlet and directed his obvious athletic gifts toward a pursuit with a more tangible payoff. Instead, he vowed to stay the course, saying nothing had changed in the way he would approach his future. “If anything,” Snyder’s father, Steve, said, “this really fires him up.” For one thing, Snyder still has 2016 to shoot for, and he considers that his primary immediate goal. Though he has another year left at Good Counsel, he has already committed to attend Ohio State in the fall of 2014 — in part because it is home to a Regional Training Center dedicated to fostering Olympic-caliber wrestlers. But beyond that, Snyder


After the meteor, some in Chelyabinsk prepare to clean up

lighted up the sky, the Interfax news agency reported. After the intense bright flash of its explosion, the children rushed to the windows, but before the shock wave could hit, she commanded them to get under their desks. Karbysheva was showered with glass and debris, but the children were unharmed. With a cut to a tendon in her left hand and a gash on her left thigh, she led her class to safety outdoors. The doctor treating her Saturday at Hospital No. 9 told Interfax she would recover. Although parts of a wall and roof at a zinc factory collapsed, the most badly damaged building in the city was the Ice Palace, a skating arena. The governor said it will require at least $6 million in publicly financed repairs. About 20,000 police and emergency workers were mobilized to get the city and region back in order. A team of nine glaziers flew in from the city of Tyumen to help with the windows. Meanwhile, with a perfectly round hole about 20 feet across having suddenly appeared in a frozen lake outside Chelyabinsk city, divers went searching for meteorite fragments, but they came up empty-handed. The meteor, traveling at about 40,000 mph, unleashed the energy of 20 Hiroshima-size bombs as it detonated in the atmosphere. Shortly afterward, a military spokesman told news services that it had been shot down by an air defense unit. Later, an official with the Ministry of Emergency Situations said that text-message alerts had been sent out before the big blast. Neither assertion was true; both drew strong criticism and mockery online. The text-message claim seems to have been inspired by the failure of officials last summer to warn residents of Krymsk, in southern Russia, of a flood they knew was coming. Remarkably, the Ministry of Emergency Situations announced Friday night that the offending official — unnamed — had been fired. Sergei Parkhomenko “As we can see, the first reaction is this: ‘Everybody lies,’ ” he said. “The second: ‘Everything is stolen.’ That’s what we hear in response to various statements by all officials — local, regional and federal. People are treated with great disdain, and there is a huge variety of fantasies, fears, some panic and so on. Why is this happening? From distrust.” Of course, a meteor streaking in unbidden from space on an otherwise normal day to shower destruction on a city of more


Fiscal trouble ahead for most future retirees

financial standing of aging Americans: an inexorable rise in health-care costs, growing debt among older Americans and a shift in responsibility from employers to workers to plan for retirement. The consequence is that the nation is facing a huge retirement savings deficit — as much as $6.6 trillion, or about $57,000 per household, according to a U.S. Senate report. Using data on household finances collected by the Federal Reserve, the Center for Retirement Research estimates that 53 percent of American workers 30 and older are on a path that will leave them unprepared for retirement. That marks a sharp deterioration since 2001, when 38 percent of Americans were at risk of declining living standards in old age. In 1989, 30 percent faced that risk. The center’s findings are similar to those recently uncovered by researchers at the New School, the Heritage Foundation and the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. “There is a mismatch between retirement needs rising and retirement benefits contracting,” said Alicia H. Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. The precarious situation comes after a long period of change that improved life for the nation’s seniors starting with the enactment of Social Security in 1935. By the 1960s, retirees also benefitted from universal health insurance through Medicare and Medicaid, sharp increases in Social Security benefits and new protections enacted by the federal government for workers who received traditional pensions, which for decades were a standard employee benefit. The changes rescued millions of retirees from poverty, while lifting millions of others to prosperous retirements symbolized by vacation cruises, recreational vehicles and second homes. But now problems for future retirees seem to be closing in from all sides. Half of American workers have no retirement plans through their jobs, leaving people on their own to save for old age. Meanwhile, four out of five private-sector workers with retirement plans at work have only 401(k)-type defined contribution accounts, rather than traditional pensions that pay retirees a fixed benefit for life. Numerous studies have found that workers with defined-contribution accounts often put aside too little money, make too many withdrawals or employ the wrong investment strategies to save enough for old age. Overall, people ages 55 to 64 have a median retirement account balance of $120,000, Boston College researchers have found, which is enough to fund an annuity paying about $575 a month, far short of what


Karzai says he intends to ban Afghan troops from requesting foreign airstrikes

of them linked to al-Qaeda, Afghan officials said. NATO launched an investigation, and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the new commander of U.S. and international forces here, met with Karzai to express condolences for civilian casualties, according to statements earlier this week from both the presidential palace and the alliance. The Afghan leader said he would issue a decree Sunday “stating that under no conditions can Afghan forces request foreign airstrikes on Afghan homes or Afghan villages during operations.” Photographers document everyday life in Afghanistan as coalition forces prepare for their 2014 departure. Because Afghanistan has only an incipient air force, NATO must fill the void to protect its own troops and the Afghans’ — even while fending off Karzai’s repeated accusations that it is somehow indifferent to civilian deaths. A former Afghan general, Amrullah Aman, reacted with surprise to Karzai’s remarks in an interview with the Associated Press. “In a country like Afghanistan, where you don’t have heavy artillery and you don’t have air forces to support soldiers on the ground, how will it be possible to defeat an enemy that knows the area well and can hide anywhere?” Aman said. “There must be air support to help all those ground forces on the battlefield.” NATO declined to comment. Many analysts continue to express doubt about the capacity of the country’s desertion-prone national police and military forces to hold their own against the Taliban after NATO ends its combat mission at the end of 2014. As they step up training Afghan forces to assume responsibility for the country’s defense, Western troops are concurrently accelerating their withdrawal, in part at Karzai’s insistence. President Obama has ordered half the remaining 66,000 U.S. troops here to depart within a year. Last June, after a NATO air attack killed 18 civilians, Dunford’s predecessor, Gen. John Allen, restricted the use of strikes against suspected militants “within civilian dwellings.” The circumstances of the latest attack are not entirely known, at least not publicly, but Afghan officials said it occurred during a combined American-Afghan raid and two homes were hit by aerial munitions. In his speech, Karzai said Dunford told him the strikes were called in by the Afghan spy agency, the National Directorate of Security. “If this is true, it is very regrettable and it is very shameful. How could they ask foreigners to send planes and bomb our own houses?” the Afghan president said.


For self-quantifiers using, life is but a spreadsheet

and business. Inkinen is part of an expanding universe of self-quantifiers who collect megabytes of personal data seeking an edge much like the devotees of quantitative analysis who transformed Wall Street. There is a dark side even at some levels of amateur competition. Swimmers, runners, cyclists and triathletes have been penalized for using illegal performance-enhancing substances. In addition, one cyclist trying to post the fastest time on Strava for a route — laying claim to the virtual title “King of the Mountain” — crashed and died in California, according to a lawsuit against Strava. Sami Inkinen’s biking data is fed wirelessly into a computer on his handlebars so he can later upload his results to the Web site Strava and compare them against those of hundreds of other riders. (Screen grabs from strava.com) Lance Armstrong San Francisco-based Strava, which advertised on broadcasts of last year’s Tour de France, treats Armstrong as “just another member of the community,” chief executive Michael Horvath says. Some Strava competitors urged that Armstrong be banned because of his doping. Strava and rival sites such as MapMyRide, TrainingPeaks, Garmin Connect and Dailymile tap into the psychological elements that make sports rewarding, says Ian Bogost, a game designer who teaches at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. They exploit people’s competitive instincts to get them to ride their bikes faster or work harder. “What is the medium-to-long-term consequence of a social environment where everything is attached to direct feedback and immediate reward?” Bogost says. “I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m a bit afraid of it.” He says he is particularly concerned that “the applications we’re getting are being built by people that have financial gain and leverage as their primary motivation.” Game mechanics are appearing everywhere, a trend known as gamification. In Zynga’s FarmVille game, players tend virtual crops with their friends on Facebook. RedBrick Health encourages healthy behavior among client companies’ employees by setting up competitions and offering other incentives for losing weight, quitting smoking and avoiding health risks, according to its Web site. Bogost created the hit computer game Cow Clicker in 2010 as a satire of FarmVille and other social games. Players who click on an image of a cow once every six hours win more clicks. They can spend “mooney” on things such as custom “premium” cows. He has since added a “Cowclickification” interface, allowing any Web site to


National park advocates pressing Congress to prevent deep budget cuts

worded “Instructions for Sequestration Reduction Planning Template” calls for drastic measures if Congress does not avert the cuts. “We expect that a cut of this magnitude, intensified by the lateness of the implementation, will result in reductions to visitor services, hours of operation, shortening of seasons and possibly the closing of areas during periods when there is insufficient staff to ensure the protection of visitors, employees, resources and government assets,” Jarvis wrote in a memo obtained by the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, which is working to rally the public against the cuts. The memo instructs park officials to plan for furloughs and eliminate most of the 9,000 seasonal employees who staff most visitor operations. “Everything would be reduced from what visitors expect when they come to a national park,” said Joan Anzelmo, former superintendent of Colorado National Monument. “We’re not an office that answers phones.” Even the White House visitor center and 82 acres surrounding 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. would be affected. The Park Service’s $2.2 billion budget would be sliced 5.1 percent. The effect would be severe, former park officials and budget experts say, because the cuts would be made over the seven remaining months of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. With salaries making up 80 to 90 percent of their costs, parks have very few discretionary expenses. Few have been able to squirrel away money to prepare for sequestration. By March, they will have spent more than 40 percent of their yearly budget. That will make the cut feel like 8.7 percent, experts say. “For agencies on a month-to-month cycle like the Park Service, you’ve got an impossible situation with these cuts,” said Scott Lilly, a former congressional budget expert and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. ‘Parks are for everybody’ On the Blue Ridge Parkway, the 469-mile road connecting the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina to the Shenandoahs in Virginia, the 14 visitor centers, many campgrounds and restrooms are so spread out that it would be almost impossible to keep all of them open by assigning employees to cover more territory. “If you have a ranger at Mile 469 in Cherokee, he’s not going to be in a position to help a visitor at the other end of the park,” said Dan Brown, a former Blue Ridge Parkway superintendent. “You can’t just move people around without closing some facilities.” The parkway,


Foxes in D.C.? Why not. It’s their city, too.

said. “They’ve adapted to the point where they can create a den site that doesn’t need to be in a wooded area. It could be under a house, in an alley, under somebody’s garage or storage shed. It’s conceivable they’ve established an area around Logan Circle. They don’t need a lot, really.” What foxes do need besides shelter is food. And Washington — from forested Rock Creek Park to the mean streets of Logan Circle and Columbia Heights — is a big buffet table. Their principal food source is small mammals: mice, squirrels, chipmunks . . . and rats. “There’s probably plenty of food down there,” Ken said of reader James’s neighborhood. “A fox will get into trash, too, if there’s an opportunity.” Scott Giacoppo “There’s a likelihood that more kits from foxes — more raccoons and possums — will survive to have an extended life expectancy,” Scott said. The relationship between animals and humans can sometimes be an uneasy one. Foxes do get rabies. When they do, they can be especially aggressive. They will chase humans and can bite them, as happened to a woman last week in Rock Creek Park. “A fox poses no threat to you and your family, unless [it’s] sick or injured,” Scott said. Although foxes are primarily dusk and dawn animals, Scott said that one of them being out in the day doesn’t necessarily mean it’s sick. If the animal looks healthy — with a shiny coat and clear eyes — and isn’t acting abnormally, it needn’t be feared. “We would advise people to admire their beauty,” Scott said. “Take a picture. Never approach them. If they’re hanging around the yard, I would start looking for reasons why.” Make sure trash is secured, and if you have a bird feeder, clean up dropped seeds and shells regularly. Ken said the fox’s only natural predator around here is the coyote. That’s right: Coyotes have been in Rock Creek Park since at least 2004. “We’ve seen one as recently as November of last year,” Ken said. He gets about eight to 10 coyote-sighting reports annually. “I think the size of the park is going to limit their population,” Ken said. They need more room than foxes. They, too, can venture out of the park. “I haven’t heard a lot of stories in this area of coyotes being aggressive,” Ken said. “They can get aggressive if people


‘A Deniable Death’ confirms Gerald Seymour’s esteemed place in spy fiction

Improvised Explosive Devices. IEDs. For almost a decade we’ve hated what these hidden bombs have done to our men and women in Iraq, but many of us know little about their origins or full military significance. Now the veteran British spy novelist Gerald Seymour has written an extraordinary work of fiction with these cruel weapons at its center. To be precise, the novel’s focus is an Iranian, known as “the Engineer,” who has designed the makeshift bombs used in Iraq and continually updated them to make them more lethal and difficult to detect. Iranian leaders hail him as “the father of the bomb in the road.” One declares, “You are, to us, our Nobel or our Kalashnikov, even our Oppenheimer.” To Western soldiers and strategists, of course, the Engineer is the devil incarnate. One British military leader calls these bombs “the weapon that has snatched victory from the coalition and replaced it with a very fair imitation of defeat.” He adds that the Pentagon has spent in excess of $30 billion to combat this weapon, the main components of which can be bought anywhere for $5 or $10. “A Deniable Death” is the story of a joint U.S., British and Israeli attempt to kill the Engineer. He lives with his wife and children outside an Iranian military base near the Iraqi border. He might live in greater safety within the base, but his strong-willed wife loves their house on a large marsh that attracts rare birds. After a long search, British intelligence learns his whereabouts, even as the Engineer faces a personal crisis. His wife has a brain tumor that Iranian doctors call inoperable, but which the Engineer hopes can be treated by European doctors with more sophisticated equipment. His government grants the couple permission to go there to seek treatment. It is then that two British surveillance experts, known by the nicknames Badger and Foxy, make their way within 200 yards of the Engineer’s home, where they hide in the marsh’s mud and reeds with powerful microphones. Their goal is to learn where the couple are going. Given that information, an Israeli assassin is poised to follow the couple to Europe. “A Deniable Death” by Gerald Seymour (Thomas Dunne) Complications arise, of course. Foxy, 51, and Badger, 28, soon loathe each other, even as they coexist for days in a shallow hole in the ground, tormented by flies, mosquitoes,


Consignment site helps ‘snobs’ swap high-end goods

Web sites such as Tradesy, RodeoDriveResale and Karma Couture to specialize in online consignment sales. Others such as Bag, Borrow & Steal, which allows customers to rent designers bags for a month at a time, and Rent the Runway, a similar program for clothing and accessories, have also gained ground in recent years as shoppers look for ways to pay less for high-end products. “The economy has made young people more discerning about their purchases,” said Milton Pedraza, chief executive of the Luxury Institute, a New York-based research firm. “They would rather have a nice classic that lasts a long time than a fly-by-night product.” Snob Swap relies on an eBay-type model that allows customers to sell items for a set price or ask for cash offers. There is also a “swap’”option that allows sellers to solicit trades. “You can post your silk scarf and swap it for a handbag in L.A. or a skirt from New York,” Whang said. Snob Swap keeps a 10 percent cut of every sale (although swaps are free). Most items are sold for 30 percent to 40 percent of their retail price, Whang said. A pair of Versace sunglasses that originally cost $175, for example, are listed for $69 on the site. “Our members are largely women in their early 20s to their 40s,” Whang said. “There are a lot of students and young professionals, and also women in their 30s and 40s who would like to cash out their closets and pass on their designer goodies to someone who would use them.” The company partners with consignment shops such as Chic to Chic in Gaithersburg and Tari in the District, to sell items from their stores online. The idea, Whang said, is to be as accessible as possible to customers throughout the country. Whang is in the process of testing Closet Concierge, a full-service option for people who are too busy to list their own items. Clients can send their designer goods to Whang, who will research the items, then price and list them on the Web site. Once the items are sold, Whang will ship them to the buyer and give the seller a 60 percent cut. Last week, Whang’s office in Northwest Washington was strewn with items from a client in New York: Tiffany & Co. sunglasses (to be sold for $125), suede Givenchy pumps ($89), cross-body Louis Vuitton bag ($225).


Wal-Mart plans getting reworked by developers

to company spokesman Steven Restivo. Reworked plans by developers, including the D.C. Housing Authorty, include offices and, shown here, apartments. Restivo said the company would work with members of the city council to open hiring centers at each of the new stores. The company has pledged more than $3 million to train 2,000 D.C. residents over three years. “We’re proud of our contributions to date, and look forward to soon opening our first store in Washington, D.C.,” Restivo said in an e-mail. Expanding projects Plans for two other D.C. Walmart projects are being re-worked. On East Capitol Street, the D.C. Housing Authority and its partner, A&R Cos., submitted plans for a Wal-Mart-anchored project in August of last year, but — at the urging of the city’s Office of Planning — have broadened the project to take better advantage of the nearby Capitol Heights Metro station. The new plans, submitted last week, call for a more modern design for the Wal-Mart store, a gateway to the Metro station, a mixed-use building with 283 apartments and a 21,000-square-foot office building. Feras Qumseya, vice president of development for A&R (and a former city economic development official), said that even though there is almost no office space in the neighborhood, the office building was designed to accommodate health care facilities and would find suitors. “We believe ultimately there is a market,” he said. Changes are also in the works for the project on New York Avenue NE, at the intersection with Bladensburg Road. The developer stumbled in trying to attract other retailers to join Wal-Mart but says he has regained his footing. Developer Rick Walker had planned to build a 124,000-square-foot Wal-Mart atop a Lowe’s home improvement store; Lowe’s opted to instead open a store next to a Costco in the nearby Shops at Dakota Crossing. But Walker said he has a signed lease from a replacement: Burlington Coat Factory, the discount clothing and furniture seller. Walker said Burlington will open a 65,000-square-foot store beneath the Wal-Mart, and he said he is considering other retailers to fill out the 320,000-square-foot project. Walker said that his shopping center and the Costco project would create a go-to shopping district, just as the opening of a Target-anchored project did in the wealthier 14th Street NW corridor five years ago. “We will be to Northeast and Southeast what the Columbia Heights area has become to Northwest,” Walker said.


Defense contractors rethinking veteran support

duty and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, leaving the military left her lonely. “I went from being part of this huge family to now I’m solo,” she said. Gordon had also become accustomed to using what in the military is dubbed a “continuity book,” given to military members taking on a new role with details about duties, terminology and contacts. In the private sector, there was no continuity book. After 20 years in the Marine Corps, Charles Miles said it was at times hard to translate his military experience into a résuméthat made sense to corporate America. Miles, who now works for ManTech, at one point interviewed with a company that had never hired a veteran. “They gave me a personality test, and ... they said I was too mission-oriented,” he said. “It just illustrates a lack of understanding that a lot of people inexperienced with veterans have.” Veterans also go through the typical changes most employees make when switching jobs, such as adjusting to new terminology and work flow systems. Many also have to adjust to the personal life changes that come with giving up deployments. “In the beginning, it’s a little bit like landing in another country without the phrase book,” said Susan Chiaravalle, a more-than-30-year veteran of the Navy who was hired by Northrop about three years ago. Organizations focused on veteran hiring often try to tailor their strategies to reflect these job candidates’ needs. For instance, the USO hosts smaller job fairs for veterans seeking new jobs. In a hotel ballroom in Springfield late last year, the nonprofit, which focuses on supporting troops, teamed up with the nonprofit Hire Heroes USA to offer a career fair tailored for former members of the military. That meant there were fewer people — meant to make it less overwhelming for job seekers who might not be accustomed to massive job fairs — and each was invited to have his or her résumé revised by Hire Heroes staff. “If they’re coming with their own version of a résumé, it’s kind of gibberish to the hiring managers,” said Nathan Smith, chief operating officer of Hire Heroes. “If we’ve done that translation piece, it’s empowered the participant.” Companies have also put in place programs to help veterans once they’re hired. Northrop, for instance, has relied on employee resource groups, or informal, volunteer groups to provide mentors and support for their


Satellites give perspective on archaeological sites; guide to North American butterflies

ground, finding buried treasures without overturning a single rock. National Geographic reports that space satellites are capturing images of archaeological sites all over the world from 400 miles above Earth. The magazine compares the satellite imagery to medical scans: Just as doctors can examine body parts and organs beneath the skin, scientists can find objects hidden a foot beneath the surface. Infrared images are processed to reveal subtle surface changes, and suddenly a muddy mound is discovered to be hiding a row of ancient homes. Sarah Parcak, a University of Alabama archaeologist, has identified 17 potential buried pyramids, 3,000 settlements and 1,000 tombs across Egypt using satellite imagery, according to the magazine. At Tanis, a 3,000-year-old city in the Nile Delta, Parcak identified shallowly buried houses; so far, a team of French researchers has excavated one of those dwellings, according to the magazine. “Using laborious, low-tech excavation, it might have taken a century to assemble a similar city plan,” the magazine says. A bonus is that satellites give scientists eyes on locales that might be difficult or dangerous to visit in person. Of course, the article notes, someone eventually needs to confirm the satellites’ findings. “When it comes to archaeology, distance provides crucial perspective, but there’s no substitute for being up close.” — Maggie Fazeli Fard A female monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, rests on a flower Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2012. (John Dunham/AP) butterflies Distinguishing the eye candy of the insect world “A Swift Guide to Butterflies of North America” by Jeffrey Glassberg How can you tell the difference between a comma and a question mark, or a monarch and a viceroy, or even a pixie and an elf? Having 3,500 sharply focused color photos at the ready is one way to identify these and hundreds of other butterfly species found in North America. Jeffrey Glassberg, president of the North American Butterfly Association and the author of “A Swift Guide to Butterflies of North America,” has spent a lifetime taking close-ups of wild, unrestrained butterflies. The result is a book that will appeal to both die-hard butterfly watchers and those who merely enjoy a nice bit of insect eye candy. The book’s words, while few, are thoughtful and thought-provoking. “Beginning their lives as caterpillars (which, like humans, are earthbound), butterflies — fragile, ephemeral and ethereal — are connected to the human soul and to the possibility of transformation.” — Carol Sottili


Police enlist war tech in crime fight

Wartime technology used by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is increasingly making its way to U.S. cities and towns, changing the way police investigate crimes by focusing not where crimes have happened but where they most likely will happen next. One of the latest technologies, called “geospatial predictive analytics,” has helped police chase copper thieves in Virginia and a strangler in Philadelphia — and enabled officers to deploy police smartly across the Washington region during the mysterious shootings of military installations in 2010. “We were able to use the information in a good way to save taxpayers money rather than haphazardly throwing things against the wall and seeing if it sticks,” said Virginia State Police Capt. Steven W. Lambert of the Virginia Fusion Center, which coordinates statewide investigations, including the case of the five shootings at military buildings. When Yonathan Melaku was arrested at Arlington National Cemetery in summer 2011, months after he started his string of shootings, police had been expecting him there. They had analyzed hundreds of factors, such as the gunman’s sightlines, access points and escape routes. His escape route was particularly important; he stayed close to highways. With the data, they produced a list of hundreds of likely target areas, along with the probability that the shooter would visit each one. It helped them figure out where to focus resources and what to protect. It didn’t lead to Melaku’s arrest; he was stopped in the cemetery behaving erratically and lugging a backpack loaded with spray paint, spent shell casings and homemade bomb-making materials. The case, led by the FBI, ended with Melaku pleading guilty to the shootings, and in January he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. But the accuracy of the prediction — placing Arlington in the top tier of his possible targets — seemed to prove the technology’s potential in helping to focus large, complex investigations, Lambert said. “This helps us make sense of our data,” Lambert said. “In the Fusion Center, I often say we’re drowning in information and yet starved for knowledge.” Other data police analyzed included terrain of the crime scenes, public transit access and the economics of surrounding neighborhoods. The technology initially was developed using satellite images and other data to help U.S. troops anticipate where explosives were buried in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is one in a string of wartime science applications — high-speed license plate readers, mobile


Afghan war’s civilian deaths fell in 2012, U.N. says

Photographers document everyday life in Afghanistan as coalition forces prepare for their 2014 departure. KABUL — The report However, U.N. officials noted increasing threats to noncombatants last year because of the reemergence of armed groups, including pro-government militias, especially in the country’s north and northeast. Those regions generally have been regarded as secure compared with the south and the east, where Taliban-led militants are most active. The United Nations recorded 2,754 civilian deaths in Afghanistan in 2012, compared with 3,131 in 2011. Since 2007, when the world body began keeping these statistics, 14,728 civilians have been killed in the conflict. For years, civilian deaths caused by foreign troops have been a thorny issue between President Hamid Karzai and his Western backers, especially the United States, even though, according to the U.N. report, militants are responsible for far more such casualties — 81 percent in 2012 — than NATO forces. Eight percent of civilian casualties were attributed to coalition forces, the report said; 11 percent percent were not linked to a specific cause. As the number of troops dwindles, so do the pilfered items that supplied what is known as the “Bush Market,” named for the former president. Civilian casualties resulting from air operations by Western forces dropped by 42 percent in 2012 compared with 2011, the report said, data that support NATO’s oft-stated position that its airstrikes against militants have become more precise. But the report stressed “the still critical need for continuous review of targeting criteria” to further reduce civilian deaths from aerial attacks. “Of the 126 civilian deaths from aerial operations, 51 were children,” the report noted. To illustrate the inherent risk of aerial attacks, the United Nations singled out a Sept. 16 series of strikes that killed eight people in Laghman province, mainly women and children, but no militants. “The decrease in civilian casualties . . . is very much welcome,” said Jan Kubis, the U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan. “Yet, the human cost of the conflict remains unacceptable.” The use of roadside bombs by insurgents was the “single biggest killer of civilians,” Kubis said. After 10 civilians died last week in a NATO airstrike that was requested by Afghan security forces in eastern Konar province, Karzai issued a decree that bars the national forces from seeking such air support in residential areas. On Sunday, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the top U.S. and NATO commander in


Is the banking system healthy?

on profit margins. And a growing chorus from Congress and regulators that large banks should be broken into smaller institutions is adding to the uncertainty. The largest banks have also been engulfed in a sea of litigation with no clear end in sight, Williams said. Dozens of cases brought by investors who claim they were misled about securities deals are still winding through the courts. Meanwhile, prosecutors have yet to reach agreements with many of the banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, being investigated for manipulating the global interest rate known as Libor. Resolution of these investigations could take another year at least, placing an ominous cloud over some of the nation’s largest institutions. Regulators, nonetheless, are encouraged by gains in the banking system that point to continued improvement of a once beleaguered industry. Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee last week, Thomas Curry, the comptroller of the currency, said conditions at the more than 1,800 banks his agency supervises continue to improve. Charge-off rates, or percentage of loans deemed uncollectable, have dipped below their pre-crisis levels, except for residential mortgages, he said. Common equity, a basic reserve against losses, is at 12.5 percent of risk-weighted assets, up from its low of just over 9 percent in the fall of 2008. And the number of problem national banks and federal savings associations fell from 192 in March 2011 to 146 last month. “The banking system is arguably as strong as it has ever been,” Mark Zandi, Moody’s Analytics chief economist, said. “Capital is at record levels, and there is ample liquidity. Credit quality is good and improving rapidly.” He pointed out that banks are no longer as profitable as they were before the recession, but they may never be given the higher capital requirements and greater regulatory oversight. All the trend lines, Zandi said, are moving in the right direction on credit quality, but as long as interest rates remain low banks will endure pressure on their profit margins. The comptroller also noted that banks are making more loans, but it is still only at about half the historical average pace. Curry stressed that “in this environment, institutions should be especially vigilant about monitoring the risks they are taking on. This is certainly not the time to let up on risk management.” Mark Calabria, director of financial-regulation studies at the Cato Institute, suspects there is an unwillingness


Suburbs to Congress: Please act now on sequester and budget plans

Suburban Maryland officials said Tuesday it is the lack of certainty about looming federal budget cuts — how much? when? is anything safe? — that is driving them crazy. “What we can’t survive is the uncertainty,” said Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D), at a news conference in Rockville to sound the alarm about the impending March 1 cuts, known as the sequester, and their impact across the Washington region. “For us, like our surrounding jurisdictions, we depend on the federal government,” said Baker, whose suburban county of nearly 1 million includes more than 70,000 federal workers, many of whom commute around the region and spend money in neighboring jurisdictions. Fellow executives Isiah Leggett (D-Montgomery) and Ken Ulman (D-Howard), as well as leaders of two Montgomery chambers of commerce urged their constituents and local businesses to send a clear message to Congress: reach an agreement now. “This is about the moms and dads who will wake up in a couple of months, and not have a job,” said Ulman, whose community is home to thousands of workers employed by defense contractors, NASA, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and nearby Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County. Noting the specialized intelligence work done at Fort Meade, Ulman asked: “What planet are we living on that it would make sense to reduce the workforce of people who are working to prevent cyberhacking?” Massive layoffs or furloughs would ripple across the regional economy, he said. “They can’t eat at a restaurant, they can’t buy a car,” Ulman said. “This affects our economy throughout.” Montgomery council president Nancy Navarro (D-Midcounty), said the lack of agreement in Congress on the sequester is also affecting businesses who might want to expand or relocate. “We have no idea what will occur, how many businesses are reevaluating if they want to come to Montgomery, stay in Montgomery or address that expansion that they are waiting for,” she said. Beyond that, the uncertainty “affects the country as a whole, and how it is seen around the world, as not being as strong and decisive as we need to be in these uncertain times,” she said. And despite signs of an economic upturn, the sequester, the lawmakers said, could undo the gains. “The loss to our county of millions of dollars in revenue could plunge us back into a severe slowdown causing budget shortfalls and a stagnant


Gen. John Allen intends to retire, decline military’s top post in Europe

The top military leader spoke exclusively with The Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran about why he's deciding to step away from service. Four months after taking office, President Obama approved the firing of the four-star Army general leading the war in Afghanistan. The following summer, the president sacked his replacement, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, for making intemperate remarks to a reporter. McChrystal’s successor, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, often disagreed with Obama on troop levels and war strategy. It was not until Marine Gen. John R. Allen took command of the war in July 2011 that Obama found a general with whom he clicked. Allen demonstrated more flexibility on troop numbers and shifts in strategy than his predecessors. Obama’s aides, in turn, were far more willing to listen to Allen’s views on how the war needed to be waged. Obama had wanted to give Allen, who relinquished command in Kabul this month, the military’s most prestigious overseas assignment — supreme allied commander in Europe. But on Tuesday morning, Allen announced that he planned to retire from the military because his wife is seriously ill. The decision deprives the president of a four-star general with whom he had built a close wartime relationship and forces the White House to find a new candidate to oversee U.S. and NATO operations in Europe. “I told General Allen that he has my deep, personal appreciation for his extraordinary service over the last 19 months in Afghanistan, as well as his decades of service in the United States Marine Corps,” the president said in a statement after meeting with the general at the White House. Gen. John R. Allen says goodbye to U.S. and Afghan troops during his last visit to southern Afghanistan. (Photo by Master Sgt. Kap Kim/PHOTO BY MASTER SGT. KAP KIM/COMISAF PUBLIC AFFAIRS) In an interview Monday evening, Allen said he wants to focus on helping his wife, Kathy, cope with a combination of chronic health issues, which include an autoimmune disorder. “Right now, I’ve just got to get her well,” Allen said. “It’s time to take care of my family.” In Afghanistan, Allen oversaw the strategic shift from troop-intensive counterinsurgency operations to the development of local security forces. As he orchestrated that change, he managed the removal of 33,000 U.S. troops from the country and the response to a spate of attacks on coalition personnel by members of the Afghan security forces.


Craft brewery with built-in dreams

seen outside a handful of Old World breweries. Translation: If most craft breweries are akin to spacious but modest homes, Bluejacket, when it opens in May or June, will be a small mansion with all the amenities. The quantity and variety of equipment, much more than a brewery of its size would usually have and all custom-built, will arguably make Bluejacket like no other small brewery in the country: a facility that NRG hopes will turn out a staggeringly diverse, constantly changing array of topnotch beers. To understand why this strategy is so unusual, it is helpful to extend the real-estate analogy. Just as most home buyers differ from most property developers, most aspiring brewers don’t have NRG’s track record, management team and experience attracting outside financing. So like families on a budget, brewers start with the basics, moving into properties and improving them bit by bit. Instead of building additions, they increase production volumes, and thus revenues and cash flow, by buying bigger brew kettles and more and larger fermentation tanks. Rather than renovating bathrooms, they replace grain mills, packaging lines or other essential equipment. Eventually they might add a wish-list item or two such as a lab, but like home fitness centers or movie theaters, expensive and specialized improvements are hard to afford and justify. Dream breweries, like dream homes, are often just that: dreams. In addition, many brewers wouldn’t want a facility like Bluejacket’s even if they could afford it. Consider Eataly’s Birreria brewpub in New York and Dogfish Head’s Rehoboth Beach brewpub, both of which are affiliated with well-funded enterprises yet are much less ambitious than Bluejacket will be. Standalone breweries, too, are usually planned differently for reasons other than money — reasons that become clear when you consider that building a new brewery is a study in tradeoffs. Should the brewery make large volumes of a few flagship beers and occasional one-offs, or small volumes of many beers, many of which will only be brewed once? Should it have relatively few large, all-purpose fermentation vessels, and thus a more efficient and streamlined production process, or many small, occasionally highly specialized vessels? Should it mostly brew beers that mature (and thus generate revenue) relatively quickly, such as pale ales and India pale ales, or devote much of its production to slower-maturing beers, such as cold-fermented lagers and sour ales fermented with wild yeasts and bacteria? In


Letter from Ireland

no speculation; they’re getting real bulbs.” Tulipomania, though, is closer to the economic crisis that has turned the Celtic Tiger into one sick pussycat. An economic boom that started soundly in the 1990s became increasingly reliant on a real estate bubble pumped up by a development frenzy, easy money, a public-works bonanza and risky banking practices. When the bubble popped, legions of Irish families were stuck in devalued homes with big mortgages and credit card bills. At first, the government agreed to cover the banks’ debt, but the guarantees were unsustainable. With the country facing insolvency, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund ponied up a $90 billion bailout in 2010 in return for painful austerity measures. Unemployment remains at almost 15 percent and emigration is again the norm, but Ireland is paying off its debts and is slowly getting on its feet, though the scars will remain for years. There is a lot of blame to go around. Millar is old enough to remember the poor times that have visited Irish life for decades. His younger countrymen knew only prosperity, he said. “That was the spoilt generation that grew up having it so easy.” When the banks sent them unsolicited offers of 100 percent mortgages and new-car loans, they jumped at the debt. “The next thing, the whole bubble bursts.” The crowd ogling and buying snowdrops at Altamont Gardens was of an older generation that is financially more settled but has found wealth in simpler pleasures. Certain bulbs may be expensive, but no one is getting either rich or bankrupt off them. “It may mean my husband can’t have as expensive a brand of whiskey,” said a woman from Cork who had purchased several hundred euros’ worth of snowdrops and another trendy winter plant, the hellebore. “The older generation have a better view of how it was and perhaps adapt to it better,” said De Schrijver. “I’m selling snowdrops on my Web site, and I have more customers than last year.” Most of the choice varieties of snowdrops are natural seedling variants rather than products of concerted human hybridizing, but stay tuned. “I can think of two or three people breeding snowdrops now, and the results will be astonishing,” Grimshaw told the gathering. “We’ll be seeing some extraordinary things in colors and forms.” Whatever the mood of the broader population, for Irish galanthophiles, spring is in the air.


Tom Sietsema: Clearing the table and reservation book

hesitate to spend $20 for, say, a six-ounce glass of nebbiolo are more apt to take the plunge with what Proof calls a “two-sie” for six bucks. *** “I would love to know how you decide on the international destinations you go to and which places to eat while there,” another poster on my online chat asked. “Is it places you have always wanted to go to for vacation, or places that are becoming increasingly popular, a combination or something else entirely?” All of the above. Last year, I flew to northern India with more than the Taj Mahal on my to-do list. I wanted to check out the restaurant scene there, which is being fueled by the country’s growing middle class, and see how the food there compared with the Indian cuisine found in Washington (Washington can be proud). I went to Vietnam, my most recent foreign trip, in part because I thought I needed to try the cuisine, which is richly represented in Northern Virginia, on its home turf. The south-to-north visit included two cooking classes and market tours in Ho Chi Minh City, Hue and Hanoi. This spring, I’m going to Paris not just because it’s fun to say “April in Paris,” but because for decades, France was where food enthusiasts traveled to keep abreast of culinary fashions. That’s less the case today, I believe, as other parts of the world (Spain, Peru, Denmark) have grabbed gastronomic headlines, although it never hurts to check in with a veteran tastemaker. As for suggestions, I do what a lot of readers do — search online — but I also reach out to embassies, cookbook authors and other experts in the field to avoid tourist spots and find local treasures. If it weren’t for a cheat sheet from the Turkish ambassador, for instance, I would have missed out on Kahraman, one of Istanbul’s finest stops for fresh fish, where the specialty is turbot. And I’ve learned over my dozen years of writing my Postcard From Tom column in the Travel section to leave time on the ground for last-minute recommendations from discerning locals. The best Peking duck of my life was the result of a suggestion from a Mandarin-speaking American in Beijing who pointed me in the direction of Duck de Chine. To access past reviews from around the world, go to wapo.st/TEXoXk. The regular Dining column returns next week


Learning from the Celtic garden

— the plants get large but “soft” and become targets for feeding caterpillars and other pests. Tanguy de Toulgoet employs French practices for edible gardening on his property in Ireland and offers day courses to visitors. (Adrian Higgins/The Washington Post) He has a lot of flowers: flowers to draw pollinators, to feed the bees and to provide the raw material for his tonics, which might be made from comfrey, yarrow, valerian, winter and summer savory and hyssop. After cutting these herbs in season, he presses them for three weeks and makes a tea that is then sprayed on plants as a fungicide or pesticide, or just a general plant tonic. “I use them to cure other plants.” He takes the cork out of a clay bottle and invites me to take a whiff. There is no smell, which is pretty amazing considering he made the contents six months ago — a black herbal tea infused with thyme, rosemary and savory. The savory is an effective whitefly repellent and the thyme is an antibacterial, he says. The dried clumps of burdock sit on the garden beds and act as a natural fungicide because the common weed is rich in copper, he says. His young apple and pear trees appear to be painted white, but they are coated in a spray made of porcelain clay mixed with a slurry of cow manure. The former creates a barrier to insects and birds, and the latter makes it persist in the wet Irish weather. In a lower garden, he has put in a new planting of pears, but the saplings are set at 45 degrees rather than upright. This seems wrong to those of us who have spent hours in our lifetimes making sure new trees are planted vertically, but Tanguy says that is how you form a hedge of pears in France. This, no doubt, would take skilled seasonal clipping to maintain and would be undone either by neglect or poor pruning. I am also struck by the sheer number of old French roses that have been planted about the place, both bushes and climbers. Rose season starts later here and lasts longer, and one imagines a summer full of color and fragrance. The rose fruits, the hips, no doubt will be harvested and put to use in autumn. He takes me to his beehive, which is called a Warre hive. In function


Fred Hiatt: With Shinzo Abe, Japan takes a pragmatic turn

TOKYO When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe meets with President Obama on Friday, he will be seeking to press not one but three reset buttons. The United States has a big stake in at least two of his goals — and it’s within Obama’s power to help realize them. Abe hopes to put back on track a U.S.-Japan relationship frayed by political instability in his country, which has rotated prime ministers every year since 2006. He hopes to kick-start Japan’s economy, transforming the country from aging, ailing ex-champion to dynamic contributor to the coming Pacific century. Both of those are essential to Abe’s third goal: resetting his own reputation, which was not enhanced by his first, brief turn as prime minister in 2006-07. Abe’s legacy is of little concern to most Americans. But as the United States seeks to contend — on a limited budget — with a rising China, the ability of its most important Asian ally to contribute, and to serve as a positive democratic role model, matters a great deal. Abe is Japan’s first leader since 1949 to be given a second chance in office, he reminded me and The Post’s Chico Harlan during an interview here late last week, and he seems determined to take advantage. “I did learn from many mistakes,” he said. When I interviewed Abe Since his election Dec. 16, he has steered largely clear of the World War II revisionism that motivates the jingoistic wing of his Liberal Democratic Party but infuriates Koreans, Chinese and other Asians. In the interview, he said he would like to leave such matters “to the good hands of historians and experts.” More to the point, he told us that he learned from his truncated first term to focus on clear priorities, which means the economy and the alliance. Strengthening ties with the United States, he said, is essential to countering the growing assertiveness of China, which is challenging Japan’s control of disputed islands in the East China Sea. “It is important for us to have them recognize that it is impossible to try to get their way by coercion or intimidation,” he said. “In that regard, the Japan-U.S. alliance, as well as the U.S. presence, would be critical.” Meanwhile, aggressive monetary easing and stimulus spending have brightened Japan’s mood; Abe is the first prime minister in a long time whose popularity has risen after his election.


Mexican authorities participated in civilian disappearances, report says

Relatives and human rights activits show a banner with pictures of missing people while marching during a protest commemorating the "International Week of the Detained-Disappeared" on May 30, 2012, in Mexico City. (YURI CORTEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) Describing what it called “the most severe crisis of enforced disappearances in Latin America in decades,” the U.S. organization Human Rights Watch issued a report Wednesday with grim implications for the thousands of Mexican civilians who have gone missing in the country’s shadowy drug fight. While inquiring into the cases of 249 missing persons in Mexico, the group said, its researchers found credible evidence that soldiers or police participated in 149 of the disappearances. The victims included husbands and fathers who went out for groceries and never came back and others dragged from their homes by uniformed men in the middle of the night, the rights group said. Many were last seen being stuffed into military trucks and police vehicles. Claims of extrajudicial killings and other grave rights violations have dogged Mexican security forces for years. But the report released Wednesday is one of the most significant attempts to date to identify patterns of abuse during the anti-drug effort and to examine the degree to which Mexican authorities either fail to investigate disappearances or, in many instances, are responsible for them. U.S. lawmakers have periodically threatened to withhold millions of dollars in security aid to Mexico over concerns that police and military abuses have worsened in recent years, and some funding was temporarily blocked in 2010. Congress has appropriated nearly $2 billion in assistance so far under the terms of the 2007 Merida Initiative, and 15 percent of the funds are supposed to be conditioned on rights improvements in Mexico. “More and more Mexican military and security forces are involved in human rights abuses, and we shouldn’t be funding that. We should be condemning that,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), co-chair of the human rights commission in the House, adding that he intends to hold hearings on the report’s findings. The group presented its findings Wednesday to the administration of Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto. Mexican officials declined to comment on the report. In its report, Human Rights Watch acknowledged that the 249 cases represent only a small and unscientific sampling of Mexico’s missing. An unpublished government database lists more than 25,000 people who have vanished since former president Felipe Calderon launched his U.S.-backed


Nordic Cool at Kennedy Center opens with potluck

energetic but not, on Tuesday, quite precise. At the opening, slightly smeared chord of “Finlandia,” I wondered whether they were struggling with the concert hall’s challenging acoustics, which (as National Symphony Orchestra players will tell you) can make it difficult for musicians onstage to hear one another. A few balance issues might have borne this out, but they also might have simply been the result of the group’s somewhat anarchic assault on “Finlandia,” offered with enough verve and crackle to break through the walls of somnolence raised by the speeches. In marketing Nordic Cool, the Kennedy Center might have made it clearer that this intermission-less concert, about 75 minutes in length, was as much an amuse-oreille as a full classical-music event. Aurally, the most unusual segment was a single movement of Jon Leifs’s first “Saga” symphony, which is made up of five movements representing five different heroes of Icelandic epics. This one, a scherzo, was bracingly different, with burbling bassoons and jarring syncopations, at once fresh and clownish, amiable and rambling, coming to an evanescent end like a burst soap bubble. Sweden and Norway got the short, not to say the pops-concert, end of the stick. Not that there’s anything wrong with Alfven’s “So Take My Heart” or “Solveig’s Song” from Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” — far from it; even if the titles don’t ring a bell, the tunes would probably strike you as familiar. And the Danish soprano Inger Dam-Jensen offered them very prettily, in a bell-toned voice with a lot of fluttery vibrato. But the real meat of the evening was Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, offered complete — at last — and with a big meaty sound indeed. Oramo plunged in with the turbulence of a propeller, churning up great depths and throwing up mud in the process, and proceeded to lead the orchestra through ups and downs and into a final cacophonous conflagration, throwing out explosions of timpani, that thoroughly bore out the work’s epithet of “inextinguishable.” As a whole, the evening offered brute strength under a veneer of refinement, and the orchestra made the most of it. Now let’s bring them back for the complete Leifs piece. Nordic Cool continues at the Kennedy Center through March 17. Complete program listings are on the Kennedy Center site, kennedy-center.org. Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson plays Monday, and Anne Sofie von Otter gives a recital March 4, among many other musical offerings.


U.S. launches effort to stem trade-secret theft

Newly released reports tie years of cyber attacks against the U.S. to the Chinese military, triggering the potential for more aggressive action from the White House. We look back at a Washington Post special report on how cyberspace has become the modern-day battleground for national security. The Obama administration warned Wednesday that it will launch new efforts to persuade China and other countries to halt the theft of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. trade secrets. The threat to place offender countries on a watch list and other steps are part a broader effort by the administration to coordinate with other nations to fight the growing theft of intellectual property. “State sponsored trade-secret theft . . . embattles our status as world leader in innovation,” Victoria Espinel, White House coordinator of intellectual-property enforcement, said at a strategy rollout. The new effort comes amid heightened attention to the issue of cyber-espionage directed at commercial targets, especially by China. This week, an Alexandria cybersecurity firm issued a report accusing the Chinese government of massive hacking campaigns against U.S. targets and President Obama recently issued an executive order aimed at better securing the computer networks of critical industries such as energy. Officials said they will urge other countries that are also targets of trade-secret theft to join in pressuring offender states to stop the pilfering. Senior administration officials also will continue to raise the issue of data theft and espionage in high-level meetings with their counterparts. Within the past year, Obama, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton raised the issue of economic cyber-espionage with their Chinese counterparts. “Our message is quite clear: The protection of intellectual property and trade secrets is critical to all intellectual property rights holders, whether they be from the United States or whether they be from Chinese companies or other companies around the world,” Robert D. Hormats, undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment, said at the event. Though China is regarded as the most aggressive actor, Hormats said other countries are guilty as well. He cited Russia and India as two countries active in the theft of intellectual property. While officials said they are concerned about traditional means for stealing commercial secrets, through tactics such as recruiting current or former employees, they said cyberspace is an increasingly important avenue for espionage. “A hacker in China can acquire source code


After abortion, woman died of natural causes from rare complication, examiner’s initial finding says

A 29-year-old woman died of natural causes after visiting an abortion clinic in Montgomery County and suffering a rare complication related to childbirth, according to an initial finding by the Maryland medical examiner’s office. The complication, which occurred when amniotic fluid was pushed into the woman’s bloodstream, can occur during or after abortions, natural deliveries or Caesarean sections. In concluding that the woman died of “natural causes,” the medical examiner’s office chose that designation over four others used to indicate “manner of death”: undetermined, accidental, suicide or homicide. The medical examiner listed three “causes of death.” One was “amniotic fluid embolism following a medical termination of pregnancy,” the complication involving amniotic fluid in the woman’s blood. Another was “disseminated intravascular coagulation,” a complication in which the body starts producing thousands of tiny blood clots, which have the counterintuitive effect of hampering the body’s ability to clot blood elsewhere. A third was “fetal abnormalities.” The medical examiner’s office, which reviews about 10,000 cases a year, has yet to complete its much more detailed autopsy report, which probably will not be released for at least a month, said Bruce Goldfarb, a spokesman for the office. He declined to comment on the case Wednesday other than releasing the cause and manner of death, which are considered public record. The case has again cast a national spotlight on a small clinic that opened inside a nondescript office park in Germantown a little more than two years ago. The clinic’s leader, LeRoy Carhart, is one the few doctors nationwide who publicly acknowledge performing late-term abortions. He has declined to comment. Abortion rights activists say Carhart courageously performs procedures many other doctors have quit doing. Abortion opponents say his procedures are dangerous and immoral, and they have targeted his clinic. They often demonstrate outside the clinic, as they did last week after the woman’s death. The New York woman, whose family has declined to comment in detail about the case, first visited Carhart’s clinic on Feb. 3, a Sunday, according to abortion opponents who tried to talk to her as she entered. They said that she was 33 weeks pregnant at the time, an assertion supported by an online gift registry the woman and her husband appeared to have set up for the baby. In the days after Feb. 3, the woman returned to the clinic several times, an indication of a multi-day abortion procedure that


One-third of seafood mislabeled, study finds

Customers select their own fish at a supermarket in this 2012 file photo. As much as one-third of seafood sold in restaurants and grocery stores is fraudulently labeled, according to a new report. (Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post) If you order tuna at a D.C. restaurant, chances are half the time you’ll be getting another, less expensive fish in its place. But those odds are better than if you had wanted snapper. Testers nationwide found that 87 percent of the time, restaurants and grocery stores were selling something else under that label. As much as one-third of seafood sold in restaurants and groceries is fraudulently labeled, according to a report the advocacy group Oceana released Thursday. The group sampled 674 retail outlets in the District and 20 states between 2010 and 2012, often finding cheaper, farmed fish being sold in place of wild-caught ones. Ninety-five percent of the sushi restaurants, 52 percent of other restaurants and 27 percent of grocery stores surveyed sold mislabeled seafood. While academics, consumer groups and media outlets in the United States and elsewhere have scrutinized fish labeling before and found major errors, Oceana’s effort is one of the largest seafood investigations to date. In its study, Oceana did not mention the names of the food stores, restaurants and sushi houses it visited because the group cannot identify specifically where in the distribution chain the fraud occurred. If you ask those in the fish business, they likewise have different ideas on where the mislabeling begins. Bob Kinkead, the veteran chef and restaurateur behind such seafood emporiums as the recently shuttered Kinkead’s, said the deception can occur anywhere along the distribution chain but notes that some suppliers prey on ignorant chefs. “I think chefs are uninformed” on species of fish, said Kinkead, who recently opened Ancora in the Watergate. “It’s not dishonesty. It’s carelessness.” Darren Lee Norris, co-owner of Kushi Izakaya & Sushi near Mount Vernon Square, however, pointed a finger directly at restaurateurs. “I think it comes down to a restaurant or chef who’s trying to buy something cheaper and jazz it up and call it something else.” The technology to conduct species tests has become relatively inexpensive and widely available in recent years, said Prof. Mahmood Shivji of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who has conducted genetic testing on fish species since 2007 and advised Oceana on its study. Although agencies such as


difference between such a marketing practice, which typically involves a pricey piece of fish in the first place, and the outright fraud of substituting a cheap fillet of tilapia for the expensive red snapper. Some chefs believe that it’s the cheaper strip-mall sushi houses that perpetuate the vast majority of the fraud, in large part because they must rely on fish sales to support the business rather than a bar program or some other revenue streams inside the restaurant. Some are pushing for reforms that would make it harder for chefs, restaurateurs and distributors to mislead the public. Some government officials and companies are pushing for increased traceability, where each fish receives an ID number that is carried over with each invoice, allowing buyers and customers to see where it is caught by logging onto a Web site. Steve Vilnit, fisheries marketing director for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, said he has been talking with the state’s fishermen about whether they would adopt such a system. “Chefs are willing to pay a little more for that level of detail,” Vilnit said, adding the idea has sparked mixed reactions. “Some are very enthusiastic; others just want to do status quo. We’ll probably start out working with a small group of guys and expand it from there.” Over at ProFish, they’re not waiting on the government to launch a traceability program. The company recently hired a firm to start conducting DNA tests as part of ProFish’s three-year-old FishPrint traceability program. ProFish’s goal is to, within a month, launch a Web-based database so buyers can see for certain what kind of fish they’re buying; the company will start with the top 20 species, such as salmon, catfish and rockfish. “We don’t want to go too big too fast,” said Rorapaugh. “You want to make sure you work out all the kinks.” Such programs could help with assessing fish stocks. While many retail outlets swapped out depleted species for more plentiful ones, Oceana’s Stop Seafood Fraud campaign director, Beth Lowell, warned this gave Americans a false impression of how these stocks are doing. The Gulf of Mexico red snapper population will not reach healthy levels until 2032, according to NOAA, while red snapper in the South Atlantic won’t be rebuilt until 2047. “If you see red snapper on every fish counter, on every menu and in every sushi restaurant, it’s hard for both


Japan’s economic turmoil may provide an opening for the U.S.

once-leading role in consumer innovation — remember the Sony Walkman? — arguably has been surrendered to the Apples and Samsungs of the world. The worry in the United States and elsewhere is no longer about Japanese dominance. Instead, it’s more about the implications if the country slides into irrelevance. “It is still a very large economy. For the U.S. it is important. . . . In the region it is key,” said Jerry Schiff, Japan mission chief for the IMF. But “under a not very optimistic scenario it may become not very important at all.” The country’s recent economic performance has compounded those concerns. The 2011 tsunami and nuclear crisis highlighted Japan’s vulnerability and the fragility of the global supply chain it helps fuel. When plants in Japan shut down because of electricity shortages, facilities around the world had to cut production because of Japan’s importance as a source of high-end parts and supplies. Although reconstruction led to a brief rebound in economic growth, the country quickly slipped back into recession. Its world-leading level of government debt has always seemed to defy gravity — with low interest rates despite its size — but many analysts feel that some of Japan’s built-in protections against a debt crisis are being lost. It ran a rare trade deficit in 2011 and needs its banks to shift from buying government bonds to investing in the economy. Even a small rise in the country’s borrowing costs, according to a recent presentation by an IMF official, could make its debt load unsustainable — with unpredictable implications if the world financial system suddenly loses what has been a safe-haven investment. Those considerable problems framed Abe’s plan — a set of ideas that has been given its own moniker, “Abenomics” — and will frame the talks with the Obama administration. For Obama, the incentives are just as great to pull Japan into the TPP’s orbit. Peterson Institute trade expert Jeffrey Schott estimated that the 11 nations currently discussing the agreement comprise about 30 percent of global economic output. Adding Japan and possibly South Korea could bring that to 40 percent — a potentially potent force for setting trade standards that other nations, including China and India, might feel compelled to adopt. With similar talks underway between the United States and the European Union, the administration hopes it can shape global intellectual property, Internet commerce and other policies in