New report rekindles questions about 2010 plane crash that killed Polish leader

including Kaczynski’s wife, Maria Kaczynska, and many senior military and political figures. On Thursday, a new Polish commission to review the crash said that “black box” recordings recovered from the accident had been “manipulated and shortened,” with several seconds of audio missing. Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz said there was “irrefutable proof of falsifications, manipulations and obfuscation of the truth.” Poland's government is expending tremendous effort in a painful reexamination of the crash. Investigators earlier this week confirmed that they would exhume the bodies of most of the victims, including Kaczynski and his wife, to search for clues to foul play. “Comprehensive post-mortem examinations . . . will be important for determining the injuries of the victims and the causes of their deaths, as well as reconstructing the final moments of the disaster and its causes,” Poland’s national prosecutor said in June. The commission, formed in March, is not tasked with naming alleged culprits, Macierewicz said. But he has indirectly accused Russia of sabotaging the plane, and former prime minister Donald Tusk, now president of the European Council, has been accused by political opponents of intentionally botching the initial investigation. Five Polish officials, including a former aide to Tusk, are on trial for alleged negligence in planning the flight. In 2012, Jaroslaw Kaczynski told Tusk in parliament that he bore “100 percent of the responsibility for the catastrophe.” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Thursday called accusations against Russia “irresponsible and provocative” and said the Polish side should produce evidence before engaging in speculation. “These are very serious things,” she said. The accusations of a vast government coverup and rogue Russian air-traffic controllers read like a thriller. And, in fact, top Polish officials last week attended the premiere of a blockbuster film called Smolensk, which follows a crusading Polish reporter debunking official explanations for the accident. The plot points to sabotage. “Before we were forbidden to ask who was behind the [World War II] murders” by the Soviets, one of the characters says in a publicity clip for the movie. "Today we are afraid to ask what really happened in Smolensk." The film’s director, Antoni Krauze, called the movie a “protest against the manipulations with the truth.” President Andrzej Duda, a former member of Kaczynski’s party, and Prime Minister Beata Szydlo attended the premiere at Warsaw’s National Opera House, along with family members of the crash victims, including Kaczynski.


The $1,000 date night: Has D.C.’s tasting-menu culture hit a tipping point?

dollar amount out, and then it was like we literally just put our head on the chopping block and people were taking slices.” It wasn’t the Washington he had come to know over the past year. “I thought people were supportive.” The people criticizing the Shaw Bijou’s prices would probably say that this is not the Washington they know, either. Is the city of half-smokes that kind of place? It is now. The Michelin Guide arrives next month, in the wake of a series of expensive restaurant debuts this year: Pineapple and Pearls, with its $250 all-inclusive price, opened in early April and Eric Ziebold’s Metier, with a tasting menu at $200, excluding drinks, opened two weeks later. The Georgetown restaurant 1789 just reopened as a prix-fixe restaurant, at $85 to $109 for its tasting menus. And Minibar, the current record-holder for the most expensive restaurant in the city, raised its prices this year, from $250 to $275, with beverages costing up to an additional $500. The price was $65 when Minibar debuted in 2003. Those restaurants join the stalwarts of special-occasion restaurants, such as the Inn at Little Washington (about $375 per person on average, including wine, tax and tip), Restaurant Eve (about $315) and Komi ($225, without tax or tip). If you’re an average consumer with a mortgage and children to put through college, reading that paragraph is probably enough to make you break into a sweat. But the District and its suburbs are not an average place. We’re the seventh-richest city in the United States, with three of the top five wealthiest neighborhoods in the country. There is definitely an audience for these expensive restaurants. It just might not be you. Charisse Dickens, Jorge Hernandez and Ruben Garcia at Minibar, the District’s most expensive restaurant. (Scott Suchman/For The Washington Post) ‘Pricing is an art’ Maybe it was Onwuachi’s brush with fame as a “Top Chef” contestant. Maybe it was his age — 26 — coupled with the fact that it will be his first restaurant, after an externship at Per Se and a line-cook gig at Eleven Madison Park, leading some critics to complain that he hasn’t paid the dues that justify his prices. Maybe it was that the restaurant is in the heart of recently gentrified Shaw. Or maybe it was that people didn’t understand a fancy restaurant’s costs — not just the king crab flown


These marathoners decided to sprint into a relationship. It paid off.

through the DC Triathlon Club’s New Triathlete Program and bonded during the 2013 Ragnar D.C. race. A month into dating, they booked a two-week trip to Africa. (Aimee Custis Photography) It was a gamble, but luckily Joe was accustomed to having his bets pay off. The State Department civil mechanical engineer has a penchant for spontaneity that has proved successful and rewarding. For example, when he first signed up to play polo in college, he had never ridden a horse but soon became a skilled player. Years later, on a whim, Joe bought a used canoe on Craigslist and now competes regularly in local regattas. “If there’s ever a whisper of an opportunity, I say, ‘All right, I’ll do it. That sounds fun!’ ” he says. Ali, 42, agrees. “He’ll sign up for anything,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what the thing is, but once he puts his mind to it, he goes all in.” The two had met in May 2013 at a carb-loading pre-race dinner in Washington through the DC Triathlon Club. Ali was training for the New York City marathon, and Joe was interested in competing in local events “I would run races in New York where it was, like, me and 10,000 other athletic people,” says Ali, a Washington urban planner. “You would go out, run your 10 miles and then go home, which was nice, but I knew I wanted a community.” Their interaction was quick, but the impression was positive. “I thought she was interesting and fun,” says Joe, who was divorced. Ali felt similarly. “He talked about his engineering work and travels with the State Department,” she says. “I was an engineering undergraduate, and I remember thinking, ‘His job is really cool!’ ” Flash-forward to October 2013, when the pair reconnected as relay members for Ragnar D.C., a 200-mile nationwide overnight race made up of 12-member teams. During the race, runners must complete three separate legs, each three to 12 miles, over 36 hours. After completing their portion, runners ride along in a shared van to rest, chat and cheer on their teammates. Because their runs were so close together (Ali was runner No. 8 and Joe was runner No. 9) they had ample time to swap stories between heats. Although Ali didn’t think of Joe in a romantic way at that point, she was taken with how easy and fluid their conversations


Don’t bring the noise

not the true cause of the increased noise. The cause of the complaints about the noise from Merriweather is a tale of two cities — for something that happened in Annapolis caused problems for the people of Columbia and surrounding areas. In 2013, the Maryland General Assembly passed a law intended to protect Merriweather by raising the permitted decibel levels only in Howard County. This law now harms the very constituents of the politicians who voted for it. The entire Howard County delegation, except for former delegate Liz Bobo, endorsed the change. The delegation included current County Executive Allan Kittleman. Fortunately, Stu Kohn, president of the Howard County Citizens Association, strongly suggested a meeting take place with our elected officials. They agreed to meet with us at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the George Howard Building in Ellicott City. The law is confusing and may violate the Home Rule Amendment of the Maryland Constitution. The law effectively raised the A-weighted decibel level, a measure of environmental noise known, also known as dBA, allowed to emanate from Merriweather to 95 until 11 p.m. The state does not allow any other venue in Maryland to exceed 75 decibels at any time. Permanent hearing loss can occur after four hours of exposure to 95 decibels. It is not just people living in Town Center who are complaining. People in Columbia’s Wilde Lake village and those near Route 108, Centennial Lane and parts of Route 40 in Ellicott City are also adversely impacted. One mother complained that her 2-year-old cannot get a restful night’s sleep because the pounding bass and the noise of rattling windows inside her house keep the child awake until 11:30 p.m. (and sometimes later). And there are other residents who feel compelled to move out of Howard County to avoid any more noise. For the past three years, Merriweather has been a nuisance to the community. Numerous complaints have been made to the police and health departments. Many people have contacted their representatives. Merriweather keeps wailing away, knowing full well its noise is unwelcome in many neighborhoods. Now after years of complaints and months of negotiations, the Howard County Council and the county’s state delegation have agreed to hold a meeting to discuss Merriweather, the state law and what changes can be made. Hopefully, the delegation will agree to repeal the law in the next General Assembly session and return the


What does Brexit mean? With divorce talks looming, Britain still doesn’t have a clue.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd, told the BBC that Brits hoping to vacation on the golden sands of the French coast or in the refined air of the Italian Alps could be forced to apply for a visa and pay a fee once the country is out of the European Union. For years, travel to the continent has been as simple as hopping on a Eurostar train or booking a flight on a budget airline. But new barriers, Rudd said, could be the price Britain pays if it wants a clean break. “I don’t think it’s particularly desirable,” Rudd said, “but we don’t rule it out.” May herself has sworn off any direct indications of what Britain wants from Europe, saying that to give “a running commentary” on the country’s negotiating strategy would put it at a disadvantage. Asked at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday how the government would safeguard its financial-services industry — which has much to lose from continental rivals if it’s not protected in the talks — May delivered what has become her standard non-answer when pressed about any of the details of Brexit. “This government will be working to ensure the right deal for the United Kingdom,” she said, prompting groans and jeers from Parliament’s green benches. It’s unclear how long she will be able to get away with such vague responses to questions that cut to the core of what could ultimately be Britain’s biggest transformation in decades. May is under pressure from her European counterparts to quickly trigger Article 50, the never-before-used mechanism for a country to leave the European Union. But May has stalled, saying it will not happen until at least the start of the new year. Once Article 50 has been invoked, Britain will have two years to negotiate the terms of its departure. Many experts regard that as an unrealistically rapid timeline for such a complex untangling and say it is one that could put Britain at a disadvantage because it has more to lose than Europe does if no deal materializes in time. With her government divided over what to ask for, May is thought to be seeking clues from her fellow European leaders about what Britain can realistically expect to get. The strategy, according to Eurasia Group analyst Mujtaba Rahman, is to “turn the Article 50 process on its head: first get a sense of the final framework, and


Beach Drive rehab will give us a taste of a painful full roadway shutdown

which starts this week, covers the stretch between Rock Creek Parkway and Tilden Street, an area used by National Zoo traffic and many commuters that connects to Rock Creek Parkway. The second phase will close the portion of the road between Tilden Street and Broad Branch Road and could start as early as next spring. After repairs on that section of road, crews will work in the area between Broad Branch and Joyce roads. They’ll then move to the final section, between Joyce Road and the Maryland border. Non-vehicular access: National Zoo traffic: The National Zoo driveway and the Harvard Street ramp from Beach Drive will be closed during the first segment of the project. Zoo traffic will be able to enter and exit on Connecticut Avenue or Harvard Street NW. Driving across Rock Creek Park: Traffic on Tilden Street will be able to get across Rock Creek Park, but there may be more delays in that area. If you plan to drive on the part of Beach Drive that will remain open, avoid driving all the way to Tilden, where the closures begin. The other east-west access point, a stretch between Porter Street and Piney Branch Parkway, will remain open for a portion of this phase but will close at some point. Traffic-mitigation efforts: Besides encouraging commuters to find alternative routes and ways to get around, city transportation officials are taking measures to improve traffic flow in corridors including Connecticut Avenue and 16th Street NW. Officials said they are making minor adjustments to traffic signals’ timing and eliminating some stop signs on the southern end of the project. The D.C. Department of Transportation will deploy traffic-control officers to key intersections near the project. For more information: The Park Service will have construction updates on the project’s website (go.nps.gov/beachdrive). Commuters are also urged to sign up for updates through Nixle, a free tool that allows information to be sent through text, email, social media and the Nixle mobile app. To receive alerts, text BEACHDRIVE to 888777. You can also check the project’s prerecorded phone line, 202-895-6232, for information on road closures. Project highlights and tips Project details: Beach Drive, which is narrow with curvy sections, will get a complete facelift. Crews will excavate the entire area and put in a new gravel base before laying new asphalt. All seven bridges will be rehabilitated and parking areas rebuilt. New traffic safety


Dusty Baker sees similarities in his team, wine and baseball

pruning the vines and getting them ready for the season,” says Dusty Baker. “That’s what spring training is. But then you have to stay on top of everything.” (Todd Kirkland/AP) “People talk about the playoffs, but you have to get to the playoffs,” Baker said, unconsciously echoing the wine cliche that “wine is made in the vineyard.” Baker played 18 years in the major leagues, and earned a World Series ring with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1981. A championship has eluded him in his nearly 20 years as a manager, however, including stints with the San Francisco Giants, Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds. After the Reds let him go following the 2013 season, Baker spent two years learning to manage the vineyard he had planted on his home property and developing Baker Family Wines. The label debuted commercially late last year, just about the time he returned to baseball with the Nationals for a new opportunity to earn a World Series championship as a manager. Each year brings different challenges, Baker said — some of them unexpected. “This year, we have a bee problem. We’ve always had birds eating the grapes as they ripened, so last year we invested in nets,” he said. “Birds bug me because they eat a lot, and they pierce the grapes and move on. I don’t mind the bees so much, because I have a garden and corn, and fruit trees, and you need the bees to pollinate everything. And with all the reports I’m hearing of bees dying, I’m like, man. . . .” Baseball, of course, has a fixed schedule. Baker knows when the regular season will end and the playoffs begin. A vintner can guess the harvest date, but Nature may have other plans. “Chik called me and said, ‘Hey man, we have to take them off the vine today,’ ” Baker said. “I said, ‘I thought you were going to do it next week,’ but he said they won’t wait.” Of course, there needs to be some pleasure in all that effort. “When we planted, I told Chik I wanted something to eat,” Baker said. Chik Brenneman, his friend and business partner, is chief winemaker at the teaching winery at the University of California at Davis. “So we planted four vines of table grapes. They told me they got a whole wheelbarrow full this time, and they were taking them


Japan’s prime-minister-in-waiting trades nationalism for globalism

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter welcomed Japanese Defense Minister Tomomi Inada to the Pentagon Sept. 15, during Inada's first visit to the United States as defense minister. Japan’s new defense minister, Tomomi Inada, is pushing her country to become a stronger, more independent actor on the world stage — and trying to make herself prime minister in the process. But as she gets closer to both goals, she’s finding that Japan’s success is more dependent than ever on deepening cooperation with its neighbors and the United States. Inada rose to prominence in Japan as a conservative firebrand who embraced controversial views, including questioning the facts surrounding Japan’s wartime atrocities. She once suggested that Japan should get its own nuclear weapons. She is often accused of being a revisionist — a term for those who seek to partly rehabilitate Japan’s wartime history. But as was clear to me after an hour-long interview last week during her first trip to Washington in her new role, Inada is coming to terms with the fact that if she wants to lead Japan into the future, she needs to be a globalist first. “I think we should have a more global viewpoint and make strategies in that sense,” she said after meeting with Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter at the Pentagon. “I think it is important to develop our own defense posture. But equally important is to enhance the U.S.-Japan alliance cooperation, and another important thing is to build up our relationships with other countries as well.” In an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies before our interview, Inada repeatedly called for better Japanese relations with its regional partners, especially South Korea, but India and Australia as well. She told me that her call for Japan to have a “global viewpoint” is meant to apply to both security and economic issues. Inada knows that to be an effective advocate for Japan on the world stage, she must moderate her image as a nationalist hawk, an image that was born out of her previous work as a lawyer on cases that involved defending Japanese actions during World War II. Her comments on historical issues such as “comfort women” and her repeated visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine have riled Asian allies, many of whom are wary of her assuming leadership of Japan’s government. Due to her penchant for stylish eyewear and her meteoric


Food labels can lead you astray if you don’t know what the buzzwords mean

sodium, that label isn’t helpful,” Kirkpatrick says. Take Pacific Organic Creamy Tomato Soup. The regular version has 750 milligrams of sodium per cup. The light-in-sodium version has 380 milligrams. Have that with a few saltines and you’ve consumed about 20 percent of the maximum amount of sodium you should have in a day. Buzzword: ‘Lightly sweetened’ The FDA has a definition for this term for canned fruit but not for other foods. For example, Fiber One Honey Clusters cereal has “lightly sweetened” written on the front of its box, but a single cup has nine grams of sugars, about two teaspoons. The American Heart Association suggests getting just six to nine teaspoons of added sugars per day. You may also see “touch of” honey or brown sugar on a package. Products with that wording can still be pretty sugary. Kellogg’s Origins Ancient Grains Blend cereal with “touch of honey” on the box, for example, has nine grams of sugars per serving (three-quarters of a cup) — the same amount as in Kellogg’s Special K Chocolatey Delight. Buzzword: ‘Whole grain’ As with Cheez-It Whole Grain crackers, whole-grain foods can have refined flour. These crackers also contain whole-wheat flour but have just one gram of fiber per serving (27 crackers), eight grams of fat and 250 milligrams of sodium. If you want whole grain, look for the words “100 percent whole grain” on the package, and check ingredients lists. A whole-grain flour should be the first ingredient, and the product should have no enriched flours at all. Buzzword: ‘No growth-promoting antibiotics’ Antibiotics have been fed to farm animals to make them grow faster and prevent disease. That low-dose chronic use creates ideal conditions for breeding superbugs — bacteria that have evolved to become resistant to antibiotics and that can make people sick. Eliminating the use of growth-promoting antibiotics while continuing to use antibiotics for disease prevention can still result in the development of superbugs. There’s no nutritional advantage to buying “no antibiotic” meat, but it supports a healthier food system. Look for meat and poultry labeled “raised without antibiotics,” a USDA-defined term that means antibiotics were not used for any purpose. Buzzword: ‘Biodynamic’ Biodynamic farming is similar to organic farming but has additional requirements. Biodynamic farms are mostly self-sufficient; fertilizer and animal feed, for example, are grown there instead of being brought in. It is an ecologically sound, sustainable and healthy food


Dorothy Cann Hamilton, who opened a French cooking school in Manhattan, dies at 67

on to achieve international renown for its top-drawer instructors and its focus on traditional French techniques. Now known as the International Culinary Center, the institute helped launch the careers of chefs such as Bobby Flay, the restaurateur and Food Network host; Dan Barber, of the Michelin-starred Blue Hill in Manhattan; and David Chang and Christina Tosi, of Momofuku Noodle Bar and its sister bakery, Milk Bar. Dorothy Cann Hamilton with chef Jacques Pepin in 2006. (International Culinary Center) Ms. Hamilton also served as a public television interview show host and as chairwoman of the James Beard Foundation, a leading culinary organization. She died Sept. 16 in a car crash in Melford, Nova Scotia, said Bruce McCann, a cousin and president of the International Culinary Center’s campus in Campbell, Calif. She was 67. A statement from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said her SUV collided with a truck pulling a camper trailer and that the two occupants of the truck were injured and taken to the hospital. Ms. Hamilton had been visiting her summer home in the coastal town of Fourchu and was on her way to a meeting with a Nova Scotia tourism board when the crash occurred, McCann said. She had been planning to discuss a new ICC project: a seafood institute, based out of a local community college, that drew on Nova Scotia fishing practices and cooking techniques. Although not an accomplished chef, Ms. Hamilton was a devotee of French cooking, and she brought a pragmatic, clear-eyed approach to culinary instruction. “The discipline that goes into learning cooking,” she told the New York Times in 1984, “is the same as that for learning welding.” “I don’t want to put down cooking in any way because, of course, it is very much a creative profession,” she added. “But at the same time it is a trade, and that’s how you should learn it.” Her view was informed by her years overseeing curriculum at Apex, and by a close study of the Ferrandi, the Paris school that inspired her vision. The school even provided the institute’s first full-time instructor, Antoine Schaefers, formerly of the Michelin-starred Le Taillevent restaurant. In exchange for that loan, Ms. Hamilton helped the Ferrandi write and codify its curriculum for the first time. The ICC’s teaching staff features some of the top names in haute cuisine. The French chef Jacques Pépin has taught since 1988 and


Bomb suspect’s family life shadowed by financial troubles and violence

a street of small businesses, including a hair salon, a dry cleaner and an international supermarket. “He was always respectful to me,” said Jaime Reyes, owner of Sonia’s Beauty, next door to the chicken place. Others, however, recounted a more volatile relationship with the Rahamis. “They were angry,” said Marcella Perrotti, who owns a hair salon across the street. In a small town with a tightknit community, the Rahami family stayed well outside of it all. “They were outcasts,” Perrotti said. There were also signs of violence within the family, said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who is on the House Homeland Security Committee. King, who has been briefed by the FBI, said Rahami once tried to stab his sister in a domestic violence incident. “My understanding is she accused him of domestic violence,” King said, but that when questioned by authorities, “the sister recanted.” King said authorities are also investigating several trips abroad that Rahami took in recent years. “I’m hearing that his trips to Afghanistan changed him. He also went to Pakistan at some point. There were a number of trips,” King said. A federal law enforcement official confirmed that Rahami had taken several trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past five years. The official also said Rahami had a firearms license. Law enforcement officials said they were investigating whether Rahami could have been influenced by international terrorist groups or the ongoing conflict in his homeland. A high school classmate said Rahami had become more religious of late. The classmate, Amarjit Singh, 27, said Rahami clashed with his father after the son started dating a Dominican woman; the couple had a daughter, who is now 6 or 7. “When he was younger, he had more Western values,” Singh said. “After he had his daughter, he became more religious. In the last few years, he was more into the Koran.” Andre Almeida, 24, who lives down the street and often ate at the restaurant, said the family had seemed Westernized. But three or four years ago, he said, he noticed that they started wearing more traditional clothing. In a 2005 bankruptcy filing, Rahami’s father, Mohammed, described himself as the parent of eight children who was separated from his wife. He listed himself as a cook at the restaurant, with an income of $1,447 a month. He said he had accumulated more than $45,000 in debt and had just


Deborah Jin, government physicist who won MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, dies at 47

Deborah Jin in 2003. (Andy Cross/Denver Post) Deborah S. Jin, an American physicist who was one of the world’s foremost experts on how ordinary atoms and molecules change their behavior at extraordinarily low temperatures and who was known for creating what is sometimes called a new state of matter, died Sept. 15 at a hospice center in Boulder, Colo. She was 47. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where Dr. Jin was employed for nearly 20 years, announced the death and said the cause was cancer. She lived in Boulder and also worked at JILA, which was once called the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics and is a joint institute of the University of Colorado and NIST. A 2003 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, known as the “genius” award, Dr. Jin was a masterfully deft and accomplished experimenter. Using lasers, magnets and vacuum chambers, she trapped and probed tiny bits of matter in realms only infinitesimal fractions of a degree above absolute zero, where all motion is understood to cease. At almost negligible particle densities, and in cold far more frigid than the farthest reaches of space, the rules of physics that govern the everyday world give way to the probabilistic regime of quantum mechanics. There, particles show the characteristics of waves, and uncertainty often replaces the deterministic. One corner of the quantum universe houses the world of ultra-cold quantum gases, and Dr. Jin received many honors and awards for her ground-breaking explorations in the field. Such work is expected to aid in the development of more practical and effective superconductors, materials that can carry electric currents without resistance. Scientists have also said it also holds promise in creating and improving electronic devices, in devising better sensors and measuring devices, and in quantum computing. It may also lead to advances in understanding the quantum behavior of systems of many particles. Martin Zwierlein, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who leads a group studying ultracold gases at temperatures near absolute zero, said Dr. Jin and a colleague created an ultracold gas of polar molecules, which can interact as magnets do. In doing so, she opened another new field of research. Calling the ultracold polar molecules highly promising as candidates for use in a quantum computer, he said such devices would far outstrip the speeds of current computers. Specific accomplishments with which Dr. Jin was credited included


to the probabilistic regime of quantum mechanics. There, particles show the characteristics of waves, and uncertainty often replaces the deterministic. One corner of the quantum universe houses the world of ultra-cold quantum gases, and Dr. Jin received many honors and awards for her ground-breaking explorations in the field. Such work is expected to aid in the development of more practical and effective superconductors, materials that can carry electric currents without resistance. Scientists have also said it also holds promise in creating and improving electronic devices, in devising better sensors and measuring devices, and in quantum computing. It may also lead to advances in understanding the quantum behavior of systems of many particles. Martin Zwierlein, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who leads a group studying ultracold gases at temperatures near absolute zero, said Dr. Jin and a colleague created an ultracold gas of polar molecules, which can interact as magnets do. In doing so, she opened another new field of research. Calling the ultracold polar molecules highly promising as candidates for use in a quantum computer, he said such devices would far outstrip the speeds of current computers. Specific accomplishments with which Dr. Jin was credited included production in 2003 of what scientists describe as the first fermionic condensate. Dubbed a “superfluid” in recognition of its ability to flow without resistance, the material embodies fermions, atomic and nuclear particles distinguished by what is known as their half-integral spin. (The name can be traced to work carried out by physicist and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi.) The fermionic condensate is kin to Bose-Einstein condensates, which embody bosons, particles with integral spin. The Bose-Einstein condensate was first produced by NIST scientists, and NIST called it the world’s first quantum gas. In deference to their uncommon properties, both condensates have been characterized in some scientific corners as new states of matter, to stand alongside the traditional solids, liquids and gases. NIST physicist Eric Cornell, one of three scientists who shared the Nobel Prize for their work on the Bose-Einstein condensate, called Dr. Jin’s work in producing the fermionic condensate “technologically much more challenging.” In addition, of the two condensates, the one credited to her is ultimately “more commercially relevant,” he said, noting that electrons, the basic particle of electronics, are fermions. Zwierlein said Dr. Jin’s impact on ultracold atom and molecule research has been immense, added that her work “has opened


Starting to run during your 40s and 50s has its advantages. Ask these first-time marathoners.

45 has already qualified for the 2017 Boston Marathon. He said an advantage to running in his 40s is a greater enjoyment of running as an end in and of itself. “I think if I had started running competitively at a younger age, I would find myself getting disappointed because I would constantly be comparing my results/performance to my younger days,” Romero wrote. Hudson finds himself visualizing the Marine Corps Marathon as he trains. He expects the completion of the race to be emotional for him and his family. “At the very end, when crossing the finish line, I’ll be saying, ‘Mom, we did it.’ Because that’s something that does drive me,” Hudson said. Cartwright will join about a dozen first-time middle-aged marathoners who will run in honor of Meg Menzies, including Meg’s mother, Pam. Running isn’t pleasant for him. “I tell folks all the time, I’m miserable the entire time I’m running,” he said. Yet he knows the challenge of going farther than the previous run makes it worth the struggle. “There’s nothing I do in my life outside the things I do with my kids where I get this feeling at the end that says, ‘Wow! I just did something.’ And it makes it worth it, that one moment at the end, whether it’s a training run or the finish at the half-marathon. I just did something that I’m not capable of doing. You get to relive that frequently.” @mjmplunkett on Twitter Also at washingtonpost.com Advice from experts If you’re hitting your stride at middle age and want to conquer long-distance races, Reichmann and Sapper recommend the following: Do not underestimate the importance of sleep Don’t neglect strength training and flexibility. Hire a coach or join a running group. Comparison is the thief of joy. “Really try to enjoy the moment you’re in and recognize that running is a hobby, it’s a joy,” Sapper said. “Don’t dwell on the past but focus on the present and the future and enjoy that your body is able to do something that you love.” More from Lifestyle: Burnout can happen to any athlete. Here’s how two of the world’s best got over it. New running apps blur the line between virtual reality and real life How to turn a fitness goal into a lifetime of good health (fluctuating weight included) Can a short, high-intensity workout replace your longer, more moderate routine?


The culture of cruelty at a Marine Corps training site

A Marine Corps drill instructor leads close-order drill at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, S.C., on April 6. (Cpl. Richard Currier/Marine Corps) THE U.S. Marine Corps is a storied fighting force, but lately it has done a huge favor to the nation’s enemies. Amid what the Marine Corps itself has condemned as a culture of hazing and abuse at Parris Island, S.C., one of two main training depots for recruits, a widening inquiry is underway involving mistreatment that targeted brand-new Muslim Marines, one of whom wound up dead at the bottom of a barracks stairwell. It is hard to imagine a greater propaganda gift to Islamist extremists than the incidents now under investigation at Parris Island, which can and will be portrayed as evidence of America’s cruelty and inexorable hostility to Islam. The revelations are also likely to subvert the Marines’ recruitment efforts at home, and not only among young Muslim Americans. In one instance last year, a drill instructor is accused of badgering a Muslim recruit by calling him a terrorist and ordering him repeatedly into a spinning industrial clothes dryer, leaving him with burns on his neck and arm. In another, involving the same drill instructor, this March, a 20-year-old Muslim recruit, Raheel Siddiqui, valedictorian of his high school in Michigan, jumped 40 feet to his death down a stairwell after he was verbally abused and slapped. He had arrived at Parris Island just 11 days earlier. The victims in these cases are young Americans who elected voluntarily to serve their country and challenge themselves by entering a military service famed for its patriotism and professionalism. In return for their service, they were hounded, persecuted and treated as pariahs. The alleged abuse violated Marine Corps policies and procedures, yet the chain of command at Parris Island seemed content to look the other way. These were not isolated episodes involving a rogue drill instructor; as the Marines’ own assessment has shown, they were part of a pattern involving the 3rd Recruit Training Battalion at Parris Island, through which tens of thousands of young Marines pass annually. White House press secretary Josh Earnest talked with reporters at the daily briefing about reports that a Marine drill instructor put a Muslim recruit into an industrial clothes dryer multiple times. The investigative documents have not been made public, but were reviewed by The Washington Post. Marine Corps investigative documents reviewed by


terrorist and ordering him repeatedly into a spinning industrial clothes dryer, leaving him with burns on his neck and arm. In another, involving the same drill instructor, this March, a 20-year-old Muslim recruit, Raheel Siddiqui, valedictorian of his high school in Michigan, jumped 40 feet to his death down a stairwell after he was verbally abused and slapped. He had arrived at Parris Island just 11 days earlier. The victims in these cases are young Americans who elected voluntarily to serve their country and challenge themselves by entering a military service famed for its patriotism and professionalism. In return for their service, they were hounded, persecuted and treated as pariahs. The alleged abuse violated Marine Corps policies and procedures, yet the chain of command at Parris Island seemed content to look the other way. These were not isolated episodes involving a rogue drill instructor; as the Marines’ own assessment has shown, they were part of a pattern involving the 3rd Recruit Training Battalion at Parris Island, through which tens of thousands of young Marines pass annually. White House press secretary Josh Earnest talked with reporters at the daily briefing about reports that a Marine drill instructor put a Muslim recruit into an industrial clothes dryer multiple times. The investigative documents have not been made public, but were reviewed by The Washington Post. Marine Corps investigative documents reviewed by The Post’s Dan Lamothe paint a chilling picture. Some drill instructors were drunk on the job; some repeatedly ordered unauthorized training exercises that left recruits injured. Ethnic and homophobic slurs were commonplace. Twenty officers and senior enlisted Marines are facing administrative discipline or criminal charges; some have already been removed from command, including the colonel in charge of training at Parris Island. Given the extent and severity of the alleged misconduct, there is reason to believe the Marines must go further if they truly want to uproot the rot at Parris Island. The Marine Corps has done itself a grave disservice. It will need more than cosmetic reforms intended to placate public opinion or congressional scrutiny. The Marines say they have taken immediate steps to enforce a “zero-tolerance” policy on hazing at Parris Island as well as at its West Coast training facility in San Diego, which has not been subject to similar allegations. That’s a good start; it now needs tough implementation and follow-up to regain the prestige it has lost.


The challenge of presenting ‘African American music’: First, define it.

the Black Panthers (dates are yet to be announced). Music events will begin this winter, says Deirdre Cross, the museum’s director of public programs. The National Museum of African American History and Culture opens its doors to the public on Sept. 24. Here’s a look at the numbers behind the 19th Smithsonian museum. The African American Museum has, however, already presented a few concerts that may give some sense of the theater’s future, well before its flagship building’s opening. In 2009, it co-presented the Navy Band in a concert devoted to the music of African American composers including Alton Adams, the first black Navy bandmaster. In 2012, a recital on the theme of art song in America presented texts by African American poets set to music by the living composers H. Leslie Adams and Alan Mandel. Cross suggests that there will be several events each month, on the order of about one a week. It’s a challenge for a concert series to reflect a museum’s mission. Witness the Metropolitan Museum’s concert series, which had become essentially a straightforward classical chamber venue until Limor Tomer took it over in 2011 and completely redefined it as a space for creative artistic collaboration. The former reflected the conventional view of museums to which classical music is so often compared; the latter reflects the kind of unconventional boundary-challenging that is a better reflection of what music and museums are becoming. But over time, such series often, inevitably, take on a life of their own — like the “Summergarden” series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, once conceived to reflect the museum’s artistic concepts and direction, today simply a showcase for contemporary music from around the world (played by the New Juilliard Ensemble) and jazz. A closer antecedent to the challenges facing the African American Museum might be the concert series that the cellist Steven Honigberg, a member of the National Symphony Orchestra, curated and led at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1994 to 2002. The Holocaust Museum is obviously not an art museum; for it, too, music is in part an artifact, or a political statement. The series focused on works by composers whose lives had been touched by the Holocaust, a vein of music that has been increasingly mined in recent years. Some of its work is documented on CD, including a series of four releases called “Darkness &


Boeing-Lockheed venture raises SpaceX explosion in fight over Pentagon contract

A Falcon 9 rocket set to take a satellite into space on Labor Day weekend exploded during testing days before. Courtesy of http://www.uslaunchreport.com/. The recent explosion of a SpaceX rocket should raise concerns about going with the lowest bidder on sensitive national security launch contracts, the chief executive of the United Launch Alliance wrote in a letter to top Pentagon officials earlier this month. Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, urged the Air Force to postpone the deadline for bids, saying it should take time to explore the impact of SpaceX’s rocket failure while also taking into account both companies’ experience and past performance. The Pentagon should have particular reservations, Bruno wrote, given that two of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets have blown up, which he said “serve as a reminder of the complexity and hazards intrinsic to space launch services.” “This strategy defies both law and logic and puts hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and Warfighter mission needs unnecessarily at risk,” he wrote. The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the latest salvo in one of Washington’s most contentious contractor feuds, one that has pitted a pair of the world’s most powerful defense contractors against a brash billionaire looking to shake up a calcified market by offering launches for far less money. And it’s the most glaring example yet of a competitor going after SpaceX for the two explosions. An explosion on the launch site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is shown in this still image from video in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. September 1, 2016. (Handout/Reuters) The Air Force did not immediately respond to requests for comment. SpaceX declined to comment. For a decade, ULA, the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, had a monopoly on launching national security satellites for the Pentagon. But then SpaceX, the hard-charging company founded by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, sued the Air Force for the right to compete, saying it could save taxpayers millions of dollars. The parties settled, and last year the Air Force granted SpaceX the certification to compete, saying it had met its rigorous technical standards. ULA fired its chief executive and hired Bruno, who vowed to “literally transform the company” for it to compete against SpaceX, which had already won contracts from NASA to fly cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. But faced with competition for the first


Is it time to do away with cash?

Bethany McLean is a financial investigative journalist and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. There are some things that are so woven into the fabric of our existence that we never pause to think about them. Cash is one of those things. But in “The Curse of Cash,” economist Kenneth Rogoff argues that we’d be better off without it. In fact, he writes that “the massive quantities of cash circulating today . . . are a huge public policy problem that needs to be urgently discussed, not taken as an immutable fact of life.” The great accomplishment of his book is that his arguments are convincing. Of course, the history of cash reveals that it isn’t immutable at all. Rogoff does a quick romp through it, from Marco Polo’s discovery of paper currency when he traveled to Asia, which “stunned Europeans as some form of alchemy,” to how new ideas about currency helped enable Alexander the Great’s empire, to the inflation that has destroyed empires when governments have debased their currencies. And we all know that money is changing today, from the proliferation of debit cards to options such as PayPal and Google Wallet. So it might be logical to surmise that the use of cash is declining. One of the many surprising facts in Rogoff’s book is that it is not. Cash transactions account for only about 14 percent of the total by value, and yet, Rogoff writes, “demand for most advanced-country paper currency notes has been rising steadily for more than two decades.” As of the end of 2015, there was “$4,200 floating around for every man, woman, and child in the United States.” The vast bulk of that was in $100 bills. Here’s another strange thing about cash: No one knows where all of it is. Rogoff cites estimates that some 60 percent of U.S. dollars are held abroad. Another way of thinking about it is that on a global basis, at least half of the outstanding cash is in the underground economy. “Cash plays a starring role in a broad range of criminal activities including drug trafficking, racketeering, extortion, corruption of public officials, human trafficking, and, of course, money laundering,” as Rogoff writes. Not to mention terrorism. (This is why Rogoff, only half-jokingly, argues that what central banks do by creating money can be thought of as reverse money laundering: Sending clean money into the world


‘Command and Control’ asks what we’ve learned from a 1980 missile accident

A 1980 accident with a Titan II nuclear missile in Arkansas sets the stage for this documentary. (American Experience Films/PBS) As he did with his excellent 2014 film based on Naomi Oreskes’s book “Merchants of Doubt,” documentarian Robert Kenner has taken journalistic inspiration for his new film. Cutting between a minute-by-minute breakdown of a notorious 1980 accident involving a Titan II nuclear missile in rural Arkansas and a deep, contextual history of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, “Command and Control” draws on investigative reporter Eric Schlosser’s 2013 account of that accident to pose troubling questions about how safe it is to house these “birds,” as the nukes are known, in our own back yard. That 1980 event — a non-nuclear explosion that catapulted the warhead into a nearby ditch without detonating it — was triggered by a leaking fuel tank that ruptured when a worker dropped a tool down the well of an eight-story silo. It should have been a wake-up call to the dangers of nuclear missile accidents on American soil — after all, the incident was not the first “broken arrow,” as such mishaps are euphemistically called — but it doesn’t seem to have been. As Schlosser puts it, somewhat mildly, “The weapons were nowhere near as safe as we all had assumed.” Yet there is little evidence that safeguards have been put in place. In other words, if a repairman with butterfingers can cause a nuclear warhead to go flying like a potentially deadly Champagne cork into the middle of Arkansas farmland, how susceptible are we to more intentional acts of sabotage? Kenner stages his story like a thriller, using the reminiscences of those who were on site to unspool the white-knuckle story. But the film loses momentum when it cuts away to discuss, say, the 1945 Trinity test site in New Mexico and the (pun intended) explosive growth of our nuclear weapons arsenal. It may prove useful to know, for example, that a couple hundred warheads were once thought sufficient to destroy the Soviet Union, and that the number of American missiles would ultimately grow to tens of thousands. But these digressions damp the suspense built by the main story. That’s because the 1980 incident isn’t the film’s central point. The film’s real message is that we should be more frightened by the nearly 2,000 nuclear warheads that are still deployed, like ticking time bombs, around


Hunting for sex-traffickers abroad — by posing as johns

Tim Ballard, founder of Operation Underground Railroad, is "arrested" by police in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, as part of a sting on child sex traffickers there in November 2014. (Operation Underground Railroad) The American men walked into the darkened brothel in Bangkok and were soon offered a variety of prostitutes, young and old, male and female. “You go in and try to look like a john as much as possible,” one of the Americans said later of his undercover role. “Try to act like them, talk like them. You don’t go in and order a glass of milk.” The men moved from brothel to brothel, each “packed with foreigners,” the American said. “You’re sitting next to these perverts, not only having to interact with them but become one of them. It’s common to go shop around. You sit there, get a price,” he said. “It was probably the darkest underworld playground of the devil that I’ve ever been in.” The American was former Washington Nationals baseball player Adam LaRoche, and he described participating in a “rescue” operation last year with the Exodus Road, one of a number of American nonprofit groups that are fighting human trafficking in a new way: by luring pimps into the open, and then working with local law enforcement to arrest the traffickers and free the victims. Members of the groups, often former U.S. service members or law enforcement officers, pose as American tourists looking to party with groups of underage sex workers. Some groups, such as the Exodus Road and Operation Underground Railroad, invite supporters or television crews to come along to spread word about the horrors and to witness the thrilling moments when sex traffickers are handcuffed and terrorized children are rescued. “We believe the problem will never go away unless everybody knows about it and does something,” said Tim Ballard, a former investigator with the Department of Homeland Security who started Operation Underground Railroad, based in Anaheim, Calif. Tim Ballard is "arrested" by police in Santo Domingo as part of a 2014 sting on child sex traffickers. The face of the second man has been blurred to protect the identity of an undercover office. (Operation Underground Railroad) But this high-profile approach is attracting skepticism from some respected workers who have fought human trafficking for decades by working with local police and prosecutors to attack the problem and rid their ranks of corruption. They


The new Godzilla film imagines a strong Japan pushing back against the U.S.

in a uniquely Japanese moment (after all, this is a country where fax machines are still in widespread use), they cheered as a convoy of photocopiers was wheeled into a task-force center. The poster of "Shin Godzilla," or "New Godzilla," is displayed under the monster's head at a movie theater in Tokyo. (Koji Sasahara/Associated Press) Yanagi was wearing strings of toy train cars around her neck and carrying a bottle of water, props to wave at the appropriate moment. Her friend was dressed as the lunch lady who appears for perhaps five seconds, bringing rice balls to the civil servants working around-the-clock. Elsewhere in the movie house, people wore homemade Godzilla heads and waved signs, while four men caused an eruption when they showed up in hazardous-waste coveralls and gas masks. Everyone waved glow-sticks as if at a rock concert. This iteration has Godzilla, a monster created out of nuclear waste, emerging from Tokyo Bay and cutting a path of radioactive destruction around the capital, then into the heart of the world’s biggest city itself. The movie franchise was first conceived with Godzilla as a metaphor for the atomic bomb as a defeated Japan got back on its feet after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Now, in the wake of the 2011 triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the theme takes on a different meaning. It is impossible to watch the flummoxed bureaucrats, the scenes of the boats being washed ashore and the fears of radiation without thinking of the tsunami that devastated the northeast coast of Japan five years ago. When the United States suggests a nuclear strike on the monster, people object, saying that Tokyo will become a “zone that is difficult to return to” — using the same phrase applied to the area around Fukushima. Kenji Tamaki, a journalist for the Mainichi newspaper, wrote that the film portrayed “the deep anxieties” of modern Japan and parodied a political elite in crisis. “Interminable meetings, bureaucrats’ reports read in somnolent monotones, an emergency that just seems to go on and on and on,” he wrote in the left-leaning paper. “Echoes of real-life Japan circa spring 2011, when the government descended into chaos in the face of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.” But the film also portrays a militarily stronger, more confident Japan. The prime minister, putting down the phone after


SpaceX suspects helium breach in blast probe

An explosion on the launch site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is shown in this still image from video in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Handout/Reuters) TECHNOLOGY SpaceX suspects helium in blast probe Three weeks after one of its rockets exploded on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., SpaceX said Friday that it is closing in on the possible cause, pinpointing a “large breach” in a helium system in the rocket’s second-stage fuel tank. In a statement, the company said the investigation is preliminary and that “all plausible causes are being tracked in an extensive fault tree and carefully investigated.” The investigative team — led by SpaceX and comprised of the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA and the Air Force — has reviewed reams of data and evidence in trying to understand how the rocket suddenly ignited into a massive fireball while being fueled in preparation for an engine test, the company said. On Twitter, Elon Musk, the company’s founder, has said the failure was the most difficult and complicated the company has ever faced. He asked the public to turn over any video or recordings of the event that might help investigators. In the statement Friday, the company said, “the majority of debris from the incident has been recovered, photographed, labeled and cataloged, and is now in a hangar for inspection and use during the investigation. . . . At this stage of the investigation, preliminary review of the data and debris suggests that a large breach in the cryogenic helium system of the second stage liquid oxygen tank took place.” It was not clear what caused the breach. — Christian Davenport BANKING Fed proposes limits on commodities The Federal Reserve wants to put new limits on big banks’ activities in physical commodities businesses, hoping to reduce financial risks from volatile trading and transport of sensitive materials. The Fed’s governors are proposing restrictions for banks’ holding, transporting and trading of commodities such as oil, aluminum and coal. Banks would be required to beef up the capital they hold against potential losses in commodities by up to $4 billion. They would also face limits on the amount of their commodities trading. The Fed is opening the proposal to public comment for 90 days. Wall Street banks have sharply reduced their involvement in physical commodities, under pressure from regulators and lawmakers. The biggest players in the field have been Goldman Sachs and


And the Oscars for good government geeks go to . . .

a Brazilian-born nuclear engineer who, as a senior Army research scientist, led a team on a 10-year quest to develop a portable battlefield computer system to detect uncontrolled hemorrhaging in wounded soldiers. Using pattern-recognition algorithms to interpret vital signs, Reifman’s project, which won him and his team the 2016 Science and Environment Medal, helps identify those with internal bleeding who need transfusions and immediate evacuation. I could go on, and I am sorry not to be able to describe in detail all the winners (Secret Service agent Tate Jarrow, a cybercrime expert who went after the largest theft of computer data from a U.S. financial institution in history; Lisa M. Jones, who oversees a Treasury Department effort to spur economic development in low-income communities by guaranteeing low-cost loans; William Gregory Burel, director of the $7 billion Strategic National Stockpile at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who scrambled to respond to the Ebola epidemic and a botulism outbreak; Edward Grace of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose Operation Crash targeted smuggling of rhino horns and elephant ivory). Indeed, I had the privilege of serving on the selection committee for this year’s awards, and the task of choosing among the various finalists turned out to be harder than anticipated: So many worthy contenders had done such impressive work. Two themes were particularly striking in listening to the honorees’ remarks at the awards ceremony Tuesday night. One was gratitude toward family for putting up with the late nights and missed events. As the FBI’s Yeager noted, “ ‘Hey, guess what, I’m going to Gaza tomorrow’ — that tries anyone’s patience.” Another was the emphasis on the team over the individual. Achieving big change, whether in the public or private sector, is not an individual sport. In an age when “cynicism sells,” as White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough noted at the ceremony, the awards serve as “a reminder of why we got into public service in the first place.” For the rest of us, they offer a reminder that the faceless bureaucrats have faces, and families, and a fierce dedication to the public good that the rest of us too often take for granted, if not ignore altogether. Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook. Read more on this topic: Lisa Rein: The federal workforce, where everyone’s performance gets


A Republican worth voting for

to make it more Democratic — 20 percent Hispanic, with a generous salting of other minorities. He won in 2012 with just 48 percent of the vote. In 2014, national Democrats recruited a formidable opponent, a Yale University graduate who had taught, in Spanish, in Central American schools. So, Coffman learned Spanish well enough to do an entire debate in the language, and today banters in Spanish with the children at Roca Fuerte Academy. The pastor who founded it in 2008 says this charter school is anathema to, and underfunded by, the local school district, which is obedient to the teachers union, which dislikes charters that are not obedient to it. The district’s schools have just a 61 percent graduation rate. Roca Fuerte Academy does better. The GOP presidential nominee is pressing his case ahead of Election Day. Some of the academy’s pupils in their school uniforms are antecedents of the pronoun in Donald Trump’s four-word immigration policy: “They have to go.” They were brought here by illegal immigrants. Trump wants to send them “home” to countries they do not remember. Coffman has co-authored legislation that would provide legal status and a path to lawful permanent resident status to those who came before age 16, have lived here five consecutive years, and who have been accepted to a college or vocational school or have demonstrated an intent to enlist in the military, or have a valid work authorization. At the Nile restaurant, Coffman’s cowboy boots go beneath a table groaning under the weight of trays laden with Ethiopian food that is eaten without utensils, scooped up with bits torn from rolls of bread as thin and flexible as fabric. Coffman sits next to an Ethiopian Orthodox bishop who is wearing a cassock and a glittering pectoral cross. As guests arrive, several kiss a crucifix he holds. He speaks scant English but draws 1,500 to Sunday services. Many of those around the table have been in the United States for at least a decade and are citizens and small-business entrepreneurs. Ethiopians are Colorado’s second-largest immigrant community and are grateful for Coffman’s attempts to pressure Ethiopia’s authoritarian government to stop using violence against protesters. Coffman attends the annual “Taste of Ethiopia” festival here in America’s Mountain West and “Ethiopians for Coffman” might matter in November. As might the Korean American community, which continues to honor those Americans who, like Coffman’s father, fought


Beer of the Week: Logsdon Szech ’n Brett

WASHINGTON, DC -- Logsdon Farmhouse Ales' Szech 'n Brett, a rustic saison flavored with Szechuan peppercorns, is the beer of the week for Sept. 28, 2016. (Photo by Fritz Hahn/The Washington Post) (Fritz Hahn/The Washington Post) More than ever, Washington-area beer drinkers are spoiled for choice. The Virginia/Maryland/D.C. brewery scene continues to flourish, and in the past month, two outsiders with cult followings — North Carolina’s Wicked Weed and San Diego’s Modern Times — have sent their wares to D.C. liquor stores and bars, where they’ve been warmly received. Amid the fuss over new releases and D.C. Beer Week, though, you might have missed the debut of another vaunted brewery: Logsdon Farmhouse Ales, from Hood River, Ore. Its saison, or Seizoen, is a wonder to behold, a rich, bready beverage full of complex peach, pear, honey and tropical notes. (The bottle is sealed with beeswax, which has a lovely smell of its own.) But, beer geeks being beer geeks, it’s hard just to be happy about the flagship: Logsdon is also sending us Seizoen Bretta, which is aged with a special yeast strain; Cerasus, a Belgian kriek aged with two pounds of cherries per gallon of beer; and the Oak Aged Bretta, a version of Seizoen Bretta aged in wooden barrels. The one I’m most thrilled to see, though, is the most odd: Szech ’n Brett (pronounced sesh-n-brett). It’s a farmhouse saison with the alcohol-by-volume dialed back from 8 percent to 6.5 percent, and spiced with Szechuan peppercorns. The beer is highly carbonated — my bottle was a gusher — with funky citrus and pepper on both the nose and tongue, and a prickly mouthfeel that works well with the flavors. The pepper doesn’t provide any sort of numbing: just an earthy, peppery spice that really compliments the fruity lemon and peach esters, and finishes dry and fruity. Logsdon beers are distributed in the District by Pekko Beer: Look for them at Craft Beer Cellar, Glen’s Garden Market and Whole Foods, and on tap at the Sovereign. — Fritz Hahn Logsdon Szech ’n Brett. farmhousebeer.com. Expect to pay around $11 for a 750-milliliter bottle, or $12 for a 13-ounce draft. More from Food: Beer Column archive


Here in America’s National Zoo, just a couple of good ol’, cornfed pandas

The National Zoo’s giant panda Mei Xiang and her cub Bei Bei snack in mid-August, presumably before discovering the delights of cornstalks. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) Even crotchety contrarians who refuse to learn anything about pandas probably know they eat bamboo. But despite their outward fondness for bamboo, pandas lack the innards to get the most benefit out of the plant, specialists say. Pandas’ digestive systems are more like those of meat eaters than plant eaters, making it difficult for them to derive full value from bamboo, much as they may enjoy it. So, in planning panda diets, zoos try to balance panda wants and panda needs. In that effort, Washington’s National Zoo has recently offered a new treat: cornstalks. “Mei Xiang, Tian Tian and Bao Bao all really enjoyed them!” said Mike Maslanka, head of the zoo’s nutrition science department. “They stripped the stalks of their leaves and ate them,” he wrote Friday on the zoo’s website. Few zoo animals get closer attention than Washington’s giant pandas. Only recently off the endangered list, pandas are still regarded as vulnerable. Besides being stellar public attractions, Washington’s pandas possess diplomatic significance as well. So the decision to offer cornstalks took careful consideration. Earlier this year panda specialists from around the world went to Scotland to discuss the Giant Panda Species Survival Plan. At that meeting, Maslanka said, Washington’s panda team spoke with specialists from around the world “about nutrition and how to balance it with taste preferences.” In Scotland Washington’s team learned of a new way to vary panda meals. It had been tried in Austria. The Vienna Zoo had been adding cornstalks to their pandas’ diets. The Viennese pandas seemed to really like them, Maslanka said. So corn was planted at the Smithsonian Institution’s conservation biology institute in Front Royal, Va., where Maslanka also heads nutrition. At the end of August, Maslanka said, the first stalks, stripped of corn, were sent to the zoo. They contain the same nutrients as bamboo, he said, but are also high in plant sugar and may make a good alternative to sugar cane as a sweet treat.


With new members in BSO, striving for a cohesive sound in season opener at Strathmore

Marin Alsop, music director for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. (Adriane White) The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s season at its second home, the Music Center at Strathmore, opened Saturday evening. Before the second half, music director Marin Alsop introduced the 10 new musicians who have joined her ensemble’s roster since the second half of last season. This includes new principal clarinetist Yao Guang Zhai, who comes to Charm City from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. For the traditional playing of the national anthem, Alsop turned not to the newly commissioned arrangements of recent years, but one made by Igor Stravinsky as a gift to the country that adopted him during the Second World War. A few harmonic oddities, restrained for Stravinsky, enlivened the familiar tune. It complemented the bonbon that followed it, “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5,” by Heitor Villa-Lobos. Julia Bullock’s clear soprano had a subtle intensity, beauty behind a veil. The eight cellists on the accompaniment, though, did not always agree in intonation. Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet was a high point in the season opener for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. (Courtesy of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra) With the adjustment in membership, it may take some time for the BSO to regain its most cohesive sound. The orchestral passages of Gershwin’s Concerto in F were a little uncoordinated rhythmically. The beat must be absolutely clean so that the jazz-infused rhythm can swing against it. It was not quite. The high point was the solo playing of pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, smoky insouciance that felt like improvisation, as well as the bluesy trumpet solos in the slow movement. Thibaudet’s tendency to rush to the downbeat in challenging passages further unsettled the piece. Alsop has decided to focus much of the season on the music of Beethoven. Again. Her urgent, overly fast tempo made the first movement of the composer’s Fifth Symphony a nervous blur, but the second movement felt bracing in its lack of sentimentality. In the third movement, she emphasized strong contrasts of loud and soft, a good setup for the surprise eruption of the finale. Incisive piccolo solos helped give the conclusion a martial edge.


China prepares for Dalai Lama’s death by looking to its own top Tibetan cleric

in the Chinese government’s efforts to install a new Dalai Lama who is more amenable to Communist Party rule than the current one. Gyaltsen Norbu, the Panchen Lama, is being pushed forward by China’s Communist Party as an alternative to the Dalai Lama. Experts are skeptical whether ordinary Tibetans will accept him as an important religious leader. (2012 photo by How Hwee Young/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY) In July, the young, bespectacled Gyaltsen Norbu, dressed in Tibetan religious finery, presided over an important and rare ritual inside Tibet before a large audience of laypeople, monks and nuns. Since then, he has been busy visiting monasteries, temples, schools and hospitals across the high plateau. “An increasingly active Panchen Lama is expected to mitigate the Dalai’s influence,” announced the nationalist Global Times tabloid last month, citing speculation that this process was being encouraged to “prepare for a post-Dalai Lama era.” Chinese state media said that 100,000 people had attended each day of the four-day gathering, called a Kalachakra ceremony, braving rain and cold weather, and quoted monks praising the young man’s “attainments.” But on a recent visit to Tibet, it was hard to find much enthusiasm for the Chinese Panchen Lama, as many people know him. Indeed, mention the Panchen Lama to many Tibetans and they start talking about a 6-year-old boy, recognized by the Dalai Lama as the true reincarnation of the Panchen Lama in 1995, who immediately disappeared into Chinese custody and was referred to as the world’s youngest political prisoner. His name is Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, and he has not been seen since, but a Tibetan official claimed last year that he was living a normal life and did not want to be disturbed. In Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, a shop selling photographs of leading Tibetan religious figures contained none of the Chinese Panchen but several of a predecessor, the 10th Panchen Lama, who was vilified and imprisoned during China’s Cultural Revolution. There were also many images of the Karmapa Lama, another important reincarnated lama, who was recognized by China before fleeing to join the Dalai Lama in exile in India in 2000 at age 14 — a decision that embarrassed Beijing but won him credibility among many Tibetans. One shop worker said there simply wasn’t any demand for images of the Chinese Panchen, while another man dismissed him as a “Chinese Buddhism official.” Similarly, images of the ninth and 10th


Ask Amy: Shocking STD disclosure places partner at risk

level, and is not only unkind and neglectful, but bordering on criminal — like leaving a loaded weapon on the bureau and then being shocked and surprised when someone gets hurt. So no, I don’t think she can be trusted. And I’m very sorry this has happened to you. For trust to be rebuilt she needs to be a full partner, admitting her wrongdoing, asking for forgiveness and offering to answer any and all questions you have. She should also accompany you to a doctor’s appointment so you could both receive reliable medical counseling. A relationship counselor could help you both navigate this very tricky issue. Dear Amy: My mother-in-law continues to be friends with a woman with whom my husband had an affair. This woman no longer lives in the area, but I feel she uses my MIL to stay in some proximity to my husband. I find that reprehensible, and I feel like cutting my MIL out of my life. Am I being harsh? Disturbed Disturbed: You don’t outline the history of your mother-in-law’s friendship with this woman, but I agree that if she isn’t willing to distance herself from this friend, the least she could do is to be circumspect about it. You should tell your mother-in-law, “I’ve worked hard to keep this person out of my life, and I would really appreciate it if you would not bring up her name. This is very painful, and I don’t want to hear about her.” Dear Amy: Regarding the sweet letter from “Worried,” the 11-year-old girl who recently lost her father, I just want to pass on another resource for her. I work for Gentiva Hospice in Pleasanton, Calif., and we are running a grief camp for children. This camp is free for all attendees — it is paid for by donations to our Gentiva Foundation. Although Gentiva has been doing this for 20 years all over the country, it is our first year putting on such a camp at our location. I don’t know where this girl lives, but there are many, many such grief camps for children all over the country. It is a chance for the grieving child to get away, have fun and process her grief away from the pain and sorrow being experienced by the rest of her family. Hospice Advocate Hospice Advocate: © 2016 by Amy Dickinson distributed by Tribune Content Agency


Hubble Telescope spots water vapor plumes on Jupiter moon

A composite image shows suspected plumes of water vapor erupting at the 7 o'clock position of Jupiter's Europa moon. The Hubble Space Telescope captured the images as the moon passed in front of Jupiter. (NASA, ESA, W. Sparks (STScI), USGS Astrogeology Science Center) Astronomers on Monday said they have spotted evidence of water vapor plumes rising from Jupiter’s moon Europa, a finding that might make it easier to learn whether life exists in the warm, salty ocean hidden beneath its icy surface. The apparent plumes detected by the Hubble Space Telescope shoot about 125 miles above Europa’s surface before, presumably, raining material back down onto the moon’s surface, NASA said. Europa, considered one of the most promising candidates for life in the solar system beyond Earth, boasts a global ocean with twice as much water as in all of Earth’s seas hidden under a layer of extremely cold and hard ice of unknown thickness. While drilling through the ice to test ocean water for signs of life would be a daunting task, sampling water from the plumes might be a simpler project. “If the plumes are real, it potentially gives us easier access to the ocean below . . . without needing to drill into miles of ice,” said lead researcher Williams Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Greenbelt, Maryland. Europa is about 1,900 miles in diameter, slightly smaller than Earth’s moon. Among Jupiter’s four largest moons, Europa is the second closest to the biggest planet in the solar system. The telescope observed the plumes three times in 2014, mostly around Europa’s southern polar region, scientists told a conference call with reporters. On Earth, life is found everywhere where there is water, energy and nutrients, so scientists have a special interest in places elsewhere in the solar system, like Europa, with similar characteristics, said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division. The findings follow an initial Hubble sighting of a water vapor plume over Europa’s south pole in December 2012. Scientists got their first hint that bright, icy Europa, which is crisscrossed by dark bands and ridges, contains an underground ocean from NASA’s twin Voyager probes, which flew by Jupiter in 1979. The follow-on Galileo spacecraft, which circled around and through Jupiter’s system from 1995 to 2003, detected a magnetic field that probably was triggered by a salty, global ocean beneath Europa’s surface. Two more missions are in


For the singing Orioles, a bittersweet changing of the guard

sweet enough yet,’ ” Clark said, laughing. “By the time we got to Blues Alley, she said, ‘You brought the sugar factory tonight.’ ” Now Clark is the de facto musical director of the Orioles, picking out leads on his electric guitar and sending falsetto curlicues above the loamy bass and baritone harmonies. And he brought in longtime friend Larry, the newest member. “He’s the first guy outside of my house that I ever harmonized with, growing up in Barry Farms,” Clark said. “Up to that point, I only harmonized with my sister.” During a break in the music, James Bennett, a former Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner from Anacostia, came up to Millie to reminisce about when Diz and Millie ran several businesses on Good Hope Road SE. There was a book shop, Book World, and Sound Town, a record store. Diz opened the Glass House opticians, too. He had been a janitor at an optician and learned the trade by paying close attention. “We supplied eyeglasses to everybody in Anacostia,” Millie said. “And not just eyeglasses: information, information about how to grow and develop and protect your community.” Said James: “They were the motivation behind the growth of Anacostia.” “I ain’t bragging, but my man was something else,” Millie said. She sat close to the stage and was dressed in bright colors, her fingernails painted Orioles orange. Millie owns the copyright to the band’s name and vows to continue managing the group with her son, Christopher. Her goal is to have the Orioles sing for President Obama before he leaves office (they once sang for Bill Clinton) and to get them included in the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. “I can’t sing, but I can sell,” she said. “I’m not going to let the legacy die.” The songs kept coming, backed up by Johnnell Gray on piano, Steve Mitchell on bass and Arvell Howerton Jr. on drums: “I Miss You So,” “Sh-Boom (Life Could Be a Dream),” “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied).” And there was “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” the old blues number outfitted with the Orioles’ trademark harmonies. The song ended in a crescendo of vocal flourishes. Clark looked at Millie, who was dabbing her eyes with a napkin. “Mr. Diz Russell used to sing that song to “He still sings that song to me,” she said. Twitter: @johnkelly For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.


Israel loses a lion

excelled in school. He arrived in Palestine in 1935 pale and introverted, but within a few years had heartily embraced the Labor movement. He worked the land at a youth village, impressing friends with a fondness for literature and history that was, at times, otherworldly. One friend told biographer Michael Bar-Zohar that “when he spoke to us we felt as if we were right now in London and had met Churchill an hour before.” Mr. Peres did not fight in the trenches in Israel’s war of independence, but rather scoured the world for arms, often working in an office separated only by a sheet of plywood from Ben-Gurion. Later, he helped found Israel’s aircraft industry and, using tortuous and sometimes illegal methods — because no one would sell weapons to Israel openly — he snapped up tanks, aircraft, torpedo boats and spare parts. He opened the doors for Israel to the French arms industry in the 1950s. This was followed by an even more spectacular and secret achievement, the creation of the Israeli atomic bomb, an unstated but powerful deterrent. Mr. Peres was a security hawk at a time when Israel’s enemies were its Arab neighbors. But the dynamic changed somewhat after Israel made peace with Egypt in the Camp David Accords of 1979. When the Palestinian uprising broke out in 1987, Mr. Peres realized that, while the Palestinians were not an existential threat, Israel would never live in peace without settling with them. Mr. Peres had been shrewd, secretive and scheming in politics, but he and his longtime rival, Yitzhak Rabin, made a fateful decision to work together upon returning to power in 1992. The next year, a surprising back-channel negotiation with the Palestine Liberation Organization led to the Oslo Accords, offering the Palestinians limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was a crowning triumph for Mr. Peres, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Mr. Rabin and Yasser Arafat. It also marked a metamorphosis for Mr. Peres, who spoke of peace fervently and with no less eloquence than in his school days. He found great respect as Israel’s president, his final stop in a long journey, but his dream of Israel at peace, pursued with such determination and vision, eluded him to the last. Read more on this topic: Yossi Beilin: Remembering Shimon Peres, the Israeli patriot who believed in peace


Russian hackers harassed journalists who were investigating Malaysia Airlines plane crash

contributors, consider what they are willing to do to major news and media outlets that publish similar articles,” said Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer at ThreatConnect, a Northern Virginia-based research firm that analyzed the campaign against Bellingcat in a report released Wednesday. ThreatConnect looked into the matter after being approached by Bellingcat. The report comes on the same day that a Dutch-led, multinational joint investigative team announced the results of a criminal probe that corroborated Bellingcat’s findings: The airplane was downed by a Russian surface-to-air missile fired from territory held by pro-Moscow separatists. Russia has denied complicity in the downing. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was destroyed on July 17, 2014, over eastern Ukraine. All 298 passengers and crew members were killed. Beginning that day and for the next 26 months, Bellingcat published no fewer than 92 posts focused on Russian involvement in the plane’s downing, using open-source information and imagery to prove the presence of Russian military equipment that had been moved into eastern Ukraine despite the Kremlin’s denials. The Russian harassment and propaganda campaign against Bellingcat, and Higgins in particular, began in February 2015. Bellingcat had completed a report that documented Russian shelling of Ukrainian military positions in eastern Ukraine, which Moscow had denied. The state-run Sputnik website ran an article suggesting that Bellingcat was linked to the CIA. Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 298 people fell in a field in Ukraine. Beginning that month through July 2016, three Bellingcat researchers, including Higgins, received “spearphishing” emails that were written in a way meant to dupe the recipient into clicking on a link containing malware. Higgins received 16 such emails, which consisted of false Gmail security notices urging the recipient to click a link to review recent suspicious activity. That technique, Barger said, is consistent with a technique used by a Russian hacker group dubbed Fancy Bear by some security researchers. The group is run out of the GRU, the military intelligence service, analysts said. Meanwhile, with every new Bellingcat revelation, Russian propaganda outlets such as Sputnik and RT, formerly Russia Today, produced pieces that called into question the citizen journalists’ work. In October, for instance, Bellingcat published reports based on the geolocation data of Russian defense ministry videos that showed that Russian airstrikes were destroying positions held by the Free Syrian Army and other rebel groups rather than the Islamic State, as Russia had indicated. Nearly every day for a


As the West pays tribute to Peres, many Arabs recall a legacy of destruction

Former Israeli president and prime minister Shimon Peres, right, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas arrive at the World Economic Forum in Southern Shuneh, Jordan, in May 2015. (Nasser Nasser/AP) CAIRO — In Saudi Arabia’s Sabq newspaper, the headline of his obituary read, “President of Israeli Colonialism Peres Dies.” On the Qatar-based Al Jazeera network’s Arabic-language website, Peres was described as: “The butcher of Qana who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace” — a reference to the Israeli bombardment that killed scores of civilians in the village of Qana during the 1996 war in Lebanon. Peres was prime minister at the time. The starkly different reactions to Peres’s death underscored the deep divides over the IsraeliPalestinian conflict and the plight of the Palestinian people, as well as the wide gulf in perceptions between the West and Arab countries. Even as President Obama and other leaders paid tribute to his legacy as a peacemaker, obituaries across the Middle East on Wednesday described Peres as playing a central role in Israeli assaults against Palestinians, dispossessing them of their lands and rights. “To the West, Shimon Peres is the ‘Nobel laureate’ and the ‘tireless dove’ who has been widely respected for his ‘achievements’ regarding the peace in the Middle East,” said an obituary on the website of Al-Manar, the television station of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite Islamist militant group and political party. “However, behind this image Peres — who died on Wednesday — represents the real face of the bloody and colonial policies adopted by the Zionist regime.” The vitriol also appeared louder and more widespread than after the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat following the Oslo peace accord in 1994. Statesmen from nine Muslim countries — including Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Qatar — attended Rabin’s funeral, which was widely seen as a tribute to his efforts to build peace in the region. Dignitaries included Egypt’s then-president, Hosni Mubarak, and Jordan’s King Hussein. Both nations had signed peace accords with Israel. As of Wednesday evening, the number of Arab leaders planning to attend Peres’s funeral, scheduled for Friday, remained unclear. Peres was a more polarizing figure in the Arab world than Rabin. In 2009, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, today the country’s president, famously stormed out of a World Economic Forum debate after orally clashing with


Israeli leader, peace champion dies at 93

Shimon Peres, left, meets with fellow presidents Abdullah Gul of Turkey and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority in 2007. Peres, who worked for peace in the region, died Wednesday at age 93. (Burhan Ozbilici/Associated Press) Israel mourned the death Wednesday of Shimon Peres, a former president and prime minister. Celebrated as a Nobel Prize-winning visionary who pushed his country toward peace during a more than six-decade career, Peres died of complications from a stroke at age 93. “We were privileged to be part of his private family,” Peres’s son Chemi said. “But today we sense that the entire nation of Israel and the global community share this great loss. We share this pain together.” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Peres “a partner in making the peace of the brave” with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin, who was Israel’s prime minister at the time. The three men shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Oslo interim peace accord in 1993, when Peres was Israel’s foreign minister. “He exerted persistent efforts to reach a just peace from the Oslo agreement until the final moments of his life,” Abbas said. President Obama awards Peres with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House dinner in 2012. Peres also received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his efforts at negotiating a Middle East peace accord. (Susan Walsh/AP) World leaders and dignitaries are expected to attend Peres’s funeral Friday in Jerusalem. — Associated Press


Man fatally shot in Northeast Washington

A Maryland man was fatally shot early Thursday in Northeast Washington, police said. About 3:55 a.m., officers responded to the 900 block of 10th Street NE after the report of gunshots, D.C. police said in a statement. They found 39-year-old Eugene Clarke, of Temple Hills, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, and Clarke was pronounced dead at the scene, the statement said. Police asked anyone with information about Clarke’s killing to contact them at 202-727-9099 or send a tip to the department’s text tip line by messaging 50411. There have been 220 homicides in the D.C. region in 2016. Of those, about 100 have been in the District.


‘Miss Peregrine’ movie review: An engagingly oddball fantasia from Tim Burton

Eva Green stars as Miss Peregrine in Tim Burton’s adaptatiion of author Ransom Rigg’s 2011 bestseller, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.” (Leah Gallo/Twentieth Century Fox) Style, for Tim Burton, isn’t a substitute for good storytelling, but an essential means of delivering it. And so with “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” — an engagingly oddball adaptation of Ransom Riggs’s 2011 bestseller about youngsters with X-Men-like powers who come under attack by malevolent entities — the opportunities for the “Alice in Wonderland” filmmaker to flex his particular brand of moviemaking muscle are manifold. In a story involving time travel, scary monsters and a group of quirkily charismatic English orphans blessed (or cursed) with such fantastical gifts as one boy’s ability to control the colony of bees that live in his stomach, Burton is in his element. If any of these strange children are stand-ins for the director himself, it is Horace (Hayden Keeler-Stone), a dapper tyke who pops a special lens in front of his eyeball, like a jeweler’s loupe, and proceeds to project his dreams onto the wall for the delectation of his friends. In the case of “Miss Peregrine” — a story that echoes Burton’s affinity for the grotesque, even the macabre — those dreams are more like nightmares. The teenage Jake (Asa Butterfield) makes sure his levitating love interest Emma (Ella Purnell) stays relatively grounded. (Jay Maidment/Twentieth Century Fox) The residents of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Chidlren” must prepare for battle against powerful and dark forces in the film. (Jay Maidment/Twentieth Century Fox) Burton’s emphasis on visuals makes sense. Riggs’s book evolved from an original idea of the author’s to showcase a collection of vintage found photographs that he had collected from flea markets, featuring apparent levitation and other oddities. In “Miss Peregrine,” the levitating girl is Emma (Ella Purnell), an otherworldly child who welcomes the American teenager Jake (the equally otherworldly Asa Butterfield) into a parallel universe when he visits the small Welsh island where his grandfather (Terence Stamp) grew up, sent there by the dying man’s enigmatic instructions. Emma and Jake fall in love, naturally, as his own plot-critical peculiarities reveal themselves. Called a “loop,” that parallel universe exists in a “Groundhog Day”-like wrinkle in time in which a single day — September 3, 1943, in this case — plays out over and over again, like a broken record. The skip in the flow


President Obama greets Katie Ledecky, U.S. Olympians in White House ceremony

President Obama addresses U.S. Olympians at a White House event honoring them on Thursday. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post) President Obama stood at the front of the East Room of the White House on Thursday afternoon, with the First Lady and Vice President beside him, and the athletes came to him, one by one, nearly 600 of them, to shake his hand. Some had medals around their necks. All had smiles on their faces. It was a rainy day in Washington, forcing indoors the ceremony honoring the 2016 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams, but by the standards of the typical White House victory tour, this one managed to rise above. For one thing, it was one of the last of these ceremonies Obama will host, as he prepares to leave the White House following two terms and eight years there. When the athletes presented him with a pair of team-signed surfboards — symbolizing a sport that will be added to the Olympic program beginning in 2020 — he joked, “I’m going to have a lot of time to surf next year.” The president seemed remarkably engaged in the lengthy, single-file meet-and-greet, surprising some of the athletes with his knowledge of their events and their successes. Either he was well-prepared by aides or he had absorbed a lot of NBC Olympics coverage in August and managed to hold onto it. “It was amazing for him to talk about specific moments. When you’re running a country, you don’t think you’ll have time to tune in to so much of the Olympics and be updated,” nine-time Olympic track and field medalist Allyson Felix said. “It made it a really special moment.” When he went to the microphone to speak, Obama cracked a few jokes. He would have entered the room with a running, flipping floor routine, he said, except he “can’t even touch my toes.” He singled out some of the best individual performances of the summer — gymnast Simone Biles, boxer Claressa Shields, shooter Kim Rhode and others. “And then,” Obama said, “there’s Katie Ledecky.” As the 19-year-old swimming champion from Bethesda — honored the night before as Team USA’s female athlete of the Olympics — smiled and turned as red as the official team warmups the athletes wore on the visit, Obama joked about her historic haul in Rio de Janeiro: four gold medals and a silver. “I was nervous she was


Federal investigators launch investigation into fatal New Jersey train crash

in is obviously devastating in its impact.” Bella Dinh-Zarr, vice chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the speed limit on the track entering the station is 10 mph. Dinh-Zarr, who is part of the NTSB team in Hoboken, said one question investigators will be examining is whether positive train control (PTC), a federally mandated technology designed to automatically apply emergency brakes to runaway trains, could have prevented the crash. The NTSB has advocated for the technology for 40 years, she said. Railroads were required to adopt PTC by last December, before Congress passed a law allowing railroads to delay installation for three to five years. New Jersey Transit has not installed PTC on any of its trains, according to data maintained by the Federal Railroad Administration. Safety experts said the crash also raised questions about how the train’s basic safety systems functioned. New Jersey Transit said earlier this year that its entire network is equipped with an Automatic Train Control system. Such systems are meant to slow or stop a train in certain circumstances. “People have to look and see exactly how New Jersey Transit has implemented that system on that track and how far it extends into the terminal,” said Steven Ditmeyer, a former Federal Railroad Administration official. Federal investigators have recovered a data recorder from the commuter train that crashed into the Hoboken terminal in New Jersey on Sept. 29., killing one person and injuring dozens. The event recorder tracks data from the train similar to an airliner's black box flight recorder. Such Automatic Train Control systems are a blunter and less sophisticated tool than the newer PTC systems. Ditmeyer noted, however, that it’s hard to know precisely how PTC would have worked in this case. “The Federal Railroad Administration rules on positive train control grant an exemption for terminals,” he said, though they are notoriously complicated environments. The train had been traveling from Spring Valley, N.Y., to Hoboken Terminal, a bustling transit hub that serves four different passenger rail systems, along with a water ferry. Several witnesses to the commuter train crash in Hoboken, N.J., share what they saw when the train crashed into a platform during morning rush hour on Sept. 29. Passengers described the moments before impact, as they looked out their train’s window at around 8:45 a.m. and realized that the train — which usually slows to a crawl as it enters


Food and beverage companies are finding creative ways to reach kids online. Here’s what to know.

Marketing junk food to kids is proven to be effective at increasing a child’s preference and consumption of advertised foods. (Dinic/Getty Images/iStockphoto) I have witnessed my sons on social media posting images of simulated Gatorade coolers being poured over their heads, sending digital Valentine Day’s cards made by Taco Bell reading “Nacho average Valentine,” and voting on new potato-chip flavors. These are not the passive ads of my childhood. They are clever ways corporations reach children and teenagers, encouraging them to interact with a brand and promote it to their friends. Valentines certainly appear innocent enough. But will manipulating an image of a Gatorade cooler really entice kids to drink more of the colorful stuff? According to studies, the answer is yes. Marketing junk food to kids is proven to be effective at increasing a child’s preference and consumption of advertised foods. Many things make children susceptible to advertising, including peer pressure. How can a brand use peer pressure? In 2007, Mountain Dew launched its DEWmocracy campaign, in which people played an online game to create a new soda flavor. In the next phase, participants were encouraged to recruit others to vote for their favorite flavor finalist. Not long after the campaign, a marketing trade publication ranked Mountain Dew No. 1 on tweens’ list of “Newest Beverages” they had tried. Dietitian Ellie Krieger, Nourish Schools co-founder Casey Seidenberg and certified health education specialist Elaine Gordon offer picks for meals from breakfast to dessert. I believed my kids were safe from the influence of advertisers. We’ve discussed how commercials during Major League Baseball games are simply paid advertisements by companies encouraging consumers to buy their products. But when my boys rattled off a long list of brands with which they regularly engage, I realized a new set of conversations was due. If they are going to employ technology as much as they do, they might as well understand it. With information from the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, the Federal Trade Commission, Common Sense Media and Digital Ads, my boys and I are now schooled on tactics brands use to reach younger audiences and create lifelong fans. Perhaps armed with this knowledge, they will take pause the next time they reach for a Gatorade. Perhaps. Immersive environments Companies use gaming, animation and virtual realities to convince consumers that what they are watching or playing is not marketing. Cereal