Pentagon exonerates Marines blackballed by war-crimes case. They doubt the gesture is sincere.

A North Carolina congressman says the Marine Corps is “publicly exonerating” several military veterans it wrongly accused of committing war crimes more than a decade ago in Afghanistan, but those blackballed by the ordeal remain skeptical of the Pentagon’s sincerity. The Marine Corps does not intend to reexamine the case, according to a letter from the Pentagon released Wednesday by Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), although top leaders have signaled their intent to provide counseling and other assistance to the 30 men who say they’ve suffered personally and professionally as a result of the military’s effort to prosecute and imprison them. “We are concerned to hear of the challenges many members of Fox Company are facing — which are, unfortunately, all too common among our combat veterans,” says the letter to Jones from Maj. Gen. Frederick M. Padilla, who serves as staff director for the Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Robert B. Neller. Jones announced the development in a news release. A spokesman for Neller declined to provide further comment, saying Padilla’s letter “articulates the service’s position.” Fox Company, in 2007, was the first unit deployed into combat from what was then the Marine Corps’ new special operations force, MARSOC. After a turbulent first month in Afghanistan, including a hellish battle near the Pakistan border, all 120 elite Marines were expelled from the war zone by U.S. commanders. The 30-man platoon that came under attack was accused of slaughtering civilians, allegations fueled by erroneous media coverage immediately following the shootout and by senior American officials’ denunciations — one commander referred to the incident as a “stain” on the military’s honor — before all of the facts had been determined. “Too often, the Marine Corps and the other services don’t give the benefit of the doubt to the warfighter,” Jones told The Washington Post, reflecting on his successful 14-year effort to The Marines were cleared of criminal wrongdoing in 2008 after a military court examined the case. At the time, a three-star general concluded the troops had “acted appropriately” on the battlefield. But that phrase has been misinterpreted inside and outside the military to mean “we got away with murder,” says Fred Galvin, 48, Fox Company’s commander during the deployment. The general’s determination was announced on the eve of a long holiday weekend, he notes, calling the timing a deliberate move to bury the story. As a consequence, those assigned to the


Amazon adds a new Prime benefit: Free Whole Foods delivery in two hours

Amazon has begun delivering Whole Foods groceries — including meat, produce and alcohol — free and within two hours to Prime subscribers in four U.S. cities, bringing a new level of competition to the already booming food-delivery business. The service is available to shoppers in Austin (where Whole Foods is based), as well as Cincinnati (home to competitor Kroger), Dallas and Virginia Beach, with plans to expand “across the U.S.” this year, Amazon said in a statement. Prime members can also pay $7.99 to have their orders delivered within an hour. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.) The grocery-delivery business — though an expensive endeavor for retailers — has become a hotly contested space in recent years, as companies compete to relieve shoppers of one of the few chores many do once a week, if not more: buying food. Walmart, the country’s largest grocer, has aggressively expanded its buy-online-pick-up-in-store option throughout the country and is eyeing same-day deliveries in New York. Others, like Costco and Target, are also rolling out grocery-delivery services in hopes of tapping into a growing pool of convenience-minded shoppers. “Nearly every chain that plans on being in business in five years is moving to delivery,” said David J. Livingston, a supermarket analyst for DJL Research. “Most people buy the same groceries week after week, so they’re saying, ‘Do I really need to go spend an hour at a Giant or Walmart for this?’” It might be a pain point, but many companies have struggled to fill the need. Analysts said grocery delivery is a pricey business full of logistical and practical challenges. For one, grocery stores aren’t warehouses, so it often takes reconfiguring to efficiently find and package fresh food for delivery. And then there’s the issue of keeping cold items cold and frozen foods frozen. And Amazon itself has tried and failed to get into the grocery business in the past. Its decade-old Amazon Fresh delivery business has been slow to catch on, leading the company to cancel the service in at least nine states, including Maryland and Virginia, last year. “If somebody’s ground beef is sitting in the back of a car for two hours, that’s not going to work,” said Lee Peterson, executive vice president of brand, strategy and design for the retail consultancy WD Partners. “There’s a lot of potential here, yes, but


Q&A with Israel’s Interior Minister Aryeh Deri: Plan to deport thousands of Africans is not about race

JERUSALEM — Thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese migrants and failed asylum seekers rallied in the city of Herzliya on Wednesday protesting against a government plan to deport them, as controversy over the issue mounts. The rally started as Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority issued the first batch of deportation notices to some 20,000 single men who entered the country illegally between 2008 and 2012. Israel is offering them $3,500 and a plane ticket if they pack up and leave voluntarily. If they refuse? They will be incarcerated for an indefinite period and deported by force. The plan, which is being overseen by Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri, is the latest in a series of controversial attempts by Israel to tackle the issue over the past decade. His ministry estimates there are as many as 38,000 African migrants living in Israel illegally. Most, they say, are job seekers looking for a better life. The migrants, however, maintain they are refugees who have fled war and persecution in their native lands. They have a right to seek asylum in Israel, they say. The Eritreans say they are fleeing an open-ended national service in their country the United Nations has said amounts to enslavement. Human rights groups maintain that the migrants face imprisonment and torture if they return. Israel does not recognize absconding from military service as a reason to be granted asylum. Out of thousands of applications, Israel has so far deemed only 11 Eritreans and 1,100 Sudanese from the Darfur region eligible for temporary residency. Deri, an ultra-Orthodox politician who spent 22 months in jail for bribery and breach of trust, said his ministry will not deport genuine asylum seekers and Eritreans and Sudanese will not be sent back to their home countries. The solution, he said, is to deport people to a third country. In a meeting in his office this week, Deri said Israel had made deals with two African countries willing to take in those being deported, though he declined to say which countries. Local media and human rights groups have identified the countries as Rwanda and Uganda. Over the past three years, Deri said, thousands of migrants have left Israel willingly, some to those countries. Human rights organizations working with the migrants and media reports on those who have already left Israel say the plan puts vulnerable people at further risk. Since Deri announced the scheme last


The crowds are back. Now can the space industry build on the momentum?

question is whether it can maintain its momentum and live up to the promise of returning humans to space while landing spacecraft on the surface of the moon — inherently difficult and dangerous endeavors, even for NASA. SpaceX’s launch comes as the Trump administration is looking to restructure the role of NASA, ensuring that private enterprise and international partners work closely with the space agency. Later this month, Vice President Pence and the rest of the National Space Council will hold their second meeting, this time at the Kennedy Space Center, to discuss the role that companies such as SpaceX could play in the country’s ambitions to return to the moon and explore the cosmos. As the council, which was reconstituted under Trump, convenes, one major question it will have to grapple with is: “How can we best spend our resources as a nation to ensure the most robust space portfolio we can?” said Phil Larson, an assistant dean at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a former SpaceX spokesman. Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator who pushed for a greater reliance on the commercial sector during the Obama administration, said the launch of Falcon Heavy should spark a change in the way NASA operates. “This much delayed, much maligned rocket is just what the space agency needs to escape from the governmental bureaucracy that has bound her to Low Earth Orbit for the past forty-five years,” she wrote in an email. “Unfortunately, the traditionalists at NASA don’t share this view and have feared this moment since the day the program was announced seven years ago.” The Falcon Heavy launch was a milestone not only because it became the most powerful rocket in operation, but also because it boosted its payload, the Tesla Roadster, out of Earth’s orbit on a trajectory around the sun that Musk said would take it out farther than Mars to the asteroid belt. SpaceX had outfitted the vehicle with three cameras that beamed back stunning images of the ruby-red car soaring through the blackness of space, with the Earth a blue orb in the distance. As impressive as the launch was, SpaceX still faces a far greater test: flying astronauts. For all the hype and hoopla surrounding the launch of a $200,000 sports car with a space-suited mannequin named “Starman” at the wheel, SpaceX has never flown a rocket with a human being


As climate changes threaten California’s giant redwoods, the key to their salvation might be within them

his time as the director of Yale University’s research and demonstration forests in New England. “Thinning works,” Campbell said. “It’s about choosing the trees we want to see carry into the future. Knowing the genetics will make sure that I don’t screw that choice up.” The redwood genome project began in April 2017, when a sample was taken from an old-growth redwood in Butano State Park, about an hour’s drive north in San Mateo County. The tree’s exact location is kept secret to prevent overzealous tourism. Two labs — one at the University of California at Davis, the other at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — began work on identifying the tree’s genetic makeup. The science is complex and time-consuming. A human has 3 billion “base pairs” of DNA on its chromosomes; a redwood has 38 billion. The lead scientist is David Neale, a professor of population biology and plant sciences at UC-Davis who has spent 40 years in the field developing and refining the technology being used in this project. While examining the initial redwood sample, Neale and his team have gathered genetic material from 10 other old-growth redwoods across a variety of climates and altitudes. This is the second stage of the project: expanding the genetic library available to forest managers. “It begins to give you an estimate of the kind of genetic variation that can be found in specific stands of these trees,” he said, describing how the information will be used in terms similar to how genetic material is applied in human health care. “Once the patient is determined to be at some genetic risk, you apply treatment and prescribe medicine.” The redwood’s genetic code can only be “read” in Neale’s lab 150 letters at a time (each piece of genetic information is assigned a letter). At Steven Salzberg’s lab at Johns Hopkins, a more expensive process can read strings of up to 10,000 letters. Salzberg is a professor of biomedical engineering, computer science and biostatistics. Like Neale, he has mapped a tree’s genome before but never one the size of the redwood’s. The identification of the genome’s composition is one challenge. The sequencing and assembly — putting the various strands of letters back together in the right order — is another equally daunting one. “Imagine we took 100 copies of today’s edition of The Washington Post and shredded it so that strings of words remained


After Iraq and Afghanistan, pioneering women in the military set sights on Congress

and maternity leave. Sullivan, who worked at the Pentagon in the Obama administration, also said she has seen firsthand the devastating consequences of war, and thinks that Trump “puts the national security of this country at risk” with his “erratic and bizarre” behavior. McGrath agreed that many veterans are upset with the commander in chief: “A lot of us are saying this isn’t the country we fought for.” The former combat pilot singled out the need for better affordable health care for her candidacy. She first must win the Democratic primary — a field that includes Lexington Mayor Jim Gray — for the chance to unseat Rep. Garland “Andy” Barr (R). A viral campaign video has boosted her bid. In it she says that at age 13, she wrote to her members of Congress saying she wanted an opportunity to fly fighter jets. Her House member wrote back saying that women were not allowed in combat, and her senator, Mitch McConnell (R), never replied. McGrath ended up flying 89 combat missions against al- Qaeda and the Taliban. Several Republican Party officials acknowledged that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and liberal groups, including VoteVets.org, are increasing their efforts to recruit veterans who are critical of Trump. “Democrats have made a concerted effort because of the stigma attached to them since the 2016 election, which showed them to be out of touch with voters, a party of coastal elites,” said Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. But Hunt said that although military service is admirable, “biography is not everything, and a Democrat is a Democrat.” Voters are swayed by where a candidate stands on issues such as single-payer health care and tax cuts, Hunt said. But many Democrats see the effectiveness of having combat veterans speak out on deeply partisan issues, including those involving guns. Burgess, of the American Enterprise Institute, said veterans have an identity apart from political party. Many grew up in middle-class and rural areas, and that helps them “get away from the hated image of the elite politician,” she said. Jeremy Teigen, author of a new book, “Why Veterans Run,” said Republicans have had more success in getting their veterans elected. Democrats have a history of backing veterans in long-shot races. But he said there are signs this year that Democrats are being more strategic. Of 36 veterans who attended a two-day workshop run


‘It’s about clean sport’: Olympians frustrated by slow-moving response to Russian doping

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — The athletes have arrived, and the global media have descended at the PyeongChang Olympics. And yet the dark cloud that formed at the previous Winter Games remains at the start of these. International Olympic Committee officials were still navigating final decisions on how to handle Russians found to have participated in a state-sponsored doping program, and athletes were still reckoning with the damage done and lingering uncertainty. Russia’s widespread doping at the 2014 Sochi Olympics — and an IOC response that has been criticized as inconsistent and meandering — already has affected these Games. On Wednesday evening, 32 Russian athletes still hoping to compete had verdicts delayed when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) adjourned a hearing without resolution. The delay means the number of Russians permitted to compete may not be determined until Friday morning, the day of the Opening Ceremonies. “I hope we will have as soon as possible the results from CAS,” IOC President Thomas Bach said. “I do not know more.” The final questions prompted by last week’s controversial decision by CAS to overturn Olympic bans for 28 Russian athletes remain unanswered, fitting for a drawn-out saga. The World Anti-Doping Agency released an initial report on the Russian program in 2015, and the McLaren Report deepened the evidence and case against Russia in July 2016. Despite ample warning, IOC officials allowed a scandal at one Olympics to seep into another. “The timing of all this is ridiculous,” U.S. biathlete Lowell Bailey said. “I mean, thank God that they’re at least looking into it and not pushing it forward another year. But yeah, we had the opportunity two years ago to review the evidence. I just think, unfortunately, the political rhetoric is somehow a clash between the West and Russia. It’s not about that. It’s about clean sport.” Bailey hopes IOC punishments will provide a deterrent, “but I really think the jury’s out on that. I think we have to wait and see what happens. And the fact that we have to wait and see, four years out from the events in question, the timing of that is pretty bad.” Even with the IOC banning the Russian Olympic Committee, at least 168 Russians could compete in Sochi under the banner of Olympic Athletes from Russia. There will be no official Russian delegation, the Russian flag is not permitted to be flown, and


flagrant attack on the Olympic Games and on clean athletes by Russia.” Still, in an email to The Washington Post, Pound said it would be a “fair bet” these Games will be cleaner because the Russian punishment will serve as a deterrent. He called for the IOC to implement more advanced testing and to store samples for 10 years. American luger Chris Mazdzer captured the sentiment of several athletes. He wanted to focus on his event because he had no control over his competitors or IOC decisions. But he still could not stifle his frustration. “Even if we are going up against people who could have potentially doped, we still have the ability to be 100 percent confident with ourselves,” Mazdzer said. “I mean, it was state-sponsored, systematic, but I think there’s ways we can still go 100 percent and still be the best in the world.” In the next breath, he said: “And I am also really disappointed with CAS’s decision.” “I’m confident in the decision-makers,” American luger Tucker West said. “If they determine they’re clean, then they’re clean. It’s not really my business to go digging in there. My business is to just go out there and beat them.” Bailey said he believes the IOC’s choice to ban Russian athletes from competing will eliminate dopers — “we have maybe our best chance of having a clean field that we have ever had,” he said. But he also wants the IOC to use its influence to help clean up his sport. Russia’s noncompliance with international doping policies — including the loss of two biathlon medals in Sochi — didn’t deter biathlon officials from holding the World Cup final this year in Tyumen, Russia. “I feel like the last few years, especially the last year, I have been very uncertain about whether the people around me in a race are clean or whether they’re cheating,” U.S. biathlete Susan Dunklee said. “That’s a very frustrating position to be in as an athlete. I worry about the future of our sport.” Her concerns echoed across sports. One after another, athletes here expressed qualms about the fairness of their sport and called for further protections to be taken. Most athletes in Korea will be competing against each other but also will be banded together. “We’re all fighting the same fight,” Canada skeleton racer Jane Channell said. “We’re all fighting for clean athletes.” adam.kilgore@washpost.com


Thank immigration for the rocket launch

Regarding the Feb. 8 news article “Is this space industry’s giant leap?”: The Tuesday launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket reflects the limitless bounds of ingenuity and brilliance of those daring to dream of a bigger, better tomorrow. Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX, the private enterprise responsible for launching the Falcon Heavy, said he hoped the launch would start a new “space race.” President Trump tweeted his congratulations, saying “this achievement, along with @NASA’s commercial and international partners, continues to show American ingenuity at its best!” Indeed, it does. But it shows much more. Mr. Musk was born in South Africa and emigrated to the United States. His achievement (along with his many others, including founding Tesla and SolarCity) shows the power and benefits of preserving, if not expanding, the immigration opportunities in the United States so future presidents do not lose the chance to tweet of “American ingenuity.” It’s somewhat ironic that Mr. Musk’s incredible achievement occurred now when our democratic system has failed to place a successful solution for “dreamers” on the launchpad. The next space race needs to start with launching dreamers on a path to permanent residency and beyond. Jesse M. Bless The writer is an immigration attorney and a former senior litigator at the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation.


Olympics Day 1: Opening Ceremonies kick off the PyeongChang Games

some challenging days ahead,” chief race director Markus Waldner told Reuters. Look who showed up for the Opening Ceremonies … Throughout the Games, we’ll occasionally bring someone in to help us better understand the Olympics. Today: Mike Tirico. For 11 straight Summer and Winter Games — dating back to 1992 — Bob Costas served as the familiar and reliable face of the Olympics. But Costas is sitting out the PyeongChang Games and has passed the torch to Tirico, who will serve as NBC’s prime-time host, starting with Friday’s Opening Ceremonies. Tirico joined the network in 2016 after more than two decades at ESPN and was a daytime host of the Rio Games. He recently spoke with The Washington Post’s Rick Maese about his new high-profile assignment. Q: It’s not like you’re a newcomer to this broadcasting game, but did you seek out Costas for any advice? A: Q: He’s so identifiable with the Olympics. Are you worried about the inevitable comparisons? A: Q: Given your busy fall and winter schedule, how were you able to follow all these different sports and athletes — particularly the ones that for many people only pop up once every four years? A: Q: NBC seems to pride itself in identifying the characters and story lines that move an audience. Who do you think will emerge from these Games and really connect with people back home? A: Q: They’re talking about PyeongChang being one of the coldest Winter Games ever. Are you prepared for the freezing temperatures? A: This interview was edited for length. The 1960 Squaw Valley Olympic Games were the first to be televised live in the United States. Let’s compare them to PyeongChang. $50,000 – How much CBS paid for the rights to broadcast the Squaw Valley Games. $963 million — How much NBC paid for the PyeongChang games. 15 — Hours of coverage on CBS for 1960 Games. 1,800+ — Hours of NBC coverage (broadcast or streaming) in PyeongChang. 665 — Number of athletes in Squaw Valley. They competed in eight sports and 27 events. 2,922 — Number of athletes in PyeongChang (1,705 men, 1,217 women) 30 — Countries that competed at the 1960 Games. 92 — Countries competing in PyeongChang (including the Olympic Athletes from Russia). Below is a TV roundup for the rest of today and tomorrow, taken from The Post’s comprehensive TV guide. All Olympic events can also


Appeals of 45 Russian athletes who are banned from the Olympics for doping are denied

On the eve of Opening Ceremonies at the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, the Court of Arbitration for Sport denied appeals of doping bans for 45 Russian athletes. The International Olympic Committee had banned the athletes after an investigation into state-sponsored doping in Russia. Russia is not allowed to field an official team in PyeongChang. Instead, its athletes will compete as Olympic Athletes from Russia (OAR), its flag will not be displayed and its anthem will not be played.This is a developing story. It will be updated.


How photos of Earth from space changed humans’ view of their life on the planet

Marcia Bartusiak is a professor in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. She is the author of six books on the frontiers of astrophysics and its history, including “Black Hole” and “Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony.” Beware, flat-earthers. Christopher Potter has mounted a powerful assault on your most cherished belief. In 1948, British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle made an intriguing prediction: “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” With “The Earth Gazers,” his beautifully written overview of our voyage into the heavens, Potter shows us how that cosmic forecast played out. Photographs from space not only allowed us to see the entire planetary sphere suspended like a blue Eden amid a black void, they also informed us that the human species is “intimately connected, even embedded in its home. The more distant our perspective,” writes the author, “seemingly the more intimate.” It’s a familiar tale, one that the author largely draws from previous histories of aviation, rocketry and space travel. Yet Potter effectively delivers the highlights, maintaining an engaging narrative thread that links all the main players over the course of the 20th century. He begins with Charles Lindbergh, a college dropout who found his passion in aviation. After some barnstorming and wingwalking, he made the highest marks at the U.S. Army flying school. Spurred by a $25,000 prize, Lindbergh then conquered the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and gained lifetime fame. “Lindbergh said that he never saw the Earth so clearly . . . as he did in those early days of flight,” writes Potter. It was a first step toward Hoyle’s vision. Lindbergh himself imagined the next frontier — rockets — and quickly telephoned rocket pioneer Robert Goddard upon hearing of his test runs. As a teenager, Goddard dreamed of going to Mars. Once it was thought impossible to escape Earth’s gravitational pull, but “Goddard’s genius was to have worked out how,” Potter writes. “His brilliant concept was the multistage rocket propelled by liquid fuel.” But, though he was a brilliant inventor, he was a lousy engineer. Many of Goddard’s rockets blew up, sputtered out or failed to launch through the 1930s. As a result, the impetus in rocketry moved to Europe, particularly Germany, where wunderkind Wernher von Braun was designing his country’s rockets and overseeing a budget of 11


Ethiopia just pardoned political prisoners. Could that signal a shift to real democracy?

Is Ethiopia opening — ever so slightly — to democracy? Some observers were cautiously optimistic after Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn’s surprising Jan. 3 announcement that the government would release some political prisoners, including opposition leader Merera Gudina. Starting in mid-January, Gudina and hundreds of Ethiopians detained during a 2016 wave of anti-government protests were released from a federal prison. That release, however, was partial. The government is still holding thousands of other opposition figures and protesters, along with journalists who have reported critically on the regime. On Thursday the state-affiliated Fana Broadcasting Corp. reported that 417 people serving sentences for terrorism, inciting violence and similar offenses to be freed. Here’s what you need to know: The ruling party installed and promotes ethnic federalism — which has stoked interethnic competition and violence In 1991, the previous communist dictatorship fell after years of civil war. Since then, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), an ethno-nationalist militia movement, has dominated Ethiopian politics, despite the fact that the Tigrayan ethnic group makes up less than 7 percent of the country’s population. Four parties make up the ruling political coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), but its elites essentially function as members of one political party. As the strongest of the four, the TPLF has controlled party agendas and dominated coalition’s policy, along with the security apparatus of the state. Under TPLF/ERPDF rule, Ethiopia adopted a constitution that established ethnic federalism, in which regions’ boundaries were drawn according to ethnic and linguistic classifications. Implemented in 1995, the new constitution was ostensibly designed to promote groups’ rights. But the ethnic federal model hasn’t ended ethnic inequality. Rather, it has created winners and losers. In my research Divisive ethnic violence and protests are endemic Movements from the two largest ethnic groups, Amharas and Oromos, have regularly protested the regime’s divisive rule. For instance, in 2016 ethnic Amharas based in the Wolkait district opposed a federal plan that reorganized their land and placed it within the boundaries of the Tigray Regional State. The Wolkait Amharas wanted to reunite with Amhara regional state, across the border. In the same year, Oromos opposed the regime’s attempt to expand Addis Ababa’s city limits, which is encircled by Oromia region. Addis Ababa has been labeled a multiethnic federally administered city. Oromos consider the expansion a plan to uproot Oromo farmers, whom the TPLF targeted with forced evictions and mistreatment. Faced


India tried to stop cheating in school — so half a million students just skipped exams

standards in schools has seen the growth of a massive cheating industry in recent decades. Students need top marks — sometimes over 99 percent — to get into the country’s highly oversubscribed universities and so examiners are bribed, answer sheets leaked and exam rooms infiltrated. No more, said Neena Srivastava, secretary of the Uttar Pradesh board of education, who described the “cheating mafia” as part of organized crime. “We are fighting against this evil. We have to cleanse the state of this menace.” To curb cheating, Uttar Pradesh’s education minister, Dinesh Sharma told Times of India that the government’s new measures this year included clamping down on suspicious exam centers and firing lax district inspectors. Top scorers would have their exam sheets published, he said, so everyone could see how they performed. “In the cheating racket, genuine students are worst sufferers,” he said. Without the option of cheating, thousands of students are simply not showing up. Others are taking their chances. In one school, a teacher was caught dictating answers to students, despite CCTV cameras being turned on, according to Scroll. In another, Times of India reported, five people including a school principal were arrested for facilitating mass cheating. India’s rapid development has seen a huge demand for college graduates in the past three decades. Aspiring young Indians hope to rise above their parents’ status and take a portion of the growing pie of wealth in cities. But getting into those colleges requires top scores in state-level exams. So crucial are school exams to ordinary Indian families, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi even penned a new book released this month called “Exam Warriors” giving young Indians top tips for exam success. Among them are doing yoga, using acronyms as a learning device, and laughing as you enter and leave the exam hall. But even Modi’s exam mantras can’t surmount the chronic problems of India’s education system. Schools are often understaffed, teachers absent, and curricula is focused on rote learning. In villages, schools sometimes don’t have electricity or the right textbooks. A lack of toilets and running water, especially for menstruating girls, leads to high dropout rates. Srivastava and others, intent on cleaning up the exam system, said the tough new anti-cheating measures will deter future cheaters. “Children should study. Teachers should give better and timely education. Children should not be enticed into these nefarious activities.” Exams will end March 12.


Russian athletes’ 11th-hour appeal denied by Court of Arbitration for Sport

athletes said they weren’t given the reasons they weren’t invited and weren’t allowed to “to prove these grounds wrong.” The law firm, the Switzerland-based Schellenberg Wittmer, issued a statement calling the CAS decision “unfair and harmful” and said the athletes have been barred “for no valid reason.” “Their Olympic dreams have been shattered,” the statement read. The ruling means 168 Russian athletes are expected to participate in these PyeongChang Olympics, but many of the country’s top performers will not be competing. The 45 Russians who were denied entry include speedskater Viktor Ahn, who won six gold medals in two previous Olympics; former NHL players Valeri Nichushkin and Sergei Plotnikov; Alexander Tretiakov, the skeleton rider who won gold in Sochi; Alexander Legkov, an Olympic champion in cross-country skiing; Elena Nikitina, who won bronze in skeleton at the 2014 Games; and Tatyana Ivanova, a luger who took silver in Sochi. Nikitina and Ivanova were the only ones to attend Friday’s hearing in person, Reeb said. Many of those athletes were initially stripped of their Olympic medals and barred from competition, but CAS had reinstated some of their Sochi results, giving them hope they might also be allowed to compete in PyeongChang. In the days leading into these Games, athletes from other countries have been critical of the process and expressed concerns about the fairness of Olympic competition, so Friday’s CAS decision was welcome news in many corners. Anita DeFrantz, a member of both the IOC and the U.S. Olympic Committee, said the decision was a victory for clean athletes and the IOC, whose authority had effectively been challenged. “The IOC has been working extraordinarily hard to make sure that we protect the clean athletes,” she said. “We’re not particularly happy with the thought of having athletes that we knew were not clean having the opportunity to compete. So we put together a case before CAS, and we’re delighted with the outcome.” Angela Ruggiero, an IOC member who serves on the organization’s athletes’ commission, said Friday’s ruling should give athletes in PyeongChang both peace of mind and confidence that these Olympics will be as clean as possible. “The message that I think we’re sending to athletes now [is] the decision has been made, you should be incredibly confident that every athlete, including Olympic Athletes of Russia, have had to jump over an enormously high hurdle to be here,” said Ruggiero, who’s also a


Russian oligarch threatens to sue media over opposition investigation

MOSCOW — A Russian business mogul allied with President Vladimir Putin threatened Friday to sue media outlets for reporting accusations that the tycoon held a secret meeting with a senior Russian government official aboard his yacht in 2016. The allegations, stemming from an investigation by Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, come as Russia heads toward a presidential election next month that is expected to keep Putin in office. Oleg Deripaska, who owns one of Russia’s largest industrial groups, said in a statement that the investigation by Navalny was part of a “planned campaign aiming to damage my reputation.” In a video posted to YouTube, the opposition leader accused Deripaska of bribing the official, Sergei Prikhodko, a deputy prime minister and former aide to Putin, by entertaining him on his yacht with several women described as escorts. The video has attracted more than 1.2 million views but no official reaction. A spokesman for Putin declined to comment on the video Friday during a daily call with journalists. “I want to warn the media against the dissemination of these mendacious accusations,” Deripaska said in his statement, which was emailed to news organizations including The Washington Post. “I will severely suppress any attempts to create and disseminate false information flow using all legal measures and will defend my honor and dignity in court.” The statement was also posted on the Instagram account of Deripaska, who has an estimated net worth of $6.7 billion, according to Forbes. Business media outlet RBC said Friday that Prikhodko responded to inquiries about the video in a statement. “I would have answered him like a man, but we will remain within the legal framework,” the statement said. Prikhodko went on to say that he did not know Paul Manafort, former campaign chief for Donald Trump and a figure in a U.S. special prosecutor’s investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “This political loser once again tried to arrange a provocation and promote himself, confusing everything that did and didn’t happen — from my friend [Deripaska] to U.S. President Trump and Manafort, whom I don’t know personally.” Navalny’s investigation was based on open-source data and Instagram photographs and videos posted by a woman named Nastya Rybka, who has written a book about her escort work. In an interview on Russian television last year, Rybka said she was hired by a modeling agency to spend time


After their town was relocated, they found an uneasy truce with the PyeongChang Games

paid for with the help of government compensation. Some decided to move out of Sukam entirely. Others were upset. For at least a few days, some residents used their cars to block an entrance to the ski construction site. The construction company called the police. The police told the residents to leave. The residents did as they were told. The protest ended, and soon, residents were buying small plots of land together on a hillside — New Sukam, less than a quarter-mile away from Old Sukam — having made some uneasy truce with whatever the Olympics promised to bring. “Gangwon has been isolated from development,” said Um Ki-bum, 34. “We had no other way. We had to accept.” “We liked the idea of South Korea hosting the Olympics,” Nam said. “So we went along with it.” Now, as the Olympics kick off, there are 51 bullet trains running daily through Gangwon Province, new highways and new condos — more than $13 billion poured into a region once known mostly for buckwheat and farming. From the hillside of New Sukam, one can look down into Old Sukam. What’s there? Terraced parking lots, a helicopter pad, a faux Swiss chalet and a hotel where the dinner buffet starts at $60. “This area used to feel so country,” said Nam, a construction worker, who would hike and forage for herbs around his home. “Now it feels almost like a city.” As the sun set Friday night, Nam could see the klieg lights shining on the Alpine slope, giving the sky a white glow. He went into his house and saw his mother-in-law, who looked at the TV and asked if a soap opera was playing. “No,” Nam said, “it’s all about the Olympics now.” Then he sat down with his wife and watched the Opening Ceremonies, where there were fireworks, and a puppet white tiger, and dancers, and heads of state, and of course athletes, some of whom over the next two weeks would arrive in Sukam, going down a new mountain slope in an area no longer off the grid. “Maybe it was better before,” Nam said. “It was more like nature. But it’s irreversible.” Yoonjung Seo contributed to this report. Read more Olympics coverage Olympics open with dazzling spectacle and warm gestures between the Koreas Coldest Olympics in history? PyeongChang organizers break out the hats and blankets. Jerry Brewer: Barry Svrluga:


Maryland open houses Feb. 10-11

718 Broadmoor Dr 956 Woodland Cir 551 Deep Creek Vw 1045 Little Magothy Vw 615 Snow Goose Lane 1318 Windsor Ridge Lane 1618 Secretariat Dr 607 Baystone Ct ARNOLD 21012 856 Twin Harbor Dr 756 Dividing Creek Rd 19 Ashcroft Ct 244 Way Cross Way 1423 Silver Oak Lane 113 Brent Rd CROFTON 21114 1400 Ormsby Pl CROWNSVILLE 21032 1361 Morgans Ridge Lane CURTIS BAY 21226 213 Greenland Beach Rd DAVIDSONVILLE 21035 737 Appomattox Rd DEALE 20751 5966 Tyler Rd EDGEWATER 21037 511 Westminister Rd 400 Bayview Dr 1706 Bentley Rd GAMBRILLS 21054 1111 Lanham Lane 1509 Sirani Lane 1603 Sirani Lane W 1509 Beaux Lane 303 Bonheur Ave 1508 Sirani Lane E 1503 Sirani Lane E 301 Bonheur Ave 1501 Sirani Lane E 1507 Sirani Lane 1505 Sirani Lane 299 Bonheur Ave 2263 Dairy Farm Rd 2136 Basil Hall Lane GLEN BURNIE 21060 7737 Overhill Rd 550 Fox River Hills Way 608 Quarterpath Way 545 Willow Bend St 8307 Encore Dr 7727 Cohansey Trail Drive 7204 Mockingbird Cir 7729 Cohansey Trail Drive 7532 Ivybrook Lane 21061 Oakwood Village Dr 113 Linwood Ave 8018 Cross Creek Dr 1453 Pleasantville Dr 99 Greenway St NW Glaser Lane 344 White Oak Way 7613 Glaser Lane HANOVER 21076 2918 Middleham Ct 7212 Howison Hill Lane 1450 Gesna Dr 7547 Moraine Dr LAUREL 20707 15700 Haynes Rd 324 Compton Ave 20723 1 Wincopia Farms Way 2 Wincopia Farms Way 3 Wincopia Farms Way 9332 Old Scaggsville Rd 9614 Patuxent Overlook Dr 8037 Mckenstry Dr 9833 Garden Ranges 8728 Polished Pebble Way LINTHICUM 21090 703 Shipley Ct LOTHIAN 20711 5707 Iron Stone Rd MILLERSVILLE 21108 1602 Misty Manor Way 423 Zeman Dr ODENTON 21113 3012 Turnstile Lane 1420 Catbriar Way 1418 Catbriar Way 1935 Gardenia Ct 737 Chapelgate Dr 2616 Rainy Spring Ct 549 Greencrest Lane 360 Chessington Dr 0 Broad Wing Dr 1316 Cheswick Lane 0 Broad Wing Dr 3132 Sunny Ridge Dr 3055 Sunny Ridge Dr PASADENA 21122 7937 Meridian Dr 7929 Meridian Dr 7927 Meridian Dr 7928 Meridian Dr 8328 Daydream Cres 781 Powhatan Beach Rd 8065 Catherine Ave 1616 Wall Dr SEVERN 21144 1705 Willard Way 401 University Dr 8527 Pine Springs Dr SEVERNA PARK 21146 301 Cloverleaf Lane 498 Mcbride Lane 127 Truck House Rd 135 Pineview Ave 614 Mckin Way SHADY SIDE 20764 4962 Lerch Dr 4964 Lerch Dr CALVERT COUNTY CHESAPEAKE BEACH 20732 3335 Blue Heron Dr N


Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny scours Instagram to accuse a top Kremlin official of ties to a billionaire

claimed to have been romantically involved with billionaire Oleg Deripaska. The Instagram posts appear to show the aluminum tycoon relaxing on a yacht in Norway in 2016. In several videos, Deripaska appears to be joined by at least one other woman, as well as by Sergei Prikhodko — a deputy prime minister in the Russian government. “An oligarch takes a top government official on a ride on his own yacht — that’s a bribe,” Navalny says in the video. “An oligarch pays for all of this, including young women from escort agencies. Believe it or not, this is also a bribe.” Navalny said his team verified the woman’s posts by checking public records for boats and private planes. Navalny said the woman wrote a book about the experience, using pseudonyms for Deripaska and Prikhodko, titled, “A Diary About Seducing a Billionaire.” After Navalny’s investigation was published, the woman, who goes by the name Nastya Rybka, posted a new video on Instagram in which she said that what took place on the yacht “was in truth a gang rape.” A spokesman for Deripaska on Thursday slammed the report and denied the accusations. “These scandalous and mendacious assumptions are driven by sensationalism and we totally refute these outrageous false allegations in the strongest possible way,” the spokesman told the Associated Press in a statement. The investigation by Navalny, whom Russian authorities banned from running against Vladimir Putin in the March 18 presidential election, underscores his ability to use Russia’s still-open Internet to get attention despite the government’s crackdown on free speech elsewhere. While Russia's mainstream media largely ignored Navalny’s report, his video drew some 700,000 views on YouTube within hours. Navalny is now trying to use his social media reach to try to persuade Russians to boycott the March election, in which Putin is expected to win a fourth term. Deripaska has been linked to former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a key figure in U.S. special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In October, Manafort was indicted on charges of conspiracy and money laundering, the first disclosed charges in that investigation. According to emails described to The Washington Post last year, Manafort — who once worked for Deripaska — directed an associate to offer Deripaska “private briefings” about Trump’s presidential campaign. A Deripaska spokeswoman said he was never offered such briefings.


At the last minute, Olympic decision-makers finally show some teeth. But damage has been done.

now knows that Nikitina won’t compete against her. But her situation clarifies exactly what this is about. What was at stake wasn’t really which Russian is allowed to compete and which isn’t. What was at stake is the faith of the athletes who, when all the corporate advertising and white-tablecloth dinners are stripped away, make up the core of the Olympics. But here’s the killer part, too: We now know the Russian team for PyeongChang. And this still isn’t over. Follow the timeline: WADA declared the Russians’ version of an anti-doping authority noncompliant with WADA standards and procedures in November 2015. The independent report from Canadian professor Richard McLaren that outlined the Russians’ operations was issued in two parts — both in 2016, which left chaos leading into and coming out of the Rio Games that summer. And finally, in December, the report from Swiss politician Samuel Schmid led to the IOC’s ban of Russia. That’s a three-year plod. So could we be sitting here, with the 2020 Tokyo Games about to begin, with the same questions about the same sanctions? “I hope not, clearly,” Reedie said. That’s not the same as, “Don’t be ridiculous.” American athletes have been among the most vocal in asking for more stringent testing standards internationally. On this, Uhlander makes an interesting point: “Our country has also had some of the worst offenses.” The U.S. needed change. Now, it has year-long, in-and-out-of-season testing of both urine and blood performed by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. American athletes said they frequently have conversations with rivals from other countries about how often their tested. Uhlander said in one season, she was tested 19 times. “We don’t want to lighten testing on us,” said American skeleton athlete John Daly. “We just want the rest of the world as strict as us.” To which, Reedie responded: “I can understand their irritation.” This is now more than irritating. It’s inexcusable. Look, I’m not a zealot about doping, and it’s my belief — realistic or cynical, depending on how you look at it — that the robbers in these cases will always be ahead of the cops. “Doping,” as WADA official Ben McDevitt said Thursday, “is not going away.” But the problem here, the issue that threatened to taint these Games even before they begin in full, is that the very athletes who could exhilarate and inspire over the next two weeks


12 things to do in the D.C. area the weekend of Feb. 9-11

Friday, Feb. 9 Seeing Deeper: ‘Rogue One’ and ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ at Washington National Cathedral PyeongChang Thang at Wunder Garten The Crystal Method (DJ set) at U Street Music Hall Bat Fangs at Comet Ping Pong Awkward Sex . . . and the City at the Black Cat Saturday, Feb. 10 Chinese New Year Festival at the Smithsonian American Art Museum Brazilian Carnival at the Grill From Ipanema 'Sucker for Love' at the Lincoln Theatre Celebrating David Bowie at the Fillmore Silver Spring Valentine's Day is a Drag at the Duplex Diner Sunday, Feb. 11 Lunar New Year Celebration at the Freer and Sackler galleries Profs and Pints: Mardi Gras 101 at the Bier Baron Tavern — Fritz Hahn, Megan McDonough, Chris Richards, Winyan Soo Hoo Read more: This blue cocktail tastes like vacation in a glass. You may be seeing more of it soon. Break out of a dining rut: 10 D.C. restaurants that recently opened D.C. jazz is making a comeback. You’ll just find it in unexpected places.


Despite sanctions and tough rhetoric, North Korean Olympians wear American sports gear

The U.S. and the U.N. have repeatedly announced new measures to cut off trade with North Korea, each round tougher than the last. "These are by far the strongest measures ever imposed on North Korea," Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in September after passage of one such trade ban. "Today we are saying the world will never accept a nuclear armed North Korea." But how much do the sanctions actually prevent such trade with North Korea? Photographs of the women's hockey team from North Korea, now at the Winter Olympics, raise questions about how players from the North Korea's women's hockey team ended up wearing so much equipment from U.S. based Bauer Hockey. As you can see in the picture below from a tournament last year, the North Korean players (in red) have Bauer sticks, Bauer helmets, Bauer goalie pads and Bauer gloves; another is holding a stick from CCM Hockey, a Canadian brand. Given leader Kim Jong Un's rhetorical contempt for the "American bastards," it's a bit of a surprise. It may also reflect the imperfect enforcement of trade bans. Here's another, more recent photo, showing Bauer pads and gloves. The sale of sporting items to North Korea has been prohibited since at least March 2016, when the United Nations clarified that its ban on luxury goods, which is supposed to target the country's elite, would cover recreational products as well. The U.N. ban on the "supply, sale or transfer" of luxury items, including sporting goods, to North Korea did have two exceptions. The prohibition is lifted, for example, in the case of "humanitarian" causes. But any exception must run through a U.N. committee, and a spokesman for that committee said such an allowance would be made only in "exceptional circumstances." The U.N. committee does not disclose requests for exceptions, however. It's also possible that the equipment could have been purchased before March of 2016. But some hockey items - especially sticks in frequent use - typically last less than a year, so that seems unlikely. Bauer officials did not respond to calls and emails for comment. Finally, it's also possible, a Security Council diplomat said, that the North Korean players are simply borrowing the equipment for use in the Olympics and other tournaments outside of North Korea. If the equipment does not return to North Korea, there is no violation of the sanctions. But


While Trump congratulates SpaceX for Falcon Heavy launch, Elon Musk says he looks forward to a new ‘space race’

COCOA BEACH, Fla. — Before founding SpaceX in 2002, Elon Musk had a wild plan to fly a plant to Mars. The idea was to show life on the desolate planet, a brushstroke of vibrant green on a lifeless red canvas. If nothing else, it would inspire people, he figured, reignite interest in space, while also furthering his ambitions to push deeper into the cosmos. At the time, he had yet to build his first rocket. On Tuesday, Musk launched his biggest one yet from the same launchpad that sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in 1969, a rocket capable of boosting a payload to Mars and that is currently the most powerful in the world. With the maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy, Musk achieved an extraordinary engineering feat, pulling off the launch of a 27-engine beast that sent a Tesla Roadster deep into space. But beyond the mechanical architecture of the launch, and its high degree of difficulty, the launch provided the artful inspiration Musk has pursued for years. After the burst of flame and smoke from the pad, two of the three boosters returned to Earth, landing side-by-side on a pair of pads along the coastline, touching down in unison, like a pair of synchronized swimmers. Then came the crescendo. As the nose cone of the rocket opened, there was Musk’s Tesla convertible, with a mannequin named Starman sitting in the driver's seat, spacesuit on, hand on the wheel, out for a cruise among the stars as if he were going for a spin up the Pacific Coast Highway. SpaceX had outfitted the vehicle with three cameras that beamed back stunning images of the ruby red car soaring through the blackness of space with Earth, blue and green and beautiful, in the background. Before the launch, some had derided the plan to launch a car into space as a waste, a cross-marketing ploy for Tesla, one of his other companies. And in his post-launch news conference, Musk said the test flight’s dummy payload was intended to excite and entertain, an abstract work of performance art. “It’s kind of silly and fun,” he said. “But silly and fun things are important. Normally for a new rocket, they’d launch like a block of concrete or something. That’s so boring.” By contrast, the scene of the Tesla in space “is something that’s going to get


North Korea’s Kim Jong Un invites South Korea’s president to Pyongyang

and work in a coordinated way to bring maximum economic and diplomatic pressure to bear on North Korea.” Asked later whether Moon’s desire to accept the North Korean invitation to visit Pyongyang undermined Pence’s trip or detracted from his message, a senior administration official said: “No, I don’t think it does in the least.” But Kim Jong Un seems determined to divide the allies. South Korea and the United States had agreed to postpone their annual spring military exercises until after the Olympics, partly to encourage North Korea to participate — and to not act as a spoiler. North Korea is calling for the exercises, which involve rehearsing attacks on the regime, to be canceled outright. “Sending his sister with an invite for Moon to Pyongyang is well played by Kim Jong Un,” said James Schoff, a Korea expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “It will be hard for the allies to resume their military exercises during summit planning.” For that reason, Schoff said, Washington should work closely with Seoul to shape any North-South summit agenda, “defending the role of exercises for stability and insisting that denuclearization is front and center of any peace talks.” Pence wasn’t trying to avoid the North Koreans at the Olympic ceremony, but he was trying to ignore them, the senior administration official said, adding that the North Koreans weren’t the reason Pence was there. Some South Korean media criticized Pence’s decisions to attend the event for only five minutes, instead of sitting at the same table as the North Koreans, and to not stand when the joint Korean team entered the stadium. The left-wing Kyunghyang newspaper called the actions “deeply disrespectful.” North Korea’s state media also sharply criticized Pence. “Pence must know that his frantic acts of abusing the sacred Olympics for confrontational ruckus are as foolish and stupid an act as sweeping the sea with a broom,” the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said in a commentary published Saturday. But the vice president’s team saw it differently. Communications Director Jarrod Agen tweeted a laudatory review of Pence’s evening: “VP stands and cheers for U.S. athletes. VP hangs out with U.S. athletes instead of dining with Kim regime. VP does not applaud N. Korea or exchange pleasantries w/ the most oppressive regime on earth,” he wrote. There were South Koreans who agreed with Pence’s stance. About 800 conservative protesters


Bombing of Chinese separatists in Afghanistan is a sign of how Trump’s war there has changed

to . . . target the Taliban and the ETIM where they previously thought they were safe.” The new authorities were approved in August by Trump, and the United States has escalated the air campaign ever since. While U.S. officials have declined to say what specifically they entail, there is broad agreement that they have allowed the U.S. military to expand how frequently it strikes. The Air Force dropped 4,361 bombs in Afghanistan last year, as opposed to 1,337 in 2016 and 947 in 2015, according to service statistics. The ETIM comprises ethnic Uyghur militants who want to form a separate state in or near the western Xinjiang region of China. The group’s emir is believed to be Abdul Haq al Turkistani, who has been on al-Qaeda’s leadership council and was targeted by the Treasury Department in 2009 for his associations with other terrorists, said Thomas Joscelyn, a senior editor with the Long War Journal, which tracks terrorist organizations. The group threatened attacks on the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. The militants once had a home across the Afghan border in Pakistan, but were pushed out of the North Waziristan region in 2015 as the U.S. reduced the number of troops in Afghanistan and the Pakistani military ran a series of counterterrorism operations on its side of the border, said Michael Kugelman, who analyzes terrorist groups for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “It’s a group that has really flown under the radar in many ways in the broader constellation of terrorist organizations,” Kugelman said. “It typically has local aims, but I don’t think we should ever take light any group with ties to al-Qaeda.” The group has expanded its operations in recent years. Under the TIP acronym, it fought in Syria alongside groups linked to al-Qaeda, according to an assessment released in November by the International Centre for Counterterrorism at The Hague. Air Force Maj. Gen. James B. Hecker, the commander of the coalition’s air command in Afghanistan, told reporters Wednesday that there has been a “change in weight of effort” recently in U.S. intelligence-gathering that has provided U.S. commanders with more information about potential targets. The United States also has added additional aircraft, including MQ-9 Reaper drones and a squadron of A-10C attack jets in southern Afghanistan. “With the current uplift in resources, we can decimate Taliban command-and-control nodes,” Hecker said. “That means we can strike


Community deaths

Obituaries of residents from the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia. Connell Trimber, ophthalmologist Connell Trimber, 83, an ophthalmologist who practiced in Alexandria, Va., from 1968 to 2009, died Dec. 18 at an Alexandria nursing home. The cause was congestive heart failure, said a son, Richard Trimber. Dr. Trimber, an Alexandria resident, was born in Philadelphia. He was a Navy doctor for seven years before moving to the Washington area. He was on the staff of Inova Alexandria and Fairfax hospitals and was on the founding committee of what is now Inova Mount Vernon Hospital. Jun-mo Nam, mathematical statistician Jun-mo Nam, 85, a mathematical statistician at the National Cancer Institute for 48 years, died Jan. 4 at a hospital in Germantown, Md. The cause was complications from pneumonia, said a daughter, Katherine Nam. Mr. Nam, a resident of Rockville, Md., was born in Daegu, South Korea. He joined the cancer institute in 1969. He wrote widely on biostatistical methodologies in the area of cancer research. He retired officially four years ago but had continued to work on a volunteer basis until shortly before his death. He was executive director and chairman of several committees for the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association. John Dunlap, newspaper stereotyper John Dunlap, 82, a Washington Post stereotyper from 1967 to 1982 who later became a contract distributor of the newspaper, died Dec. 18 at his home in Murrells Inlet, S.C. The cause was congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said a granddaughter, Diane Berringer. Mr. Dunlap was born in Franklin, Pa. He was a stereotyper for papers in Florida and Massachusetts before joining The Post, he made relief molds for the printing press. In 1982, he became a contract distributor of the newspaper to carriers and stores. He left his distributorship in the mid-1990s shortly before moving to South Carolina from White Plains, Md. — From staff reports


Putin ally warns of arms race as Russia considers response to U.S. nuclear stance

the Defense Department’s Nuclear Posture Review. “And then a mere spark will be sufficient. With the number of weapons in the world today, there will be no winners; the world will be destroyed.” Chemezov heads Rostec, a state industrial giant that makes small arms, helicopters, radar systems and other weapons, and that controls Russian arms exports. He is also one of Putin’s key associates at the intersection of business and government and a longtime friend. The two served together in the KGB in Dresden, East Germany, in the 1980s and shared an entryway in a six-story apartment building. Chemezov is under U.S. sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department. It referred to him as “a trusted ally of President Putin” when it announced sanctions against him and several other Russian officials in response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Late last month, Treasury listed him as one of Russia’s “senior political leaders.” “They think that people on the list will start getting upset and come to the Americans and say, ‘Yes, we are with you,’ and ‘Let’s overthrow Putin together,’ ” Chemezov said, referring to the sanctions list. “On the contrary — it had the exact opposite effect. All the people who are on the list support Putin.” Echoing senior Russian politicians, Chemezov said he had been expecting a friendlier U.S. policy toward Russia after Trump took office. Loosened sanctions, Chemezov said, would have allowed his company to deepen its business ties with American companies such as Boeing, with which it already works to produce titanium airplane parts in Russia’s Ural Mountains. “Maybe he will gain the strength to create some opportunities that will allow him to change something regarding Russia,” Chemezov said of Trump. “We were expecting normal relations to be reestablished, as things were under George W. Bush.” Instead, Russian officials see the Nuclear Posture Review as the latest sign that Trump is failing to deliver on his promise of improved relations. Writing for the Valdai Discussion Club, which is close to Russia’s foreign-policy establishment, international relations specialist Dmitry Suslov said the new nuclear policy could not only bring about a new arms race but also “a dramatic military crisis fraught with a direct military clash between the US and Russia.” The Foreign Ministry in Moscow said Russia will “take measures to enhance our security” on the heels of the U.S. nuclear plans. Russia is already modernizing its


Nuclear scientists logged on to one of Russia’s most secure computers — to mine bitcoin

alleged infraction took place at the Federal Nuclear Center in Sarov, a top-secret area surrounded by barbed-wire fences where the Soviet Union’s first nuclear bomb was produced during the Cold War. “There has been an unsanctioned attempt to use computer facilities for private purposes including so-called mining,” the center’s press service said, according to the BBC and the Interfax news agency. “As far as we are aware, a criminal case has been launched against them.” Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said in a phone interview that the issue touched on numerous security-related concerns, some of which were compounded by the fact that cooperation between the United States and Russia over its stocks of nuclear materials — the largest in the world — had ended over the past few years. “One of the long-standing concerns that experts have had about the Russian nuclear complex is the potential for insider threats — the potential that Russian nuclear scientists or employees could, in search of a payday, siphon off material that could be used in a nuclear radiological device or help a terrorist group,” Reif said. “That said, it’s a good thing that the facility’s security system appears to have been alerted to the unauthorized use of the computer quickly and the suspects quickly apprehended. Let’s also hope the supercomputer is closely monitored when it’s not hooked up to the net as well.” The supercomputer that was purportedly used was not supposed to be connected to the Internet for security reasons. Facility operators uncovered the transgression after they were alerted that it had been connected. The scientists were handed over to the Federal Security Service, the BBC reported. Cryptocurrencies require a great deal of computer energy to mine, the BBC reported. The nuclear center employs about 20,000 people; it’s supercomputer can do the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, the BBC reported. Read more: George Papadopoulos, his bride-to-be, and the Russia-linked ‘professor’ who brought them together A government worker says he didn’t want to help ICE deport immigrants. So he quit. ‘Who knew libertarians were so sensitive?’: Lawmaker won’t apologize for Rand Paul crack. More on bitcoin: The bitcoin bubble is a joke, and you’re the punchline ‘Bitcoin is my potential pension’: What’s driving people in Kentucky to join the craze Bitcoin is all the rage — but is it worth the risk?


These record-breaking pictures were taken by the farthest camera from Earth

system. After New Horizons launched in 2006, it flung itself around Jupiter in 2007 to get a boost toward Pluto, where it arrived in summer 2015. There, it changed the way we view the dwarf planet. New Horizons continues its journey into the cosmos at a rate of about 700,000 miles a day. During its travels, New Horizons alternates between periods of activity and dormancy to conserve fuel. It was most recently active between September and December 2017. In the first week of December, it passed the Pale Blue Dot's record distance. It imaged the Wishing Well at 3.79 billion miles away, beating the Blue Dot photo shoot by 40 million miles. New Horizons broke its own record in the following days, photographing Kuiper belt objects 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85. With diameters of a hundred kilometers or so, the two Kuiper belt objects are not large enough to classify as dwarf planets. Next to nothing is known about the micro-surfaces of objects like these, Porter said. The images of 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85 provide vital context to the understudied bodies at the solar system's bleeding edge. The Kuiper belt is a vast expanse of rocks, ice clumps, comets and dwarf planets beyond Neptune. (Dwarf planet Pluto is a part of the belt, but it was not recognized as such until the discovery of other Kuiper objects in the early 2000s.) Pluto was estimated in 2015 to be the largest object in the belt, though there are other dwarf planets of note, such as Eris, Haumea and Makemake. For now, the Hubble telescope, which orbits Earth, can image most Kuiper belt objects in greater detail than New Horizon's eight-inch telescope, Porter said. But that will not be true when New Horizons wakes up in August. The spacecraft's camera will continue to set image records as it flies by a Kuiper belt object called 2014 MU69 in January 2019. The Kuiper belt object flyby is “not nearly as flashy as Pluto,” Porter said, but “it's a really unique observation.” If a craft were launched today, it would take a decade to travel as far as New Horizons has, and there are no immediate plans to follow in its path. Read more: New Horizons studies its first mysterious, distant space object after Pluto Why Pluto is even colder than it should be Gorgeous new photo shows Pluto with jazzed up color


Space X sent a cute red Tesla Roadster into space. Here’s what’ll probably happen to it

There’s a midnight cherry Tesla Roadster hurtling toward deep space right now, the first payload of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. It’s worth asking what is going to happen to this electric sports car condemned to what could be a billion-year elliptical journey. “I’m not so worried about the vacuum [of space] itself,” said William Carroll, a chemist at Indiana University and an expert in plastics and organic molecules. People tend to experience some pretty grisly effects in a vacuum. But that has more to do with our internal pressures no longer getting counteracted by an atmosphere, Carroll said, than any direct effects of the vacuum itself. Cars just don’t have those kinds of internal pressures. The real forces that will tear the car apart over hundreds of millions of years in space, Carroll said, are solid objects and — most important — radiation. It’s unlikely that the vehicle could avoid the kind of collisions with micrometeoroids that leave space junk riddled with craters over time, Carroll said. But assuming those collisions don’t tear the car apart, the radiation will. On Earth, a powerful magnetic field and the atmosphere largely protect humans (and Tesla Roadsters) from the harsh radiation of the sun and cosmic rays. But objects in space have no such protections. “All of the organics will be subjected to degradation by the various kinds of radiation that you will run into there,” Carroll said. Organics, in this case, doesn’t mean the bits of the car that came from animals, such as its leathers. Instead, it includes all the plastics in the sports car and even its carbon-fiber frame. Those materials “are made up largely of carbon-carbon bonds and carbon-hydrogen bonds,” Carroll said. The energy of stellar radiation can cause those bonds to snap. And that can cause the car to fall to bits as effectively as if it were attacked with a massive knife. “When you cut something with a knife, in the end, you’re cutting some chemical bonds,” Carroll said. A knife cuts those bonds in a straight line. But radiation will split them at random, causing organic materials — leather seats, rubber tires, paints, perhaps even the carbon-fiber body — to discolor, flake and splinter away. And under the harsh glare of the unshielded sun, Carroll said, that process could happen fast. “Those organics, in that environment, I wouldn’t give them a year,” he said. Materials with


Shirtless Tongan sensation returns to Olympics, this time as a cross-country skier

isn’t shiny,” he wrote on social media during his previous brush with celebrity. “The truth is that I have had more injuries than I can count, that I have lost more matches than I have won, that I have gone through massive financial hardship and lost very close relationships in pursuit of the dream. What I pride myself in is not my skill in my craft, there are others who will always be better. … What I pride myself in is that I do not quit, I do not stop!” And so he didn’t stop after the Rio Games, deciding to find a winter sport despite his southern Pacific heritage. “After the Summer Games, I said, ‘You know what? I want a new challenge. I want to find something that’s the hardest possible sport I can think of and see if it’s possible to get Tonga qualified within a year,’ ” Taufatofua told People. Which is why he learned how to cross-country ski, something he called “the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” according to the Olympic news service. “Most of my training was on roller skis [short skis on wheels], which don’t have brakes,” he said. “There were so many wipeouts — cuts, scrapes and bruises. Probably every week I’d lose half an elbow or graze my knee or land on my face.” He also strapped pieces of wood to his feet and ran on sand to glide and get a feel for balance. Now he’s in South Korea, ready for Olympic thrills and whatever comes next, in and out of athletics. According to his personal website, the Australian-born 34-year-old spent “his whole adult life working in homeless shelters with the underprivileged to show and teach people the power of self belief.” Since his Rio moment, he has turned down the kinds of movie and modeling offers that probably will pick up again with his second trip through the Olympic spotlight. After PyeongChang, he will resume training in taekwondo, a sport in which he has broken six bones, torn three ligaments and endured endless of rehabilitation, with an eye on the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. If he makes it, well, look for the oiled flag-bearer. “People don’t see the hard work that goes behind,” he told NBC. “They just see the shiny guy that walks with the flag.” Read more Olympic coverage from The Post: Opening Ceremonies at PyeongChang Olympics:


A battle over language is at the heart of Northern Ireland crisis

have stalled. The sleepy security guards at Stormont read newspapers, recently featuring an article about a patient who endured a 49-hour wait at a local emergency room. A Belfast reporter said with bitter humor that the only thing missing from the TV reports at Stormont is tumbleweeds blowing by. Unionists and nationalists alike describe the atmosphere as toxic, the worst in years. Twenty years after the optimism of the Good Friday Agreement, “I would have thought there would be more progress, more reconciliation,” said Emmet McDonough-Brown, a Belfast city councilor from the middle-of-the-road Alliance Party. “Yes, the violence is gone, and that is great. But don’t we deserve more than that?” he said. “The feeling now is, ‘Is there no fixing this place?’ ” Nobody in Belfast sees widespread violence returning, but the power vacuum has created anxiety. McDonough-Brown recalls that in 2012 there were death threats — and petrol bombs — targeting members of his party who pushed for a compromise over how many days a year the British flag should fly over the Belfast city hall. He supports an Irish Language Act but said, “You’re not going to unite Ireland with bilingual traffic signs.” Northern Irish politicians say everything now is complicated by Brexit, the decision by U.K. voters to leave the European Union. The voters in Northern Ireland came out against leaving, but theirs was a minority voice. Unionists and nationalists here worry about a return to a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which is remaining in the E.U. In the bad old days of the Troubles, the border area was widely described as “bandit country.” Last February, DUP leader Arlene Foster vowed, “I will never accede to an Irish Language Act” and said that Sinn Fein was using language to beat unionists over the head. Asked about compromise at the time, Foster added, “If you feed a crocodile, it will keep coming back and looking for more.” Sinn Fein seized on the remark. “See you later, alligator,” said its outgoing leader, Gerry Adams, who sent campaigners out in crocodile costumes. There have been two elections since. In the first, Sinn Fein gained; in the second, the Democratic Unionists did well — enough to prop up May’s weakened government in Westminster. Peter Weir, a DUP lawmaker and former education minister (who upon taking up his position removed all the Irish language from


A new Poor People’s Campaign, but the same old obstacles

many measures, these problems are worse today than they were five decades ago.” The IPS report noted: • Compared to 1968, 60 percent more Americans are living below the official poverty line today — a total of 41 million people. And while the percentage of families in poverty has merely inched up and down, the top 1 percent’s share of national income has nearly doubled. • According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school, 23 states have adopted voter suppression laws since 2010. • The criminalization of poverty and racially biased sentencing and policing practices have driven the number of prison inmates up eightfold since 1968, with the share who are people of color increasing from less than half to 66 percent. Even where progress has been made, there are usually significant caveats. For instance, the latest jobs reports show unemployment for African Americans at 7.7 percent. Moreover, for single black men between the ages of 25 and 54, the unemployment rate is an astonishing 10 percent. At the event in Annapolis, activist Steven Merrick of Baltimore asked, “How can there be so much poverty in a 21st century, first-world country?” The same could be asked about racism. “I listen daily to my patients talk about colleagues dismissing the effects of systemic racism on their health and the quality of their workplace environment,” said Renee Grant, an acupuncturist and activist in Columbia, Md. “Knowing that black employees get paid less for doing the same work as whites, seeing whites get promoted over blacks because the boss is just more ‘comfortable’ with whites, always the last hired and first fired — it’s exhausting, both physically and mentally.” Another organizer, the Rev. Janelle Bruce, pastor of the Church Without Walls in Mount Rainier, Md., cited passages from the Bible, the book of Zechariah, in an appeal to the nation’s conscience. “Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless or the foreigner or the poor,” she said. “Show mercy and compassion.” The Rev. Pratima Dharm of the Unitarian Universalist Association cited a Hindu religious text, “The arrogant wealthy person thinks, ‘I have gained so much wealth today and I shall have even more tomorrow. I am like God Himself.’ ” In the United States, arrogance and greed obviously trump mercy and compassion. And it’ll take a lot more than 40 days of moral action to change that. courtland.milloy@washpost.com


At these Olympics, Russian fans add a little color to the drab world of OAR

is a source of sadness among many in the figure skating community. In many ways, figure skating is global community that feels a universal debt to Russian competitors, coaches and choreographers — many of whom have inspired and developed generations of skaters around the world. Yet at the 2018 Olympics, in addition to the other restrictions, OAR athletes may not join “alternate” victory celebrations where the Russian anthem is sung. And they are urged to refrain from any social media activity associated with the Russian flag, anthem or emblems. “Basically, I feel sadness for athletes,” said Rafael Arutyunyan, 60, the Armenian-raised coach of 2018 U.S. Olympic figure skaters Nathan Chen and Adam Rippon, as well as 2014 Olympian Ashley Wagner. Arutyunyan trained as a young skater under the former Soviet system but, like many of his peers, moved to the United States in the early 1990s for greater opportunity and artistic freedom. “I know a little bit Russian culture, and I feel little bit sadness for Russian athletes because they cannot compete for Russian country, which they represent,” Arutyunyan said. “It’s not fault of the athletes. If some things that are happening according to doping … it’s more (the responsibility of) officials than athletes. I feel very sad about athletes; athletes have nothing to do with that.” American Scott Hamilton, a 1984 Olympic gold medalist in figure skating, voice similar sentiment. “If it’s cheating on the highest level of leadership, then those leaders should not be allowed to serve in the Olympic movement anymore,” Hamilton said. “But if these athletes are clean, it’s not their fault. Don’t punish them if it’s the country’s faulty or the leadership fault. Expel every person (who was) on watch.” Rippon, 28, who’ll make his Olympic debut in Monday’s team event finale, where he’ll represent U.S. medal hopes in performing his free skate, said he empathized his Russian counterparts for the restrictions at these Games. “And the gray,” Rippon said, alluding to the drab OAR uniforms. “It’s pretty sad.” But the energy was entirely positive in the Russian cheering section Sunday at the Gangneung Ice Arena, as the short ice dance performances were underway for the team event. “They are competing for our country, and we want to support them,” explained Ilya Stupkin, 28, who traveled from his St. Petersburg home to cheer Russian Olympians. And it wasn’t just Russian skaters who earned their applause.


Olympics Day 3: U.S. follows its first gold medal with a surprise silver

Sven Kramer Despite putting three competitors in the women’s moguls final, the United States could not capture a medal. France’s Perrine Laffont took the gold, followed by Canadian Justine Dufour-Lapointe and Yulia Galysheva of Kazakhstan. One last medal of note: Germany’s Arnd Peiffer won an unexpected gold in the men’s 10km biathlon sprint. Pre-race favorite Martin Fourcide finished eighth. Lowell Bailey was the top American finisher at 33rd. Biathlon remains the only Winter Olympic sport in which the United States has never earned a medal. The pairs free-skate segment of the figure skating team event also wrapped up Saturday night. Americans Alexa and Chris Knierim came in fourth, landing the United States in third place overall. Evgenia Medvedeva posted the highest women’s short-program score ever to move the Olympic Athletes from Russia into second. Canada maintained its lead after a strong performance by Olympic champion ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. The men’s Alpine downhill was postponed because of high winds. It was rescheduled for Wednesday night at 9 Eastern time. That pushed the men’s super-G to Thursday night, also at 9 Eastern. North Korea also brought its cheerleading team with it to the Olympics (we translated the squad’s cheers). But, as The Post’s Jerry Brewer warns: “Don’t let Olympic reverie enchant you too much. It can blow up in your face.” SUNDAY: American Mikaela Shiffrin goes for gold in the giant slalom. This isn’t her strongest discipline, and she’s coming off a bout of fatigue. But she is still very much a medal favorite (also watch for Germany’s Viktoria Rebensburg to contend). The first run starts at 8:15 p.m., and the second, and final, run is at 11:45 p.m. In between those runs, you can catch the finale of women’s slopestyle snowboarding (9 p.m.). Olympic rookies Julia Marino and Hailey Langland could join defending champion Jamie Anderson on the podium. It would be only the fourth U.S. medal sweep at the Winter Olympics. Representing the United States in the figure skating team event Sunday evening (8 p.m., NBC) will be: Mirai Nagasu (women), Adam Rippon (men) and the Shibutani siblings (ice dance). Also Sunday night, watch for American medal favorites Chloe Kim and Kelly Clark to make their PyeongChang debuts in women’s snowboarding halfpipe qualifying (11:30 p.m.). MONDAY: At the speedskating oval, expect a friendly duel in the women’s 1,500 between Heather Bergsma — the world champion and


Between hollow bans and lack of Bob Costas, Winter Olympics leave me cold

Norman Chad Couch Slouch In a spiraling, soulless America that I call home, I sometimes have trouble remembering all the stuff that I now boycott: Starbucks, Anheuser-Busch, boxing and MMA, resort fees, convenience fees, Pilates, new-age music, Facebook, the MLS aggregate-goal playoff format, airport restrooms, Velveeta, cryptocurrency, kale, Skip Bayless . . . And, of course, the Olympics. Frankly, I have determined the Olympics — vaguely reminiscent of my second marriage — to be too much commitment for too little benefit. Note: As a de facto sports columnist who primarily watches sports on television, turning off the Olympics should be tantamount to professional suicide. Nonsense. I already committed professional suicide when I stuck with newspapers years ago. Anyway, even if you don’t execute a full-scaled boycott — and, trust me, it involves a lot of negative emotional energy — there are still three good reasons to largely ignore the Winter Games just underway: 1. This whole Russian doping business. I mean, if the Russians also engaged in brazen meddling in an effort to, say, influence the result of a U.S. presidential election, there would be immediate and severe consequences, no? Uh, maybe not. So the International Olympic Committee bans Russia from the 2018 Winter Games because of doping at the 2014 Winter Games, but Russian athletes who prove they are clean can still compete in PyeongChang in neutral uniforms. This would be like giving your kid a midnight curfew but letting him stay out until 2 a.m. if he insists he wasn’t drinking. All of which means that 168 Russian athletes are at these Games, nearly three-quarters the total in Sochi in 2014 and just below the 177 who competed in Vancouver in 2010. It is unclear whether any of them voted in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 2. Where oh where is Bob Costas? They’ve replaced him with Mike Tirico. Now, Tirico’s a fine broadcaster, but every time I see his mug, I half-expect Hubie Brown to be sitting next to him. Plus Tirico, like Costas, went to Syracuse University. What, this is the only school that can produce Olympic prime-time hosts? Why not a Maryland grad? Heck, Tim McCarver hosted the 1994 Winter Games for CBS wearing a catcher’s mask; like Norman Esiason (U-Md., Class of ’84) couldn’t anchor this baby in his sleep while simultaneously doing his obnoxious, tone-deaf New York morning-drive radio show? 3. The wide


Kratom is hailed as a natural pain remedy, assailed as an addictive killer. The U.S. wants to treat it like heroin.

attention to the potential for new products to cause addiction and we must take strong, decisive measures to intervene,” he said late last year. Marc Swogger, a clinical psychologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center who has studied the plant, has said that the government’s attitude toward kratom is “drug hysteria.” He and others also are skeptical of the estimated death toll from kratom. “It’s all anecdotal, and in many cases other substances were involved,” Swogger said. “It’s just very, very poor evidence.” The list of 44 deaths, for example, includes nine cases in Sweden in which kratom was laced with a powerful opioid, and just one in which kratom was the only substance present. Madras worries that the number of deaths associated with kratom could be much higher than the FDA’s count because “nobody monitors it” and because medical examiners aren’t doing toxicology screenings to find it. 'I have gotten my life back' For Turner, the problem wasn’t addiction. It was pain, anxiety and depression. By early 2015, he was barely able to leave his house in Hyattsville, Md., and he decided to take a drastic step: He quit his prescription pain medications and tried kratom, which he found online. After his third time using kratom, he noticed that his mood was brightening. His pain subsided, his anxiety eased and his energy surged. “I feel like I have gotten my life back,” said Turner, 44, who is no longer on Social Security disability, has started a weekly podcast and is thinking of running for city council. He now makes weekly batches of kratom tea and drinks two cups a day. He says he could probably get high from taking kratom if he took enough, but he adds: “That’s not what I’m looking for.” Megan George of Lexington, N.C., was prescribed opioids for chronic pain until a doctor told her that she no longer needed them. Desperate and in withdrawal, she turned to heroin and quickly became addicted. She tried for years to quit by using medications for opioid addiction, but she never succeeded. Last April, George, 31, tried kratom and says she has not used heroin since. In the past 10 months, she has held down her first job in years and is finally the parent she dreamed of being to her 2-year-old daughter. “I’m going to work, I’m making money and coming home to her,” George said.


Q&A: Sanctioned Putin ally holds out hope that Trump will boost Russia ties

Sergey Chemezov is one of the most influential people at the intersection of Russian business and politics. He runs Rostec, a state conglomerate of arms manufacturers and other industrial companies that is looking for foreign and private investors for many of its more than 700 subsidiaries, such as gun maker Kalashnikov. He also is a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, having worked with him in the KGB in Dresden, East Germany, in the 1980s. The U.S. Treasury Department targeted him for sanctions after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, describing him as “a trusted ally of President Putin.” Chemezov recently sat for an interview with The Washington Post at his company’s Moscow headquarters, during which he offered to sell Russia’s S-400 antiaircraft missile system to the United States, warned of a new arms race, reminisced about his friendship with Putin and held out hope that President Trump would yet keep his promise to improve U.S. relations with Russia. He predicted, without irony, that Putin would win the March 18 presidential election. Here are lightly edited excerpts of the conversation. In what direction do you expect Russian defense spending to go? I don’t think the expenditures on defense will grow. I don’t think there will be any growth, actually. I believe they will remain the same. In order to develop, Rostec companies need additional products which they will be able to sell. And these products can only be civilian. And these products should not be irons or frying pans — we had this sad experience in the '90s — but today we produce more sophisticated high-tech products, which are in demand not just in Russia, but also abroad. And we have many examples: medical products and medical equipment that are quite competitive and that we sell to European countries and, of course, to Asia. How do you see the U.S. sanctions on Russia? I must say that we are industrialists and not politicians. From the point of view of business, this is a simple example of unscrupulous competition. We are manufacturing in a way that is better in terms of technical characteristics and more affordable than European or American analogues. That’s why the Americans are doing everything they can to push us out of and not allow us to operate in markets where they’ve always felt comfortable. The S-400 antiaircraft missile system still seems to be seeing a lot


Every four years, they come from Norway to plunder your gold

most decorated female Winter Olympian ever. Multiple medals could go to Bjoergen, to biathlete Johannes Boe, to Alpine skier Aksel Lund Svindal, to cross-country skiers Heidi Weng and Martin Johnsrud Sundby, the latter two years removed from his two-month doping suspension of 2016, which involved taking excessive asthma medication, a charge often leveled at the Norwegian athletes, as in a recent Swedish documentary. Said Bjoergen, “It’s not fun to be accused, but for me personally, who has been in the game for a long time, and as long as we as athletes know what we have done, and what we stand for, I don’t think any of us will use a lot of time on it.” That 30-medal bit has been ascertained carefully. “And there are also sports like speedskating,” Ovrebo said, “that have been out of the medal tally for a while that is probably coming back, if you see what we have done so far this season and in past years. So I think that it’s because we are better as a nation, and then we should raise the bar, too. It’s important to make sure that everybody understands that this goal is something that we have created together with the sports. They have been involved all the time. “It started two years ago, discussions, how many medals each sport can plan and hope for. And then we have made a sum. And then we do some quality work on that sum. Something is dreams, and something is real goals. And then after we have done this, there was a huge commitment to this common goal. But if you ask all the athletes, one by one, in all the sports, the number will be higher. I think that 30 is quite a lot, and we will be very happy if we achieve that.” In charming downtown Daegwallyeong, they are ensconced in a hotel Norway booked almost entirely. They are hunkered in, hoping not to mingle with the viruses and whatnot going around. They have a Norwegian chef in a bid to simulate home. There did come a mix-up when, at one point, they ordered 1,500 eggs and received 15,000. That has handled, of course, with aplomb. “So there was an extra zero on the order,” Ovrebo said. “So from fifteen hundred to fifteen thousand, that’s . . .” He hunted for the words. “S--- happens,” he said. chuck.culpepper@washpost.com


This is the U.S. county that buys the least healthful groceries

food culture. Or to call out Musselshell, which their data indicates is the country's least healthy county, according to grocery purchases. (Washington Post readers in the county note that residents often supplement their diets with items from hunting trips and home gardens, meaning that they may be eating more healthfully than measurable data indicates.) Their paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, analyzed 12 years of Nielsen grocery purchase data from 100,000 households across the United States, looking for patterns that explain why low-income and high-income families buy such different foods. Economists and public health advocates have long known that high-income households tend to buy more fruits, vegetables and proteins, and that a large dietary discrepancy exists between the rich and poor. The exact mechanisms of this gap are less clear, however. They can’t be entirely explained by the cost or availability of food. For this paper, Allcott and his colleagues analyzed what happened to a household’s food purchases when a new, full-service grocery store opened in the neighborhood, or when the household moved from “food deserts” to areas with more abundant grocery options. But even major changes in a household’s immediate food environment, the paper found, had a limited impact on the foods that people purchased. Instead, the economists write, there appears to be a great deal of variation in demand for healthful foods. And those big demand gaps tend to correlate with other, fairly predictable characteristics, such as income, education, nutrition knowledge — and geographic region. The map below shows how unhealthy counties tend to cluster in the south central states. Each county is colored according to its “average health index,” a standardized measure of grocery nutrition based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, with darker shades representing the least healthful food purchases. Among the healthiest counties: New York County, N.Y.; Pitkin County, Colo.; and Iroquois County, Ill. Among the least healthy: Menominee County, Wis.; Turner County, Ga.; McNairy County, Tenn.; and, of course, Musselshell. “This suggests a separate role for culture and tastes that vary across regions,” the paper says. Allcott acknowledged that the role of region was something of a surprise to him. He hypothesizes that a region’s dominant cuisine, be that barbecue or avocado toast, informs the meals that people eat as children. That, in turn, has a large effect on their lifelong food preferences. An upcoming paper from his team, looking at the same


White House wants to return to moon but offers few details how that will happen

for at least seven years. “The notion that we would walk away from LEO [or low Earth orbit] and the space station is not accurate,” the official said. “We know the space station is going to eventually end. Rather than putting ourselves in the situation with shuttle, where we had no way to get to LEO, we want to start planning for that transition now.” The United States’ international partners on the station “are one of the most important pieces of the station and how it functions,” the official said. “We believe that opening up options and different models also means opening up opportunities for additional partners and additional ways to expand our international involvement in low Earth orbit. Imagine a scenario where a company says we have a business plan, we’d like to partner with the Japanese government and the Europeans to do these types of experiments.” The official said that under commercial control, NASA would become another customer, so “instead of owning the building, we would rent a couple of floors.” In its budget document, the White House said it plans to partner with industry “to land robotic missions on the surface of the moon in the next few years, paving the way for a return of U.S. astronauts — this time not just to visit, but to lay the foundation for further journeys of exploration and the expansion of the U.S. economy into space.” The budget proposal “really reflects the administration’s confidence that America will lead the way back to the moon and take that next giant leap,” NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a speech Monday at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Alabama. Nelson, the U.S. senator, expressed concern about plans beyond the moon. “If we’re ever going to get to Mars with humans on board and return them safely, then we need a larger funding increase for NASA,” he said. The proposed budget also calls for the termination of the $100 million Office of Education at NASA “redirecting those funds to NASA’s core mission of exploration.” And while it supports the development of the $8.8 billion James Webb telescope, the budget calls for the termination of the WFIRST space telescope, which NASA planned to help scientists better understand dark matter and dark energy. The budget would provide $54.2 million for public-private partnerships to help develop manufacturing technologies in space, such as 3-D printing. christian.davenport@washpost.com