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Why you should grow garlic chives

I sometimes wonder why garlic chives (Allium tuberosum) are not as commonly grown as regular chives (Allium schoenoprasum). They are hardy perennials and just as easy to grow. Like regular chives, they can spread and become too much of a good thing. But more likely, they’re just less familiar and slower to creep into our kitchens. Both plants grow in grass-like clumps, but while the common chive foliage is tube-shaped and grass-green, a garlic chive is a flat, blue-green blade. And its flavor is more garlicky than oniony, though not as strong or harsh as a raw clove of real garlic. Snip the leaves just as you would chives, as a seasoning and as a garnish, but be more liberal with them. These are larger, more robust plants, more vegetable than herb. You’ll find garlic chives most often in Asian cookbooks; in fact, they are often called Chinese chives or Chinese leeks. Uses range from the meticulous, as in stuffed dumplings, to the ultra-simple, as in broths into which the leaves, cut an inch or two long, have been dropped and briefly simmered. Even the flower stems can be softened in cooking. Heat mellows the garlic taste as well. The flowers themselves are another great reason to grow garlic chives. Where the familiar chive sends up small, rosy-purple globes in late spring, this one makes larger white star-shaped florets in late summer and early fall. Both blossoms are fabulously attractive to bees, butterflies and other pollinators, and both make pretty and pungent garnishes in salads. But those of garlic chives are much longer-blooming, on strong, straight, two-foot stems that are great for picking when so many other garden flowers have gone by. With both plants, leaves start to turn brown when the plants begin to flower, but because garlic chives are a late-season herb, the decline isn’t as much a drawback, ornamentally. You can cut the plants back any time you like to produce fresh leaves. Garlic chives are late, lovely bloomers (Alan Buckingham/GETTY IMAGES) Start garlic chives with fresh seed in spring, or acquire a clump or two and divide them each year to increase your supply. Those of you who are laughing riotously at that sentence know that this may not be necessary. I don’t know why garlic chives spread so rampantly in some gardens and not in others. Mine have stood their ground in a tidy grid,

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State of the Union 2013: President Obama’s address to Congress (Transcript)

their elected officials cause another. Now... (APPLAUSE) ... most of us agree that a plan to reduce the deficit must be part of our agenda. But let’s be clear: Deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan. (APPLAUSE) A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs, that must be the North Star that guides our efforts. (APPLAUSE) Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills they need to get those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living? OBAMA: A year-and-a-half ago, I put forward an American Jobs Act that independent economists said would create more than 1 million new jobs. And I thank the last Congress for passing some of that agenda; I urge this Congress to pass the rest. But... (APPLAUSE) ... tonight I’ll lay out additional proposals that are fully paid for and fully consistent with the budget framework both parties agreed to just 18 months ago. Let me repeat: Nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime. It is not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth. (APPLAUSE) That’s what we should be looking for. (APPLAUSE) Our first priority is making America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing. After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three. Caterpillar is bringing jobs back from Japan. Ford is bringing jobs back from Mexico. And this year, Apple will start making Macs in America again. (APPLAUSE) There are things we can do, right now, to accelerate this trend. Last year, we created our first manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio. A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything. There’s no reason this can’t happen in other towns. So tonight, I’m announcing the launch of three more of these manufacturing hubs, where businesses will partner with the Departments of Defense and Energy to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs. And I ask this Congress to help create a network of 15 of these hubs and guarantee that the next revolution

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Going Out Guide for the District of Columbia, Jan. 26-Feb. 1

The Chinese Lunar New Year Parade is Sunday. (Matt McClain/for The Washington Post) THU 26 Cowboy Mouth H Street Karaoke Championship Roy Ayers Basile FRI 27 Advance Auto Parts Monster Jam “On the Lakeshore . . . and Other Stories: Photographer Iris Janke” SAT 28 Renwick anniversary party The gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary with games, talks, crafts, cake and the unveiling of its winning anniversary postcard design. 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Renwick Gallery, 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. 202-633-1000. www.americanart.si.edu. Free. Elia Kazan double feature The Chariots “Double Dare Ya” “Gabarron’s Roots” “I Love Lucy: An American Legend” “Reverb + Echo: A Haitian Landscape” SUN 29 Chinese Lunar New Year Parade “Into the Wild” “Powerplay: China’s Empress Dowager” MON 30 Joao Kouyoumdjian “Men in the City” TUE 31 “La Cage aux Folles” WED 01 Happy Birthday, Langston Hughes “Voices Out Loud: A Celebration of Bayard Rustin” ReelAbilities Disabilities Film Festival — Compiled by Carrie Donovan from staff reports Chinese Lunar New Year Parade 3Welcome the Year of the Dragon, lunar new year 4710, at this colorful parade sponsored by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. Organizers expect about 40,000 people to attend. Sunday 2-4:30 p.m. Parade starts at Sixth and I streets NW, goes west on I Street, follows the perimeter of Chinatown and ends at Sixth and H streets NW. Free.

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After earthquake, Japan can’t agree on the future of nuclear power

TOKYO — Nearly a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi facility, Japanese decision-makers cannot agree on how to safeguard their reactors against future disasters, or even whether to operate them at all. Some experts say this indecision reflects the Japanese tendency to search for, and sometimes depend on, consensus — even when none is likely to emerge. The nation’s system for nuclear decision-making requires the agreement of thousands of officials. Most bureaucrats and politicians in Tokyo want Japan to recommit to nuclear power, but they have been thwarted by a powerful minority — reformists and regional governors. The stalemate comes with heavy consequences, especially as reactors are idled, leading to record financial losses for major power companies and economy-stunting electricity shortages in manufacturing hubs such as Tokyo and Osaka. Those shortages are likely to mount, as more reactors are shut down for required maintenance. After the shutdown Wednesday of Unit 5 at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa plant in northwestern Japan, the country is now operating just four of its 54 reactors. By the end of April, those last reactors are due to be idled for testing, and Japan, once the world’s third-largest nuclear consumer, could be nuclear-free, if it is unable to win approval from local communities to restart the idled units. For decades, Japan’s nuclear policies received little public scrutiny and generated little opposition. The country established an elaborate network of hand-holding, with Tokyo passing subsidies to host communities and utility companies forming de facto partnerships with nuclear manufacturing firms such as Toshiba, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Since the March 11 accident, just enough has changed to stall that cooperation. Two-thirds of Japanese oppose atomic power. Politicians in areas that host nuclear plants are rethinking the facilities; they hold veto power over any restart. A few vocal skeptics have emerged in the government, and in the aftermath of the accident, Japan has created at least a dozen commissions and task forces for energy-related issues. The broad attempt to seek opinion might sound like a welcome change, but according to some panel members, it leaves Japan with a system that impedes reform. “Oh, there are so many panels,” said Tatsuo Hatta, an economist who sits on three of them. “I’m sorry it’s so complicated.” A debate over safety The most immediate question is whether to restart the reactors, which once supplied almost a third of Japan’s power.

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Japan losing hope for its pricey ‘dream reactor’

its costly resource-scarcity problem, which necessitates fuel imports from across the world. “It was supposed to be the dream reactor, powering Japan for 100 or 200 years,” Satoru Kondo, director general of Japan’s fast breeder program at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview this week. “I never thought it would take this long.” Japan’s only prototype fast-breeder, a 280-megawatt reactor known as Monju, sits in this coastal town, roughly 250 miles west of Tokyo. The reactor is idle, and officials here say they have no control over whether it will operate again. Wasteful spending That decision will come from Tokyo, where a government with the world’s highest debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratio is trying to eliminate wasteful spending. Based on recommendations from a panel of cost-cutting specialists, officials in December slashed Monju’s $275 million annual budget by roughly 20 percent. They also removed all money reserved for operation of the reactor in 2012. Some politicians say that even with those cuts, Monju is receiving too much, particularly at a time when Japan should be adding safety measures for existing reactors. “We’re not going to get the fast-breeder reactor,” said Taro Kono, a Japanese parliament member and a critic of nuclear power. “We spend billions of yen every year just to maintain Monju. It’s crazy. We spend so much money just to keep things not running.” Monju has turned into an easy target for ridicule because of its tormented history. Japanese engineers began work on the fast-breeder technology in the 1960s. They wanted the breeders to be commercially viable by the 1980s. Now the hope is that Japan can create commercial fast breeders by 2050. But critics and nuclear watchdog groups describe Monju as Japan’s most dangerous reactor because it uses plutonium fuel, even more deadly than uranium, and because it cools its reactor with sodium, which can explode if it comes into contact with water. The United States and other countries abandoned their fast-breeder development efforts decades ago because of safety and price concerns, but Japan remained committed, even after a 1995 fire caused by a sodium leak. That accident — coupled with an attempted coverup by the plant’s officials — caused a 14-year freeze on operations. Three months after the reactor restarted in May 2010, a 3.3-ton piece of machinery fell into the reactor vessel, causing another delay. The device has been removed, but Monju hasn’t operated since. Reform

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Obama’s military strategy should focus on troops, not technology

does not stop the development of technology useful to the military, though it is an unwise and dangerous strategy. Indeed, every major war of the past hundred years has prompted, in months, technological innovations that in peacetime would have required years. Even the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — which were not supported by any significant technological or industrial mobilization — spurred the rapid fielding of systems and vehicles to counter improvised explosive devices, the primary technological challenge to our soldiers. It is easier, of course, to build mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles than an F-35 fighter jet. But it need not take two decades to build a stealth fighter or even to refurbish an aircraft carrier, if the equipment is urgently needed. There is, on the other hand, no way to accelerate the fielding of good military leaders. Certainly soldiers can be recruited rapidly and their training courses shortened. Junior officers can be swiftly promoted, skipping the career steps and educational requirements of peacetime. More senior officers can be drawn from reserves and staff positions. During World War II, entire divisions were recruited, trained and deployed within a year. But the brigade and battalion commanders in those divisions did not know how to command brigades and battalions. The company commanders might not have seen combat. They learned awfully fast in North Africa, Europe and the Pacific — at a very high price in lives. The development of military leaders cannot be accelerated beyond a certain point without seriously degrading quality. People can learn, adapt and assimilate experiences only so rapidly. Good software or other distributed learning tools help individuals master enormous amounts of information, but there are innate limits. Military leadership is more than knowledge and technique. It requires fundamental changes in personality, patterns of thought and perception, emotional control and interactions with others. That is as true for fighter pilots as battalion commanders. Inexperienced leaders panic when seasoned veterans would calmly carry on; unseasoned commanders leap to conclusions where salted warriors comprehend the entire situation. Advanced technology generally exacerbates these problems by flooding hastily promoted officers and noncommissioned officers with information as they fight to retain or regain emotional balance and rational perception. And there can be no real preparation for the loss of soldiers under one’s authority except to live through that horrible experience. The U.S. military is overwhelmingly composed of officers and noncommissioned officers who have developed these

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Man pleads guilty to Catonsville military recruiting office bomb plot

A Baltimore man pleaded guilty Thursday to trying to blow up a Catonsville military recruiting station. Antonio Benjamin Martinez, 22, was arrested on Dec. 8, 2010 after he attempted to detonate what he believed to be explosives at the armed forces recruiting station near Baltimore. According to Martinez’s plea agreement, he was a recent convert to Islam when he began planning an attack against a military building. He confided those plans to an FBI confidential source, saying Muslims were being unjustly killed by the American military. He said he wanted to kill American soldiers until the country stopped its “war” against Islam, according to the plea agreement. He also posted militant beliefs on his Facebook page. After he unsuccessfully tried to involve several people in his plot, the FBI source connected Martinez with his fictitious “Afghan brother,” who would help with the operation. The brother was an undercover FBI agent. After meeting with him, Martinez said the brother was the “answer to his prayers,” according to the plea agreement. On the day of the planned attack, Martinez had the FBI informant record him on a camcorder saying he would continue to fight those who waged war with Islam, according to the plea agreement. At the recruiting station, Martinez then tried to detonate a fake bomb given to him by the FBI, authorities said. Martinez later told authorities that the bomb was intended to kill military service members who worked in the building. “We are catching dangerous suspects before they strike, and we are investigating them in a way that maximizes the liberty and security of law-abiding citizens,” said Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein. Martinez, who pleaded guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction against federal property, faces 25 years in prison when he is sentenced April 6. “This is an example of another successful prosecution that resulted from outstanding partnerships between the Muslim community and law enforcement,” said Richard A. McFeely, FBI special agent in charge.

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Clarinetist Joerg Widmann shows off his composing skills with National Symphony

You get to be young for a long time in the classical music world. Joerg Widmann has been a wunderkind in Germany for years — as a clarinetist who regularly plays with the world’s leading musicians and as a much-feted composer. Although he’s been on the scene for a couple of decades, he’s still younger than 40, and it was with his wonted boyish mien — albeit belied by a sprink­ling of gray hair — that he took the stage of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Thursday night to introduce himself to the National Symphony Orchestra audience in both musical capacities simultaneously. He was preceded by his piece “Armonica,” a 16-minute feast of what appeared to be sound effects, built on the ubiquitous idea of a musical work growing from nothing into a cascade of sound and dying away again. The idea here had a visual echo in the solo glass harmonica at center stage. In appearance, it was an elongated cone of glass; in the hands of the soloist Christa Schoenfeldinger, though, it produced eerily artless melodies — like a song sung by a long-dead child — that were supported by the bevy of percussion, wind sounds and even a solo accordion player around it. “Armonica” was Widmann’s contribution to the Mozart year, citing an instrument for which Mozart wrote but using it here in an eminently un-Mozartean manner. There was nothing classical about the piece apart from the sound of the instrument rising out of it like a recorded sound from an era before recording. Widmann’s physical entrance filled the negative space that his piece had created by bringing both composers — himself and Mozart — front and center. In Mozart’s clarinet concerto, he showed himself as an elegant, slightly cerebral soloist who plays a mean clarinet, with subtle phrasing, crack fingerwork and a certain amount of moxie. Conductor Christoph Eschenbach and the orchestra offered robust accompaniment that was, if not exactly classical either, at least hearty. The audience received Widmann with deserved raptures. It’s not every day that you encounter a musician who is equally good at two different forms at the same time. Widmann also happens to be breaking into conducting — he’s recently become principal guest conductor of the Irish Chamber Orchestra — but on this occasion, he left the podium to Eschenbach. The evening showed Eschenbach in many ways at his best as

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Runner Brooke Curran is on a global marathon campaign for Alexandria

the city’s cobblestone streets when she moved there in 1994. They reminded her of Richmond, her childhood home. So far, Curran has run 43 marathons in 32 states and five continents and raised more than $90,000. Her cause has brought her to the coastal monoliths of Easter Island, finish lines on China’s Great Wall and the quiet roads of Pocatello, Idaho. By summer, she’ll have run in Austin; St. Louis; Fargo, N.D.; Antarctica; and Kona, Hawaii. If she runs on schedule, she will finish in Des Moines in October 2013. But Curran has no plans on stopping once she’s met her goal. After Des Moines, her first plan is to complete a full Ironman triathlon in Florida the following month. And after that? She wants to start 100-mile marathons and jump out of an airplane. “I’m looking for that thing that will totally break me down,” she said, “a challenge that brings me into a black hole, and I’ve got to claw my way back out.” Curran plans to expand her fund with her endeavors; RunningBrooke Fund will most likely become a regional and national organization with models for other communities that want to follow suit. To train, she runs about 70 miles a week through Old Town and jogs the stairs of the Masonic Temple in the early morning. When it comes to races, she prefers the small-town marathons to the ones that draw thousands. “The small ones remind me why I love to run,” she said. “I wake up in my hotel, cross the street and go. That’s when my mind and body really sync up.” She pays her own way to every race and occasionally brings along one of her daughters: Clare, 19; Katherine, 17; and Caroline, 14. Her husband, Christopher, a lawyer in the District, mans the house when she’s away. Curran insists that although her journey sounds glamorous, it isn’t always fun. “There are days when it’s hard to even look at my sneakers,” she said, “but that’s why the cause is so important. It pushes me to take a deep breath and lace up.” On Sunday, Brooke Curran is taking a day off from running to host a Zumba Explosion at the Carlyle Club in Alexandria. Proceeds from the event, which includes two dance classes, a silent auction and fitness tips, will be divided among the charities she supports. For information, go to www.runningbrooke.com.

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Popular magnets pose risk if swallowed

safety commission to spread the message that the magnets should be kept from children. “We don’t sell to stores that sell exclusively children’s products or toy stores,” he said. “We are doing everything we can to make sure it’s not getting to children.” Brookstone, one of many retailers that carry the magnets, says they are a popular item. A boxed set of 125 Buckyball magnets sells for $24.99. A company spokeswoman said new product training includes warnings that they are for adults only. ‘My favorite’ gift Meredith said she likes Buckyballs because “you can use them for fake piercings on your ear, your nose, lip or tongue.” On braces, too. The magnets are also very strong, she said, “so you can make different stuff out of them.” Many friends had them, so she was excited to get a set for Christmas. Her siblings, 11 and 13, also each got a box. She didn’t read the warnings about not putting the magnets in her nose, mouth or ears. “I just opened it,” she said. “It was probably my favorite of everything I got until I swallowed it,” she said of the magnets. On Jan. 17, a Tuesday, she was in the library at Oak View Elementary School, checking out a book with a friend. The two magnets were in her pocket. After she swallowed them, Meredith, at her friend’s urging, told the school nurse. The nurse sent Meredith back to class, but as a courtesy, notified Meredith’s mother, Helen DelPrete. DelPrete called her pediatrician, Gary Bergman, as a precaution and was told to take Meredith to the emergency room immediately. Luckily for Meredith, the two magnets had connected in her esophagus, making the situation less dangerous, doctors said. For four days, doctors monitored the movement of the magnets in Meredith’s body. She was not allowed to eat. They maneuvered the magnets to her appendix after they became embedded in her large intestine. Helen DelPrete said her husband bought the magnets for the children and didn’t notice the warning labels. She said she wasn’t aware of the concerns until after Meredith was hospitalized. “It’s etched on the plastic container [holding the magnets], but you can’t even read it — it’s the same color as the plastic container,” she said. So far, Meredith’s hospital charges are about $22,000, DelPrete said, but when the individual doctors’ charges are added, the total cost could be

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Book World: ‘Fug You,’ by Ed Sanders, a look back at the ’60s band

A Fugs performance in 1966 at Astor Place Playhouse (Credit: Ed Sanders Collection/Credit: Ed Sanders Collection) In 1967, I drove with several other leading radicals (i.e., Johns Hopkins grad students who wanted a day off from school) from Baltimore to Washington to levitate the Pentagon. As we parked and began walking, a flatbed truck crowded with bearded, longhaired guys and gals with pots of Day-Glo paint stopped for us, so we climbed on board. “Who are you guys?” asked one of my friends as the women painted our faces. “We’re the Fugs!” was the reply. So my pals and I ended up levitating the Pentagon with the Fugs, or at least I’m pretty sure we did. Meanwhile, as Ed Sanders points out in his detailed, casually compiled and often wistful memoir, “the Vietnam War went on for another seven years.” To say those were momentous days is an understatement. As I read“Fug You,” I wondered how often we’re going to hear the phrase “50th anniversary” in the next few years. Nov. 22, 2013, will be the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Feb. 9, 1964. That same year, Muhammad Ali defeated Sonny Liston and became a global icon. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk, the Birmingham church bombing, Freedom Rides, the Watts Riots, the war in Vietnam, LSD, Woodstock, psychedelic rock, Chappaquiddick, the Voting Rights Act, “Easy Rider” and the first six James Bond movies: These and a hundred other phenomena not only collided but reached critical mass, setting off chain reactions that shape our lives today. Like a hippie being hustled into a paddywagon by a couple of overeager cops, Sanders’s sentences often lurch and struggle for footing. He begins by saying, “As the years in this book whizzed by, I believed most fervently that the roots of revolution were going to lift the concrete away from the field of truth, after which Bread and Roses and the utopian place I called Goof City would grow up afresh in a warless world — Goof City on the hill, Goof City in the Lower East Side, Goof City shining.” This awkwardness may be due to Sanders’s difficulty in dealing with his late-life realization that much of what he called “Total Assault on the Culture” turned out to be a series of exercises in self-indulgence

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45 years after America’s first space tragedy, lessons linger

CAPE CANAVERAL — Faulty wiring probably sparked the blaze that killed Roger Chaffee, Virgil “Gus” Grissom and Ed White, according to NASA and congressional investigations. The fire spread quickly in the pure-oxygen environment. The tragedy is still etched on the space agency’s collective psyche. The agency held its annual day of remembrance last week. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden laid a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery, and a ceremony at the Kennedy Space Center visitors center honored the three Apollo heroes and the 14 astronauts who later died in space shuttle disasters. When the 1967 tragedy happened, NASA’s first news director, Jack King, was in the blockhouse, the heavy concrete launch room near the pad. He’s got a sharp memory and can still rattle off figures for how many pounds of thrust each of the early NASA rockets delivered. A former Associated Press reporter, King was on site the day of the fire to type up the news of a successful test and get it out to reporters: another small step toward the moon, welcome fodder for a press corps eager to trumpet the nation’s triumphs in the accelerating quest to beat the Soviets to the moon. King, now 80, took a reporter out to the site of the tragedy, Space Launch Complex 34. It’s on Cape Canaveral, on Air Force land, a quick jog up from the beach. A weathered four-legged concrete stand — which supported the Saturn IB rocket — sits surrounded by grass and weeds. The blockhouse is still there, a squat, heavy mound of tan concrete a hundred yards or so west of the launch stand. When asked what he remembered about that day in 1967, King lighted a cigarette and wiped the corner of his eye under his glasses. “It’s something you never forget,” he said. There were a lot of problems with the early Apollo capsule, King said. Before the test, Grissom had been complaining about communications issues between the capsule and the blockhouse. King recalled Grissom saying, “How could we go to the moon if we can’t even talk to each other?” King stopped talking. He stood in the sun and stared at the blockhouse. “I was locked in there for 10 hours,” he said. Donald “Deke” Slayton was the chief astronaut at the time. Slayton left the blockhouse and climbed up to the capsule to confirm what everyone feared. The trio was dead.

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A dangerous shift in Obama’s ‘climate change’ rhetoric

deployed, and people setting policy agendas know this well. In 2002, Republican political strategist Frank Luntz issued a widely cited memo advising that the Bush administration should shift its rhetoric on the climate. “It’s time for us to start talking about ‘climate change’ instead of global warming. . . . ‘Climate change’ is less frightening than ‘global warming,’ ” the memo said. Luntz was not alone in wanting to change the terminology. The nonprofit group EcoAmerica issued a report in 2009 arguing that the terms “global warming” and “climate change” both needed rebranding. In their place, the group recommended the phrase “our deteriorating atmosphere.” But what do we lose when global warming and climate change get repackaged as clean energy? We wind up missing a thorough understanding of the breadth of the problem and the range of possible solutions. To start, talking only about clean energy omits critical biological and physical factors that contribute to the warming climate. “Clean energy” doesn’t call to mind the ways we use the land and how the environment is changing. Where in the term is the notion of the climate pollution that results from clear-cutting Amazon rain forests? What about methane release in the Arctic, where global warming is exposing new areas of soil in the permafrost? “Clean energy” also neatly bypasses any idea that we might need to curb our consumption. If the energy is clean, after all, why worry about how much we’re using — or how unequal the access to energy sources might be? And terms such as “carbon pollution” ignore that climate change isn’t just a carbon issue. Some greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide, do not contain carbon, and not all carbon-containing emissions, such as carbon monoxide, trap heat. When the president moves away from talking about climate change and talks more generally about energy, as he did in the State of the Union, calling for “an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy,” the impact is more than just political. Calling climate change by another name creates limits of its own. The way we talk about the problem affects how we deal with it. And though some new wording may deflect political heat, it can’t alter the fact that, “climate change” or not, the climate is changing. boykoff@colorado.edu Maxwell T. Boykoff Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.

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What would Mitt Romney’s offshore account filings show?

offshore holdings have become an issue in the Republican primary campaign. “We’re not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts,” rival Newt Gingrich said in a Florida appearance Thursday. The Romney tax returns showed that he and his family held investments abroad in such places as Luxembourg, Ireland and the Cayman Islands. At least one of those investments, an account at the Swiss Bank UBS held in a blind trust for Romney’s wife, would have triggered the FBAR requirement. The Swiss bank account and other offshore holdings were left out of a separate, public financial disclosure required of presidential candidates that Romney filed last year with the Office of Government Ethics. The Romney campaign has said it will amend the ethics disclosure. In a Jan. 24 conference call with reporters arranged by the Romney campaign, R. Bradford Malt, a Boston lawyer who is trustee of the Romney family trusts, said he set up the Swiss account in 2003 and closed it in 2010. He said it held approximately $3 million and generated income. “The tax is fully paid just as if this were a U.S. bank account,” he said. Malt was asked during the briefing whether Romney “filed any and all required FBARs in a timely fashion.” In response, Malt said: “The people required to file FBARs are Mrs. Romney and myself, and we have filed all FBARs.” The Treasury Department requires U.S. taxpayers to file the FBAR forms, whose full title is “Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts,” to help the Internal Revenue Service make sure that people are not dodging taxes by stashing money overseas. UBS in 2009 agreed to pay the U.S. government $780 million to settle civil and criminal charges that it helped thousands of Americans evade U.S. taxes. The U.S. government said the bank allowed Americans to hold money in Swiss accounts that were concealed from the IRS. Both the bank and the clients were supposed to make disclosures to the U.S. government about the accounts. Against the backdrop of the UBS case, the IRS has offered leniency to U.S. taxpayers for belatedly disclosing offshore accounts. Stephen Hudak, a spokesman for the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, said FBARs are exempt from public disclosure under open records laws. The Treasury Department will neither release any such forms nor confirm or deny that they have been filed, he said.

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Iceland sharply divided on joining E.U. amid debt crisis

it’s going pretty badly.” Taxi drivers. Tattoo artists. Barbers. Baristas. Nearly everyone has an opinion, and very often a strong one. “It’s a very hard topic; it’s very divisive,” said Baldur Thorhallsson, a political science professor at the University of Iceland. “It’s about national identity, and that’s why the debate is so heated. It’s a question of where we belong.” There is an irony hanging over the debate, of course. Three years ago, Iceland’s European neighbors, along with much of the world, looked on in dismay as the island’s once-booming economy imploded, the result of a banking system that had grown far too large and far too reckless. Now, as Iceland shows glimmers of recovery and Europe finds itself wrestling with a debilitating debt crisis, many Icelanders look at the situation with alarm and disdain. And Iceland is not alone. On Sunday, Croatians voted to join the E.U. next year despite reservations among many citizens about a loss of sovereignty and the debt troubles in the euro zone. Here, those who favor joining the E.U. — a group that includes Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir — argue that Iceland would benefit from a larger community, primarily by gaining much-needed stability in its currency. Iceland’s krona has long suffered from precipitous booms and busts and has little appeal outside the country, especially after the recent crisis. Those against joining the E.U. — a group that includes former prime minister Geir Haarde — note that the euro has done little to stave off instability in Europe and argue that allowing the krona to fall in value helped hasten Iceland’s recovery by making its exports cheaper. Many critics also note that Iceland could lose control over the policies that govern fishing off its coasts, a particularly sensitive issue because it involves one of the country’s chief exports. Ossur Skarphedinsson, Iceland’s foreign minister and a longtime member of Parliament, ticks off a list of reasons he thinks the country should join the E.U. Among them: long-term currency stability, an opportunity to expand the number of industries in Iceland and the potential to attract more foreign investment. “I am absolutely convinced that they will do whatever it takes to save the euro,” he said of his counterparts in Europe wrestling with the debt crisis. “I am looking further ahead. In the end, Iceland would lose its competitiveness compared to Europe [if it doesn’t join]. We would

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Obama ally suggests administration is undermining Endangered Species Act

Bush administration proposal that was later ruled illegal, redefines what constitutes a “significant portion of its range” for a given species. It says that a plant or animal deserves listing only if its disappearance from one area threatens the entire species’ survival. It also defines a species’ range as its current distribution, as opposed to its historic one. When the agency issued the policy Dec. 8, Ashe released a statement: “This proposed interpretation will provide consistency and clarity for the services and our partners, while making more effective use of our resources and improving our ability to protect and recover species before they are on the brink of extinction.” In the proposal, which is subject to public comment until Feb. 7, the agency predicted that it would lead to the additional listing of species, but “only under limited set of circumstances.” Markey questioned the agency’s assessment, saying that under the proposed approach the bald eagle would not have qualified for protection in the 1970s because the bird was faring better in Alaska than in the Lower 48. “This proposed threshold for protecting species is simply too high under the ESA,” Markey wrote. “Even during the worst era of DDT-pesticide usage, healthy populations of eagles lived in Alaska, meaning that, even if the eagle had completely disappeared from the lower 48 states, the ‘viability’ of the species was never in doubt.” The policy the Bush administration put forward was even more limited, saying that if a species was found to be threatened in a part of its range, federal protections would only be extended to the area where the species was in trouble. Noah Greenwald, who directs the endangered species program for the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity, called the Obama administration’s move a “regulatory sleight of hand” that undermines the Endangered Species Act. The act “allowed for species to be protected if they weren’t at risk everywhere,” said Greenwald, whose group successfully challenged the Bush policy in federal court. But in a statement, Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chris Tollefson said the new policy “will make it possible to protect species before they are at risk of disappearing everywhere.” “We can act on the basis of threats in only a portion of the range of a species, but only when that portion is so important that without it, the species would be in danger of extinction everywhere,” he added.

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For CIA family, a deadly suicide bombing leads to painful divisions

comments. Click here to read a summary Then, in October 2010, the CIA released results of the agency’s internal investigation into the Khost attack, fueling another round of stories that Matthews was partially responsible. Matthews and her team, the report concluded, failed to follow the agency’s procedures for vetting informants. One of Matthews’s severest critics was her uncle, Dave Matthews, a retired CIA official who had helped inspire his niece to join the agency. Now Anderson and other relatives who once agreed not to speak with the media are breaking their silence to talk about Matthews’s life and death and about how her promotion to a perilous CIA posting has divided them. On the surface, Anderson, a chemist and devoted churchgoer, accepts his wife’s fate even as he continues to mourn her death at the age of 45. “I loved being married to her,” he said. “She was a great lady.” But underneath, Anderson, 50, is seething. He’s angry with the teachings in the Koran that he believes incited the suicide bomber to kill Americans; he’s upset with the CIA for failing to realize that a prized informant was a double agent willing to blow himself up; and he’s hurt by the legion of critics, including Matthews’s uncle, who have questioned her qualifications for the job she was doing. “The suicide bomber was a bad guy, but at the time, nobody could clearly see it,” Anderson said. “I think the agency prepared my wife to be a chief of the Khost base, but not in terms of preparing for this asset. This guy wasn’t vetted.” And the mother of his three children is dead because of it. * * * From the start, Dave Matthews, 74, tried to talk his niece out of going to Afghanistan. He had served during the 1960s in the agency’s secret war in Laos and didn’t think that Matthews, whom he says he loved like a daughter, had the training for a war-zone posting. But she wouldn’t listen. Jennifer Matthews hadn’t always aspired to be a CIA operative. In 1986, she graduated with degrees in broadcast journalism and political science from Cedarville University, a small Christian college in Ohio where she met Anderson. Back then, she was an avid runner with auburn hair who believed deeply in God but also reveled in arguing about theology and politics. “There were a lot of submissive types there,”

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quality of life and the dosage and side effects of the medications they take. The information is compiled in detailed charts and graphs that are updated each time a patient adds information. The company has even done a clinical-trial-type study based on the experiences of patients on its site who used lithium to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). “The more you share, the easier it is to find other patients like you,” the site says. Heywood created the company in 2004 with his brother Benjamin and longtime friend Jeff Cole. Five years earlier, another Heywood brother, Stephen, had been diagnosed with ALS. The family’s quest to help him inspired the Web site. Stephen’s profile is still on the site. He died in 2006. The firm makes money in part by selling trend information to pharmaceutical companies, who invest billions of dollars a year in research. “By selling this data and engaging our partners in conversations about patient needs,” Heywood said, “we’re helping them better understand the real-world medical value of their products so they can improve them.” iTriage Peter Hudson and Wayne Guerra, co-founders of Healthagen, developed a free smartphone app called iTriage based on their work as emergency room doctors. The technology aims to help people sort through all sorts of decisions when time is of the essence. “Most people don’t experience something and say: ‘I have appendicitis,’ ” Hudson said. “They experience something and say: ‘I have lower abdominal pain.’ Then the next question is: ‘What is causing it?’ and then, ‘Should I be worried? Where should I go?’ ” The app tries to offer answers by enabling people to look up information about their symptoms, find possible causes, determine the type of care they need (emergency room? urgent care? specialist?) and then find the closest provider. In some markets, users can check out waiting times or check-in ahead of arrival. Aetna bought the company in September for an undisclosed sum, though it remains an independently run subsidiary that’s available to all consumers. Health-care providers pay the company for the ability to share certain types of information with patients who use iTriage, such as waiting times. Treato Gideon Mantel, an Internet entrepreneur for two decades, says he sees value in building on top of what’s already available online. Five months ago, his company launched Treato, a Web site that scans social media sites all over the

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Stargazing in the nation’s defense

a star can’t be used for navigation. (Ellen Perlman) “We tell them this star is too much of a mess,” said Bill Hartkopf, also an observatory astronomer. “There might be three or four or five or six stars in complicated motion.” The earth also speeds up, slows down and wobbles from the effects of snow and ice, the tides and other factors that change rotation rates, Hartkopf added. Star observations like those undertaken by Mason are used over time to make minor corrections to GPS positions. The federal government purchased the observatory’s “Great Equatorial Refractor” telescope in 1873, the largest at the time, for $50,000, including the dome. Larger telescopes, such as the observatory’s 61-inch telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona, are better at separating close pairs of stars into two distinct points of light. Washington’s telescope seems both antiquated and awe-inspiring. While it might seem time for an update, the lens can’t be made any better than it already is for a 26-inch piece of glass. Mason controls the telescope using simple switches on a “hand paddle” that is a little larger than a television remote. To stargaze, he rotates the dome, opens a slit to reveal the sky and swings the telescope around to aim it through the opening. The floor of the 40-foot diameter room rises so his eye reaches the viewfinder. “I’ve been told it’s the largest elevator in D.C.,” he said. Some nights, depending on his schedule, Mason bunks in a small bedroom in Building 3, a short walk from the telescope. One of the job’s hardships is shifting from working nights to days and back again, he said. Light pollution, a problem for local amateur astronomers, isn’t much of an issue for Mason. “The fact we can only see bright stars means the work is kind of right in our wheelhouse for Navy purposes,” he said. When looking at a relatively tiny patch of sky, the sky tends to be dark anyway, he added. Mason wasn’t planning to be an astronomer. The declared journalism major needed to take a laboratory science and found astronomy to be “pretty cool.” He graduated with a physics degree, teaching high school physics for five years before returning to school for a Ph.D. in astronomy. In addition to observing duties, Mason runs an internship program and chairs a history committee that is collecting and categorizing past astronomers’ papers for the National

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Military leadership will surmount troop cuts

In his Jan. 27 Washington Forum commentary, “Troops, not technology,” Frederick W. Kagan vastly overstated the impact of President Obama’s new defense strategy on military leadership. Mr. Obama’s proposed reduction of 92,000 troops in Army and Marine Corps personnel is not that significant. It will bring the ground forces back to where they were in 2005, and the reductions will be done between now and 2017. Therefore, the reductions can be made primarily by lowering recruitment quotas over the next five years. Moreover, since about half of the officers and noncommissioned officers who reach 20 years will retire, many of those developed leaders will leave of their own accord, regardless of the size of the force. Finally, many of the best and brightest, who have borne the brunt of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, have already left because of the strain of back-to-back deployments, allowing promotion rates to captain and major to skyrocket. Mr. Kagan also exaggerates the impact of the post-Cold War drawdown on our ground forces. It was this force, created by President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, which marched to Baghdad in three weeks and chased al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan in four. The problem was not the military leaders (think Gens. David H. Petreaus and Raymond T. Odierno) but their civilian leaders who did not have a clue about what they were asking our troops to do. Lawrence Korb Sr., Alexandria The writer, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, served as assistant defense secretary from 1981 to 1985.

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Consumer Reports Insights: Unexplained fevers can be signs of serious illness

bacteria turned out to be resistant to the antibiotics available at the time and would have killed the former first lady even if her illness had been diagnosed promptly. That may have helped ease the conscience of those involved in her care. Fevers of unknown origin are always worth investigating because they can be caused by many conditions, including serious ones. First, think infection One would think that with our current sophisticated diagnostic techniques, FUOs would be less common than in years gone by. Instead, the number has increased, and no one is sure why. Infections are the cause of about one in five unexplained fevers. They include endocarditis, or an infection of the heart valves, as well as such infections as cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus and toxoplasma, a parasite. The early 1980s surge of immunocompromised people with HIV/AIDS was associated with an increase of previously obscure and hard-to-diagnose viral and fungal infections, all capable of causing weeks of fever. Today, of course, we know to look for those conditions, which have become less common in the United States with the steady improvement in treatments for HIV/AIDS. Cancer accounts for about 20 to 30 percent of FUOs, and that hasn’t changed over the last half- century. Lymphomas, especially of the Hodgkin’s disease type, are the most common cancer-related cause of a prolonged fever. Kidney and colorectal cancers are also frequently to blame, even when they’re small and therefore more difficult to pin down. Long-lasting fevers can also be due to disorders marked by the inflammation of connective tissue, the glue that binds cells together. Rheumatic diseases such as polymyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus can cause temperature elevation long before more recognizable symptoms appear. The same can be true for inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis and regional ileitis. Medication, too, can cause FUOs, even after people have been taking them for a while. Among the more common culprits are sulfa drugs, phenytoin (Dilantin and its generic cousins), allopurinol (Zyloprim and generics), methyldopa (Aldomet and generics) and isoniazid. Finding normal temperature Since fever can be a marker for many problems, it’s important to know what constitutes a significant elevation in body temperature. The most accessible site that reflects true internal body temperature is the rectum. Rectal temperature can vary from an early-morning low of 97.9 degrees to a late-afternoon high of 100.4. Oral, armpit and ear temperatures are less accurate and

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February Checklist: Caulk tub, change filters and prepare a garden

harder, which adds to your energy bill and makes the system run noisier. While you're basking in the furnace's warmth, also spend a few minutes planning for those days when the temperature is too hot. Have your air-conditioner serviced now, when technicians aren't booked up. Get ready to bike Has your bike been sitting in the garage gathering cobwebs all winter while the tires slowly leak air? Tune up your bike so you're ready to ride on the first glorious days of spring. Drop it off at a bike shop, or sign up for a class and learn to do it yourself. The Washington Area Bicyclist Association has links to area classes. Get a head start on a garden Consider starting your own tomato seedlings this year. If you plant seeds in pots indoors in mid-month, the seedlings will be ready to transplant into the garden after the last spring frost, which is typically the first or second week of April in the D.C. area. While you're waiting for warm summer days and ripe tomatoes, get a head start on a spring vegetable garden. To make sure soil isn't too soggy to work, squeeze a handful. If no water oozes out, it's safe to proceed. Dig in some compost or well-rotted manure and begin planting. Collards, peas, radishes, spinach and turnips can go in any time this month. Wait until the last week of February to put in potatoes. Smother the bugs If your fruit trees, roses or shrubs were damaged by insects last year, you can kill the next generation of pests by spraying an oil emulsion now, before buds swell. Ask at a garden center for horticultural oil, also known as dormant oil, which controls aphids, scale, whiteflies, fruit moths and mites by killing the eggs or the overwintering adults. The oil is sold as a concentrate. Mix it with water in a tank-type sprayer, or attach a container of the concentrate to a hose. Pick a clear, calm day when the temperature is between 40 and 70 degrees and when freezing temperatures aren't expected for three or four days. Because the oil works by smothering, not poisoning, it's considered a nontoxic pest control. However, you still need to make sure the spray doesn't hit certain plants that can be damaged if they are slicked with oil. Check the label to see what other plants might be susceptible.

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In Florida Everglades, pythons and anacondas dominate food chain

pythons are causing the decline of native mammals in the Everglades. When researchers struck out to count animals along a main road that runs to the southernmost tip of the park, more than 99 percent of raccoons were gone, along with nearly the same percentage of opossums and about 88 percent of bobcats. Marsh and cottontail rabbits, as well as foxes, could not be found. The Obama administration recently banned the import and interstate commerce of Burmese python, two species of African pythons, and the yellow anaconda. But under pressure from the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers, trade of the world’s longest snake, the reticulated python, and the boa constrictor were allowed to continue. The reptile trade is a $2 billion business in the United States, according to the Humane Society. About 11 million reptiles were kept as pets in 2005, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association. More reptiles are imported here than anywhere else in the world. “Pythons are wreaking havoc on one of America’s most beautiful, treasured and naturally bountiful ecosystems,” Marcia McNutt, director of the USGS, said in a statement. “The only hope to halt further python invasion . . . is swift, decisive and deliberate human action.” But officials do not yet know what can be done to slow the migration of pythons to other areas in Florida, and north to Georgia and Louisiana. “We need more research into methods to limit the population spread,” said Michael F. Dorcas, one of the authors of the study, Severe Mammal Declines Coincide with Proliferation of Invasive Burmese Pythons in Everglades National Park. Researchers collected data through repeated night road surveys, traveling 39,000 miles for eight years ending in 2011, counting live animals and road kill. They compared the data with findings of similar surveys conducted in 1996 and 1997, according to a statement by the USGS. Andrew Wyatt, president of the Reptile Keepers, which advocates on behalf of snake importers, dismissed the study. “They play fast and loose with facts and make big jumps to conclusions,” Wyatt said. The authors contradict prior studies showing that mercury in the water has played a role in the deaths of small mammals, he said. Wyatt also said pythons can only survive in southernmost Florida and that they would perish in extreme cold. Dorcas, who participated in several studies of pythons and cold weather, said it’s not simple. Hundreds of

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Smarter Food: The flexible CSA box

site offered, among other things, three varieties of apples, pea shoots and lettuce from the greenhouse, Jerusalem artichokes, eggs, mushrooms, jams and jellies. Entrepreneurs are building similar models. Richmond-based Farm2Family has a multi-farm CSA that offers meat, dairy, bread and soy products, such as tofu in winter, plus vegetables during the warmer months. There’s no official start date. Customers can sign up for a season at any time (the fees are prorated) and pick up biweekly at Eastern Market or Maret School in Northwest. Similarly, Brooklyn’s Nextdoorganics, offers a winter CSA that serves locally made bread, cheese and pantry items such as jam and granola. Customers can choose what and how much goes in their box, put orders on hold for vacation or cancel at any time. Nextdoor also offers home delivery for a fee. (It’s New York, after all.) Traditional CSAs “are not a sustainable business,” says Kris Schumacher, the company’s co-founder. “We try to make it as easy as possible because we want people to switch from the stuff in the supermarket.” One of the most innovative models is Kansas City’s Good Natured Family Farms. Customers commit to pay $25 each week for 18 weeks. But they pay only when they show up and get their box, which might include bison meat, milk, squash, tomatoes and zucchini bread. Pickup is on Saturdays at Hen House Market, a local grocery chain, where they can shop for whatever else they need to go with their CSA allotment. Moreover, every item has a certain number of points associated with it. So if a customer doesn’t like beets, for example, they can trade them in for cucumbers or something of equal value. The CSA, which sources from more than 150 farms, now has more than 700 members. But when it launched in 2006, the scheme had lots of critics, says Otavio Silva, Good Natured’s director of sustainability: “A lot of people said it wasn’t a CSA. And I said, ‘Why not?’ ” It’s not your perceived idea of granola bars and work on the farm. But there are many ways to create community.” And, I might add, to build a better CSA. 2012 list of Washington area CSAs Black, a former Food section staffer, is a Brooklyn-based food writer who is working on a book about one West Virginia city’s struggle to change the way it eats. Follow her on Twitter: @jane_black.

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District Taco will soon deserve its name

NAME RINGS TRUE: “I knew Douglas, and I was like, ‘I want that space when it becomes available,’ ” Wallace recalls during a hard-hat tour of the future District Taco at 1309 F St. NW, the partners’ second bricks-and-mortar restaurant since launching as an Arlington food cart in 2009. Wallace and Hoil eventually got that space; in fact, they’ve had it since last spring, when the partners signed a lease. They couldn’t take possession of the spot, however, until the previous tenant, that health-conscious restaurant and organic liquor spigot/lounge known as FunXion, concluded its proceedings in bankruptcy court. “We’re in here months later than we wanted to be,” says Wallace, who hopes to open by March or April with the same hours and menu as the Arlington-based restaurant. “But we’re rockin’ and rollin’ now.” CORE, the District-based design group, has plans that call for a grill station, a salsa bar and an elevated mezzanine area that will seat about 26 people. Demolition crews were working to exterminate the lounge-lizard vibe, stripping walls down to the terra-cotta brick, removing anything that glows and otherwise preparing the space for a casual taqueria that balances American and Yucatecan influences. The authenticity at any District Taco, Hoil notes, is completely dependent on the customer, who can choose between flour and corn tortillas, not to mention a variety of meats and toppings. “It’s up to you whether you want to make it very original,” Hoil says. “Or it’s up to you whether you want to make it very American.” The co-owners are on the prowl for a third location, perhaps in Dupont Circle or Capitol Hill. “We probably want to do a third one in D.C. before we do another one in Virginia, so we can get rid of people saying that we’re not District Taco, we’re ‘Arlington Taco,’ ” says Wallace.

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D.C. news in brief

Bandalongs use natural water currents to trap trash and debris and keep it from reaching the river’s mainstream. The devices are considered safe for fish, waterfowl and other aquatic wildlife. The traps were installed at Watts Branch near the District-Prince George’s County line and an outfall near the James Creek Marina in Southwest. An earlier 2009 installation at the mouth of Watts Branch has since collected more than six tons of trash and debris. Funds from the Anacostia River Clean Up and Protection Fund, the 5-cent bag tax, were used to pay for the installations. For information, go to ddoe.dc.gov. Electricians offer free work to churches, seniors The nonprofit D.C. Electrical Association is offering free, small electrical work for churches, senior citizens homes and children’s recreation centers in all wards this month. The work is in honor of Black History Month. In previous years, the journeymen electricians have done volunteer electrical work for the Covenant House, So Others Might Eat and Catholic Charities. Possible jobs include replacing smoke detectors, exit signs, light fixtures, wall receptacles, switches, ceiling fans and fluorescent light tubes. All work will be performed by union-trained electricians, along with supervised apprentices. For information, call 202-534-6905. Housing agency plans rent control seminar Feb. 21 The D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development is having a seminar on rent control rules at 10 a.m. Feb. 21 at its office, 1800 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE, first-floor conference room. The session will cover the registration process and rent adjustment procedures for tenants, landlords and real estate agents. To register, call 202-442-7251 or e-mail dhcd.events@dc.gov by Feb. 20. D.C. students prepare for annual Blacks in Wax The sixth annual Blacks in Wax, presented by the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, will feature portrayals of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama and Eartha Kitt by D.C. school students, ages 7 to 17. Students research the people they will represent and will speak about their subject’s life and achievements. The free performances will be from 1 to 3 p.m. and for the general public from 5 to 7 p.m. Feb. 24 for school groups and seniors at the Southeast Tennis and Learning Center, 701 Mississippi Ave. SE. Students will also perform from 5 to 7 p.m. March 3 at the Kennedy Center. For information, call 202-645-6242 or 202-678-7530. — Compiled by Terence McArdle

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Prince George’s County Animal Watch

prince george’s county The following cases were received by the Prince George’s County Department of Environmental Resources Animal Management Group. Call 301-780-7200 for directions to the county animal shelter, hours of operation and adoption and licensing procedures. The shelter’s Web site is at www.princegeorgescountymd.gov/der/amg. Cat trap: Trespassing dog: Raccoon stuck on trash truck: Overstaying welcome: Beagle mix follows girl home: Vaccination clinic Sunday The Prince George’s County SPCA/Humane Society is sponsoring a low-cost shot clinic for dogs and cats from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday at 8210 D’Arcy Rd., Forestville. Rabies shots are $8; distemper shots are $12. Microchip IDs are $25. Only cash and credit cards are accepted as payment. Animals must be on a leash or in a carrier. Owners should bring an up-to-date rabies certificate. For information, call 301-262-5625. — Compiled by Jillian S. Sowah

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2012 list of Washington area CSAs

$625 full share, 22 weeks; $400 half share, 11 weeks.; chicken and egg shares available Pickup in southern Calvert County and Alexandria, and at the farm. Lock Farm Woodsboro John Poffenbarger, 301-639-6988 poffmaj@earthlink.net www.lockfarm.net $130, 6 weeks (spring); $400, 20 weeks; $120, 6 weeks (fall). Pickup in Frederick, Walkersville and at the farm. Market Basket Annapolis Craig Sewell, 410-266-1511 csewell@acookscafe.com acookscafe.com $250, small spring share, $290 large spring share, 10 weeks; $550 small summer share, $640 large summer share, 22 weeks; eggs, dairy and meat shares available. Pickup at A Cook’s Cafe, 911 Commerce Rd., Annapolis. Norman’s Farm Market Potomac Eris Norman, 301-674-9929 info@normansfarmmarket.com www.normansfarmmarket.com $575 family share, $402.50 couples share, 24 weeks; $200 family share, $140 couples share, 8 weeks; egg shares available. Pickup in Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Potomac and Rockville. One Acre Farm Clarksburg Michael Protas, 301-503-3724 michael@1acrefarm.com www.1acrefarm.com $625, 22 weeks. Pickup in the District, Potomac, Rockville and at the farm. One Straw Farm Northern Baltimore County Joan Norman, 410-343-1828 csa@onestrawfarm.com www.onestrawfarm.com $520 (before March 1)/$570 (after March 1) full share, $270 (before March 1)/$295 (after March 1) half share, 24 weeks. Pickup at 45 Baltimore metro area locations and at the farm. Open Book Farm Mary Kathryn and Andrew Barnet, 240-457-2558 openbookfarm@gmail.com openbookfarm.com $500 (farm pickup) or $575 (pickup in North Chevy Chase), 20 weeks; pastured meats also available. Pickup in North Chevy Chase or at the farm. Our House Farm Brookeville Michelle Nowak, 724-840-4022; Stephanie Jones, 410-903-4943 ourhousefarmmd@gmail.com www.ourhousefarmmd.com $600 full share, $300 half share, 20 weeks. Pickup in Silver Spring and at the farm. Pheasant Hill Farm CSA Mount Airy Marjorie Satterlee, 410-215-7173 msatter195@aol.com www.localharvest.org/pheasant-hill-farm-csa-M20139 $550 full share, $400 half share, 18 weeks. Pickup in Damascus, Gaithersburg, Mount Airy and Wheaton. A Practically Organic CSA Harwood Shawn Sizer, 410-507-5917 practicallyorganic@hotmail.com www.practically-organic.com $1,330 full share, 38 weeks; $800 summer share, 20 weeks; eggs, herbs and other shares available. Delivery included in price of shares. Priapi Gardens Cecilton Vic Priapi, 410-275-9438 vic@priapigardens.com www.priapigardens.com $585, 32 weeks; $435, 24 weeks; organic. Pickup in Stevensville. Query Mill Hill Farm Darnestown Mark Israel, 301-926-8602 marksisrael1@hotmail.com $440 full share, $220 half share, 20 weeks; organic, though not certified. Pickup at the farm. Radix Farm Kristin Carbone, 202-744-0373 radixfarm@gmail.com radixfarm.wordpress.com $675-$700 full share, 22 weeks Pickup in the District. Red Wiggler CSA Germantown Kara Desmond, 301-916-2216 csa@redwiggler.org www.redwiggler.org $210 spring share, 7 weeks; $270 summer share, 9 weeks; $270 fall share,

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Rethinking leadership in America’s schools

into collective power to implement change. New accountability laws, increased school funding, and a greater use of digital technology for instruction, among other proposed improvements, will only be successful with strong, collective leadership in our schools. While our principals and superintendents may have a clear idea of what needs to be done, they cannot implement change on their own. Principals must be trained and empowered to be able to drive collective action on the part of their faculty focused on shared goals of student achievement. Impending reforms will only have a lasting impact if superintendents can create a systemic leadership framework to support their principals and aspiring school leaders. This framework must be based on a defined leadership strategy that includes a variety of leadership development opportunities and is supported and reinforced through traditional talent management processes. Some of the key leadership development opportunities include: — Formal Learning: Principals and superintendents, like any effective leader, should have the opportunity to participate in formal leadership development learning programs to stay ahead of strategic and technological trends. — Mentoring: To complement formal learning, principals and superintendents could benefit from connections with those outside of their field, including members of the business community. Business leaders are an important stakeholder in our education system, and their active involvement in leadership mentoring could constructively bring another significant player in the “As One” pursuit for excellence in education. — Knowledge Sharing: Another piece of the puzzle is participation in communities of practice, which could include periodic “town hall” or public group meetings with principals, superintendents or subject matter experts from various areas, focusing on critical leadership skill gaps and targeted leadership challenges. This is the pinnacle of knowledge sharing and connecting with peers on what has worked and understanding where there might be opportunity for improvement. Principals and administrators can also learn from some select high-performing public schools. Take two public schools in Dallas as an example: The School of Science and Engineering Magnet (SEM) and School for the Talented and Gifted Magnet, both of which were named the top spots on Newsweek’s 2011 public high school rankings. Both schools also made it to the top of the national list for the Washington Post’s High School Challenge. SEM was rated 100 percent on college-ready student performance by U.S. News & World Report (a measure of the degree to which students master some college-level material). This can

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D.C. charter school under scrutiny for lack of special-ed students

A Northwest Washington public charter school that has not enrolled a special education student in three years is under scrutiny by District officials. Roots Public Charter School Federal law requires that all public schools provide “a free and appropriate” education to students with disabilities. Charter schools, which are open to all families citywide on a first-come, first-served basis, are prohibited from inquiring about a prospective student’s special education status. About 10 percent of the city’s 29,366 charter school students were eligible to receive special­ education services in the 2010-11 school year, according to enrollment data. Roughly 13 percent of students in traditional D.C. public schools are in special education. The inquiry into Roots comes as charter school treatment of special-needs students has been called into question in the District and across the country. The Southern Poverty Law Center is suing the Louisiana Department of Education on behalf of thousands of disabled New Orleans students. Last year, the Bazelon Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, filed a complaint with the Justice Department claiming that some of the District’s charters openly discourage parents from enrolling disabled children, especially those with significant needs. Traditional D.C. public schools serve the vast majority of “Level 4” students — those with the most profound emotional or physical disabilities. Most Level 4 charter students are concentrated at two schools, St. Coletta and Options. The Justice Department is gathering information about the complaint, which did not name Roots or other individual schools. Roots, tucked into a converted garage in the Lamond-Riggs neighborhood, opened in 1999 built around Nguzo Saba, the seven principles of African heritage: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Part of its mission is to “prepare students to break the chains of psychological conditioning that attempt to keep them powerless in all phases of society,” its Web site says. School ranks in middle tier Class sizes are small, with a 1-to-10 teacher-student ratio. About 60 percent of Roots students read at proficient or advanced levels on the 2011 DC CAS. The charter board’s new performance rating system places the school in “Tier 2,” the middle of its three tiers. School officials said they have served special education students over the years, but just not in the past three. Parents wary of labeling Founder and Principal Bernida Thompson said the school often draws parents who don’t want their children labeled as

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Christoph Eschenbach leads National Symphony Orchestra in emotional program

someone for getting so involved with a moving work of art, and for caring about his musicians so much, that he shook hands with every one of them when the piece was over? Anyone who bemoans how big symphony orchestras can fall into routines should come watch Eschenbach. There’s no routine in his work; he’s reinventing the wheel every time. That is the reason some big orchestras have looked down on him, thinking he doesn’t know better. It’s also the reason many musicians would follow him to the ends of the earth: Because this kind of sincerity and honesty is rare. Christoph Eschenbach, right, directs the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. (Bill O'Leary/For The Washington Post) There’s no right answer, only the way each performance happens to hit you — and the unevenness is a byproduct of the excitement. To me, “Metamorphosen” failed to come across well Thursday, but Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony had a lot of pizazz and energy, and it mostly kept me riveted. Eschenbach’s approach keeps the music fresh; it’s as if he were discovering it along with the listener — and were surprised a little, each time, at how it comes out. In the face of so much genuine excitement and feeling, in a field that desperately needs more of both, it can seem beside the point to single out things that didn’t work — especially in a performance that offered a lot to like. Yet the idea of excellence in music is traditionally about going beyond mere feeling. Eschenbach’s expressive points were blunted when the mystery of the strings’ quiet chords in “Eroica’s” first movement was answered by winds that sounded downright pedantic. Or when, in “Metamorphosen,” the lyrical solo line of the concertmaster, Nurit Bar-Josef, was submerged in a fuzzy sea of dark sound from the other surging strings. There’s an obvious connection between the two works: The theme from “Eroica’s” second-movement funeral march permeates “Metamorphosen,” emerging time and again in a gesture of sorrow like the beating of a breast. That referentiality made for an inward-turning program on an inward-turned night that featured Eschenbach and his orchestra, without the intermediary of a soloist. And if to my ear it offered too much of the musical equivalent of Method acting, it had virtues that too many orchestra concerts lack these days and appeared to delight the audience, which greeted it with warm applause.

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Small business lending on the rise

(Creative commons licensed from Flickr user paalia) In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama urged Congress to help “tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow.” This raises the question: Is access to credit still one of the biggest issues facing entrepreneurs and small business owners? The answer is that the picture appears to be improving. Citibank recently reported a 30 percent jump in lending to small business. J.P. Morgan Chase said it boosted lending to small businesses (which it defined as businesses with less than $20 million in annual sales) by 52 percent in 2011. And Biz2Credit said its most recent monthly analysis of loan applications that ran through its online lending platform showed approval rates by credit unions, micro lenders and other alternative lenders topped 62 percent in December, compared with about 49 percent in January 2011. “With most major banks done reporting fourth-quarter earnings, one trend is clear: For the first time in a while, loan growth is back,” according to a Motley Fool report. Tim McPeak, Sageworks’ director of financial markets advisory services, said the tide may be starting to turn. “There are borrowers that are healthy — that are now looking to expand as opposed to the borrower who was approaching their bank [in recent years] just because they were trying to stay in business,” McPeak said. “And bankers always want to lend; that’s how they make money.” According to Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Northern Trust, the U.S. economic recovery hinges on banks getting money flowing to businesses again. “The good news is that we don’t have to worry about the fact that our federal legislators can’t seem to get anything done,” Kasriel said, “because it doesn’t matter what they do. It’s all about the banks.” And he thinks banks will continue to lend more this year, which will “get the ball rolling again.” Even so, McPeak and others say it’s still not an easy-credit environment. “It’s going to take a healthy balance sheet to borrow,” McPeak said. There can be no doubt that there are significant events and factors which may throw a wrench at businesses’ prospects for growth — namely, the deficit and tax policy. But apparently the lending environment is improving, which bodes well for businesses that need capital. Mary Ellen Biery is a research specialist at Sageworks, Inc., a Raleigh, N.C.-based financial

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Corcoran exhibit helps viewers picture the horrors of the Civil War

Alexander Gardner. ‘Ruins of Confederate Armory, Richmond, VA.’ April 1865. Albumen silver print, 7x9 in. (Collection of Julia J. Norrell/Collection of Julia J. Norrell) Former lawyer and lobbyist Julia J. Norrell, 77, has collected art since she was a teenager in Arkansas. But she didn’t start studying and collecting Civil War images until she read Jay Winik’s “April 1865: The Month That Saved America” during a weekend at her farm in Virginia six years ago. The result is the exhibit “Shadows of History: Photographs of the Civil War From the Collection of Julia J. Norrell,” on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Norrell, who shares a birthday with President Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12), discusses what she wants others to see: “I want them to see the horror of the war, I want them to see into the future, though. And I want them to see that role, of the African American regiments, because it’s not always depicted. Not because anyone is against depicting it — there’s not much that work that shows it. I would like it to be educational, because . . . what if I hadn’t had a National Gallery, a Corcoran and a Phillips to go to? “My life has changed because of the art I saw as a young person. I’d like to think that’s true in the nation’s capital, of all places, and it’s not if you don’t loan work or if you don’t have museums doing shows, and if you don’t have people interpret it. “If a child is told they can’t see anything, or they can’t relate to anything — well, the Civil War is more than just several birthdays of national figures. It’s more than Lincoln — it’s important, and it’s as relevant today, I think, in some ways, as it was years ago. Whitfield Lovell, ‘Visitation: The Richmond Project: Battleground,’ 2001. Charcoal on wood, found objects. (Collection of the artist, courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York/Collection of the artist, courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York) “I think I’ve always been sensitive to that, and have been educated about — I believe very much in what Lincoln accomplished. I’m a political child. My mother [Rep. Catherine D. Norrell (D-Ark.), 1961-63] served in Congress, too — she was elected after my father [Rep. William F. Norrell (D-Ark.), 1938-61]. So, basically, I’m very aware of the political process and have dealt with it

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Calling all beer lovers

A bartender serves two mugs of beer at a tavern in Montpelier, Vt. (Toby Talbot/AP) The Food section’s sixth annual Beer Madness is practically around the corner, so you know what that means: We’re in need of a few tasters. This year, the bracketed taste-off will feature 32 all-American craft brews. ChurchKey beer director Greg Engert will help and host once again, and our tasting panel will include experts and readers. So take your best shot: Send an e-mail to food@washpost.com with BEER MADNESS in the subject line. To be considered for one of the four reader-designated slots, you must be able to attend tasting sessions on the evenings of Feb. 27 and March 5 (at ChurchKey). Other requirements: ■ Describe your qualifications and your passion for beer in a single, tightly constructed sentence. Humor’s always appreciated. ■List your three favorite domestic craft beers. The deadline for submitting your panel bid is Friday, Feb. 17. — Bonnie S. Benwick

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Nicholas McGegan conducts Baltimore Symphony with energy

Conductor Nicholas McGegan was a bundle of energy on Thursday night. (Randi Lynn Beach/Baltimore Symphony Orchestra) Correction: Nicholas McGegan is a baroque specialist. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, not so much, so the first half of its concert at Strathmore on Thursday was a little uncomfortable. There was guest conductor McGegan, a small bundle of ferocious energy, motoring up the tempos and dancing through every phrase of the first of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos, while the solo horns and woodwinds searched for an elusive sense of ensemble and violin soloist Qing Li (for three movements, a model of elegant agility) unveiled a harsh and heavy-footed overkill for the polonaise. Sure, McGegan was stomping around the podium (which he does charmingly), but hers seemed to be an overly literal response. The Orchestra Suite from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera “Nais,” full of martial sound effects, moments of light lyricism and general jolly scurrying about, fared better. McGegan drew crisp rhythmic shapes from an alert string section and splendidly pointed solos from the piccolo, even if the concluding percussion “bop” that McGegan promised in his delightful introduction to the absurdities of the “Nais” plot almost escaped unnoticed. The second half of the program, the Haydn Trumpet Concerto and Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, found McGegan and the orchestra more in sync. With BSO principal trumpet Andrew Balio as soloist, they fashioned a reading that was graceful and unsentimental. Balio seemed to revel in the lyrical and athletic opportunities that Haydn offered and tickled the audience with a couple of over-the-top cadenzas. The concluding Mozart was splendid, particularly the second movement’s grace and the momentum of the fourth as themes played a sort of operatic and superbly coordinated hide-and-seek with each other. Reinthaler is a freelance writer.

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Government action needs to target microbusinesses

of Ms. Mills’s background in venture capital. Moreover, the other agencies with which it would be merged, according to Obama’s proposal, will pull it even further in the direction of supporting large businesses. We believe the SBA has largely ignored the needs of micro-businesses in America — despite the importance of such business in creating good local jobs. Access to capital is a place for the SBA to begin. The SBA provides a 90 percent guarantee to financial institutions that provide loans and other credit to small businesses. When the SBA increased the limit on the size of the loans they would guarantee, the banks responded by making loans to businesses on the larger end of the spectrum — almost exclusively. In addition, micro-businesses depend more on lines of credit than large loans. Lines of credit help medium and small businesses spend only what is needed for payroll and inventory. Owners can pay down the line of credit as money is earned. Yet banks are not extending lines of credit and, one major bank (Bank of America) is canceling these lines, even for solid businesses with steady financial performance. The banks claim the risk is too high, even though the SBA holds most of it. The SBA should address this and make lines of credit more available to small and micro-businesses so they can grow. In addition, if banks won’t lend to small businesses, then the SBA and others should support non-bank lenders like credit unions and community development finance institutions that do help micro-businesses. Yet even if access to capital is improved, another crucial piece of the puzzle needs to be put in place. In my 25 years of experience, the first step to success for these locally grown and start-up micro-businesses is business assistance: training and mentoring for new entrepreneurs. Then the businesses are ready to get a loan and grow. We need to fund the programs that provide business assistance so that the business owners can put together a credit-worthy loan application. That means they need a business plan, cash flow projections, a viable business model and a marketing plan. When the businesses receive this assistance and have done the necessary preparation, they have an 80 percent chance of success — which means eight of 10 of these start-ups will hire at least two other employees. Micro-business training programs have fought for crumbs in appropriations, compared with

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New York sues big banks, local firm over foreclosure documents

the MERS system as an end-run around the property recording system, to facilitate the rapid securitization and sale of mortgages,” Schneiderman said in a statement Friday. “Once the mortgages went sour, these same banks brought foreclosure proceedings en masse based on deceptive and fraudulent court submissions, seeking to take homes away from people with little regard for basic legal requirement or the rule of law.” His lawsuit asserts that the MERS database is riddled with inaccuracies, misrepresentations and numerous “robosigned” documents, which together have “confused, misled, and deceived homeowners and the courts and made it difficult to ascertain whether a party actually has the right to foreclosure.” Schneiderman is seeking damages for homeowners who have suffered from the alleged abuses, as well as a court order forcing MERS and the banks to correct any flawed or deceptive documents that led to muddled titles or improper liens. The banks named in the lawsuit declined to comment Friday. On its Web site, MERS posted rebuttals to the allegations in the lawsuit and again argued that its practices “are in compliance with state and federal laws.” “We are confident that as people understand more about MERS and the role we play, they will see that MERS adds great value to our nation’s system of housing finance in ways that benefit not just financial institutions, the broader economy and the government, but — most of all — homeowners,” the company said in its statement. The new lawsuit comes as Obama administration officials and a coalition of state attorneys general are on the brink of a major settlement with the nation’s biggest banks over foreclosure-related abuses that sparked national outrage in the fall of 2010. That long-anticipated deal, expected to be finalized in coming days, could net as much as $25 billion in penalties that would go toward ongoing foreclosure prevention efforts and in restitution to troubled borrowers who lost their homes in the wake of the financial crisis. It also would force banks to overhaul the way they service loans. Until recently, Schneiderman had been critical of the deal, arguing that officials should hold off on a settlement until conducting deeper investigations into every aspect of the housing crisis. In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama announced a new task force of state and federal officials to further investigate mortgage misdeeds. The administration tapped Schneiderman to help lead that effort.

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Afghan civilian deaths hit record high in 2011, U.N. report says

KABUL — The report Insurgents were responsible for the vast majority of the casualties, at least 2,332, according to the report. Most of the victims were killed by makeshift explosives or suicide bombers. The use of both tactics increased sharply over the past 12 months. The report describes a deteriorating security situation as NATO’s war effort begins to ebb, and as the United States pursues negotiations with an insurgency that shows no sign of relenting. Meanwhile, Western officials have described the Taliban’s power as waning, pointing to a 20 percent decrease in the number of coalition troops killed last year. But the U.N. report suggests that the number of foreign troops killed is a poor indicator of the Taliban’s ability to foment unrest. Even if the insurgents’ ability to fight conventional forces has diminished, they remain a major source of instability in the country’s southern and eastern provinces, where deadly attacks often target civilians. Suicide bombings killed 410 civilians last year, 80 percent more than in 2010. U.N. officials called such shifts “changes in the tactics of the parties to the conflict.” The report attributed about 400 of the deaths to NATO and Afghan forces, a small decrease from 2010, with aerial attacks responsible for about half of those casualties. NATO-led night raids, a long-standing source of tension between the United States and President Hamid Karzai, accounted for 63 deaths, down 22 percent from the previous year. “Afghan children, women and men continue to be killed in this war in ever-increasing numbers,” said Jan Kubis, U.N. secretary-general’s special representative for Afghanistan. “For much too long, Afghan civilians have paid the highest price of war.” Gen. John R. Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan, said the decline in NATO-related deaths was a validation of the coalition’s efforts to reduce civilian casualties. “Every citizen of Afghanistan must know [the International Security Assistance Force] will continue to do all we can to reduce casualties that affect the Afghan civilian population,’’ he said in a statement. “This data is promising but there is more work to be done.” The Taliban issued several public statements in 2011 related to its concern for civilian casualties, claiming at one point that “strict attention must be paid to the protection and safety of civilians during the spring operations.” As Afghan forces prepare to inherit the conflict, questions remain about their ability to minimize civilian casualties. In the last

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Md. brewers, restaurant owners push for return of ‘growlers’

Once, Baltimoreans could stop by the corner tavern and take away a container of their favorite brew, straight from the tap. The sound those pails made as they slid empty down the bar for refills is said to be how they got their name. Growlers, which in recent decades have taken the form of 2-liter brown-glass jugs, have been experiencing a resurgence among beer enthusiasts looking for their favorite microbrews or those who just want fresh draft beer at home. But many Maryland brewers and restaurant owners are prohibited from selling growlers and are pushing for a change in state law. Statewide restrictions limit the sale of growlers to brew pubs that make their own beer on the premises and sell food, excluding bars and most restaurants. Only 15 establishments in Maryland have such a license, and lawmakers from Baltimore City and Howard County want to expand sales. Hugh Sisson, general partner of Heavy Seas Beer in Halethorpe, is working with state legislators to refine the growler law in Baltimore. He helped lead efforts in the 1980s to get laws changed to allow the first brew pub in the state, and now he’s hoping he can sell growlers of his Heavy Seas Beer at a new restaurant, Heavy Seas Ale House, which is scheduled to open Feb. 15. He said he doesn’t want Maryland to fall behind as other states move to more flexible laws for growlers. In Buffalo, for instance, Sunoco gas stations have had pilot projects allowing patrons to fill up their car and their growler in one stop. “It seems to be an evolving trend across the country,” Sisson said. While many bars in Maryland sell carry-out beer, wine and liquor, it is always in sealed bottles or cans. Though people in the industry say the law is not clear, the state considers growlers to be refillable containers, which require a different license. Two bills proposed in Annapolis would allow licensed restaurants in Baltimore City and Howard County to fill growlers intended to be opened at home. State Sen. William “Bill” C. Ferguson IV, a Democrat who represents Baltimore’s waterfront, has introduced what he terms a “very limited” bill that would create a “refillable container license” for restaurants in the city and would exclude bars that do not serve food. The bill requires General Assembly approval, as would a similar bill planned in Howard. At the Brewer’s

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Lax U.S. gun laws enable killing in Mexico

DO AMERICA’S failed gun policies contribute to the terrible violence in Mexico? Alejandro A. Poire Romero makes a compelling case that the answer is yes. Law enforcement officials in both countries acknowledge that 70 to 80 percent of the traceable guns seized in Mexico can be tracked to the United States. Mr. Poire Romero, a top Mexican national security and criminal justice official, offers additional evidence that the United States has been an enabler of the violence. In 2005 roughly one-third of the seized guns were assault weapons. Today, according to Mr. Poire Romero, assault weapons represent 60 to 65 percent of the guns confiscated by Mexican authorities. The assault-weapons ban in the United States lapsed in 2004. “The significant rise in violence and the increase in the number of public officials killed in Mexico coincides with lifting of the assault weapons ban,” Mr. Poire Romero said. Mr. Poire Romero met with Post editors and reporters on the day that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was again being grilled on Capitol Hill about “Operation Fast and Furious,” during which U.S. law enforcement agents, in order to trace weapons to higher-ups in a criminal enterprise, failed to interdict guns bought by suspected straw purchasers. The operation, a version of which was undertaken during the George W. Bush administration, was deeply flawed; some 2,000 weapons are unaccounted for. Weapons traced to Fast and Furious purchases were found on the scene of the 2010 killing of a Border Patrol agent. These revelations led to the resignation of the U.S. attorney in Phoenix and reassignment of the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Mr. Poire Romero calls Fast and Furious “an issue of concern” for Mexico. “It’s clear that we did not know and would never have approved of an operation that let guns walk into Mexico,” he said, noting that the Mexican government — in addition to the U.S. Congress and the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General — is conducting its own investigation. Yet Fast and Furious was a well-intentioned, misguided response to — and not the cause of — the proliferation of illegal guns in Mexico. To stanch that flow, the Obama administration and Congress should heed the pleas of Mr. Poire Romero and his countrymen by reviving the assault weapons ban and closing the gun show loophole that makes it far too easy to

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Car bomb in Kandahar, Afghanistan, kills seven outside police headquarters

An Afghan police officer retrieves documents stained with blood after a car bomb in Kandahar. The attack killed at least seven people and wounded 19 on Sunday. (Ahmad Nadeem/Reuters) KABUL — An additional 19 people, six of them police officers, were wounded in the blast, provincial officials said. Children also were among the victims. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but a spokesman for the governor blamed Taliban insurgents. The southern Afghan city has been the scene of such attacks before, as violence grows in many parts of the country despite an influx of foreign troops. In a separate incident, Afghan officials announced Sunday that a U.S. soldier fatally shot an Afghan guard Friday night at a U.S. base in northern Afghanistan. The guard was on duty at the gate of a base in Sar-e Pol when the incident occurred. Provincial governor Sayed Anwar Rahmati said the U.S. soldier opened a door and saw the barrel of the guard’s gun. Feeling threatened, he fired. “It was a mistaken act and happened due to the threat the soldier had felt from the guard,” Rahmati said by phone. A spokesman for the NATO-led troops in Kabul said the coalition was aware of the report, but he would not provide further details, saying an investigation was underway. According to reports, a dozen foreign troops have been killed recently, some of them by rogue Afghan forces at joint operating bases. In the worst incident in recent months, four unarmed French troops were killed by an Afghan soldier northeast of Kabul. The incident followed a similar attack a few weeks prior against French troops by a man wearing an Afghan army uniform. After the deaths, French officials announced that the country plans to withdraw its combat troops from Afghanistan by 2013, earlier than scheduled. Some of the attacks have been blamed on personal, cultural and religious disputes, while others have been in retaliation for civilian casualties during foreign operations. Taliban-led insurgents The attacks have caused distrust among international forces serving on joint duty or providing training for Afghan forces. Salahuddin is a special correspondent. More world news coverage: Russia and China veto U.N. resolution on Syria Afghan civilian deaths hit record high in 2011 U.S. assistance to Egypt in peril Russians rally en masse against Putin More headlines from around the world

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Golfsmith opening multiple stores in Washington area

Golfsmith employee Pablo Gonzalez demonstrates the club-fitting studio at the retailer’s Tysons Corner location. (Jeffrey MacMillan/Capital Business) Barely a year has gone by since Golfsmith opened its first store in the Washington area, but the sporting goods retailer is teeing up to open three more. Austin-based Golfsmith plans to set up shop at Potomac Run Plaza in Sterling and Kamp Washington in Fairfax this May, and at Potomac Town Square in Woodbridge in August. Each location is roughly the size of the company’s existing 21,000-square-foot store at 8459 Leesburg Pike in Tysons Corner. Golfsmith stores carry golf equipment, apparel and accessories, and have in-store putting greens for customers to test out products. Stores also feature computerized swing analyzers and golf simulators. Customers at the Sterling location can sign up for golf lessons with third-party provider GolfTEC. “We’re not a sporting good store where it’s just self-service. Our people are highly trained to fit you with the right clubs so you’ll play better,” said Marty Hanaka, president and chief executive of Golfsmith. He noted the company is looking to hire 25 to 30 employees at each store: “We need a store that is big enough to allow the experiential model to come to life.” The Washington area is one of seven markets, including Atlanta, Baltimore and Cleveland, in which Golfsmith is moving to open a total of 10 stores this year. The retailer, with 79 existing locations nationwide, identified more than 100 locations for potential growth. “We targeted the ones we felt were underserved by off-course speciality stores,” Hanaka said. “Washington, the fourth largest golf market, was the most underserved.” Hanaka estimates the expansion effort, and relocation of four stores, cost about $30 million, funded by cash flow from operations. Golfsmith most recently reported a profit of $1.3 million in the third quarter of 2011, compared with a net loss of $1.1 million for the same period a year earlier. Sales rose 8.3 percent to $101 million. “We’re taking share in a struggling marketplace,” Hanaka said. “The experiential model is something that people really respond to, and we’ve put a lot of emphasis on hiring and training.” Specialty golf retailers, such as Golfsmith, endured sluggish sales during the recession as customers retreated from the market. The industry is the midst of a recovery, with total year-over-year sales up 3.2 percent to $3 billion as of November 2011, according to market research

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Government loses second major technology official

Vivek Kundraleft his post. They served as the federal government’s first CTO and CIO, respectively. The two were also something of a pair, as they previously worked together in the state of Virginia’s technology office and are friends. “There was a great synergy between them,” said Bobbie Kilberg, president of the Northern Virginia Technology Council. “They made a subject exciting that many people find boring.” The two pushed for greater innovation and openness for government and commercial technology. Kundra, in particular, focused on moving to cloud — or Web-based — computing, consolidating federal data centers and developing federal IT programs in a more agile and iterative way, while Chopra encouraged making government data available and giving technology firms the chance to come up with innovative applications. Tony Ayaz, who heads the Bethesda-based federal unit of California technology firm Splunk, said his company is watching closely who will be selected to replace Chopra. Chopra’s advocacy for making data available to entrepreneurs made Splunk, which launched its data management business in the commercial world, feel more comfortable as it expanded into the federal government. Chopra pushed for government to look “at new technology as a good thing, not as a bad thing,” Ayaz said. “There’s a lot of pushback sometimes when you’re introducing new technology.” Kundra and Chopra helped define the roles of federal CIO and CTO, said Tim Hoechst, chief technology officer at Chantilly-based Agilex, and the next step will be continuing their efforts. “Both of the roles — of the CIO and the CTO — have created, I think, a good momentum of activity,” Hoechst said. The successors will need to make “sure that that momentum is not lost.” Still Kilberg and Olga Grkavac, executive vice president of the public sector group of industry association TechAmerica, said they don’t expect the priorities to change. Grkavac pointed to Steven VanRoekel, who has taken over for Kundra and “is really building on the foundation and expanding it.” She noted that the departures aren’t entirely unexpected, as political appointees commonly depart around the beginning of the year if they don’t expect to stay through the November’s election. “The fourth year going into a presidential election, [contractors] expect this to happen and they plan for it,” she said. “The impact ... is that in some areas it’s more of a holding operation. ... The programs are delayed because of the vacancies at the top.”

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George Huguely’s trial in Yeardley Love’s death starts Monday with jury selection

lacrosse for her school in Towson, a Baltimore suburb, before going to U-Va. Her death had a profound impact on the circle of athletes closest to her, marked in memorial services and the creation of a foundation in her name that raised at least $500,000 toward an athletic field at her prep school alma mater and ongoing service projects with young people. But the response reached further. Last year, Virginia lawmakers invoked Love by name as they expanded laws to make it easier for people who are dating but not living together to obtain court orders to protect themselves from an abusive partner. Authorities say the change led to a substantial increase in such orders. At U-Va., administrators ratcheted up training for students, faculty and staff members on how to respond when they suspect someone might be in an abusive relationship or struggling with alcoholism or mental health issues. The university also says it is aggressively enforcing a policy that requires students to notify school officials if they are arrested or charged with a crime other than minor traffic infractions. It was only after Love’s death that U-Va. officials say they learned that Huguely had been convicted in 2009 in Lexington, Va., for public drunkenness and resisting arrest after an encounter during which a female police officer used a Taser to subdue him, according to court papers and interviews. U-Va. students now must report criminal incidents on a computerized form at the start of each academic year and risk expulsion under the university’s honor code if they are caught lying. U-Va. also now requires athletes to inform their coaches of a new arrest within 24 hours of the event. In fall 2010, the university received more than 600 reports from its more than 21,000 undergraduate and graduate students, said Allen Groves, the dean of students. The number fell to 350 last fall and included some duplicates from earlier years or reports considered frivolous. Of the roughly 100 relevant reports, most were first-time offenses involving alcohol or small amounts of marijuana, Groves said. In addition to helping the university evaluate threats, Groves said the reports have given him a clearer picture of what help a student might need. If the system had been in place and used by Huguely, “no one knows if that would have made a difference,” Groves said, “but I would have liked to have had that chance.”

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Brig. Gen. Terence J. Hildner of Fairfax dies in Afghanistan of apparent natural causes

Hood. The U.S. Army says Brigadier General Terence J. Hildner, 49, died of apparent natural causes Feb. 3 in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Courtesy U.S. Army) As of last month, 1,850 American service members had died in Afghanistan since 2001, according to military records. About 375 of those deaths have been classified as “non-hostile,” which includes deaths from accidents and natural causes. Growing up in a military family, Hildner moved frequently. He was born in New Haven, Conn., and lived in Tokyo, Rome and Colorado as well as Chantilly, where he attended Brookfield Elementary School. Hildner graduated from Autauga County High School in Prattville, Ala., in 1980, and he joined the University of Notre Dame’s class of 1984. He began his Army career in Fort Bliss, Tex. His father described him as an ambitious and dedicated military man. “From the Irish side of the family, he inherited a sense of humor and exuberance about life,” Robert Hildner said. “And from the German side, a singularity of purpose and a very keen analytical mind.” Hildner was married twice and had four children, ages 17 to 22, from his first marriage. His second wife, Cindy Hildner, is a civilian employee for the military. He met her about seven years ago after she began monitoring the condition of one of his injured soldiers at what is now Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Fairfax was what Hildner considered his home base, even as he moved from place to place in a nearly 30-year military career that included tours in Germany, Iraq and Kuwait. His parents lived in Fairfax near George Mason University from 1980 until last year, when they moved to Charles County. He also is survived by his mother, Susan, and a younger brother and sister, Steven Hildner and Elizabeth Edwards, both of whom live in the Washington area. Hildner commanded troops in Kuwait and during the Persian Gulf War in Iraq. He also conducted the last U.S. patrol along the East-West German border before reunification. His combat missions earned him various service medals, including two Bronze Stars. From 2003 to 2006, he was in charge of the 13th Corps Support Command’s Special Troops Battalion at Fort Hood. The battalion provided supplies to units stationed around Joint Base Balad and Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war, and to troops responding to Hurricane Katrina. More recently, he was stationed at Fort Lee, Va., where

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U.S. deals favoring blind draw scrutiny as rivals struggle

the organization’s annual report. An additional $221 million in uniform orders was set aside for small businesses, defined as those with no more than 500 employees. That left about $907 million, or 49.9 percent, available for unrestricted competition, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The squeeze on private uniform makers was evident in Alabama on Jan. 9, when American Apparel, which isn’t related to the publicly traded clothing retailer of the same name, announced plans to close its Fort Deposit plant and eliminate about 175 jobs. That meant Rachel Proveaux, 30, mother of an 8-week-old boy, returned from maternity leave to find herself out of a job. “I’m sending out résumés anywhere I can find,’’ she said in an interview. “They should not set aside so many contracts for small business. To me, that’s not fair.” While the company’s officials didn’t fault the program for the disabled in particular, they said the large share of contracts awarded through set-aside programs has left little work for competitive bidding. They also said the government ends up paying more than it should, sometimes for inferior products. “We are denying our troops the best if we do not allow competition,” C. Lash Harrison, chairman of American Apparel’s board of directors, said in a September letter to President Obama. U.S. Representative Terri A. Sewell, a Democrat from Birmingham, Ala., agrees. “While I fully support the Pentagon’s policies to assist various restricted sources,” the lack of competition in programs such as AbilityOne and Federal Prison Industries “has resulted in an increase in prices paid by the services for uniforms,” she wrote in a Sept. 8 letter to the Defense Logistics Agency, the biggest buyer of military uniforms. The agency paid as much as 17 percent more for AbilityOne-manufactured uniforms compared with those made by large commercial businesses, according to a Bloomberg analysis of $2.23 billion in uniform spending by the agency in the past decade. Before awarding orders, the government has to determine whether the prison workshops or organizations for the disabled can provide a “fair and reasonable” price, Nancy Heimbaugh, the senior procurement executive at the Defense Logistics Agency, said in an Aug. 18 letter to U.S. Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.), who has raised concerns about combat uniform orders going to favored groups. AbilityOne’s prices are “usually within the competitive market range of what federal agencies would pay for other, similar projects,” George Selby,

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Butterflies help out scientists and the military

Butterflies are teaching scientists important lessons that could be used in designing flying robots. The military wants to be able to use bug-size robots to fly into areas without risking human lives. They call their robots MAVs, short for micro air vehicles. The problem is that the robots don’t do as good a job of flying in tight spaces with changing wind conditions as do butterflies. “Flying insects are capable of performing a dazzling variety of flight maneuvers,” said Tiras Lin, a Johns Hopkins University student who is doing some of the research. “In designing MAVs, we can learn a lot from flying insects.” Because butterflies move their wings far too quickly for the human eye to detect all the movements, Lin and other researchers have come up with a special camera that takes 3,000 images per second. (Your family’s video camera takes no more than 60 images a second!) Other universities are at work developing their own tiny fliers. Butterfly research is being used in the development of micro air vehicles such as this one. (Robert J. Wood and Pratheev Sreethara/Harvard University)

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Going Out Guide: Nightlife Agenda

Every Tuesday, the Going Out Gurus highlight the week’s best DJs, bands, dance nights and parties. Find a longer list of events at www.goingoutguide.com . Home Brewers Match Up There’s been a lot of talk about DC Brau, 3 Stars and Chocolate City beers, but the truth is there are dozens of brewers in Washington, and Meridian Pint is offering the chance to taste their products for free. At the semi-regular Home Brewers Match Up, you can sip beverages made by two dozen amateur brewers — everything from hoppy IPAs to chocolate-chipotle stouts — and vote for your three favorites. (There’s a big tournament-of-champions showdown at the end of the year.) Admission and beer samples are free, but get to Meridian Pint’s basement bar on the early side, because the better beers tend to run out fast. Tuesday from 6 to 8 p.m. Meridian Pint, 3400 11th St. NW. 202-588-1075. www.meridianpint.com. Free. Assemble Here’s a concertgoing experience that promises to be different. Assemble is an aptly named event that brings together a handful of musicians for an improvised exercise that, we hope, will end with something cool. Saturday’s edition features Bob Boilen of NPR’s “All Songs Considered” (and former D.C. new wave star), Fugazi/French Toast percussionist Jerry Busher and Patrick Noecker of These Are Powers. They’ll sit in a circle and play their own micro-jams for a few minutes before passing the invisible baton to the next person. Eventually they’ll team up for a 10-minute jam. Video projections by Robin Hill will run continuously. After the experiment, get ready for loud music by Expensive [Expletive], a band that is percussive and funky enough to use a name inspired by Fela Kuti’s classic album. Saturday at 10 p.m. Comet Ping Pong, 5037 Connecticut Ave. NW. 202-364-0404. $10. Mad Fox Barleywine Fest In the aftermath of holiday party season, many people cut down on their drinking in January or give up altogether. But now that we’re into February, it might be time to cut loose again. This weekend, Mad Fox Brewing Co. in Falls Church will host its annual Barleywine Festival, celebrating the pumped-up beer style that goes over the top in terms of flavor, hops and alcohol level. (These beauties clock in between 9 and 15 percent alcohol by volume.) There will be about 30 barleywines to sample, including two from Mad Fox and others from Dogfish Head, Rogue, He’Brew and

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A vegan queen’s cupcakes take the crown

a line of people out the door or do you have a line of just vegans out the door?” Both carnivores and vegetarians scooped up their sticky buns and brownies, and in 2006 the business moved to a bigger space in Columbia Heights. A retro oven and refrigerator were brought in to hold condiments and the cabinets were painted mint green to give the feel of a 1950s kitchen. By then, Petersan’s partner had moved on to tour with a rock band. The bakery’s menu expanded to include breakfast and lunch dishes, and the shop garnered interest from bakers in Korea who came to train with Petersan for several weeks before ­returning home to open an outpost of the Sticky Fingers franchise in Seoul. Sticky Fingers also launched a wholesale business, packaging its products for resale at Whole Foods and other local stores. Last year Petersan got a call from Food Network, offering her a spot on the baking competition “Cupcake Wars.” She was ­pitted against another vegan baker and two others who used dairy products. Petersan won. “I thought it was going to be a long shot. But also that we absolutely have to win this because we’re the underdog,” she says. “So we went in it with full guns blazing.” The secret, she says, is in using high-quality ingredients and knowing how to work with them. Instead of butter, she uses non-hydrogenated margarines and shortenings. Soy milk, coconut milk, fresh fruits and nuts “are imperative,” as is really good chocolate and the restraint to not overmix a cake batter. In her second time on the show, she was cut in the second round, but Petersan was invited back for an All-Stars lineup. That time she and an assistant won with a collection of rock-and-roll-inspired cupcakes that included the Salt-n-Peppa, a “chocolate bourbon smoked pepper cupcake” with salted caramel, vanilla bean frosting and a tiny pair of headphones made of fondant. Each time the shows aired, the line at the counter grew a little longer. Sticky Fingers now sells thousands of cupcakes each week. People have begun asking to have their pictures taken with Petersan. It’s an odd thing to be a semi-celebrity vegan, but she’s not complaining. “The bigger picture is to show that vegan food is not scary,” she says. “It’s not a bad word, and my mission — my passion — is to prove it.” Petersan

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Barley wine’s not just for winter nights

made between 1968 and 2008. This strong ale (it could measure more than 12 percent alcohol by volume) was dosed with fresh yeast in the bottle, and as it continued to ferment, it developed enormous complexity over time. It was eventually deemed too expensive to make, but vintage-dated bottles continue to change hands on eBay. Some guidebooks refer to Thomas Hardy’s Ale as an “old ale,” and other terms such as “stock ale,” “stingo” and “malt wine” have been slapped on English strong ales as well. Beer taxonomists have drawn up guidelines to distinguish barley wine from similar styles, but they afford brewers a very long leash. Barley wines on the market range in color from honey-gold to deep mahogany. Alcohol can be as little as 8 percent, and as much as 15 percent in the case of Dogfish Head’s Olde School Barleywine, which incorporates dates and figs to add extra sugar for fermentation. Muddying the waters further is the fact that English and American brewers don’t always agree on what constitutes the ideal barley wine. English versions are malt forward, with sugary and toffeeish flavors dominating. American barley wines tend to be much hoppier. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine, with its immense resiny and fruity flavors, is a classic; six-packs and kegs of the 2012 vintage should hit the Washington market in mid-February. Hog Heaven Barleywine-Style Ale is dry-hopped with such an abundance of piney Columbus hops that it probably ought to be labeled an imperial IPA, except that the latter style didn’t exist in 1998 when Avery Brewing in Boulder, Colo., first released the brand. Dominion Millennium Ale, which survived the brewery’s move from Ashburn to Dover, Del., is getting a makeover this year, reports Casey Hollingsworth, vice president for sales and marketing. Specifically, the brewery has replaced East Kent Golding hops, a subtle, earthy English variety, with more aggressive strains Chinook and Apollo. “We’ve truly Americanized it,” says Hollingsworth. The brewery continues to add some Virginia honey to the brew kettle for “a nice, delicate, flowery aroma,” he adds. Hugh Sisson, founder and general partner of Clipper City Brewing in Baltimore, has been brewing his Below Decks Barleywine Style Ale for eight years, and is making no concessions to hop heads. “It’s very malt-driven,” he says of the 10 percent alcohol brew. “The West Coast barley wines are interesting, but to me, that’s not what barley wine is

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Washington Post food calendar for Feb. 11-Feb. 21

SATURDAY SPARKLING WINE TASTING: WASHINGTON D.C. INTERNATIONAL WINE FOOD FESTIVAL: SUNDAY COCKTAIL CLASS: FOOD AND DRINK IN MEDIEVAL CYPRUS: MONDAY CHOCOLATE, CHEESE AND BUBBLY: WINE DINNER: TUESDAY TUESDAY TEA: RESERVE NOW FEB. 17 CHOPIN VODKA DINNER: FEB. 19 CELEBRITY SURF ’N’ TURF DINNER: FEB. 21 ST. JUDE GOURMET GALA: WINE DINNER: — Becky Krystal SEND NOTICES to: To Do, Food, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, or e-mail food@washpost.com, 14 days in advance.

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Roger Boisjoly, engineer who warned of Challenger shuttle danger, dies at 73

The 1986 explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger and killed seven astronauts shocked the nation, but for one rocket engineer, the tragedy became a personal burden and created a lifelong quest to challenge the bureaucratic ethics that had caused the tragedy. Roger Boisjoly was an engineer at solid-rocket booster manufacturer Morton Thiokol and had begun warning as early as 1985 that the joints in the boosters could fail in cold weather, leading to a catastrophic failure of the casing. Then on the eve of the Jan. 28, 1986, launch, Mr. Boisjoly and four other space shuttle engineers argued late into the night against the launch. In cold temperatures, O-rings in the joints might not seal, they said, and could allow flames to reach the rocket’s metal casing. Their pleas and technical theories were rejected by senior managers at the company and NASA who said they had failed to prove their case and that the shuttle would be launched in freezing temperatures the next morning. It was among the biggest engineering miscalculations in history. A little more than a minute after launch, flames shot out of the booster joint, melted through the nearby hydrogen fuel tank and ignited a fireball that was watched by the astronauts’ families and much of the nation on television. Engineer Roger Boisjoly examines a model of the O-Rings, used to bring the Space Shuttle into orbit, at a meeting of senior executives and academic representatives in New York in 1991. Boisjoly died in January in Utah. (AP) Mr. Boisjoly could not watch the launch, so certain was he that the shuttle would blow up. In the months and years that followed, the disaster changed his career and permanently poisoned his view that NASA could be trusted to make the right decisions when matters came to life and death. Mr. Boisjoly, 73, died of cancer Jan. 6 in Nephi, Utah, his family said. The Challenger disaster and the resulting investigation pulled back the curtain on NASA’s internal culture, revealing a bureaucracy that had made safety secondary to its launch objectives and to the political support it needed to continue the shuttle program. “It was the end of the dream,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org and a longtime analyst of U.S. aerospace. “Before the Challenger, you could think about the idea of going boldly where no one had gone before. The accident ended it.” Mr. Boisjoly

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D.C. news in brief

Affordable housing building opens in Ward 8 Matthews Memorial Terrace, a 99-unit affordable housing building at 2616 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE in Ward 8, opened Jan. 31. The apartments will house 32 families headed by seniors and 67 low-income families. Amenities include a meeting room with kitchen facilities, a community room and a terrace-level courtyard that functions as a green roof. Matthews Memorial Baptist Church provides child development and senior services in an adjacent property. The church and a nonprofit planner, Community Builders, developed the property with $22 million from a public-private partnership. For information and residence applications, go to www.matthewsmemorialterrace.com. Garrison needs school supplies, volunteers Garrison Elementary, 1200 S St. NW, is collecting donations for its school store and seeking volunteers for its Saturday school program. The school store, part of a behavioral incentive program, sells school supplies, games and snacks. Items are bought with “wildcat paws,” which are issued to students who demonstrate respectfulness, responsibility or safety. The store teaches students to operate a business. Garrison’s Saturday program help students prepare for the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment Test in April. To volunteer or to donate supplies, snacks, games or puzzles to the store, contact Darryl Webster at 202-207-4964. D.C. Circulator meeting rescheduled for Feb. 29 The District Department of Transportation is having a public forum on the D.C. Circulator bus lines from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Feb. 29 at the Columbus Club, Union Station, 50 Massachusetts Ave. NE. Topics will include route performance and future plans for the system. The meeting was originally scheduled for Feb. 7. Send comments to brooke.fossey@dc.gov or via a link at www.dccirculator.com. For information, go to ddot.dc.gov . National science camp seeks applicants Applications are open for the National Youth Science Camp from June 27 to July 21 in Charleston, W.Va. Two graduating District high school seniors who excel in science, engineering or math will be chosen to attend the camp this summer, all expenses paid. Activities include research work with career scientists, student presentations and hiking. To apply, go to www.sboe.dc.gov by March 16. AARP offers free tax counseling, preparation Free tax counseling and preparation are available to low- and middle-income taxpayers, especially those 60 and older. The AARP Tax-Aide program has IRS-certified volunteers working in senior centers, libraries and community centers throughout the city. Help is available on a walk-in basis or by appointment, depending on the site. Tax counseling

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D.C. rat summit: Another day in the sun for city’s rodents

Lyme disease, rabies and other animal-borne ailments. “Like others, I want to ensure the humane treatment of animals, but when it comes to rodents and other animals that often carry diseases, human health must come first,” Cuccinelli wrote in an e-mail to The Washington Post. The law actually would allow “commensal rodents” — types of mice and rats that live in close contact with humans — to be destroyed. But critics of the law have argued that some other rodents are on the “protected” list, including the deer mouse and rice rat — two species whose stomping grounds include the D.C. area. That would make it difficult for pest-control workers to use lethal traps for rats, since those devices obviously couldn’t differentiate between the exempted and protected species. Officials in D.C.’s Department of the Environment, which will enforce the law, said they plan to consider all rodents exempt from the law’s protective provisions. Even if rats and mice weren’t exempt, it is unlikely that pest-control workers would release live rodents from their traps into the D.C. suburbs, said Bruce Colvin, a national consultant on rodent control issues who helped draft the District’s rodent control plan 12 years ago. “That just doesn’t happen,” he said. “Pest-control personnel usually end up handling dead rats, not live ones.” The controversy also has prompted Maryland Del. Patrick McDonough (R) to announce plans for an “anti-rat trafficking” bill that would make it illegal to transport vermin from the District into Maryland territory. Aides from McDonough’s Annapolis office said Tuesday that he still plans to go forward with the bill, but the state House of Delegates has not scheduled its introduction or assigned it to relevant committees. In the meantime, the Wildlife Protection Act awaits full implementation by the city. While restrictions on the handling of animals are in effect, the city has not identified funding to enforce a pest-control licensing regime included in the law. The environment department is in the process of drafting regulations setting prices and procedures for securing those licenses. Few concrete details of the upcoming rat summit have been set, according to Cuccinelli spokesman Brian J. Gottstein. There’s a historic precedent, however: D.C. previously hosted a rat summit in 1999, when then-Mayor Anthony Williams decided to declare war on the city’s rodent population. That summit eventually led to the plan Colvin helped craft, which remains the basis for D.C.’s current rodent

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For owners of ’60s-era Carderock Springs house, renovation ordeal was worth it

the whole thing.” A quick decision David and Barbara Beers’s passion for maintaining their home’s original style makes them ideal Carderock homeowners. And in fact, this is their second house in the neighborhood. Barbara, who works for Microsoft, grew up in Carderock Springs, and the couple had been living in her old house, spending five years seriously renovating it. But then the atrium house went on the market. While almost all of Carderock’s houses have pitched roofs, developer Bennett took a chance in the mid-1960s and built seven flat-roofed homes, each clad in western red heartwood cedar siding and featuring a glassed-in atrium at its center. Distinctly more contemporary than anything else in the neighborhood, the houses were featured in House and Garden and Architectural Record magazines. But they weren’t particularly popular with buyers, according to Shannon, and Bennett stopped building them. These days, the homes are in demand among Carderock residents and fans. Barbara Beers had long her eye on them, but she and David figured it would be forever before one opened up. Still, a couple of years ago David added their name to a waiting list to be notified when an atrium home was about to go on the market. As luck would have it, one of the houses soon became available. The home, which had been owned by an elderly blind man, was in pretty bad condition, and the sellers had no interest in fixing it up before putting it on the market. So the agent in charge, Theres Kellermann, took advantage of real estate laws that give a seller 48 hours to find a buyer before publicly listing a property. She turned to the waiting list. The Beerses were second in the queue, and the family that was first passed on the home. “We had 24 hours to decide,” remembered David. The pair drove over and met with the home’s owner. “We didn’t have time to do an inspection; we just did a 20- or 30-minute walk-through. We had to believe that no one was hiding information about the place.” It seemed like a good investment. The four-bedroom, three-bathroom house was selling for $900,000 and needed serious repairs. But the same model up the street had recently sold for over $1 million. So they decided to jump. “Barbara really loved it,” said David. “I was less eager. I saw how much work there was.” Highlighting

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Chinese official on leave amid defection rumors

a U.S. consulate. Chongqing officials posted a short, cryptic message on a microblog — the Chinese equivalent of Twitter — on Wednesday, saying that Wang Lijun was “receiving a vacation-style treatment” for overwork and mental stress. Several other Chinese microblogs speculated that Wang, a former city police chief, had sought to defect and posted pictures purportedly showing police surrounding the U.S. consulate in nearby Chengdu on Tuesday night. The episode drew unusual attention because Wang has close ties to Bo Xilai, Chongqing’s charismatic Communist Party chief and a rising star within the party who has been campaigning for a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee. A key part of Bo’s appeal involves his high-profile crackdown on crime and corruption in recent years. Wang played an integral role in that effort, in which police arrested several alleged criminal leaders while confiscating drugs and guns. The U.S. State Department confirmed Wednesday that Wang had requested and attended a meeting Monday at the Chengdu consulate, but U.S. officials would not comment on whether he sought asylum. “He did visit the consulate, and he later left the consulate of his own volition,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. Responding to online reports that Wang was forced to leave the consulate or dragged out, she said, “He walked out. It was his choice.” At a news briefing in Beijing on Thursday morning, Cui Tiankai, the vice foreign minister in charge of U.S. affairs, declined to offer specifics about Wang’s visit to the U.S. consulate, but, he said, the upcoming visit to Washington by Vice President Xi Jinping would not be affected by the incident. Asked later to elaborate, Cui said, “This issue has been resolved, and resolved quite smoothly.” It was unclear whether Wang’s departure resulted from a falling out between him and Bo. It was also unclear how the episode involving Wang could affect Bo’s political aspirations. Bo has pursued the Politburo seat with the zeal of a Western-style populist, most notably through “red culture,” a revival of socialist songs and culture from Mao Zedong’s time. Staff writer Keith Richburg in Beijing contributed to this report. More world news coverage: - Architect of Egypt’s NGO crackdown is Mubarak holdover - Russia says Assad wants dialogue - U.S. seeks smaller embassy presence in Iraq - NATO, Pakistan and Afghanistan reportedly in border talks - Ex-Marine sentenced to death in Iran needs U.S. intervention, lawyer pleads

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President’s next budget to cut Mars, solar system exploration

that have immeasurable benefit to the nation and inspire the human spirit of exploration we all have,” Rep. John Abney Culberson (R-Tex.) said. Last fall, NASA handed out $46 million to contractors to begin building instruments for the 2016 mission. But earlier this week, Alvaro Gimenez, top scientist at the European agency, told the BBC that NASA’s continued participation in the partnership was “highly unlikely.” “The impact of the cuts . . . will be to immediately terminate the Mars deal with the Europeans,” said G. Scott Hubbard, a Stanford University and former NASA planetary scientist who revived the agency’s Mars exploration program after the 1999 failures. “It’s a scientific tragedy and a national embarrassment.” The 2016 mission, called the Trace Gas Orbiter, was to sniff the Martian atmosphere for methane, which could signal the existence of microbes on the surface. The 2018 mission was to land a rover to gather rocks and soil for eventual return to Earth. An official familiar with deliberations at NASA said the agency is still hoping to launch a robotic Mars mission in 2018, although the goals and hardware would probably differ from those of the joint European project. With austere budgets expected across the federal government, NASA is finding itself squeezed. Last year, Congress ordered the agency to build a giant new rocket and a deep-space crew capsule. Congress also told the agency to finish the overbudgeted James Webb Space Telescope, now expected to launch no earlier than 2018. The executive branch’s budget request, unveiled every February, is used by federal agencies to set spending priorities. Details are often decided by officials in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. On Wednesday, planetary scientists accused the OMB of ignoring advice given to NASA by its scientific advisers. In May, planetary scientists told the agency they favored two big projects: the Mars missions, or, if those proved too expensive, a probe to explore Europa, an intriguing moon of Jupiter with an ice-covered ocean and, within it, conditions possibly favorable for life. “They don’t seem to be interested in finding life in the universe or letting the experts manage their own program,” Hubbard said of the OMB. “Low-level workers have substituted their judgment for 1,700 scientists and the National Academy of Sciences.” Culberson said the House committee would continue to push for the Europa mission, which Congress directed the agency to study this year.

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China confirms its official stayed one day at U.S. Consulate

Chongqing Vice Mayor Wang Lijun is being investigated after visiting the U.S. consulate in Chengdu. (AP/AP) BEIJING — The official Xinhua News Agency reported late Thursday, citing the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman’s office, that “Wang entered the U.S. general consulate in Chengdu on Feb. 6 and left after staying there for one day.” The report, on Xinhua’s Chinese- and English-language Web sites, was the Chinese government’s first acknowledgment that Wang — a former police chief renowned for tackling organized crime in Chongqing — had been at the consulate. On Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters in Washington that Wang had gone to the Chengdu consulate to meet with U.S. officials and had left “of his own volition.” Reports throughout the day Thursday in China’s official news media said Wang was suffering from “depression” and had been placed on medical leave. But the Internet was rife with unconfirmed speculation that Wang had gone to the U.S. mission to request political asylum, perhaps fearing he was about to be targeted for corruption. The case of the vice mayor has taken on broader significance because of his close ties to Chongqing’s Communist Party chief, Bo Xilai, a colorful figure in the party hierarchy who has been widely tipped for elevation to a spot on the powerful nine-member Politburo Standing Committee. Bo made his mark in Chong­qing in a controversial “hard strike” campaign against organized crime, with Wang as his top police enforcer. While the crackdown was popular with the public, human rights lawyers and others were critical, saying that the police ignored individual rights and targeted some innocent people. Bo also made headlines here — and some enemies — with his flamboyant style, including a “Red Culture” campaign in which he encouraged Chongqing residents to gather in public parks on weekends and sing old Communist Party songs. He also ordered the local Chongqing TV station to drop sitcoms and begin broadcasting “patriotic” programs. Some analysts saw Bo’s efforts as a means of self-promotion in advance of this year’s leadership transition. The mystery surrounding Wang — whether he actually tried to seek political asylum and if so, why — gave rise to speculation about a power struggle in the Communist Party’s top ranks. China’s Communist Party often uses corruption allegations to remove unwanted officials from prominent positions. According to the power struggle theory, if someone were determined to stop Bo’s rise, he or

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NRC approves construction of new nuclear power reactors in Georgia

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Thursday approved a construction and operating license for new nuclear power reactors for the first time since 1978, giving Southern Co. the green light to build two new units at its existing Vogtle site in Georgia. The commission voted 4-1 in favor, with NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko casting the sole vote against granting the license. Jaczko said later that he wanted binding assurances that the new reactors would be modified to meet recommendations made by the agency’s task force on the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant last year. “I think this license needed something that ensured that the changes as a result of Fukushima would be implemented,” Jaczko said in an interview after the vote. “It’s like when you go to buy a house and the home inspector identifies things that should be fixed. You don’t go to closing before those things are fixed.” Jaczko said he did not believe that those changes would be onerous or time consuming or that they would delay construction. He said they involved issues such as how the reactors would deal with an extended blackout and the use of better instrumentation for measuring the amount of water in spent fuel pools in the event of an accident. “To me, it’s just common sense,” he said. Southern, which filed its license application in March 2008, said it expects the project to cost about $14 billion. It will use Toshiba’s AP1000 reactors, the design of which the NRC certified in December, and it hopes to bring them online in 2016 and 2017. The new reactors, however, are no longer seen as the start of what the industry once predicted would be a nuclear renaissance. Virtually all of the 31 plants that had been proposed by 2009 have been shelved as a result of cheap natural gas, high construction costs, weak electricity demand and safety concerns following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan. Ten anti-nuclear groups have vowed to file suit against the NRC if it approves the license as expected. The groups said they would argue that the agency broke the law by failing to consider the full lessons of the Fukushima disaster, in which a string of four reactors were badly damaged in an earthquake and tsunami. Southern, whose Georgia Power subsidiary owns 45.7 percent of the project, has already spent $4 billion preparing the site and

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Pentagon to ease restrictions on women in some combat roles

The Pentagon will maintain bans on women serving in most ground combat units, defense officials said Thursday, despite pressure from lawmakers and female veterans who called the restrictions outdated after a decade of war. After taking more than a year to review its policies on orders from Congress, the Defense Department announced that it would open about 14,000 combat-related positions to female troops, including tank mechanics and intelligence officers on the front lines. But the Pentagon said it would keep 238,000 other positions — about one-fifth of the regular active-duty military — off-limits to women, pending further reviews. Virtually all of those jobs are in the Army and Marine Corps. Pentagon officials said that they were committed to lifting barriers to women but that it was difficult to make sweeping changes on the battlefield during a time of war. “Sometimes this takes longer than you’d like,” said Virginia S. Penrod, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for military personnel policy. “It may appear too slow to some, but I see this as a great step forward.” In the 1970s, Penrod recalled, she was one of the first women allowed to serve at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Female troops had previously been banned there because it was “too cold,” she said, adding that the military has come a long way since then. Advocates for women in the military, however, accused the Pentagon of dragging its feet and only belatedly recognizing the critical role that female troops have played in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They said many of the job openings announced by the Pentagon merely codify the reality on the battlefield, where commanders have stretched rules for years to allow women to bear arms and support ground combat units. Since 2001, about 280,000 women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Defense Department statistics; 144 have been killed, and 865 have been wounded. The biggest previous advance for women in uniform came in 1994, when the Clinton administration removed restrictions on more than a quarter-million troop slots. Since then, however, the Pentagon has kept in place a prohibition on women serving in units whose primary mission is “direct” ground combat, such as artillery, infantry and tank units. “Since then, it’s been drip, drip, drip,” said Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, expressing frustration with what she called incremental changes. “This is

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GAO study looks at impact of highway tolls

Vehicles enter the toll plaza. Tolls for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge went up in 2011. (Michael S. Williamson/WASHINGTON POST) A new study by the Government Accountability Office finds that variable tolling can help reduce congestion on U.S. highways, while also focusing attention on the fairness of such transportation systems. So far, there are few examples of variable tolling in the D.C. region. But that is changing, and other urban areas already have built up some experience with them. The GAO report to Congress, released in January, addresses many of the concerns raised by people who drive along or live near Maryland’s Intercounty Connector and the privately built Dulles Greenway, as well as those awaiting the opening of the high-occupancy toll lanes on the Capital Beltway in Virginia. Tolling techniques Variable tolling takes several forms. Each is a response to congestion, and to the fact that limited space and limited revenue reduce the likelihood that new lanes will be built without toll financing. The new forms of tolling are used not only to pay for construction and to reward investors, but also to manage traffic through a technique known as congestion pricing. Congestion pricing in the United States comes in one or two forms, the GAO report said. High-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes vary the toll according to current demand. The varying toll moderates the number of drivers entering the lanes so speeds can stay at 45 to 55 mph. The 495 Express Lanes on the Beltway and the other HOT lanes planned for Interstate 95 will be examples of that. HOT lanes offer a free ride to those meeting the HOV requirements, but charge other drivers. The other format bases the toll on time of day, charging a pre-set premium price for travel during peak periods. The Intercounty Connector and Dulles Greenway follow that model. The traffic management goal is similar: The changing toll encourages drivers to use the highway when it’s likely to be less congested. History and future The first congestion pricing project in the United States was launched in 1995 in Orange County, Calif. The GAO report now counts 41 pricing projects either open or under development on highways, bridges, and tunnels. Tolls range from 25 cents to $14. It looks like the way of the future Performance So how are they doing? The report describes the results of its research and other studies that examined how variable

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League monitoring mission on the ground in Syria offers the only possibility to directly affect the violence, administration officials said. The mission was suspended last month amid fears for the safety of the monitors, and the Arabs have shown little inclination to send the monitors back without some kind of protection. The Arab League is meeting in Cairo on Sunday to discuss the situation. On Friday, the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, posted on the Facebook page of the U.S. Embassy in Damascus satellite images showing what he said were Syrian troops firing mortar and artillery shells at residential neighborhoods in several cities. Ford was recalled to Washington this week and the embassy was closed following a series of mysterious explosions in the capital in late December and early January in which at least 70 people died. The government blamed the attacks on al-Qaeda. Following similar explosions in Aleppo on Friday, the state news agency SANA said that two suicide bombers driving white minibuses struck within minutes of one another in separate neighborhoods shortly after 9 a.m. The first attack targeted a law enforcement department and killed 11 people, and the second struck a military security branch and killed 17, some of them children playing in a nearby park, the agency said. The residents of Aleppo, a mostly middle-class mercantile city, have largely refrained from taking part in the mass anti-government demonstrations that have swept much of the rest of the country. But in recent weeks there have been signs that the unrest is reaching into the city, with protests erupting in several neighborhoods and suburbs as unhappiness grows with the levels of violence being used by the government to suppress its opponents elsewhere. Free Syrian Army spokesman Col. Malik al-Kurdi denied that rebels had carried out the bombings, but he said they had staged attacks against Syrian security forces immediately beforehand. “While our soldiers were withdrawing, the explosions took place,” he said. “We don’t know what really happened. It could be that their bombs and ammunition blew up or that they staged the explosions to imply that the Free Syrian Army has sophisticated explosives.” Sly reported from Beirut. More world news coverage: - In Helmand, training local police is a challenge - Pentagon to ease restrictions on women in some combat roles - In Egypt’s bread, signs of economic weakness - Read more headlines from around the world

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The National Zoo in winter offers special treats

Lelie, an 18-month-old cub, wants to play, but her brother John doesn’t seem so sure. These two won’t be playing much longer because the zoo’s three male cubs will soon be separated from the rest of the family. (Ann Cameron Siegal/For The Washington Post) “Where is everybody??” exclaimed Pearl Benjamin, 10, when she arrived at the National Zoo one Sunday afternoon last month. The walkways were empty. Welcome to the winter zoo. If you’ve ever gone there with your school on a spring field trip or tried to be patient as your parents hunted for a parking space there in the summer, you know how crowded the zoo can get. It’s sometimes hard to get close enough to really see the animals. Winter is different; it’s a time for quiet observation. Fifth-grader Simon Rosenthal of Chevy Chase was doing research for a school project on lemurs, primates that live on Madagascar, an island off the southeast coast of Africa. A red panda climbs a tree at the zoo. The adult red pandas are usually outside during the winter. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post) With room to spread out his notebook in the small-mammal house, Simon took notes as he and his dad observed how red-ruffed lemurs use their long tails for balance. “You really get to study animals up close,” he said. Some animals are more active Ivan Mallon, 9, visiting from North Carolina, saw two lion cubs squabbling. “First there was a low rumble,” he said. Then he heard a loud, ferocious roar from one of the cubs. Later, the 18-month-old cubs wrestled playfully in a dusting of snow as only six people watched. Another good reason for a trip to the zoo this month is that the male cubs are getting old enough that zoo officials expect to separate them from the rest of the family within the next few weeks. So this is a great chance to see the family together one last time. The lions are most likely to be outside when the temperatures are in the 50s. On colder days their outside time varies according to what zookeepers think is best. Ivan also visited the Great Ape House, where he watched orangutans use purple sheets to play peek-a-boo with one another and visitors. Without leaves to block your view, you can see how red pandas use their “false thumbs” to grasp bamboo. (Panda thumbs don’t have

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Don’t throw us an Iraq victory parade

cheering and it’s back to business as usual. That’s what scares me. Less than 2 percent of Americans serve in the military, and for them, a parade would be just another superficial acknowledgment of a sacrifice that has not been shared and certainly not celebrated. Some people argue that it’s a way to show support for the troops, some argue that it’s premature since there’s still a war in Afghanistan, and others argue that Iraq and Afghanistan are different fights. While all this arguing is going on, veterans are struggling. In this country, an average of 18 veterans commit suicide every day. The jobless rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is as high as 15 percent. They are trying to find work despite having been labeled ticking time bombs, unable to assimilate back into society, plagued with post-traumatic stress. Later this month, on an evening like any other in America, nearly 70,000 veterans will spend the night on the street while President Obama and the first lady host a special White House dinner to honor 200 or so hand-picked Iraq veterans from a war that produced more than 30,000 wounded in action. Across the country, on any given night, nearly 5,000 dinner tables have an empty place where a loved one who never came home from the war used to sit. But maybe a parade would be a nice, quick way to thank our troops for doing what so many chose not to do and for volunteering so that there wouldn’t be a draft. We’ve had a decade of war in which almost everyone received a deferment. The question, then, is when to throw the party. Will it be appropriate to have one when we finally pull out of Afghanistan, as expected, in the summer of 2013? Will there be a parade then? Who knows and who cares. The victory parades after World War II were iconic, and they were celebrations for a whole nation touched by the war. It made perfect sense to have them. If you think about it, in a twisted way, not throwing them for the Iraq war makes perfect sense as well. It reflects the attitude Americans have had toward this conflict. A parade honoring Iraq veterans would be nothing more than lip service to the very small minority of people who fought to keep the majority entirely unaffected by the war. We’ve gone from

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Robert W. Roche, Africa specialist

Robert W. Roche, 61, a former Africa specialist with Catholic Relief Services, died Jan. 12 at Sanctuary Holy Cross Nursing Home in Burtonsville. He had been in a comatose state since 1997, when he was struck by an automobile while crossing a street in Columbia, said his son, Robert L. Roche. Since the accident, Mr. Roche had been cared for by his family at their home in Columbia until recently, when he was hospitalized for pneumonia. The family is awaiting results of a private autopsy to determine the exact cause of death. Robert Winslow Roche was born in Monroeville, Pa., and was an Eagle Scout while growing up. He graduated in 1972 from the University of Notre Dame and became a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in Zaire. After the Peace Corps, he joined Catholic Relief Services and had assignments in Mauritania, Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Burkino Faso, Benin and Ghana. In 1994, he settled in Columbia. At the time of the accident, he was working in Baltimore as an Africa specialist with Catholic Relief Services. Survivors include his wife of 31 years, Louise Kilombo Roche of Columbia; three children, Robert Lumengu Roche of Washington and Melissa Mupondo Roche and Annette Kubatuka Roche, both of Baltimore; his mother, Wanda Elizabeth Roche of Fort Myers, Fla.; three brothers; two sisters; and a grandson. — Bart Barnes

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Economic weakness and policy gridlock

the housing sector showed some faint signs of life, with a decrease in the glut of houses that is keeping prices down. Builder confidence rose and climbed further in more recent weeks to its highest level since June 2007, well before the recession began. Notwithstanding these improvements, the unemployment rate has stayed above 8 percent for three years. Long-term unemployment has decreased but remains at a near-historic high. There are dangers beyond the hardships this imposes on those individuals directly affected. Skills erode as workers spend time unemployed, making it harder for them to find new jobs. Meanwhile, policymakers in Washington have limited options with which to support the economy. Between the political gridlock and the coming elections, it is very unlikely that significant legislation will be passed before November. Accordingly, the administration has focused on executive action, especially regarding housing. Last fall, Obama officials announced a ramped-up effort to allow more “underwater” borrowers to refinance their mortgages at lower rates. More recently, the administration’s foreclosure prevention program was expanded: Eligibility was broadened and incentive payments to banks that reduce the principal balance on loans to troubled borrowers were increased. Additional tools for foreclosure prevention — such as forgiveness of mortgage debt — are part of a settlement announced Thursday between state and federal officials and the largest U.S. banks involved with servicing mortgages whose borrowers subsequently defaulted. The Federal Reserve could take steps to further boost demand. Fed leaders indicated in January that they expect to keep the federal funds rate — its traditional policy tool — close to zero percent until late 2014. Given the Fed’s stated expectation that the unemployment rate will decline only gradually, combined with its expectation that inflation will remain at or below the desired target, the Fed could soon attempt to stimulate the economy through unconventional measures such as more purchases of mortgage-backed securities or Treasury bonds. This policy is designed to ease financial conditions in ways that stimulate investment, exports and consumer spending. But these complicated issues barely register in the dynamic of the 2012 election. In the Republican primaries, a surprising debate has emerged about the merits of capitalism — a narrative that temporarily eclipsed the discussion of whether President Obama’s economic policies have made the economy better or worse. Given the volatility of the Republican nominating process so far, several political surprises are likely along the road to Election Day.

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In China, will transition bring real change?

decision to help consolidate the power of Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang,” said Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution, “and to make the transition more orderly and prepared.” A vist to Washington by Xi next week will add to the choreographed effort. But beneath the top two jobs, little else seems settled, or at least is known publicly, about a shadowy selection process that takes place largely behind closed doors and involving the most senior of China’s Communist Party leaders and ex-officials. The continued jockeying is for positions on the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, considered the most powerful body in the country’s ruling structure. Seven of the current nine members are due to change — only Xi and Li will retain their positions. Who will occupy the remaining spots, or even whether the Standing Committee might be expanded to 11 seats, is subject to an ongoing guessing game. The fragility of the process was underscored by reports that Wang Lijun, vice mayor of the sprawling western municipality of Chongqing, was placed under official investigation, after visiting the U.S. consulate in nearby Chengdu on Feb. 6. Wang, with a reputation as an anti-crime fighter, was allied to Chongqing’s Party Chief Bo Xilai, considered a top contender for a Standing Committee seat, possibly inheriting the portfolio that would place him in charge of China’s security apparatus. But the loss of one of Bo’s top deputies — and unconfirmed rumors that Wang may have tried to seek political asylum — have thrown off all predictions about Bo’s future. Beyond the intrigue of who’s in and who’s out, there are larger questions over whether the new leadership team led by Xi will mean a change of course in China’s policy direction. Will the economy continue to open up, particularly to foreign competition? Will there be any change in China’s regional policy, including sometimes tense relations with some neighbors over territorial disputes in the South China Sea? Will there be a new détente with the United States, or more confrontation over bilateral and global concerns? How will the new leaders deal with growing social tensions — protests over land rights, worker strikes and mounting unrest in the Tibetan region and among ethnic Uighurs in western Xinjiang province? And, one question overhanging all: Will the new leadership prove any more willing to open up the country’s authoritarian political system to allow more pluralism, a more independent

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Top general assassinated in Damascus

the capital to witness large-scale anti-government protests until they were suppressed there last fall. Kholi is not the first senior military official to be assassinated in recent months, as the protest movement has rapidly evolved in many parts of the country into an armed, if disorganized, insurgency. But the brazen attack in the center of the normally calm capital, coming a day after twin suicide bombings in the commercial center of Aleppo, heightened the building sense of vulnerability in the two major cities that have remained largely immune to the violence raging elsewhere. The Local Coordination Committees, an opposition group, said 30 people were killed by security forces on Saturday as the government sustained its assault aimed at crushing the opposition in Homs, several rural suburbs of Damascus and a town in the southern province of Daraa, which are among some of the locations that have in recent months fallen under the sway of the rebel Free Syrian Army. The spreading violence has heightened concerns that militant groups linked to al-Qaeda may seek to exploit the growing chaos to project their own extremist ambitions onto an uprising that started out as a peaceful protest movement demanding change. The McClatchy news service on Saturday quoted U.S. officials as saying that al-Qaeda in Iraq was responsible for two suicide bombings that killed 44 people in Damascus on Dec. 23, and also, perhaps, Friday’s bombings in Aleppo, in which 28 people died. The al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is believed to be hiding in Pakistan, ordered operatives of the Iraq-based al-Qaeda affiliate to carry out the attacks, McClatchy said. Intelligence officials told The Washington Post that while the recent bombings in Syria have the hallmarks of al-Qaeda operations, they have found no conclusive link to al-Qaeda or its Iraqi affiliate. The officials said, however, that it is plausible that al-Qaeda, marginalized by the recent uprisings across the Arab world, will attempt to insert itself into the effort to topple the Assad regime. “It wouldn’t be a surprise that al-Qaeda in Iraq — which has operational networks in Syria — would seek to join the opposition and attack the Assad regime,” a U.S. official said. Miller reported from Washington. More world news coverage: - U.S. sees few good options in Syria - Al-Awlaki led ‘underwear bomber’ plan - In Helmand, training local police is a challenge - Read more headlines from around the world

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As wildfire season nears, the aging fleet of air tankers raises concerns

could be put down much sooner. During a routine maintenance check of one plane, a 12-inch crack was discovered near its left wing, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a directive Monday to ground the damaged plane and carefully inspect every plane in the government’s fleet. At least three large air tankers have crashed since 2002, killing eight people, according to a memorial posted by Associated Aerial Firefighters. “I don’t know yet if [the damaged plane] will be ready,” said Dan Snyder, president of Neptune Aviation Services, a Montana company under a five-year contract to provide nine air tankers at a cost of $10,000 a day for maintenance, flight and training. “My engineers are still looking at it.” Large planes take brutal beatings from wildfires. Snyder said temperatures reach 120 degrees in the cockpit, and repeated takeoffs and landings add to the pressure. An analysis found that the crack in Neptune’s plane was caused by stress from hard landings. Critics of the Forest Service wonder why the strategy released Friday was years in the making. Observers said that although it is a step forward, the plan falls short of Harbour’s promise in June that the agency would prepare a proposal for newer large, fixed-wing aircraft and take an appropriations request to Congress in August. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee spokesman Robert Dillon said the agency has not made a request to appear before the committee. Forest Service representatives came to the office for the first time Friday to deliver a copy of the strategy to staff, he said. “Trying to figure out the right attributes . . . the right specifications, and . . . working across the variety of land and . . . just coordinating with people takes a bunch of time,” Harbour said. “We’re happy it’s out. It’s a part of the discussion we have to have with Congress.” Money also played a role in the agency’s struggle to draft a proposal to modernize. Its pricey shopping list of planes was not acceptable to the Office of Management and Budget. The agency sought state-of-the-art C-130Js, at $80 million each, a price it cannot afford, according to congressional staffers and aviation experts. The head-turning cargo plane flies at nearly 400 mph and can deliver an optimal load of 4,000 gallons of fire suppressant. Harbour called the C-130J “an aircraft . . . designed for the kinds

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NASA’s science missions bring the universe into sharper focus even as agency struggles with manned flight

of NASA) Science at NASA is not without serious problems, a fact expected to be reflected in the Obama administration’s budget request Monday. The James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble, has gone far over budget and is still years from launch. The next Mars rover has also experienced cost overruns. As a result, planetary science, one of the divisions within NASA’s science directorate, will suffer a sharp cut under the new Obama budget, according to scientists familiar with the administration’s plans. Scientists expect that NASA will terminate its collaboration on two European-led robotic Mars missions scheduled for later this decade. The question is: To what extent will future science missions be squeezed, delayed or terminated by the NASA budget crunch? What’s certain is that NASA has managed in recent years to launch a formidable fleet of scientific instruments. Activity abounds NASA’s internal chart shows 86 missions, involving 96 spacecraft, either in service or preparation. That doesn’t include the two European Mars missions. It does include other international collaborations, and the extended operations of aging spacecraft that have completed their primary mission and are still blinking away. One probe, New Horizons, is on its way to Pluto. Another, Messenger, has been orbiting Mercury since March. A lunar orbiter launched in 2009 has mapped the moon in unprecedented detail, and two more NASA spacecraft achieved lunar orbit six weeks ago on a mission to study the moon’s gravitational field and interior structure. NASA’s Juno spacecraft blasted off in August on a five-year mission to Jupiter. The robotic probe Cassini continues to study Saturn, and in a week will make another close pass of the huge moon Titan. Kepler, a space telescope launched in 2009, has found 61 planets by last count, with many more candidate planets yet to be confirmed. The longer Kepler observes a small patch of deep space, the more likely it is that it will detect a true Earth twin — a planet that’s both Earth-size and in a propitious orbit that puts it in a star’s “habitable zone.” NASA is eager to see what happens on the morning of Aug. 6, when the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory, launched in November, lands in a crater and dispatches a souped-up rover, Curiosity, to look for signs that Mars was once warm, wet and teeming with Martian life. The laboratory will land on Mars using a never-before-deployed

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Music Review: Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center

One of the advantages of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s residency at the University of Maryland School of Music is that local audiences get to hear the celebrated conductor-less ensemble in action. On Friday night, the musicians stepped out of the classroom and into the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center for a concert with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. The performance is just one component of Orpheus’s residency. School of Music director Robert Gibson noted that Orpheus players coach students in chamber music, a crucial step to becoming a well-rounded orchestral player. “There are elements in large ensemble performance that can’t come from a conductor,” Gibson said. “Listening closely, knowing when to lead and follow and adopting the collaborative spirit of chamber music brings qualitative results.” Friday’s concert epitomized those results. Orpheus, with 23 players and a smart program, showed how to blend chamber music transparency with a full symphonic sound. Michael Tippett’s underappreciated Divertimento on “Sellinger’s Round” was an inspired choice for an opener. An ingenious, Renaissance-styled stew intricately spiced with 20th-century dissonances, Tippett’s suite provided five viewpoints on an old English dance tune, including elegant solos for violinist Eric Wyrick, syncopated viola strumming and quirky excursions for winds, which quickly evaporated in Dekelboum Hall’s troublesome acoustics. Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet (Decca/Kasskara) Sonically, Honegger’s impressionistic “Pastorale d’ete” fared better. Softly undulating strings supported a twittering of winds, references to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony and Julie Landsman’s soaring horn. The tranquilizing swelter of a summer day was palpable. There was also heat in Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, but perhaps too much. The tremendously energetic performance felt, at times, strangely overdriven. This is not heart-on-sleeve Tchaikovsky; it’s the composer’s homage to Mozart. Yet the aggressively attacked phrases in the opening movement and the famous waltz (far from lilting) would have sounded more at home in the heady melodrama of the fourth symphony. But there was also subtlety and beauty: a delicate scrim of tone opened the Elegie; and in the Finale, low strings produced waves of lustrous, chocolate-dark sound while violins plucked like balalaikas. More musical impersonations materialized in Shostakovich’s whip-smart Piano Concerto No. 1. Composed as a vehicle for himself in 1933, the concerto prominently features a single trumpet, backed by strings. The music’s carefree personality marked high times for the lauded composer. But those days were numbered. It wouldn’t be long before Shostakovich’s brilliant but acerbic opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” would land him

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Community banks and credit unions brace for end of Fannie, Freddie

credit unions out of the market. “We want some sort of mechanism or entities that would provide equal access to community banks,” said Ann Grochala, vice president of lending and accounting policy at the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade group. “There’s a variety of possibilities out there . . . but we haven’t seen the solution yet.” Holding on to their loans Traditionally, community banks and credit unions kept on their books a majority of the loans they originated. Credit Union National Association, for instance, estimates that its members sold between 25 and 40 percent of their loans before the financial crisis. Those percentages grew as falling interest rates fueled demand for mortgages. “Credit unions individually are fairly small in this business,” said Bill Hampel, chief economist for the credit union group. “But if there’s no publicly supported vehicle to the secondary markets, each credit union would be so small that they would not get good pricing or access. And that would cost credit union members.” Hampel said the association is talking with the Treasury Department about the future of McLean-based Freddie Mac and Washington-based Fannie Mae, but he noted that credit unions are working on contingency plans. One solution, he said, could be greater reliance on credit union service organizations. Such entities enable institutions of all asset sizes to make loans by collectively managing the risks. Grochala said the community bank association is also considering a cooperative structure, modeled after the Federal Home Loan Banks, whereby participating banks would be responsible for capitalizing the entity. Still, she said, “there must be some sort of continued government ties because that provides the liquidity source you truly need and confidence to the markets,” Grochala said. “There are a variety of ways that could function, whether it be an explicit or implicit fee paid for the guarantee.” While Cardinal Bank chief executive Bernard Clineburg doesn’t discount the viability of a cooperative model, he stressed there are private investors, such as pension funds, buying mortgages from community banks like his. Tougher on borrowers McLean-based Cardinal, he said, holds on to less than 10 percent of the $3 billion to $5 billion in mortgages it originates annually. Clineburg said the bank doesn’t sell directly to Fannie and Freddie but instead moves loans to aggregators that are likely to work with the mortgage giants. Cardinal, he said, should suffer little impact if the

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In Md., fear for the turtles

biologists said. But several wildlife experts said the disease’s short-term effects are probably affecting the food chain in the ICC study area between Muncaster Mill Road and Emory Lane, just west of Georgia Avenue in northern Silver Spring. The birds, snakes and raccoons that dine on salamanders and tadpoles have less food at their disposal, experts say. Meanwhile, the loss of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tadpoles and salamander larvae wiped out in two consecutive breeding seasons has probably left far more of the insects that young salamanders and frogs eat. “What is the ecological significance of a virus that can kill every one of an animal’s offspring? The implications of that baffle me,” said David Green, a veterinary pathologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. Wildlife experts say they’re also concerned that the sudden appearance of ranavirus, a disease that some believe has been lurking in the United States for a century, might signal that local ponds and wetlands are becoming more susceptible to disease under the stresses of climate change, pollution and development. “Amphibians are very good indicators of the health of our ecosystem,” said Scott Smith, a wildlife ecologist for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources. “When we see things happen to them, it means our environment is unhealthy.” Green, the veterinary pathologist, said ranavirus causes measles-like or severe herpes-like symptoms. Often, turtles discharge mucus from their eyes and noses. He said the virus damages their skin, palate, esophagus, stomach, liver, spleen and blood vessels. ICC researchers said they found some turtles dead within four days of their first symptoms. The ICC tadpoles and young salamanders became sluggish and were seen swimming off-kilter before bleeding into the skin of their bellies, thighs and feet. “It’s a really, really, really horrible disease,” Seigel said. Confirmed cases Ranavirus, first identified in the United States in 1968, has been suspected or confirmed in turtle and amphibian deaths in 29 states 71 times since 1997, according to the USGS, which tracks animal diseases at its National Wildlife Health Center. Maryland’s first confirmed case came in 2005, when it and the Chytrid fungus killed more than 2,000 young wood frogs and spotted salamanders near Montgomery’s portion of the C&O Canal, Smith said. Since 2000, ranavirus has been confirmed in Anne Arundel, Prince George’s and Baltimore counties. Virginia’s only confirmed outbreak hit in 2003, when ranavirus killed 20 Southern

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In Md., fear for the turtles

leopard frogs in the Virginia Beach area, according to the USGS. No cases have been reported in the District. Ken Ferebee, a National Park Service wildlife specialist in the city’s Rock Creek Park, said he’s seen no signs of the disease in the box turtles and pond life that he monitors about 12 miles south of the Montgomery outbreak area. He said he hopes box turtles’ slow pace and propensity to stick close to home will keep the disease contained near the ICC. “I don’t think it’s something we can stop,” Ferebee said. “If we find it in the park, it will probably be way too late.” ‘Devastating impacts’ The Towson University findings, which are just beginning to circulate among biologists in the Northeast, stemmed from a $300,000 state-funded study of how to best save the turtles that, unlike deer and foxes, needed help to escape 18 miles of woods and wetlands ahead of the bulldozers. A team of Towson students attached radio transmitters to 123 of the more than 900 turtles rescued, allowing them to track the animals’ every move. The idea was to study whether the turtles fared better by being relocated about six miles away or to an adjacent area separated from the construction site by a fence. The study was considered potentially important to highway agencies and developers across the country, who are under pressure to reduce the environmental effects of road and building construction. Rob Shreeve, the Maryland State Highway Administration’s ICC environmental manager, said the study was helpful in concluding that the turtles’ survival rates — even with ranavirus — were about the same even when they were moved to different locations with similar living conditions. Seigel, the Towson researcher, said he has no data to show that turtles that were moved from the ICC’s path started the outbreak or were more susceptible to illness. He said his team checked the turtles’ mouths, eyes, noses and weight to make sure they were healthy before moving them. The ranavirus death rate in turtles that were moved from the ICC site was roughly the same as the mortality rate in a control group of turtles that already lived in the area and never relocated, Seigel said. The apparently fast-acting virus didn’t begin affecting any of the turtles until about 18 months after the ICC animals were moved, making it less likely that the relocation was at

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China’s president-in-waiting heads to Washington for a visit crucial to both nations

The man who is expected to become China’s next president will arrive in Washington on Monday for a visit crucial to his political ascension and also to U.S. hopes for easing the mounting tensions between two of the world’s most powerful nations. Xi Jinping He is, for example, quick to mention his fondness for the American Midwest, having toured Iowa’s small towns in 1985 as a lowly provincial official, visiting farms and staying overnight in the cramped bedroom of a middle-class family, surrounded by their boys’ “Star Trek” figures. In exclusive comments to the Washington Post, Xi said of that trip: “I was deeply impressed by America’s advanced technology and the hospitable and industrious American people. That visit drove home to me the importance of closer exchanges between our peoples and gave me a better understanding of China-U.S. relations.” But it remains unclear whether Xi’s familiarity with U.S. culture will help lead to warmer relations between the countries after years of intensifying economic and military rivalry. So far, he appears no less likely than previous Chinese leaders to resist demands for expanded human rights at home or to rail against Westerners for meddling in Chinese affairs. This week’s visit, however, could indicate whether Xi’s ascension might result at least in a more candid and productive rapport, current and former U.S. officials say. “Right now, I think there’s a lot of concern in the administration and Congress that we’re heading for a very rough five to 10 years,” said Michael Green, who was a White House adviser on Asia under President George W. Bush. “If there’s a sense in his meetings here . . . that he’s a guy we could do business with, that could help.” There’s little doubt that the United States and China have entered a rough period, with tensions over China’s economic policies and its territorial ambitions in the South China Sea, among other issues. For its part, Beijing has sounded increasingly alarmed by the Obama administration’s shift of military resources toward Asia. None of those issues are likely to be resolved during Xi’s visit, which includes meetings at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department. Rather, U.S. officials say, the visit is an opportunity to build a relationship and to get a better sense of how Xi operates. The few U.S. and foreign diplomats who have met with him at length say the stylistic

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For China’s next leader, the past is sensitive

After years of persecution by a Communist Party he helped bring to power, Xi Zhongxun was hauled from solitary confinement and taken to see his family. The purged revolutionary could barely recognize his own offspring and recalled a melancholy Tang Dynasty poem: “My children do not know me. They smile and say: ‘Stranger, where do you come from?’ ” More than three decades later, his son is set to become China’s next leader. Just months from his near-certain elevation to the country’s most powerful post — general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party — 58-year-old Xi Jinping arrived in Washington on Monday for a visit that U.S. officials hope will clarify the direction of the world’s fastest-rising economic and military power. Probing where Xi might be going, however, involves answering a question that, back home in China, is largely taboo: Where exactly is the leader-in-waiting coming from? A brief, official biography issued by Xinhua News Agency makes no mention of Xi’s illustrious father, who commanded communist guerrillas in northwest China, rose to the rank of deputy prime minister after the 1949 revolution, got ousted by Mao Zedong in 1962 and, after 16 years in disgrace, reemerged to pioneer some of China’s boldest economic reforms. In written replies to questions submitted by The Washington Post, Xi did not answer a query about how he has been influenced by his father’s troubles. That Xi’s father — who died in 2002 at age 88 — was once one of Mao’s trusted lieutenants and also one of his early victims is not a secret. Nor is the family’s suffering. Xi himself mentioned the trauma in a private August meeting in Beijing with Vice President Biden. But the details of the elder Xi’s tumultuous career — his rupture with Mao, his close ties to other purge targets who are still on the party’s blacklist, and his defiance of rigid orthodoxy — are increasingly sensitive topics in a one-party state where history is shaped to serve the present. Like father, like son? Fixing an official line on the elder Xi “has become more and more complicated,” said Jia Juchuan, a party historian entrusted with writing an official biography of Xi Jinping’s father. He published a first volume in 2008, covering his life up to 1949, but a second volume recounting subsequent, strife-torn years is stalled. The text was finished three years ago, but Xi Jinping’s anointment

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Rail and trucking industries call a truce

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted 33 to 22 on Feb. 2 to delay any expansion in use of trucks weighing more than 80,000 pounds for three years, so the Transportation Department can study the potential effect on highway safety, roads and bridges. The measure, as originally written by House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman John L. Mica (R-Fla.), would have allowed states to permit more 97,000-pound trucks on U.S. interstate highways and would have expanded use of double- and triple-trailers in states that allow them. The language on longer, heavier trucks prompted a lobbying and public-relations blitz before last week’s vote that included a YouTube video, posted by a railroad equipment trade group, that showed triple-trailer trucks weaving on rainy highways. Burnley accused railroad interests at the time of running a “multimillion- dollar propaganda campaign.” Trucking companies such as Con-way and shippers including Home Depot and International Paper were pushing for the language to improve efficiency as freight volumes are expected to surge. The rail industry opposed the language, citing a study that showed it would reduce railroad traffic by 19 percent. In addition to the railroads and their suppliers, big-truck opponents included highway safety advocates, truck accident victims, independent truck drivers, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and state highway patrols. Before the deal was announced Thursday, the Railway Supply Institute, which represents makers of railroad equipment and technology such as Wabtec Corp. and Alstom SA, asked its member companies “to help us keep the pressure on your members of Congress by urging your employees to call and ask them to vote ‘no’ on bigger trucks,” according to a report in Railway Age, an industry newsletter. The Washington-based institute told members their employees could call the Coalition Against Bigger Trucks’s toll-free hotline to be connected to their representative’s office. The coalition, based in Alexandria, is a railroad-industry-funded group that works with law enforcement, local government, engineers, independent truckers and highway safety advocates to oppose increasing truck size and weights. “We are obviously disappointed that the weight provisions didn’t survive in the committee vote, but there are significant productivity gains in the bill,” McNally said. Holly Arthur, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based railroad association, declined to comment. The Highway Trust Fund, which finances U.S. road, bridge and mass-transit projects, may become insolvent as soon as October unless lawmakers lock in additional funding sources, the Congressional Budget Office said on Jan. 31.

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Love’s injuries came from various impacts, medical examiner tells Huguely jury

senior at University of Virginia and a lacrosse player. A roommate found her body May 3, 2010, face down in blood in her bed. Love, of Cockeysville, Md., was 22. Under questioning by Huguely’s attorney, Gormley agreed that injuries to the right side of Love’s head, right eye and chin could have been suffered in one incident close to the time of her death, such as a fall. But Gormley said he couldn’t say what had caused the damage and told attorney Rhonda Quagliana that no one impact could explain the other injuries, including small oval bruises on her chest, bruises to a buttock, calf and knee, and a pair of “major bruises” on her forearm. In his police statement aired in court, Huguely said he had shaken Love “a little bit” and “may have grabbed her a little bit around the neck.” But he said he had not strangled her or hit her in the face on the night he went to talk to her about their jeal­ousy-tinged arguments. When he left her, Huguely said on the tape, he thought she was bleeding from her nose, but not so badly that he needed to call for medical help. Gormley is expected to return to the stand Tuesday and has not told jurors his conclusion about what caused Love’s death. Previous hearings revealed that he ruled that she died from blunt force trauma to her head. Huguely’s attorneys have called Love’s death a tragic accident and indicated their case will include testimony that Love could have died from an irregular heartbeat brought on by the drug Adderall, which she was prescribed for an attention disorder. Jurors on Monday also were asked to read what was described as an “e-mail exchange” that appeared to be about four pages long. Although those e-mails have not been read aloud in court, last week prosecutors and the defense team referred to a series of angry e-mails the couple exchanged days before Love’s death that included a line from Huguely that said, “I should have killed you,” after finding out about a sexual encounter Love had with another man. More news from PostLocal: The Groupon effect: Can date-night deals save your marriage? Fear for the turtle: Deadly disease could devastate Md. ecosystem Some students learn about suspension before they master spelling or math Score one for lovesick third-graders: Md. school lifts ban on Valentine’s Day

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Five myths about cheating

1. Cheating and affairs are more common among the rich and less common in conservative cultures. From golf star Tiger Woods to Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich, cheating seems commonplace among famous and wealthy men. But although studies have found that the more money and celebrity men have, the more likely they are to cheat, cheating is hardly the domain of just the rich and famous. In fact, according to Boston College economist Donald Cox, poorer women are more likely to cheat than wealthy women. Nor do more socially conservative times erase infidelity. America today may seem more sexually relaxed than in the buttoned-down years immediately following World War II, yet pioneering research by Alfred Kinsey found that married men cheated at rates of around 50 percent.In 1953, Kinsey showed that 26 percent of married women had also been unfaithful. Estimates today find married men cheating at rates between 25 percent and 72 percent. Given that many people are loath to admit that they cheat, research on cheating may underestimate its prevalence. But it appears that cheating is as common as fidelity. 2. If you really love your partner, you’ll remain faithful. Perhaps one of the most tragic misconceptions about cheating is that people stray because they have fallen out of love with their partners. We are taught to value fidelity as the litmus test of a relationship and conditioned to feel victimized if someone cheats on us. But my research shows that young men don’t cheat because they have fallen out of love with their partners. Rather, they cheat simply because they desire sex with someone else, even if they want to preserve their relationship. I found that, though 78 percent of the men I interviewed had cheated on their current partner, only a handful said they cheated because they were near the end of their emotional relationships. And women may respond to similar pressures: According to a 1999 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 68 percent of female undergraduates also cheat. (Whether they cheat for sexual or emotional reasons remains unclear.) 3. We generally agree on what counts as cheating. In Kinsey’s day, the meaning of cheating was simpler — it involved physical contact with another person. But today, the Internet and its democratization of pornography not only make yesterday’s stigmatized bedroom activities seem mundane but also force us to ask what defines cheating. A

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The myth of China as a harmless tiger

difficulties she encountered as a result of this decision. On the surface, the West has profited from its trade with China. Western consumers can buy vast amounts of cheap Chinese products. However, fundamental values of the West are quietly being eroded: Who knows whether the American flag flying outside your home was manufactured by inmates in Chinese prisons or by child labor? I arrived in the United States a month ago, thinking I had escaped the reach of Beijing, only to realize that the Chinese government’s shadow continues to be omnipresent. Several U.S. universities that I have contacted dare not invite me for a lecture, as they cooperate with China on many projects. If you are a scholar of Chinese studies who has criticized the Communist Party, it would be impossible for you to be involved in research projects with the Chinese-funded Confucius Institute, and you may even be denied a Chinese visa. Conversely, if you praise the Communist Party, not only would you receive ample research funding but you might also be invited to visit China and even received by high-level officials. Western academic freedom has been distorted by invisible hands. I believe that China is a far greater threat than the former Soviet Union ever was; unfortunately, the West lacks visionary politicians, such as Ronald Reagan, to stand up to this threat. President Obama might perceive the Chinese Communist Party as a tiger that does not bite and, hence, is looking forward to Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit this week. Will Obama, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, openly request that China release Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace laureate imprisoned by the Communist Party? Why did Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have the courage to meet with Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi but not to meet with Liu? Is it because Burma is weak, while China is strong? The Chinese Communist Party remains a tiger that will bite. For working on human rights with Liu Xiaobo, after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, I was tortured by the country’s secret police and nearly lost my life. Since then, dozens of lawyers and writers have been subjected to brutal torture; some contracted severe pneumonia after being held in front of fans blowing cold air and then being baked by an electric furnace. The secret police threatened me, saying that they had a list of 200 anticommunist party

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Not up for a marathon? Try a relay race.

A Ragnar Relay D.C. team gets psyched up before the September 2011 race. (Bruce Buckley/Swim Bike Run Photography) On New Year’s Day, when you vowed to run a marathon this year, it probably seemed like an awesome idea. And then the champagne wore off. Maybe you researched some training programs and realized you just can’t devote the time. Or you saw that as many as 90 percent of folks training for marathons get injured. Or your background is in team sports and the idea of going for a goal solo now seems lonely. Whatever the reason for your resolution dissolution, I have a backup plan: Run a relay. Splitting up the work means you don’t need to train as hard or as long, plus you’re guaranteed to have at least one person cheering for you. In the case of the Delaware Marathon (May 13), you could have seven teammates. “A lot of people aren’t going to run 26.2 miles, but they want to be a part of it,” says Wayne Kursch, the director of the race, which is introducing an eight-person relay option this year. The marathon’s four-person option has been popular, but Kursch realized that even 6.55 miles was a hurdle to entry for some would-be runners. Offering to cut down the distance to a little over a 5K “is a great way to bump up the numbers,” says Kursch, who hopes to lure 3,000 participants. Plenty of other races are also welcoming runners who don’t want to go the distance. The Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend featured a relay for the first time last month. The Marine Corps Historic Half marathon (May 20), launched last year, is growing from 100 teams to 250 teams. And the relay at this year’s inaugural Rock ’n’ Roll USA Marathon (March 17) is sold out. When you hear runners talk “relays” these days, however, chances are they mean the long-distance, overnight kind. There’s nothing new about getting 12 people to take turns covering 200 miles over 30 hours. This year marks the 31st running of Oregon’s Hood to Coast, which has 12,600 participants, making it the largest relay in the world. In the D.C. region, the granddaddy of overnight relays is Tom’s Run, which was founded in 1999 and stretches from the northwest corner of Maryland to Washington. It’s not a race, which is part of the appeal to participants such as

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Report: Yahoo calls off talks on Asia deal

In this Oct. 14, 2010 photo, the exterior of Yahoo Inc. offices are seen in in Santa Clara, Calif. Yahoo Inc. reports third-quarter financial results Tuesday, Oct. 19, after the close of the market. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma) (Paul Sakuma/AP) Yahoo has reportedly broken off talks with its partners in Asia to work out a deal to drop its holdings in China and Japan and save Yahoo over $4 billion in U.S. taxes. All Things Digital’s The deal, as detailed in the Wall Street Journal, was believed to have been a swap of cash and assets that would help Yahoo avoid a serious tax hit. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has been undergoing some major changes in the past year, naming former PayPal executive Scott Thompson to be its chief executive. Last month, Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang left Yahoo’s board; a few weeks later chairman Roy Bostock announced he and three other board members will step down. With those developments, all of Yahoo’s directors will have joined the board after 2010. In a release announcing a major board shake-up, Yahoo had mentioned that it was looking at restructuring its Asian assets without going into detail. Yahoo stock fell following the report, down over 5 percent in mid-afternoon trading. Around 1:45 p.m., Yahoo stock was trading at $15.15 per share, down from an opening price of $16.07. Related stories: Yahoo shakes up its board Yahoo’s 4Q earnings fall 5 percent as revenue slumps again; new CEO vows to shake things up Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and others companies team up to combat e-mail ‘phishing’

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Eating meat, with a side order of conflicting emotions

Barnard, a physician and president of the PCRM, make no apologies for it. He compares current anti-meat campaigns to those that discourage underage smoking: It’s important to hit ’em while they’re young. “If a kid, like me, found a pack of cigarettes when he was 11,” Barnard says, “that kid is more likely to grow up as a smoker as opposed to a kid who never encountered them at all.” Hitting the youth market PETA, in particular, has actively targeted young eaters with its Peta2.com Web site, which launched in 2002 and has more than 500,000 e-news subscribers. The site has little interest in promoting the health-care savings or potential long-term health benefits of a vegetarian diet. Instead, it adopts a pop-culture approach to make meat-free eating seem cool and “cruelty-free” to animals — or, at the very least, contrarian to the adult world, which in itself might appeal to the more rebellious. The idea, says Dan Mathews, senior vice president of campaigns for PETA, is not to take an elevated intellectual approach in trying to appeal to youth, but to play up factors important to young eaters. Like looking good, or sex, or celebrities. PETA even works with television producers to insert anti-meat messages into various programs, such as an episode of last season’s “Real Housewives of Miami” in which Lea Black annoys her fellow South Beach sun-bunnies by pooh-poohing a pig roast. “Being realistic, we realized we had to go to a lower common denominator” to hit the youth market, says Mathews. “They want to look good. They don’t care about something that will take decades to affect them,” like heart disease. But the anti-meat and reduced-meat messages are not coming just from animal-rights organizations with an agenda. Cookbook authors, activists and even the federal government have embraced an idea that might have seemed radical a generation or two ago: We don’t need to eat as much meat as we used to. Pollan, in his “In Defense of Food” (Penguin, 2008), famously wrote that we should “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The following year, author Mark Bittman espoused essentially the same idea in “Food Matters” (Simon & Schuster, 2009) by noting that we should “eat less meat and junk food, eat more vegetables and whole grains.” More than two years later, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued

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Eric Waldbaum, entrepreneur in financial services and information technology businesses, dies at 73

policies at competing markets such as Giant Food and Safeway. Mr. Waldbaum was dismissed by the board for reasons that were never publicly stated. He brought an unsuccessful libel suit against Fairchild Publications, whose Supermarket News wrote that the cooperative was losing money and retrenching under Mr. Waldbaum. A federal trial judge ruled in 1979 that Mr. Waldbaum was prominent enough in his profession to be considered a public figure and did not prove Supermarket News deliberately published false information — the standard for public figures. The judge dismissed the suit. The following year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the trial judge’s ruling and announced a test for determining whether a person qualifies as a public figure that has since been widely cited in defamation cases. While with Greenbelt Consumer Services, Mr. Waldbaum served on the Ad Hoc Committee of the Uniform Grocery Code Council, which was initially formed to facilitate automatic scanning at supermarkets. The council recommended the adoption of the UPC symbol that is now commonplace in scanning systems on products in virtually every business. After leaving Greenbelt Consumer Services, Mr. Waldbaum worked for several businesses and started others, including a computer retail store. He was president of Baskin Financial Corp. from 1985 to 1990 and then spent much of the next decade as a senior partner with Pacific Basin Partners, a U.S.-Japan consulting firm that provided strategy planning and advisory services for financial institutions, governments and aid agencies. He subsequently was chief financial officer of eGlobal Business, a microlender, and created a technology consulting business that included Middle Eastern and former Eastern bloc countries. He was on the board of Solargenix Energy, a North Carolina-based solar-energy business, and a past board chairman of Legacy International, a nonprofit organization focused on international conflict resolution that teaches leadership to youths and business development to young professionals. Eric Waldbaum was a Philadelphia native and a 1960 mathematics graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Early on, he worked in New York for Hills Supermarkets and the old E.J. Korvettes department store. In 1997, he moved from Arlington County to Huddleston, a community southwest of Lynchburg, Va. His marriages to Susan Carlin and Dorothy Stein ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 20 years, Yvonne Behrens-Waldbaum of Huddleston; a daughter from his second marriage, Kiran Waldbaum of Alexandria; a sister; and a brother. — Adam Bernstein

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Efforts lag to improve care for National Guard

N.C. A sea of Web sites Steve Hale, a Washington National Guardsman sent to Iraq, said that reservists experience a brief honeymoon after returning from war, but that “the ticker-tape parades, the pats on the back, the free beers at the bar” often give way to loneliness, stress and depression. Reservists suffer from high rates of PTSD, alcoholism, unemployment, divorce and drug abuse, but military psychologists and research studies indicate that many cases go unreported. Lack of emotional support is challenging for reservists, whose patched-together units often scatter between deployments. Eric Kettenring, who served in Iraq and is a Veterans Affairs counselor in Montana, said the onus is on reserve unit commanders to watch for signs of trouble. But unlike active-duty units, their commanders only see them during drills, which can be 60 days apart, as opposed to the frequent contact during recruitment and enlistment. “When they come back and they’re no longer serving and they have problems, who’s finding them?” he said. In 2005, the National Defense Authorization Act established a health plan to give reservists access to the Tricare military health-care network for a monthly fee. But many wounded reservists instead choose to drive often long distances to Veterans Affairs facilities that provide free care from specialists. The Pentagon has scrambled to close gaps in care by creating more than 200 programs, but that has invited waste, duplication and a lack of oversight, according to a recent Rand Corp. report. Capt. Brian Pilgrim, a behavioral health officer with the New Mexico National Guard, praised the service network for reservists, saying it provides more options than the regimented system for the active-duty military. But that range of options, many of them private-sector, often means reserve members are “thrown into a sea of Web sites with no idea of where to go to find appropriate care,” said Stephanie Nissen, North Carolina’s behavioral health programs director. The issue is further complicated in the National Guard because each state is responsible for developing its own programs, and states are not required to adopt another’s successful strategies. More changes to the post-deployment system were made last April. In response to Wyden’s investigation, the Army National Guard increased the time allotted for demobilization and required leaders to sign off on the disposition of each soldier. In recent congressional testimony, McKinley praised the guard’s reform efforts. But he added: “We will have decades to go

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In D.C., a real-life drug investigation straight out of ‘The Wire’

A game at the Barry Farm public housing project, which prosecutors say was the home turf of a violent drug-running gang led by Mark Pray. (Jonathan Newton/Washington Post) When Crystal Washington checked out of her halfway house and stepped into a gray April morning, the gunman was ready. He silently slipped behind Washington as she crossed a busy street at rush hour, then he pulled out a semiautomatic pistol and fired six shots at point-blank range, killing the 44-year-old mother of four. It would not take long for authorities to piece together a motive — Washington, a recovering drug addict, was a key prosecution witness at the looming trial of the gunman’s boss, an alleged Southeast Washington narcotics kingpin. The slaying in 2009 soon sparked an undercover FBI investigation straight out of the HBO series “The Wire” that would lead to charges against 13 alleged members of a Southeast drug gang. On Feb. 1, the trial of three of those people began in the District’s federal court. Six defendants have pleaded guilty; the dispositions of four others could not be determined from court records. The investigation provides a rare window into an organization that dominated a vibrant open-air drug market in Southeast, a gang that stopped at nothing to protect its turf. The case also helps explain the city’s stubborn level of violence. Although homicides have plummeted in the District (last year, city police tallied 108 killings, nearly half the number recorded in 2004), authorities say they are still battling an intractable cycle that fuels the city’s murders — territorial disputes and retaliation for snubs and other acts of violence. In the case of the Southeast gang, prosecutors say, its ringleader, Mark Pray, thought little of conspiring to kill Washington, a woman he had known for years. A few months later, prosecutors say, Pray and his chief “enforcer” — the same man accused of shooting Washington — agreed to eliminate a rival dealer because that man’s brother had shot one of Pray’s lieutenants. And, in 2008, angered that another dealer had disrespected one of his associates, Pray participated in a drive-by shooting: He popped out of the sun roof of a speeding Cadillac, whipped out two semiautomatic pistols and littered a major street with 27 bullets that riddled another car and killed his intended target, prosecutors say. “This is a case about greed,” federal prosecutor Matthew Cohen of the District’s

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Guantanamo detainee with Baltimore ties is charged with war crimes

A former Baltimore area resident held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was charged Tuesday by military prosecutors with war crimes, including murder, attempted murder, spying and providing material support for terrorism. Majid Khan, a Pakistani citizen and a former legal resident of the United States, is accused of conspiring with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to conduct a series of follow-up operations in the United States. These included targeting underground gasoline storage tanks, according to the military. Khan, a graduate of a suburban Baltimore high school near where his parents ran a gas station, is also accused of donning a suicide vest and planning to assassinate former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf. According to the military, Khan traveled to Pakistan in January 2002 and returned to Baltimore a few months later to acquire a laptop for al-Qaeda and get information about the U.S. military. After he went back to Pakistan in August 2002, Khan worked directly for Mohammed, according to the military, and his tasks included carrying $50,000 to an al-Qaeda affiliate group in Bangkok. The military alleges that Jemaah Islamiah, a regional terrorist organization in Southeast Asia, used the money to fund the bombing of the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, in August 2003. Eleven people were killed in the attack, and more than 80 others were wounded. Khan was detained at a relative’s house in Pakistan in March 2003 and turned over to the United States. He vanished into the CIA’s system of overseas prisons until President George W. Bush announced that he was one of 14 “high-value” detainees who had been transferred to Cuba in September 2006. At Guantanamo Bay, he is held at the top-security Camp 7, whose exact location at the U.S. naval base remains classified. Khan’s attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based advocacy organization, have said their client was tortured and coerced into making self-incriminating statements. If convicted, Khan faces up to life in prison. A senior Pentagon official must still refer the charges to a military commission for trial. More national security coverage: - Chinese blocked visit by U.S. religious freedom envoy, advocates say - Efforts lag to improve care for National Guard members - U.S. shippers watch for progress on Panama canal project - Read more national security news

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NATO resumes transfer of Taliban detainees to Afghan government

KABUL — The transfers began again in January after three rounds of inspections by NATO officials at 12 of the 16 facilities where, according to a U.N. report released publicly in October, some detainees were subjected to “systematic” torture. The Afghan government has replaced the directors of several of the facilities in recent months as part of an effort to prevent the abuses, Maj. Carl Dick, a U.S. military officer involved in inspections and recertifications, told reporters. “We see no gross violations of human rights,” he said of the 12 facilities that have been listed as “certified.” The coalition is monitoring those detentions, along with the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to make sure abuses do not occur again, he said. If they do recur, the coalition will be forced to again halt the transfer of detainees, he said. The four facilities where transfers have yet to resume include a prison called 124 that is run by the Afghan National Directorate of Security and has gained a particularly notorious reputation. The U.N. report said the detainees there were subjected to torture by Afghan interrogators seeking intelligence regarding the war against the Taliban. The detainees are suspected insurgents arrested during operations by international forces. The U.N. report Many released detainees formerly held by the Afghan government or international forces have complained of being mistreated or tortured. More world news coverage: - Iran touts activation of nuclear reactor - ICE agent’s death puts new focus on U.S. role in Mexico’s drug war - Opposition crowd-sources Syria’s map - Read more headlines from around the world

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Wrestling: Dylan and Olivia Devine find a home on the mat

to focus full-time on wrestling and has only continued improving, finishing third at the National Prep tournament last season. Thanks to a daily workout regimen and an improved diet, he now competes at 195 pounds. For the past two years, he’s had a constant training partner in his little sister. Olivia Devine also grew up practicing martial arts and earned a second-degree black belt. Right away, wrestling’s similarities appealed to her. “I think it’s the work ethic involved,” Dylan said. “What you put in is what you get out. We both love it.” To prepare for her first high school season, Olivia attended open mat practices at North County several times a week during the summer and a wrestling camp at Bloomsburg (Pa.) University, where she was the lone girl that session. She also worked out almost daily in the basement of the family’s Severn home alongside Dylan. Olivia competed mostly on junior varsity this season, compiling a 6-5 record wrestling at 132, 138 and even 145. She finished her season at the county’s junior varsity invitational on Tuesday. In 24 seasons as a wrestling coach in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland, Liddick had never used a girl on varsity before, but he didn’t hesitate turning to Olivia when his lineup thinned due to injury and illness. She made her varsity debut with a pair of losses at the Arundel Holiday Tournament, where Dylan won his weight class. At first, Olivia leaned on Dylan heavily for help. Dylan taught her moves that utilize her leg strength and continues to provide feedback when the family gathers to watch tape of matches. “It’s easier when he critiques her,” their mother Theresa said. “She’d rather hear it from him than us.” “He breaks me down and builds me up.” Olivia added with a smile. Lately, there have been fewer lessons and more conversations. Dylan, who hopes to wrestle in college — with West Virginia and Edinboro among his options — chuckles when thinking about how far his sister has come in a short time. “She knows a lot more now,” Dylan said. “We’ll talk about what a guy should’ve done [on the mat], and sometimes now she’ll argue with me because she’ll know something better than I do.” Related links: New team, individual wrestling rankings Westfield back on top in Northern Region Photo gallery from Northern Region Urbana wins first Md. duals title

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U.S. will lead new effort to cut global warming from methane, soot

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks during a security conference in Munich. Clinton is set to announce the five-year climate initiative Thursday. (THOMAS KIENZLE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) With global efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions stalled, the United States and five other countries are starting a new program to cut other pollutants — including methane, soot and hydrofluorocarbons — that contribute to global warming. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is set to announce the five-year initiative Thursday morning. Canada, Sweden, Mexico, Ghana and Bangladesh are also participating. The plan will be administered by the United Nations Environment Program, with a $12 million contribution from the United States for the first two years. Canada will add $3 million; contributions from the other countries are not known. Carbon dioxide — from burning fossil fuels — plays the largest role in pushing up global temperatures, climate scientists say. But methane, soot and hydrofluorocarbons also contribute to global warming. Combined, those three pollutants are believed to account for 30 to 40 percent of the nearly one degree Celsius rise in global temperatures since the beginning of the 20th century. If adopted globally, measures to reduce soot and methane emissions could slow global warming by about a half a degree Celsius by 2030, according to research published in January. They can have a quick effect on global warming because these gases do not last in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide does. “The science is quite clear that the only way to slow warming in the near term . . . is to reduce emissions of these so-called short-lived climate forcers,” said Erika Rosenthal of the advocacy group Earthjustice. The new program, called the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants, will not set targets for reductions in pollutants. Rather, it will fund education projects and joint public-private efforts to reduce emissions, said three people briefed on the announcement. They said the new program is likely to encourage nations to reduce diesel exhaust, stem the burning of agricultural waste, and capture methane from landfills, coal mines and natural gas wells, among other policies. While most of these policies are expected to pay for themselves in the long run, each requires some upfront investment, said Johan Kuylenstierna, scientific coordinator of two U.N. reports on the benefits of reducing methane and soot. Getting governments and industry to pay those costs is “the

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Congress must think 10 years down the line when it comes to nuclear carriers

to be able to show our force structure in the Pacific.” But as Navy experts say, you need that number just to keep one in the Indian Ocean, another in the Western Pacific, and enough in reserve for contingencies, such as today’s need to keep two available for South Asia/Middle East use. The general standard for carriers is seven months on station and 25 months at home port or dry dock. The nuclear ones also must have their power generators refueled. For example, the new budget contains $1.6 billion to refuel the reactor of the USS Abraham Lincoln, which just days ago passed through the Strait of Hormuz after weeks in the Persian Gulf aiding in the Afghan war. Refueling beginning in the next 12 months will keep the Lincoln out of action for a year. The new fiscal 2013 budget contains no money for CVN78, the USS Gerald R. Ford, although the Navy has identified the need for another $881 million for cost overruns in what has become a $12.3 billion ship. Its funding began in 2001, and money to pay off the overruns has been pushed into the fiscal 2014 and 2015 budgets. The first of a new class of nuclear-powered carriers, the Ford is projected to save money in the long run by having a new reactor power plant that requires 50 percent fewer people to run it while generating far more electricity than the previous class of nuclear carriers. Overall, including the flight crews, the Ford will have some 3,800 personnel. That’s almost 1,200 less than the current carriers. Of course, the Ford has had its problems. It became a test bed for new equipment and construction techniques. Along with the new power-generating nuclear reactor, the Ford will have a new electromagnetic catapult-launching system and a new phased-array radar to replace five radars on the earlier carriers. The catapult-launching system had to be built and then tested on land, since there was no ship deck built that could handle it. Those tests are ongoing at a site in Lakehurst, N.J., while parts of the finished system have begun to be installed in the Ford, which is being built at the Huntington Ingalls shipyard at Newport News, Va. The electromagnetic system, which has taken a decade to develop, will permit controlled acceleration and stoppage when launching aircraft. The Ford — more than 50 percent complete, with some

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Norovirus sickens about 85 at GWU

George Washington University officials alerted the campus Wednesday that about 85 students have been infected by noroviruses this week. After testing by the university’s Student Health Service and the D.C. Department of Health, officials confirmed that the norovirus was the cause of dozens of cases of gastrointestinal illness since Monday, university officials said in a statement. They said they could find no common link for the infections, as students were affected who live at the Foggy Bottom campus, the Mount Vernon campus and off campus. The ill students also attended classes, studied and dined at many locations, the statement said. Students were advised to wash their hands frequently and disinfect surfaces they use, and the school said it would increase the cleaning of commonly used areas. The virus is usually not considered serious, and most people recover in one or two days. Symptoms include diarrhea, vomiting, nausea and stomach cramps. Other symptoms are a low-grade fever, chills and muscle aches.

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The Education Issue: Enrichment classes don’t offer credit, but they can change lives

through personal coaching and corporate training sessions. People use the classes not just to perform as storytellers but to learn to make better sales pitches, raise money, teach in academia, become less shy, or “be the life of the party,” says Amy Saidman, artistic executive director. “They finish the class, and now they get together regularly for happy hour; or, another class created their own Facebook group,” Saidman says. When she is not performing, Vijai Nathan teaches at SpeakeasyDC and has seen bonds develop firsthand. Students usually hesitate to take part in one exercise that pairs up people to talk about their first crushes. But they soon come to value the intimacy. “I think there are so few opportunities anymore where we can do that as adults,” Nathan says. “With texting and e-mail, you hardly talk to people anymore, or even make any sort of human connection with people unless you are living with them.” Like a growing number of booksellers nationwide, Politics & Prose in Northwest Washington is expanding classes. “The initial goal is to create new programming that will engage the store’s already loyal community of readers, but it would be great to attract new audiences,” says writer Susan Coll, who is heading up the effort. “Because P&P is a bookstore and not a university, we can be flexible and have a little fun with this.” Among the eclectic slate of upcoming courses are a six-part class on Eugene O’Neill pegged to upcoming Arena Stage and Shakespeare Theatre productions, and a two-session class called “Close Reading: The Craft of Reading Fiction Like a Writer.” Classes as community-builders are also offered by other local businesses, such as Hill’s Kitchen on Capitol Hill, which holds classes on topics such as knife skills and making baby food. Meanwhile, the concept of community-building has led to the establishment of new groups that are providing free classes. Hub DC Last summer and fall, more than 30 people total participated in Hub DC’s eight Citizen Circles, which are peer learning groups that aim to “knock down the notion that there are teachers and there are learners,” says Allison Basile, one of the founders. Basically, a group of as few as three people picks a topic it wants to explore and then does so, gathering and sharing research, discussing and taking field trips. Knowledge Commons DC is a free school established to foster accessible education

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Consumer agency wants oversight of debt collectors, credit bureaus

gets credit and how much they pay for it. For most consumers, those scores are based on records of loans they have taken out in the past and how well they have paid them off. This information is housed in the Big Three national credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Lenders use formulas developed by companies such as FICO and VantageScore to analyze the data and determine how likely each person is to repay. Government regulators, financial firms and consumer advocates have launched extensive education campaigns in recent years to make sure that consumers understand what goes into their Big Three credit reports and how that affects the cost of a loan. But little attention has been paid to the so-called “Fourth Bureau” firms that target the 30 million consumers outside the mainstream financial system. Often they are students, immigrants or low-income consumers who do not qualify for traditional loans or choose not to use them. Instead, they rely on a makeshift system of payday lenders, check cashers and prepaid cards — none of which show up in the Big Three. Without a paper trail of credit, these consumers are virtually shut out of the traditional banking system. As a result, fourth bureau firms are increasingly using non-traditional and, at times, unreliable data, including auto warranties, cellphone bills and magazine subscriptions to come up with credit scores. Yet federal regulations do not always require these companies to disclose when they share your financial history or with whom, and there is no way to opt out when they do. No one is even tracking the accuracy of these reports. That has left the most vulnerable consumers with little insight into the forces determining their financial futures. The CFPB The proposed rule sets the bar for debt collection agencies at $10 million in annual receipts. The CFPB estimated that would encompass about 175 firms that account for about 63 percent of the debt collected from consumers each year. For consumer reporting agencies, the CFPB proposed a standard of $7 million in annual receipts. That includes not only the three major credit bureaus but also roughly 30 smaller firms in the Fourth Bureau. The rule would give the CFPB authority over about 94 percent of the industry by receipts. The power to oversee such firms and other nonbanks was a key component of the new agency’s design, and the CFPB has quickly

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In Russia, Putin allies sharpen anti-American attacks ahead of elections

anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. Among recent incidents was a confrontation outside the U.S. Embassy shortly after McFaul arrived in Moscow on Jan. 14. Opposition leaders who visited the embassy for an unannounced meeting with McFaul and visiting Deputy Secretary of State William Burns were accosted by a group of young people identifying themselves as television reporters demanding to know the purpose of the visit. The exchange was shown on the main television channel and on the Internet with the suggestion that the Russian opposition was receiving its orders from the Americans. Opposition leaders say they suspect the incident was a setup facilitated by Russian government surveillance. More recent Russian television broadcasts have included attacks describing McFaul as a promoter of revolution. The barrage reached a new level of offensiveness a few days ago when a video posted on the Internet drew comparisons between photos of the ambassador and those of a notorious pedophile. “Putin is choosing worse relations with the West to keep himself in power,” says Dmitri Oreshkin, a political analyst and writer who says that Putin is thinking short-term tactics rather than long-term strategy. “Of course it’s a KGB mentality.” Putin unleashed the assault Nov. 27 in a nationally televised address as he accepted the presidential nomination, suggesting that the independent election monitor Golos, which gets financing from the United States and Europe, was a U.S. vehicle for influencing the elections here. Since then, Golos has been turned out of its Moscow office and its Samara branch has come under tax investigation. Duma deputies are considering banning all foreign grants to Russian organizations. Then Putin accused U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of sending a signal to demonstrators to begin protesting the fairness of the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections. On Thursday, TV Dozhd — an Internet channel that has become a popular source of news — received a letter from a Moscow prosecutor asking how the organization had paid for coverage of the big December protests. The investigation was requested by a Duma deputy wondering whether U.S. money was involved. Responding to attacks McFaul has avoided commenting publicly but has responded by using Twitter and his blog to speak directly to the Russian people. After a columnist on the government RT television Web site proclaimed that Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright had ordered McFaul to groom revolutionaries in Russia —

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Genome news flash: We’re all a little bit broken

will help especially in determining whether newly discovered mutations are likely to cause disease or are probably “benign.” As biologists come to understand better how genes interact with one another in complex networks, they may be able to discover how much of what makes each of us unique is a product of what we lack, and not just what we have. What the researchers did in the new study is carefully read a book — an individual’s genome — in which some of the sentences — a single gene — have suffered a typographical catastrophe. Words have been changed, their order changed, or whole phrases have been dropped. Whatever the cause, the result is a sentence that no longer makes sense. In genetic terms, these are “loss-of-function variants.” Most of the time this isn’t a problem. That’s because (with a few exceptions) we get two copies of every gene — one from the mother and the other from the father. If one copy is broken, the other takes over. In the new study, MacArthur and his many collaborators sequenced the genes of 185 people from four regions and ethnicities — Chinese, Japanese, Ni­ger­ian and Western European. They repeated and checked their work, filtering out variants that were simply laboratory errors. They ended up with a list of 1,285 loss-of-function variants. The number of genes involved was slightly fewer — 1,035 — because a few of the genes had more than one loss-of-function variant. On further study, the researchers found that there were 253 genes in which both copies were inactivated in at least 1 of the 185 people without obvious effect. And they found that each person in the sample carried about 20 such inactivated genes. What is the function of those genes that we don’t seem to need? For many, that can’t be answered yet. But a look at their structure gave some hints. Expendable genes tend to be ones that have evolved recently. They aren’t ancient ones shared by everything from fungi to oysters to orangutans, and therefore probably essential for life. About 13 percent are involved in smell, which is a sensation necessary for some the survival of some species but not Homo sapiens. The proteins these genes make also don’t interact much with other proteins. That makes sense, because one missing piece in such a network could cause lots of problems and would probably be visible.

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Aghan army resorts to tough measures to combat Taliban infiltration

a hard-won improvement from several years ago. A closer look at recruits Training the Afghan army has been a top U.S. priority, and the force stands at 170,000 troops. But after years of rapid growth, defense officials say it’s time to take a closer look at the quality and allegiance of soldiers rather than focusing on recruitment numbers. “As we approach our ceiling, we’re able to be more selective about our soldiers,” Karimi said. He insisted that the policy would not be meant as an affront to Pakistan, but as a means of strengthening the Afghan army. After an infiltrator’s attack last month on French troops north of Kabul, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that his country’s troops would depart a year earlier than expected. The assailant had probably had contact with the Taliban in Pakistan, French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet told reporters. Shortly after the incident, the Afghan Defense Ministry sent top Afghan military officials a memo titled “Keeping the Enemy Out of the Army.” The memo highlighted the urgency of the infiltration problem and the need to make changes. Attacks on foreign troops have inflamed tensions between Western trainers and Afghan recruits just as NATO’s commitment to Afghanistan appears to be waning. A report commissioned by the U.S. military said at least 58 Western military personnel were killed in 26 attacks by Afghan soldiers or police between May 2007 and May 2011, when the report was finished.“Such fratricide is fast leading to a crisis of trust between the two forces, if it hasn’t reached this point already,” the report concluded. In Kandahar alone, four rogue Afghan soldiers have killed three American and two Australian soldiers in the past year. Shokor said that in each of those cases, “upon investigation, we found a relationship with Pakistan.” Afghan officials are quick to point out that infiltrators don’t target only Western troops. Dozens of Afghan soldiers, police officers and top military officials have been killed by Taliban infiltrators in recent years, they say. Several months ago, Brig. Gen. Abdul Hamid, the top commander in southern Afghanistan, found an unexploded bomb under his desk. Last spring, a man in an Afghan army uniform opened fire inside the fortified Defense Ministry complex, intending to kill Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak. A senior Pentagon official played down the threat from Afghans with Pakistani relatives. “Our strong sense is that the insider threat isn’t an

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Aghan army resorts to tough measures to combat Taliban infiltration

appears to be waning. A report commissioned by the U.S. military said at least 58 Western military personnel were killed in 26 attacks by Afghan soldiers or police between May 2007 and May 2011, when the report was finished.“Such fratricide is fast leading to a crisis of trust between the two forces, if it hasn’t reached this point already,” the report concluded. In Kandahar alone, four rogue Afghan soldiers have killed three American and two Australian soldiers in the past year. Shokor said that in each of those cases, “upon investigation, we found a relationship with Pakistan.” Afghan officials are quick to point out that infiltrators don’t target only Western troops. Dozens of Afghan soldiers, police officers and top military officials have been killed by Taliban infiltrators in recent years, they say. Several months ago, Brig. Gen. Abdul Hamid, the top commander in southern Afghanistan, found an unexploded bomb under his desk. Last spring, a man in an Afghan army uniform opened fire inside the fortified Defense Ministry complex, intending to kill Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak. A senior Pentagon official played down the threat from Afghans with Pakistani relatives. “Our strong sense is that the insider threat isn’t an organized effort. Insurgents are probably to blame in some cases, but sometimes it’s simply disaffected members of the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces]. And it’s worth noting that instances of Afghan-on-Afghan violence inside the ANSF are more frequent than ANSF-on-NATO attacks,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The Afghan army has ramped up its counterintelligence operations over the past year. While its traditional vetting process required enlistees to get letters of endorsement from village elders and district governors, the army now pays increased attention to soldiers after they have been admitted into the armed forces, particularly when they are on leave and subject to Taliban threats. “We now have a special reconnaissance group to investigate what soldiers do on leave,” Hamid said. Afghan officials have for years been weighing possible solutions to the problem of infiltration. Three years ago the country’s parliament issued a recommendation to the Defense Ministry to root out soldiers with ties to Pakistan, including those with families who own property there. The recommendation was not acted upon at the time, but it reflects the widespread sense among Afghan officials that Pakistan is at the root of their troubles. “It’s all linked to Pakistan,”

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Maryland hospitals to share patient data

Maryland’s 46 acute-care hospitals will soon be able to share basic patient information among themselves and with credentialed doctors, a key step that health officials and clinicians say will improve patient care and cut costs. The development, announced at a news conference Friday at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, is being led by the Maryland’s health information exchange, a statewide system that is working to promote the secure electronic sharing of health information among approved doctors’ offices, hospitals and other health organizations. Maryland officials have been among the most aggressive in pushing for the sharing of health information, an important piece of the federal health-care overhaul. Patients have long been frustrated by the inability of doctors at one facility to access records about a visit to another hospital. But changing the process has been slow for a variety of reasons, including reluctance by hospitals and others to exchange information with competitors. The goal is to “help ensure that providers have the right information about the right patient at the right time so we can reduce costs and improve care for all Marylanders,” Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown (D) said in a statement. The level of data available for sharing is rolling out in stages. All of Maryland’s acute-care hospitals are providing basic patient demographic information in real time to the exchange. But it will be 18 to 24 months before the hospitals’ users are fully trained to use the shared data. This includes when any patient in the state is admitted, discharged or transferred, officials said. Eventually, all hospitals would share much more detailed clinical data, such as lab reports, radiology reports (but not images), and clinical documents such as hospital discharge summaries and specialist reports, said Scott Afzal, who heads the arm of the nonprofit Chesapeake Regional Information System for Our Patients (CRISP) that is in charge of running the state’s health information exchange. Four of the five hospitals in Montgomery County already provide the most detailed clinical data to the exchange. But only two — Suburban and Holy Cross — have received the extensive training to allow their users to access patient data from other hospitals, he said. At Suburban, emergency room doctors say the additional information has allowed doctors to improve care. In an interview posted on the CRISP Web site, Barton Leonard, who heads Suburban’s emergency department, said doctors can even access the operation notes

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A world away from China, Geng He seeks justice for her dissident husband

and torture. Gao was arrested in August 2006, convicted of inciting subversion of state power, sentenced that December to a three-year prison term, but was instead given five years of probation and released. He was taken into custody again in 2007 for 50 days, during which Gao says he was beaten with electrified batons until his skin was black and swollen. (In response to petitions from the United Nations, the Chinese government denied ordering enforced disappearances or taking coercive measures against Gao; the Chinese Embassy did not respond to requests for comment on this article.) That October, Geng related the family’s hopeless situation to a sympathetic fruit vendor near their home. The next day, the vendor passed along a note while giving Geng change. It included detailed instructions for initiating a two-week-long escape for Geng and her children, who would be guided by a succession of anonymous agents. She and her husband agreed that it would be impossible for Gao to go. He was watched too closely. In January 2009, she and her children were escorted to a train station, where they received tickets, fake IDs, a cellphone and several SIM cards from an unidentified man. They boarded a train for two days and nights. Upon arriving in a southern province of China, they received a phone call and further instructions, which set in motion a series of rides across the porous, mountainous border. Throughout the journey, Geng trusted her helpers to lead her in the right direction. Gao was arrested again in February 2009, reappeared in March 2010 and spoke to his wife on the phone for the last time that April. He was relieved that his family members had sought asylum in the United States and settled in northern California, where they relied on savings, food stamps and loans from friends while Geng began learning English. Gao disappeared again that month and has not been heard from since. In December, China announced that Gao had violated his parole — even though he had disappeared and was presumed to be in custody — and would spend the next three years in prison. * * * Geng He (pronounced “Gung Huh”) tells this story Sunday, through an interpreter, over a dinner of steamed rice and stir-fried green beans at a Chinese restaurant in Rockville. Her eyes are wet, and her face is twisted into a frown. She landed at Dulles