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Correspondent Anthony Shadid, 43, dies in Syria

Anthony Shadid, one of the most incisive and honored foreign correspondents of his generation, died Thursday in Syria, where he was covering the armed insurrection against the government for his newspaper, the New York Times. Shadid, 43, won two Pulitzer Prizes for his lyrical and poignant dispatches from Iraq, which he covered extensively for The Washington Post before and after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Shadid, a fluent Arabic speaker, roamed broadly across the Arab world, reporting with precision, nuance and depth from the West Bank, Lebanon, Libya and other troubled and peaceful realms in the region. The apparent cause of death was an asthma attack — an ironic end for a man who placed himself in the path of danger countless times. Shadid was shot in the shoulder while in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Easter Sunday in 2002; he and several of his New York Times colleagues were arrested, detained and treated roughly by forces loyal to Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi last year. “He changed the way we saw Iraq, Egypt, Syria over the last, crucial decade,” said Phil Bennett, the former managing editor of The Post who worked closely with Shadid. “There is no one to replace him.” The Times said Shadid had been reporting in Syria for a week on rebels battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was accompanying Shadid, said the reporter had asthma and carried medication with him. Shadid began to exhibit symptoms early Thursday, and they escalated into what became a fatal attack, according to Hicks’s account, as quoted by the Times. The two men had entered the country last week in defiance of a Syrian ban on Western reporters, sneaking in at night under barbed wire, according to the Times. They were met by guides on horseback, and Shadid apparently had an adverse reaction to the horses. A week later, as they made their way out, he reacted to the horses again. “I stood next to him and asked if he was okay, and then he collapsed,” Hicks said. Hicks attempted to revive his colleague and then carried him across the border into Turkey, the newspaper said. The news of Shadid’s death sent shock waves through newsrooms in New York, Boston and Washington, where journalists who had worked with Shadid at those cities’ three leading newspapers recalled a colleague of deep intellect, enormous generosity

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Colleagues recall Shadid as extraordinary reporter, kind friend

Here are some reactions from colleagues to the death of Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who brought the Middle East alive on the pages of the Boston Globe, Washington Post and New York Times. Shadid died in Syria while reporting for the New York Times. Phil Bennett, former Washington Post managing editor It was about 3 a.m. in Washington in March 2003, on the eve of the war in Iraq, when Anthony called me at home. We’d ordered The Post’s correspondents out of Baghdad. “I know you might fire me,” he said. “But I’m not leaving. I’ve been preparing for this my entire career.” And so over the next three weeks, he stayed. His work then was the best run of journalism I’ve seen in 30 years; I don’t expect to see better. In those few days, Anthony somehow saw, through the simple accumulation of voices and details and his own quiet presence, the soul of Iraq and Iraqis in a way that anticipated what would follow: the confusion, hope, disillusion, distrust, sadness, heroism, futility and cruelty. The entire history of a misunderstanding, unfolding even before it could be fully understood. How could he possibly have been prepared? Even in the most dire circumstances, with his life at risk, Anthony had the ability to match the big idea — about history, identity, faith, language — with the small things he could see in front of him, and the people around him. His courage never seemed fearless; he seemed determined to report and write through his fear. He lived as a witness. Anthony wrote many great stories over the last decade. Nobody captured the language and emotions and roots of change in the Middle East with the same care, wisdom and feeling for the bridge between the past and present. He had come full circle in recent years, back to the Lebanon of his grandparents, of his wife Nada, restoring the Shadid family home in the town of Marjayoun. In his memoir of that project, not yet published, he wrote about laboring to build something beautiful as an antidote to violence and war: “Cultures that may seem as durable as stone can break like glass, leaving all the things that held them together unattended. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.” David Hoffman, former

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Colleagues recall Shadid as extraordinary reporter, kind friend

love and gratitude toward his wife, Nada. Laila had decided she wanted to be a writer like her dad and was learning Arabic. In Baghdad, I complimented him on a beautiful piece he told of the loss of life in Iraq. He followed a mother and her family on the search for her missing son. The story took us from that first glimpse when she recognized her son among the pictures of unidentified corpses flashing on a screen at the Baghdad morgue to the burial in Najaf in southern Iraq. He wrote back “that piece really took it out of me. I broke down at the cemetery. I felt like I knew him in the end, and I just sat staring, wondering why so many people had to die, and for what.” That was Anthony. Kevin Sullivan, former Post foreign correspondent, now Sunday and Features editor In late July 2003, as I was preparing to leave The Post’s Baghdad bureau after a summer assignment there, a brief notice in a local Iraqi paper caught my eye. It was about a man who had been forced by his fellow villagers to kill his own son because he was suspected of being an informant for the U.S. military. It was an extraordinary story, if true, but I doubted that I would be able to do it justice. In a village where they were killing people for talking to Americans, I didn’t imagine I would stand a chance of getting to the truth. But I knew who would. I handed the paper to my colleague Anthony Shadid. With his flawless Arabic, his easy familiarity with the ways of Iraq and his titanium nerves, Anthony was the perfect person to determine just what had happened. And a few days later, on Aug. 1, his story appeared on the front page of The Washington Post. It was lyrical and powerful as we had all come to routinely expect from Anthony. Not only did he find Salem, the father, but the man who had just shot his eldest son to death opened up and explained himself to Anthony. Here’s what he wrote: “ ‘I have the heart of a father, and he’s my son,’ Salem said. ‘Even the prophet Abraham didn’t have to kill his son.’ He dragged on a cigarette. His eyes glimmered with the faint trace of tears. ‘There was no other choice,’ he

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Conductor Herbert Blomstedt lets the music speak for itself

Herbert Blomstedt manages to be, at once, one of the best conductors in the world and one of the music world’s best-kept secrets. Sure, he’s headed some of the world’s leading orchestras (the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Gewandhausorchester in Leipzig), but he has none of the mystique, or even name recognition, of a Riccardo Muti or Claudio Abbado. He’s unflashy, and rather unromantic. He just makes music. And, as Blomstedt showed at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall with the National Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night, he makes it with such integrity and straightforwardness and love that for those in the know, it’s a joy to watch him. Yet it’s hard to get people to be in-the-know if your offering is a rather unspectacular midwinter concert without even a big-name soloist to lure the public. Blom­stedt’s program bracketed the 19th century: At the beginning was Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, which is not traditionally considered one of the highlights of the composer’s “mighty nine”; and at the end was Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben,” which is flashy in its way but not particularly unusual orchestral fare. No concerto, no special attraction, no crowd-pleaser: just a slender, 85-year-old, American-born Swede with thick, gray hair, moving with the back-locked stiffness that some musicians acquire with age, taking the podium and opening the Beethoven so slowly and unremarkably that it — like him — was deceptively colorless. It wasn’t, of course, colorless, because Beethoven isn’t colorless, and this performance offered Beethoven’s vivid essence. Blomstedt’s failing as a conductor — and I say “failing” with tongue planted firmly in cheek — is that he’s not an entertainer in the sense that, although he can be very entertaining, he has no interest in showcasing himself. He doesn’t signal from the start that something special is going to happen, and he doesn’t telegraph his feelings to the audience. What happens, instead, is an honest act of devotion: a performance in which every drop of the music is manifested. Details emerge that you are seldom aware of — phrases bursting out like popcorn kernels in the buildup to the recapitulation of the first movement or the tangy, crunchy contrasts between the sounds of different instruments as they pass around a single tune at the end of the second movement — all in the course of a narrative told so clearly, there’s never a doubt where in the piece you are. There’s a widespread

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Post office closings may increase rural isolation, economic disparity

divided on how to address the Postal Service’s woes. “When you deal with billions, there’s nothing that you should ignore, even if it’s only a couple percentage points of your total operating costs,” Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said. But for many in the communities where post offices are slated to close, doing business online is not an easy option. Trinchera, Colo., a rural town near the New Mexico state line, lacks wired broadband. Rancher Carlos Sandoval said he relies on the post office for everything except groceries. He said he uses a computer only when he visits his daughter “in town” — Trinidad, Colo., about 15 miles from his home. Like Sandoval, about a third of the 110 people served by the Trinchera post office have no Internet access, according to Gene Caldwell. The 82-year-old began mustering statistics last fall to share with postal officials at a community meeting. Many residents live as many as 50 miles from the nearest town, and to get there, they travel mostly on unpaved roads, Caldwell said. They rely on the Postal Service for livestock vaccinations and medicines, notices of livestock sales, trade newspapers and other items. Nationwide, about 1.7 million people live near post offices slated for closure in areas with limited or no broadband Internet service. “We’re targeting the wrong people,” said Mark Strong, president of the National League of Postmasters. “We probably should have taken a look to see if first of all they have Internet accessibility in their communities.” Digital divide Internet access has spread the way most businesses expand: to areas more densely populated with people willing to pay for the service. Today, rural areas remain less connected to the Internet than urban populations across every technology type, according to Commerce Department data. Nearly 90 percent of the 24 million Americans without wired broadband access live in rural areas. “There’s still a real digital divide between rural and urban America,” said Ed Luttrell, head of the National Grange, which represents rural areas. “You look at rural folks, they tend to rely much more heavily on the Postal Service for delivery of a wide variety of necessities.” Reuters gauged communities’ Internet connectivity by comparing their locations with a national map of wired broadband availability that’s compiled by the Commerce Department. Areas were identified that met the most basic government threshold of 768 kilobyte per-second-download speed, which corresponds roughly to the

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Anthony Shadid, the ‘most gifted foreign correspondent in a generation’

Eloquent and prescient. Graceful and gripping. His death on Thursday, from an apparent asthma attack while on a reporting trip in Syria, has deprived American journalism of its most gifted foreign correspondent in a generation. His coverage of the Middle East — from Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and beyond — was, simply, the best. He set the standard. If you cared about the region, if you really wanted to understand what was going on, you read Anthony. If you were in his presence, as I was — we were fellow correspondents and housemates in Baghdad — you watched his performances with the awe usually reserved for basketball stars and violin virtuosos. His colleagues got it. He won two Pulitzer Prizes in a six-year span. His first, in 2004, was a result, according to the Pulitzer board, of “his extraordinary ability to capture, at personal peril, the voices and emotions of Iraqis as their country was invaded, their leader toppled and their way of life upended.” He found humanity amid the rubble, compassion in the tableau of violence. He wrote about war by focusing on people, with intimate detail, revealing their lives in elegiac prose. Anthony never let the plaudits go to his head. He could have had his choice of cushy assignments in Europe or the United States. He could have become a successful commentator or analyst. But his heart was in the Middle East — and in the story. He kept going out to report — to talk to people, to observe, to understand. Sometimes, it involved great personal peril — he stayed in Baghdad through the shock-and-awe bombing campaign, he traveled through southern Lebanon during the 2006 war and Israeli invasion, and he was kidnapped in Libya with three other New York Times journalists — but he was no adrenaline junkie. He did it because he wanted to know what was really happening. And that couldn’t be gleaned from a distance. During the U.S. invasion of Baghdad, when other journalists tried to figure out what was going on from their hotel rooms, Anthony sneaked into the streets and talked to Iraqis. His dispatches were an order of magnitude more illuminating. His knowledge of Arabic also put him ahead of the pack. Everyone assumed he picked it up as a child, as the son of second-generation Lebanese Americans. But English was the language of his home in Oklahoma. He learned

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Cirque de la Symphonie brings high-flying classics to the Kennedy Center

interesting and unique,” Streltsov says. Nearly 300 performances later, the group will make its debut at the Kennedy Center (it has played 11 shows with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and Strathmore Music Center in Rockville — seven of them sellouts). Krajewski, who has conducted Cirque de la Symphonie throughout its six-year history, says he has often heard comments on the music from people leaving the shows. “They’re awed by hearing a live orchestra, which probably many people have never experienced before,” he says. “We hear comments like, ‘Can you get recordings of this music?’ ” It may help that the music tends to be familiar. “When we started this program, we realized that the best way to go was to go with the masterpiece classics,” Streltsov says. Initially, Krajewski says: “I myself was pretty nervous, because these performers are doing some incredible things, and sometimes some dangerous things. There was all this stuff going on behind me, and I was thinking: ‘I hope there’s no accidents. I hope everyone safe. I hope we don’t have a disaster here.’ But I soon realized that the performers are very professional and are very much in control of what they’re doing, so I’ve learned to just relax and let them do what they do.” Streltsov, for example, grew up in a Russian circus family, though he later found that he preferred the theatrical presentation over a more traditional circus arena, despite its inherent limitations. “Having only 15 feet of stage from the lip of the stage to the conductor’s podium, that’s a pretty tight spot to have something flying around,” Streltsov says. “So there are some acts that cannot be used unless we’re performing on a big arena.” When the cirque comes to town, the musicians are sometimes as startled as the audiences, Streltsov says, and “we always do at least one rehearsal so they can get it out of their system and concentrate on the music.” By now, Krajewski says, “there are times when I get myself really involved in the music, and almost forget that there’s something else happening. Except every now and then, there will be some guy flying over my head.” Catlin is a freelance writer. Cirque de la Symphonie Conducted by Michael Krajewski. 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW. Call 800-444-1324 or visit www.kennedy-center.org/nso.

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Lying about receiving a Medal of Honor? It’s shameful — but it shouldn’t be a crime.

wife. It seemed like virtually everything he said about himself after “I am Xavier Alvarez” wasn’t true. He was found out, publicly ridiculed and hounded out of office. Normally, that would be the end of it. However, for local prosecutors, it was not enough to expose Alvarez as a fraud — they decided to make him one of the first people prosecuted under the Stolen Valor Act of 2005. Signed into law by President George W. Bush, the act makes it a crime to falsely claim “to have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States.” Across the country, a number of rather pathetic individuals are being prosecuted for parading around in uniforms and pretending to be heroes. The problem with the law they may have broken is not just that it is unnecessary, but that it can be dangerous to criminalize lies. After all, with the power to punish a lie comes the power to define the truth — a risky occupation for any government. After Alvarez was convicted, he challenged the constitutionality of the law, claiming that it violated his First Amendment rights. The federal court of appeals in San Francisco ruled in his favor in two separate opinions. Now the case will go to the Supreme Court, where the Obama administration will argue that the First Amendment does not protect lies as it does true statements. Under this logic, Congress would be able to criminalize statements solely because they are lies, alleging some type of amorphous social harm. The government would become the truth police, determining when fibs become felonies. Lying about military service is a long and dishonorable tradition, standard since the founding of the republic. Some of our greatest colonial heroes were accused of lying about their military records. Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, passed himself off as a “lieutenant general in the king of Prussia’s service” when it appears that he not only had been discharged under a cloud of controversy from the King of Prussia’s service but had achieved only the rank of captain. The Stolen Valor Act criminalizes what many view as a common human impulse. When the issue was raised before the federal appeals court, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski balked at the notion that lies can be crimes in a society saturated

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Myong Y. Park, supermarket owner

Myong Y. Park, 64, who was the co-owner of the Capitol Supermarket in Northwest Washington, died Jan. 23 at Washington Hospital Center. She had a stroke, said her son David Park. In 1976, Mrs. Park and her husband opened the Capitol Supermarket, near the intersection of 11th and N streets NW. The store specializes in international foods. Myong Hui Yun was born in Seoul and moved to the Washington area in the early 1970s. She lived in Potomac and was a member of St. Andrew Kim Catholic Church in Olney. Survivors include her husband of 40 years, Joo Soung Park of Potomac; two sons, David Park of New York and Doo Yun Park of Gaithersburg; her mother, Jae Yun of Wheaton; three brothers, Yong Won Yun of Columbia, S.C., and Yong Bok Yun and Yong Kwon Yun, both of North Potomac; three sisters, Myong Kwak of North Potomac, and Myong Jung and Susan Yun, both of Rockville; and a granddaughter. — T. Rees Shapiro

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Why higher gas taxes are the right medicine for Maryland

region’s worsening congestion and poor road conditions cost each of us right now: Almost $2,300 a year in wasted gas and extra wear and tear, according to the Road Information Project. Such congestion costs disproportionately fall on the backs of working families and the poor. Nothing is more regressive than severe congestion, lost opportunity and job losses. From a job-creation perspective, we are not just on life support, we are about to flat-line. Already, Maryland faces an uphill battle to lure companies’ headquarters, and Montgomery County has suffered a net loss of jobs in the face of stiff competition from Northern Virginia. Our job losses will continue to mount if employers can’t count on easy access to workers, customers and markets. It doesn’t have to be this way. We have studied our transportation needs for decades and know exactly what will ease our traffic woes. We simply need to make those investments. Each year, local jurisdictions submit a list of their top transportation priorities to the state for construction funding. This year, two key transit projects top the list for Montgomery County: The Corridor Cities Transitway and the Purple Line, followed by a number of road and intersection improvements that would make a real difference in relieving traffic. However, none of these projects will move forward — not now, not ever — without a major increase in transportation funding. Of course, we also must protect transportation funds from being “raided,” and the governor is supporting legislation to this effect. Finally, several major economic development projects — including new science and technology centers in the Interstate 270 corridor and community revitalization projects in the East County — cannot move forward without the specific transportation improvements the governor’s proposal would help fund. The opportunity costs in terms of our future employment and tax base would be almost too huge to measure, putting at risk our ability to support good schools and other priorities. A good transportation system is just as important to our economy as a healthy circulatory system is to our bodies. Right now we have a bad case of clogged arteries. Maryland legislators need to step up and support this proven life-saving tre The writer, Montgomery County executive from 1994 to 2006, is chairman of the Suburban Maryland Transportation Alliance. More Local Opinions: Gary Newton: Goose-proofing the reflecting pool Douglas Weil: One-gun-a-month’s success Ruth Hammond: Scenes from an after-midnight commute

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hero. He served for a time (and served well) as president of Columbia University and wrote a wartime memoir, “Crusade in Europe,” that Smith deservedly praises for its lucid prose and “complete record of the war in Europe.” He really didn’t much like or understand academia, though, and was receptive when “I Like Ike” fever got underway. His progress to the 1952 Republican nomination was not exactly a victory march, but he got there, won the general election in a landslide and settled in at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Smith’s account of Eisenhower’s stewardship is astute, with only a couple of exceptions — Ike was no leader on civil rights and, contrary to legend, was not “personally responsible for the interstate highway system” — and, again, Smith’s judgment is deserved: “As president, Eisenhower restored stability to the nation. His levelheaded leadership ensured that the United States would move forward in measured steps under the rule of law at home and collective security abroad. His sensible admonition upon leaving office to be wary of the military-industrial complex was the heartfelt sentiment of a president who recognized the perils of world leadership. . . . As with FDR, politics came naturally to Eisenhower. Bismarck once observed that political judgment was the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history. Ike possessed that talent in abundance. As historian Garry Wills put it, Ike was a political genius. ‘It is no mere accident that he remained, year after year, the most respected man in America.’ ” Ike did have a private life, and it was more interesting than those of many presidents. Smith does not scant it. He paints a full portrait of the long marriage to Mamie Doud, with its frequent ups and downs, and as best he can he portrays the relationship between Ike and Kay Summersby, the attractive and much younger British woman who was, throughout the war, his driver and much more, though precisely what “much more” means is in dispute. “Whether he and Kay were intimate remains a matter of conjecture,” Smith writes. “But there is no question they were in love.” It was with Mamie, though, that Ike lived out his last years at the farmhouse in Gettysburg, Pa. They seem to have been happy years, which both of them manifestly deserved. EISENHOWER IN WAR AND PEACE By Jean Edward Smith Random House. 950 pp. $40

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Returning military members allege job discrimination — by federal government

Chris Matthia with his wife, Lindsay and 11-month-old son Christopher, pose for a photograph Jan. 18 in Mt. Airy, Md. Matthai was fired from his job with the Social Security Administration when he notified them that he was being deployed to Afghanistan. His son was born while he was deployed. (Katherine Frey/THE WASHINGTON POST) Every year, more than a thousand National Guard, reserve and active-duty troops coming back from Iraq, Afghanistan or other military duties complain of being denied jobs or otherwise being penalized by employers because of their military obligations. The biggest offender: the federal government. It is against federal law for employers to penalize service members because of their military service. And yet, in some cases, the U.S. government has withdrawn job offers to service members unable to get released from active duty fast enough; in others, service members have been fired after absences. In fiscal 2011, more than 18 percent of the 1,548 complaints of violations of that law involved federal agencies, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. “On the one hand, the government asked me to serve in Iraq,” said retired Army Brig. Gen. Michael Silva, a reservist who commanded a brigade in Iraq and was fired from his job as a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol contractor on his return. “On the other hand, another branch of government was not willing to protect my rights after serving.” The federal government is the largest employer of citizen-soldiers. About 123,000 of the 855,000 men and women currently serving as Guard members and reservists, or about 14 percent, have civilian jobs with the federal government. Over a fourth of federal employees are veterans. The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), enacted in 1994 to ensure that members of the military do not face a disadvantage in their civilian careers because of their service, calls on the federal government be “a model employer” for service members. But critics contend that the federal government has been far from perfect, and they fear that with troops back home from Iraq and more on the way from ­Afghanistan, violations of the law could increase. Obama “priority” The problems persist even though the Obama administration has made a priority of cutting the rate of veterans’ unemployment, which is significantly higher among post-9/11 veterans than in the population as a whole. Advocates for veterans say the system set

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Returning military members allege job discrimination — by federal government

agreed to represent only three, but helped settle nine other cases. The department declined to represent 18 service members, despite Labor’s conclusion that their cases had merit. Another dozen cases were still being considered by Justice at the end of the fiscal year. The Justice Department’s decisions “are always based on a careful consideration of the case from a litigation and merits standpoint,” said spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa. Service members who have been refused reemployment or denied new jobs say the consequences often extend to their personal lives. First Lt. Christopher Matthai, 31, enlisted in the Army at 18 after graduating from high school in Baltimore, and in 2006 he joined the Army Reserve. In May 2009, shortly before he married, Matthai was hired for a two-year internship by the Social Security Administration as an information technology specialist. Soon after he started, however, the Army Reserve selected Matthai for a commission. After missing much of his first year at work for officer training, Matthai informed his civilian supervisors in April 2010 that he would be sent to Afghanistan in the fall for a year. A few days later, he was fired for “poor performance” and for being absent without leave. “I was shocked,” Matthai recalled. “I told them, ‘At least let me resign so I can walk out of here with a clear name.’ ” Instead, he was escorted out by a guard. Matthai filed a complaint with the Labor Department. An investigation stretched on for months, and Matthai deployed to Afghanistan with the situation unresolved and his wife, Lindsay, pregnant with their first child. Stress from the case “was destroying my marriage,” he said. “I’m sitting overseas, banging my head against the wall.” The Labor Department’s investigation, completed in March 2011, found that Matthai had been “wrongfully terminated” because of his military obligations and falsely accused of being absent without leave. There was no evidence of poor performance. No enforcement power Matthai was entitled to get his job back with lost wages and benefits and have his record cleared of any wrongdoing, according to the Labor Department. Matthai, then midway through his tour in Afghanistan, only wanted the SSA to clear his record and pay his attorney fees. But the Labor Department’s findings carry no enforcement power. The SSA offered to pay only a small portion of his attorney fees and insisted that Matthai not seek reemployment with the SSA

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In D.C., a push for better restaurants east of the Anacostia River

out to colleagues. “This is something we’ve never had.” For decades, the main arteries east of the Anacostia River have been dominated by carry-out joints and fast-food chains, their menus catering to an African American population that is the city’s most impoverished. In wards 7 and 8, with 140,000 residents, District officials and community leaders say they’re aware of just six restaurants that provide waiter service, including a Denny’s and an IHOP. The dearth of choices fuels the sense among residents that theirs is a forgotten part of Washington. District officials say they hope to bridge the culinary gap. In recent weeks, they have invited restaurateurs and real estate brokers on two bus tours through the wards, talking up the professionals moving into new condominiums and showing off projects recently completed or planned, including the Department of Homeland Security’s pending move to the St. Elizabeths Hospital campus. “People are a lot more open to hearing the story about east of the river,” said Keith Sellars, president of the Washington D.C. Economic Partnership, a nonprofit group that promotes development and helped lead the tours. On the cusp of change Domenico Cornacchia, owner of the Bethesda-based Assaggi Mozzarella Bar, took the tour, his interest inspired by a vision of opening a restaurant in Anacostia that serves pastas and salads and where he could train local residents in the dining business. Cornacchia said he needs to raise $1 million and has his eye on a vacant property at MLK Avenue and Good Hope Road, across from a recently built office building. “You have to come with the right concept, the right prices,” said Cornacchia, who also owns a restaurant in McLean, one of the region’s wealthiest suburbs. “We’ve seen all the changes in D.C. over the past 10 years. I don’t see why it won’t happen here.” But Joe Englert, who has made a career of opening bars in gentrifying neighborhoods, including the H Street corridor, is skeptical it will happen anytime soon. Opening east of the river, he said, is daunting because the population lacks “the expendable cash” to guarantee success. “You’d have to have a lot of money and a lot of patience,” Englert said. Comparing the area to H Street NE, which was desolate when he arrived, he said, “H Street abuts Capitol Hill, and many people have lots of money.” Paul Cohn, who owns Georgia Brown’s, said he dropped

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New writings about science, technology

Astronomy Keeping interest alive in outer space “Space Chronicles,” Norton Books In this new essay collection, astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson lays out a series of arguments for NASA’s continued relevance. The space program drives technology, he says. It cultivates a sense of national pride. And it might give talented foreign scientists and researchers a reason to come to the United States and stay put rather than head back to China or India, both increasingly interested in space exploration. Possessing both a keen scientific curiosity as well as an appreciation of pop culture, deGrasse shows he can titillate the public’s imagination when it comes to the stars. In other words, he spends a lot of time writing about aliens. Do they exist? Will they come in peace? In his essay “Extraterrestrial Life,” he offers an unexpected nomination for the dumbest fictional extra-solar being: V’ger, from 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” which was really the U.S.-built space probe Voyager, spruced up with alien technology. “What irks me is that V’ger acquired total knowledge of the cosmos, yet remained clueless that its real name was Voyager,” he explains. Technology Artful dodgers in the digital era “The Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment,” Tech Crunch Computer technology is prevalent enough that brilliant coders can come from anywhere, even a third-world slum. But denied other recourse, they may wind up expending their genius as digital pick-pockets. In a recent article posted on Tech Crunch, writer Sarah Lacy traces an inbox-clogging e-mail scam letter back to its source in an Internet café in Lagos, Nigeria, where teenage boys spend hours upon hours diligently working to part people from the cash in their PayPal accounts. She compares them to the bright young coders that crowd Silicon Valley — smart, innovative and adept with a computer. Only, they’re driven to crime by lack of opportunity. Lacy interviews several alleged scammers, one who claims to have spent the better part of his youth hacking bank systems, and others who ply more traditional scams, such as posing as virtual girlfriends for lonely Western men. “We use our brains to get what we want. For us it’s the only way to live and survive,” one of them tells Lacy. “As long as technology keeps advancing, there is no way to stop us.” — Aaron Leitko

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A massacre at Mexican prison, then an escape

Relatives of inmates at Apodaca prison pull the security fence following a riot inside the prison, on Sunday near Monterrey where 44 inmates were killed. (Julio Cesar Aguilar/AFP/Getty Images) MEXICO CITY — Mexican officials said Monday that it appears all of the 44 inmates stabbed and beaten to death at a state prison in northern Mexico on Sunday were members of the same crime syndicate, known as the Gulf Cartel. They were murdered by their arch enemies, members of Los Zetas, a sensationally violent group that appears to have staged the massacre, in part, as a diversion. About 30 members of the Zeta cartel escaped from the overcrowded Apodaca prison near Monterrey in the hours after the killings. Officials called the escapees “especially dangerous.” What was initially characterized as a melee among rival gangs appears to have been a well-planned and -executed attack, followed by a successful getaway, accomplished with the help of the jailers. The governor of Nuevo Leon, Rodrigo Medina, told reporters Monday that the prison's director, three top officials and 18 guards are under investigation and may have aided in the escape. The governor called the prison officials “a group of traitors” and said that it appeared they were corrupted by the powerful Zeta syndicate. “The most important thing is to make sure that the people working on the inside are on the side of the law, and that they not be corrupted and collaborate with the criminals,” Medina said. The governor also used his press conference to complain that his state prisons are overcrowded with inmates facing federal charges for drug and weapons trafficking, kidnapping and extortion. He said that in Nuevo Leon state, 60 percent of all inmates are incarcerated for federal crimes. Mexico is engaged in a prison building boom, and new guards are being trained by the U.S. government. But the handful of new maximum security federal prisons cannot keep up with the flow of criminals. The Mexican government has been overwhelmed by huge numbers of arrests in its five-year, military-led, U.S.-backed war against organized crime. Prisons are now jammed with inmates, including many who await convictions in poorly run, antiquated, dangerous state prisons, where many criminals continue to run their operations via courier and cellphone. According to the Associated Press, all 2,500 inmates in Apodaca prison were incarcerated for federal crimes, and as many as 70 percent had yet to be convicted.

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Nuclear power entrepreneurs push thorium as a fuel

nuclear plants. Sorensen says he has talked with Pentagon officials about using thorium for such reactors in hostile areas. Since thorium is less adaptable for weapons purposes, the reactor would be safe enough to leave behind for civilian use when U.S. troops pull out. “Thorium potentially would offer some way to mitigate that challenge of security and safety if we do convince ourselves to put nuclear plants in these locations,” said Col. Paul E. Roege, chief of the Army’s operational energy cell at the Pentagon. Roege said the Pentagon is considering the pros and cons of thorium. One drawback, he said, is that engineers aren’t familiar with it. “We have lots of uranium reactors, people are comfortable with them, and we have a mature technology,” Roege said. “That’s not the case with thorium reactors.” Ingersoll, the Oak Ridge scientist who is skeptical of thorium as a new fuel, agreed that it cannot practically be used to make a nuclear weapon. He cautioned, however, that it is still a radioactive material: “It doesn’t eliminate the [nuclear waste] product. It’s just not as bad.” Ingersoll said that thorium-powered reactors make more sense for countries that don’t have access to the plentiful reserves of uranium that exist in the United States. Chinese government officials announced in February 2011 that they are developing a thorium-based reactor and will have it operating within the next 15 or 20 years. India has plans to use thorium in some of its existing reactors. Kutsch argues that the United States could be losing out on developing an important technology. He has been lobbying members of Congress to introduce legislation that would reclassify thorium as a special industrial material, rather than a nuclear material. “Our legislation would say thorium is not like uranium and plutonium,” he said. “It can be safely and handled and stored, like ammonia or fertilizer.” Kutsch is also pushing for another bill that would direct the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to develop rules for the use of thorium. That would give U.S. companies an opening to start using thorium in existing reactors. Rep. John Shimkus, the Illinois Republican who chairs a subcommittee that oversees nuclear waste disposal, says he will be introducing thorium legislation this year. “For those who hate the [problem of] high-level nuclear waste,” Shimkus said in a phone interview, “thorium is a great response.” Niiler is a freelance writer based in Chevy Chase.

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The man who retrieves the Taliban’s dead

he wants to keep the old anguish from resurfacing. But the families often grab him before he drives off, he said, to thank him through tears. “When we saw my brother’s body, the bullet holes in his chest, it was terrible. But we saw his face. It was the same as always. We got to say goodbye,” said Ahmad, whose brother joined the Taliban several years ago and was killed in a firefight with Afghan police. It was Hakim who returned the body. Sorting carnage of war Hakim receives the second round of phone calls — this time, from the ICRC — days or weeks after fits of violence. The organization draws on its vast network of Afghan elders to identify unclaimed bodies in the Mirwais morgue: men killed in such remote locations or uncertain conditions that Taliban commanders and family members don’t come looking for them. Not all of the bodies are those of insurgents — about two-thirds are those of civilians and government security officials, mostly police officers. Hakim transports all of them: 107 government employees in the past three years and 28 civilians, in addition to the 127 insurgents. He gets a signed letter from local officials giving him permission to pick up each body; he stores copies in a black suitcase at home, so he can keep a precise count of the bodies he has transported. Last year, he picked up the remains of 14 suicide bombers on a single day, trucking them to families across Kandahar province. Once he carried five Afghan intelligence agents from a district largely controlled by the Taliban to their agency’s headquarters. He has hauled the bodies of children and the elderly, he said, sometimes on the same day. Across the country, men like Hakim assist civilians and Taliban commanders, even slipping into Pakistan to return the bodies of insurgents. Their efforts have had a pronounced effect in recent times: The number of unclaimed bodies in Afghanistan decreased by 50 percent last year, according to the ICRC. But none of those crisscrossing the front lines have devoted as much time as Hakim to sorting the carnage of war. “There’s no one who sees as much of the dead,” said Sardar Mohammed Niazmand, director of the Red Crescent in Kandahar. Because members of the Taliban and Afghan security forces are often sent to fight in provinces far from their homes, the family

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Renato Dulbecco, who won a Nobel for virus research, dies at 97

Baltimore, then of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and cancer researcher Howard M. Temin of the University of Wisconsin for what the Nobel committee termed “their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell.” Temin, who died in 1994, had studied under Dr. Dulbecco at Caltech. He and Baltimore conducted breakthrough research on how some viruses carry their genetic information in ribonucleic acid, or RNA. Dr. Dulbecco’s work had a profound impact on cancer and genetic research, fields in which he continued working for years to come. From 1972 to 1977, he worked at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund laboratories in London. Dr. Dulbecco was president of the Salk Institute from 1988 to 1992, after which he helped organize a short-lived genome project in Italy. Renato Dulbecco was born Feb. 22, 1914, in Catanzaro, a town in southern Italy. His father, a civil engineer, resettled the family in the northwestern community of Imperia. At 16, he entered the University of Turin and befriended two other precocious students and future Nobel laureates: Salvador Luria, a microbiologist, and Rita Levi-Montalcini, a neurologist who is now 102. Dr. Dulbecco received his doctorate of medicine in 1936 and joined the Italian army. He was seriously wounded in the Soviet Union in 1942 and came home. He subsequently became a physician for local partisan fighters during the German occupation after Italy left the Axis camp. In 1947, Dr. Dulbecco joined Luria at Indiana University and shared lab space with Watson, who went on to win a Nobel for co-discovering the structure of DNA. Dr. Dulbecco was recruited to Caltech in 1949 and developed a research specialty in animal virology after a wealthy donor gave the school funding in that area. He became a U.S. citizen in 1953. In addition to the Nobel, Dr. Dulbecco received the prestigious Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1964 for his work on cancer cells. Dr. Dulbecco was a classically trained pianist. When he retired from the Salk Institute at 92, he said he would spend his days performing opera. Dr. Dulbecco’s first marriage, to Giuseppina Salvo, ended in divorce. In 1963, he married Maureen Muir. Besides his wife, of La Jolla, survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Maria; a daughter from his second marriage, Fiona; a brother; and four grandchildren. A son from his first marriage, Peter, died in 1984.

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Asian American soldier’s suicide called a ‘wake-up call’ for the military

else didn’t speak up?” asked Kim, who now lives in Queens. The Asian American presence is small in the military, as it is in the U.S. population. The most recent data showed 43,579 Asian Americans were on active duty in 2010, making up 3.7 percent of enlisted men and women. Most were in the Army or Navy. In the officer corps, a little more than 8,400 were Asian American in 2010, or 3.9 percent. They’re people like Anu Bhagwati, 36. The Indian American woman spent five years in the Marines, and said that she left in 2004 largely because of the discrimination and harassment she faced, even as an officer. In her case, gender was the big issue, but she said she saw racial discrimination against others, including the few other Asian Americans she saw in the service. “The great American myth about the U.S. military is that racism doesn’t exist,” she said. “It’s alive and well.” In Chen’s case, while his parents are immigrants, he was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He enlisted in the military after high school. Chen told his family and friends, and wrote in his journal, that he was teased about his name and repeatedly asked if he was Chinese. He said the bullying and abuse worsened in Afghanistan and racial slurs were used. At one point, when the soldiers were putting up a tent, Chen was forced to wear a construction hat and give instructions in Chinese, even though none of the other soldiers spoke the language, investigators told his parents. On Oct. 3, Chen was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a guardhouse, the Army said. Eight soldiers in Chen’s unit were charged in his death. In January, the military said that one should be court-martialed on charges including assault, negligent homicide and reckless endangerment — but not for involuntary manslaughter. On Wednesday, the Army said two other soldiers should face courts-martial. One is charged with dereliction of duty; the other is charged with violations including assault and maltreatment. Asian Americans played a role in the major American conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries, and there’s some anecdotal evidence that Chinese Americans fought on both sides in the Civil War, said K. Scott Wong, a professor of history and public affairs at Williams College. In World War II, Japanese Americans instantly fell under suspicion and their loyalties

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Smoked beer in the barbecue sauce? Yes, please.

Beer-Braised Beef Shanks get an infusion of smoke flavor from the beer. (Deb Lindsey/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) A flight of glasses is lined up in front of me, for what might be called a liquid smoke tasting. No, it’s not a sampling of that bottled stuff you find on the barbecue sauce aisle. Greg Engert is walking me through a field of smoked beers at ChurchKey. He is beer director for the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, which includes this Logan Circle hot spot. The beverage was new to me, but with grillers chased indoors even in this mild winter, it seems as if smoked beer could be another way to keep smoke flowing in our veins till we go from 40 degrees to 68. At ChurchKey and its downstairs sister restaurant, Birch & Barley, Engert carries several bottled versions and at least one on tap. In November, Birch & Barley hosted a four-course tasting menu beer dinner with the owner of Bamberg, Germany’s, Tavern Schlenkerla, the world’s most famous producer of rauchbier, or smoked beer. Schlenkerla’s method is a long-standing tradition. For regular beer, barley is dried through an industrialized process. At Schlenkerla, run by the Trum family for six generations, the germinated barley is spread over wire netting and dried over smoldering beechwood logs. The process gives the beer its characteristic aroma. American craft brewers have discovered smoked beer. The Ithaca Beer Co. in upstate New York produces a smoked porter. Rogue turns out what it calls a Smoke Ale and a spicy-smoky Chipotle Ale. “People are really experimenting with smoke in their beers,” Engert says. “It’s something that’s almost kind of comically mundane to the history of beer brewing because open flame was the way you created heat, and we know that beer was being produced at least 6,000 years ago. Smoke would have been in the beer for fermenting the grains to get the sugars.” Before going further, let me say that I have only a vague idea what Engert is talking about. I’m the barbecue guy, not the beer guy. My interest isn’t in the brew so much as it is in the smoke. After my tasting, I was certain of just one thing: I wasn’t going to be drinking a smoked beer with smoked food. I like my smoked foods complemented, not suffocated. Wondering if I could cook with it for some semblance of barbecue until

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Craft brewer with a cult following

(Courtesy of The Farmers' Cabinet) “I’m a bug collector,” Terry Hawbaker says, referring to the wild yeasts and bacteria swarming in the two oak barrels in his Alexandria storefront. At 39, with a divot in his forehead from a recent bike accident and a love of punk-inflected rock-and-roll, he has been maturing his sour beer since September, tasting it as it slowly grows tarter, funkier and more complex. It’s the brewing equivalent of a baker’s sourdough starter. Colonizing barrels of unfermented beer, the bugs will work their slow alchemy over months and years, enabling Hawbaker’s Cabinet Artisanal Brewhouse to make creative “wild ales” that connoisseurs will sniff and savor. His own rise to fame, however, is likely to be quicker: Cabinet Artisanal Brewhouse, he says, just signed a major distribution deal. It could transform the startup into a shrine for beer geeks practically overnight. The brewery, which also will specialize in Hawbaker’s avant-garde riffs on saisons and other European farmhouse styles, wasn’t created with such grand ambitions. Last summer, when it took over the former strip-mall home of Shenandoah Brewing, near the Van Dorn Street Metro station, it was intended to be primarily a place where the partners behind the Philadelphia restaurant the Farmers’ Cabinet would brew house beers to accompany dishes such as roasted marrow bones and duck confit sandwiches. But three weeks ago, according to Hawbaker, the brewery agreed to a distribution contract that will place its beer in 35 states and Europe in the coming months. Production will be tiny by industry standards: only about 50 barrels per month at first, or roughly 1,500 gallons. Still, for a brewery that hardly exists — Hawbaker has brewed only a handful of test batches, on equipment left behind by Shenandoah — such a deal is unusual. This rapid expansion is largely a bet on Hawbaker’s talent. He previously spent seven years at central Pennsylvania’s Bullfrog Brewery, where his beers — especially sour ales like his Beekeeper, aged for 21 / 2 years in cabernet sauvignon barrels — acquired a cult following and were honored with medals at the prestigious Great American Beer Festival. Now, with the Farmers’ Cabinet team backing him and providing a guaranteed market for much of his output, Hawbaker has even more freedom to brew what he loves. Hawbaker calls Cabinet Artisanal Brewhouse an “urban farmhouse brewery,” a label that captures both the rustic realities of

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Consumer watchdog launches overdraft inquiry

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is expected to launch an inquiry Wednesday into banks’ overdraft practices, which have been in regulatory crosshairs in recent years. The bureau said it will look into whether banks are reordering customers’ debit-card charges to maximize overdraft fees. Reordering transactions can double or triple penalties, and the practice has been the target of several class-action lawsuits against the nation’s biggest banks. The CFPB’s inquiry also will focus on bank overdraft policies, how they market the plans, and their impact on low-income and young consumers. The agency will solicit feedback from the public. “Overdraft practices have the capacity to inflict serious economic harm on the people who can least afford it,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray said in a statement. “We want to learn how consumers are affected, and how well they are able to anticipate and avoid paying penalty fees.” Overdraft fees have long irked consumers, who have complained that withdrawals of as little as $3 from their bank accounts have resulted in penalties as high as $37. As the recession squeezed Americans’ budgets and anger at the financial industry reached fever pitch, regulators and lawmakers began moving to curtail banks’ fees. In 2010, the Federal Reserve began prohibiting banks from imposing overdraft charges unless a customer had signed up for the service. The rule only applies to debit-card transactions, not to checks or recurring withdrawals such as automatic bill pay. Meanwhile, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued guidelines calling for the smaller banks it oversees to set limits on the number of times customers can be charged overdraft fees in one day and offer alternatives to those who overdraw their accounts more than six times in a year. Its guidelines encompass checks and recurring payments. As a result of the new regulations and consumer uproar, several banks, including Bank of America, ended their overdraft programs all together. A poll by Consumer Reports shortly after the Fed’s ban went into effect found that only 22 percent of customers had opted into the service. Of those customers, more than half had experienced an overdraft in the past six months, the poll found. One thing regulators left unaddressed, however, was the order that banks processed charges. That issue has been winding its way through the nation’s court system instead. In 2010, a California judge ordered Wells Fargo to return $203 million in overdraft fees to customers whose transactions

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George Huguely trial highlights alcohol abuse among college students

some educators are now cautioning against sending teens away to school, where they can't be easily watched over. "For the first time in my career," said Gimbel, "I'm advising parents not to send their kids off to college, because it's nothing but a big party." Disturbing statistics While some campus education and prevention initiatives, like those offered by U.Va.'s Gordie Center, have helped reduce alcohol abuse and the associated consequences among college students over the past decade or so, the national numbers are still disturbing. An NIAAA report released in 2009 shows that alcohol-related deaths of people ages 18 to 24 were up 14 percent to 1,825 in 2005, compared with roughly 1,605 in 1998. And the number of students reporting a DWI arrest skyrocketed 46 percent during the same time period, to 3.36 million from 2.3 million. Who's doing the drinking varies, but there are representatives from all groups, educators said: jocks, Greeks, nerds and socialites alike. Athletes, along with fraternity and sorority members, tend to be considered the stereotypical abusers, however, with each falling prey to peer pressure. "The thing about athletes is the team is so important," said Bruce, and that puts a lot of stress on students to fit in. Studies, including a 2001 examination by the Harvard School of Public Health, have shown that athletes tend to drink more than their non-athlete peers and to experience more negative effects. And among athletes, lacrosse players are among the biggest partiers, according to a National Collegiate Athletic Association report published this year looking at substance use among college athletes. The report was based on responses to the association's 2009 survey of 20,474 student athletes in 23 championship sports. The survey found that male and female lacrosse players are more likely than any other kind of athlete to take amphetamines like Adderall, which many at U.Va., including Love, were prescribed for attention deficit disorder. And roughly 95 percent of the country's male lacrosse players drank, the study claimed. Among women players, 85 percent consumed alcohol. Both Love and Huguely were lifelong lacrosse players, and they traveled among a tight-knit crew of other athletes, many of whom grew up together in the same Mid-Atlantic prep school circles. Several witnesses during Huguely's trial said they had known Love for years. Chris Clements, one of Huguely's team members, met Love when they were pre-teens. Both attended private schools in the Baltimore

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George Huguely trial highlights alcohol abuse among college students

drowned on her own bloody nose. When Love's roommate found her, she reported a possible alcohol overdose to 911 operators, not knowing what else to immediately make of Love's unconscious, though bruised, state. Love's death stunned the U.Va. community and campuses across the country, which were suddenly faced with the reality that even prestigious universities and privileged students aren't immune to alcohol abuse and violence. The University of Virginia quickly launched a bystander action program that trained students and staff to intervene if they're concerned about someone. Roughly 10 percent of the school's 14,000 undergraduates volunteered for the program that first year, said Bruce, of the Gordie Center. Her institution is now named after Lynn Gordon Bailey Jr., an 18-year-old who died during a 2004 hazing incident at the University of Colorado in Boulder, after merging with the Gordie Foundation recently. But it began in 1987 as the Institute for Substance Abuse Studies. At one point, the university was outpacing the national average numbers when it came to drinking, Bruce said, but that's changed in the past 10 years, with fewer drinking-and-driving incidents and negative consequences being reported. "Most students are drinking in a moderate way," Bruce said. And even those who drink to excess are generally taken care of, U.Va. students say. "They're going out with friends who take care of them," said Chris Leslie, a 20-year-old from Vienna, Va., who was having a pizza dinner with friends last week. "There are obviously aberrations, which is why there's this story (about Love and Huguely)," he added. Getting parents involved Emily Sears, who coordinates Towson University's substance abuse counseling center, said many young people don't know how to drink responsibly. "There's a complete lack of understanding and knowledge about how to measure a drink ... how to measure a shot out instead of just pouring alcohol out of a bottle into a red Solo cup," she said. Towson students call their plastic cup concoctions "jungle juice," Sears said. And when she was in college at Loyola in the early 1990s, her peers called it "the trash can." Towson students are required to take an online alcohol education course as freshmen, like many other students at campuses around the country, including U.Va. But Gimbel thinks there should be more done, "especially with freshmen and getting parents involved." There should be "more education, mandatory education," he said, "not just something on a

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D.C. news in brief

increase in foreign language outreach efforts, a 7 percent increase in written translation services and a 19 percent increase in agency staff training on language access were also reported. According to the 2010 Census, more than 13.5 percent of D.C. residents are foreign born and 14.5 percent of residents 5 and older speak a language other than English. To read the report, go to www.ohr.dc.gov. Job fair for veterans, spouses is Thursday A job fair for veterans and military spouses is scheduled from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday at the Washington Hilton, 1919 Connecticut Ave. NW. Confirmed employers with tables will include Microsoft, Home Depot, the U.S. Department of Energy, Allstate and Kaiser Permanente. The event is sponsored by RecruitMilitary, a military-to-civilian recruiting firm, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Admission is free to veterans. For information, go to www2.recruitmilitary.com. Parks and recreation offices to move The D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation is moving from 3149 16th St. NW to two locations next month. The central office, 1250 U St. NW, will include the director’s office and offices for permits, customer service, communications and human resources. The agency’s program offices, including camps and aquatics, will relocate to the Columbia Heights Community Center, 1480 Girard St. NW. For information, go to www.dpr.dc.gov. Free women’s health symposium is March 10 Woman to Woman: Mind, Body and Spirit, a free health symposium, is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. March 10 at the George Washington University Marvin Center, 800 21st St. NW. The program includes health seminars with doctors on new treatments and technology, fitness tips, cooking demonstrations, workshops and free health screenings. To register, e-mail gwuhwb@gmail.com or call 301-893-4443. Cherry Blossom Regatta planned for April 21 DC Sail is holding its annual Cherry Blossom Regatta, a race of Flying Junior sailing dinghies on the Potomac, on April 21. The proceeds benefit DC Sail’s sailing education programs and youth scholarship fund. DC Sail is a community sailing program of the nonprofit National Maritime Heritage Foundation. Registration for a two-person sailing team is $50. Only eight racing boats are available. For information, call 202-547-1250. Shaw library to close next week for sewer work The Watha T. Daniel-Shaw Neighborhood Library will be closed from Sunday to Wednesday for sewer work. Patrons can pick up holds at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, 901 G St. NW. — Compiled by Terence McArdle

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Formerly secret telexes offer window into Iran’s nuclear deceit

telexes confirm what IAEA officials believe was a lavish, global shopping spree that continued throughout the 1990s and beyond. Besides the fluorine gas, Iranian officials ordered mass spectrometers, crucial for analyzing the enrichment level of uranium hexafluoride gas, as well as highly specialized types of motors, pumps, valves and transducers used in manufacturing gas centrifuges. “The fact that so many items are of the type used in centrifuges, and organized under one specific heading, stands out in the data,” ISIS said in a report analyzing the documents. Privately, Iranian leaders have responded to evidence of duplicity and deceit by blaming the West, saying the United States and its allies unfairly sought to block Iran from its rightful pursuit of nuclear technology, said George Perkovich, a nuclear expert who has met with senior Iranian officials responsible for the country’s nuclear policy. “The only way they could get what they need is to keep things secret and use duplicity,” said Perkovich, director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Iranian view, he said, is “if we didn’t use these tricks, we wouldn’t get the technology we needed, and to which we have a right.” Many of the telexes were ostensibly orders from Sharif University of Technology, a prestigious school in the Iranian capital. Yet, the fax number and post office box on the return address belonged to the PHRC, ISIS said in its analysis. An Iranian scientist who headed the military research center, Abbas Shahmoradi-Zavareh, also kept an office at Sharif University. The president of Sharif University at the time was Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s current foreign minister and the one-time head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. One series of telexes that apparently raised eyebrows at spy agencies involved an attempt by Iran to obtain tens of thousands of highly specialized magnets used in gas centrifuges. Fearing perhaps that some of its efforts would be thwarted, Iranian officials sent requests to multiple companies at once, asking for as many as 30,000 magnets made from unusual alloys and cut to precise dimensions. “Snd us a few samples for testing,” one order, written in the typical abbreviated English used by telex operators, began. “We are looking forward to yr early rply.” It is clear from the telex exchanges that many of the orders were filled, though in some cases the Iranians were turned down when European

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Montgomery County Animal Watch

These were among the cases received by the Montgomery County Animal Services Division. For information on shelter hours and location, adoption and licensing procedures, rabies clinics and low-cost neutering, call 240-773-5960. Dog digs out and kills, returns home: Rascally raccoon flees through flue: Goat roams from home: Pets available for adoption Rockville Germantown Milestone PetSmart 20924 Frederick Rd. Noon to 3 p.m. Sunday Shelter has adoptable felines Gaithersburg Animal Welfare League of Montgomery County no-kill shelter12 Park Ave.Noon to 3 p.m. Saturday6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday Kentlands PetSmart218 Kentlands Blvd. Noon to 3 p.m. Saturday Germantown Lucky Dog Animal Rescue Germantown Spaniel group’s adoption show — Compiled by Lisa M. Bolton

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Study raises concerns about pot smoking, teen drivers

about another factor: Kids may be stoned on marijuana. New data compiled by Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) and the insurance industry indicates that pot smoking is up among teens, and use is higher among high school kids than it has been in three decades. Nineteen percent of teens said they’d driving a vehicle while stoned, according to a survey done by SADD and Liberty Mutual Insurance. The information released Wednesday comes a week after the Governors Highway Safety Association reported teen highway fatalities increased in the first half of 2011, reversing an eight-year downward trend and contradicting data that showed overall fatalities continued to decrease. About a third people who die during their teenage years in the United States are killed in vehicle accidents, the single leading cause of teenage death. SADD and Liberty Mutual have surveyed teens about their driving habits for a dozen years. Responses collected last year showed that the number of teens who believe smoking pot distracts their focus on driving declined by 8 percent. More than one-third said marijuana use causes no distraction to their driving. And 19 percent of teens who say they have driven after drinking believe alcohol doesn’t result in distraction. “What keeps me up at night is that this data reflects a dangerous trend toward the acceptance of marijuana and other substances compared to our study of teens conducted just two years ago,” said Stephen Wallace, senior adviser for policy, research and education at SADD. Most teens said, however, that they would stop driving after smoking or drinking if their passengers asked them to, and almost as many said they would speak up if they were passengers in a car driven by someone who was impaired. “Teens are faced with potentially destructive decisions every day and don’t always make the best ones,” said Dave Melton, a driving safety expert with Liberty Mutual Insurance and managing director of global safety. “It’s our job as mentors, parents, role models or friends to effectively communicate with them to ensure they are armed with the right information and aware of the dangers of marijuana and other substances, especially while driving.” The survey of teen drivers began with four teenage focus groups, followed by questioning of 2,294 11th- and 12th-grade students from 28 high schools nationwide. The poll was done by ORC International, which said the results had a margin of error of 2.02 percent.

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competition in late 2010, but a series of appeals and threatened court actions by prospective bidders delayed the final offering. The result was the latest extension for MEP. Meanwhile, as the Army said in its justification document, “the need for linguists in theater evolves on a daily basis while remaining critical to current and future operations.” Afghanistan’s population is spread out, with a high illiteracy rate and “dozens of languages and dialects.” The number of linguists needed by U.S. troops far “exceeded the number of locals that could take jobs,” according to the Army. In addition, there are three types of interpreters needed — locals and others who have no security clearances; U.S. citizens who have secret clearances; and U.S. citizens with top-secret clearances and “capable of supporting continuous operations on a 24/7 basis in austere/hostile locations throughout Afghanistan,” according to the Army. Salaries can range from as low as $900 a month for an Afghan to $200,000 or more a year for an American working at forward operating positions. It is a dangerous business, and even more so for Afghans, who become special targets for the Taliban. MEP in September said that over the years 73 of its employees had been killed, with 312 injured and 10 missing. In January 2010, one of its interpreters, Nasir Ahmad Ahmadi, went on a rampage and killed two U.S. soldiers at a fire base and wounded another. Ahmadi, a 23-year-old Afghan who had immigrated to the United States in 2009, was in turn fatally shot by a U.S. Army sergeant. A wrongful-death lawsuit was filed last year against MEP by relatives of the dead soldiers who claimed that Ahmadi had been hired without proper vetting. The company said that Ahmadi had been thoroughly vetted and that his actions were “entirely unforeseeable.” The case is pending. Meanwhile, MEP is rising on Washington Technology’s list of the 100 biggest defense contractors. It was No. 42 last year, up from No. 62 in 2010. The company was even mentioned at a July 26, 2010, hearing of the Commission on Wartime Contracting. Former representative Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), co-chairman of the panel, noted that MEP got its interpreter contract increased without competition. Although Shays said that MEP had received at that point more than a billion dollars and “was a great American success story,” he added that it hadn’t had any audits. “Whatever your costs are, you

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of its employees had been killed, with 312 injured and 10 missing. In January 2010, one of its interpreters, Nasir Ahmad Ahmadi, went on a rampage and killed two U.S. soldiers at a fire base and wounded another. Ahmadi, a 23-year-old Afghan who had immigrated to the United States in 2009, was in turn fatally shot by a U.S. Army sergeant. A wrongful-death lawsuit was filed last year against MEP by relatives of the dead soldiers who claimed that Ahmadi had been hired without proper vetting. The company said that Ahmadi had been thoroughly vetted and that his actions were “entirely unforeseeable.” The case is pending. Meanwhile, MEP is rising on Washington Technology’s list of the 100 biggest defense contractors. It was No. 42 last year, up from No. 62 in 2010. The company was even mentioned at a July 26, 2010, hearing of the Commission on Wartime Contracting. Former representative Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), co-chairman of the panel, noted that MEP got its interpreter contract increased without competition. Although Shays said that MEP had received at that point more than a billion dollars and “was a great American success story,” he added that it hadn’t had any audits. “Whatever your costs are, you get something plus,” he said, meaning that the company gets a fee and whatever its operating costs are. MEP’s then-chief executive Chris Taylor responded that the Defense Department’s auditors were at the company’s offices and that the firm was current on its invoices to the Army. One element in MEP’s growth that imitates what other big defense contractors have done is to create a “board of advisers” and stock it with former government officials. Among the current advisory board members are retired Adm. Eric T. Olson, former head of the U.S. Special Operations Command; Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security; John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security and a member of the Defense Policy Board; and David Kilcullen, senior counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David H. Petraeus during the 2007 surge and adviser to the Afghanistan International Security Assistance Force in 2009 and 2010. According to the Army, there are five applicants for the new Afghanistan interpreter contract, which is scheduled to run for another five years, from 2012 to 2017. MEP is one of the bidders. It will be interesting to see who wins. For previous Fine Print columns, go to washingtonpost.com/fedpage.

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In Kabul, Afghan police sympathize with protesters angry over Koran burning

Taliban issued a harshly worded statement encouraging Afghan security officials to take up arms against Western forces. On the streets of Kabul, police officers said they didn’t care about the flurry of U.S. apologies, including the one from Obama, or the demands of Afghan politicians. The offense felt was personal, most said, not diminished by contrition or inflamed by hostile rhetoric. “It is difficult sometimes to convince people not to resort to protest,” said Qaseem Jangalbagh, the police chief of Panjshir province. Asked whether that included his own officers, he said, “It is a problem.” Junior officers spoke more bluntly, saying they would shirk their duties rather than quash demonstrations and referring often to their own violent impulses. “We should burn those foreigners,” said a police officer in his early 30s who has been in the force for almost 2 1 / 2 years. Like most of the country’s security officers, he was trained by NATO troops. Anger within Bagram base Police officers weren’t the only Afghans assumed to be U.S. allies who spoke of mounting friction. The first early morning protests Tuesday were led by Afghan employees of Bagram air base, where the religious materials were burned. NATO military officials have said in public statements that the incineration was accidental. Some Bagram employees — who often face threats for aiding the United States — waved the charred books in the air, demanding a response. Those employees, among the 5,000 Afghans who support the base’s operations, chanted “Death to America” and lobbed rocks at gates that some had entered for years. Some cursed their bosses and promised never to return to work at Bagram. “How could we ever work for someone who could do this?” asked a 21-year-old man who said he had worked for two years in a warehouse on the base. “This couldn’t have happened by accident. This was meant to offend us.” Taliban officials, who are in the middle of tenuous peace talks with the United States, had initially condemned the burning but stopped short of advocating violence — an uncharacteristically muted response. But in the written statement released Thursday, the insurgent group took a tougher stance. The statement described the burning as a “deliberate” act, despite repeated statements by top U.S. officials that the books were sent to the incinerator by mistake. The Taliban statement said Afghans and Muslims should not be placated by the U.S.

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The Impulsive Traveler: In Florida, a taste of tropical fruits

Chris Rollins, who has been director of Fruit and Spice Park for 30 years. Browsing the park’s Web site on a gray November day, I’d had visions of sipping fresh-squeezed juice in the sunshine and decided to make a trip to the Redland area the next time I was in Miami. So on a 75-degree day in mid-January, my husband and I headed to the Redlands, making a warm-up stop first at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables. The 83-acre garden’s walking paths wind among lakes, tropical flowers, palm trees and other plants. But our destination was a small greenhouse at one end of the park. The Whitman Tropical Fruit Pavilion houses a display of fruit species from around the world — mangosteen, durian, rambutan and many others — with informative signs describing their origins. Without a guide, though, it was hard to find the fruit on the mostly bare trees and bushes. (This was our first clue that perhaps January was not the best time to take a tropical fruit tour, even in South Florida.) Luckily, the outdoor “edible garden” next door proved more accessible. The Fairchild runs a farm in the Redland area that houses an extensive seed collection and hosts fruit research and public education programs. The farm also supplies the raw materials for two weekend-only smoothie bars, one at the farm and one at the main garden. Taylor Carman, the helpful smoothiemaker manning the bar, showed us around the small outdoor garden and gave us a few tastes of in-season fruit there: a super-sweet, cinnamony sapodilla and a bright yellow canistel (also called eggfruit). Half an hour later, we found ourselves making a quick transition from the strip malls and gas stations of suburban Miami to acres of avocado orchards. In the middle of them sits Fruit and Spice Park, on 37 acres of land purchased by Miami-Dade County in 1944 to build an educational botanical garden. The park “is really a reflection of the community,” Rollins says. “The very first European inhabitants here, around 1900, the first thing they did was plant guavas, mangos, avocados.” Today, avocados are the biggest commercial crop grown nearby, covering nearly 8,000 acres, according to Rollins. Growers also produce smaller numbers of longan, lychee, sapodilla, mamey, star fruit and other exotic tropical fruits, which they ship to specialty markets, resort chefs and ethnic grocery stores across the country.

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An outrageous deal to release a senior al-Qaeda terrorist

the opportunity to begin using signals intelligence to track the entire JI network. Thanks to the information Khan provided, Zubair was captured in June 2003 and taken into CIA custody. Under questioning, Zubair revealed that he worked directly for a JI leader named Hambali, KSM’s partner in the West Coast plot. He provided information that was used to track down and capture Hambali as well as another key player in the JI plot — a terrorist named Bashir bin Lap (a.k.a. “Lillie”) who, according to the office of the director of national intelligence, “was slated to be a suicide operative for an al-Qaeda ‘second wave’ attack targeting Los Angeles.” Agency officials informed KSM that both Lillie and Hambali has been captured and confronted him with detailed questions from their debriefings. When presented with this information, KSM finally provided more specific information on al-Qaeda’s operational plans with JI and the identities of JI operatives. KSM also provided information that helped lead to the capture of Hambali’s younger brother, Rusman Gunawan, whom KSM identified as the leader of the JI cell that was to carry out the West Coast plot. Once in custody, the brother identified a previously unknown cell of JI operatives — the Ghuraba Cell — that was hiding out in Karachi, Pakistan, awaiting orders. When confronted with his brother’s revelations, Hambali gave U.S. officials information that, together with intelligence from his brother, led to the capture of more than a dozen members of this cell. The disruption of the Hambali network shows both the effectiveness and the unique value of the CIA detention and interrogation program. It was only because Majid Khan, KSM and other captured terrorists were held together in secret prisons that CIA officials were able to “triangulate” the detainees — using information from one to elicit more information from others and ultimately to track down and unravel the Hambali network. The story also shows that Majid Khan was at the center of some of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous post-9/11 plotting. Khan worked side-by-side with KSM, vetted terrorist operatives for the 9/11 mastermind, delivered funds for a deadly terrorist attack in Indonesia and volunteered to be a suicide operative and to personally conduct terrorist attacks in the United States. The idea that the Obama administration would release this murderous man from Guantanamo Bay is astounding. Read more on this topic News article: Majid Khan offered a plea deal

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Offering a little of everything in art

that are unabashedly erotic. Rendered in bronze, the women’s physical intimacy feels a little less immediate yet still palpable. Cronin’s sculpture is a rare example of a memorial that’s more about life than its loss. Ian Whitmore It’s common practice for artists to redo other people’s work, whether in the spirit of homage or mockery. That’s what Ian Whitmore does, except that the artist he remodels is himself. The pictures in his “A Devil, the Shadow, the Notice of a Small Falling Leaf,” at G Fine Art, are doubly diverse. Not only does Whitmore work in various styles, but he often returns to a long-ignored painting to complete it in a different mode than he began. A George Washington University graduate who moved to Brooklyn in 2008, Whitmore takes perverse inspiration from radical 16th-century Protestant reformer Andreas Karlstadt, the source of the show’s wordy title. Karlstadt considered religious paintings and sculpture idolatrous and wanted them removed from churches. Whitmore’s goal isn’t religious, but he seeks the iconoclasts’ boldness to destroy art — even if it’s only his own. This process, which Whitmore calls “detuning,” makes for some lively contrasts. “Grey Gardens” is half realist rendering of a classical building, half abstract-expressionist freakout. The punning “Short Trip” subverts the tradition of the sacred triptych by assembling three unrelated canvases. The book-size “My Copy” is designed to look as if the artist has painted over a real tome; its title, barely visible, includes the phrase “master forger.” There’s a crucifix in one of these pictures, but Whitmore is just as a likely to refer to science as to theology. One canvas shows a rocket blasting off (among other things); another is modeled on early 20th-century industrial efficiency studies. “Keyhole,” painted on a jaggedly shaped canvas, is derived from photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope; it plays on the way the telescope’s finished photos are edited and composited from many individual shots. One of the strangest and most striking pieces in the show, “Keyhole” is a rare case in which Whitmore tries to find, rather than lose, a coherent image. Jenkins is a freelance writer. Select: WPA Exhibition and Art Auction Gala on view through March 2 at 1801 L St. NW; 202-234-7103; www.wpadc.org. Patricia Cronin: Bodies and Soul on view through March 10 at Conner Contemporary Art, 1358 Florida Ave NE; 202-588-8750; www.connercontemporary.com. Ian Whitmore: A Devil, the Shadow, the Notice

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Japan grows uneasy about earthquake forecasts

Japan is vulnerable to huge quakes, some experts say, but that’s about all we know for sure. The skepticism is shared by seismologists worldwide, but Japan is the world’s earthquake capital, and no country spends more on forecasting temblors. A search for clues For decades, researchers in this island nation have studied historical data, dug through fault lines, attached instruments to the sea floor and pulverized rocks in laboratories — all in a search for clues about how the earth behaves before it slips, shifts and shakes. Unlock that mystery, scientists say, and they could make predictions (“Tokyo will have a 7.0 quake tomorrow”) with enough warning time to allow a city to be evacuated. They could also make broad and accurate forecasts (“There’s a 70 percent chance Tokyo will have a 7.0 quake within the next four years”) that could influence everything from building codes to government planning. Experts have spent decades looking for earthquake precursors by examining changes in the levels of water and radon gas, electrical current and animal behavior. They have frequently had their hopes raised. In the laboratory, for instance, rocks under pressure show small signs of rupture before a dramatic slip, suggesting the possibility that “pre-slip” deformations could signal a developing earthquake. But most scientists say that pre-slip movement, if it exists in real life, is too inconspicuous to serve as a clue. There’s also the common but fraught practice of forecasting earthquakes by using apparent historical patterns. In some regions of the country, major quakes usually happen every 100 or 150 years. But even those areas can remain calm for three centuries. In Tokyo, which had its last major quake in 1923, centuries of records produce no clear pattern. Sometimes, most notably with last year’s 9.0 magnitude temblor, the problem is history itself: Scientists either lack enough data to see the pattern, or they don’t see one until it’s too late. According to the government-issued earthquake hazard map that Japan updates annually as part of its public safety efforts, the northeastern coast of Japan was thought to be among the least likely places in the country to experience a major jolt. Then, March 11, miles off the northeastern shoreline, the earth slipped 100 to 160 feet. In the weeks after, Japanese seismologists looked for missed signals. The northeastern coast, it turned out, was indeed susceptible to major quakes. But the region hadn’t seen

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Two NATO soldiers killed inside Afghan interior ministry, officials say

KABUL — The deaths prompted Marine Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, to recall all NATO personnel working in Afghan ministries in the Kabul area. The step was taken “for obvious force protection reasons,” Allen said in a statement that capped a week marked by escalating distrust between NATO and Afghan forces. “We are investigating the crime and will pursue all leads to find the person responsible for this attack. The perpetrator of this attack is a coward whose actions will not go unanswered.” Fratricide has been a growing problem between Afghan soldiers and their foreign counterparts here. In the past, Western military advisers have been advised to operate cautiously after such attacks. But this incident marks the first time a commander has publicly withdrawn his personnel from their posts for fear of attacks by men in Afghan uniforms. “This afternoon, two of our international counterparts were killed inside the compound of the ministry. An investigation into the incident has already begun,” said interior ministry spokesperson Siddiq Siddiqi in a statement. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force also confirmed the deaths of “two service members” in a statement. Their bodies were discovered by another western official on the ground of a command center meeting room, at the heart of the fortified compound, according to Siddiqi, who said the specifics of the killings are still unclear. The Taliban promptly claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the shooter was an insurgent infiltrator in the Afghans’ security forces. At least three people were killed and dozens wounded on Saturday when protests turned violent in Kunduz, a province in northern Afghanistan. One crowd tried to storm the United Nations compound, but were resisted by armed guards. “Although caused by legitimate defense, the United Nations also regrets the casualties among the demonstrators and expresses condolences to the families of those who lost their lives,” said the United Nations Assitance Mission in a written statement. Four NATO service members have been killed in the last week, since the U.S. military burned a pile of Korans at a military base here, inciting five days of violent protests across Afghanistan. In the wake of that incident, the Taliban issued a statement asking Afghan soldiers and police to target their western counterparts. Western military advisers were warned of an escalated risk of fratricide this week, and told to stay out of Afghan ministries unless their

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At the Monroe Institute, a spiritual experience could just be a beat away

cushioned vaults we are encouraged to ask ourselves questions we might not during the course of otherwise busy days. The woman whose husband cheated on her can’t decide if she should divorce him. During one exercise, she sees herself and their three children appearing happy at their old house, a place she told herself she would go if she left him. “How many are getting something out of this?” Kortum asks, referring to the overall program. Eighteen of the 20 hands go up. “And how many feel nothing at all is happening for you?” Krishnan Chary and one other man raise theirs. Rademacher says those who come here with the highest expectations usually find the least success. By Monroe’s estimates, 15 percent of participants will have an out-of-body experience, but Rademacher says people can focus so much on that that they fail to perceive other developments. On a sheet of general guidelines for the program, the first line reads: “Most importantly . . . don’t try, don’t force anything.” *** A bell rings, indicating another exercise. We slip on our headphones as usual, and, per Monroe’s instructions, try to feel vibrations flowing through us. “Follow the sound, let yourself follow the sound and the change in the pulse,” Monroe tells us. “Now let the vibration move upward more and more. . . .” When we meet later to discuss the exercise, Broadman speaks first. Until now, he has said little during group discussions. “The vibe flow for me was almost a shattering experience,” he says, sounding both awed and bewildered. “I vibrated. I don’t vibrate. It started at my toes and went right through my body.” “Besides feeling shattered, was there any other emotion it brought up for you?” Stone, the facilitator, asks. Broadman holds his empty palms upward. Before meeting with the group, he tried to analyze what happened. How could putting on a set of headphones make him vibrate? Broadman looks at Stone and Kortum. They have been telling the group for days that there is more than can be seen, more than logic can prove. “Just, thank you,” he says. The next day, the group takes a silent walk. Kortum explains that the purpose is to show us how states beyond our everyday consciousness can be accessed from anywhere. We don’t need a bed cut into a wall. Several people walk slowly down the gravel road, aware

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Should you hire a social media person?

our social media presence part-time, but we learned quickly that in order to go from just having a presence to actually building and maintain high-value relationships on several different platforms, we needed a full-time social media manager. So yes, we do have a full-time person on social media. “Our social media channels allow us to communicate in real-time with a much broader audience than we would otherwise have access to. We reach several very distinct groups — language teachers, language learners, education policy aficionados, education bloggers and more. Managing, leading and participating in all these distinct conversations on a wide variety of platforms require a full-time manager.” Erin Blaskie, CEO of BSETC in Ontario, Can.: “Within our team of 20 subcontractors, we have two that focus entirely on social media activities for our company and for our clients’ companies. One reason is because we also incorporate specific tracking techniques to help us measure effectiveness and reach. While tracking techniques are used in traditional marketing also, it is helpful to have someone already well-versed in this specific area. “The other reason is because we want the tone across these platforms to be less marketing speak and more conversational. The messages shared on social media outlets should be equally matched by outreach and ongoing conversation to allow relationships to be built and cultivated. While using social media is different than traditional marketing, we do consider it all part of our communications and marketing activities because it still requires sharing a message across a form of media.” Emerson Spartz, CEO of Chicago-based Spartz Media: “We do have dedicated social media people — it’s far too important to our business to lump under a macro category like ‘communications.’ However, an integrated team approach to social media is critical. “Social media is about the give-and-take between your company and your users. The authenticity and personality of those interactions are critical to increasing customer loyalty. Therefore, we have a dedicated community team who continually experiments with various social media strategies and explores ways of tapping into the potential of new social media platforms like Pinterest. “When platforms like Facebook make changes to their sharing functionality or to their user interface, it can have a significant effect on our users’ sharing habits. By having a team dedicated to improving our social media influence, we’ve been able to dramatically ratchet up the number of conversations about our content.”

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Is the fight against global warming hopeless?

IS THE FIGHT against global warming hopeless? It can seem so. The long-term threat to the climate comes from carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, locking in higher temperatures for generations. After decades of effort, only about one-tenth of America’s energy mix comes from renewable sources that don’t produce carbon dioxide. But two policies can buy the world more time to allow carbon-free technologies to catch up. One is aimed at greenhouse substances that clear out of the atmosphere after a few years, months or even days. Cutting back the emission of soot and ozone gases such as methane would reduce the world’s warming by as much as a half degree Celsius over the next few decades, according to a study in last month’s Science. Adding hydrofluorocarbons — another class of short-lived pollutants — to the list would help even more to delay the approach of temperature thresholds beyond which global warming could be catastrophic. Reducing these emissions is relatively cheap, especially when the benefits to health are factored in. For example, primitive cooking stoves in developing countries produce much of the world’s soot; using more efficient ones would prevent perhaps millions of deaths from respiratory illness. Methane, meanwhile, is the primary component of natural gas — a commodity that pipeline or coal-mine operators could sell if they kept it from escaping into the atmosphere. Researchers have even concluded that global crop yields would rise. Coordinating an effective international effort to cut so-called short-lived climate forcers will be the hardest task. The Group of Eight and the Arctic Council have acknowledged the need but have moved slowly. On Feb. 16 Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a new international initiative, along with $12 million for the program. It will take more than American money. Regulators in the developing world must enforce stronger air-pollution rules. Since many of the health benefits will be immediate, though, some may be more eager to do so than they have been to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Nations may also add hydrofluorocarbons to the substances regulated by the Montreal Protocol, the treaty responsible for slashing the use of a related class of chemicals. Another development that promises to provide time for clean technology to scale up — America’s natural gas boom — faces a challenge of a very different sort: environmentalists. Innovative drilling techniques have made huge amounts of fuel

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Karzai urges Afghans to avoid violent retaliation over Koran burnings

Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks during a news conference in Kabul February 26, 2012. (MOHAMMAD ISMAIL/REUTERS) KABUL, Afghanistan — Karzai also voiced his support for NATO’s decision Saturday to recall its personnel from Afghan ministries after two U.S. service members were killed by an Afghan security official in the country’s heavily protected Interior Ministry earlier in the day. Karzai described the move as “temporary” and justifiable in the face of the attacks and spreading protests. Meanwhile, officials in the northern Kunduz province said residents took part in fresh demonstrations Sunday, attacking a police station and a U.S. military base. At least 16 policemen and a half-dozen U.S. service members were wounded in the attacks, in which protesters used a hand grenade and small arms fire, according to Sarwar Hussaini, a spokesman for Kunduz’s governor. Several protesters were wounded during clashes with police, he said. The deaths at the ministry in Kabul — by a man wearing an Afghan police uniform — follows Thursday’s assassination of two U.S. troops by an Afghan soldier during protesters’ attack on a U.S. base in the east. More than 25 Afghans have died in the demonstrations, and the service members’ killings prompted London to pull its civilian advisers from Afghan ministries, according to British media. During days of demonstrations across the country, many protesters pushed for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan and chanted slogans against the United States and Karzai. Protesters and Afghan Islamic clerics have demanded the parliament and government to put those responsible for the Koran burnings on trial. The resurgent Taliban has urged Afghans to ignore apologies from U.S. authorities over the apparent inadvertent act and urged retaliation against Western installations and military personnel. However, Karzai, while pushing for the punishment of those responsible for Koran burning, has called on his countrymen to not resort to violence because he said the insurgents and their foreign backers would manipulate their protests. “Now is the time to return to calm and not let the enemies of peace and development to use this situation,” Karzai said in a news conference Sunday. “We have asked for justice and punishment for those who have done this act,” he said of the culprits behind the Koran burnings. The week’s events have exposed a core vulnerability of the Obama administration’s strategy for winding down the decade-long Afghan war and are seen as a blow to the West’s

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The federal government needs to lead — not lag — the private sector in tech

The government’s $80 billion budget for IT spending tops that of any organization in the world. And yet for many workers in the public sector, sharing information often takes archaic forms: exchanging physical hard-drives, mailing CDs, using outdated computer systems and software or scavenging for critical information stuck in data silos and legacy platforms. What’s so remarkable about today’s sleepy pace of innovation is that the government served as both the benefactor and beneficiary of technology progress for decades in the 20th century. Many of IBM’s major developments sprung from government-led orders, such as the Defense Department using its early mainframes during the Cold War. Oracle famously got its start by building a database for the CIA. ARPANET, the first network resembling today’s Internet, came out of research funded by the Defense Department. Once the chief adopter of some of the most groundbreaking technologies in history, the government is often seen as a laggard in the most recent wave of innovation. The capital is mired in a swamp of legacy technologies (using 2,094 data centers, some of which have closed). Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), who chairs a subcommittee on federal financial management and government information, said, “We have seen hundreds of millions of dollars wasted by the federal government on poorly planned and poorly managed IT projects and through unnecessarily duplicative IT investments.” The federal government’s “cloud first” policy, championed by the Obama administration’s former Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, is starting to see progress in its attempt to address the technology problem by using third-party services that deliver software over the Web. The General Services Administration announced last year that it was moving its e-mail services to Google, which costs roughly half as much as its previous architecture (saving about $42 million over the next five years). The Army Experience Center found a cloud customer relationship management solution that resulted in a 10th of the cost of maintaining and upgrading its previous technology. Cutting costs and increasing efficiency are just the start. The need for more clouds With cloud technologies, we have the opportunity to do far more than eliminate redundancies and save billions of dollars. We can create a new culture of information sharing in the capital, one that breaks down data silos to promote better decision making, cross-agency collaboration and an overall gain in government productivity. There’s still a ways to go, but many of the

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There’s an association for that app

said Pete Snyder, a founding member of ADA and chief executive of Disruptor Capital. Eat your Veggies Mom’s Organic Market Don’t look for processed carbs such as mac-and-cheese or mashed potatoes. Owner/founder Scott Nash tells us the organic lunch and dinner offerings will include salads, steamed veggie bowls with brown rice and whole grains, sandwiches and vegetable juice. “The concept is a throwback to the old health food store lunch counters,” said Nash, who is hiring extra staff to man what he is calling the Naked Lunch. Nash said he plans to add counters at other stores, such the ones in Waldorf and Merrifield. “We’re optimistic,” he said. And if it flops? “We’ll use it as an employee cafeteria.” High-end travel Steve Case Absentee owner When we heard Jim Garland, chief executive of Dulles-based Sharp Details, was scheduled to speak today at Ingar Grev’s National Capital Region Entrepreneurs Forum luncheon at the Tower Club in Tysons Corner, we were curious to know the topic. Garland, 43, said he planned to discuss how he was able to establish his $3 million business cleaning and maintaining corporate jets while taking a year off to travel the world with his wife and four children. The quick answer? “I hired well,” said Garland, who checked in monthly on his operations, which employs 65 people across seven states. “At the end of the day, systems are great, but if you have poor people running them, it doesn’t work. I had the right people in the right place.” Garland traveled the world from August 2010 to June 2011, starting with a 10-day trip across the United States and then on to Costa Rica, Spain, South Africa and China. He finished up in Fiji before returning to home. And the cost? “Let’s just say I will be cleaning airplanes for a long time,” he said. The Buzz Hears: Columbus, Ohio-based Bravo Brio Restaurant Group is expanding into the Washington-Baltimore area. Brio Tuscan Grille opens in Rockville on Feb. 29 and another unit opens in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in mid-March. Brio is already in Tysons Corner and Annapolis. Former NBC correspondent Brooke Salkoff, founder of CampEasy, the McLean-based search engine for parents planning camps for their kids, sold $3,000 in subscriptions in one 24-hour period last week to camps looking to market their summer programs. The site, which went live a few weeks ago, has generated more than

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Composer helps arrange a concert for people who, like him, use hearing aids

Composer Richard Einhorn found that a “hearing loop” at the Kennedy Center improved the sound picked up by his hearing aids. (Kevin Rivoli/ASSOCIATED PRESS) In 2010, the composer Richard Einhorn suddenly lost most of his hearing. He could still write music, but wearing hearing aids made it frustrating to attend a public performance: The sound typically was blurred with static and ambient noise. Then he attended a musical at the Kennedy Center that used a “hearing loop” — a wire that beamed sound to the telecoils built into many hearing aids and cochlear implants. Einhorn was delighted with the result. This weekend, he’s working with Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the Hearing Loss Association of America to introduce other people to the same pleasure. Most of the seats in Baltimore’s Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall will be looped for performances Friday and Sunday of Einhorn’s 1995 composition “Voices of Light,” an oratorio that will accompany the classic silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” HLAA members get a 20 percent discount on tickets and are invited to meet Einhorn at a reception after Friday’s 8 p.m. show. For information, e-mail nmacklin@hearingloss.org or go to www.bsomusic.org. — Nancy Szokan

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Like a Stradivarius, conductor Leonard Slatkin just gets better with time

“As I get older, I do not even think about the technique anymore ,” says conductor Leonard Slatkin. (Kevin Clark/THE WASHINGTON POST) When Leonard Slatkin turned 60 seven years ago, his manager told him that his music career now would really begin. Slatkin had already won seven Grammys and a National Medal of Arts award, but that was all a dress rehearsal. Unlike aging athletes, whose abilities wind down as their bodies grows older, musicians often get better with age and experience, and audiences appreciate them more. A 2010 compilation of the world's busiest conductors found an average age of 62. Since Slatkin’s 1968 debut at age 23 with the St. Louis Symphony, he has conducted major orchestras and opera companies on three continents. He served as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra from 1996 to 2008 and is currently the music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre National de Lyon in France as well as the principal guest conductor for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Slatkin returned to Washington last fall to conduct French cellist Gautier Capucon playing Saint-Saens’s Concerto No. 1 in A Minor. He conducted Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3 and the NSO premiere of 31-year-old composer Anna Clyne’s “Rewind.” Via e-mail, he discussed how growing older affects musicians and their artistry, and his in particular. Does aging help you as a conductor? I think that not only is there a more emotional understanding but a structural one as well. It more than likely comes from repeated study and many years of performing. There is no “perfect” in music. If I ever came off the stage and felt it could not be better, it would then be time to quit. What do you mean by “more emotional understanding”? Is that like Beethoven writing his best symphonies late in life, after he wrestled with his failing health? Do you have a richer sense of life because of things that have happened to you? When one is young, the focus of attention is on the technical matters: how to beat time, where to cue in the different instruments, et cetera. As I get older, I do not even think about the technique anymore and only consider how to get closer to the intention of the composer. Is there music you loved when you were younger that you don’t anymore and, vice versa, music you once loathed and

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Virginia Senate approves contentious ultrasound bill

that perform abortions, told reporters that he will review the legislation but supports the concept. “I think women have the right to know all of the medical information before they make a very important choice,’’ McDonnell said. The Senate amended the bill to exclude women who have reported to law enforcement agencies that they are victims of rape and incest, but it did not exempt women who know that their babies would suffer from birth defects. “The purpose of the bill is to make sure the mothers have more information as to the gestational age and physical development before making a decision as to the abortion,’’ said Sen. Stephen H. Martin (R-Chesterfield), who spoke during the debate. A series of other amendments died that would have forced insurance companies to cover the cost of the ultrasounds or required the state to pick up the tab for women without health insurance. Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R), who presides over the equally divided Senate, cast three tie-breaking votes on the amendments. Opponents of the bill, including Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia and the American Civil Liberties Union, said they have not decided whether to challenge the legislation in court should McDonnell sign it. Seven other states have similar laws. Republicans, who control both chambers of the General Assembly, have considered several abortion-related measures in the 60-day legislative session. But most, including those ending state subsidies for low-income women to abort fetuses that have serious birth defects and giving rights to fertilized eggs, have been killed. The House and Senate had already approved versions of the ultrasound legislation. But a national uproar over the measure and opponents’ graphic detail of the ultrasounds in early pregnancies led McDonnell — an abortion opponent — to intervene. An abdominal — or “jelly-on-the-belly” — ultrasound before an abortion would still be required. Both abdominal and transvaginal ultrasounds are already used by most abortion providers. Sen. Janet D. Howell (D-Fairfax) described the original version of the bill as “state rape’’ and said the new version is tantamount to “state assault.” “Very rarely do I get angry, but I am angry about this bill,’’ she said. “It reflects an attitude that is demeaning to women. It presumes the legislature — which as we look around is virtually all male — knows better what should happen to a woman’s body than the woman herself and her physician.’’

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The U-Va. murder case

I agree with Alexandra Petri’s lament about the lack of adult supervision for Yeardley Love and George Huguely V, whose lives were once so promising [“Murder at U-Va.: Where were the grown-ups?” op-ed, Feb. 25]. Some of the blame for this tragedy must fall upon society. One is led to believe that the young and able are sent to institutions of higher learning to study and mature in order to become individuals who can make a contribution to society. But this tragedy calls all that into question. And where were the “friends” of this young couple? Are we sending our youth to universities hoping that these institutions will solve issues that we as parents did not monitor? This is a sad comment on society as much as it is a tragedy for the Love and Huguely families. Ana Maria Balfour, Kensington ● ●

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I take strong issue with Alexandra Petri’s column on the University of Virginia murder case. College students George Huguely V and Yeardly Love were the adults in this tragedy. This type of incident also involves, all to often, young adults who are in the workforce or in the military, and no one asks, or should ask, “Where were the adults?” Parents who send young adults (they are not children anymore) off to college and expect the college to play a parenting role are badly misinformed about a university’s role in society. The university’s role is to provide an education for its students. The university is not a substitute parent. Duncan Nixon, Palmyra, Va.

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Maryland moves to limit school suspensions

BALTIMORE — Drawing a link to achievement gaps, the board also endorsed findings that out-of-school suspensions disproportionately affect minorities and special education students. A detailed written plan the board unveiled would redefine the vocabulary of suspension — what is short, what is long — and require Maryland’s 24 school systems to pay far closer attention to whom they suspend and why. The state would require close tracking of racial disparities in each school system. In some cases, local officials would be required to create plans to reduce disparities in one year and eliminate them over three years. “What we’re trying to do is to prompt people to think differently about discipline, with an eye toward achievement for all students,” board President James H. DeGraffenreidt Jr. said in an interview. In the 36-page document, the board said it aimed to keep students in school as much as possible and require educational support for those who do get removed. Now, about 23 percent of suspended students in Maryland get services to help them keep up while they are out of school. Tuesday’s action followed lengthy study. Several discipline cases figured in the deliberations, board members said, including the suicide of a student disciplined in neighboring Virginia and the suspension of a Maryland student involved in a fight who languished for most of the school year with no educational services. The board will allow public comment on the plan until March 30. It will take up the issue again April 24, with final action on proposed regulations expected at some point afterward. Under the plan, the state also would require school systems to keep detailed data on campus arrests, citing a federal initiative to address the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.” But walking a careful line, the board sought to shift thinking on discipline across the state without being too prescriptive. “The superintendents and local boards have asked that we leave the imposition of appropriate discipline in their hands,” the report said. “We agree.” No reforms would specifically address which offenses could lead to out-of-school discipline, it said. Suspensions for nonviolent offenses, such as insubordination or classroom disturbance, account for more than 63 percent of all out-of-school suspensions in the state. “We would hope to reduce that number to as close to zero as possible,” DeGraffenreidt said. The plan envisions that disciplinary offenses would be coded, to distinguish violent infractions from those that are nonviolent.

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Stomach-virus cases increasing

If it seems as though everyone you know has been sick or has a child who is vomiting or has diarrhea (or both), that’s probably because of an increase in the number of acute gastroenteritis outbreaks in the region the past several weeks. In Virginia, the number of outbreaks is about 20 percent higher than during the same period last year, health officials said. Maryland health officials said that so far, the overall number of outbreaks in that state is comparable with recent years, but since January and February are peak times for the nasty and highly contagious bug, they are asking residents to take simple precautions, like washing their hands, to avoid infection. The most common cause of acute gastroenteritis, or inflammation of the stomach and intestines, is a virus called norovirus. Symptoms can include vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain, a low-grade fever, headache, muscle aches, chills and fatigue. (Norovirus: How to stay healthy) During peak season, outbreaks are common because the illness is easily spread, person-to-person, through contaminated food or water or by touching contaminated surfaces. People with noro­virus are contagious from the moment they begin feeling ill to at least three days — and perhaps as long as two weeks — after recovery, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most people recover within a day or two. The illness is especially common in schools, child-care centers, nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other closed environments where people are in close contact. At Willow Springs Elementary School in Fairfax County, students began complaining last week of vomiting and diarrhea, and more than 100 students and several teachers were absent Friday. The school canceled all events Friday evening and over the weekend, and the building was thoroughly cleaned with a bleach solution, a spokeswoman for the county school system said. More than 100 students were absent Monday, but by Tuesday all but 16 had returned. The illnesses have not been confirmed as caused by noro­virus, but doctors and health officials said it is the most likely culprit. Earlier this month, about 85 students were infected by noro­virus at George Washington University. Last week, several had the bug at Howard University. In Montgomery County, health officials said that norovirus-like outbreaks have affected child-care facilities, nursing homes and schools. In Maryland, there have been 87 outbreaks of norovirus-like illnesses, up from 58 last year. But the number of

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20 years later, George Mason professor finally gets a telescope

Surrounded by Girl Scouts on the roof of George Mason University’s Research Hall, professor Harold Geller uses a laser pointer to identify stars in the night sky. “You can see Orion’s belt there,” he said. Then, circling other stars in the Orion constellation using the pointer, Geller said: “And there’s Rigel, Betelgeuse, which sounds a lot like Beetlejuice . . . and Bellatrix. And if you follow the belt all the way down, you can see the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius.” Immediately, whispers break out among the dozen or so fifth-graders from Herndon-Sterling Troop 920. “It’s Sirius? Why does it all sound like Harry Potter?” Sakina Ahmad, 10, and a student at Herndon Elementary School, whispered to a friend. Both recognized that two of the stars in the Orion constellation — Bellatrix and Sirius — share names with characters in author J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter books. Having identified a constellation of literary interest to the students, Geller then led the Scouts into George Mason’s observatory, showing them the best view on campus. It is a view that Geller made possible. In May, Mason added a 4,500-pound, $350,000 telescope to its Fairfax campus observatory, reachable through a walkway that links the observatory tower to Research Hall. “When I first came to George Mason in the 1980s as a graduate student, . . . I started a petition for an observatory,” Geller said. “We were promised a telescope on top” of two now-built science buildings on campus. Despite these promises, however, administrators told those promoting the addition of a telescope that the funding was not available. More than 20 years later, Geller — who has gone from grad student to professor — finally got his telescope. “This was a long-term effort by many people over many years, from amateur astronomers to people [living] next door who wanted to see us get a telescope. . . . The main point here is education.” The telescope serves as a tool to not only get astronomy students excited about research and their studies but also to bring in students — on and off campus and of all ages — interested in the study of the stars. Mason’s observatory opened in 2007. The telescope was added in May. Before the addition, Mason relied on a telescope from Virginia Tech, which it used from 1991 to 2001. “This is a much larger telescope,”

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Fairfax magnet school focuses on educating ‘the whole child’

Music technology teacher Tara Hofmann’s lab buzzes with the sounds of young composers. Third-graders in the class perch in front of computer screens, plugging in music notes onto digital staves and playing back their work on recorders, a woodwind instrument all students at Bailey’s Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences learn to play. “This is college-level stuff,” Hofmann said of the composition, adding that although students are working on music, the applications of composition reach into their other classes, such as reading and writing. “Right now, what they are doing is the same process they would learn in [writing] classes. It’s about coming up with an idea, writing it, revising it, editing and then publishing it. It’s the same process.” Hofmann’s lab is a good example of the collaboration the school’s arts- and science-enhanced curriculum offers students as a means to teach the Standards of Learning required by Virginia, Assistant Principal Rachel Charlton said. “It’s amazing to see how the kids respond when they’re able to use these integrated skills,” she said. Bailey’s, which serves students in kindergarten through fifth grade, is one of two magnet elementary schools in Fairfax County currently accepting applications from students who live outside of the attendance area in Falls Church. Hunters Woods Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences in Reston is the other magnet. Students applying to Bailey’s are required to be proficient in English, entering grades kindergarten through fourth, and on or above grade-level status in math and language arts. About 250 to 300 students each year apply to Bailey’s, said Debbie Jones, the school system’s magnet school lottery coordinator. Jones said about 50 students each year are accepted. “About 80 percent of our applications are for kindergarten,” Jones said. “Each year, I ask the principals to tell me how many spaces are available at each grade level.” Student applicants are separated by grade level and compete in a computer-generated lottery for seats available for their grade. Parents who apply for their children can expect to learn the results in early April. A waiting list is maintained until August in case winning students decide against attending. The school system provides transportation to students living outside of Bailey’s and Hunters Woods schools’ attendance areas, with centrally located pickup spots, Jones said. Although Bailey’s draws parents interested in its focus on arts and sciences, the school also supports a Spanish-language immersion program, in

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Montgomery County Animal Watch

These were among the cases received by the Montgomery County Animal Services Division. For information on shelter hours and location, adoption and licensing procedures, rabies clinics and low-cost neutering, call 240-773-5960. Horse wanders over yonder: The magical, vanishing cat Owl hits midflight snarl Free workshop for dog owners Pets available for adoption Rockville Germantown Shelter has adoptable cats Gaithersburg — Compiled by Lisa M. Bolton

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Israel raids Palestinian TV stations

Staff members of a local private television station “Watan”, look at the damage caused after Israeli troops raided this and another Palestinian television station in the West Bank city of Ramallah overnight, seizing computers and broadcasting equipment. (ABBAS MOMANI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) JERUSALEM — The military said the two outlets, al-Watan TV and al-Quds Educational Television, were pirate stations whose transmissions interfered with legal broadcasting stations and aircraft communications. The army said the raids followed “countless requests” to cease broadcasting, but the Palestinian Telecommunications Ministry said it was never notified of such interruptions. Ramallah is the seat of government of the Palestinian Authority, and Palestinian officials condemned the raids as an invasion of their territory and an attempt to stifle free speech. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad visited the two stations and pledged speedy efforts to get them back on the air. He said Israeli incursions into Palestinian-ruled areas “aim to destroy what is left of the influence of the Palestinian Authority.” Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, left, visits the offices of “Watan” TV after an Israeli army pre-dawn raid in the West Bank city of Ramallah. (Majdi Mohammed/AP) Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the raids a “blatant assault on freedom of the press and expression.” More world news coverage: - North Korea agrees to moratorium on nuclear missile tests, U.S. says - Netanyahu’s Iran focus reaches critical point - Iran’s underground nuclear site more vulnerable than portrayed, experts say - Read more headlines from around the world

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John Thompson ends run as D.C. radio talk show host

to 20 NCAA tournament appearances, three title game appearances and a national championship — Thompson was often described as combative and controversial, a “bluff, outspoken, sometimes difficult man” as this paper described him in a staff editorial. Critics wondered whether racial issues — or profanity — would inject tension into his on-air appearances, while Thompson was such a radio novice that he talked right through scheduled commercial breaks. As his show wound down on Wednesday, Thompson was singing Bob Marley songs in an absurd Jamaican accent, turning multiple discussions into openings for racial humor, dropping dozens of curse words between segments, and looking thoroughly at ease. “I’m calling to tell you how much I love you, and I wish you nothing but the best, Coach,” CBS sportscaster and native Washingtonian James Brown said early in the show. “James, I appreciate you calling, but we have to make some money right now,” Thompson later said, cutting off the interview to go to a commercial. A cultural icon Thompson — the first black coach to win an NCAA men’s basketball championship — and his Hoyas were cultural icons in the ’80s, beloved by many across urban black America and targeted by critics of Thompson’s political stances. He famously launched an on-court protest against the NCAA’s Proposition 42, which limited the criteria for offering athletic scholarships, and dealt with racial taunts in visiting arenas. WTEM’s then-sports director, Andy Pollin, recommended the station use Thompson on the air just months after his resignation from Georgetown, despite a reputation for being combative with members of the media. Pollin thought Thompson might call in a couple of times a week; instead, the coach introduced a different side of himself, posing as “Joe the Fan,” leveraging his enormous Rolodex and outlasting hundreds of career radio employees. While Thompson’s show continued to attract younger listeners, it sometimes felt like a window back to his Georgetown days, from the music (Sly and the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, George Strait and Alan Jackson) to the guests, who occasionally hailed from Thompson’s age group. Thompson said he wanted his show to capture the feel of the barbershop, “and I loved it for that, and I think a lot of people loved it for that,” said Clay Goldsborough, a 42-year-old native of the area who frequently called into Thompson’s show. “He was one of my childhood idols, but what I know about

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Two U.S. troops gunned down on NATO-Afghan military base

KABUL – A local official said both of the slain service members were American. The shootings raise to six the number of American troops killed in recent days on military bases or at Afghan government facilities. Two of those troops were shot dead by an Afghan soldier a week ago, when a mob attacked a joint base during protests over the burning of Korans by U.S. military personnel at the Bagram air base earlier in February, an action U.S. officials have said was accidental. Two others, acting as advisers, were slain at the Afghan Interior Ministry on Saturday by a police officer, prompting NATO to withdraw its personnel from ministries. At least 10 Americans have been killed this year by Afghan security forces or militants wearing military or police uniforms. No motive was immediately given for Thursday’s slayings, and officials differed as to whether one or two men were responsible. The shootings came hours after NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John R. Allen, decided to allow the return of selected coalition advisers to some Afghan government ministries. On Thursday, a senior U.N. official in Kabul seconded a call by Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the U.S. military to discipline those involved in the Koran burning, Reuters reported. President Obama and top U.S. defense officials have apologized profusely for the incident. “After the first step of a profound apology, there must be a second step . . . of disciplinary action,” Jan Kubis, special representative for the U.N. secretary general in Afghanistan, told a news conference, according to Reuters. He said the United Nations “rejected and condemned” the burnings, adding, “It doesn’t matter that it was a mistake.” Obama’s formal apology to Karzai for the burnings had drawn criticism from political opponents, as well as some members of the U.S. military. The president defended his decision Wednesday, saying it had “calmed things down” after the incident provoked deadly violence across the country . “We’re not out of the woods yet,” he said in an interview with ABC News’s Bob Woodruff at the White House. “But my criteria in any decision I make, getting recommendations from folks who are actually on the ground, is what is going to best protect our folks and make sure that they can accomplish their mission.” Thursday’s killings happened before dawn at a base in the Zhari district of southern Kandahar, said Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi,

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Baltimore Symphony hosts Women of the World festival

extreme example of an orchestra taking on nonmusical issues. But it isn’t an isolated one. “I think it just builds on what’s been happening in the field,” says Jesse Rosen, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, “acknowledging that classical music inhabits a world of ideas. As orchestras are looking for more and more ways to engage more people, they’re increasingly looking at broader streams of cultural activity to plug themselves into.” Other orchestras are also thinking outside the concert hall. The Cleveland Orchestra, under Franz Welser-Most, has joined in scientific symposia on music and the brain at the Salzburg Festival and elsewhere. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is partnering with Bard College and the Longy School of Music in an initiative called “Take a Stand” to train music educators around the country. A new consortium of four orchestras — the Pacific Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the North Carolina Symphony and the Louisville Orchestra — is exploring ways to work with museums and universities to show music’s place in a wider cultural context. “What’s going on is a role change,” Rosen says. “Orchestras are looking at themselves as being responsive citizens in their communities. They do that first and foremost through the music they create. But they have capacities and interests that extend beyond just giving concerts.” Given the rather creaky way in which orchestras have tended to address social change within their ranks, Alsop and the BSO may be wise to turn their focus outward. WoW is not setting out to reform orchestras — only, modestly, all of society. Alsop hopes that Baltimore’s WoW, like the Southbank Centre’s, will become an annual event. There are plans for other WoW festivals worldwide, from Iceland to Australia. But by talking about something nonmusical, even an orchestra stands to benefit. “I think there’s a vitality that comes out of artistic organizations feeling they belong to the society they’re in,” Kelly says. “It doesn’t split their focus; it energizes.” And it’s not a bad idea to turn discussions of change into a celebration. “Having fun,” Kelly says, “is a good way to convince people that changing the world is quite a nice thing to do.” WoW festival will be held Friday to Sunday at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and other venues in Baltimore. A one-day pass to festival events (daytime only) is $10; a weekend pass is $20. www.wowbaltimore.org .

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U.S. must maintain pressure on Russia over human rights

HAVING CAMPAIGNED on a platform of anti-Americanism, Vladi­mir Putin likely will be proclaimed the winner of Sunday’s presidential election in Russia, giving him a new six-year mandate — and likely inaugurating an era of unrest in a nation whose rising middle class rejects him. The United States, which has focused on cutting deals with Mr. Putin while largely ignoring his autocratic domestic policies, now has a clear interest in encouraging the emerging mass movement demanding democratic reform. It’s therefore unfortunate that the Obama administration’s first initiative after Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency will be to lobby Congress to grant Russia permanent trade privileges. The problem is not the preferences, per se; it is the administration’s resistance to replacing an outdated protocol for pressing Moscow on human rights with one suited to this moment. The White House is seeking the repeal of a 1974 law known as Jackson-Vanik, which links the trade preferences for Russia to free emigration. Repeal is logical for a couple of reasons: Russia, unlike the former Soviet Union, does not restrict the exit of Jews and others; and if the law is not removed, U.S. companies will be penalized after Russia enters the World Trade Organization later this year. But a bipartisan coalition in Congress is concerned about removing this legacy of U.S. human rights advocacy without addressing the abuses of the Putin regime. Led in part by Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), the group proposes to couple the Jackson-Vanik repeal with a measure that would require the administration to single out Russian officials responsible for gross human rights violations, ban them from traveling to the United States and freeze their assets. This measure could be as effective in its own way as Jackson-Vanik was on the Brezhnev-era Kremlin. Unlike their Soviet predecessors, senior Russian officials crave contact with the West; they vacation in Europe, send their children to U.S. colleges and, not infrequently, transfer their money through U.S. banks. A visa ban and asset freeze would be severe punishment for those involved in persecuting liberal politicians and journalists, or extorting money from U.S. companies. That’s why the Russian opposition strongly supports the measure. The Obama administration, on the other hand, is doing its best to kill it. In part it objects to Congress mandating foreign-policy actions. (In an attempt to defuse the issue, the State Department last year banned visas for a few dozen officials

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Sudanese troops massing near border, South Sudan says

JUBA, SOUTH Sudan — A spokesman for South Sudan’s armed forces said two Sudanese planes dropped six bombs in Pariang county, along the north-south border, on Wednesday afternoon. Col. Philip Aguer said that at least one oil well had been damaged and was leaking into the ground, polluting drinking water. Sudan has also been massing ground forces in a nearby town, he said. Al-Obeid Merwah, a spokesman for the Sudanese Foreign Ministry, did not return calls seeking comment. South Sudan became independent from Sudan in July, but many issues remain unresolved, including the demarcation of the border and the sharing of oil revenue. Separately, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s defense minister, the third senior government official sought by the court over alleged involvement in atrocities in the Darfur region of western Sudan. The court said it wants Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein arrested on a warrant containing seven counts of crimes against humanity and six war crimes, including murder, persecution, rape and torture. The charges cover 41 incidents, the court said. Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo asked judges for the warrant in December, saying Hussein is among those who “bear greatest criminal responsibility” for atrocities in Darfur from August 2003 to March 2004. Sudan does not recognize the court and refuses to hand over suspects, including President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is accused of genocide in Darfur. His government in Khartoum had denounced Moreno-Ocampo’s request for a warrant for Hussein. At the time covered by the charges, Hussein was interior minister and the Sudanese government’s special representative in Darfur. He is accused of overseeing a state-sponsored plan to attack villages in western Darfur. Sudan’s government is accused of unleashing Arab militias on civilians — a charge the government denies. The United Nations estimates that 300,000 people have died and 2.7 million have been displaced in the conflict.

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U.S. probe of Koran burning finds 5 troops responsible, officials say; clerics demand trial

“For the soldiers, it will be serious — they could lose rank. But you’re not going to see the kind of public trial that some here seem to want,” said one U.S. military official. Another military official said: “What they did was careless, but there was no ill will.” The much-discussed investigation was intended to quell unrest and prove to the Afghan public that U.S. officials were apologetic and willing to make amends for wrongdoing. But U.S. military officials expressed concern that the investigation’s finding — which stops short of pinning blame on malevolent service members — might not satisfy Afghan leaders. Senior Afghan clerics, in a statement issued after a meeting with President Hamid Karzai, said: “This evil action cannot be forgiven by apologizing. The perpetrators of the mentioned crime should be put on a public trial as soon as possible.” The clerics reiterated calls for the U.S.-led NATO coalition to relinquish control of military prisons to the Afghan government. “This incident was caused due to the illegal management of the prison,” the clerics said, according to a translation of their statement provided by the U.S. military. A NATO spokesman, Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, declined to comment on the findings of the military inquiry, saying it was “still going through the legal process.” A separate Afghan investigation, which is being conducted by lawmakers and religious officials, is expected to conclude in several days. U.S. military officials worry that if the Afghan investigation clashes with their findings, it could reinvigorate protesters. “There’s a real concern there. We don’t know what the investigation will say or how the public will react,” one official said. “But we know that there’s a real interest in trying guilty parties in an Afghan court, and that’s not something we’re prepared to do.” Gavin Sundwall, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, said American officials “certainly hope” that the release of the Afghan report will not lead to more violence. A third investigative panel that includes U.S. and Afghan officials is expected to issue its findings soon. “We appreciated President Karzai’s repeated calls for dialogue and calm earlier and hope that people took them to heart,” Sundwall said. “We believe that we will get through this unfortunate period, that a decade’s worth of relationships don’t go away in a single week.” When Afghan employees discovered the partially charred Korans, they launched a protest outside Kabul

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After 5 eateries, restaurateurs go retail with ‘Society Fair’

year, up 3.3 percent from last year, according to the National Restaurant Association. Virginia’s and Maryland’s sales are also projected to increase by 3.3 and 3.7 percent respectively, although those states’ statistics capture more than just the immediate Washington area. “Food is going to be the fastest-growing retail sector for the Washington market,” said Cynthia Groves, a retail consultant with Newmark Knight Frank. “It’s a town that works late, so people are out eating late.” The vibrant restaurant sector has encouraged some local restaurateurs to expand their offerings after existing locations prove popular. Ty Neal, CEO of the Matchbox Food Group, already runs four of the classic-American Matchbox restaurants, but he recently expanded to two new eateries — a new Ted’s Bulletin, a 1930s-themed spot, and DC-3, a hot dog place. Last fall, Jeff Tunks and partners Gus DiMillo and David Wizenberg opened Burger Tap & Shake next to District Commons. Jeff and Barbara Black, of BlackSalt, Black’s Bar and Kitchen, Black Market Bistro, and Addie’s, opened Pearl Dive Oyster Palace in Logan Circle. Ruthless restaurateurs In addition to Restaurant Eve and Society Fair, the various offerings under the Armstrongs’ EatGoodFood Group include a pub-food “chipper,” a speakeasy, the tavern Virtue and the rustic-American Majestic Cafe, which the group took over in 2007. It all started with Restaurant Eve, which they opened in 2004. At the time, both Meshelle and Cathal were working in the restaurant industry — she as a manager at Gabriel Restaurant and Cathal as the executive chef at Bistro Bis — and they had been dreaming about starting their own venture together for years. When they opened the half-bistro, half-multicourse Eve, they named it after their daughter, who was three years old at the time. “We had been looking for a spot for two years, and we finally found a space that could accommodate both of our styles,” she said. The way Armstrong scouts locations for new restaurants sounds like something out of a spy novel. She drives to a new neighborhood, sits in her car and watches for pedestrians pushing strollers. “Strollers show that there are young families in need of a place to go and eat,” she said. “If I see that, and that there isn’t much around, I see that there’s a need.” She allows two years in between opening new concepts in order to adequately gauge just how busy a season will

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Technology and mayhem

1,000 yards under fire,” said Hacker, a curator of armed forces history. “You’re just taking a whole lot more fire — and, in general, more accurate fire. You could actually hit something you aimed at several hundred yards away with a rifle musket. With a smoothbore, you were lucky to hit your target beyond 50 yards.” The generals had learned their craft at West Point, where they had read Antoine-Henri Jomini’s theories on the science of warfare. They knew about the importance of the turning maneuver and of interior lines of supply and communication. They learned the virtues of concentrating forces and sending masses of men into the enemy’s weakest point. This was the Napoleonic orthodoxy. But in practice in the Civil War it could be suicide. The masses of men charged into a meat grinder. Technologist-in-chief Lincoln was keenly aware that he lived in a technological society. He was a modern man, knifing into the future. He experienced the acceleration of technological progress more than most Americans because of the primitive nature of his birth in a log cabin on the frontier. The telegraph came along in 1844, and information suddenly no longer moved at the speed of a horse. Since earlier in the century, the ancient sources of power — wind, water, human and animal muscle — had been to a great extent supplanted by the miracle of steam. Lincoln saw these changes and approved. He was a technophile, curious about contraptions, a student of machines. He became a promoter of railroads and an eager user of the telegraph. He was even an inventor himself. He owned a U.S. government patent, which no other president before or since could boast. He had designed a mechanism for assisting a boat across shoals. He was quite obsessed with the importance of what people called “internal improvements,” meaning the building of roads, railroads, canals, harbors. He once told his best friend, Joshua Speed, that he wanted someday to be the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois – Clinton being the New Yorker behind the Erie Canal. By 1858, the year of the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, Lincoln had developed a traveling lecture about the history of technology. “Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship,” Lincoln declared in his lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions.” As president, he was technologist-in-chief. Inventors

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How to get Afghans to trust us once again

American troops reveal a crisis of trust between Afghans and Americans. To rebuild that relationship, we need to focus not just on the Taliban insurgency, but also on dissolving Afghan security forces’ resentment of coalition troops and defeating the pervasive notion that our forces are in Afghanistan to destroy Islam. As an Army major, it is not my role to debate policy. However, my job in Afghanistan over the past year gave me a unique perspective on the difficulties of building trust. I was on a small team of special operators, governance experts, and Dari- or Pashto-speaking U.S. officers embedded with coalition and Afghan units across the country, coaching, advising and listening to their problems. Sometimes we wore beards and Afghan uniforms and patrolled in Ford Rangers rather than armored trucks, and often we were the only Americans on remote bases — all in hopes of getting a real sense of what Afghan soldiers thought when their Western partners weren’t around. One of the first things we learned was the power of a simple narrative, repeated endlessly by the Taliban: The coalition is here to occupy Afghanistan and destroy Islam. This message is at the core of the Taliban’s strategy; the group uses it to draw recruits, win sympathy from civilians and encourage soldiers to defect. While the Afghans we worked with protected us from harm — often at great risk to themselves — sometimes doubt would creep into our conversations: Why do you speak our language? Are you a Muslim? Why not? Do you want to take away our religion? Many of these men had never heard of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They didn’t know why we were in their country. Any coalition action in Afghanistan — no matter how accidental — that feeds the perception of a Western-led war on Islam endangers the mission and destroys trust. The smallest mistakes are amplified by the Taliban through videos, magazines, DVDs, Web sites, personal visits and other methods. A committed cadre of Taliban agents will infiltrate peaceful demonstrations to incite violence and provoke a strong coalition reaction — so that the cycle of mistrust can begin again. To defeat this threat to the U.S.-Afghan relationship, leaders at all levels must not only avoid making unforced errors but also take actions every day to convince their Afghan colleagues, then the local population, that they respect Islam. For example, just west

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Ireland faces long road back to borrowing

Of all Europe’s crisis countries, Ireland has been perhaps the most adamant about pushing ahead with the budgetary, banking and other steps urged by its international lenders. Yet more than a year into its bailout, economic growth is lagging, high unemployment seems entrenched, and households and banks remain weighed down by the debts accumulated during a heady real estate boom. For all the country’s efforts to play by the rules set out under its $90 billion rescue, the International Monetary Fund said on Friday that Ireland might not reach one of the central goals: regaining enough trust among investors to begin borrowing money on its own again next year. The country’s initial progress toward returning to markets “could be fragile,” the IMF said in its latest review of the Irish program. It cites a possible future downgrade by credit agencies, a domestic economy in which demand remains weak and a damaging slowdown in exports because of Europe’s regional problems. “The prospects for regaining the substantial access to market funding that is assumed in 2013 remain uncertain,” the IMF concluded. It is a sobering conclusion as European leaders debate how to rekindle economic growth, whether to create a larger regional crisis-fighting fund and how to centralize control of national budgets. Throughout the region’s crisis, the aim has been to provide assistance when nations need it, but also to lay out policies that will wean them from international help as quickly as possible and allow them to borrow on their own again by selling bonds to private investors at market interest rates. If a nation such as Ireland struggles to “graduate” back to independent borrowing, it does not bode well for less economically dynamic countries like Portugal — and could test the promise of European officials to stand by troubled nations for as long as they need to regain market access. The amount of assistance funneled from richer European nations has taxed the political consensus on which Europe’s regional institutions depend, and none of the troubled countries has yet to turn a corner. Spain, another nation that has tried to comply with European and IMF advice, on Friday announced it would miss its deficit target this year — a revelation that came as European leaders approved a treaty committing their countries to smaller deficits. In the first months of its bailout program, Ireland appeared to bounce back, recording strong levels of foreign

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Prime Minister Noda says tax hike essential for Japan's sustainability

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda speaks with the foreign media at his official residence in Tokyo on Saturday ahead of the first anniversary of the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan's northeast and sparked a nuclear power plant crisis on March 11, 2011. (KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) Correction: TOKYO — During a 30-minute group interview with 19 members of the international news media, Noda appealed for opposition cooperation on his tax plan, which would help the country pay for its escalating social security costs and ease global concerns about its massive debt. “There is no waiting in responding to this question” of how to create a sustainable social security system, Noda said. “We’re faced with an aging society and a declining birthrate unprecedented in the history of humankind, and we cannot sidestep this challenge. I believe all the political parties fully understand this.” Noda has staked his six-month-old administration on the tax increase. He faces a deadline later this month to submit the bill, which would double Japan’s 5 percent consumption tax rate by 2015. Noda’s hope for political cooperation runs counter to recent history, and he faces a critical test in the next weeks to rally support for a bill that many in his own party oppose. The leading opposition party, meanwhile, provides an even trickier obstacle: Although its members support the more taxes in theory — the Liberal Democratic Party platform recommends the hike — they also sense an opportunity to obstruct the bill, lower Noda’s approval rating and force a snap election. But Noda said Saturday that talks with the opposition party were “beginning to jibe,” and he discounted the idea of dissolving the lower house — which his own party, the Democratic Party of Japan, controls — soon. According to reports in the Japanese news media, Noda had a private meeting last week with LDP President Sadakazu Tanigaki, their first one-on-one sit-down since Noda took office. Because the LDP has power in the upper house, Noda, a fiscal hawk and former finance minister, will need cooperation from the opposition to pass the tax increase. Some political analysts in Tokyo think the LDP will agree to approve the consumption tax increase only if Noda promises to dissolve the lower house immediately thereafter. That would set off an election among equally unpopular groups; according to a mid-February poll conducted by the Yomiuri newspaper, 16 percent support the DPJ

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Tech firm adds retail services, litigation campaign to drive revenue

new strategies like how to create low-end and high-end service packages and when to include maintenance with their products. Meanwhile, ObjectVideo continued to improve its technology and pursue additional patents, and in 2007, the company branched into an entirely new market: business intelligence solutions. The company started to hear from retailers who wanted more insight into buying decisions. “Retailers fear that they will become showrooms as shoppers stop in to browse but make purchases on their computers and mobile devices,” Fernandez said. So ObjectVideo began selling software packages that could extract even more complex information from security cameras, like how many customers were waiting in a checkout line and how long shoppers lingered in front of a marketing display. A new revenue stream was born. Not long afterward, a phone call from another video surveillance firm presented another opportunity for Fernandez. The other company wanted to use some patented technology, noting that it had no interest in buying the software but wanted to avoid a lawsuit. The firms eventually signed a licensing agreement, prompting a monumental “aha” moment for the folks in Reston. “When somebody calls you to buy something you’re not currently selling, that should make you look and see just how valuable that something is,” Fernandez said. ObjectVideo launched a sweeping patent enforcement campaign late last year after identifying several firms it believed infringed on its patented video technology. That meant hiring about a half-dozen legal professionals and working with another dozen outside the company, but that’s already proved a wise investment. The company started by filing lawsuits against technology juggernauts Bosch, Samsung and Sony — the last of which has since settled on agreement to license the technology from ObjectVideo. Litigation against the other two companies is ongoing, however, Fernandez’s firm has also struck a deal to share its technology with American Dynamics, another video surveillance company and a subsidiary of Tyco International. The patent enforcement program gives the company a third stream of revenue in addition to the firm’s security services and software licensing arms, and it has given Fernandez an even greater sense of security concerning the future of the company. “Businesses have to try to differentiate their revenue,” Fernandez said. “Something can happen to one sector or another just like something can happen to one customer, so when possible, you want to avoid having your business rely entirely on one source.” Follow On Small

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Beard dinner will preview development of ‘Union Market’ in D.C.

R.J. Cooper from Rogue 24 is one of the area’s culinary stars that is to be featured at the June 3 dinner. (Dayna Smith/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) Developer Edens plans to host a James Beard Foundation dinner featuring a heavyweight roster of D.C. chefs at the Capital City Market in June, a kickoff for the firm’s effort to transform the dilapidated wholesale district into a culinary destination for local foodies and chefs alike. Referred to alternately as the Capital City Market and Florida Avenue Market, Edens is planning an overhaul of at least six parcels it owns or controls along 5th and 6th streets NE between Florida and New York avenues. It is re-branding the area Union Market, a historical name for the district, and hopes to create a high-end destination. The Beard dinner — to be held in Eden’s building at 1309 5th St. NE, which suffered a fire in October — could be a major step in that direction. The New York City-based James Beard Foundation, named for the famed chef and cookbook author, supports culinary education and grants prestigious awards to restaurants and chefs, for which some locals were named semifinalists last week. The foundation typically holds dinners in New York, but the June 3 “Sunday Supper” event in Washington aims to feature 250 guests with foods prepared by some of the city’s most renowned chefs, said Jodie W. McLean, Edens president and chief investment officer. They are R.J. Cooper of Rogue 24, Fabio Trabocchi of Fiola, Bryan Voltaggio of Volt, Mike Isabella of Graffiato, Katsuya Fukushima of Daikaya, Robert Weland of Cork, Nate Anda of Red Apron Butchery and Robb Duncan of Dolcezza Gelato. “Each chef will be responsible for something on the menu, but it will really be served family style,” McLean said. “It’s about community, it’s about bringing people to together, it’s about quality. And it’s absolutely a celebrating of reopening the Union Market.” Edens, the South Carolina-based developer of retail at CityVista in D.C. and the coming Mosaic District in Merrifield, plans on “preserving the authentic culinary story of the market itself and reopening it with a very high-quality market that will serve both wholesale and a retail need in D.C.,” McLean said. It has named chef Richard Brandenburg to direct “culinary strategy” for the project, and McLean said she plans to announce some operators in the next 30 days. Eventually the project

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Megamarket to open sixth location in Adelphi

Aisles are being cleared and shelves are going up for Megamart Supermarket, a Silver Spring-based ethnic grocery store, to open its sixth location this April. The homegrown chain is taking over the former Shoppers Food Warehouse at 2400 University Blvd. in the Adelphi Manor shopping center in East Hyattsville. At 21,111 square feet, the store is double the size of Megamart’s average supermarket, and sits a few block away from another location that will remain open. Megamart has thrived in cities with large Hispanic populations, such as Riverdale Park and Gaithersburg, since it began in 2004. Immigrants from Latin America have come to rely on the chain for seasonings, beverages and other fare from back home. But the newest store will carry a wide selection of Caribbean, Indian and African items, said Gerson Lopez, one of four partners in the chain. “We want to take care of those communities; they don’t have a lot of options,” said the El Salvadoran grocer. “So 70 percent of the goods in this store will be dedicated to them, but we’ll still have quite a lot of Spanish foods.” Competition from Korean-owned grocers and mainstream stores such as Giant, which have expanded their ethnic offerings, has grown fierce over the years amid an influx of immigrants, Lopez said. “Ten years ago, nobody respected the Hispanic community. They’d charge 50 percent more for Hispanic goods. So we opened our own stores,” Lopez said. “There are a lot of Hispanic stores now, but they’re all doing the same thing.” Echoing Lopez’s sentiments, Ramon Arbaiza, owner of El Amate restaurant, said that despite all of the Hispanic families that call East Hyattsville home, the neighborhood lacks diverse retail options. He said that is why he opened a 140-seat white-table cloth bistro at Adelphi Manor in December. “People want a place where they can sit down and have a nice diner,” said Arbaiza, who has three other restaurants in Olney, Silver Spring and Ashton. “People kept telling me there was nothing like that in Langley Park. When Ledo’s Pizza closed ... it presented the opportunity.” El Amate serves Tex-Mex and El Salvadoran cuisine, and features a live mariachi band on the weekends. Arbaiza opened his first restaurant, El Andariego, in Silver Spring 23 years ago. He grew to love the restaurant business while working at his mom’s diner in El Salvador as a teenager. Over the past decade,

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Celebrity chef opening burger joint in Largo

option. The chef kept looking. A few months later, officials at the Boulevard called him to say Reggiano’s Gourmet Market was vacating and leaving its equipment. The chef jumped at the chance and signed a lease for Timothy Dean Burger, opening March 10. “Largo has great demographics,” said Dean, who poured about $120,000 into the new space. “There are a lot of chain restaurantsout here doing good numbers.” Gourmet burgers and pizza are a departure for Dean, an acolyte of French culinary legend Jean-Louis Palladin. Fast-casual fare, however, has long been on his to-do list. “T.D. Burger had been in the pipeline for about three years, as I played around with menu ideas,” he said. “I’ve always been in fine dining, but I realized that people are just not spending that kind of money anymore.” Burgers at the new 50-seat restaurant will start at $6.50. The menu will feature selections named after politicians, including the Obama burger: topped with melted sweet Maui onions, swiss cheese, honey mustard and fresh watercress. Dean has had a number professional setbacks. His holding company, T.D. Bistro Inc., filed for bankruptcy in 2010, shortly after his restaurant in Baltimore, T.D. Lounge, shuttered. Dean reopened a steakhouse, Prime, in the same location, but sold it in the fall. Like Dean, the Boulevard, once a celebrated symbol of development in Prince George’s, fell on hard times in recent years. The center still deals with questions about safety after shootings that occurred in the early 2000s. And a series of corporate bankruptcies robbed it of Linens ‘n Things, Circuit City and Borders bookstore. HHGregg, TGI Fridays and a smattering of smaller retailers have absorbed much of the vacant spaces, bringing occupancy up to 87 percent, said Kenneth Baker, general manager at Inland Western Retail Real Estate, owner of the property. “We’re really excited about what’s happening here as the market turns around,” he said. “We’re hoping to find more innovative retailers that will add new brands to the center.” Residents, such as Arthur Turner, say the project has fallen short of their expectations, with too many restaurants (17 in total) and not enough boutiques. “Having Timothy Dean sign on is great,” said Turner, president of the Coalition of Central Prince George’s Community Organizations. “But the Boulevard is viewed as a place to eat, not a place to shop, and there needs to be a marriage of the two.”

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Kettler alumni make run on apartment sites as Insight Property Group

Richard Hausler and Michael Blum became veterans of apartment development at Kettler — the area’s largest multifamily housing builder — before starting their own firm following the 2008 economic collapse. Since then, they have not looked back — maybe because they have not had time. After founding Insight Property Group in the fall of 2009, Hausler and Blum have closed deals for eight apartment complexes or development sites in the Washington area, despite only being in business for 10 quarters. The deals total 537 existing apartment units and 1,129 apartments in development, planning or construction. They have two more sites under contract. With the credit markets in shambles, Blum said he and Hausler didn’t expect to be developing property so soon. Insight, based in Tysons Corner, began with the purchase of an existing apartment complex in Rosslyn, the Metro Rosslyn Apartments, that offered future development opportunities. Then Washington’s apartment market began to heat up, a product of a turn away from home ownership, a better-than-average job market and low vacancy rates. As Blum and Hausler began to acquire more sites, they found improving conditions. “Frankly when we got into this, we thought development would be a little further down the road, but the pendulum began to swing very quickly,” Blum said. Of the eight purchases, four were of existing complexes in places as far off as Fredericksburg and Stafford, but the other four were in hot neighborhoods near Metro stations inside the Beltway, and Insight is moving quickly on them. In the fall of 2011, Insight broke ground on Grayson Flats, a 67-unit complex at 1200 N. Rolfe St., which is to replace a former 42-unit project. Completion is expected in the middle part of the year. On H Street NE, Insight acquired one of the last major development sites, a Murry’s grocery store, for $10 million and Blum said it holds a contract to buy a self-storage facility next door. In February, Insight bought a Silver Spring post office slated for closure for $7.2 million and plans to begin work this year on a $75 million, 310-unit apartment complex. Blum said investors are continuing to back Insight’s deals to the point where he and Hausler are looking to land a long-term equity partner. “We didn’t set up Insight just to flip land or be merchant builders,” he said. “We want to be in this for the long-term.”

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Jerusalem String Quartet exhibits dazzling coordination

The Jerusalem String Quartet, from left, Sergei Bresler, Kyril Zlotnikov, Alexander Pavlovsky and Ori Kam, exhibited dazzling coordination at Barns at Wolf Trap on Friday night. (Vera Reider/Jerusalem String Quartet) Correction: Political protests have dogged the Jerusalem String Quartet because of its association with the armed forces of its native Israel, including at a 2007 concert at the Library of Congress. Perhaps by going outside Washington, to the partially filled Barns at Wolf Trap on Friday night, the group avoided such trouble. Foreign policy grumblings, if there were any, vanished when the group played quartets by Beethoven, Debussy and Shostakovich. This fine quartet, formed in 1993 when the members were conservatory students in Jerusalem, has made a series of recordings for Harmonia Mundi, none better than a pair of discs of Shostakovich quartets. No surprise, then, that Shostakovich’s ninth quartet stood out on this program, too, for the vigor of the interpretation, which kept one on the edge of one’s seat, and the overall quality of playing from all four musicians in dazzling coordination. The mood swung back and forth from a glowing lament in the second movement to an airheaded gallop in the third and back to mournful tension in the fourth. The fifth movement, which brings the themes back together, was a tour de force of biting tone and rhythmic precision. Tuning issues plagued the first work, Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 2, with an over-agitated approach to the first movement balanced by a tuneful second, more bright than strident. The third and fourth movements, where the energy was mollified into bouncy fun, worked the best. Careful tuning at the interval improved the intonation in the work that followed, Debussy’s G Minor quartet, rendered not as a work of evanescent color but as surprisingly muscular music. The urgent serenade of the second movement, opening with lutelike pizzicato strikes around a raspy viola ostinato, led to the hushed benediction of the slow movement full of glassy, iridescent sounds. Downey is a freelance writer.

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Safety concerns, industry changes push U.S. to rethink approach to food inspection

The agency now known as the FDA gained its modern-day mission in 1906, on the same day that the nation’s meat inspection law was enacted. Although that law barred meat from leaving the slaughterhouse or processing plant without a USDA stamp of approval, other foods were considered safe by the government and they were not subject to daily inspection. (Eric Gay/AP) Every day, inspectors in white hats and coats take up positions at every one of the nation’s slaughterhouses, eyeballing the hanging carcasses of cows and chickens as they shuttle past on elevated rails, looking for bruises, tumors and signs of contamination. It’s essentially the way U.S. Department of Agriculture food safety inspectors have done their jobs for a century, ever since Upton Sinclair’s blockbuster novel, “The Jungle,” exposed horrid conditions in a Chicago meatpacking facility and shook Americans awake to the hazards of tainted food. But these days, the bulk of what Americans eat — seafood, vegetables, fruit, dairy products, shelled eggs and almost everything except meat and poultry — is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. And the FDA inspects the plants it oversees on average about once a decade. These radically different approaches are a legacy from a time when animal products were thought to be inherently risky and other food products safe. But in the past few years, the high-profile and deadly outbreaks of food-borne illness linked to spinach, peanuts and cantaloupe have put the lie to that assumption. The FDA’s approach is partly by necessity: The agency lacks the money to marshal more inspectors. But it also reflects a different philosophy about how to address threats to the nation’s food supply: an approach based on where the risk is greatest. The agency concentrates its limited inspections on food products that have the worst track record on safety — seafood, for example — and on companies with a history of problems. It puts most of its efforts into responding to outbreaks after the fact, using genetic fingerprinting and other scientific tools to track contaminants back to their source in hopes of stopping any further spread. The USDA and the FDA are under pressure to overhaul their dramatically different procedures, in essence bringing them closer together. There’s a growing recognition among food-safety experts that the government can be smarter about tackling food-borne hazards that sicken one in six Americans each year and kill about 3,000. “We

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Baltimore Symphony entertains with ‘Voices of Light’

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s 2011-12 concert season celebrating women focuses not on women composers but on a female icon: Joan of Arc, who was born 600 years ago. The season began in November with Arthur Honegger’s “Joan of Arc at the Stake” and continued Friday in Baltimore (repeated Saturday at Strathmore) with “Voices of Light,” which combines Richard Einhorn’s score for soloists, chorus and orchestra with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” Dreyer’s film served as both backdrop and inspiration, playing on the big screen above the orchestra. The film was thought to be lost to fire until 1981, when an almost-complete print of the original was found in the recesses of an Oslo mental institution. The film constantly rivets viewers with new first-person vantage points: We’re an onlooker behind the bald pates of condemning priests; we’re Joan, and even God. Einhorn honors Dreyer’s “Passion” with an oratorio that does more than flesh out the drama. The composer chose Old French, Italian and Latin for the singers because he wanted the audience to get the feeling of the words but not immediate understanding. Peabody Institute soprano Julie Bosworth and mezzo-soprano Janna Critz joined as one voice to sing Joan for their BSO debuts. Tenor Tyler Lee and baritone David Williams completed the vocal quartet, but mikes robbed magic from Einhorn’s renaissance incantations. The Baltimore Choral Arts Society gave sufficient roar to medieval slurs and raised good glorification (although one wishes the group would sit and rise quietly). The symphony’s low strings never sounded larger. Principal cellist Dariusz Skoraczewski shone in leading many a tonal line. He, his associate principal and principal bass and viola crowned the moment before Joan takes her last sacrament with grace. Oboe and flute threaded their way throughout the choral work, creating the delicacy and constancy we witness in the Joan on-screen. The relentless violin figures awakened in us the terror of the nail-studded wheel upon which she will be draped. Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor Marin Alsop. (Dave Hoffmann/COURTESY OF BALTIMORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA) Williams tolled bell-like “Depone animos” (“Renounce your purpose”) as the soprano and alto darted silver shafts that struck the heart. Concertmaster Jonathan Carney’s raw violin work captured the ribald sword-swallowers entertaining the masses at the execution. Einhorn knows when to model on Bach and when to channel “Carmina Burana.” The greater test of his oratorio would be

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Super Tuesday: Santorum would ease regulations, provide certainty

If we assume, as is often stated, that small businesses are the engine of the U.S. economy, it follows that governmental policies affecting this segment of the economy play an important role in the overall financial well-being of our country. Let’s take a look then at how a Rick Santorum administration might impact the ability of small businesses to grow and prosper. Santorum’s platform addresses five key issues — deficit reduction; credit availability and access to capital; health insurance costs; regulatory burdens; and uncertainty. In a recent survey conducted by the National Small Business Association, 44 percent of respondents ranked reducing the deficit as their No. 1 issue to be addressed by the government, up from 23 percent in December 2010. Former senator Santorum has committed to cutting $5 trillion of federal spending within five years. Access to capital has a direct impact on a business owner’s ability to hire additional employees. Historically, bank loans have been the primary source of financing for half of all small businesses. The Santorum platform does not address this issue, perhaps wisely. Many small businesses lack the assets necessary to secure bank loans, and are often considered to be poor credit risks. A small percentage of businesses avail themselves of loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration, and this is not expected to increase significantly. The escalating costs of employee health care are holding down job growth, according to almost 30 percent of respondents in the NSBA survey. Santorum proposes to repeal Obamacare, replacing it with a market-based health care initiative. The operative phrase, of course, is “market based,” minimizing government involvement in the health care industry. He also proposes to implement Medicare reforms and innovation proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and to speed up their implementation to control health care costs and improve quality. This issue is at the heart of the health care debate, and of the role of government in this area. About 40 percent of small-business owners consider regulatory burdens as one of the most significant challenges to the growth and survival of their businesses. The Santorum platform calls for cutting EPA resources for job-killing regulations, and for eliminating funding for implementation of Dodd-Frank regulatory burdens. The greatest challenge to growth and survival, however, is economic uncertainty, according to 66 percent of respondents. This element is contingent on a host of factors, but at its core is

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The doctor diagnosed chronic Lyme disease, but many experts say it doesn’t exist

Also, I trusted my internist. I felt as if we’d landed in the middle of a war. Pat, who had been climbing mountains a few years ago, now struggled to walk a city block. Both my internist and the Lyme specialist believed that chronic Lyme was treatable and that Pat could recover. But the standard medical authorities were telling me that this condition didn’t exist and the proposed treatment was ineffective and harmful. What were we supposed to do? In November 2010 I accompanied Pat to his first appointment at a Lyme disease clinic. During my research, I’d discovered that a state medical board had once suspended the license of the clinic’s doctor for prescribing long-term antibiotics. I felt like an outlaw entering that office — and also like someone desperate for help. Staff members ordered more tests to screen out look-alike diseases. Blood tests and a brain scan ruled out a host of conditions. Chronic Lyme disease seemed to be the diagnosis that fit. Pat was prescribed a variety of drugs to control his symptoms, plus multiple antibiotics to fight the infection. He would need to take the drugs for the next year or so. Pat started swallowing about 25 pills a day, and the pace of his recovery picked up. Searching for answers I’m not a scientist. I don’t know exactly what’s causing Pat’s symptoms, or how they’re related to the bacteria carried by a tick. In some ways I’m not surprised that doctors don’t have ready answers, because Lyme disease was pinpointed only 35 years ago (it’s named for Lyme, Conn., where a cluster of cases was first identified), and it’s still considered an emerging disease. Here’s what I do know: Just because scientists don’t understand the cause of a disease doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Back when patient-reported symptoms were all doctors had to go on, some practitioners dismissed multiple sclerosis as “faker’s disease.” Then magnetic resonance imaging was invented, and doctors could see the brain lesions that explained the symptoms patients complained about. Like those MS patients who were once called fakers, chronic Lyme disease patients are trapped in a nightmare. I see only one solution: We need to pick apart the tangled causes of this disease and find the most effective treatments. NIH is the logical choice to create a national research agenda and, in the process, set up a series of long-term,

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In Pakistan, gone but not forgotten

Amina Masood Janjua is the leader of the missing persons protest in Islamabad. (Michele Langevine Leiby/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) ISLAMABAD — They huddled in small groups under a bright orange tarpaulin, seated on rugs and prayer mats laid out end to end to protect against the chilly February ground. Some of the protesters were resting, some sharing a meal of lentil dahl and naan bread, others solemnly clutching homemade posters bearing the faces and neatly scripted names of their missing loved ones. Infants and elderly, housewives and working professionals, entire families representing Pakistan’s so-called “missing persons” have set up a protest camp near the parliament here to demand answers on the whereabouts of their relatives. “People are pinning their hopes here,” said the group’s leader, Amina Masood Janjua. “We have no guns, no nuclear weapons. Our words and our grief is the power.” Her husband, businessman Masood Ahmed Janjua, now 51, disappeared six years ago. She said he was last seen in Rawalpindi, a city just outside the capital, on his way to Peshawar. Janjua is one of hundreds if not thousands who have been “disappeared” — seized in extrajudicial detentions allegedly conducted by Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, according to human rights officials. The missing are presumed by the agency to be terrorists and Islamist militants. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate is thought to be behind the seizures of the putative terrorists, because when those detained are allowed to go home, they say they were with the intelligence agencies, said Amina Janjua. The ISI denies involvement with most of the cases and when it does concede involvement, the agency justifies the seizures as in the interest of stemming Islamist militancy. Last month, the Supreme Court ordered ISI officials to produce seven of the disappeared detainees in court. The men had been tried and acquitted by the courts for attacks on military and ISI facilities but then were later allegedly reapprehended and detained by security forces. Their story was splashed across local media after the court appearance — the media even gave the group a catchy moniker, the Adiala 11 after Adiala jail where they were being held in Rawalpindi. Photos of the men — emaciated, barely alive — gave the public a glimpse into the Islamabad courtroom where a macabre iteration of a habeas corpus proceeding played out. Only seven of the Adiala 11 appeared because four had died in

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Brumidi study of Capitol dome painting to go to Smithsonian

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 17: FILE, (L-R) J. George Stewart, Architect of the Capitol; Mildred Thompson, great-grandniece of Brumidi's wife; John R. Murdock, former Representative from Arizona, and his wife, Myrtle Cheney Murdock, in Washington, DC on August 17, 1961. Stewart accepted a 30-foot scroll containing working sketches by artist Constantine Brumidi for the frieze in the rotunda of the Capitol. (Photo by United Press International) (Photo by United Press International/PHOTO BY UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL) The bidding for the Constantino Brumidi painting started relatively low on Sunday, said Chris Barber of the Skinner auction house in Boston. By “relatively low” he meant around $100,000. From there, it climbed steadily. There was at least one interested bidder in the room. Four prospective purchasers were bidding by phone. Soon, the oil study that Brumidi did for “The Apotheosis of Washington” in the Capitol dome had reached its high estimate of $350,000. The bids kept rising until only two bidders remained. When the bidding stopped, it stood at $475,000. Sold! Add in the buyer’s premium, and someone paid $539,500. “It eclipsed even what we thought it might bring,” Chris told me Monday. “It set a record by a painting by Brumidi.” Not bad for something that was last sold back in 1919 for $300. And who was the lucky — and deep-pocketed — winner? It was the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. “We think that’s where it belongs,” Elizabeth Broun, the museum’s director, told me Monday. “We’re thrilled.” I imagine the U.S. Capitol Historical Society isn’t quite as thrilled. It was hoping someone might buy it and donate it. “I’m sure we would be happy to talk with them about lending it to the Capitol visitors center,” Elizabeth said. “I understand all the reasons they would love to have it.” The painting was paid for by the museum’s American Art Forum, a group of public-spirited art collectors from around the country. Elizabeth said the painting will go on display at the American Art Museum after conservation, it’s hoped by this summer or earlier. Now for some unfinished business. Four years ago — July 1, 2008, to be exact — President George W. Bush signed legislation granting Brumidi a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal. But there has been no official awards ceremony. This displeases local history buff Joe Grano, chairman of the Constantino Brumidi appreciation society. Joe notes that on the same day that Bush signed

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Do OPM program’s e-mail issues indicate broader problems?

Are problems with the Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program examples of broad failures by the Office of Personnel Management? Or are they minor mishaps, affecting relatively few and quickly corrected? The top two House Republicans overseeing the federal workforce are calling on the Obama administration to explain recent missteps with the prestigious program designed to attract future government leaders. PMF advertises itself as “a flagship leadership development program at the entry level for advanced degree candidates.” But a letter to the Office of Personnel Management, from Reps. Darrell Issa (Calif.) and Dennis A. Ross (Fla.) says that “unfortunately, recent problems with OPM’s administration of the Program threaten its prestige and the government’s ability to recruit future Fellows.” A letter to the Office of Personnel Management, from Reps. Darrell Issa (Calif.), above, and Dennis A. Ross (Fla.) says that “unfortunately, recent problems with OPM’s administration of the Program threaten its prestige and the government’s ability to recruit future Fellows.” (Carolyn Kaster/AP) Baloney, says a former fellow. “I find it ironic that they blow a simple email mistake, and what amounts to less than three days of computer issues, completely out of proportion,” said Mary Krebs Devine, who was in the class of 2000. She posted her comments to washingtonpost.com’s Federal Eye blog. “I graduated from the PMF program’s forerunner, the Presidential Management Intern (PMI) program. . . . It was, and still is, an effectively and efficiently run program. This outstanding program will not be tarnished by a simple email blunder.” The March 1 letter to OPM Director John Berry identified the blunders: ●On Jan. 23, OPM mistakenly sent 300 semifinalists, who had not qualified as finalists, e-mails congratulating them on their acceptance into the program. ●On Nov. 1, 2011, OPM sent out blank e-mails that did not identify whether applicants qualified for the in-person assessment. ●From Oct. 7-10, 2011, qualified applicants could not access the online assessment tool. Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Ross, chairman of the federal workforce subcommittee, said they are “concerned that these problems are indicative of larger IT failures within OPM, which include Retirement Modernization and USAJobs.gov.” The retirement program and the online jobs board have experienced serious technical issues. Whether they were big problems or small, certainly the January PMF mistakes caused heartburn among applicants. “Why were some individuals receiving both acceptance & rejection emails while others just received

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It takes a village to build a sustainable following

of its business comes from customers at the drive-through. His goal is to promote sustainable food in the world of casual dining, where pre-shaped burgers, frozen fries and gallon-size bags of salad dressings are kitchen norms. That means not only cooking from scratch but replacing factory-farmed pork with heritage breeds raised on smaller farms and contracting with local farmers to grow staples including pimentos, peppers, garlic, onions and jalapenos — all without raising prices above what his customers can afford. Pihakis is not the first chain restaurateur to wade into these murky waters. Chipotle’s Steve Ells has proved that serving high-quality, even local, meat can build customer loyalty — and profits. But Chipotle’s assembly-line, fast-food restaurants are less costly to run than Jim ’N Nick’s, which must pay servers and dishwashers and offers a menu with more variety. Perhaps Pihakis’s biggest challenge is that his customers appear happy with things just as they are. In 2011, the Birmingham News named Jim ’N Nick’s the best barbecue in the city. The one time Pihakis did try to introduce higher-quality meat — an antibiotic- and hormone-free chicken — with a slight price hike, customers complained. Pihakis returned to his former supplier of conventionally raised birds. However, Pihakis is determined to prove that good food doesn’t have to be expensive or highfalutin. “I don’t think good food has to cost that much more to produce,” Pihakis says. “It can be scaled. And that’s the only way we’re going to get it into the hands of mainstream Americans.” Pihakis says he always knew he wanted to be in the restaurant business. At 19, he got his first job as a bartender in Birmingham, his hometown. Eight years later, in 1985, Pihakis’s father, Jim, helped him open the first Jim ’N Nick’s. Today, the chain grosses $90 million a year and has outlets sprinkled across the southeast and in Colorado. Three more are set to open this year. Pihakis caught sustainable-food fever about seven years ago after meeting Bill Niman, the founder of Niman Ranch. The two hit it off instantly and decided to drive around Alabama to find small farms that might supply at least one of his restaurants. But after days on the road, they had not found a single farmer. The severity of the situation only increased Pihakis’s resolve to do something. He began to talk with chefs and cult producers, such

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3 Md. family members dead in cluster of respiratory illnesses; 2 from flu complications

arrived with the same flu-like symptoms as her siblings, including fever, aches, cough and shortness of breath, Orlowski said. Tests confirmed the siblings who died had a strain of flu virus known as influenza A, and each also acquired a serious staph infection, according to Orlowski. She said it was unlikely the infection was acquired in the hospitals because the siblings arrived coughing blood. “It’s likely they came to the hospital with the infection, which is what caused the cough and fever,” Orlowski said. The mother was Lou Ruth Blake, according to a funeral home notice that was confirmed by a county official who did not want to be identified because the investigation is not closed. Tests are being conducted to determine whether the second daughter has the same influenza virus and infection. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will determine what strain of the influenza A virus infected the family, Orlowski said. This year’s flu season has gotten off to a late start, but Orlowski said there has been an increase in the number of patients with flu-like symptoms in recent weeks. Hospital center officials are looking into at least one other recent death — unrelated to the Calvert cluster— to determine whether it was related to flu. The severity of illness and death due to flu varies widely from season to season. The very young, adults older than 65 and individuals with certain medical conditions are at higher risk for developing flu-related complications. The 2011-2012 flu vaccine will protect against the three viruses that research indicates will be most common during the season: two strains of the influenza A virus, H1N1 and H3N2, and an influenza B virus. Health officials said the department is urging people who have not yet received a flu vaccine to get one. Local officials are also asking residents to take standard precautions to prevent the spread of illness, including hand washing and limiting contact with sick individuals. Anyone with flu-like symptoms should check with a health-care provider. Maryland’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner also is conducting autopsies as part of the investigation. Medical Examiner David Fowler said Calvert health officials contacted his office Monday seeking assistance. One of the bodies was being transported to Baltimore on Tuesday for an autopsy. At least one of the bodies had already been embalmed and buried, local officials told him. The medical examiner’s office

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Beer Madness 2012 begins with 32

Correction: The beer universe continues to expand. There were 1,927 breweries operating in the United States for all or part of 2011, according to the Brewers Association, and 855 more in the planning stages. That’s an increase of almost 10 percent in a year’s time. With such developments in mind, we probably could have doubled last year’s field of 64 for Beer Madness, our annual blind tasting to crown a king of the cooler, the results of which will be revealed over the next month or so. But we went in the opposite direction, condensing the pack of craft brews to 32. That made sense for several reasons, and it gave our judges the right amount of time to swish, swirl and determine a true champion. Cast a vote for your favorite beer in our online bracket. Greg Engert, beer director for the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, welcomed our tasting panel of four food and beverage professionals and four motivated Washington Post readers to his draft palace, Birch & Barley/ChurchKey in Logan Circle. Once again, we grouped the beers, which represent the breadth and depth of the brewing art in America, into four categories (based on a flavor paradigm developed by Engert for NRG): Fruit and spice. Roast. Hop. Last year’s malt category, however, was deep-sixed in favor of a niche called Crisp: an assortment of pale and amber lagers, most with lower alcohol contents and softer, more delicate flavors, that often get short shrift when placed aside the boozy, super-bitter imperial styles. “So often, people mistake intensity for complexity,” noted Engert. “Just because it hits you in the face doesn’t mean there’s a lot going on.” But would our panel appreciate subtlety? All of the breweries fit the Brewers Association’s definition of “craft.” They’re small (under 6 million barrels a year); they’re independent (not divisions of large industrial brewers such as Blue Moon or Shock Top); they’re traditional (in the sense of not using corn or rice to lighten the beer). And all of their products are widely available in the Washington area, year-round, via takeout in bottles or cans. We listened to the readers who wanted to re-create the Beer Madness challenge at home and had trouble tracking down some of last year’s bracketed brews. Out: draft-only operations such as Oliver Breweries or Chocolate City Brewing, as well as intriguing options such as Avatar Jasmine IPA from Seattle’s Elysian

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Beer Madness: 32 American craft brews in the brackets

multigrain brew, made with malted barley and rye. Righteous Ale Sixpoint Craft Ales, Brooklyn, N.Y. The brewer of this resiny rye PA, with a spicy pumpernickel finish, takes its name from the six-pointed star that was once a symbol of alchemists and beermakers. Lagunitas Maximus Lagunitas Brewing Co., Petaluma, Calif. The brewery warns that this West Coast India pale ale, on the cusp of being a double IPA, may remove the enamel from your teeth. Will the second time be the charm for the 2011 Beer Madness runner-up? Burton Baton Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Milton, Del. Immensely hoppy and strong (10 percent alcohol by volume), Burton Baton is a blend of an imperial IPA and English-style old ale that spends a month mellowing on oak before its release. ROAST Lucky 7 Evolution Craft Brewing Co., Delmar, Del. The brewery, which is packing up to move across the state border to Salisbury, Md., recommends pairing this robust porter with smoked barbecue or a chocolate dessert. Maui Coconut Porter Maui Brewing Co., Lahaina, Hawaii The brewery adds chunks of toasted coconut post-fermentation to this full-bodied porter, which is freighted 4,800 miles from the islands to your local cooler. Allagash Black Allagash Brewing Co., Portland, Me. This Belgian-style stout incorporates a special variety of dark candy sugar to smooth over the rough edges from the highly roasted malts. Existent American Farmhouse Ale Stillwater Artisanal Ales, Baltimore; brewed at DOG Brewing Co., Westminster, Md. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, gazing into the abyss, graces the label of this dark saison, a melange of chocolaty and earthy flavors. Sierra Nevada Stout Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Chico, Calif. The brewery gained its reputation from its pale ale but it has been producing this roasty, Cascade hop-accented stout almost from its beginning. Schlafly Oatmeal Stout The Saint Louis Brewery, St. Louis, Mo. Made with flaked oatmeal and English hops, this beer is a tribute to British stouts of the 19th century that were marketed for their nutritional value. Breakfast in a bottle, anyone? Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale Stone Brewing Co., Escondido, Calif. The brewery refers to it as “liquid dichotomy,” alluding to the ebony color, caramel and coffee flavors, and a big Pacific Northwest hop flavor usually associated with paler ales. Black Lightning DuClaw Brewing Co., Abingdon, Md. This hoppy American black ale is made with roasted barley that’s been de-husked to add color and flavor while minimizing astringency.

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Beer Madness: A style guide to this year’s field of 32

(Deb Lindsey/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) Tasting the 32 American craft brews of this year’s Beer Madness over the course of two separate sessions allowed us to include stronger styles of beer that we couldn’t sample in years past. Here is a style guide to give you an idea of what flavors the judges’ panel experienced with each beer. Abbey ales Ale Helles Imperial India pale ale Lager Marzen Pale ale Pilsener Porter Saison Stout Wheat beers

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If knocking back a cold one doesn’t appeal, you can still tap into the spirit of Beer Madness by cooking with beer. Here it adds subtle bitter notes to two main-course dishes and to crepes, which can be filled in savory or sweet ways. — Jane Touzalin Beer Recipes: Cuban-Style Chicken and Rice Mustard-Glazed Pork Chops With Beer and Caraway Belgian-Style Crepes

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The military has not done enough to diversify its leadership or stop harassment and abuse of minorities by fellow service members, lawmakers said Tuesday. Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), whose nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, committed suicide in Afghanistan last April after alleged physical harassment from other Marines, angrily told representatives of the Defense Department and the military services at a joint congressional forum that the armed forces have failed to take hazing seriously. “Any claims that hazing incidents are isolated are unfounded,” said Chu, who complained that the services do not compile data on alleged cases or adequately punish violators. “The feeling that hazing is a necessary part of military life is very, very entrenched,” she added. Mike Applegate, director of manpower plans and policies for the Marine Corps, told Chu that the case involving her nephew was “inexcusable” and that the service intends to stamp out hazing “wherever it exists.” “I just don’t believe you,” Chu replied. In April, the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, established by Congress, issued a report finding that minorities are underrepresented in the leadership of the armed forces. Lawmakers expressed disappointment Tuesday at the progress in implementing the commission’s recommendations. “It sounds like there’s been a lot of talk but not enough action,” said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who presided over Tuesday’s forum, held by the Congressional Black Caucus, the Asian Pacific American Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus. “I don’t see the commitment from the Department of Defense to the seriousness of the problem,” added Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.). In many cases, Cummings said, the services have placed recommendations on standby, with more than half under review or in the process of being implemented. “Things are beginning to happen,” retired Air Force Gen. Lester Lyles, who chaired the diversity commission, told the forum. “They’re not happening at the pace perhaps that we’d like to see.” He credited the Pentagon with making diversity an “integral part” of the department’s culture and said all the services have clear, consistent diversity plans. Clarence Johnson, director of the Defense Department’s Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity, told lawmakers that the Pentagon considers diversity “a strategic imperative.” He said the Pentagon is combating hazing and regrets “recent incidents that may call that commitment into question.” “The department’s policy prohibiting hazing is unambiguous,” he added. “It is contrary to good order and discipline and is unacceptable behavior.”

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Loudoun teen competes for Intel science prize

in the high-tech field. Amy Dyckovsky, a photographer, said Ari and his dad bonded over their shared love of math. Howard played math games with 3-year-old Ari on long car rides and created math worksheets to keep him engaged when he grew bored with school in second grade. When his father died of a heart attack in 2003, 9-year-old Ari, the oldest of three children, was left reeling. “Ari and I shared the worst day of our lives,” Amy said. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life is to tell Ari that his dad died.” For years afterward, Ari lost enthusiasm for learning. His excitement wasn’t rekindled until he was admitted to the Academy of Science, a competitive public program based at Dominion High School in Sterling. Wolfe and teacher Duke Writer offered guidance and encouragement as Ari pursued his research. “Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Writer definitely are the type of educators who are willing to break boundaries to help someone who really is motivated,” Ari said. Writer helped Ari search for a research mentor. Of more than 60 letters they sent to scientists, Olmschenk was the only one to respond. Wolfe and Writer were thrilled to see Olmschenk teach Ari about quantum mechanics and allow him to lead the project. Ari was thriving, even if it was sometimes a challenge for him to balance being a teenager and a serious researcher. “It’s just difficult for me to go to a basketball game and really enjoy it in the same way that the other kids can,” Ari said. “I definitely try, but it’s also not as much of an interest of mine.” Ari said he has been accepted at Stanford University and is waiting to hear from Harvard and Yale. As the Intel competition approached, Ari said he was most excited to get to know the other finalists, who have already formed a Facebook group. “We talk about our projects, and about science in general,” Ari said. “It’s cool to find peers who are coming up with things that are completely non-trivial. You can see their passion and hard work.” Wolfe said he once reminded Ari about the importance of modesty. “There was a time when I told him, ‘Ari, you’re just going to have to watch that you don’t come off as arrogant,’ ” Wolfe said. He recalled Ari’s self-effacing reply. “Mr. Wolfe, I’m just a kid.”

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Montgomery County Animal Watch

These were among the cases received by the Montgomery County Animal Services Division. For information on shelter hours and location, adoption and licensing procedures, rabies clinics and low-cost neutering, call 240-773-5960. Saint Bernard attempts attack: Rampant rodent Cock-a-doodle-shush! Shelter has adoptable cats Gaithersburg Pets available for adoption Rockville Germantown Partnership for Animal Welfare needs volunteers — Compiled by Lisa M. Bolton

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Robert J. Adler, database administrator

Robert J. Adler, 56, a database administrator who worked in the Washington area for about 20 years, died Feb. 1 of injuries sustained that day in a traffic accident in New Market, Md., his brother Eric Adler said. The death was confirmed by the office of Maryland’s chief medical examiner. Mr. Adler, a resident of Columbia, retired about three years ago from iSKY, a market research firm. He had previously worked at Riggs National Bank and, in the 1990s, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, where his assignments included projects related to the Hubble space telescope. Robert Jeffrey Adler was born in Nassau County, N.Y. He received a bachelor’s degree in general sciences and a teaching certificate in 1981 and a master’s degree in information studies in 1984, all from the University of Michigan. Survivors include his mother, Gwen Adler of Ann Arbor, Mich.; three brothers; and one sister. — Emily Langer

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‘Social’ credit card from Barclays lets users set terms

A logo sits outside a Barclays Plc bank branch in London, U.K. (Simon Dawson/BLOOMBERG) As the financial industry faces deteriorating public opinion and a raft of new regulations, one bank is adopting an un­or­tho­dox philosophy: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Barclays this week announced that it is launching a new credit card that will use social media to crowdsource features that could range from where call centers are located to the size of late fees. The British bank said the goal is to rebuild trust among increasingly wary consumers and create a new level of transparency for credit cards. It even plans to disclose how much it makes off the card — and potentially return some of that money to customers. “Underneath it is the core tenets that people are asking for,” said Paul Wilmore, managing director of consumer markets for Barclaycard US, the bank’s payments division. “It’s simple and transparent, and people have a voice in dictating how these features work.” According to a Gallup survey last summer, a record 36 percent of Americans reported that they lacked confidence in the nation’s banks. Less than a quarter of the people surveyed said they viewed banks positively. That sentiment was crystallized in the fall when Bank of America tried to institute a $5 fee for its debit cards. Angry consumers revolted online, signing petitions and organizing a “move your money” day. Bank of America eventually backed away from the fee. Consumers aren’t the only ones lashing out at banks. Congress passed sweeping reforms of the credit card industry three years ago aimed at limiting fees and interest-rate hikes. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said it has received roughly 12,000 complaints about credit cards since opening for business last summer. One of the top issues? Consumer confusion. Wilmore said Barclays has taken these lessons to heart. “The government’s telling us three things: You’ve got to be simple, you’ve got to be transparent, and you’ve got to be fair to the consumer,” he said. The Barclaycard Ring MasterCard has no traditional rewards program but carries an 8 percent interest rate for all balances — well below the average rate of 14.25 percent, according to Lowcards.com. Late fees are capped at $25. Lowcards.com Chief Executive Bill Hardekopf said those terms are generally reserved for consumers with the most pristine credit histories. It remains to be seen who can actually qualify

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Key commanders have their say on Afghanistan

Two senior American military commanders spent the past two days putting into context recent negative news about the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. At the same time, they tried to get members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees to realize that U.S. units will remain in that country long after combat troops depart in 2014. A question asked on both days: “Should the U.S. modify its Afghan strategy in the wake of those six U.S. soldiers being killed by Afghan soldiers between Feb. 23 and March 1?” “Treachery has existed as long as there’s been warfare, and there’s always been a few people that you couldn’t trust” was the way Marine Gen. James Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command, put it. On Tuesday, he told the Senate panel: “I’m one of those who has slept peacefully under Afghan boys guarding me back in 2001. No force is perfect.” On Wednesday, Mattis told House members that the U.S. military relationship with Afghan troops “should not be defined by the occasional tragedies.” He went on to say, “More Afghan boys have died as a result of this sort of thing in a society that has been turned upside down by the Soviets some decades ago. . . . The Kalashnikov culture found its way inside that society and violence has become too often the norm. It’s one of the things we’re trying to turn back.” But, he added, “in Afghanistan right now, it has not stopped us in our tracks.” Adm. William McRaven, head the U.S. Special Operations Command, told the senators that his troops “have not had any what we refer to as ‘green-on-blue’ incidents [Afghan soldiers attacking U.S. or NATO personnel] with respect to our partner relationships.” Another question that came up several times was President Hamid Karzai’s repeated objection to Special Forces night raids on Afghan villages in order to capture targeted, high-value Taliban leaders. McRaven told the senators that the raids are “essential” and that the high-value individuals “generally bed down at night. They are much more targetable at night. And I think if you look at it tactically, what you find is the Afghans are actually much safer if we target an individual at night because there aren’t so many people out and about in the little villages.” He also said that Karzai has been told that Afghan forces have taken the lead on night raids.

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Chinese ruling party frets over a new threat: A book by an aged communist

taken by our society and country. I feel a responsibility to cry out to those who lead this country’s ruling party and to common people: we have taken the wrong road.” The party says that it doesn’t reject democracy but only its Western forms, an argument that resonates at a time of growing Chinese nationalism. It points to the National People’s Congress, which has nearly 3,000 members, allows some discussion of policy and no longer votes unanimously in favor of everything. But the legislature still invariably approves party-scripted legislation. Its chairman, Politburo Standing Committee member Wu Bangguo, is a fervent critic of what the party scorns as alien Western notions of democracy incompatible with China’s “national essence.” At last year’s session, Wu outlined a doctrine of “Five Don’ts,” denouncing multiparty competition, pluralism and other innovations as heresies that will plunge China “into an abyss of internal disorder.” Du’s book provides a detailed theoretical critique of Wu’s arguments. His conclusion: “The National People’s Congress is nothing more than a democratic signboard for a one-party dictatorship.” Criticism of senior party leaders by name is still taboo in China, and Bao, the publisher, thinks this might partly explain Beijing’s sensitivity to the book. Du’s book also hits another raw nerve: It contains a preface by Bao’s father, Bao Tong, a reform-minded senior party official who was purged and jailed after the Tiananmen crackdown. Other literary targets While ignoring Hong Kong books about the extravagant sex lives of corrupt officials and other titillating topics, Beijing has repeatedly tried to curb more sober works, usually by pressuring the authors. Bao said Chinese officials have intervened to try to halt five New Century Press titles. All but one got published, including a work denouncing China’s current prime minister, often viewed as a liberal, as a fraud. Yu Jie, the author of “China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao,” fled to the United States in January and said he had been tortured by Chinese security forces, in part as punishment for his criticism of the premier. Du has been spared physical abuse and has instead been quietly ordered to withdraw his book from publication. “This is such a depressing story,’ said Bao, the publisher. “The system is so intolerant of criticism it cannot even let a sick man in his 80s say what he wants to say. . . . This is why 1.3 billion people are effectively silent.”

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House hunters must do their homework about real estate Web sites

Washington, DC - March, 3: Renata Ko, with her husband Jeremy and son Sebastian, used real estate web sites to conduct research when hunting for their new home. (Bill O'Leary/WASHINGTON POST) Whether you’re searching for a home, preparing to sell or just nosy about your neighbors, real estate Web sites include so many new features that they can become addictive. Instead of waiting for an agent to dole out listings on their time schedule, you can search anonymously at midnight, receive e-mail alerts about newly listed homes or open houses, see market and neighborhood reports, map recent home-sale prices, and use apps that display listing details and interior photos of nearby homes. Nearly 90 percent of home buyers used the Internet in their house searches in 2011, according to the National Association of Realtors. And even if you aren’t looking for a house, it’s easy to get sucked into these sites for their voyeuristic appeal — you just can’t help yourself from peeping into your neighbors’ listings and sales history, seeing their estimated home value (and competitively comparing it with your own), and getting a glimpse into their homes and finances. Admit it — you’ve peeked. But house hunters, sellers and real estate agents say the quality of information can vary greatly from site to site, and tension is brewing between third-party syndication sites — such as Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com — and traditional real estate brokers and agents. Brokers have complained that some of the information on these Web sites can be inaccurate or misleading. They say that outdated listings leave buyers frustrated when homes they thought were available are actually sold, and they can leave sellers angry when price reductions aren’t reported quickly. What is the biggest gripe by agents and brokers? They complain that their own for-sale listings are being used as lead-generating tools for other agents, who pay the Web sites for advertising space or buy a percentage of the inquiries related to when a user looks at a home in a specific Zip code. “Everybody looked at the Web as a great marketing tool, so they pushed everything out without thinking about the integrity of the information,” says Hoby Hanna, president of Howard Hanna Real Estate, who does business in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and West Virginia. Hanna considered removing his firm’s 35,000 annual listings from all of the third-party sites. But the eyeballs were

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Prince George’s County Animal Watch

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 www.princegeorgescountymd.gov/der/amg. Attack of the stray cat: Dog jumps fence: Chihuahua in the can: Puppy found limping: Older cat gets pickup: Dog and cat adoption showcase: — Compiled by Jillian S. Sowah

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In Tanzania, an American English teacher reconnects with his students

were high above the city, which stretched farther than I remembered. A nearby hill was feathered with transmission towers. I could feel the past slipping away, making room for the present. “Arusha has changed a lot,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “A lot.” *** Gerald was indeed fatter than Simon, but not quite as fat as Simon had led me to believe. As Gerald waved from down the street, it took me a minute to see the face of the boy in the face of the man. But it was there, in his smile. We were downtown, near the clock tower. Gerald was in town working on a five-story guesthouse near the stadium. On our way to lunch, the three of us crossed the street, and a car stopped in front of us. “Mwalimu!” the driver yelled. “It’s James … from Ekenywa!” James. I remembered his face. Lackluster student. Not a bad guy. I believe he exited my class with almost no working knowledge of English. “James!” I said. “What are you doing these days?” He held out a tissue and unrolled it. Inside were two big, cut pieces of blue gemstone. “Glass?” I said. “No, not glass. Tanzanite. I’m selling it.” Some cars honked behind him, and he said he’d call later and sped off. Down the street, we came to an office building, where we climbed stairs and knocked on a door. It was an auditing firm. Inside, seated at a desk covered by ledgers, was Makata, the erstwhile Ekenywa math teacher. He was so happy to see us that he left work and came with us to a restaurant, where we ate nyama choma (grilled meat), drank beer and sat for several hours, reminiscing about the old days, catching up on events, gossiping about other students and teachers, and discussing how things had changed. It was all very good to see what these young guys had become, how life had carried them down the road to something a little better. At one point, I asked something that had been on my mind. “Gerald,” I said, “do you think having an American teacher helped you with English?” “Sana!” he said. “Very much! It helped me so much! I got a B in your class, but a C in all the others. Do you remember?” “I remember you were very good in English.” “Sana.” I wasn’t sure if I

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Washington sightseeing guide: Museums, galleries, monuments and memorials

ones. Have a plan: Insider tip: What’s in the neighborhood: Info: Independence Avenue and Sixth Street SW. 202-633-2214. www.nasm.si.edu. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (closed Christmas). Cost: Transit: National Gallery of Art Count on seeing a bit of everything in this grand museum, which consists of two buildings (the East and West buildings) and a sculpture garden. The West Building features more traditional art (the Old Masters and the newly renovated 19th-century French Galleries, etc.), while the East Building focuses on more modern and contemporary art (Calder, Dubuffet, etc.). Have a plan: Insider tip: What’s in the neighborhood: Info: Cost: Transit: National Museum of American History This site is home to a broad mix of American treasures — from the first ladies’ gowns to Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Have a plan: Insider tip: What’s in the neighborhood: Info: Cost: Transit: National Museum of the American Indian The Smithsonian’s newest museum celebrates Native American cultures from North and South America. Have a plan: Insider tip: What’s in the neighborhood: Info: Cost: Transit: National Museum of Crime & Punishment With such exhibits as J. Edgar Hoover’s revolver and Pancho Villa’s death mask, dare we say that missing this spot would be a real, uh, crime? Have a plan: Insider tip: What’s in the neighborhood: Info: Cost: Transit: National Museum of Natural History Whether you want to see the jaw-dropping Hope Diamond or the towering Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, this Smithsonian museum is sure to dazzle. Have a plan: Tips from an insider: What’s in the neighborhood: Info: Cost: Transit: Newseum Opened in 2008, this high-tech museum offers interactive displays on the news business. Have a plan: Insider tip: What’s in the neighborhood: Info: Cost: Transit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum This museum honors the victims of one of mankind’s worst atrocities. Opened in 1993, it is one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations. Have a plan: Insider tip: What’s in the neighborhood: Info: Cost: Transit: Update March 16, 2012: A section on the National Archives was added to this story. National Archives and Records Administration The nation’s founding documents are on display here, along with other primary sources from our country’s history. Have a plan: Tourists flock to the Archives for a glimpse of the Charters of Freedom, a.k.a. the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, so don’t leave this visit to chance. To avoid being

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occurs, we won’t have an elite executive corps. Lloyd Grable, McLean, formerly with the Navy and Energy departments An interview with Rep. Dennis A. Ross (R-Fla.), chairman of the House federal workforce subcommittee and advocate for a smaller workforce, touched off an online debate. The rolls are filled with millions that could not compete or hold a job as private citizens so over the years government employment has turned into another form of high-paying welfare! The Democrat welfare society is going bankrupt! They did not cut enough! After spending years working with, around and supervising government workers I can tell you for sure those people do not work. Every five government employees could be replaced by two workers. BlackSaint I suppose you worked with all 2.1 million so you can cast your black net over all of the workforce including the brains behind the guy who got Osama Bin Laden. createland The Federal Government isn’t a Taco Bell. If you want minimum wage work, then dole out minimum wage pay. The real challenge is recruiting and retaining quality personnel. Salaries and benefits attract top talent, but more so, is the feeling that you can make a difference. With the current state of vilifying federal employees, a young person with talent will look elsewhere. OldFed1 An article earlier this week reported on an inquiry by two members of Congress into problems with Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program. When I came into the program in 1998 we were selected as semi-finalists based on our résumés and our dean’s recommendation . . . however, the assessors didn’t know what résumé went with whom (or even what our names were) when we went to the assessment center so that they wouldn’t favor one over another for reasons other than the three assessments. Once there, we first took a timed writing test. Our question was something like, “Describe your accomplishments and what you learned from them.” Secondly, we had an individual analytical assessment. We were each given a controversial policy question and asked to choose a side and develop our argument on paper first, then present and defend it orally before the assessors. The third and last assessment was a group discussion monitored by the assessors and very similar to the analytical portion, except in a group of other candidates and with no preparation. This kind of assessment process is as rigorous as it gets.

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Will Reid break the judicial nomination logjam?

from the prize and replace it with his country’s name, thereby likely allowing the prize to be given. The United States voted no, but African countries, an Arab bloc, and traditional democracies such as China, Cuba, Belarus, Pakistan and Russia voted in favor. Human rights groups, Western democracies and prominent African leaders such as Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu had strongly objected to the award, noting that the State Department constantly slams Obiang for things like arbitrary arrest and detention and and judicial corruption. But Obiang, who put up $3 million for the award (to be given over five years), kept trying, most recently taking his name off the award and just having the country’s name on it. UNESCO kept stalling, hoping he would just go away or maybe might somehow be embarrassed by charges the money came from Obiang’s preposterous looting of the oil-rich country’s treasury. Detractors cited a Justice Department effort to seize a $30 million Malibu mansion, a fleet of luxury cars, a $38.5 million Gulfstream jet, Michael Jackson clothing and other items owned by the dictator’s playboy son, who has a yearly salary of $81,000. Just weeks ago French authorities, investigating alleged embezzlement, reportedly seized truckloads of art and antiquities said to be worth more than $50 million from the son’s six-floor mansion in a tony Paris neighborhood. But, despite Thursday’s vote, the fight over the prize may not be over. Despite UNESCO’s inspired effort to discredit itself, the organization’s legal office has determined that legal problems related to the name change and other matters may make it impossible to award the prize. Washington stopped paying $80 million in dues and contributions to UNESCO after the organization granted membership to the Palestinian Authority in October. Thursday’s action sure isn’t going to help efforts to restore that funding. Knows what he likes There’s a new salvo in the ongoing turf war between the Federal Trade Commission and the chairman of the House transportation committee, John Mica . Mica has long had his eye on the FTC headquarters’ primo real estate on Pennsylvania Avenue — space he thinks is perfect for a new wing of the National Gallery. This week, his committee passed a resolution directing the General Services Administration to produce a plan for the agency-for-museum switcheroo. Meanwhile, the FTC is none too pleased with Mica’s latest maneuver — or with the underlying proposal, which calls for the

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One year after the Fukushima disaster of 3/11, Japan looks inward

to overtake America as the world’s leading economy. That never came to pass, and last year Japan was knocked from its No. 2 perch by China, with a prospect of further relative decline. In politics, too, the nation was adrift. An upstart left-of-center party had unseated the conservatives who had ruled Japan for more than half a century, but by the time of the disaster — 11 / 2 years into its administration — the Democratic Party of Japan had yet to find its footing. Most of all, there was the dawning realization that, because of Japan’s pathologically low birth rate and its allergy to immigration, its population would both dramatically age and dramatically decrease in coming decades. After the initial shock came hope that the disaster would jump-start Japan out of its malaise — that the country would rebound as it had after World War II or the 1973 oil crisis. But jump which way? For some, the disaster points toward accepting a reduced position for Japan in the world instead of resisting it. “Our status as an economic power will come down, but look at France or Germany or Great Britain,” Hideki Kato, president of the Tokyo Foundation, said at the forum this week. “The economic scale in Japan is much bigger, but I don’t think the level of happiness is much bigger.” Others hope Japan’s growth will resume but in a new direction. Just as the Japan of the 1980s proved the possibility of economic power without military might, so in an era of climate change and diminishing resources Japan would blaze a more sustainable path. And then there are those, like Japan’s savvy ambassador to the United States, Ichiro Fujisaki, who argue that with 127 million people living on narrow, rocky islands, “we have to depend on science and technology.” “We will seek safe and sustainable technology,” he told me, “but I don’t think it will change our society or makes us less open to innovation.” In the past year, a new prime minister has provided steadier leadership, but he, like leaders in Washington, has to cope with a divided legislature. Tax-free development zones have been created in the disaster area, but they must overcome exaggerated fears of radiation. Maybe nothing will ever be the same, in other words, but neither is everything transformed. Hard problems are still hard, and democratic politics are still slow-moving. fredhiatt@washpost.com

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Japan's Nikkei breaks 10,000 for first time in seven months

A man walks past screens showing the Nikkei stock average and stock quotation boards in Tokyo on Friday. Japan's Nikkei average topped 10,000 for the first time in seven months on Friday, buoyed by signs that Greece had avoid a messy default and by a weaker yen, which would help struggling Japanese exporters. (Issei Kato/Reuters) TOKYO — The Japanese stock rally came as Greece moved toward a deal to restructure its massive debt, easing concerns of a default. The Nikkei broke the 10,000 barrier for the first time since Aug. 1 just before the close of trading, but fell briefly after that to close at 9,929.74, up 1.65 percent on the day. As Japan prepares for a weekend of somber services and memorials to mark the one-year anniversary of its mega-earthquake and tsunami, the Nikkei is now back to pre-disaster levels, and the country has had weeks of encouraging economic news. The yen has weakened by more than 6 percent since Feb. 1, alleviating the strain on majors exporters who said that the strong yen was destroying their profits, making their products more expensive overseas. Meanwhile, driven by construction demand in the disaster-hit northeast, industrial production is back to pre-disaster levels. Most economists forecast modest GDP growth in the first quarter of the next fiscal year, which begins in April. “Even before the overseas economy started to firm and the [yen] started to depreciate, we had been expecting real GDP growth to return to positive territory” in the first quarter of 2012, said a recent economic research report from Barclays Capital. “In this sense, the favorable currency movements are an important bonus, but not the sole driver.” The yen on Friday stood at 81.7 against the dollar; it was as high as 76.2 against the dollar at the beginning of February. Toyota chief Akio Toyoda has said that the ideal exchange rate is 90 yen to the dollar. But even as stocks rise and the yen helps this country’s major exporters — auto and electronics manufacturers, most notably — the economy is still vulnerable. With 52 of its 54 reactors shut down in the wake of a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japan has been forced to import costly coal and liquefied natural gas. That dependence leaves the country susceptible to major worldwide economic shocks; it also means that Japan is in danger of becoming a

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Chinese official speaks out as rumors, intrigue swirl

Bo Xilai, the charismatic but controversial Communist Party secretary of Chongqing, waits for a question from the media during a press conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday. (STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) BEIJING Bo, the Communist Party boss in the sprawling south-central municipality of Chongqing, said he was as surprised as anyone when his aide, Wang Lijun, who was the vice-mayor and former police chief, sought refuge Feb. 6 at the U.S. consulate in neighboring Chengdu. Wang was either seeking to defect, or trying to hide out from Chongqing authorities in fear of his life, depending on which version of the bizarre episode is believed. “I truly never expected this to happen,” said Bo, speaking to reporters at a meeting of the Chongqing delegation during the annual session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress. “I felt it was extremely sudden.” Bo has long been considered a top contender for a promotion this year to the powerful nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, but the episode involving Wang — who is now believed being held incommunicado in Beijing — may have jeopardized Bo’s ambitions. In the absence of any real information on Wang, the Internet rumor mill, and Hong Kong newspapers, have been filled with speculation that the case may have been stoked by Bo’s political rivals as a way to embarrass him in advance of the scheduled leadership reshuffle at the 18th Party Congress this fall. The mystery only deepened this week, first when a Chongqing businessman, Li Jun, now in hiding outside of China, detailed to The Washington Post and the Financial Times a story of being harassed, jailed and forced to flee the country in a property dispute with Chongqing’s power-brokers, including Wang Lijun. Then on Thursday, Zhang Mingyu, a Chongqing property developer, was reported detained here in Beijing, after he publicly threatened to provide more details on the Wang Lijun case. Bo, looking tired while speaking to reporters Friday, tried to brush off the case and questions about its impact on his own plans. “For myself, speaking from my heart, I’ve never associated myself with anything specific about the 18th Congress,” Bo said. Speaking of his rumored offer to quit, he said, "That's totally a rumor, totally imaginary. There's no such thing as a resignation." “Wang Lijun is now being investigated by the relevant central agencies,” Bo said. “When the results are concluded, they will