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How did the postponement of the 2020 Olympics affect athletes?
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"With many elite U.S. gymnasts favoring a delay, USA Gymnastics on Monday added its voice to that of USA Swimming and USA Track and Field in calling for the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, scheduled to start July 24, because of the risk posed by the novel coronavirus. USA Gymnastics President and CEO Li Li Leung said the governing body would ask the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee to advocate that the International Olympic Committee delay the Games until they can be safely held. The request won’t specify a preferred timetable. “This pandemic affects the entire world, and everyone’s health and safety should always be first,” Leung told reporters in a conference call. USA Gymnastics is the United States’ third major sports governing body to call for a delay of the 2020 Games because of the virus’s health risks and the upheaval it has created in athletes’ training. On Friday, USA Swimming asked for a one-year delay; soon after, executives of USA Track and Field requested a delay of unspecified duration. Later Monday, the USOPC called for a postponement as well. Swimming, track and field, and gymnastics are the most watched summer Olympic sports and the most lucrative and influential in IOC decision-making. In raising their voices, the sports’ American governing bodies made a powerful statement that the Games should not be held as scheduled. Before taking a public position on the question, USA Gymnastics polled its men’s and women’s national teams to gauge their sentiments. The athletes were asked whether they favored postponing the Olympics and, if so, how far out they felt they should be postponed. The options presented on the survey were three to four months, one year or “other.” About 80 percent of the roughly 70 national team members responded. Of those, 62 percent were in favor of postponing the Games, while 38 percent wanted them to be held as scheduled, Leung said. Of the 62 percent in favor of a postponement, most favored a one-year delay rather than a three- to four-month delay, while other athletes suggested different timetables. Because the survey was anonymous, there was no way to tell whether the top prospects for making the high-profile U.S. women’s artistic gymnastics team for Tokyo, led by 23-year-old Simone Biles, take a different view than male trampolinists, for example. Leung said that in terms of reasons cited by those favoring a delay, many mentioned health",
"With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics less than six months away, the fast-spreading coronavirus is wreaking havoc with preparations for the Summer Games, prompting several sports to relocate or cancel events originally scheduled for China. On Wednesday, the Feb. 12-13 World Indoor Track and Field Championships in Nanjing were postponed until 2021 out of concern over the coronavirus. The decision was made by World Athletics, track and field’s international governing body, which issued a statement that read, in part: “The advice from our medical team, who are in contact with the World Health Organization, is that the spread of the Coronavirus both within China and outside the country is still at a concerning level and no one should be going ahead with any major gathering that can be postponed.” The unchecked coronavirus has killed 132 and infected more than 6,100, including residents of more than a dozen countries. With the death toll growing and no vaccine on the horizon, the World Health Organization on Wednesday voiced “grave concern” and is weighing whether to declare “a global health emergency.” On Monday, the United States’ leading public-health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recommended that travelers avoid all “nonessential” travel to China. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee was said to be studying the CDC recommendation with an eye toward its athletes’ travel. But the organization did not respond to a request to comment about what it is doing to monitor the situation or mitigate danger to its athletes. Han Xiao, chair of the USOPC’s Athletes’ Advisory Council, said there had been little conversation with prospective U.S. Olympians about coronavirus safeguards. After canvassing several fellow athletes, Han wrote in an email exchange that they would favor any rescheduling that would safeguard their health. “We are in favor of moving or rescheduling events in order to protect the health of athletes, as long as there is communication to the athletes and the athletes are included in the decision-making process,” wrote Han, a table tennis athlete. Tokyo, the site of the 2020 Summer Olympics, is nearly 1,600 miles from Wuhan, the central China metropolis that’s the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. But grave concern over the virus’s spread, both within central China and now overseas, is being felt around the world, particularly since health officials have confirmed it can be transmitted human-to-human rather than simply contracted at the point of origin. USA Pentathlon",
"as maybe some others around the world have. “I think there’s an underlying mental health concern here for our best athletes and it’s put them in a place where postponement makes sense.” Earlier in the day, Hirshland said on a conference call with reporters that the USOPC has shared some of the concerns that have been expressed by American athletes about competing in Tokyo this summer, adding, “I can assure you there’s no circumstance when the USOPC would send our athletes into harm’s way if we did not believe it was safe.” The USOPC remarks come as athletes have started to publicly voice their reservations about competing this summer and pressure has increased on the IOC to reconsider holding the Tokyo Games on schedule. One day earlier, a member of the Japanese Olympic Committee became the first executive committee board member to break with the IOC in calling for a postponement. Kaori Yamaguchi, a bronze medalist in judo at the 1988 Olympics, said Thursday that the IOC is “putting athletes at risk.” Olympic hopefuls from several countries have expressed similar concerns about the safety of a Summer Olympics and have said their training has already been compromised. Earlier in the week, gymnast Colin Van Wicklen became the first athlete vying for a spot on U.S. Olympic team to publicly urge for a postponement, posting on Twitter, “We must put the pressure on the IOC to do the right thing.” “I don't think it's fair to the athletes who have dedicated their whole life to trying to make an Olympic team to have to deal with this,” Van Wicklen told The Washington Post in a phone interview Thursday. “We deserve to be at our best, to give it our best shot and have the best opportunity to make an Olympic team and have our dreams come true.” The IOC hasn’t wavered in its intention to stage the Tokyo Games on schedule and has urged athletes to continue training with the July 24 start date in mind. But as cities around the world have experienced heightened restrictions, athletes are having an increasingly difficult time finding the gymnasiums, swimming pools and practice facilities needed for training. “There are just a lot of mixed statements right now, and that really messes with your head,” Van Wicklen said. “You’re trying to do the best for yourself being safe and stay healthy. You want to listen"
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[
"Panda keepers and veterinarians finally got an extended look recently at the cub born August 21 at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington. Mom Mei Xiang (pronounced may-SHONG) left the small den September 19, and zookeepers were able to take the cub just outside the enclosure for a physical exam. The cub has quickly grown much larger than the butterstick giant pandas are often compared with at birth. It weighed a little more than two pounds and measured 13.4 inches long, zoo staff said. It’s not obvious this early whether the cub is female or male, so veterinarian James Steeil swabbed inside its mouth to get DNA, genetic material that will reveal the sex of the cub. The zoo expects to share the news in a few weeks. The cub, which was pinkish-white at birth, is starting to look more like a panda, with large patches of black-and-white fur. Its eyes were closed, as they have been since birth, but one eye was starting to open. Steeil listened to its heart and lungs, felt its stomach, and checked its arm and leg movements. He pronounced the cub to be in good health. Mei Xiang was soon reunited with the cub, which made several loud squeals during the exam. The pair are expected to remain off public view for a couple of months. The cub’s siblings — Tai Shan, Bao Bao and Bei Bei — met the public when they were 4 or 5 months old. Panda fans don’t need to wait until then to see the pair. You can watch and listen to mom and cub anytime on the Giant Panda Cam at national zoo.si.edu/webcams/panda-cam. Mei sometimes keeps the cub cradled close, but with a little patience you may see the two lying nose to nose in a snuggle.",
"continue to innovate. And that's the way we think about it, it's really something we like to call the \"double bottom line.\" How can we deliver results for our shareholders at the same time as delivering results for society on a whole? MS. LABOTT: You know, I think especially in the COVID pandemics, companies are really mindful of that double bottom line, not only productivity and profit, but also the worker. Brad Surak, President of Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara; and Bryan Jones, CEO of JR Automation, also part of the Hitachi Group, thanks for joining me. Back to The Washington Post. [Video plays] MR. SCOTT: Welcome back. I'm Eugene Scott, political reporter for The Fix and the Washington Post. My next guest is Scott Galloway. He's a professor of marketing at the NYU's Stern School of Business, and he's also an author and well-known podcast host. Scott, welcome to Washington Post Live. Thank you for joining us. MR. GALLOWAY: Thanks, Eugene. Good to be with you. MR. SCOTT: Awesome, awesome. I would like to start by asking you about this explosion in the use of technology that we have seen during COVID-19. Do you see this as an era of digital transformation? Is this something that we think could stick, or is this just pretty temporary? MR. GALLOWAY: So, I think that almost when we talk about digital, it's a little bit talking about electricity, and that is it's now just such a fundamental component of everything we do. I think technology is a tool. Obviously, it's helping us scale, just as the assembly line or the printing press helped us scale innovation, but really at the end of the day, what you have here, as largely facilitated by digital but also consumer, changes in consumer behavior, changes in regulations coming down, if we're going to talk about the acceleration in telehealth or remote medicine, but loosely speaking, COVID-19 is more of an accelerator than a change agent. I think a decent exercise for any organization to go through is to take the three biggest trends in your industry or your company, take the slope of those trend lines, and then extend them 10 years out or where they were supposed to be in 10 years, and ask yourself are we there today. So, I see COVID-19 as more of an accelerant. Digital is obviously a key component of",
"TRADE Trade deficit rose in August as exports fell The U.S. trade deficit jumped sharply in August as exports fell to the lowest level in nearly three years while imports increased, led by a surge in shipments of cellphones from China. The deficit grew 15.6 percent to $48.3 billion, the biggest deficit since March, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. Exports of goods and services dropped 2 percent to $185.1 billion, the lowest level since October 2012, while imports rose 1.2 percent to $233.4 billion. Exports have been hurt this year by the rising value of the dollar, which makes U.S. goods less competitive on overseas markets, and by weaker economic growth in China and other major export markets. Economists say they expect that these trends will combine to push the deficit higher and make trade a drag on overall growth this year. So far this year, the trade deficit is running at an annual rate of $531.6 billion, 4.6 percent higher than last year’s deficit of $508.3 billion. Canada, the United States’ largest trading partner, is in a recession, and China, the world’s second-largest economy, is growing much more slowly; meanwhile, many emerging market economies are being battered by a plunge in commodity prices. — Associated Press TRANSPORTATION Amtrak chief warns on safety deadline The head of Amtrak warned Congress that some passenger rail service outside the Northeast Corridor will be suspended if lawmakers don’t extend a Dec. 31 deadline for railroads to install safety technology. “There will be significant impacts to our service and on our customers and tenant railroads,” chief executive Joseph Boardman said in an Oct. 5 letter to Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. “The potential economic impacts would also be substantial.” The Senate included an extension in broader transportation legislation that is stalled. House transportation leaders last week introduced a standalone bill to extend the deadline for three years. Negotiations between the House and the Senate are underway, and the key lawmakers involved say they’re trying to get legislation to President Obama’s desk this month. Under current law, railroads have until Dec. 31 to install technology, known as positive control, that can automatically slow or stop trains to prevent crashes. Amtrak and other rail operators have long said they can’t meet the deadline to install it in all the areas where it’s required, including on all passenger routes and in areas",
"BEIRUT — Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf Arab countries are seeing a sharp spike in coronavirus cases, prompting governments to reimpose some restrictions that had been lifted late last month ahead of the holy fasting month of Ramadan. Saudi Arabia, the largest Arab gulf country, had recorded about 15,000 cases when Ramadan began. But in less than a month, the kingdom’s numbers quadrupled, with nearly 60,000 confirmed cases as of Wednesday, making it the Arab world’s new hotbed of infection. In response, the kingdom has announced it will enforce a nationwide 24-hour curfew starting Saturday and continuing into next week during the Eid al-Fitr festival, which marks the end of Ramadan. Kuwait has experienced an even sharper increase in cases, the most dramatic in its neighborhood, with confirmed infections up nearly sevenfold since the first day of Ramadan to 16,800 on Tuesday. Kuwait announced plans earlier this month to reimpose a complete lockdown from May 10 until May 30 in response to the spike. Walking for exercise is permitted for two hours every evening, but driving cars is not. In Qatar, where case numbers have quadrupled to 37,000, the government decreed new restrictions Monday. It announced the closure of nonessential stores for 10 days and required that all citizens and residents download a cellphone tracking app to monitor those who come into contact with people who test positive for the novel coronavirus. Noncompliance can be punished with three years in jail and a fine of up to $55,000. The three other gulf Arab countries — the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain — had also eased restrictions at the onset of Ramadan, an especially social month when pious and impious alike make social calls and hold dinner parties. All those countries have now seen their numbers of infections surge. Public health officials say many of the new cases are in the large communities of foreign workers, who represent a major part of the labor force in these six countries. After Saudi Arabia recorded its first coronavirus case on March 2, the public health response was swift. The deeply religious kingdom barred Muslims from conducting daily prayers inside mosques, and pilgrimages to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina were halted. International flights were suspended, most major cities were placed under 24-hour lockdowns, most public places were closed, and curfews were put in place. In the third week of April,"
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Are there any 3-star Michelin restaurants in the DC region?
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"Remember date night, when a couple could escape for a leisurely meal and spend time talking and catching up after a week of work? We can’t eat at restaurants now, but we can try to recapture some of that spirit, thanks to restaurants bringing multicourse meal packages and optional wine pairings into your home. Some are fine-dining establishments preparing swordfish or wagyu brisket, while others bring the vibe of a carefree Friday night. The Michelin-starred Masseria used to offer guided tasting menus with four to six courses in its dining room near Union Market. Now, the “Masseria a Casa” takeout menu offers one multicourse meal for two each day. Diners can check the restaurant website on Monday to see a week’s worth of dinners and plan ahead. The reduced number of options is the result of both a leaner team in the kitchen and the challenges of getting ingredients. “We used to get deliveries from the West Coast every day, or overnight from Italy,” chef Nick Stefanelli says. Now, “some deliver once a week, some every other day.” But the intent is still there: “We’re trying to stay within what Masseria’s experience was — being able to bring happiness through food,” he says. Creating a restaurant-like experience is also on the mind of Michael Rafidi, the chef at Albi near the Navy Yard. His weekly three-course menu features a limited number of courses, he says, to remove guesswork for customers. Albi’s staff has been trained to guide diners through the menu and answer questions about flavors and serving sizes, which just isn’t possible for people reading a menu from a screen. “When you’re ordering a la carte, you’re not getting the best of what we do here,” Rafidi says. However, just because you’re ordering a meal from a renowned chef doesn’t mean that their kitchen is doing all the work. A recent takeout dinner for two from the Michelin-starred Rose’s Luxury arrived in a fleet of 18 different plastic containers with a sheet of paper providing “a couple of tips” for each of the four courses, including advice to heat sausage in the microwave for 30 seconds before mixing it into the restaurant’s famous litchi salad. “There was a big learning curve” with packaging food to go, says Masseria’s Stefanelli, whose menu also arrives with detailed instructions. “We put a three-course meal in a bag but didn’t label each of",
"in last year’s guide. Be warned: This is a section that might not stick around next year. There are now 11 restaurants in the Hall of Fame. Surprise: Rasika West End joins its sister restaurant in Sietsema’s list of “restaurants that do what they do better than their peers.” None of the restaurants in this category had ratings change, including the three-and-a-half-star Rasika West End. The Hall of Fame is home to seven of the guide’s eight four-star restaurants. The other one is Métier, which placed fourth in Sietsema’s Top 10. Eric Ziebold’s dining room earned four stars in 2017, was docked half a star in 2018, but is now back to a “superlative” rating. A Michelin star isn’t always enough. Little Pearl and Gravitas both celebrated receiving their first Michelin stars this year, but neither is featured in Sietsema’s new guide. Little Pearl had earned three stars in 2018, and Gravitas earned a No. 10 ranking in Sietsema’s spring Top 10, but that wasn’t enough. “One could argue that I liked two of Aaron Silverman’s restaurants [Pineapple and Pearls and Rose’s Luxury] better than Little Pearl this year,” Sietsema says, “or I thought Rooster & Owl was a more original, and less expensive, tasting menu experience overall than Gravitas. As I said in my introduction [to the Dining Guide], I also had to stop somewhere.” Bresca, Fiola, Masseria and Plume are other Washington restaurants that earned Michelin stars but have not been featured in Sietsema’s recent guides. Kinship, which has one Michelin star, returned to the dining guide after missing out in 2018. The big mover: The Restaurant at Patowmack Farm Chef Tarver King’s Lovettsville escape made its fall dining guide debut with a three-and-a-half-star rating and the No. 5 spot in Sietsema’s Top 10. Pretty impressive for a farm restaurant that first earned a mention in 2017′s spring dining guide, and “almost made it” into the fall guide that year. King is “living the dream,” Sietsema says, “getting most of his ingredients from his backyard and really putting ingredients on a pedestal, while also explaining their connection to the tasting menu. I tasted joy in his dishes.” As the dining scene grows, so do the options outside the city. This was a banner year for restaurants outside Washington’s borders. Eighteen of them — a dozen in Virginia, six in Maryland — earned a spot in the dining guide,",
"Hundreds of people have made Washington a better place to eat, drink and be merry since I became food critic in 2000. These brands blazed trails: José Andrés: Ashok Bajaj: Amy Brandwein: Derek Brown: Jeff Buben: Erik Bruner-Yang: Lisa and Peter Chang: Jackie Greenbaum: Mark Furstenberg: The Nortons: The Obamas: Patrick O’Connell: Michel Richard: Andy Shallal: Fabio and Maria Trabocchi:"
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"part of an investigation to determine whether the automaker failed to fully report accident-related deaths and injuries as required by U.S. law. The deadline for information pertaining to that order is Nov. 24. — Reuters AUTOMOTIVE Tesla’s third quarter shows ups and downs Electric carmaker Tesla Motors set a record for deliveries of its Model S sedan in the third quarter, delighting investors even as its losses doubled from a year ago. Tesla said Wednesday that it delivered 7,785 cars during the July-to-September period. That was slightly below its guidance of 7,800 but up 41.5 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Tesla’s net loss widened to $74.7 million for the quarter, which was almost double its loss from a year ago. The company blamed increased research-and-development costs for both the Model X SUV, which is due to go on sale next year, as well as its new all-wheel-drive system. It also cited the expense of adding stores in Asia and building more charging stations. Tesla managed record quarterly deliveries even with the temporary shutdown of its Fremont, Calif., factory in July to install more production capacity. Tesla said the longer-than-expected shutdown cost it 2,000 vehicles, but the plant changes will allow production to increase 50 percent both this year and next. Tesla said it expects to deliver 33,000 Model S sedans for the full year. That is 5 to 7 percent below its previous estimates. — Associated Press Also in Business ● U.S. companies added 230,000 jobs in October, a private survey said, the most in four months and a sign that businesses are still willing to hire despite signs of slowing growth overseas. Payroll processor ADP said the job gains were slightly ahead of the 225,000 added in September, which was revised up from an initial estimate of 213,000. Gains above 200,000 are usually enough to lower the jobless rate. ● Anheuser-Busch has agreed to buy 10 Barrel Brewing of Oregon. The companies did not disclose terms of the sale, which they expect to complete before the end of this year. Bend, Ore.-based 10 Barrel’s beers are sold in Oregon, Idaho and Washington. It expects to sell about 40,000 barrels of beer in 2014, with its Apocalypse IPA brand accounting for almost half the total. ● CBS, owner of the most-watched U.S. TV network, reported a 2 percent rise in quarterly revenue, driven by higher distribution revenue",
"a night — and he sets aside several hours each week “to think about big ideas.” When he was a brigadier general, he told Naval Academy students in a letter that he had been profoundly affected by reading classic military historians, among them Stephen Ambrose, John Keegan and Barbara Tuchman. “If my house were on fire and we were all running for our lives,” he wrote, “I would first save my family, and then all my volumes by these writers.” He has not yet informed Obama, who has indicated that he wants to keep withdrawing forces next year, how many troops he believes should stay in Afghanistan through 2013, but he is not digging in his boots to maintain all of the 68,000 troops that will remain after the current drawdown phase is completed at the end of September. By the end of the year, he predicted, “we could find that the operational environment for ’13 could be pretty significantly different,” although he said he will still need Special Operations forces, trainers for the Afghan troops and some conventional units to operate in areas not yet ready for transfer to Afghan control. It is a very different method from that taken by Petraeus, who sought to push Obama, during war cabinet discussions in 2011, to delay the drawdown until the end of this year so that U.S. forces could continue large-scale counterinsurgency missions. Petraeus failed. But Allen did manage to persuade Obama, in private discussions, not to announce any additional troop cuts until he provides a range of options to the White House in late fall. To those in the two-story yellow building that houses the NATO headquarters in Kabul, Allen’s approach to the troop reductions reflects his leadership style. Under Petraeus, “it was much more of a one-man show. There was much less oxygen for debate,” said a senior NATO official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the two generals. “John Allen listens a lot more carefully to what people are saying to him.” When Allen arrived in Kabul last July, the U.S. and NATO war plan called for a gradual transition of territory to Afghan control by the end of 2014, the point at which NATO’s combat mission will end. Based on the assumption that the United States would maintain substantial combat power in the country until then, the strategy envisaged the most violent, Taliban-saturated",
"toys-only store in 1957 in Rockville, Md., taking on the name Toys R Us in part because the letter “R” helped fit the store’s name onto signs. He modeled his locations after the New York chain Korvettes, in which a large variety of products were stocked in long aisles, easily accessible by shopping cart. By 1966, he had four stores and $12 million in sales. Perhaps anticipating that his company had peaked, Mr. Lazarus sold Toys R Us that year to the Interstate department store chain for $7.5 million, remaining with the business as head of its toys division. When Interstate went bankrupt in 1974, Mr. Lazarus took the reins of the company, which emerged from bankruptcy and renamed itself Toys R Us in 1978. The business went on to expand at a rate of nearly 20 percent each year, elbowing department stores out of the toy business as it added locations across the country and grew to offer about 18,000 items in each store in the mid-1980s. According to Eric Clark, author of “The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for America’s Youngest Consumers,” the company’s success was in part a result of tough business tactics by Mr. Lazarus. The executive used his leverage in the industry to force toymakers to accept payment months after they delivered products, and insisted they grant Toys R Us exclusive offerings, early releases and free advertising. Unusual for the time, he also oversaw the installation of a computerized inventory system that allowed him to track sales and inventory from behind his desk. “I think Toys R Us is a unique operation — the only proprietary merchandise company that rivals IBM as revolutionary in concept,” a retail analyst told The Washington Post in 1982. “Their superb controls and information systems are unrivaled in the industry.” Mr. Lazarus applied his low-cost, high-volume strategy to clothing beginning in 1983, when he opened Kids R Us stores in Brooklyn and Paramus, N.J. The brand launched stores across the country but proved less successful than Babies R Us, which opened in 1996 and sold diapers, cribs and car seats. Mr. Lazarus had by then left his day-to-day oversight role at the company, which by 1987 had made him the country’s best-paid executive, according to Forbes magazine. He earned more than $60 million that year. “If you’re going to be a success in life, you have to want",
"The Bagel Store in Brooklyn has rolled into a new craze that has customers lining up outside the door - the rainbow bagel. It's mid-afternoon, but the line still spills out the front door, snaking around the block, eating up the better part of the sidewalk, as it has since early that morning. There are young couples, clinging to each other in the cold. Mothers, standing patiently next to their anxious children. There are teenage girls, chatting in packs. And there are SLR cameras — so many SLR cameras. \"What are you all waiting for?\" a passerby who lives in the neighborhood asks as she plucks an earphone out from one of her ears. She is looking at the crowd with amazement. \"I see this line every day. It isn't just for bagels, is it?\" \"It's the line for rainbow bagels!\" a little girl yells. She takes out her phone and opens Instagram. She holds it out so the woman can see the striped, multi-colored bagel in all its glory, accompanied, of course, by the hashtag #rainbowbagel. The woman rubs at her eyes. She is unimpressed. She turns and walks away, shaking her head in the sort of exaggerated and prolonged way people do when they want to make sure others notice. * * * The rainbow bagel, the brainchild of self-proclaimed \"world premier bagel artist\" Scott Rossillo, who has been making the brightly hued treat for almost two decades, is having a moment that many people in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, could do without. For years, Williamsburg was the epicenter of cool for a specific kind of person. A thriving artist population, a liberal bend and a general disdain for popular culture birthed a haven for counterculturalism, a capital of hipsterdom that was defined, at least in part, by a high concentration of yoga studios, organic markets, vintage stores and artisanal coffee shops. But time has transformed the neighborhood from the sort of place coveted by a select few to a destination for just about anyone visiting New York City. And that popularity hasn't always jibed with local values. The tourism triggered a commercial flood: First came the Dunkin' Donuts, then the Starbucks. A Whole Foods will be opening this year. In many ways, the rise of the rainbow bagel perfectly encapsulates this tension, an unlikely but apt example of a proud neighborhood confronting the inevitable: change. The dye-infused treat, whose"
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What is the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)?
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"Aylward, WHO’s assistant director general. Ten days later, RBC Capital Markets gave it only a 50 percent chance of succeeding as a treatment. The mixed signals have done little to dampen interest. There have been desperate pleas for supplies to treat patients on a “compassionate use’’ basis. Although Gilead leads the pack on treatments, large drug companies such as Merck, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi, as well as lesser-known companies Regeneron and Moderna, are pursuing coronavirus vaccines and medications, and executives estimate that at least 40 small biotech companies are developing drugs to fight it. Every time there is a new virus, “we get started, but we don’t cross the finish line,’’ Julie Gerberding, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who is now the executive vice president and chief patient officer at Merck, said at a news briefing in Washington last week. This time, she said, industry is committed to pushing a vaccine to cross the line for regulatory approval. “If we don’t cross it, it will be because it’s scientifically hard,’’ she said, “not because of the will or the investment.’’ But drug companies also have been accused of not pursuing vaccines and antiviral treatments aggressively because the commercial markets for such drugs are weak. The potential patient pool for clinical trials dries up once a new infectious outbreak subsides, so investment can be frozen in partly completed projects. And the pool of medical customers for a drug can be short-lived, if a seasonal epidemic quickly disappears, offering little chance to recoup an investment of what could be hundreds of millions of dollars. Vaccine and treatment development tailed off after outbreaks of the earlier coronavirus cousins, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). The drug industry’s lobbying arm, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), said that at least half of its members have mobilized in various ways to fight the new coronavirus in recent weeks. “We need to encourage as many shots on goal as possible,’’ Stephen J. Ubl, PhRMA’s chief executive officer, told reporters. Government efforts to spur development have produced sporadic progress. In the nearly 20 years since the SARS outbreak, the National Institutes of Health has spent nearly $700 million on research and development efforts around coronavirus, according to a survey by the advocacy group Public Citizen, which criticized the pharmaceutical industry for a “lack",
"As we wait for details on the second case of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in the United States, here's some good news about the first one: The patient was released from a hospital Friday and is considered fully recovered, according to the Indiana Department of Health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has scheduled a 2 p.m. news conference on the new case, a patient in Florida. But health officials reported Saturday that the first case, an unnamed U.S. health-care worker who had been living and working in Saudi Arabia, is fine. “The patient has tested negative for MERS, is no longer symptomatic and poses no threat to the community,” said Alan Kumar, chief medical information officer at the Community Hospital in Munster, Ind. The hospital talked to the CDC before releasing the patient, the hospital said. MERS comes from the same family, coronavirus, The virus's incubation period — the time between exposure and development of symptoms — is about five days, similar to SARS. While experts do not know how the MERS virus is spread, the CDC advises Americans to protect themselves by washing their hands often, avoiding close contact with people who are sick, avoiding touches to their eyes, nose and/or mouth with unwashed hands, and disinfecting frequently touched surfaces. People who develop fever and cough or shortness of breath within 14 days after traveling from countries in or near the Arabian Peninsula should see a doctor. The Indiana patient traveled from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to London on April 24, and then to Chicago by air. He took a bus to the Highland, Ind. area and went to Community Hospital in Munster, Ind. after falling ill. He was kept in isolation until he recovered. Authorities contacted most of the passengers on the flights and the bus, and none are symptomatic, according to the Indiana health department. So far there has been no clear evidence that the virus can be transmitted by casual contact. Hospital staff who had direct contact with the patient are still off duty and remain in temporary isolation in their homes until lab results confirm they are not infected. Related: CDC confirms first case of deadly MERS virus in Indiana",
"The World Health Organization has announced three new deaths from a new virus that has alarmed health officials in the Middle East and Europe since it was first discovered last year. The organization has now confirmed 50 cases of what it calls Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS. Thirty of those patients have died. Those numbers are cause for concern. The MERS virus is a coronavirus, which is the same type of virus responsible for the common cold as well as SARS, but less than a tenth of the people who fell ill in the SARS epidemic of 2002 and 2003 died. The new avian influenza virus spreading in China, known as H7N9, has resulted in death in a quarter of known cases, while the more well-known bird flu strain, H5N1, kills about half of those who are infected, according to The New York Times. It's still too early to say whether the MERS virus is more dangerous than these other viruses, since many more people could have been infected without developing severe symptoms. Yet MERS is worrisome for other reasons. A study published online Thursday in The Lancet described how one patient in a French hospital caught the disease from another who had recently traveled to Dubai and did not survive. The two shared a room together for three days, but it wasn't until more than a week afterward that symptoms appeared in the other patient. The authors of the study estimated the incubation period at 9-12 days, a long time in which infected people could spread the disease without realizing that they are ill. It still isn't certain at what stage people carrying the virus are most contagious, the Los Angeles Times reports. Another concern is that the virus is difficult to identify. An article published in The New England Journal of Medicine this week described how the disease apparently spread through three generations of a family in Riyadh. A boy and his uncle survived the illness, while the boy's father and grandfather did not. Yet doctors could not confirm the presence of the MERS virus in the youngest of the patients, and were not able to confirm it in the two who died until after they passed away. The World Health Organization is not advising restrictions or special screening for travelers, but it has issued recommendations for surveillance that describe what respiratory illnesses hospital personnel should regard"
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"the demonstrations, according to lawyer Zhang Qingfang. He said the authorities seemed to be in a hurry to deal with the case. “Normally, in a case like this, with 1,000 pages of material, it takes the prosecutor’s office 11 / 2 months to go over it” and file charges, he said. “I’m very surprised they handled it this fast. It is neither reasonable nor normal. It looks like it is just for show, and on orders from a higher level.” Zhang said he was informed that charges were filed by the prosecutor’s office but had not seen the written charge sheet. He said a charge of disturbing public order carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. An official in the prosecutor’s office declined to comment. Shortly after his arrest in July, Xu released a video from prison vowing to pay any price for “freedom, public interest and love” and urging Chinese citizens to unite to promote “democracy, rule of law and justice.” His friend and fellow member of the movement, leading entrepreneur Wang Gongquan, was arrested in September and is expected to be tried separately, said activist Chen Min. Authorities apparently want to avoid one large trial at which all the dissidents could stand together, Chen said. On Monday, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said the U.S. government was “deeply concerned” about the arrests of activists, including Xu and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, “for peacefully exercising their universal right to freedom of expression.” China’s Foreign Ministry rejected Kerry’s appeal for the activists’ release, arguing that Liu and Xu had violated Chinese laws and implying that Xu’s conviction was a foregone conclusion. “They deserve to be punished by law,” spokesman Hong Lei said at a routine news conference Tuesday. “I need to emphasize that only the 1.3 billion Chinese people are best qualified to pass judgment over China’s human rights condition.” The nationalist Global Times newspaper also criticized Kerry’s comments in an editorial Wednesday. “The U.S., in hopes of seeing China’s legal system crashed by the combined force of globalization and the Internet, is labeling extremist views of activists in the country as free speech,” it said. Liu was detained in December 2008, convicted of subversion the following year and sentenced to 11 years in prison for writing an appeal for democracy. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. Liu Liu contributed to this report.",
"'Legalize it' is written on the side of a giant joint during a demonstration to demand the legalization of cannabis, in Berlin on Aug. 8. (Rainer Jensen/European Pressphoto Agency) By significant margins, Republican voters in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire say that states should be able to carry out their own marijuana laws without federal interference. Sixty-four percent of GOP voters in Iowa say that states should be able to carry out their own laws vs. only 21 percent who say that the federal government should arrest and prosecute people who are following state marijuana laws. In New Hampshire, that margin is even slightly higher with 67 percent of GOP voters saying the feds should stay out. These numbers come from recent surveys conducted by Public Policy Polling and commissioned by reform group Marijuana Majority. They come as some GOP candidates, such as Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), have stepped up their anti-marijuana rhetoric in recent weeks. \"We put these polls into the field because we want presidential candidates to understand that the voters in these key states — who they need support from to win — overwhelmingly want the next occupant of the Oval Office to scale back federal marijuana prohibition,\" said Tom Angell, chairman of Marijuana Majority, in a statement. [When all else fails for their children, desperate parents drive national push for medical marijuana] But, he added, \"a small handful of the contenders are still talking about sending in the DEA to arrest people who are following state law, and we hope these new numbers send a message to those outliers that this type of outdated drug war bullying just isn't going to score any points in 2016.\" In a New Hampshire town hall meeting in late July, Christie told voters, \"if you’re getting high in Colorado today, enjoy it. As of January 2017, I will enforce the federal laws.\" He recently released a TV ad accusing President Obama of \"lawlessness\" for, among other things, allowing state-level marijuana laws to stand. Asked about marijuana recently, Rubio said that “I believe the federal government needs to enforce federal law.” In May, he told ABC News, \"Marijuana is illegal under federal law. That should be enforced.\" Christie and Rubio are currently polling in 11th and fifth place in the GOP horserace, respectively. Opinions like theirs are increasingly outside the mainstream of",
"The investigation started within two weeks of the shootings, ran for a month and was forwarded to CentCom in June 2012, about a year before Bales’s 2013 guilty pleas. When he pleaded guilty, Bales admitted that while deployed he used sleeping pills, steroids and liquor — including drinking whiskey in the hours before he twice sneaked away from his post on March 11, 2012, to walk to two villages. Bales went door to door before shooting 22 people. He burned bodies using kerosene from a lamp, testimony showed. Bales had left his camp before dawn, killing some villagers, then returned to his base and woke a fellow soldier, telling him he had shot people, that soldier recounted in court. The statement — which amounted to a confession — seemed so preposterous that the soldier said he did not believe Bales and went back to sleep, he told the court. Bales left the post a second time and killed the rest of his victims in another nearby village. He returned to the base in a blood-stained uniform and wearing sheeting torn from a doorway that he had fashioned into a cape. Marine Corps Gen. John R. Allen, who was commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan at the time of Bales’s actions but has since retired, commissioned the investigation. In accepting the report, Allen wrote, “I want to express my heartfelt sorrow” and extended his condolences to the families and friends of the villagers. He also pledged tighter discipline and urged better training of conventional forces, such as Bales and others on the base, who are selected to work in villages to stabilize them and counter insurgents. “Though words and investigations cannot undo what happened, please be assured that I will continue to take every measure to ensure that our forces are well disciplined and follow the laws of armed conflict,” Allen wrote. After the shootings, a commander at Bales’s outpost warned soldiers to get rid of alcohol and hide contraband because Army investigators were on their way, according to the report. Some military members also lacked credibility in their accounts of events and some Special Forces members showed “disdain” for infantry units and more loyalty to one another than to Army values, the investigation found. The report on Bales — known as an Army 15-6 report— was withheld as Bales’s criminal case progressed but finally was released after repeated",
"(iStock) Patients with critical illnesses will be turned away and research will be disrupted if the government shuts down again on Oct. 1, the director of the National Institutes of Health and the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee warned Tuesday. With just four legislative days remaining until the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said that during the 16-day shutdown in 2013, new patients were not allowed in to the clinical facilities of the Bethesda medical campus. During a tour before Tuesday’s news conference, Van Hollen said, he met a young cancer patient who had suffered a recurrence and was being treated at NIH. Hundreds of patients like him were turned away when the government shut down the last time, Van Hollen said. “If there is a government shutdown…someone like [this child] would not be able to come to NIH to get his treatments,” Van Hollen said. “If you were one of those kids, you would not want to be told that NIH is closed for business.” NIH is located in Van Hollen’s Maryland congressional district. The seven-term Democrat is seeking a Senate seat in next year’s election. [Who gets sent home if the government shuts down] During opening remarks, NIH Director Francis S. Collins lamented a slide in funding for NIH research and, in particular, the $1.55 billion lost when automatic budget cuts took effect via budget sequestration in 2013. As a result, Collins said, NIH was unable to fund 600 research grants. “Who knows which of those grants would have been the next big breakthrough in diabetes or cancer or infectious disease?” Collins said. Federal contingency plans based on the last shutdown show that 54 percent of 84,222 employees who work for the Department of Health and Human Services would be furloughed in the event of another shutdown. NIH is part of the HHS department. NIH would continue to care for patients already in its clinical center and provide minimal support for the animals in its labs. Collins said that scientists in other countries who have looked to the U.S. as a leader in biomedical research are beginning to wonder about the nation’s commitment. “Other countries, in fact, look at us and wonder what happened,” he said. “Many of them are trying to be America and yet, to them, American seems to have lost its way in biomedicine and science.”"
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Describe US sanctions on Oleg Deripaska
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"is how Russia responds — both to the sanctions and to any U.S. strike in Syria, where Moscow has military forces aiding Assad’s regime. Putin has said little on both topics in recent days. He visited Russian scientists Tuesday and thanked them for their role in helping develop new Russian nuclear weapons. “This all strengthens the isolationist, consolidating logic of a besieged fortress,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a domestic policy specialist at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said of the sanctions and Syria developments. “The regime won’t fall. It will only become more isolationist and aggressive toward the West.” Slides in the Russian stock market this week showed that Friday’s U.S. sanctions were the Trump administration’s most damaging move against Moscow so far. The ruble fell to 63 against the dollar, the Russian currency’s weakest level since December 2016, and government officials said they were preparing to take steps to stabilize the Russian businesses affected. “A blow to any of the groups of companies” affected by the sanctions “is a blow to the economy as a whole,” Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said Tuesday. Sanctioned businessman Oleg Deripaska’s company Rusal, an aluminum giant that employs 62,000 people worldwide, has lost more than half its stock market value since the sanctions were announced. Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, has lost some 15 percent on the stock market this week even though it was not sanctioned. Monday’s plunge of more than 8 percent in the benchmark MOEX Russia Index was the worst since March 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, though the index recovered some of those losses Tuesday. “If a very strong sanctions regime spreads to other sectors, this can lead to a financial crisis and certainly a renewed recession,” said economist Alexandre Abramov, a financial-markets expert at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. The risk, he said, is that investors will shun all Russian company stocks, fearing further sanctions. Even as Russia reeled from the blow to its economy, another crisis was deepening in Syria. The suspected chemical attack in rebel-held Douma brought dire predictions in Moscow that disaster could follow if Washington launched airstrikes in response. Russia denies that its Syrian allies used chlorine or other agents in the Saturday attack, which claimed dozens of lives. The West says overwhelming evidence points to Assad’s forces, with their backers Russia and Iran sharing responsibility. Igor Korotchenko, a Russian military scholar and a member of the Defense",
"Force One to an event in Orlando yesterday. -- Legal experts warn the Trump team’s use of joint defense agreements, known as JDAs, with others caught up in the Mueller probe may push legal boundaries. -- The federal government has frozen the U.S. assets and sprawling Upper East Side mansion of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and close ally of Vladimir Putin THE MIDTERMS: -- Trump will announce a pro-ethanol EPA directive at a rally in Iowa tonight as part of a bid to woo rural voters in the Midwest for the midterms. -- A new Post-Schar School poll found GOP Rep. Barbara Comstock has fallen 12 points behind Democrat Jennifer Wexton in their Virginia race. -- During a debate for Indiana’s closely watched Senate race, Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly and Republican Mike Braun attacked each other over their stances on abortion. -- Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is planning a nine-day blitz next week for Democratic midterm candidates. -- Sen. Tim Kaine (D) launched his first attack ad against Republican Corey Stewart in Virginia’s Senate race. THE REST OF THE AGENDA: -- House Speaker Paul Ryan predicted a “big fight” over border wall funding after the midterms. -- Lawyers who work with immigrants say courts are increasingly dealing with the cases of young children. -- Trump encouraged Chicago police to use the controversial “stop and frisk” policy to address the city’s gun violence. SOCIAL MEDIA SPEED READ: Trump reiterated his baseless claim that the anti-Kavanaugh protesters were paid actors: Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the No. 2 in GOP leadership, posted this picture from last night’s cocktail reception to celebrate Kavanaugh at the White House: More color from our man in the room: Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a potential 2020 presidential candidate, had this message for his followers after Kavanaugh’s swearing-in: Sarah Huckabee Sanders celebrated Hope Hicks’s new job at Fox: So did on-air talent at Fox: From a New York Post reporter: A New York Magazine reporter added another observation: A Vanity Fair reporter shared this: A writer for The Fix addressed arguments about Senate representation following Kavanaugh’s confirmation: Senators from both sides of the aisle expressed concern about Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance: The vice president mourned the journalist’s possible death and emphasized the importance of freedom of the press: A CNN host made this point about Trump’s meeting with Rosenstein: A Post reporter questioned the House speaker’s thoughts on Democratic",
"Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska sued the Treasury Department and Secretary Steven Mnuchin in U.S. federal court to demand the lifting of remaining U.S. sanctions against him, alleging the measures were illegal and harmed his finances and reputation. Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, claimed that Washington’s 2018 sanctions were “completely untethered” from “legal criteria.” The lawsuit, filed in district court in Washington, D.C., said the oligarch’s net worth has fallen by more than $7.5 billion, or 81 percent, since he and some of his companies were sanctioned for what Treasury called his support of “the Kremlin’s global malign activities.” In January, the Treasury Department lifted sanctions on three Deripaska-connected companies, but left in place the sanctions on Deripaska himself. “Treasury does not generally comment on pending litigation,” an agency spokesman said Friday. Sanctions experts said it is not unusual for sanctioned individuals to sue Treasury. The government usually wins the cases, “since the judiciary is pretty deferential to [Treasury] and the government on issues of national security,” said Peter Harrell, a former State Department official who worked on sanctions policy during the Obama administration. The D.C.-based lawyer representing Deripaska in the case, Erich Ferrari of Ferrari & Associates, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Ferrari’s online profile says he has previously “worked to have names removed” from Treasury sanctions lists. [email protected]"
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"say these are crucial for feeding needy American children as well as to ensure school districts have enough money to operate in the fall. While the Community Eligibility Provision waiver allows a district to feed all comers irrespective of documented need, the National Meal Pattern waiver provides flexibility in what can be given out. Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school time programs for Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit organization for eradicating poverty-related hunger and undernutrition, is calling for continuing these programs. “If families are in need, we think they should be able to come to a site and get food.” The meal pattern waiver, she said, allows feeding sites flexibility to offer different food items or combinations than have been delineated by the USDA’s school lunch program. With food supply chains disrupted by the pandemic, she said, it’s essential to allow substitutions. “While we want the meals to be as healthy as possible,” FitzSimons said. “If they are having a hard time getting fresh fruit, say, it’s important that they’re able to waive that.” The USDA said in a statement that it was looking at “all options within our statutory and budget authority to assist program operators with the challenges they are facing during the current health crisis.” Food insecurity doubled overall in the United States in April, tripling among households with children, according to a study by Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research. Another study, the Survey of Mothers with Young Children, said 40.9 percent of mothers with children ages 12 and under reported household food insecurity since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. “There’s been an almost unfathomable increase in food insecurity,” said Lisa Davis, senior vice president of Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign. “It’s going to require a number of policies and programs working hand in glove.” Food banks have been overwhelmed, with lines of cars reaching several miles from feeding sites. April saw the sharpest increase in grocery store prices in nearly 50 years. And now many urban grocery stores are boarding up after days of destruction and looting. Thirty-nine states have been approved to operate an emergency electronic grocery debit card program, called Pandemic-EBT, according to the USDA, covering more than three-quarters of eligible students. But many families have not yet received money from the program. Davis said states don’t have up-to-date rosters of all the children getting free and reduced",
"team has no immediate plans to introduce discounted concessions. “We’re constantly taking a look at what we’re offering and what we can do better, and what we need to do to make sure we have the best fan experience possible,” Jonathan Stahl, the team’s vice president of ballpark operations and guest experience, said. “I think when you see a lot of these lower-priced items, you’re seeing a lot of smaller items. Some of the items that we’ve introduced this year, while they may be a little higher-priced, they’re a lot bigger, they’re really signature items, and they’re a whole meal in that single item. . . . We continue to look and see: Are there ways to give them that better product, but keep it the cheapest price point possible?” Unlike the Falcons, who prohibit outside food and beverages at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Nationals fans still have the option of bringing their own food into the ballpark. On game days, Half Street is lined with vendors selling water, peanuts, hot dogs and more at a fraction of the cost of the same or similar items inside the gates. During Monday’s exhibition game against the Yankees, I took a few laps around all three levels of Nationals Park and tried to note the prices for some of the new food items available this season. Bao Bao (Section 130) Two (2) bao, chips and bottled soda $15 Two (2) bao, chips and 25-ounce Bud Light $21 Chicken bao $9 Mushroom bao $9 Pork loin bao $9 Medium Rare (Section 135) Culotte steak, hand-cut fries and secret sauce on rustic bread $18 Foot-long hot dog $9 Bavarian pretzel $6 Peanuts $8 Lobster Shack (Section 107) Lobster roll $17 Lobster blossom (lobster inside a tomato that’s been sliced to resemble a blossom) $17 Fried shrimp $9 Hank’s Oyster Bar (Section 106) Oyster po’ boy $14 Shrimp po’ boy $16 Fish and chips $16 Fried fish sandwich $16 Fried oysters $17 Fried shrimp $16 Shrimp cocktail $17 Old Bay fries $7 Coleslaw $5 Old Hickory BBQ (Bud Light Loft) Bone-in short rib $18 Smoked turkey leg $15 Smoked kielbasa $12 Street corn $9 Mac and cheese $8 Watermelon wedge $8 Fries $7 CHIKO (Section 240) Korean double-fried wings $15 Bulgoagie hoagie (Korean BBQ beef, caramelized onions, kimcheese wiz) $15 Bulgogi tots (Korean BBQ beef, caramelized onions, kimcheese wiz) $13* Chiko tots (roasted sesame, chili mayo) $12",
"said a friend and guardian, Pamela Buckles. Mrs. Gordon, a Bethesda resident, was born Barbara Ann Walker in Baltimore. At the State Department from 1948 to 1953, she was a delegate to a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) meeting in London. She was a past president of the National Symphony Orchestra’s women’s committee and a board member of the Washington Performing Arts Society and the Friends of the Corcoran Art Gallery’ acquisition committee. Henry S. Sizer, Foreign Service officer Henry S. Sizer, 82, a former Foreign Service officer who specialized in Middle East affairs who became a labor management officer at the American Foreign Service Association until retiring in 2003, died April 7 at his home in Washington. The cause was a heart attack, said a son, Michael Sizer. Mr. Sizer, a Buffalo native, was a Foreign Service officer from 1958 to 1986, and his assignments included Syria, Yemen, Tunisia, Vietnam, France and Lebanon. In 1978 and 1979 he was charge d’affairs at the embassy in Oman. He was a volunteer at the Washington charity Martha’s Table. Anne Favo, trade magazine editor Anne Favo, 80, an associate editor for the American Bus Association’s Destinations magazine in the 1980s and ’90s, died April 10 at a nursing home in Verona, Pa. The cause was carcinoid syndrome, said a son, James McGrath. Mrs. Favo was born Anne Finnegan in Washington. In the 1960s and ’70s, she coordinated events for Blackthorn Stick, an Irish folk dance group. As a member of the Catholic Church of the Little Flower in Bethesda, Md., she co-founded a volunteer committee to help parishioners with limited mobility. A longtime Bethesda resident, she moved to Washington in the 1990s and began to split her time between the District and Oakmont, Pa. Robert A. Copeland Jr., ophthalmologist Robert A. Copeland Jr., 60, the founding chairman of Howard University medical school’s ophthalmology department, died April 11 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. The cause was heart ailments, said Sholnn Freeman, a university spokesperson. Dr. Copeland was born in Germantown, Pa., and joined the Howard medical school staff in 1986. Over the last 30 years, he treated thousands of ophthalmology patients, trained and mentored hundreds of ophthalmology physicians and was co-author of a textbook on the cornea. He had done ophthalmology procedures in Haiti, Ghana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Chile, Liberia, Nigeria and India, and he had received the American Academy",
"A selection of beers at Ocelot Brewing Company, which is celebrating its second anniversary in May. (Deborah Jaffe for The Washington Post) May is a weird month for the Washington area's beer scene, falling between two of the biggest events of the year: the Craft Brewers Conference, which ended in mid-April, and the Savor Festival, which takes place June 2 and 3. But it's still a banner month for festivals, especially outside of the city, and sees the releases and rereleases of several noteworthy beers. Crab Cakes and Crab Cake Flying Dog's Dead Rise Ale — the beer made with Old Bay — is returning to local bars and liquor stores, just as crab season is getting underway. To celebrate, Flying Dog is hosting a party at its Frederick brewery. A $15 ticket to Crab Cakes and Crab Cake includes one Dead Rise (now in cans), a crab cake from Roasthouse Pub and a slice of a large crab-shaped cake made by Buttercream Bakeshop. 3 to 8 p.m. 4607 Wedgewood Blvd., Frederick. Mad Fox Spring Bierfest Beers from more than 20 Virginia breweries will flow at Mad Fox's outdoor Spring Bierfest in Falls Church. Sample ales from Triple Crossing (Richmond), Three Notch'd (Charlottesville), Adroit Theory (Purcellville) and Benchtop (Norfolk), among others, while listening to live music and eating grilled meats and veggies. Admission is $30 and includes six tickets for beer or food; a $55 couples ticket includes 20 food and drink tickets. The $65 VIP ticket adds early admission and unlimited food until 5 p.m. Noon to 6 p.m. 444 W. Broad St., Falls Church. The American Artisans of Craft Brewing Here's an event that would have been impossible to host a few years ago: Owen's Ordinary is hosting a special tap takeover with some of the most highly acclaimed small craft breweries in the country, including Jester King, Grimm, Prairie and Holy Mountain. (Seriously, Jester King's Figlet, with figs smoked at Austin's legendary Franklin Barbecue, available in North Bethesda?) There's no cover charge, and all beers go on tap at noon. 11820 Trade St., North Bethesda. Port City Trifecta release party at Port City Brewing Company Every year, judges at the Great American Beer Festival name the best large, midsize, small and very small breweries in America, based on the results of blind-tasting panels. During last month's Craft Brewers Conference, the three most recent winners of the Best"
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Find information about troops who have been accused of war crimes during their service in Afghanistan.
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"Speaking at the Pentagon, Gen. John Campbell, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said Afghan troops under fire in Kunduz requested air support from U.S. forces. The airstrikes killed 22 in a Doctors Without Borders hospital. A heavily armed U.S. gunship designed to provide added firepower to Special Operations forces was responsible for shooting and killing 22 people at a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, over the weekend, Pentagon officials said Monday. The attack occurred in the middle of the night Saturday, when Afghan troops and a U.S. Special Forces team training and advising them were on the ground near the hospital in Kunduz, the first major Afghan city to fall to the Taliban since the war began in 2001. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan said Monday the airstrike was requested by Afghan troops who had come under fire, contradicting earlier statements from Pentagon officials that the strike was ordered to protect U.S. forces on the ground. [Afghan response to hospital bombing is muted, even sympathetic] The new details, and the continuing dispute over what exactly happened, heightened the controversy over the strike. In the two days since the incident, U.S. officials have struggled to explain how a U.S. aircraft wound up attacking a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders. On Monday, the medical humanitarian group said the United States was squarely responsible. “The reality is the U.S. dropped those bombs,” Christopher Stokes, general director of Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement. “With such constant discrepancies in the U.S. and Afghan accounts of what happened, the need for a full transparent independent investigation is ever more critical.” The weekend’s disastrous airstrike reinforces doubts about how effectively a limited U.S. force in Afghanistan can work with Afghan troops to repel the Taliban, which has been newly emboldened as the United States draws down its presence. The strike also comes as the Obama administration is weighing whether to keep as many as 5,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2015, according to senior officials. Obama has not made a final decision on the proposal, but the recent advances by the Taliban have certainly complicated the president’s calculus. Army Gen. John Campbell, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told reporters Monday at a news conference that Afghan forces “advised that they were taking fire from enemy positions and asked for air support from U.S. forces.” Campbell made",
"a five-day visit. ICRC runs its third-largest humanitarian operation in the country. “We see a pattern in conflict now where medical facilities have become an area of combat.” In Afghanistan — where the United States maintains roughly 10,000 troops — the ICRC each week records about three to four incidents involving attacks on medical facilities or health workers, Maurer said. In 2015, health workers and institutions were subjected to searches by government forces, threats from armed groups, looting and abductions, according to the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). The most devastating attack was in October, when a U.S. AC-130 gunship bombarded a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz province. The strikes, which took place over several hours, killed 42 people and likely constituted a war crime, the nongovernmental organization said. Last month, elite Afghan special forces summarily executed two patients and a caregiver at a Swedish-run clinic in Wardak province. And in Baghlan province earlier this month, the government raided a local medical NGO and confiscated its equipment, reports said. In all three instances, government officials blamed either the NGOs or the medical facilities for treating patients they said were Taliban fighters. “The fact that soldiers and arms-bearers are getting treatment in medical facilities is now being accepted as an argument to attack those facilities,” Maurer said. The Geneva Conventions, which the ICRC follows, require that war wounded be treated without prejudice, whether or not they participated in the conflict. As such, they are protected from being attacked. Also in Afghanistan, militants loyal to the Islamic State stepped up attacks on health clinics in areas under their control in the east. The jihadists confiscated medicine and equipment and warned medical staff to stop working for the government, according to the United Nations. Despite these attacks, the ICRC has been in contact with Islamic State fighters in eastern Afghanistan to negotiate access to the local population. “While a couple of years ago, we could safely say this is a conflict between the Taliban and the government, it is now more multifaceted,” Maurer said, referring to the rise of the Islamic State in Afghanistan. “We see that the conflict has now spread all over the country,” he said. “But it’s not getting much attention.” Read more: Top U.S. general in Afghanistan: Hospital was ‘mistakenly struck’ Doctors Without Borders says U.S. airstrike hit hospital in Afghanistan; at least 19 dead",
"to fire. [By evening, a hospital. By morning, a war zone.] AC-130s operate with a variety of infared and low-light sensors that allow them to see almost everything on the battlefield below, albeit not in color. In order for the aircraft to fire, it must locate the friendly forces it is supporting before engaging enemy targets. Though there are now various accounts circulating about what happened that night, it is still unknown who talked to the aircraft and when. Was there an American combat controller embedded with the Afghan forces talking to the AC-130? Or was the aircraft only talking to American special forces soldiers located at the command center nowhere near the battle? Another important question raised by the hospital bombardment is whether the U.S. government can be charged with war crimes for knowingly targeting a hospital — something that Doctors Without Borders has repeatedly accused U.S. forces of doing. According to the Law of Armed Conflict and the Army field manual of the law of land warfare, “Medical units/establishments lose protection if committing ‘acts harmful to the enemy.’ Acts harmful to the enemy are not only acts of warfare proper, but also any activity characterizing combatant action, such as setting up observation posts, or the use of the hospital as a liaison center for fighting troops.” The Law of Armed Conflict also notes that even if a hospital is being used in a manner which voids its protected status that “protection ceases only after a warning has been given, and it remains unheeded after a reasonable time to comply.” [From ‘collateral damage’ to ‘deeply regrets’: How the Pentagon has shifted on the Afghan hospital attack] So in this case, even if the Taliban had been using the hospital, the United States could still possibly be at the same level of fault regardless of the Taliban’s presence. While Doctors Without Borders had called for an external investigation into the incident, the Pentagon is still conducting one of its own that has yet to be released. “My intent is to disclose the findings of the investigation once it is complete,” said Gen. John Campbell, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in an emailed statement Saturday. “We will be forthright and transparent and we will hold ourselves accountable for any mistakes made. While we desire the investigation to be timely, what’s most important is that it be done thoroughly and correctly.”"
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"The coronavirus pandemic has changed a lot of things, including kids’ sports. Recently the Aspen Institute, an organization that studies sports as well as other important subjects, issued its State of Play 2020 report. One part of the report examined the effects of the pandemic on kids’ sports and how kids play. Researchers at the Aspen Institute and two universities (Utah State and North Carolina State) asked more than 1,000 parents of youth sports participants (ages 6 to 18) from across the country what their kids were doing during the pandemic. Interesting things the study found out include: ●Even though kids are going back to playing organized sports, kids were only half as physically active in September as they were before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic in March by the World Health Organization. ●On average, kids spent about 6 1/2 hours a week less on playing sports during the pandemic than before. ●The study looked at 21 sports and physical activities, including flag football, field hockey, skateboarding and swimming. The number of hours kids spent playing each of those sports fell from March to September. ●However, that is beginning to change. Parents reported kids playing more in 10 of the sports since June. For example, kids were spending 29 percent more time playing baseball in September than in June. ●One activity that dropped less than others during the pandemic was bike-riding. In fact, bicycling went from being kids’ 16th favorite activity before the pandemic to the third-favorite during the pandemic. ●Another sign that bike-riding is getting more popular is that sales of regular bikes and mountain bikes are way up from last year. ●Experts say the popularity of bike-riding may be part of a move — a small move — toward individual sports and more unstructured play during the pandemic. ●One big problem the study uncovered is that 29 percent of kids say they are no longer interested in playing sports. These aren’t kids who sat on the couch all day: They are kids who used to play sports before the pandemic. That’s higher than the 18 percent who said they didn’t want to go back to sports at the beginning of the pandemic. So the bad news is that kids are playing less, and some kids are thinking of staying on the sidelines. The good news is that people at the Aspen Institute and other places are working",
"risk more draconian actions that theoretically could lead anywhere from elimination of all U.S. commercial bank financing to the severing of diplomatic relations. Those are among the measures that are spelled out in the 1991 Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act. The State Department posted a notice Friday in the Federal Register outlining the measures. Russia has denied involvement in the March attack against Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy living in Britain, and his daughter, Yulia. Both survived exposure to the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, although a British woman later died from exposure to residue of the toxin left on a perfume bottle. In prohibiting U.S. foreign assistance, defense sales and military financing, government credit, and national security-sensitive exports to Russia — all mandated in the legislation — the posted notice carves out exceptions for humanitarian aid and technology related to commercial air safety and space cooperation. It says that licenses for excepted exports will be approved on a case-by-case basis. Those restrictions and exceptions are already in place for most exports, under sanctions imposed for Russia’s activity in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, as well as interference in the 2016 U.S. election. U.S. Export-Import Bank activity in Russia has been under a formal hold because of Crimea. The administration has resisted a push by lawmakers for even more stringent sanctions, as President Trump has called for more cooperation with Russia on a range of foreign policy issues. But Trump, in an interview with Reuters this week, said he has no intention of lifting existing sanctions. White House national security adviser John Bolton said on a visit to Ukraine that “the sanctions remain in force and will remain in force until the required change in Russian behavior.” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Friday that “all options are on the table” in terms of a response to the sanctions, according to the Interfax news agency. “Many have been saying that Russia should stop supplying the United States with rocket engines, aircraft titanium, and uranium concentrate. But that’s shooting ourselves in the foot,” he said. “We should get ready for the United States’ eventual decision to stop or significantly reduce its purchases of such Russian products. We should not jump the gun,” Ryabkov said. “There will be no rapid change for the better in any event, given the sentiment in the United States today.” [email protected]",
"that allowed truckers to steal $1.5 million of fuel from a forward operating base in 2010. In August, a former Army sergeant pleaded guilty to soliciting $400,000 in a similar plot that involved stealing $1.4 million of fuel in 2010 from another forward operating base. In June, two Army servicemen pleaded guilty in a plot to steal jet fuel from a base and getting $6,000 for clandestinely filling 3,000-gallon trucks owned by an Afghan contractor. Sopko told the House panel that his office has 20 active criminal investigations looking into the theft and diversion of fuel or bribery or bid-rigging on fuel contracts involving more than $100 million. Perhaps worse, the SIGAR inquiry found that U.S. coalition financial records covering $475 million in fuel purchases and payments from October 2006 to February 2011 had been shredded. This was done “in violation of DOD [Department of Defense] and Department of the Army policies,” according to the SIGAR report. In addition, SIGAR auditors were not given half the records sought for the March 2011 to March 2012 period. And although June 2012 Afghan army fuel purchases and payments were reconciled, the command “still could not account for the amount of fuel delivered and consumed,” SIGAR said. A July SIGAR report found that because the military command did not “file claims for damaged or missing equipment, it was providing fuel for vehicles that had been destroyed.” Sopko said his audit found that in one case “as much as 1 million gallons of fuel had been stolen over a four-month period without causing any red flags to be raised in the system.” In short, corruption involves Americans and Afghans. Now, according to SIGAR, the U.S.-NATO command “does not have accurate or supportable information on how much U.S. funds are needed for ANA [Afghan National Army] fuel, where and how the fuel is actually used, or how much fuel has been lost or stolen.” The command has taken actions “to improve controls over fuel purchases, vendor deliveries, and the payment of invoice amounts,” but SIGAR maintains there is still a need to ensure “all fuel activity is tracked and accounted for.” There may be a history of corruption in Afghanistan, but the United States is continuing to create tempting, rich, new targets such as fuel, and apparently enough Americans are willing to join in the illegal action. For previous Fine Print columns, go to washingtonpost.com/fedpage.",
"aspects of the situation and underplay others. Every map embodies an argument. Here is what you need to know about mapping coronavirus. Maps do more than present information Mapmaking has been transformed by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software, which makes it very easy to create your own map of a phenomenon, with data and a little bit of technical ingenuity. However, mapmakers’ assumptions, biases or omissions may unintentionally become embedded in GIS-produced maps. This isn’t to say that all maps “lie,” but all maps emphasize certain things and leave others out — intentionally and unintentionally. Mapmaking choices have shaped the politics of issues such as the nation-state, colonialism and boundary negotiations. The complications involved in mapping coronavirus The Johns Hopkins and New York Times maps, and others like them, show how mapmakers’ choices can have unexpected consequences. The Johns Hopkins map illustrates the capabilities of GIS-based online mapping. The map shows cases by location; users can pan, zoom and bring up detailed data; and it contains extensive information about sources. As a proportional symbol map, it uses circles to represent the number of cases for each place: an enormous circle over Hubei province, large circles on South Korea, Iran and Italy, and so on. The New York Times maps are more static, but also encapsulate a lot of valuable information. However, the ways in which they present information has consequences. Obviously, the fact that they are maps — rather than lists, charts or graphs — emphasizes the importance of physical space, suggesting that the outbreak is spreading more to nearby countries than to distant places. Since the virus has moved via air travel, the implicit emphasis on proximity can be misleading (though other maps have added air travel information). By using a default basemap that just shows state boundaries and few geographic features, they do not capture important information about such things as whether the borders are open or closed. Their choices of color and centering also tell political stories. Many (but not all) coronavirus maps use shades of red and orange, colors associated with danger in many cultures. This encourages fear even as most official statements are urging calm. Mapmakers often wish to place their own location near the center and at the top, but in the case of coronavirus, the Chinese government is unlikely to be happy with how many maps default to centering on China. The Johns"
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How do the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes compare?
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"They installed a series of coin-size mirrors that corrected the light as it bounced through the telescope, plus a new camera with the optical corrections already built in. That inaugurated the new era in which Hubble dazzled the world with one spectacular image after another. The telescope became something of a celebrity. When lawmakers threatened to cancel a repair mission, school kids turned over their lunch money to help pay for it. “Hubble gave us beauty in a way that no other telescope had ever done,” said John Mather, the Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at NASA Goddard who is the senior scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in late 2018. Astronomers a couple of decades ago said the universe is 10 billion to 20 billion years old. Thanks to the Hubble and other telescopes, they can now say it’s 13.8 billion years old. The Hubble played a key role in the stunning discovery, announced in 1998, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Astronomers detected this acceleration, which they attribute to a mysterious force they call “dark energy,” in part by using the Hubble to study supernovas in extremely distant galaxies. A long, hard look at the past The deep gaze of the Hubble offers a view into the remote past; all telescopes are time machines of sorts, gathering light emitted long ago. The Hubble, thanks to new instruments, can see deeper into space than anyone had anticipated when the telescope was designed, said astronomer John Grunsfeld, NASA’s top official for science, who as an astronaut visited and repaired the Hubble three times. “Before Hubble, we didn’t know how many galaxies there are in the universe,” Grunsfeld said. The orthodoxy was that there were tens of billions of galaxies. Now, thanks to the Hubble, scientists can say there are roughly 200 billion. That estimate stems from Hubble’s “deep field” images, obtained by training the Hubble on a single point of seemingly empty, dark space, and holding it there for a couple of weeks, collecting the thin stream of photons (particles of light) coming from the farthest regions of the universe. The Hubble might get just one photon per minute from the faintest objects. Some astronomers assumed that, looking far back in time, they wouldn’t see much. “When the Hubble Deep Field pictures were taken, people didn’t expect to see anything. It had thousands and thousands",
"The massive red galaxy reveals a small spiral galaxy (in blue) behind it. (NASA and ESA) \"Lensing\" galaxies Now, scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have unexpectedly found the most distant lensing galaxy to date. Its light has taken 9.6 billion years to reach us (200 million light years closer than the previous record holder), and the obect it's magnifying - a tiny spiral galaxy that we can now see undergoing a surge of star formation - is 10.7 billion light years away. Kenneth Wong, one of the researchers to announce the discovery, said in a NASA press release that these cosmic magnifiers aren't all that rare. But to find outside of our stellar backyard is a special treat. \"There are hundreds of lens galaxies that we know about, but almost all of them are relatively nearby, in cosmic terms,\" said Wong, first author on the team's science paper. \"To find a lens as far away as this one is a very special discovery because we can learn about the dark-matter content of galaxies in the distant past. By comparing our analysis of this lens galaxy to the more nearby lenses, we can start to understand how that dark-matter content has evolved over time.\" Dark matter The lens galaxy has presumably spent the past 9 billion years bulking up on dark matter as it grew up, and today it probably looks a lot like the massive galaxies we find closer to home. But because it's so far away, the image we see of it provides a fascinating lens into the past.",
"All that glitters. (NASA/ESA/Gilles Chapdelaine) It kind of looks like a snow globe -- or maybe like the glittering ornament atop a massive Christmas tree. Or like your neighbor's house during December, if you're lucky enough to live next to an aggressive seasonal decorator. But this image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows Messier 92. Messier 92 is a globular cluster, or a spherical group of old stars bound tightly together by gravity. Their density can make globular clusters appear quite bright, and this is one of the brightest in our whole galaxy. You may even have seen this cosmic bauble before. It's over 25,000 light years away from Earth, but with 330,000 stars packed tightly into it, it's often visible with the naked eye. You can catch its occasional appearances in the constellation Hercules. Astronomers know from Messier 92's molecular composition that it isn't just bright -- it's also very old. About as old as the universe itself, in fact. Like this image? You could have been the one to create it. A version of this photo was submitted by Gilles Chapdelaine as part of the Hubble's Hidden Treasures image competition. The Hubble has beamed back so much data that not all of it has been translated into visible images, but the public is welcome to sift through archives to try to find stellar shots worth sharing. Find out more at the Hubble Web site."
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"Have you noticed a lot of dragonflies skimming over ponds, creeks, yards and even parking lots? They seem to be more active than usual this summer, and weather is playing a role in their behavior. We were first notified about the abundant bugs back on July 23 when Scott Spendolini tweeted: According to wildlife enthusiast Phyllis Carlson, the increased dragonfly activity is probably a result of the abundant rain this summer, which has helped to produce more of the dragonfly’s insect prey, such as mosquitoes. Dragonflies are voracious and agile predators that can catch and eat 30 or more mosquitoes per day. Because of the persistent rain, ground conditions have stayed moist, and mosquitoes and other insects have flourished, providing dragonflies a flying smorgasbord for feasting. Dragonflies catch their prey in the air with their feet and devour them with their strong, serrated mandibles. With four wings, dragonflies can out-fly all of their food sources, which include bees, butterflies, gnats, caddis flies, mayflies and mosquitoes. They fly up, down, sideways, and instantly change direction during flight with amazing speed. They can also hover in air and spin, much like a helicopter. I asked outdoorsman and award-winning fisherman Stephen Miklandric to confirm that dragonflies are more active this summer. He responded: “I can say that I’m seeing a lot more of them this year over last. I don’t know why, but it could be due to how wet this year has been.” So I went out into the field with my camera to verify for myself that dragonflies are active, and to snap a few photos and videos of the big-eyed bug with a long tail. After six photo missions during the span of two weeks, I can safely state that I saw a large number of dragonflies and damselflies buzzing around local ponds and creeks, and even in my own backyard. If you look at the first photo in this post, a dragonfly found me. A blue dasher posed for a photo on my truck’s antenna while it was parked in my driveway, between my photo missions. I will also note that I was chewed up by mosquitoes during my bug shoots, which confirmed that a primary food source for dragonflies is indeed plentiful. Mosquitoes are quite numerous this summer, and those little bloodsuckers made my photo shoots a bit unpleasant. Besides being excellent fliers while hunting mosquitoes and other",
"Regarding the March 1 WorldViews article “Ethiopia: Africa’s real Wakanda and its struggle to stay uncolonized”: Reading the article on the 122nd anniversary of the Battle of Adwa was heartwarming. Although I have not seen the “Black Panther” movie yet, it is encouraging to learn about a Hollywood production that depicts the African continent in a positive light. The popularity of the movie, I hope, will motivate many to learn about Africa, its people and various aspects of its neglected but glorious history, such as the victory at Adwa. As the article rightly noted, Ethiopia’s stunning defeat of a colonial power in 1896 has remained the pride of Africa and of all peoples of African descent around the world. The Ethiopians achieved the spectacular triumph through their unyielding spirit of unity, heroic deeds and priceless sacrifices. Theirs is a captivating story that narrates a nation’s quest to preserve its freedom and dignity. It carries a universal message of courage and perseverance. The lives and achievements of illustrious African leaders such as Emperor Menelik II, along with those of his remarkable wife, Empress Taytu, can also provide priceless lessons to the young in any land. In these challenging times for Ethiopia, I hope that the tenacity and unity that brought the victory at Adwa will be repeated to secure a better future for the entire nation. Tewodros Abebe",
"links to arthritis. Some vaccines have been shown to do the opposite of what they’re designed to do by inducing unwanted immune responses. In the 1960s, an experimental vaccine for RSV, a common respiratory virus, not only failed to protect children, but made them more susceptible. Two toddlers died. In recent years, Sanofi’s dengue vaccine was found to exacerbate symptoms in some who received it. Documented reports of unexpected side effects from new vaccines are different from the persistent and incorrect belief that well-established vaccines against childhood diseases carry significant risks. A fumbled Covid-19 shot could further damage perceptions of vaccines. 6. If a vaccine pans out, how does it get mass produced? Given the high failure rate for experimental vaccines, developers usually don’t invest in the capacity to manufacture lots of doses before a new one looks like a winner. In this case, some of the most prominent players in the race, such as Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi and Moderna, are scaling up production facilities already. CEPI, backed by philanthropist Bill Gates, wants to set up manufacturing facilities in every region. Glaxo announced that it is collaborating with Sanofi, an Australian university and two Chinese companies on projects that use its adjuvants, vaccine ingredients that boost the immune response, in the hope of making it easier to produce shots in larger quantities. 7. How would a vaccine get delivered to every corner of the globe? Some populations are bound to get vaccine supplies before others. One risk is that wealthier nations will monopolize Covid-19 vaccines, a scenario that played out in the 2009 swine flu pandemic. A fund-raising drive launched by the European Union brought in pledges of more than $10 billion to develop coronavirus vaccines, treatments and tests and deploy them universally. Immunizing the world would cost multiples of that figure, according to Seth Berkley, head of Gavi, a global non-profit organization focused on vaccine delivery. His group proposes a financing measure called an advance market commitment, aimed initially at getting doses to health workers. In such an arrangement, vaccine companies agree to make their products available at affordable prices in return for funding commitments from governments or other donors. Health advocates say that distributing vaccines evenly all over the globe isn’t just the ethical thing to do. It’s also critical to ending the crisis. For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com ©2020 Bloomberg L.P.",
"lack federal loan access compared to 34 percent of white students. Roughly 86 percent of Native American students in Montana lack access to federal loans, compared to 2 percent of their white peers. Community college students in small towns and rural area are more than twice as likely as their counterparts in cities and suburbs to attend schools that block access to federal loans, according to the report. “A lot of community colleges think that their relatively low tuition means that students don’t have to borrow, so opting out of the loan program isn’t that big of a deal,” said Debbie Cochrane, research director at the institute and co-author of the report. “But the cost of college isn’t limited to tuition. It also includes textbooks, transportation and living costs. And very few community colleges students get those costs covered by grants.” One year at a community college, including tuition, fees and living expenses, costs an average of $7,160 for a full-time, in-state student in the 2015-2016 school year, and that’s after taking grants, scholarships and tax credits into account, according to the College Board. While that’s roughly half the amount the same student would pay at the average public four-year university, it is still a lot of money for those with modest means. A vast majority of full-time community college students need financial aid to cover costs, and just 2 percent have their needs fully met by grants, according to the report. Most community college students do not take out students loans — just 37 percent of people who complete an associate’s degree have borrowed for it — but policy analysts at the institute say students who need the help should have access to the most affordable options. Interest rates on federal loans are the lowest they’ve been in a decade. Federal Stafford loans for undergraduates carry a 3.76 percent interest rate, while the rates on loans offered by banks and other financial firms can climb as high as 10 percent. Private student loans also have inflexible repayment terms and weaker consumer protections than federal loans. Community colleges often are reluctant to participate in the federal loan program out of concern that students will borrow excessively and fail to repay the money, said James Hermes, associate vice president of government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges. Schools that amass high loan default rates face the threat of losing"
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Japan is backing it's magnetic-levitation railroad technology in the US.
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"visit near the town of Sedrun, Switzerland, on Thursday. (REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann) According to the World Economic Forum, Switzerland has the world's best infrastructure, even though everyone who has been to the country in the center of Europe knows that its mountainous landscape is far from being perfect to build modern infrastructure systems. For every highway or train line, construction workers need to tunnel through mountains and hills. Having one of the world's highest transport system densities, Switzerland primarily proves that it is governmental commitment to infrastructure that makes the difference. 3. Money matters — and banks aren't much interested in long-term projects Given the United States' size, developing countries like India or China might be a better comparison than Switzerland. Writing in the Financial Times, Patrick Jenkins argues that it's all about money. Infrastructure projects often face financing gaps because banks have abandoned the idea of financing such long and massive projects. \"This is partly a result of a shrunken risk appetite across banking. It is also thanks to tougher capital charges on such assets, imposed by global regulators,\" Jenkins writes. 4. In Copenhagen, you can travel on a driverless metro running 24/7 One does not have to change the entire banking and financing system to improve American infrastructure, though. The example of Copenhagen shows that smaller steps might be equally helpful. The Copenhagen metro runs 24/7 because it operates without drivers. 5. This Japanese train could get you from San Francisco to New York City in seven hours The Maglev (magnetic levitation) train is seen on an experimental track in Tsuru, west of Tokyo, in May 2010. The train set a world speed record on April 21, 2015, in a test run near Mount Fuji, clocking 375 miles an hour. (KATORU YAMANAKA/AFP/Getty Images) Japan's magnetic-levitation trains set a new world record last year when they reached 375 miles per hour on a test run. That means travelers could go from San Francisco to New York City in only seven hours because the trains do not touch the steel tracks because of magnetic power. The \"bullet\" trains are primarily a prestige project. Critics have said the expensive investment makes little sense for a country like Japan that has a rapidly aging and declining population. Last year, U.S. officials appeared to show interest in implementing a similar system between Washington and Baltimore. There's still hope for commuters in and around D.C.",
"Japan wants to loan the U.S. $4 billion to build a 15-minute \"super train\" between D.C. and Baltimore. http://t.co/NWiMWmUIdq So really? A 15-minute trip between D.C. and Baltimore? You could get to Camden Yards quicker than you could make it Nats Park! Japan is well known for its super-efficient bullet trains. And while travelers in the U.S. always have been enamored with the idea of high-speed rail, efforts to build such as system have been stymied by myriad issues. According to The Telegraph newspaper, however, the Japanese government is eager to promote “Super-Maglev” trains — an even faster solution. The D.C. to Baltimore link would be part of a large rail line that would connect D.C. with Boston. The proposal for the Maglev route was put forward last year by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during talks with President Obama, the newspaper reported. The Japanese government would be willing to pay half of the $8 billion it would cost to install the tracks. According to The Telegraph: “Maglev vehicles have no wheels and are propelled along their track through electromagnetic pull – doing away with friction and, hence, providing a smoother and quieter ride at a faster speed. Conventional Maglev technology is already in use on a number of short routes around the world, but is limited to a speed of around 267mph. Japanese “Super-Maglev” trains are already operating on test tracks at speeds of more than 310mph.” Considering the bumpy road advocates have already encountered when it come to high speed rail, it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll see Super-Maglev trains anytime soon. But in a region looking for smart solutions for its congested roads, it’s always nice to dream.",
"Line and questioned whether it is a wise investment for the state. But as for the maglev, the state government is “very interested in studying it further and taking it to the next level,” he said, and the Japanese government is “very interested in being involved in financing the project.” The two leaders agreed on a “memorandum of cooperation” that addresses liquefied natural gas exports to Japan, scientific and cultural exchanges — and maglev rail. Certainly, Japan is also desperate to sell the high-tech trains. Abe has been busy touting its rail technology as part of his plan to get the world’s third-largest economy back on track. In addition to promoting maglev for the Northeast corridor, when he visited the United States in April, Abe tried to persuade California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) to choose Japanese companies to build a $68 billion high-speed non-maglev railway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A separate project is underway to sell Japanese trains to Texas, linking Dallas and Houston. But, as with so many things in Japan, this is also about China. China is fast catching up with Japan when it comes to train technology, and its companies are also looking for export opportunities. In a time of increasing concerns about China, Abe has suggested that the maglev could stand as a testament to the strong alliance between the United States and Japan. “I have just proposed to President Obama that this technology be introduced to the Northeast part of the United States as a symbol of Japan-U.S. cooperation,” he said last year on the 50th anniversary of the shinkansen, a train he said was “symbolic of safety and peace of mind.” In the wake of the Amtrak accident near Philadelphia that killed eight people last month, Japan’s safety record could be its strongest selling point. Asked about the crash, Hogan said that “one of the beautiful things about this technology is that an accident like that couldn’t happen.” “You can’t have driver error because there is no driver,” Hogan said. For his part, Hogan seemed sold. As he left the maglev site on Thursday evening, he joked to his Japanese counterparts: “You had me at 314 miles per hour.” World’s fastest passenger train breaks its own speed record This train could take you from D.C. to New York in less than an hour VIDEO: The future of train travel in the U.S."
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"A man and a woman look at the moon as they ride a Ferris wheel, while a total lunar eclipse begins in Tokyo. (Toru Hanai/Reuters) Night owls and early risers in parts of Asia and North America were treated to view the total lunar eclipse or “blood moon” on October 8th, which even made a quick appearance in Australia. The Earth’s shadow renders the moon as a person in a Ferris wheel observes it during a total lunar eclipse in Tokyo, Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014. (Koji Sasahara/AP Photo) The moon turns orange during a total lunar eclipse behind the CN Tower and the skyline during moonset in Toronto October 8, 2014. Mark Blinch/Reuters The blood moon as seen from Gosford, north of Sydney, October 8, 2014. (Jason Reed/Reuters) A seagull flies in front of a total lunar eclipse, also known as a “blood moon”, in Sydney October 8, 2014. (David Gray/Reuters) The beginning of a total lunar eclipse is seen from the Qizhong Tennis Court in Shanghai October 8, 2014. (Aly Song/Reuters) A lunar eclipse is seen near a statue entitled “Enlightenment Giving Power” by John Gelert, which sits at the top of the dome of the Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack, N.J.,Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014. (Julio Cortez/AP Photo) A lunar eclipse dips down behind the Wheeler Town Clock in Manitou Springs, Colo. early Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014. The moon appears orange or red, the result of sunlight scattering off Earth’s atmosphere. (Michael Ciaglo/The Colorado Springs Gazette/AP Photo) A plane flies before the moon at the beginning of a total lunar eclipse in Yokkaichi, central Japan, on October 8, 2014. (Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images) The total lunar eclipse over Milwaukee on late Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2014. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel/AP Photo) The Earth’s shadow begins to fall on the moon during a total lunar eclipse, as it goes behind a weathervane shaped like a Spanish galleon on the Freedom Tower, Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014 in Miami. (Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo)",
"(Robert Galbraith / Reuters) Feds back away from forced decryption — for now. Facebook to pay $20 million to settle class-action privacy suit. Microsoft’s best hope after Ballmer? A breakup. DRM for 3D printing. Security researchers discover Dropbox flaw that circumvents two-factor authentication.",
"A Russian captured fighting with insurgents in Afghanistan and held for years at a detention facility near Bagram air base will be flown to the United States to be prosecuted in federal court, according to U.S. officials. The move marks the first time a foreign combatant captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and held by the U.S military at Bagram will be transferred to the United States for trial, a decision the Obama administration has weighed for months. With combat operations winding down, the administration’s authority to continue to hold the man was in question, and U.S. officials said Russia had little interest in getting him back. The detainee, known by the nom de guerre Irek Hamidullan, is suspected of leading several insurgent attacks in 2009 in which U.S. troops were wounded or killed. He was captured that year after being wounded in a firefight. Congress was recently notified that Hamidullan would be transferred to the United States, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the decision to prosecute him had not been released publicly. Congress has barred the transfer to the United States for prosecution or continued detention of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but has not enacted a similar law preventing the movement of those held in Afghanistan. A spokesman for the Justice Department’s National Security Division declined to comment. It is not clear what terrorism charges Hamidullan will face. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement that he believes the Obama administration “is trying to undercut the military commission process,” by sending all terrorism suspects captured overseas to federal court, but that he accepted the decision on how to handle Hamidullan. “I would have preferred he be tried before a military commission, but I respect the decision to bring him to trial in an Article III court,” Graham said. “He has been held for a sufficient period of time as an enemy combatant and I believe we have gained valuable intelligence during this period.” National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan declined in a statement to discuss specifics of the transfer, but said “the President’s national security team examined this matter and unanimously agreed that prosecution of this detainee in federal court was the best disposition option in this case.” Hamidullan, also a veteran of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, is expected to be tried in the Eastern District of Virginia, U.S.",
"government would never make good on its promises not to harm him. “The intelligence … has fueled speculation by officials and analysts in multiple countries that what transpired at the consulate was a backup plan to capture Khashoggi that may have gone wrong. A former U.S. intelligence official … noted that the details of the operation, which involved sending two teams totaling 15 men, in two private aircraft arriving and departing Turkey at different times, bore the hallmarks of a ‘rendition,’ in which someone is extra-legally removed from one country and deposited for interrogation in another. But Turkish officials have concluded that whatever the intent of the operation, Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate. “The intelligence poses a political problem for the Trump administration because it implicates Mohammed, who is particularly close to Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. … Kushner’s relationship with Mohammed … has long been the subject of suspicion by some American intelligence officials. Kushner and Mohammed have had private, one-on-one phone calls that were not always set up through normal channels so the conversations could be memorialized and Kushner could be properly briefed. … On Wednesday, Kushner and national security adviser John Bolton spoke by phone with the crown prince, but White House officials said the Saudis provided little information.” -- Meanwhile, Turkish officials publicly accuse the Saudis of not cooperating with their investigation. -- The Wall Street Journal reports that the two Gulfstream jets used to ferry the 15 men into and out of Istanbul belong to a company controlled by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince. -- NBC News obtained screenshots that show Khashoggi checked his cellphone just before entering the Saudi consulate, but he never read messages sent to him minutes later. -- The Saudi-U.S. relationship has weathered storms before, including the revelation that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. -- Politico reports that it was actually MBS himself who asked for the call with Kushner and Bolton after the top U.S. official at the embassy in Riyadh asked him directly about the case earlier in the week. “On Tuesday evening, a group of foreign policy figures attended a dinner with a senior White House official with responsibility for the Middle East. … The official kept stressing that the U.S. had significant long-term interests in Saudi Arabia and repeatedly noted that Iran is a top threat,” Nahal Toosi reports. “When"
] |
Discuss the commercial status of quantum computing in the US.
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[
"Futuristic machines that rely on quantum mechanics to solve complex problems, known as quantum computers, have been touted as technology disrupters that could one day transform entire industries. Some of the world’s biggest companies say they are developing such systems — IBM, Google and Lockheed Martin, to name a few — though they say they are years away from being able to use them for practical purposes. In the meantime, the industry’s early players are enlisting influential lobbyists to sell the concept as a national imperative, arguing that America risks falling behind China if it does not take a more concerted approach. Computing hardware pioneer IBM wheeled a towering replica of its own quantum computer into the Rayburn House Office Building last week, where company lobbyists and technical experts schmoozed with sharply dressed congressional staffers. The next morning a consortium of physicists and industry representatives organized by the trade group National Photonics Initiative met at the offices of BGR Group, a lobbying firm, to discuss existing federal programs, according to a person who was at the meeting. A separate lobbying group called the Quantum Industry Coalition is bringing together 14 of the industry’s early players to influence legislation on the matter. The coalition doesn’t have a website yet, but it says it counts some of the technology world’s biggest players among its membership: Microsoft, Intel and Lockheed Martin, as well as a handful of start-ups. The coalition’s goal is to help the fledgling U.S. quantum computing industry — which promises to transform entire economies but as of yet has no known viable product — move from theories to products. “We wanted to have an exclusively corporate voice, one that represents the U.S. quantum industry community — and only that community,” said Paul Stimers, a partner at the law firm K&L Gates who founded the coalition. “We are pushing the legislation as much as we can in two directions: One is more of a focus on applied research as opposed to theoretical research, and the other is workforce development.” They are trying to shepherd parallel legislation in the House and Senate. On June 7, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) introduced the Quantum Computing Research Act of 2018, which calls for a federal research consortium funded by the Defense Department. It is now being considered by the Senate Armed Services Committee. And staffers for Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), say they are preparing",
"Jacob M. Taylor Position: Physicist, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Best known for: Government work: Motivation for service: Biggest challenge: NIST physicist Jacob Taylor (Curt Suplee/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY) Quote: “ — From the Partnership for Public Service For a full profile, go to The Fed Page at washingtonpost.com/politics/federal-government.",
"The Trump administration released its budget proposal this week, and science funding would take a hit. (Here’s where we point out that Congress has, for the past three years, rejected these trims and generally increased funding at research agencies.) When asked to explain the proposed cuts to basic research, Kelvin Droegemeier, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director, told reporters Monday: “The key priority in this administration is prioritizing of research and then, you know, placing our money on things that are extremely important. And then, for those things that are less important or lower priority, not focusing on them as much” while “relying on the private sector to innovate from the research outcomes that our universities and our federal labs produce.” About those priorities: Quantum information and artificial intelligence remain the lodestars that guide the administration’s research budget. The proposal “commits to double quantum R&D and nondefense AI R&D by 2022,” said Michael Kratsios, the White House’s chief technology officer. Kratsios said American leadership of artificial intelligence was an “imperative,” as “our adversaries and others around the world” use AI “to track their people, to imprison ethnic minorities, to monitor political dissidents.” The National Science Foundation requested $868 million to be allocated to artificial intelligence research and $226 million to quantum information science, NSF Director France Cordova said. At USDA, its competitive grant program would receive an additional $100 million for AI and other technology applied to agriculture — though the agency that distributes those grants, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, has been hobbled by its recent relocation out of the District. The request would provide $25 million to develop an “entangled quantum Internet” that connects Energy Department labs, said Paul Dabbar, the Department of Energy’s science undersecretary. If successful, nodes at the 17 labs, from Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, would form the backbone of the first national quantum network. As science-fictional as a quantum Internet might sound, the reality is that its immediate importance is security — exploiting quantum mechanics to prevent information from being intercepted — rather than new online experiences."
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[
"Since 1993, Earth Networks has mainly sold weather data to the scientifically inclined. Co-founders Bob Marshall and Christopher Sloop traversed the country setting up more than 10,000 weather stations in individual neighborhoods and built a comfortable business selling the aggregated data to meteorologists, government research labs and a hodgepodge of private companies. A few years ago the little Germantown-based company spotted a new market: giant utility companies looking for untapped cost efficiencies. Earth Networks nabbed its first utility account in 2012 and has since expanded to a handful of states, a new revenue stream that is already in the millions of dollars, Marshall said. The most recent deal, a partnership with Northeast energy provider National Grid, was announced last month. The utility, which serves homes in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, is looking to spot cost-savings opportunities by merging home thermostat data with hyper-local weather readings. “We feel this would really help customers not only to save money, but help us from a distribution perspective,” said Carlos Nouel, National Grid’s New Energy Solutions chief. The business relationship grew from a project National Grid was working on with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The team at MIT had developed a mathematical model that could predict certain costs associated with specific weather events. They quickly realized that it was much easier to accurately measure such costs for a home that sits within five miles of a weather station because neighborhood-by-neighborhood temperature variation can actually have a big effect on how much it costs to heat a home. “Fifty percent of [energy] usage in your home, especially in the Northeast, is driven by weather,” said Nouel, citing National Grid’s internal data. That matters to utilities because minor temperature variations from one neighborhood to the next can affect the rate at which different houses gain or lose heat. “You might be in D.C., but if you’re in Arlington or somewhere else, the weather can be totally different,” Nouel said. Utilities pay Earth Networks for more than just weather data. What National Grid is really buying is the ability to unite home thermostat data with weather readings and to influence costs by taking control of people’s thermostats. Earth Networks has a separate product called WeatherBug Home, a free system that lets homeowners manage energy costs in conjunction with what’s going on outside. Opting into the app gives Earth Networks the ability to",
"Barristers, solicitors and other members of the legal profession take part in a 2014 march of silence in Hong Kong to protest Beijing's policy toward the judiciary. (Bobby Yip/Reuters) Regarding Robert Edward Precht’s Sept. 7 op-ed, “A moral dilemma for the ABA”: The American Bar Association is concerned about recent legal developments in China and is following them closely, hoping that conditions will evolve to allow for ongoing international collaboration with Chinese lawyers, which has been mutually beneficial. The ABA is proud of its long-standing commitment to the rule of law and human rights. In China, ABA programs provide valuable support to lawyers working to advance reform on disability rights; domestic violence; criminal procedure reform; environmental rights; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights; and other human rights issues. Paulette Brown, Chicago The writer is president of the American Bar Association.",
"the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona. “Mike and I do not share all the same political beliefs, but I believe the role of the Senate is to evaluate every nominee based on whether he or she is professionally qualified,” Sinema said, “and can be trusted to faithfully interpret and uphold the law.” But Ilyse Hogue, NARAL president, called Sinema’s comments “beyond troubling,” criticizing Liburdi’s “anti-choice record.” “You can’t claim you are an advocate of women and our reproductive freedom just because you vote correctly on some legislation if, at the same time, you help elevate right-wing judges who will inflict long-term damage to our cause,” Hogue said in a statement. “Senator Sinema, like so many Democrats, was elected last year in large part due to a wave powered by women voters who wanted to put a check on this runaway Administration,” she continued. “So to use one of her first acts in office to help elevate a judge with a clear anti-choice record is beyond troubling.” — Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) have introduced legislation that would authorize Veterans Affairs doctors to prescribe medical marijuana. The bill, which would apply to the 33 states where medical marijuana is already legal, also calls for research into how medical marijuana can help alleviate opioid abuse among veterans and manage pain. “In 33 states, doctors and their patients have the option to use medical marijuana to manage pain—unless those doctors work for the VA and their patients are veterans,” Schatz said in a statement. “This bill gives VA doctors in these states the option to prescribe medical marijuana to veterans, and it also promises to shed light on how medical marijuana can help with the nation’s opioid epidemic.” — CVS Health has opened three health-focused concept stores in Houston, which include expanded clinics, blood-testing labs and health screenings as well as dietitians and rooms for yoga, CNBC’s Angelica LaVito reports. The pilot “HealthHUBs” are part of CVS Health’s approach following the $70 billion acquisition of health insurer Aetna. “As part of the acquisition, which closed in November, CVS promised to transform its stores and make customers healthier and to lower health-care costs,” Angelica writes. “The new services in the stores are available to all customers, not just Aetna members. One feature unique to some Aetna members is the type of care they receive at the pharmacy",
"Sandy Lerner at her new store, Gentle Harvest, in Marshall, Va. (Gentle Harvest/Courtesy Gentle Harvest) Before long drives, Sandy Lerner plugs a back-seat mini fridge into the cigarette outlet of her Chevy Volt and fills it with the sort of local, organic foodstuffs she has been cheerleading for two decades. The owner of the first farm in Virginia to be both certified organic and certified humane, Lerner doesn’t want to risk getting hungry on the highway, where the only option might be gas station food. “And I am so not alone,” says Lerner, sipping coffee in the cafe of Gentle Harvest, her new retail and grocery store an hour west of Washington in Marshall, Va. When Lerner tells locals that the store, the first of “hundreds” she plans to open near the region’s highways, will have a drive-through window, take-home meals and a $5 organic hamburger, “The first thing they say is, ‘Oh, thank God, I don’t have to bring food with me anymore,’” she says. Ask her how she plans to adhere, at those price points, to the farming practices she has espoused at her 800-acre Ayrshire Farm and Hunter’s Head Tavern in Upperville, and she flashes a knowing grin. “We’ve spent 20 years learning how,” she says. Reinventing the system By any account, Lerner, 61, is a formidable businesswoman. In the 1980s, she and her then-husband founded tech giant Cisco Systems, which made the router ubiquitous, and made millions when they cashed out their stake after she was fired in a corporate shake-up. In 1996, she followed her longtime interest in animal welfare to start Ayrshire, with a focus on rare and endangered animal breeds. That same year, Lerner started the cosmetics company Urban Decay; she sold it a few years later, and now it’s part of L’Oreal. Stephanie Bates, a friend and fellow business owner in Upperville, Va., long ago realized Lerner’s reach. “She’s a woman of endless talents, and she has this ability to fill the niche that people are looking for,” Bates says. Lerner’s experience at Ayrshire taught her that she’d need to buy a slaughterhouse to make the economics of this new fast-food model work. So, when one of the half-dozen U.S. Department of Agriculture-certified facilities in Northern Virginia became available this year in Winchester, she did just that. Horses graze at Sandy Lerner's Ayrshire Farm in Upperville, Va., the first farm in Virginia"
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Lidl grocery store begins operations in US.
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"asking [company officials]for a meeting for almost a year.” Williams said the union has been told that the Shoppers in Landover could close as early as Thursday — a decision that could leave its 72 employees without work heading into the holidays. Signs posted in the windows Tuesday read: “Store closing,” “Everything on sale!” “Nothing held back!” Inside, many of the shelves were bare. UNFI, a major supplier for Whole Foods Market, is committed to reducing its retail footprint, chief executive Steven Spinner said in a statement this month announcing the sale of the 13 stores. North Carolina-based grocer Compare Foods will take over the Shoppers location in Landover, in addition to those in Coral Hills and Colmar Manor in Prince George’s County and two locations in Baltimore, said general manager Leo Pena. He said that Compare Foods will receive the keys to the stores around Jan. 10 and that the stores will open 30 to 45 days after that. Pena said Compare Foods will offer “the same services as Shoppers, and more,” including free delivery. He said the store is considering renegotiating a contract with the union that serves Shoppers’ employees. Lidl, a German grocery powerhouse that is rapidly expanding in the United States, plans to acquire six Shoppers locations, said spokesman William Harwood. Those sites are in Annapolis, Brooklyn Park, Oxon Hill, Takoma Park and Wheaton in Maryland and in Burke in Virginia. “We will be making significant investments in the redevelopment of these sites, and will have more to share in terms of the grand opening timeliness and hiring events at the end of next year,” Harwood said in a statement. The four Shoppers locations that are closing by the end of January are in Baltimore and Severn in Maryland, andAlexandria and Manassas in Northern Virginia. This summer, the chain’s outlet in Chillum, Md., shut its doors; a store in Falls Church, Va., closed Sept. 1. Kevin Freeman, a butcher who has worked at Shoppers for 32 years, said the spirits of employees at the New Carrollton location where he now works are low, even though the fate of that location is unknown. “People don’t know where they are going to live — they are already living paycheck to paycheck.” In Prince George’s County, which had 12 Shoppers locations, officials say they have been frustrated by the lack of information they have received from UNFI. About 15",
"The Lidl prototype store in the Fredericksburg, Va. area of Spotsylvania County. (Lidl) On a busy road in the Fredericksburg, Va. area, a tall, black security fence guards a sprawling — and, for now, largely empty — brick-and-glass building. The under-wraps facility is a prototype store for Lidl, a German grocery chain that has been working for more than a year to plot its entry into the U.S. market. The company is using the space to test which details appeal to American shoppers: To hit on what kind of signage looks good dangling from the ceiling, to figure out how many aisles makes for the most efficient movement through the store. Lidl (pronounced lee-duhl) is a global grocery juggernaut, with 10,000 stores in 27 countries. It has made its name offering a limited assortment of goods, many of them private label, at ultralow prices. Now, it is ready to descend on America, potentially throwing a disruptive curveball in a retailing category that is already scrambling to adapt to new pressures, including the growth of online shopping and competition from nontraditional rivals such as drugstores. Lidl is set to open 20 stores this summer in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, an earlier debut than the 2018 time frame that it initially targeted. Within 12 months of opening its first U.S. stores, it is slated to have 100 locations up and down the East Coast. One thing that is instantly noticeable in the prototype store: It is significantly larger than what is typical for Lidl overseas. With about 21,000 square feet of shopping space, U.S. chief executive Brendan Proctor says, this store is 35 percent larger than some of the chain’s biggest stores in Europe. The company decided to go with a larger format because it thinks that it will need to offer a wider array of items to thrive in the U.S. market. Brendan Proctor, the U.S. chief executive of Lidl, is seen in the test kitchen at company headquarters in Arlington, Va. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) That’s just one of many tweaks that Lidl is making to its formula to address the expectations and habits of U.S. shoppers. It is offering chilled beer, for example, and free samples in its bakery department — things it doesn’t do elsewhere but that Proctor says are “normal” here. When it comes to the exterior of the store, focus groups were initially",
"The union representing more than 10,000 Safeway grocery store workers is moving closer to a strike that could disrupt operations at 116 D.C.-area locations, union representatives said Friday, as a disagreement with the company’s private equity-owned management over pensions remains unresolved. United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, which represents workers at Safeway and Giant stores in Washington, Maryland and Virginia, has been negotiating with Albertsons, a management company owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, since September 2019. A temporary extension has been in place since the contract expired in October. A meeting between union and company representatives Friday did not resolve the dispute, and negotiations were expected to resume Monday, the union said. To trigger a strike, a majority of Local 400 members would have to reject the company’s offer, and then two-thirds would have to vote to strike. The vote is scheduled for March 5, and a strike could begin the next day. The pension dispute at Safeway is in many ways a microcosm of the broader retail industry, where automation, outsourcing and thinning profit margins have weakened the hand of organized labor. Pensions have been phased out across the business world as financial managers favor employee-managed 401(k) plans that entail fewer long-term liabilities for managers. Grocery stores also face new competition as gas stations, drug stores and delivery services enter the market. Amazon opened its first cashier-less Amazon Go grocery store this week, marking the latest major foray into the industry by the online giant, which bought Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion in 2017. (Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.) European discounters Aldi and Lidl also have expanded rapidly throughout the country, adding further pressure to traditional chains. Private equity firms and hedge funds have been aggressively buying up supermarket chains since the mid-2000s, when a strong economy and low interest rates made leveraged buyouts attractive. They often used large chunks of debt to finance the deals, putting pressure on grocers as increased competition was cutting into sales. Local 400 officials say Cerberus, which bought Safeway in 2015, is offloading its financial responsibilities to take the company public. “Since Cerberus has taken over Safeway, thousands of jobs have been lost at these stores,\" said Jonathan Williams, communications director for the Local 400. “We think that has everything to do with the company’s brutal efforts to reduce its costs"
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[
"CIA Director Gina Haspel departed for Turkey on Monday amid a growing international uproar over Saudi Arabia’s explanation of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to people familiar with the matter. The visit by the U.S. spy chief comes as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a speech planned for early Tuesday vows to reveal the full extent of what his aides are calling a Saudi-directed murder and attempted coverup. The arrival of the director suggests an effort by the U.S. intelligence community to assess the information the Turks have, including what Turkish officials have said is audio that captures the killing. Intelligence officials are increasingly skeptical of the Saudi account and have warned President Trump that the idea that rogue operators flew to Istanbul and killed Khashoggi without the knowledge or consent of Saudi leaders is dubious, a White House official said. On Monday, Trump told reporters that “I am not satisfied with what I’ve heard” from Saudi Arabia and pledged to get to the bottom of what happened. “We have top intelligence people in Turkey. We’re going to see what we have. I'll know a lot tomorrow,” he said. “They'll be coming back either tonight or tomorrow morning. But we have people in Saudi Arabia and in Turkey.” A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment. Other officials spoke about the director’s travels on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the trip. The chief concern for Washington is that Erdogan will reveal details about Khashoggi’s killing that implicate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, who has been a key ally for the Trump administration. On Saturday, the Saudi government acknowledged that Khashoggi was killed by Saudi agents after he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2. The 33-year-old prince has denied any knowledge of the killing and his top diplomat, Adel al-Jubeir, called it a tragic “rogue operation” by a group of people acting outside Mohammed’s consent. A U.S. official who has not heard the audio that purportedly captures the killing but is familiar with its contents said it does not corroborate Saudi Arabia’s version of events that Khashoggi’s death was the result of a fistfight. Turkish investigators concluded days ago that Khashoggi was killed and dismembered by a Saudi team dispatched to Istanbul. At least 12 members of the Saudi team are connected to Saudi security services, and",
"repair, too. That said, the fact that liquor stores within a storefront or two of payday lenders lost the most business suggests that borrowers in Washington were making impulsive decisions -- walking out of a payday establishment and into a liquor store. To the extent that they were, they may well be better off all around with the new law in place, protected from exploitation. Proponents of payday lending might object that the poor deserve the freedom to buy and borrow as they choose, even if that means using an expensive loan to pay for alcohol. These proponents might argue that it isn't for lawmakers in Olympia to dictate the spending habits of the poor. Cuffe doesn't see it that way. In an interview, he argued that the decisions a person makes on impulse -- whether to buy or to borrow -- don't always indicate what that person actually wants. For example, many people will actually volunteer for savings accounts that restrict how much money they can spend. That's an indication that people want safeguards imposed on their financial decisions, because they know they can't trust themselves. [Read more: How your lack of self-control might actually boost your savings] \"They may know that they won't be able to stop,\" Cuffe said. He went to say that although everyone makes bad financial decisions, he noted, no matter how much they make, such protections are especially important for the poor. \"We can all be equally irrational,\" he said. \"For me, that just means the next morning, I wake up and regret my purchase, but it may pose a bigger consequence for people who, let's say, have to take out a payday loan.\" That doesn't necessarily mean the poor would welcome proposals from conservative politicians around the country to restrict how welfare recipients use their benefits. These politicians have argued the poor can't be trusted to carry cash or to use their money wisely. [Read more: The double-standard of making the poor prove they’re worthy of government benefits] There's a big difference between between a check from the government and a loan from a payday lender: you only have to pay back one of them. The consequences of misusing a payday loan are much greater if doing so leads is the start of a cycle of debt. As the interest accumulates, the borrower will have less money to spend on everything, including booze.",
"President Trump’s declaration Tuesday that he won’t hold Saudi rulers accountable for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi distilled the president’s foreign policy approach to its transactional and personalized essence. Nearly two years into his presidency, Trump is unswerving in his instinct to make everything — from trade to terrorism, from climate change to human rights — about what he sees as the bottom line. “We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” Trump said in an oddly brisk statement laying out that the U.S. business and security relationship with Saudi Arabia, and with its designated next leader, is paramount. He cited arms sales with the kingdom, its role as a bulwark against Iran and the threat of higher oil prices as risks to the United States if his administration ruptured the relationship over the Khashoggi killing. The statement was issued as Trump prepared to head to his golf resort in Florida for the Thanksgiving holiday and in the wake of the CIA’s conclusion that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the Oct. 2 killing of Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributor and U.S. resident. The nothing-to-see-here tone, the fractured syntax and falsehoods, and the abundance of exclamation points were pure Trump — and as far from the massaged, nuanced products of past White Houses as one could imagine. “It’s ‘America First,’ ” Trump told reporters Tuesday before departing for Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. “For me, it’s all about America First. We’re not going to give up hundreds of billions of dollars in orders and let Russia, China and everybody else have them.” Trump said that Saudi Arabia had helped him keep oil prices down and that without those efforts, “oil prices would go through the roof.” As with U.S. intelligence assessments that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, he overrode his advisers and downplayed their findings in favor of his own priorities and interpretation of events. “King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi. Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” Trump wrote. Trump’s clannish management",
"KABUL — Taliban insurgents on Wednesday issued an extraordinary, 17,000-word appeal to the “American people,” asking them to pressure U.S. officials to end the 16-year-old conflict in Afghanistan and asserting that the protracted American “occupation” had brought only death, corruption and drugs to the impoverished country. The letter, whose authenticity was confirmed by a brief telephone conversation with insurgent spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, was primarily aimed at a U.S. audience. Unlike previous statements issued by the Taliban, it used statistics and logical arguments — not just ideological harangues — to convince Americans that their government’s investment in the war has been a dire mistake. “Prolonging the war in Afghanistan and maintaining American troop presence is neither beneficial for America nor for anyone else,” the document said, calling on U.S. citizens, legislators and others to “read this letter prudently” and evaluate the costs and benefits of continuing to fight. “Stubbornly seeking the protraction of this war,” it added, “will have “dreadful consequences” for the region and the “stability of America herself.” The letter, sent under the banner of “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” was issued just weeks after a blitz of deadly insurgent attacks in the Afghan capital have left the government struggling to cope with increased public anxiety and anger. It also came as the Trump administration is ramping up a new military strategy, involving thousands of additional troops, to expand the Afghan security forces and train them to defend their country independently. While insisting that “our preference is to solve the Afghan issue through peaceful dialogues,” the letter also warned that Taliban forces “cannot be subdued by sheer force” and that seeking a peaceful solution does not mean “that we are exhausted or our will has been sapped.” This combination of outreach and threat has been a hallmark of Taliban statements, including a shorter one issued shortly after the spate of attacks last month that killed more than 150 people in urban population centers . The insurgent group has said it would not revive peace talks unless foreign troops leave the country, and it has rejected feelers from the administration of President Ashraf Ghani. A spokesman for Ghani, Shah Hussain Murtazawi, responded sharply to the letter, saying, “We never negotiate with groups who resort to crime and the brutal killing of people and then claim responsibility for it. The door of peace is shut to them, but the door of"
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How has foreign travel been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic?
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"Since March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised travelers to self-quarantine for 14 days after all international travel, and after domestic travel to states seeing a high rate of coronavirus cases. But the CDC has changed that stance, removing the directions for two-week quarantines from the “After You Travel” section of its coronavirus travel guidance. Instead, they share “after-travel” recommendations based on individual countries. A map of country-specific health information can be found on the CDC website, and includes a map of reported cases in the United States. In an email, CDC spokesman Scott Pauley told The Washington Post: “This updated guidance is based on risk of exposure during travel, asking travelers to think about what they did, where they were, and who they came into contact with to evaluate their risk of exposure to covid-19.” The CDC’s updated travel guidance states that all returning travelers should social distance, wear a cloth face covering, wash their hands often and watch for symptoms. Notably, those are all basic measures the CDC has highlighted to Americans to follow since the beginning of the pandemic, regardless of whether traveling is involved. Doctors say that quarantines can still be a good idea after traveling to a coronavirus-impacted area, and that quarantines are especially useful in the absence of testing. Plus, if you’re from a state that requires a two-week quarantine, you’ll likely still need to complete one. “Broadly speaking, if someone travels to an area with an active outbreak, it’s reasonable upon return for them to be required to either get tested or to quarantine, a measure that many states now have in place,” Boston University epidemiologist Sandro Galea told The Washington Post. “We’re all trying to adapt to shifting realities and shifting facts all the time,” he says, but the advice to distance, frequently sanitize and wear a mask in public “are guidelines we should all be following all the time, regardless of whether we’ve traveled or not.” The CDC’s travel guidance does still note that travel and being in crowds increases the chance of contracting the virus, and that infected people can be asymptomatic and spread the disease. But CDC quarantine guidelines also now narrowly define those who should isolate for two weeks as “people who have been in close contact with someone who has COVID-19 — excluding people who have had COVID-19 within the past three months.” Galea",
"week and pitching to the White House a plan to safeguard passengers. But stock value of cruise companies has plummeted as the industry struggled to deal with the infections on the two ships and warnings from health experts about the risks of such travel. Trump appears sympathetic and has said he wants to help the cruise lines. At the donor event Friday, the president brought up the industry and said he did not want it to shut it down or for it to suffer job losses, according to three people familiar with his remarks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door event. A White House spokesman declined to comment. Trump echoed that sentiment publicly Monday, saying at a White House news conference that he was concerned that cruise lines and airlines “will be hit.” “We’re working with them very, very strongly,” he said. “We want them to travel.” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that the administration was considering emergency assistance for affected industries. “This is not a bailout. This is considering providing certain things for certain industries. Airlines, hotels, cruise lines,” he said. But at the same time, several top health officials and members of the administration’s coronavirus task force have been pushing for a tougher stance and wanted to impose a temporary ban on Americans going on cruise ships, according to people familiar with the conversations. They included Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma and Surgeon General Jerome Adams, the people said. The advisories from the State Department and the CDC were recommended by the White House coronavirus task force, according to an administration official who said Trump and Vice President Pence knew about them in advance. There has been mounting frustration with the cruise industry’s handling of the crisis among top administration officials, including in the office of Pence, according to people with knowledge of their thinking. The lack of a clear mitigation plan for ships with outbreaks has forced the government to handle the expensive and complicated logistics of evacuating and quarantining thousands of potentially infected passengers this week aboard the Grand Princess in Oakland, an operation that has drawn in the National Guard and the Defense Department, among other agencies. On Thursday, Princess Cruises announced that it was voluntarily canceling trips on its 18 ships worldwide through May 10, following a",
"and cargo but various other things as we get approval. Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing.” The president corrected himself on Twitter shortly after the Oval Office speech, noting that “trade will in no way be affected by the 30-day restriction on travel from Europe. The restriction stops people not goods.” Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, also tweeted a clarification, saying that the restrictions do not apply “to American citizens or legal permanent residents or their families,” indicating that the restrictions would apply only to foreign nationals. Much of the community transmission of coronavirus in the United States thus far has been linked to U.S. travelers who visited foreign countries or who contracted the disease at gatherings in the United States. Aside from restricting travel from Europe, Trump’s announcement Wednesday night was largely focused on the U.S. economy, which continued to slide amid global economic fears related to the virus. He prodded Congress to provide payroll tax relief and to direct the Small Business Administration to provide low-interest loans to affected small businesses. Trump also instructed the Treasury Department to defer tax payments without interest or penalties. “This is not a financial crisis,” Trump said. “This is just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.” European fears also heightened as covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, appeared to be picking up pace there, moving northward. More than 600 people have died in Italy, where the government announced it is closing all shops except grocery stores and pharmacies. German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that as much as 70 percent of her country’s population could be infected if no medications or vaccines to treat or prevent the disease emerge soon. Merkel urged Germans to help slow its spread: “The virus has arrived.” India has effectively closed its border by suspending existing visas, with some exceptions, and Lebanon has halted travel to four affected countries. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a $2.8 billion relief package to stabilize the economy after requiring everyone arriving in the country to self-quarantine for 14 days. The Trump administration is considering moving all of Europe to a Level 3 travel advisory, discouraging all nonessential travel there. The federal government was developing contingency plans to have employees telework, and it barred State Department and"
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"it a hotel room or plane tickets, make sure to check prices ahead of time to compare them with offerings during the sale. It is the best way to find out just how good of a deal you can secure. Because time is arbitrary in 2020, Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals are no longer tethered to their day. Many retailers started their holiday sales back in October. EF Go Ahead Tours And who says the holiday has to stop in November? The DoubleTree Suites by Hilton in downtown Salt Lake City, for one, is offering its “buy one, get one free” Black Friday deal (with chocolate chip cookie on arrival) through the end of the year. Healdsburg Inn on the Plaza in California wine country is offering 50 percent off stays when booked between Nov. 27, 2020, through April 1, 2021. Because of the unpredictable nature of the pandemic, it’s nearly impossible to make concrete travel plans. Travel brands are offering deals accordingly. “There will be a lot more flexibility at play than they’ve seen in years past,” Corwin says, adding that travelers should be looking for great deals but also for the most lenient cancellation or rescheduling policies. She says many airlines and hotels have implemented flexible policies as is, but she is seeing many offer further flexibility during the sales. Many companies are offering bookings without cancellation or change fees. For example, Intrepid Travel’s sale is offering 20 percent off international trips and 10 percent off domestic trips that may be changed without a fee 21 days before scheduled departures — whether that’s for a new travel date or a completely different trip. In Florida, the 30 percent off Black Friday and Cyber Monday trips to Margaritaville Resort Orlando and Encore Resort at Reunion can be canceled without fees and come with resort credits to sweeten the deal. Travel during the pandemic: Tips: Safe holiday travel | Coronavirus testing | Sanitizing your hotel | Using Uber and Airbnb Flying: Pandemic packing | Airport protocol | Staying healthy on plane | Fly or drive | Best days to fly Road trips: Tips | Rental cars | Best snacks | Long-haul trains | Foliage finder | Art road trips Camping: First-time | Camping alone | Meal planning | Glamping | National parks Places: Hawaii | Machu Picchu | New York | Private islands | Caribbean | Mexico | Europe",
"imports were allowed only from foreign plants certified to have food-safety systems that were “at least equal to” those in the United States, based on site visits by U.S. government inspectors. But now, Wallach says, foreign countries can have their regulatory system deemed “equivalent” based only on submitted documents and visits to a few pre-selected sites in the country. Once a nation’s system is found “equivalent,” any facility within its borders can export meat to the United States. And, Wallach adds, a number of countries were grandfathered as having equivalent systems when the WTO launched in 1995, even if only a select number of their plants had been previously approved as “equal to.” In the early 2000s, Public Citizen reviewed the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service reports for a number of countries granted equivalent status by the United States and determined that federal officials were “allowing imported meat onto U.S. grocery shelves that does not meet domestic food safety standards,” according to a July 2003 news release. “The very notion of replacing an import safety standard that required meat and poultry to meet U.S. standards [with] one that allows a very squishy, unclear notion of equivalents,” Wallach says, “means that U.S. consumers have been put at enormous new risk for the benefit of facilitating trade in products that, if not processed properly, can kill your kids.” At least with COOL, Wallach says, consumers can decide whether they want to buy meat imported from foreign countries. If Mexico, Canada or other country’s animals could gain “Product of the U.S.” labels — after feeding and slaughtering in the States — consumers would be “playing Russian roulette with every burger, steak or chop.” Pork and beef industry officials disagree vehemently with that position. “If there were an issue, we’d be up in arms about it,” says Nick Giordano, vice president and counsel for international affairs for the National Pork Producers Council. “Our ability to continue to supply the customer . . . is dependent on us supplying a product that is second to none in safety and quality.” To the meat industry, the COOL system is little more than package-based advertising, one that favors domestic products over foreign ones. “It’s not any sort of food safety program; it’s just simply a marketing program,” says Woodall of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. “We don’t think government should be in the marketing of cattle.”",
"a “Keep America Great” rally in Louisiana on Thursday night, but that did not occur. U.S. officials said they will be watching his Twitter account for an announcement on Friday, but added that he could publicize them later, or one at a time. A Pentagon official, asked about the case, referred comment to recent remarks made by Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper. Esper acknowledged last week speaking with the president about the issue but declined to share his personal opinion. “I do have full confidence in the military justice system and we’ll let things play out as they play out,” Esper said. “I offered ― as I do in all matters ― the facts, the options, my advice, the recommendations and we’ll see how things play out.” The cases include that of Army Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn, a former Special Forces officer who faces a murder trial in the 2010 death of a suspected Taliban bombmaker; former Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who recently was acquitted of murder but convicted of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State militant; and former Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, who was convicted of second-degree murder in 2013 and is serving a 19-year prison sentence for ordering his soldiers to open fire on three men in Afghanistan. Golsteyn faces a court-martial that is scheduled for February. He first came under investigation in 2011 after he applied for a job with the CIA and disclosed during a polygraph test that he had killed someone on deployment and burned the body, according to Army documents and a Washington Post interview with Golsteyn in February. Golsteyn said he killed the suspected bombmaker in an ambush after he had been detained and crossed paths on base with a tribal elder working with U.S. forces. U.S. troops were required to set the detainee free, he said, prompting fears that he would kill the elder. Golsteyn contends the ambush of the man, who was unarmed at the time, was legal. Gallagher was tried by the Navy in a case over the summer that fell apart after another SEAL in his unit testified in court that he had actually killed a wounded Islamic State detainee in Iraq at the center of the case. Gallagher was convicted instead of taking a photograph with an Islamic State member’s corpse and demoted one rank to petty officer first class.",
"confidence than do Democrats, and nonwhite Americans report about 10 percentage points less confidence in the armed services than do whites. In other words, despite the military’s commitment to nonpartisanship, and despite the fact the military’s enlisted ranks are even more diverse than the general U.S. population, a polarized American public increasingly views the military through a partisan political lens. The president has threatened to use the military, which he often refers to as if it were his political constituency and political resource, against a group of citizens not generally aligned with him, in an election year. That the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff joined a photo op with the president Monday night and later walked around downtown “just checking” the security services around the White House could raise more questions about how Trump is using the military for political gain. Alice Hunt Friend As Lindsay Cohn explained here at TMC this morning, the president is within his rights to use the military domestically under certain circumstances, and the military is obliged to follow legal civilian orders. But one lesson of 20 years of continuous foreign wars — which have, in turn, helped militarize the police — is that engaging in heavy-handed tactics against civilians can inflame rather than calm tensions and can even escalate violence. How the military handles the role Trump is assigning it will affect its own future as an institution. The military’s status as one of the most trusted institutions in U.S. society could be compromised if the public and Congress perceive the military as using excessive force, particularly against peaceful protesters, or as behaving like a politicized tool of the president. Such a perception could hurt the military’s ability to maintain internal cohesion and to recruit a diverse force, which research suggests are important for combat effectiveness. It also could puncture the bubble of political invincibility that has protected large Pentagon budgets since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, leading the public and Congress to question whether spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year on defense has actually made the country safer. Caitlin Talmadge The U.S. government has deployed the military within its own borders to enforce domestic law more than 100 times in the nation’s history. Those episodes include enforcing desegregation of schools in the 1950s and protecting civil rights marchers in the 1960s, as"
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Tell me about the situation pertaining to the lock out of musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
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"Wearing tuxedos with tails and lugging brass horns and metal music stands, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra musicians rallied in Annapolis on Thursday to urge Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to release funding to help save the orchestra — and their jobs. The orchestra is one of about three dozen programs and projects waiting for the governor to make available money that the General Assembly “fenced off” in the state’s $46.6 billion budget — meaning Hogan could not reroute it to other priorities. The orchestra announced last month that it was canceling its summer programming to reduce costs, cutting the season from 52 to 40 weeks per year. “Governor Hogan, we are the Baltimore Symphony musicians,” Michael Lisicky, a second-chair oboist, yelled into a white megaphone while a half-dozen musicians played “That’s a Plenty” across the street from the statehouse. “We urge you to release the funds.” In addition to $1.6 million specifically to help keep the orchestra afloat, the General Assembly set aside $127 million for school construction, $3.5 million to launch a grant fund to pay for testing a backlog of rape kits and $1 million for a summer youth jobs program in Baltimore, among other things. “These are not frivolous items,” said Del. Maggie McIntosh (D-Baltimore City), the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, adding that the legislative priorities are a “small, tiny, fraction” of the state budget. “They are of major importance to our constituents.” The back-and-forth is part of an annual budget battle between the Democratic majority legislature and Hogan that essentially pits the governor’s budget priorities against the General Assembly’s. In past years, Hogan has at times refused to release money for the General Assembly’s priorities, instead placing the money in the state’s rainy day fund. House Democrats this week began waging a social media campaign against that practice, using the hashtag #FreeTheFunds and urging followers to contact the governor’s office to ask him to do so. Hogan on Thursday accused the legislature of playing “political games” by fencing off money for its priorities instead of requesting supplemental funding for them. “We’ve said repeatedly that we’re not going to let them play those kinds of games,” he said. The General Assembly cannot add money to the spending plan that the governor introduces during the budget process but can shift money from one fund to another to pay for programs it prioritizes. Setting aside the money restricts it",
"Every year has highs and lows. Sometimes they’re even connected. In 2019, classical music wrestled with topical issues and economic concerns that were reflected in some of the year’s most significant triumphs. It was the year of new flexible, multiuse performance spaces. In New York, the Shed debuted with a goal of bringing a culture of new art to offset the gleaming consumerism of Hudson Yards. In Lenox, Mass., the Linde Center expanded Tanglewood’s offerings to a year-round calendar. And in Washington, the Kennedy Center’s $250 million Reach annex, which opened with a 16-day festival, prompted debate about whether “they will come” is always what follows “if you build it.” Waking up at last to the lack of people of color both on and behind the stage, classical music is attempting, sometimes clumsily, to tackle the problem. This year saw world premieres of operas about race and injustice (“The Central Park Five,” Long Beach Opera) and white cops shooting black youths (“Blue,” Glimmerglass Festival opera company, coming to Washington National Opera next year), which is good, but there was also more pigeonholing of black artists such as the tenor Russell Thomas, in WNO’s “Otello” this fall. Epitomizing the problem was the Metropolitan Opera’s lavish “Porgy and Bess.” Maybe next year we’ll see more works that truly spotlight and celebrate black culture. The Baltimore Symphony pump-faked fans by announcing a summer season and then locking out its musicians for nine weeks, citing steep revenue losses. But the two sides managed to find a way forward, and the musicians are now playing under a one-year contract. Meanwhile, the announced demise of the National Philharmonic, based at Strathmore in Bethesda, Md., prompted hand-wringing and an 11th-hour bailout. Will it last? Stay tuned. The countertenor Iestyn Davies, always a source of dazzling and thoughtful music, offered not one but two programs in Washington this calendar year: the first at the Library of Congress with the ensemble Fretwork and the second at the Kennedy Center with his longtime collaborator, lutenist Thomas Dunford. The beauty of “Akhnaten,” in Phelim McDermott’s production, marked a moment when the beleaguered and often mediocre Metropolitan Opera had a chance to turn things around. At least the company took a step toward a much-overdue housecleaning by announcing the impending departure of Jonathan Friend, the longtime casting director, who will be succeeded by Michael Heaston, formerly of the Washington National Opera. The",
"Fiddling while Rome burns: It’s used as an image of leaders ignoring serious problems for their own amusement. In the case of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra musicians, though, fiddling through a crisis represents an attempt to save their orchestra. Faced with a lockout that began June 17, weeks after management announced cancellation of the summer season, BSO musicians are trying to figure out how to pay mortgages, afford health insurance and make it through the summer. Some have already departed to substitute with other orchestras — Ivan Stefanovic, the associate principal second violin, left Monday morning for the Atlanta Symphony. But most are staying here and planning to perform at the annual Independence Day event July 3 — one of the events that the BSO announced it was canceling but which Baltimore County is going ahead with anyway. The orchestra members were going to pitch in free, but a grant from the Music Performance Trust Fund, an independent public service organization, and the Film Funds, will make it possible for them to be paid. The county is arranging the fireworks, food vendors, security and parking — using money that would otherwise have gone to the BSO. “We were in a position to use existing funding through a grant we provide the BSO,” said T.J. Smith, the press secretary for Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski. “Part of the grant is the Independence Day extravaganza. Considering that’s not happening, we were able to use the funding that already existed to put on a portion of it.” The concert will go off “essentially as planned,” Smith said, though “there are a few logistical things that will be different.” It will also be on a slightly smaller scale, with an audience of about 5,000. The Independence Day concert is usually a moneymaker for the orchestra, says Brian Prechtl, a percussionist and member of the orchestra committee. This year, for the first time, it will be free to the public, though it remains a ticketed event. The free tickets were all snapped up last week. The musicians are trying to maintain continuity in other ways. The popular Academy Week, which allows amateur musicians to play side by side with orchestra players, was among the canceled events, but players are trying to continue it in some modified form, emphasizing mainly chamber music, between July 12 and 21. What the musicians aren’t trying to replace are some of"
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"is common for teams to have alternate signs when a runner is on second base and can see the catcher put down his fingers. But the Nationals called every at-bat as if a runner was on second base. New wrinkles were put in, such as telling pitchers to obey the signs that followed two fingers from the catcher or changing signs on a hitter-to-hitter basis. This planning added time and layers to preparation, forced the team to use wristbands with the sign sets printed on them and made it easy for pitchers and catchers to get mixed up. But there were just a handful of instances in which that happened, players said. MLB’s report revealed that the Astros cheated in 2017 and 2018. Their sign-stealing scheme at one point included banging of trash cans to tell hitters what pitch was coming. The Nationals, though, were not worried about trash can banging. They were more concerned about whistling and clapping from the dugout, according to three people in the organization. Catcher Kurt Suzuki on Thursday accused the Astros of cheating during the World Series, telling The Washington Post that he heard whistling from the Astros’ dugout and that he felt the Astros had devised more effective ways to conceal illegal practices. On Saturday, on the other side of a shared spring training facility, Astros shortstop Carlos Correa offered a sharp rebuke. “You have the audacity to tell the reporters, yeah, they were cheating because we heard the whistles?” Correa told reporters. “The fans whistle in the game. The fans are whistling all the time in the game. What does a whistle mean? So don’t go out there telling reporters that we were cheating, and don’t go above MLB, the investigation, the lawyers, the report, when there was obviously nothing going on.” Gomes does not believe the Astros were doing anything untoward during the World Series. Yet the plausibility of normal baseball stadium sounds perhaps being a covert cheating code speaks to the potential impact of this scandal. Multiple Nationals reflected on how it will now be more difficult to suspend disbelief. Unusual outcomes, such as hitters making good swings on tough pitches, could prompt moments of doubt. Did the hitter know that was coming because of pitch-tipping or because of a runner picking up signals from second base? Or was it cheating? In the World Series, the Nationals felt they always",
"The Court of Arbitration for Sport reduced Russia’s four-year ban from international sports competition by half, but the country still will miss the next two Olympics and the World Cup. The decision was announced Thursday morning by the Swiss-based court. A panel of three arbitrators held a four-day hearing last month behind closed doors to consider the Russian Anti-Doping Agency’s appeal of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s ban, which was handed down last December. The court ruling means that Russia won’t have any formal presence — no flag, no anthem — at the Tokyo Olympics next summer or the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. It also will be barred from most major international competitions through 2022, including the FIFA World Cup, the Youth Olympic Games, Paralympics and world championships. Many of its athletes will still be eligible to compete, though not under the Russian flag. “This Panel has imposed consequences to reflect the nature and seriousness of the noncompliance and to ensure that the integrity of sport against the scourge of doping is maintained,” the arbitrators wrote in their decision. “The consequences which the Panel has decided to impose are not as extensive as those sought by WADA. This should not, however, be read as any validation of the conduct of RUSADA or the Russian authorities.” While the panel reduced the punishment, it agreed with WADA in allowing Russian athletes who have not been implicated in the country’s state-sponsored doping scheme to compete in Tokyo and Beijing as unaffiliated athletes. They can wear Russian colors, but if their uniforms bear the name of their country, it also must say “neutral athlete.” At the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, 168 Russians competed as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.” In addition to the ban on international competition, the panel agreed with WADA’s recommendation that Russian officials be barred from sitting on any boards and committees related to international sports governance. Russia also will not be permitted to host any major sporting event or even apply for hosting duties, and the Russian flag would not be allowed to fly at any major event. The two-year punishment is expected to go into effect this month and will run through 2022. The court ruling also states that no Russian government representatives, including President Vladimir Putin, may attend any major international events for two years, including the Olympics. The panel also laid out terms for reinstatement, requiring Russia to pay",
"story to two colleagues at the time, and they confirmed that account to The Post. Later, he “put his groin against my butt and pushed really hard,” she said. “ I said, ‘Don’t f---ing touch me.’ He was like, ‘Oh, I’m the bad guy now?’ ” She told her manager that either the customer had to leave or she would, and he was escorted out. But before long, he was back. “One of the managers was very into what the guys with money were into. He knew that I was upset that night, but he let him come back in, and I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘Are you f---ing kidding me?’ ” A recipe for a toxic culture Restaurant kitchens are a man’s world. The Brigade de Cuisine, the division of kitchen labor famously developed by chef Auguste Escoffier in the late 19th century, was based on the French military structure he observed while in the army. Home cooking has historically come from women, while high-status restaurant work was until a few decades ago the domain of men. As French chefs began to rise in stature in the late 1800s, “a lot of work was done to sort of denigrate women’s cooking and uphold and elevate men’s cooking,” said Deborah Harris, co-author of “Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen.” “The women were kept out, and over the years that kind of crystallized in these very hypermasculine work cultures.” Some women view the sexual harassment as an outgrowth of Escoffier’s system. When Liz Vaknin graduated from culinary school and went to work in a fine-dining restaurant in Manhattan in 2012, she came to see the kitchen as a place where higher-ups bullied underlings, no matter their gender, and sexual harassment was an expedient form of abuse. “It’s easier to make a woman feel bad about herself by touching her than just yelling that you’re not cutting your parsley right,” Vaknin, now 28, said. The rough talk so common in kitchens is a result of those jobs being historically blue-collar. But that does not mean elite restaurants are immune. Two women who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still work in the industry said a male manager at the Alinea restaurant group, which includes the Michelin three-star restaurant of the same name in Chicago, harassed them in 2013 and 2016. “He would",
"Editors’ note: Our biweekly Afrobarometer Friday series explores Africans’ views on democracy, governance, quality of life and other critical topics. In Nigeria, thousands have taken to the streets in recent weeks, calling for the abolition of the police’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) and other police reforms. On social media, #EndSARS has been a rallying cry for those protesting how the unit has extorted, harassed, illegally detained, tortured and even killed with impunity for decades. This social movement has demonstrated how disenfranchised groups, in this case youths and women, can harness the power of digital media to fight endemic problems like police corruption and brutality. Earlier this year, Ethiopians took to social media after the killing of singer Hachalu Hundessa. While many shared expressions of sadness, others spread speculation and rumors. Some asserted that government agents killed Hachalu as retaliation for his activism on behalf of displaced ethnic Oromo. Others blamed the government of Egypt, reasoning that the country was trying to sow chaos as Ethiopia proceeded with plans to construct a controversial dam on the Nile. Riots followed, leaving as many as 230 dead. These examples highlight the promise and peril of social media in Africa. WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook are providing new platforms for social mobilization. But they are also making it easier to spread disinformation, rumors and hate speech, sometimes with deadly consequences. New data from Afrobarometer show that the use of digital media (news from the Internet and social media) is growing fast across Africa. But access is uneven, and many Africans are well aware of the pitfalls of getting their information online. Africa has a large digital divide The past decade has seen significant growth in Africans’ use of digital media. Surveys by Afrobarometer, an independent African research network, offer a way to track this growth. On average across 16 countries surveyed in both 2014/2015 and 2019/2020, the proportion of people who said they used either the Internet or social media to get their news at least a few times a week nearly doubled over five years, from 22 percent to 38 percent. But are groups benefiting equally from the spread of digital media? Survey responses show that some traditionally disadvantaged groups — such as rural residents, women and those with primary education or less — are seeing big gains in their regular use of digital media (see Figure 1). But so are already-privileged groups. Between"
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How Brexit will impact Ireland facts and fiction
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"rival, and only months from being its enemy. Although the outbreak of World War I averted an all-out civil war, it did not prevent sectarian violence from descending on Ulster during the Irish struggle for independence from Britain or the partition of the island into North and South. Northern Ireland emerged from the insanity of political violence that terrorized the country between 1969 and 1998. In 1998, Unionists and Nationalists acknowledged the other’s right to hold political views anathema to their own, thanks to honest brokers such as Britain and the United States. Subsequently, Britain operated as an outside referee, decidedly neutral, to ensure that both sides abided by their agreements and protected the rights of all citizens. That neutrality, however, is now in serious jeopardy. A power-sharing government in Northern Ireland broke down last year. The fight was ostensibly over a funding scheme controversy, but the identity politics of Brexit, brimming with conflict over immigration, trade and national meaning, loomed large. And that brings us back to May and the DUP. Brexit divides Northern Ireland. The DUP championed “leave” while Sinn Fein, along with 56 percent of Northern Irish voters, voted “remain.” The day after the referendum, Sinn Fein opportunistically began raising the specter of Irish reunification. Both sides blew past a June 29 deadline to reach an agreement, and neither side appears willing to compromise its demands. Absent that, Northern Ireland would confront the prospect of direct rule from Westminster by a DUP-backed Tory government. It’s no wonder many are skeptical of the British government’s ability to remain an honest broker. What does the future hold for Northern Ireland, the border between North and South, or May’s Conservative government? No one knows. Considering President Trump’s vocal support for Brexit, his decidedly isolationist approach to foreign policy and his deep unpopularity abroad, it seems highly unlikely the United States has the power or will to ensure Northern Ireland’s continued stability. But, one thing is certain: May’s reference to the “Conservative and Unionist Party” is an echo of the disastrous Conservative policy that enabled political violence in Ulster, and a constitutional crisis nearly a century ago. Sadly, the legacy of that constitutional crisis and the narrow, nationalistic politics that drove it continue to haunt the political realities of the present. Northern Ireland provides a cautionary note against embracing nationalism at the expense of globalism — it threatens to upend peace.",
"In 1998, after 30 years of violence that left 3,500 people dead, peace was finally achieved in Northern Ireland. Now some are concerned that Brexit could be putting at risk the treaty that helped end the fighting, usually known as the Good Friday Agreement. A critical part of that agreement was softening the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which was militarized during the decades of violence known as the Troubles. Today, people and goods can pass freely across that border, thanks to the peace and the European Union’s policy of free movement between its member countries. But if Britain leaves the E.U., it could potentially need to reestablish customs controls and entry points with Ireland. Many fear that returning such checkpoints to the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland — making it a “hard border” once more — would be reminiscent of the island’s dark past, potentially unleashing a new wave of instability. “Both the U.K. and Ireland will have an obligation to honor the Good Friday Agreement, protect the peace and honor our commitment to the people of Ireland and Northern Ireland, that there won’t be a hard border,” Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said Wednesday. Former U.S. senator George J. Mitchell, who served as independent chairman of the Northern Ireland peace talks, wrote in The Washington Post in December that changing the status of the border “could increase the possibility of a resumption of violence.” Those living there have similar concerns. As William Booth and Amanda Ferguson wrote for The Washington Post in November, some people just over the border in Northern Ireland “worry that a bungled Brexit could rekindle tensions and possibly lead to violence.” In recent days, hundreds of people have gathered by the border, holding signs and protesting the possibility of new restrictions. But attempts to solve the issue have ground the Brexit process to a halt. The withdrawal deal that British Prime Minister Theresa May struck with the E.U. included a provision known as the “backstop” to make sure that a hard border would not be reinstated in Ireland. The backstop specified that Northern Ireland would leave the E.U. customs union only when Britain and the E.U. were able to work out an arrangement to avoid a hard border. It was intended to give the two sides time to hash out a final deal on the issue after Britain leaves",
"LONDON — In the days of the Troubles, as the 30-year sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland was known, the borderlands between the North and the Republic of Ireland were called “bandit country” — a frontier of milk smugglers, gun runners and frequent clashes between British soldiers and Irish Republican Army cells. Today, because the sides made peace and because both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland are members of the same European Union, the border between them is wide open to the point of invisibility. Manufactured goods, alongside tens of thousands of people, and a lot of sheep and Guinness stout, pass freely on a daily basis, without customs checks or passport control, over new highways, farm roads and country lanes. But that border is now a major point of contention in the Brexit debate, as Britain and the E.U. sort out how to disengage next year. European negotiators on Wednesday released draft language for a treaty that would have Northern Ireland essentially remain in the E.U. customs union, which would allow for an open border for trade and travel between Northern Ireland, still a part of the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland in the south, a member of the European bloc. In Parliament, British Prime Minister Theresa May immediately called the proposal unacceptable, signaling a rocky road ahead. May said the Brussels draft would “undermine the U.K. common market and threaten the constitutional integrity of the U.K. by creating a customs and regulatory border down the Irish Sea, and no U.K. prime minister could ever agree to it.” Presenting the proposed treaty, Brussels’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier said that Europe was open to other suggestions but that it must preserve the open border. He signaled that Europe needed to hear clear answers from May and that time was running out. This vexing issue of the Irish border was hardly mentioned before Britain’s historic June 2016 vote to leave the European Union. But the balance between Republicans and Unionists, and between north and south on the Irish island, remains fragile and unsettled 20 years after the sectarian violence ended with the Good Friday Agreement. May is squeezed by the border issue in part because she failed to achieve a majority in the last British elections and so had to enter into a soft coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland, made up of Protestants loyal"
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"in shootings and panic that rocked the polio vaccination campaign in Pakistan, one of only three countries where polio is endemic. The others are Afghanistan and Nigeria. Pakistan has made serious strides in vaccinating against poliovirus, which is highly contagious, largely strikes children under age 5 and can cause permanent paralysis. In a vaccination drive that ended April 27, Pakistani workers were able to reach more than 37 million children, nearing the target of 39 million. Pakistan has wisely enlisted Muslim religious scholars to endorse the vaccination campaigns. But there are still pockets of hard-line Islamist forces that spread irrational beliefs that vaccines are either contaminated or are part of a Western plot to sterilize Muslims, and they promote violence. A mob set fire to a government health facility in Peshawar on April 22 after rumors spread that expired vaccination drops were being administered to children. Officials said the vaccine was neither expired nor dangerous, but still, thousands of parents swamped local hospitals and demanded their children be examined. One day after the health facility was burned, a police officer guarding health workers was killed. The next day, another police officer was killed. At least 700,000 families have refused polio vaccination in the province that includes Peshawar because of rumors and panic. On April 25, two gunmen on a motorcycle shot and killed a polio vaccinator in the southwestern Pakistani city of Chaman. All the incidents have a knock-on effect, causing delays and suspensions in the vaccination campaign, which in turn leads to swathes of population not being inoculated, making them vulnerable to infection. The trouble is not only gunmen. Social media easily spreads alarmist and false rumors about vaccinations. Pakistani officials noticed a wave of vaccination refusals recently — up to 10,000 a day in Islamabad, compared with 200 to 300 in the previous campaign. Babar Atta, a Pakistani official leading the effort, said that anti-vax propaganda on Facebook was becoming a major obstacle to eradication of poliovirus, and called on the platform to take down offending posts. In the age before vaccines, millions of people were afflicted by disease and there wasn’t much they could do about it. Nowadays, vaccinations are a critical firewall against illness caused by polio, measles and Ebola. But vaccines only work if people are inoculated — and they won’t be if frightened by false information on social media or gunmen on a motorcycle.",
"An outbreak of the mumps virus in the U.S. government’s crowded immigration detention facilities is adding a new strain to a system that the secretary of homeland security warned months ago had reached its “breaking point.” Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Homeland Security agency responsible for the long-term detention and deportation of people who are in the country illegally, said Friday that they have quarantined 5,200 migrants at 39 detention facilities across the country, most after exposure to mumps. The agency said it has confirmed 334 mumps cases since September. Mumps is considered a highly contagious but not life-threatening disease. The quarantines, which were first reported by CNN, come as the Trump administration has struggled to manage an ongoing influx of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, where immigration authorities have apprehended nearly 600,000 people since October. ICE agents have apprehended another 34,500 people in the interior of the United States, according to official government statistics. The agency says it is currently holding about 52,560 people in detention facilities across the country, 5,000 more than it forecast in its 2019 budget. Nathalie Asher, the executive associate director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, said that the need for quarantines to prevent the spread of infection will result in lengthier detention times, and compound backlogs across the system. Asher blamed the influx of migrants — most of whom are families and children — at the southwest border as a “significant” factor in the mumps outbreak. “With 75% of our current detention population coming to us directly from the border, the fact that we’re seeing mumps in nearly 40 facilities across the country and recent outbreaks of mumps in Central America, the preponderance of evidence points to the major influx at our Southwest border being, at minimum, a significant contributing factor of these occurrences,” Asher said in a statement. Another ICE official said news reports of mumps outbreaks in Honduras starting in late 2018 and the occurrence of mumps in dozens of ICE facilities also supported that assessment. There were no confirmed reports of mumps among ICE detainees before 2018, the official said. Mumps outbreaks in the United States are rare. The virus is largely preventable through the same widely used vaccine that protects against measles and rubella. However, health officials have warned in recent months that declining vaccination rates in the United States have spawned measles outbreaks in cities across",
"Even though much of the world is focused on the novel coronavirus outbreak, Earth Day should be a reminder that there’s another issue that deserves our attention: climate change. But you might be wondering, what is climate change, exactly? “The way I often talk about it is that it’s too much of a good thing,” said Claudia Wagner-Riddle, an environmental scientist and professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. The Earth has a collection of gases that reaches high above into the sky known as the atmosphere. And while the gases allow sunlight to pass through, they also trap heat, like a blanket does. Without our atmosphere and the gases it contains, the temperature would hover around zero degrees, said Wagner-Riddle. As it is, the atmosphere keeps the planet at a balmy average of about 60 degrees. The trouble comes when human activities add more of those gases to the atmosphere than there used to be. The gases build up and trap even more heat, triggering global changes in climate. Carbon dioxide, which is produced by cars, trucks and factories, is one of those gases humans keep adding more and more of. Methane is another culprit, much of which comes from the burps of cows in the beef and dairy industries. But there’s another gas that’s much less talked about in relation to climate change. It’s nitrous oxide. Often called laughing gas, most people know it as something dentists give patients so they don’t feel pain during a procedure. Formed from two nitrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, the gas is present in much smaller quantities in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide or methane. But on a molecule-by-molecule basis, Wagner-Riddle says, nitrous oxide is mighty in its ability to change the climate. And once nitrous oxide gets into the atmosphere, it can stay there for more than 100 years. Nitrous oxide is created by naturally occurring bacteria in the soil. But people are accelerating how much nitrous oxide is present by adding nitrogen fertilizer to croplands. This helps us grow greater quantities of grass, corn, soybeans and apples, said Wagner-Riddle, but it also supercharges those bacteria and creates excess nitrous oxide. So what can kids do to change all of that? Surprisingly, Wagner-Riddle said, there is something you can start doing today. “Number 1 is to not waste food,” she said. Between 30 percent and 40 percent of",
"are not abusing their awesome powers, but also to inform the public when our intel agencies are acting lawfully and legitimately, to bolster public confidence in them when they are being undermined for nefarious purposes. That’s what Trump is doing now. (His latest tweets absurdly seized on the new documents to bolster his “hoax” narrative.) And Nunes is helping him by completely corrupting his oversight mission to that end — with the full acquiescence of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). Meanwhile, Democrats are the ones informing Americans about what’s really happening here. Many journalists have pointed out that the new documents reveal that Trump and Nunes have been deceiving the public. But the other side of this coin is that generally speaking Democrats have been trying to counter those efforts by informing the public with real, solid information in good faith wherever possible. The conventions of neutral reporting and analysis of course allow scrutiny of one side’s political misbehavior, but also tend to discourage journalists from forthrightly saying so when the other side is doing the right thing and acting legitimately in the public interest. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here, and we all need to be as clear in saying so as Savage has been today. * TRUMP IS ‘LASHING OUT’ AT IRAN — AND EVERYONE ELSE: Indeed. You can smell the fear in Trump’s lies. * GOP SENATOR: FBI DIDN’T SPY ON TRUMP CAMP: As Trump continues to portray himself as the real victim of Russian sabotage, let’s not forget that he encouraged it and cited its fruits of on the campaign trail. * GOP CANDIDATES’ RESPONSE TO TRUMP IS SILENCE: Of course, that Republican “silence” sends the message that Republicans will not act as a check on him, which gives Democrats an opening to say they will. * TRUMP’S TRADE WAR WILL HURT GOP IN MIDTERMS: Trump’s trade war is a bad issue even in the industrial Midwest, i.e., Trump Country? We keep hearing that large silent majorities are rooting for Trumpism to succeed. * DEMS COULD WIN MANY GOVERNORSHIPS: Republicans will remain in control of many state legislatures, but in many states, governors can veto district lines, giving them some influence over maps. That will prove important. * ADMINISTRATION KEEPS DOWNPLAYING RUSSIA THREAT: How can the Trump administration be fully prepared for the next round of Russian sabotage if its senior officials refuse to accurately"
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