https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/04/01/cicadas-come-out-2021-brood-x/?itid=hp-top-table-main

Sometime this spring, billions of cicadas that have been underground since 2004 will emerge en masse and blanket parts of the Eastern United States with their song and, eventually, their carcasses.

If you’re in the right location, they will be impossible to ignore.

That depends on the weather. This brood has been quietly rummaging around underground for the past 17 years and will not emerge until the soil temperature about a foot below ground reaches 64 degrees. Most will wait for a humid (but not stormy) evening to pop out of the tunnels they’ve been building for weeks.

They don’t all appear at once, but it may seem like it.

Where will the cicadas emerge in 2021?
If you live in the D.C. area, lucky you! You’ll be in the middle of cicada-Palooza, where huge concentrations will emerge simultaneously.

Atlanta spa shooting victims highlight struggles for Asian and Asian American immigrant women in low-wage jobs

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/20/atlanta-spa-shooting-victims-highlight-struggles-asian-asian-american-immigrant-women-low-wage-jobs/



Many of the victims had come to the U.S. in search of a better life, following the difficult path of immigrant women before them

The three workers at Gold Spa in Atlanta had come to the United States in search of a better life, following the difficult path of many other immigrant women before them.

Suncha Kim, 69, did not speak English when she arrived with her son in tow around 1980, and picked up odd jobs washing dishes and cleaning office buildings. Hyun Jung Grant, 51, worked so much that one of her sons recalled that he and his brother were left with another family for at least a year. And Soon Chung Park, 74, had moved more than 800 miles to Atlanta from her family in the New York/New Jersey area.

The women, all originally from South Korea, were among eight people killed on Tuesday when a gunman opened fire at their workplaces and shot his victims in the head and chest.

Three other victims — Yong Ae Yue, 63; Xiaojie Tan, 49; and Daoyou Feng, 44 — were also Asian women and workers or managers at the three businesses that were attacked.

Two other people — Delaina Yaun, 33, and Paul Andre Michels, 54 — were also killed Tuesday. Yaun and her husband had decided to treat themselves to a couples massage and were in separate rooms when the gunman entered and started shooting, according to DeLayne Davis, a relative. Yaun was killed. Her husband escaped. Michels, a handyman at Young’s Asian Massage, was an Army veteran, family members told news outlets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bad-faith-talk-about-shooter/2021/03/19/17d86fa2-8838-11eb-bfdf-4d36dab83a6d_story.html



An incomplete list of things I do not ever need to hear or read about a shooter again, especially one who targets women:

I do not need to hear that he “snapped,” “lost it” or “had a bad day.”

After he has taken the lives of six or eight or 14 other people, I am not inclined to care what kind of day he had.

I do not need to hear that he was heartbroken over a woman who dumped him/rejected him/ignored him. It is not the responsibility of women to pay attention to men to make sure those men do not shoot other people.

I do not particularly care whether his family was shocked.

I do not particularly care whether he did not resist arrest.

I do not need to hear about how he was a churchgoer, unless that revelation also comes with an acknowledgment that some faiths have historically taught such horrifying messages of misogyny and female subservience that “he went to church” is as much of an explanation as an expression of dumbfoundedness.

What kind of church? Is it a place where non-heterosexual people are viewed as sinful? Where purity culture twists normal desires into malignance? Where premarital sex is seen as such a moral failing that girls believe they are worthless if they have it? Where boys believe they should blame girls for making them want it at all?

I definitely do not need to hear about how he struggled with “temptation.”

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/62220/what-do-they-use-dye-chicago-river-green-st-patricks-day

It wouldn’t be a St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the Windy City without 400,000 spectators crowding the banks of the Chicago River to “ooh” and “aah” at its (temporarily) emerald green tinge. But how do officials turn the water green?

First, a bit of history: The dyeing tradition became an annual thing nearly 60 years ago, in 1962, but its real origins go back even further. In the early days of his administration as Mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley was a man on a mission to develop the city’s riverfront area. There was just one problem: The river itself was a sewage-filled eyesore. In order to get to the bottom of the city’s pollution problem and pinpoint the exact places where waste was being discarded into the waterway (and by whom), Daley authorized the pouring of a special green dye into the river that would allow them to see exactly where dumping was occurring.

Fast-forward to late 1961 when Stephen Bailey—part of the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Local, the city’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade chairman, and a childhood friend of Daley’s—witnessed a colleague’s green-soaked coveralls following a day of pouring Daley’s dye into the Chicago River. That gave Bailey an idea: If they could streak the Chicago River green, why not turn it all green?

Three months later, revelers got their first look at an Ecto Cooler-colored river when the city poured 100 pounds of the chemical into the water. They got a really good look, too, as the river remained green for an entire week.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/washington-commute-coronavirus/2021/03/12/53cb5d2e-7dfe-11eb-85cd-9b7fa90c8873_story.html

Most Washington-area residents who have spent the past year teleworking because of the coronavirus pandemic could be back to their commutes by fall, but it might not resemble the commute they left behind early last year.

Labor Day has become a target date among many employers eyeing the return of workers to the office, according to surveys, business leaders and public officials. A study led by the Greater Washington Partnership, an alliance of the region’s top chief executives, found employers expect 75 percent of their workforce to return by the end of fall.

Prospects for a return were heightened this month when President Biden’s administration announced that vaccines would be available for all adults by May, although business groups and other experts say the transition to widespread in-person office work should be gradual and telecommuting is likely to remain an option for many workers.

“Most employers are going to start to go to a more hybrid model where folks are in the office a couple of days a week,” said Joe McAndrew, vice president of transportation at the Greater Washington Partnership, which surveyed nearly 200 Washington-area employers. “This all kind of rests on our ability to both vaccinate the population at a scale needed for herd immunity, and to reopen the supporting services that enable folks to be able to get to the office.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/03/12/avalanche-rescue-dogs/



It hardly looks like anything other than a fun romp: A dog happily sticking its snout into deep snow, tail wagging in the air as the nose goes deeper and deeper. But for dogs trained in avalanche rescue, it could be a lifesaving mission.

Canines have become invaluable at many backcountry areas and ski resorts, a role highlighted during what has been an especially deadly winter season. Thirty-three people in the United States have been killed by avalanches since Dec. 18, according to statistics kept by the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Its figures show that deaths this season (a season typically extends from November into June), are on pace to exceed the modern record of 36 recorded in 2007-08 and 2009-10. Over the last 10 years, an average of 27 people have died in avalanches in the U.S.

The ideal dog for search and rescue is energetic, goal-oriented and playful. They come from a variety of breeds. Some, like hounds, are gifted at tracking; others, such as Labrador retrievers, have a keen sense of smell and can search in minutes an area that could take humans hours.

With their heightened senses, trained rescue dogs can find “a bullet shell, a piece of plastic, a ballpoint pen or a set of keys,” said Scott Guenther, who works alongside his yellow Labrador, Nahla, with Jackson Hole Search Dogs in Wyoming.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/19/world/swati-mohan-nasa-perseverance-landing-scn-trnd/index.html



(CNN)It was Swati Mohan who first delivered the news to earthlings that NASA's Perseverance rover had successfully landed on Mars.

"Touchdown confirmed," she announced to roaring applause from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life."
You might have seen her in the front row of the control room, bindi on her forehead, providing constant updates to the team as mission commentator for the historic landing. But before that nail-biting moment, Mohan had been working for years to make it all happen.

Mohan, an Indian American who moved to the United States when she was a year old, is the guidance and controls operations lead for the Perseverance rover mission, acting as the "eyes and ears" for NASA's most sophisticated spacecraft to date.
Not only is Mohan a pivotal player in the effort to determine whether there was ever life on the red planet; she's also a reflection of the progress NASA has made in reflecting the nation it represents.

Her passion for space started with 'Star Trek'
Mohan has been interested in space ever since she saw her first "Star Trek" television episode at age 9. It opened up her world to the beauty and expanse of the universe.

"I remember thinking 'I want to do that. I want to find new and beautiful places in the universe,'" she recalled in a Q&A on NASA's website. "The vastness of space holds so much knowledge that we have only begun to learn."
Still, she thought she would grow up to become a pediatrician. It wasn't until she took her first physics class at age 16 that she began considering a career in engineering, which would allow her to follow her childhood dreams of exploring space.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/merrick-garland-oklahoma-city-bombing/2021/02/19/a9e6adde-67f2-11eb-8468-21bc48f07fe5_story.html

The truck bomb leveled a section of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring hundreds more in one of the deadliest domestic terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. But as Merrick Garland huddled with the lead prosecutor on the case, he urged caution in presenting the massive amount of evidence from the wreckage.

“Do not bury the crime in the clutter,” he said.

Garland, then a top Justice Department official, was encouraging prosecutors to speed the trial along and jettison superfluous findings in their case against Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted of carrying out the 1995 attack and executed in 2001, said Joe Hartzler, the team’s lead attorney. Hartzler said he found the advice so compelling that he wrote the words on a sheet of paper and hung it on an office wall as a rallying cry for his team.

More than two decades later, Garland, 68, is preparing to lead the Justice Department as attorney general and facing a domestic terrorism threat that has metastasized, with white supremacists and conspiracy-minded anti-government types emboldened by their acknowledgment from former president Donald Trump.

Those who worked with Garland on the Oklahoma City case — and the prosecution of another notorious domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber — say the experiences shaped him, and make him well-positioned to confront the current threat.

“This almost feels like a precursor. How much more experience could you possibly have in domestic terrorism?” said Donna Bucella, a former Justice Department official who, like Garland, was sent to Oklahoma City in the attack’s aftermath to help manage law enforcement’s response. “He’ll be very methodical. I think he’ll demand it’s being done the right way.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/17/dc-area-forecast-accumulating-snow-early-thursday-then-changing-wintry-mix-staying-cold-through-weekend/

The National Weather Service has issued a winter storm warning for much of the region, except Calvert and St. Mary’s counties, which are under a winter weather advisory. The warning is in effect from 3 a.m. Thursday to 6 a.m. Friday.

https://twitter.com/NWS_BaltWash/status/1362057234608316416

The Weather Service expects 3 to 6 inches of snow and up to a quarter inch of ice from Thursday’s storm. “Travel could be nearly impossible,” the Weather Service writes. “The hazardous conditions could impact the morning or evening commute.”

We’ll have a new, detailed briefing on the storm published between midday and early afternoon.