Navy admiral is Obama’s pick to take reins of NSA

Associated Press - This Oct. 5, 2011, photo, provided by the U.S. Navy, shows Vice Adm. Michael Rogers. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is announcing that Rogers, the head of the Navy’s Cyber Command, has been chosen to be the next chief of the troubled National Security Agency. Rogers, also a former intelligence director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is being nominated to replace Army Gen. Keith Alexander.

By Associated Press, Published: January 30

WASHINGTON — A Navy admiral is President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next head of the National Security Agency, which is embroiled in controversy over its secret surveillance programs and massive collection of phone and Internet data.

Vice Adm. Mike Rogers, the head of the Navy’s Cyber Command and a former intelligence director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is being appointed to lead the NSA, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Thursday. Rogers also is being nominated to get a fourth star and head U.S. Cyber Command.

 Rogers, who replaces Army Gen. Keith Alexander at the NSA, comes into the job facing the challenge of revamping the way the agency collects and stores its data. Alexander plans to retire in mid-March.

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

First phase of new town center at former Laurel Mall site is set to open in March

By Luz Lazo, Published: January 28 

The first portion of the $130 million redevelopment of the former Laurel Mall will open in March, the developer said Monday, announcing more than a dozen retailers and restaurants that will debut there this year.

A 70,000-square-foot Burlington Coat Factory will open in late March, kick-starting the grand opening of the Towne Centre at Laurel, just two years after the city in northern Prince George’s County said goodbye to the old enclosed mall.

 Thomas M. Fitzpatrick, president and chief operating officer at Greenberg Gibbons, the Owings Mills, Md.-based developer, said the center on Route 1 is 85 percent leased.

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

Construction set to begin next week on Prince George’s County’s first Whole Foods Market

By Luz Lazo

Construction of Prince George’s County’s first Whole Foods Market is set to begin next week and the store will open in late 2015, the project’s developer said Thursday.

The Whole Foods store, planned for a wooded property on the northwestern boundary of Riverdale Park, was stalled for nearly two years. During the lengthy approval process, residents and some elected officials from nearby towns argued that the new grocery would worsen traffic in the already congested Route 1 corridor.

 Washington-based Calvin Cafritz Enterprises is building the store as the anchor of a $250 million development that includes nearly 1,000 units of multifamily housing, a 120-room hotel, 22,000 square feet of office space and about 168,000 square feet of retail space.

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

Montgomery Council member Roger Berliner drafts environmental reform proposals

By Bill Turque

A Montgomery County Council member plans to introduce 13 environmental and energy reform proposals to address the consequences of climate change — an area where he says the federal government has fallen short.

Some of the ideas from Roger Berliner (D-Potomac-Bethesda) are adapted from laws passed in New York state, California, Chicago, the District and other places. They include a requirement that commercial and residential building owners publicly disclose the energy-efficiency ratings of their properties. Other provisions would require new commercial buildings to meet a more stringent level of construction — Silver LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) — set by the U.S. Green Building Council and to have at least one electric automobile charging station for every 50 parking spaces.

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

Blimplike surveillance craft set to deploy over Maryland heighten privacy concerns

By Craig Timberg

They will look like two giant white blimps floating high above I-95 in Maryland, perhaps en route to a football game somewhere along the bustling Eastern Seaboard. But their mission will have nothing to do with sports and everything to do with war.

The aerostats — that is the term for lighter-than-air craft that are tethered to the ground — are to be set aloft on Army-owned land about 45 miles northeast of Washington, near Aberdeen Proving Ground, for a three-year test slated to start in October. From a vantage of 10,000 feet, they will cast a vast radar net from Raleigh, N.C., to Boston and out to Lake Erie, with the goal of detecting cruise missiles or enemy aircraft so they could be intercepted before reaching the capital.

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

O’Malley formally unveils plans to raise Maryland’s minimum wage, tackle other goals

By John Wagner

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) formally announced his final legislative package Monday, putting forward bills to raise the minimum wage, curb domestic violence and expand pre-kindergarten, among other priorities.

Most of the legislation that will be pushed by O’Malley during the 90-day General Assembly session had been previously advertised, including bills to cap hospital spending and provide an alternative for citizens who have had trouble obtaining health-care insurance through the state’s glitch-ridden online exchange.

 Other bills seek to expand state-designated wildland areas and continue a push to ensure emergency personnel can communicate on the same radio system.

 Read full article here from The Washington Post

Security start-ups spin out of Washington intelligence community

By Mohana Ravindranath

The surveillance factory that is the National Security Agency produces more than secrets. It also drives the development of new technologies, some of which are spilling out into the world at large.

Often the entrepreneurs with the inside track are former government employees who had a hand in creating the technology and realized that the advances might find a larger market among Internet users and businesses.

Former NSA Internet security architect Will Ackerly, for instance, left the agency in 2012 to found VirTru, an e-mail security start-up, with his brother John Ackerly, who was associate director of the National Economic Council and director of the Office of Policy and Strategic Planning at the Commerce Department under President George W. Bush. The two run the business out of an office in Dupont Circle and are publicly launching a free version of their product this week. 

Read full article here from The Washington Post

Is monumental Washington area ready for the Capital Wheel at National Harbor?

By Thomas Heath and Jonathan O’Connell

A city known for a monumental skyline marked by a sober granite obelisk and a stately cast-iron dome is getting a piece of good, old American razzle-dazzle just outside its borders.

In April, a $15 million brightly lit 175-foot-tall Ferris wheel will begin slowly spinning visitors on 12- to 15-minute rides as they overlook the Potomac River from the burgeoning $4 billion playground known as National Harbor, seven miles south of the District in Prince George’s County.

“When you have a place like National Harbor or Washington, you need new things, iconic things. Not piddly things. When you do something like this wheel, you are going to get people from Richmond driving here, people from Philadelphia driving here,” said Milt Peterson, the real estate magnate behind National Harbor.

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

O’Malley unveils $39 billion budget that he says closes shortfall without raising taxes

By Fredrick Kunkle

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley unveiled a $39.3 billion budget Wednesday that offered few new initiatives but that he said would close a projected $421 million deficit without raising taxes and put the state on a path toward removing a structural deficit by 2017.

The budget also proposes more money to hire corrections officers while calling for a modest down payment on an expansion of pre-kindergarten education and continued investment in new-school construction.

O’Malley (D) struck a valedictory note during a news conference on his eighth and final budget proposal. He said the fiscal 2015 budget is the culmination of a tough but realistic approach to spending and taxes that has allowed the state to prosper despite the worst recession in generations, recent cutbacks in federal spending and the effects of last year’s U.S. government shutdown.

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

Maryland officials were warned for a year of problems with online health-insurance site

By Aaron C. Davis and Mary Pat Flaherty

More than a year before Maryland launched its health insurance exchange, senior state officials failed to heed warnings that no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan for how it would be ready by Oct. 1.

Over the following months, as political leaders continued to proclaim that the state’s exchange would be a national model, the system went through three different project managers, the feuding between contractors hired to build the online exchange devolved into lawsuits, and key people quit, including a top information technology official because, as he would later say, the project “was a disaster waiting to happen.”

The repeated warnings culminated days before the launch, with one from contractors testing the Web site that said it was “extremely unstable” and another from an outside consultant that urged state officials not to let residents enroll in health plans because there was “no clear picture” of what would happen when the exchange would turn on.

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

The PC is dead, and this year’s CES proves it

A decade ago, the PC was the center of the digital world. Web TV aside, a full-scale Windows or Mac OS PC was the only reasonable way for ordinary people to get on the Internet. People also used their PCs to write term papers, organize their music and photos, edit video, play games, and a lot more.

But today, conventional PCs face a growing army of cheap, special-purpose rivals. No single device is an adequate PC replacement all by itself. But together, the growing menagerie of devices is making PC ownership less and less necessary for ordinary consumers.

This week's Consumer Electronics Show demonstrates just how far this trend has developed. Most of the big product announcements were related to post-PC gadgets. And product roadmaps from Intel and others suggests that the decline of the PC will only accelerate in the coming years.

Read full article here from The Washington Post

Maryland chooses four teams of private companies to bid on Purple Line

By Katherine Shaver

Four teams of private companies have been chosen to compete for a public-private partnership to design, build, operate, maintain and help finance construction of a $2.2 billion light-rail Purple Line in the Maryland suburbs, state officials said Wednesday.

The four were chosen from six teams that submitted “statements of qualifications” in mid-December.

Maryland Department of Transportation officials said they plan to select a bid by early next year. That would allow construction of the 16-mile line between Bethesda and New Carrollton to begin in spring 2015 and open in 2020, officials said. The line connecting Montgomery and Prince George’s counties would have 21 stations, including in Silver Spring, College Park, Langley Park and the Riverdale area.

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

Postal Service gets approval for a temporary increase in stamp prices

By Lisa Rein

The price of a first-class letter and most other mail will rise by 3 cents on Jan. 26, the largest rate hike in 11 years, the commission that oversees the U.S. Postal Service announced Tuesday.

The stamp-price increase to 49 cents will be in effect for two years, giving the financially struggling agency a temporary infusion of extra revenue intended to help it recoup losses suffered during the economic downturn between 2008 and 2011.

The Postal Regulatory Commission rejected the Postal Service’s petition for a permanent increase, saying that the $2.8 billion infusion should compensate only for the recession, not offset losses caused by Americans’ growing use of electronic communications and commercial delivery services.

Read full article here from The Washington Post

Prince George’s schools chief adds executive-level positions and attracts criticism

By Ovetta Wiggins, Published: December 23 

Prince George’s County Schools Chief Executive Kevin M. Maxwell, who came to the district as part of an overhaul of the school system, has added four new executive-level positions to his administration, hires he said will improve academic achievement.

Maxwell, who took the school system’s top job in August, has spent $1.53 million to hire a chief of staff, a diversity officer, a health officer, a performance and evaluation officer and 10 employees to assist them. He said the hires were necessary because he noticed that some jobs were not being done adequately and children were not being properly served because there was less coordination.

 “You have to be organized around the work that needs to be accomplished,” Maxwell said in a recent interview about the decision to add employees. “If you don’t have people in place to do particular jobs, you might find a situation where you have someone doing 15 jobs.”

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

Maryland public university offers price cut: $20,000 for a bachelor’s degree

By Nick Anderson, Published: December 19 | Updated: Friday, December 20

Two Republican governors in recent years have championed big price cuts in higher education, pushing their states to offer a four-year bachelor’s degree for a tantalizing $10,000.

Now Maryland is forging into this price-slashing discussion with a plan that will enable students to get a bachelor’s degree from a public university for $20,000.

This week, the University of Maryland University College announced a discount for graduates of the state’s community colleges. The UMUC Completion Scholarship will cut $4,440 off the price of a bachelor’s degree for students who transfer into the public online university with an associate’s degree from one of Maryland’s 16 community colleges. 

Read full article here from The Washington Post

WSSC turns to solar power to cut sewage- treatment electricity costs

By Katherine Shaver

On a recent gray December morning, nearly 8,500 solar panels covering 13 acres in Germantown tilted toward the sky, straining to harness any glimmer of sunlight.

Their host: a sewage-treatment plant in Montgomery County, one of the first in the Washington region to try solar power. The panels, also installed at a Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission facility in Upper Marlboro, began operating in October.

Solar panels are expected to provide up to one-fifth of the two plants’ electrical needs at rates 25 percent cheaper than traditional electricity, WSSC officials said. (And, yes, if it’s a cloudy day or the middle of the night, your toilet will still flush.)

Read full article here from the Washington Post

Washington region home to nation’s most affluent counties, again

By Carol Morello
 

The Census Bureau has confirmed that, once again, the Washington region dominates the list of the most affluent counties in the United States.

Among more than 3,000 counties nationwide, Loudoun County had the highest median household income last year, almost $119,000, according to Census Bureau data released Thursday.

Los Alamos County in New Mexico was next, followed by Maryland’s Howard County and Virginia’s Fairfax County. Hunterdon County in New Jersey completed the top five, but Virginia’s Arlington and Stafford counties made it into the top 10. 

Read full article here from The Washington Post

Six teams compete to build, operate light-rail Purple Line in public-private partnership

By Katherine Shaver
 

Six teams of private companies have begun to compete for a long-term contract to design, build, operate and help pay for a light-rail Purple Line in the Maryland suburbs, state officials said Wednesday.

The companies met a deadline Tuesday to submit a “Statement of Qualifications” detailing their ability to carry out such a contract on a 16-mile rail line planned between Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.

Maryland Department of Transportation officials said they plan to narrow the group to four or fewer teams that will be invited to submit detailed proposals. That “short list” is to be announced early next month.

Read full article here from The Washington Post

D.C. Council backs $11.50 minimum wage

By Aaron C. Davis

The D.C. Council unanimously endorsed an $11.50-an-hour minimum wage for the nation’s capital Tuesday, completing a rare act of regional cooperation with the Maryland suburbs and setting up a stark contrast with the $7.25 federal minimum wage.

By coordinating with lawmakers in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, which approved similar measures last month, the council put the three localities on the cusp of creating a contiguous region with 2.5 million residents and a minimum wage higher than any of the 50 states. Virginia requires employers to pay the federal rate.

The D.C. Council must hold a final vote on the rate-increase measure and send it to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), probably early next year. But with all 13 council members pledging their support, the final vote appeared to be a formality and likely wide enough to override a veto by Gray, who repeated Tuesday that he would prefer a smaller increase — to $10 an hour.

Read full article here from The Washington Post 

Brown offers ‘compact’ with Md. businesses, brushes off questions about Gansler

By John Wagner and Bill Turque

 

Maryland gubernatorial hopeful Anthony G. Brown on Thursday proposed a nine-point “compact” with the private sector to boost the state’s business climate and sought to steer clear of questions about his rival’s controversial June appearance at a raucous beach-house party for recent high school graduates.

Brown (D), the state’s lieutenant governor for the past seven years, said his plan includes pledges to reform Maryland’s tax code and streamline regulations, as well as steps such as investing in skills training programs and curbing energy costs.

His presentation at a business event in Baltimore was largely overshadowed by the brouhaha over reports of fellow Democratic contender Douglas F. Gansler’s visit to the party at a beach house where his 19-year-old son was staying.

Read full article here from The Washington Post