A study released this month by the Virginia Department of Transportation makes the case that Interstate 95 in the D.C. suburbs will eventually fail its drivers and proposes high-occupancy toll lanes as a solution for solo motorists, carpoolers and transit users. Publication of the study, an environmental assessment of the HOT lanes project , is the state’s latest step toward adding another ambitious megaproject to the area’s transportation system. Three public meetings are scheduled for this week to review the plan. Read full article > >

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Virginia advances plan for I-95 HOT lanes

Thelma Steele, a 92-year-old neighborhood matriarch, and William Fitts, a teenager who lived across the street, were like grandmother and grandson, family members said. She would buy him toys and gadgets for Christmas and his birthday; he would often stop by her house with fruit baskets, cookies and tea. That’s what makes the case so mystifying. One day late last week — after Steele welcomed Fitts into her Forestville home — the 15-year-old boy bludgeoned her with her walking cane and stabbed her with a knife, law enforcement sources said. Police did not discover her body until Monday, when Fitts’s family became concerned that mail was piling up at their elderly neighbor’s house. Read full article > >

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Killing of elderly Forestville woman has two families wondering what happened

Carr, unsurprisingly, makes the case : When I was in Austin, I would fall asleep each night to bad dreams, prompted by cable television ranting that the world was melting down, principally in Japan. And each morning I would wake up to reporting that described in very careful detail what was actually known, not feared, about the nuclear crisis in Japan. Throughout the day, I checked my news alerts to make sure the world was not ending imminently. Tellingly, I never picked up a copy of the newspaper, reading it on the new iPad where The Times is a living thing and the better for it.  People, real actual people, went and reported that information, some of it at personal peril and certainly at gigantic institutional expense. So The Times is turning toward its customers to bear some of the cost. The Times is hardly alone: AFP, Reuters, The Associated Press, Dow Jones, the BBC and NPR are all part of a muscular journalistic ecosystem. But it seems an odd time to argue against a business initiative that aims at keeping boots on the ground during a time of global upheaval. Andrew Cohen puts it all in perspective :  At $15 per month, access to nytimes.com is roughly the price of one lunch for my son and I at Chipotle. It is less than I am willing to pay each month for my Fresca and my Diet Pepsi and my coffee, all of which I should drink less of anyway. It is less than the price of two movie tickets or what I spend on crappy wrapping paper each year, courtesy of school fundraising drives. And it is far less than I paid when (for years) I subscribed to the Times’ national print edition, which was dutifully dropped at my door each morning. Yeah, I pay more for Warcraft, then I’m going to end up paying for the Times. I think there can be a good debate over whether the Times’ model will work. (Times Select was a terrible model, for instance) But I don’t really see the argument for the paper never asking readers for money.

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Paying for Information

Ron Rosenbaum makes the case that we are entering a new nuclear era in “How the End Begins.”

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Books of The Times: Thinking the Unthinkable Again in a New Nuclear Age

There’s been a wave of Twitter and Facebook posts over the past couple of days that RSS and RSS readers are dying. Whenever this happens — it isn’t new — my stomach gets a little uneasy because I’ve spent years building out a massive Google Reader feed (seriously, they should hire me as a spokesperson) that I am logged in to for approximately 14 hours a day. Over at GigaOm, Mathew Ingram makes the case that RSS feeds are about as dead as the web, which is to say not at all; how they are being used and implemented is just shifting. In the same way, RSS has become a crucial part of how web content gets fed from blogs and other sites into real-time services such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as aggregation apps like Flipboard, as CEO Mike McCue noted during the debate between Winer and TechCrunch. Do Twitter and Facebook compete with RSS to some extent, in terms of content discovery? Sure they do — but they also benefit from it. Along with real-time publishing tools such as Pubsubhubbub, RSS is one of the things that provides a foundation for the apps and services we see all around us, including real-time search (and plenty of people still use RSS readers, says venture capital blogger Fred Wilson). The fact that RSS may be fading in terms of mainstream user awareness is actually a good thing rather than a bad one. The sooner people can forget about it because it just works in the background, the better off we’ll all be — in the same way many of us have forgotten (if we ever knew) how the internal-combustion engine works, because we no longer have to pull over and fix them ourselves. Read the full story at GigaOm .

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RSS and RSS Readers Are Alive and Well

Political thinker Phillip Blond makes the case for peers

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Good Lords

Mysticism and blue in a sweeping Yves Klein retrospective At age 19 Yves Klein stood in the backyard of his parents’ home in Nice and pointed a camera up at the open sky. This photograph of endless blue was his first monochrome work, setting the stage for hundreds more created during the artist’s short yet profound career. Exploring this approach in both his groundless, brilliant blue canvases, along with films, sculptures, and architecture, I recently had the chance to preview the final leg of the ballyhooed Klein retrospective ” With The Void, Full Powers ” at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center. The show makes the case that Klein’s single-hued work defined his aesthetic not just because he “owned blue” (as some like to quip), but because of his clever pursuit of suspending everyday perceptions to create a heightened reality, or what he called immaterial sensibility . To imagine these hyper-realities, risk was essential to Klein’s process. His proposal for a new architecture arose out of his propensity to rethink the world in spiritual and aesthetic terms. Renderings and blueprints shown in a 1961 L.A. exhibit “Air Architecture” depict a future built environment created only using the elements of fire, water and air. That same year also saw Klein return to his search for pure color, painting “Blue Monochrome.” Working with a chemist to create his own hue of blue, he created the renowned pigment “International Klein Blue,” which he used to indicate his ethereal view of world. Furthering this concept, in his notorious “Anthropometries of the Blue Epoch,” Klein used blue-painted women as his brushes, moving them across the canvas to create abstract disembodied images. “Into the Void, Full Powers” is co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden , and is on view from 23 October 2010 to 13 February 2011.

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With The Void, Full Power

An international research team makes the case that stone tools from the Arabian Peninsula and India point to humans coming “out of Africa” earlier than has been thought.

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Artefacts ‘alter migration story’