Inside a Bethesda elementary school this month, an Army official representing a group of U.S. intelligence agencies stood before 100 residents and issued a curt edict: Don’t ask for specifics about the spies poised to occupy your neighborhood. “I really can’t say who’s coming to the facility,” Jared Olsen, a program manager with the Army Corps of Engineers, told the audience. “Let’s take that question off the table. Let’s just say it’s ‘Agencies very involved in protecting the United States, you all, and the rest of the citizens of the United States.’ ” Read full article > >

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Bethesda residents seek changes in design of government intelligence campus

While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday. A little frosting to start the day – November 10 is National Vanilla Cupcake Day ! Treat yourself, because today is about celebrating one of life's sweetest simple pleasures, the great vanilla cupcake. Vanilla is never boring, especially when it's baked into cupcakes and slathered on top in rich, creamy frosting. While vanilla cupcakes were long regarded as a confection best enjoyed at kid's birthday parties, these delicate little cakes are perfect for any occasion – especially snacking. While you can hit up the neighborhood bakery for a quick fix, settle into the kitchen and bake up a scrumptious snack. Regular vanilla cupcakes are already quite spectacular, but make an even bigger spectacle today with White Linen Cupcakes . These little puppies combine mascarpone frosting and curls upon curls of luscious white chocolate, all on top of moist cupcakes. If you're the kind that craves cupcakes all of the time, you're not alone – Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell would love to “hit up Magnolia and mack on some cupcakes” with you, especially on a ” Lazy Sunday .”

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Breakfast buffet: National vanilla cupcake day

Southeast Washington resident Nikki Peele says seeing police walk around her neighborhood makes her feel safe. So she likes D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier’s All Hands on Deck program, which floods the streets with police during select weekends each year. Across the Anacostia River in Northwest, Martin Moulton says his neighborhood near the Walter E. Washington Convention Center struggles with public urination, loitering and other quality-of-life issues. Seeing police around is fine, Moulton says, but he doesn’t think it impresses or intimidates criminals. Read full article > >

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All Hands on Deck police effort gets mixed reviews

BAGHDAD — The five-bedroom villa has a soaring living room with cathedral ceilings and is shaded by palm trees, but sits on a trash-strewn street that gets about eight hours of electricity a day. Worse yet, bombs still explode in the neighborhood with alarming regularity. Asking price? $1.4 million. As Iraq’s economy rattles awake after years of war, the country is experiencing a real-estate boom, with choice properties in Baghdad or in towns such as Karbala or Irbil selling for $500,000 to more than $1 million. Read full article > >

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In postwar Iraq, housing is scarce and pricey

BAGHDAD — The five-bedroom villa has a soaring living room with cathedral ceilings and is shaded by palm trees, but sits on a trash-strewn street that gets about eight hours of electricity a day. Worse yet, bombs still explode in the neighborhood with alarming regularity. Asking price? $1.4 million. As Iraq’s economy rattles awake after years of war, the country is experiencing a real-estate boom, with choice properties in Baghdad or in towns such as Karbala or Irbil selling for $500,000 to more than $1 million. Read full article > >

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In postwar Iraq, housing is scarce and pricey

BAGHDAD — The five-bedroom villa has a soaring living room with cathedral ceilings and is shaded by palm trees, but sits on a trash-strewn street that gets about eight hours of electricity a day. Worse yet, bombs still explode in the neighborhood with alarming regularity. Asking price? $1.4 million. As Iraq’s economy rattles awake after years of war, the country is experiencing a real-estate boom, with choice properties in Baghdad or in towns such as Karbala or Irbil selling for $500,000 to more than $1 million. Read full article > >

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In postwar Iraq, housing is scarce and pricey

D.C. police found Bobby L. Jackson early in the morning of June 25, slumped over dead and unarmed in a lawn chair after being shot in the back at least seven times. Many more shell casings were scattered nearby. More than two months after the shooting, police have no strong suspects. Nobody in the neighborhood, a tightly packed hamlet of small homes, called 911 until almost an hour after the shots were fired, law enforcement sources say, hampering efforts to make quick arrests or gather leads. Canvassing the neighborhood has yielded little useful information. Read full article > >

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Police seek leads in June killing

D.C. police found Bobby L. Jackson early in the morning of June 25, slumped over dead and unarmed in a lawn chair after being shot in the back at least seven times. Many more shell casings were scattered nearby. More than two months after the shooting, police have no strong suspects. Nobody in the neighborhood, a tightly packed hamlet of small homes, called 911 until almost an hour after the shots were fired, law enforcement sources say, hampering efforts to make quick arrests or gather leads. Canvassing the neighborhood has yielded little useful information. Read full article > >

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Police seek leads in June killing

The terrorist attacks scythed through generations of firefighters and Wall Street traders in the largely Irish-Catholic neighborhoods on the Rockaway peninsula. Also, the neighborhood’s Muslim bagel man; and the connection between the 9/11 families and wounded American soldiers.

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The 9/11 Decade: Hit So Hard by 9/11, Rockaway Struggles to Let Go

Police have named a suspect in a double homicide in Columbia Heights. Wanted posters hanging in the neighborhood show the face of Irving Harris Johnson, 25, who police say is the lone suspect in the shootings of Jimmie Lee Simmons III, 32, and Dominique Barber, 31, of Northwest. They were killed in the 1400 block of Parkwood Place on July 9. Barber, Simmons and a third man were shot in the head shortly before 6 a.m. outside a house that neighbors and D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) say is notorious for late-night drug-dealing and gambling. The third man is still being treated for his injuries, Graham said Tuesday. Read full article > >

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D.C. police name suspect in double homicide in Columbia Heights

LOS ANGELES — The suicide of a young woman in the Hollywood Hills might have seemed just another sad Tinseltown story but for large notes plastered on the window of the car in which she died: “Danger! Chemicals Inside! Call 911.” Police and coroner’s investigators had seen this before — three or four times in the past year — and they knew the danger was real to them and the neighborhood. Had the chemical cloud escaped from the car with people nearby, many others could have died, according to authorities. An evacuation of residents was contemplated but never carried out. Read full article > >

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Hollywood suicide by chemical mix is part of trend potentially dangerous to public

LivingSocial, a Washington-headquartered online coupon company, has secured room to grow in the east end of the city by leasing a seven-story building that dates to 1890. The lease at 918 F St. NW will keep LivingSocial in the heart of the city’s bustling Penn Quarter neighborhood near Gallery Place and Verizon Center. The company’s headquarters are already in the neighborhood, at 829 7th Street. With 26,000 square feet, the new building should provide enough space for the company to house 100 to 150 employees. Read full article > >

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LivingSocial leases building in D.C.

Mark Gail/The Washington PostMaya Soetoro-Ng, right, poses with Nia Alsop, 7, at the author’s visit to the Tenley-Friendship Neighborhood Library to promote her new children’s book, “Ladder to the Moon.”

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Maya Soetoro-Ng, President Obama’s sister, visits D.C. library with new children’s book about their mother

In dire financial straits, the suits at the New York Times have been, for some time, talking about erecting a pay wall that could — executives hope — help to bring in some new money. Readers (customers?) long accustomed to getting all of their content from the paper for free could be in for a bit of a shock. Not all of them though. Only about 15 percent of the paper’s current readers access the site enough to trigger the pay wall that executives hope to put in place sometime next month, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal . Are you one of them? It’s still unclear how often you would need to visit the website to be considered a power user, but with more than 30 million monthly unique visitors to nytimes.com, there’s 4.5 million of them. Here’s what we know so far: According to New York Times Co. executives, only about 15 percent of the paper’s current online audience use the site enough that they would trigger a pay wall. All readers will get free access to a predetermined number of pages on the newspaper’s website every month before they are prompted to join a subscription plan. Readers who arrive to a particular story on the New York Times’ website through a Google search — or a search conducted through another major search engine — will not be blocked from viewing the first page of that story regardless of how many times they have visited the site in the past. (This could change, though. Executives have said that they are going to be working with search engines in an attempt to limit how often visitors can come in through this side door.) The New York Times’ iPad application, which is available for free in the App Store at the moment, will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 per month once the new pay wall is erected. Subscribers to the print edition of the New York Times will be able to access any of the newspaper’s online offerings at no additional cost. Inside sources familiar with the pay wall plan at the company have suggested that the New York Times will cost about $20 per month for a complete digital bundle, which will include unlimited access to the website and all of the content on the iPad application. A Web-only package might cost less than half that amount.  

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What You Need to Know About the New York Times’ Pay Wall

People who study online life are familiar with the One Percent Rule . It says that if 100 people gather at a given site, about 10 percent will contribute anything at all, even a comment at a blog post, and less than one percent will become deeply engaged as a regular contributor. The rest will just use the service. There are two ways to come at that finding. One is to sneer at utopian projections like “everyone’s an author now.” And the One Percent Rule does, in fact, crash those illusions. It’s a double espresso of digital realism. Wakes you up fast. A different way to think about it is to do a little math. Today, nytimes.com draws in the neighborhood of 18 million unique visitors per month. They tend to be educated, informed, curious about the world. According to the One Percent Rule, about 180,000 of them would become serious contributors — if given a proper chance. As the Times tries to make its way in the new economy of news, it has no choice but to think about how to tap into that massive group, which is many times larger than the entire American press corps. Think of it this way: If the number one asset the Times has is its brand and reputation, and number two is the talent and experience of its professional staff, the third most important asset is, in fact, the knowledge and sophistication of its users and especially the 180,000, the one percent.  But how to get some of that knowledge flowing in, so as to make from it high quality editorial goods for the remaining 99 percent? This is a strategic puzzle for the New York Times . I believe they’re aware of it. Now in that puzzle, the single best place to turn for how something like that can be done is Wikipedia, which still calls itself “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” “Anyone can” doesn’t mean “everyone will.” Almost everyone won’t. But even then something great and powerful can be built. That’s what Wikpedia teaches us about organizing people online.

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Jay Rosen on Wikipedia’s 10th Anniversary