Reading archive 2026-10-02

Proposed 110-foot parking garages draw scrutiny at RFK planning meeting

Why Is Russia Manufacturing a Story About NATO Preparing to Blockade Kaliningrad? - "Months ago, I warned that if Russia decides to attack NATO, it likely wouldn’t begin with a direct attack. Moscow would need a pretext, and Russia is more than capable of manufacturing an attack on its own territory, playing the victim, and claiming it was forced to respond. This is their decades-long playbook. Now Moscow is building a story that NATO is preparing to blockade Russian territory, while European intelligence agencies are warning about possible false flags and military incursions. We don’t know what comes next, but we may be watching Russia write the narrative and prime the information space."

A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose.: Last Ditch Bar in Greenfield wanted to build community. They got a firestorm instead.

The D.C. Housing Authority faces a major budget gap. A $52 million error could make it worse: The public housing agency is considering cost-cutting measures that could lead to major changes for the 20,000 residents it serves.

Metropolitan Branch Trail Closure for Resurfacing Between Brookland and Fort Totten

The THAAD Delusion: The story of a missile system placed in a role for which it was never intended illuminates the broader challenges facing the U.S. military. - "But the war with Iran has exposed the flaw in this scheme. The THAAD was never designed to protect an entire country. As capable as the system might be, it was created with a narrow mission in mind: to protect U.S. troops in combat for an extremely limited time. The Army, which oversaw air-defense systems like the THAAD, had wanted a system that could fend off an initial wave of missile attacks long enough for U.S. fighter jets and naval destroyers to fully respond. 'What you needed to do was just survive the first salvo, right? Protect your high-value military deployments, the ports, right from the initial salvo, and then we just go destroy them, and the war's over,' John Ferrari, a retired Army major general who supervised the THAAD system when he was the commander of the White Sands Missile Range, told me.

"In the war with Iran, the THAAD has worked precisely as designed-but not at all as promised. The system performed well in the early days of the conflict, intercepting Iranian ballistic missiles with impressive accuracy. But the U.S. has not destroyed many of Iran's missile launchers, and the war is far from over. And despite planning for just such a conflict for two decades, the U.S. failed to take the steps necessary to convert the THAAD into a system that could provide protection for as long as it would be relied upon to do so."