ABCDE Thunderstorms. 84/72 • Tomorrow: Partly sunny. 86/72 • details, B10 Trees (and trucks) take another pounding FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
Prices may vary in areas outside metropolitan Washington.
MD DC VA SV1V2V3V4
washingtonpost.com • 75¢
For GM, a surprise change at the top
CHIEF EXECUTIVE STEPPING DOWN
Automaker announces profit ahead of blockbuster IPO
by Thomas Heath and Frank Ahrens
General Motors took an unexpected BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
On Kalmia Street in Northwest Washington, a truck was crushed by a downed tree as a series of violent thunderstorms swept through the region Thursday morning. METRO
CAPITAL WEATHER GANG A double whammy
The third day of violent summer storms within three weeks came in morning and evening waves Thursday. Trees fell, rivers swelled, flights were delayed, and tens of thousands of households lost power across the region. B1
Calm after the storms? 6
Oil spill shows difficulty of balancing traditional tasks with post-9/11 missions
by Joe Stephens and Mary Pat Flaherty
The U.S. Coast Guard in recent years has fought international terrorism, de- fended Iraqi pipelines and patrolled for pirates in the Arabian Sea.
After a night of severe thunderstorm and flash-flood watches, what’s in store for the Friday commute,
tonight’s Redskins game and the summer weekend? Stay up to date at
washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang.
POSTLOCAL.COM The view from your house I
Its work in such high-visibility mis- sions accelerated after Sept. 11, 2001, when Congress swept the Coast Guard into the Homeland Security Department. More funding followed. But the changes had the unintended consequence of lowering the profile of the Coast Guard’s vital programs related to oil. “Priorities changed,” a 2002 Coast Guard budget report said. Internal and congressional studies highlighted the difficulty the agency faces in balancing its many added re- sponsibilities. “Oil-spill issues were not
Look through photo galleries and view videos submitted by readers across the region, and read
“Your Take” accounts of the latest storm damage and cleanup on our local news home page:
PostLocal.com.
Coast Guard feels the strain of greater workload
at the top of the list,” said retired Capt. Lawson Brigham, a former strategic planner for the Coast Guard. When Coast Guard inspectors board
offshore drilling rigs such as the Deep- water Horizon, which exploded and killed 11 workers in April, they rely on regulations put in place three decades ago, when offshore drilling operations were far less sophisticated, records show. The Coast Guard acknowledged 11 years ago in a little-noticed disclosure that its regulations had “not kept pace with the changing offshore technology or the safe-
Stabbing suspect tried to settle in N.Va.
Man facing charges in attack in Mich. worked at Leesburg mental health center
by Maria Glod and Caitlin Gibson The man arrested Wednesday and ac-
cused of being the “Flint serial killer” is a Christian from Israel who tried unsuc- cessfully to put down roots in Northern Virginia and once worked with troubled children at a Leesburg mental health fa- cility, according to friends and court rec- ords.
Elias Abuelazam, 33, married twice
and tried to settle down in the region, first in Fairfax County and then in Lees- burg. Both marriages ended in divorce, and after the last one in 2007, Abuela- zam’s life became more nomadic. He bounced between Loudoun County, Michigan, Florida and Israel, the friends and court records say. Nothing in Abuelazam’s past could
have predicted what authorities say he has done since May, the friends said. Over the past 11 weeks, Abuelazam began randomly stabbing and attacking men — most of them black — in Michigan, Vir- ginia and Ohio, police say. About 10 p.m. Wednesday, U.S. Cus- toms and Border Protection agents paged him over a loudspeaker at Hartsfield- Jackson Atlanta International Airport,
where he was about to board Delta Flight 152 for Tel Aviv.
Abuelazam was being held Thursday
in Georgia, awaiting extradition to Michigan to face charges in one of the stabbings. Police in Michigan said Thursday they think he fatally stabbed five men in the Flint area and slashed nine others. Lees- burg police said he stabbed two men there and attacked a third with a ham- mer last week. He is also suspected of stabbing a man Saturday outside a To- ledo church. Sixteen of the victims were black; one was a dark-skinned Hispanic man; and one was white. “There’s no understanding why he
stabbings continued on A5 In India, age often not an impediment to pregnancy by Emily Wax
hisar, india — Inside a crowded rural hospital, gray-haired Nananki Rohtash rested on a cot, her swollen legs elevated while her sister-in-law paced nearby. Rohtash is a 60-year-old mother of five and a grandmother of eight. She’s also nine months pregnant, the result of an in vitro fertilization clinic, one of hundreds that have opened re- cently in India, urging clients to “Come alone. Leave as a family. Age no bar.’’ With 1.2 billion people, India is still growing rapidly, and there are few ef-
forts to control population growth, in sharp contrast to China’s one-child pol- icy. Some planning advocates argue that India’s population is stalling develop- ment, adding to unemployment, and overwhelming roads, schools, water sup- plies and other basic infrastructure needs. There are no government regulations
for IVF clinics, especially in rural areas of northern India, and women older than 50 make up a surprising number of their patients, in a country where giving birth to many children defines a woman’s worth and is considered parents’ best chance for financial security.
Rohtash was awaiting a Caesarean
section in the private National Fertility Center in Hisar, a middle-class frontier farming town in the northern state of Haryana, more than 170 miles outside the capital of New Delhi. In the past 18 months, the doctors at this clinic have helped 100 women older than 50 become pregnant. About 60 were able to carry those pregnancies to full term. Some of the women received eggs donated by younger relatives. Their hus- bands’ sperm was used to fertilize the eggs in a lab, and the embryos were then
india continued on A8 INSIDE
STYLE 1 Sly, Julia . . . or Scott Pilgrim? Pandering at a multiplex near you, three flawed appeals to three distinct constituencies. C1
OPINIONS
Charles Krauthammer: A matter of sacrilege at Ground Zero. A19
POLITICS & THE NATION
Six-day delay on gay weddings
The judge who overruled Proposition 8 rules that same-sex marriages may resume in California — but gives opponents time to pursue relief from a higher court. A2
METRO Trump vs. trunks Hundreds of trees along the Potomac are felled as Donald Trump’s golf club in Loudoun County is renovated. B1
BUSINESS NEWS ......A10-15 CLASSIFIEDS.....................E1 COMICS ..........................C4-5
EDITORIALS/LETTERS...A18 FED PAGE.........................A16 LOTTERIES.........................B4
MOVIES..................Weekend OBITUARIES...................B6-9 STOCKS............................A12
TELEVISION.......................C6 WEATHER ........................B10 WORLD NEWS...............A6-8
Printed using recycled fiber
DAILY CODE Details, B2
48 2 0
2 SPORTS Tiger’s travails Woods is briefly atop the leader board at the PGA Championship before his recent form returns. D1
1
WEEKEND Do go back to Rockville Exploring a suburb’s many surprises.
The Washington Post Year 133, No. 251
CONTENTS© 2010
ty problems it creates.” Since the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, investigations into oversight gaps have focused on systemic problems within the Interior Depart- ment’s Minerals Management Service, which in recent weeks has been renamed and revamped.
But the Coast Guard, which shared oversight with MMS, has largely escaped scrutiny. While the MMS inspected dril- ling equipment, the Coast Guard in-
coast guard continued on A8
detour Thursday, as its chief executive said he is stepping down just days before the company plans to file what may be history’s biggest initial public offering of stock.
At the same time, GM announced its
biggest profit in six years, a $1.3 billion turnaround quarter as the nation’s top automaker prepares to pay back the gov- ernment’s $51 billion bailout a little more than one year after emerging from bank- ruptcy. It’s not typical for a chief executive to announce his resignation on the eve of an IPO, but that’s what the 68-year-old Ed- ward E. Whitacre Jr. did, saying he will be succeeded on Sept. 1 by Daniel F. Aker- son, a GM director and a managing direc- tor of the Carlyle Group, a Washington private-equity firm. The Obama adminis- tration appointed Akerson, 61, to GM’s board a year ago after forcing G. Richard Wagoner Jr. to step down as chief exec- utive. “My goal in coming to General Motors was to help restore profitability, build a strong market position and position this iconic company for success. We are clear- ly on that path,” said Whitacre, the former AT&T chief who took over GM’s top job in December after the board fired Wag- oner’s successor, Fritz Henderson. Hen- derson faltered in getting rid of un-
gm continued on A11
XIAOMEI CHEN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Issue Gaynor, left, tries to sell perfume to Destiney Hollins, Nikole Davenport and Sherisse Latimore near the Gallery Place Station, where a melee recently occurred.
Gallery Place’s growing pains Deluge of teens challenges entertainment area as it matures
This article was reported and written by staff writers Christian Davenport, J. Freedom du Lac, Michael S. Rosenwald, Brigid Schulte, Ian Shapira, Annys Shin and Kevin Sieff.
Verizon Center, monitors his post like a military commander awaiting insur- gents. From his stool facing Seventh Street
P
NW, he sees clumps of teens purposely bump each other, hit each other, knock each other out. He sees young people steal sodas or tourists’ wallets. “You
eering through his sunglasses, Spencer Johnson, the security guard at the McDonald’s outside
know, it’s pandemonium. It’s ugly,” John- son says. Gallery Place, Washington’s newest re- tail and entertainment district, a prod- uct of the construction of a downtown sports arena and a decade-long boom, has become a meeting place that tran- scends the city’s usual dividing lines. The Seventh Street corridor from Penn Quar- ter to Chinatown has attracted an unusu- ally mixed crowd, a blend of races and ages, of urban dwellers, suburbanites and tourists, all drawn by the street’s res- taurants, bars, theaters and shops. But recently, according to business
teens continued on A14
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