Today’s Washington Post has another front-page story about the evil doers in China. This one focuses on speed skater Joey Cheek, who was denied a visa to attend the upcoming Olympics.

The implication of the story is that Cheek won’t be allowed into China because of his efforts to call attention to atrocities in Darfur.

Not great.

All of these anti-China stories should make us feel better about us and worse about them.

And I might, if only I didn’t know that we put Cat Stevens on our no-fly list.

Cat Stevens!

Yeah, Homeland Security actually diverted a London-to-Dulles flight to Maine and arrested Stevens just to keep the guy who wrote “Peace Train” out of the country.

And by “the country,” I mean the U.S.

Not China.

And nobody really gave a rip. (The Post’s story about the singer’s detention and deportation only got a few paragraphs on page A10.)

And I’d get more worked up about Joey Cheek if he could write a protest song that was also a pop hit.

Sing with me:

“Now I’ve been crying lately/Thinking about the world as it is…”

Remember the heady time of the anthrax case, when the Post devoted 32 chapters to the riveting drama of airborne spores invading big-time news networks, District postal workers, and one “person of interest” who turned out all innocent?

OK. Maybe not. Nearly seven years old, the anthrax case had the misfortune of terrorizing citizens between 9/11 and the Sniper. The case consumed very few other than the more intense strains of the scientific community, the creators of www.anthraxinvestigation.com and the friends and relatives of the wronged “person of interest” Steven Hatfill.

So this morning it came as a shock that law enforcement were still on the case. I read the Post’s lead:

A Maryland bioweapons expert, who prosecutors were on the verge of linking to 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and terrorized the country, has died — apparently by suicide, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

Wow. I thought: Hatfill killed himself. All the media ever talked about was Hatfill. He had been pursued and pursued. The FBI tailed him. I spent time as a passenger in his world, hanging out with him at his home and generally taking in the utter terror of being called “a person of interest.” You can read that story here. Hatfill would get his revenge–a $2.8 million settlement with the Department of Justice made formal a few weeks ago.

Now we have a new person of interest–a dead man named Bruce E. Ivins, 62. According to the Post story a grand jury had been interviewing his colleagues. The Post writes: “Investigators were tightlipped in part because the investigation is ongoing, and also because of their experience with another onetime suspect in the notorious case.”

The anthrax case is now more riveting than ever.

John McCain on the U.S. invasion of Iraq: “We were greeted as liberators. We mishandled the war for nearly four years. We mishandled it in a way that was so harmful that I stood up against it.”**

Nevermind that it took McCain a really, really long time to stand up against the Iraq War strategy. He may have even hedged his bets on supporting the surge.

But were we really greeted as liberators?

**McCain quote taken from an interview he did that aired today on “This Week…” McCain also oddly invokes the Oil-For-Food scandal as part of a laundry list of reasons we invaded Iraq. I hadn’t heard that reason.

This is what anarchy sounds like.

(Click link for several representative minutes of the zooms and bangs heard throughout Petworth all night long on July 4, recorded from my porch.)

About a year and a half ago, I posted an item about an online nuclear blast simulator that told you just how you might fare in the event of a nearby atomic explosion. While I was having dinner the other night with some old friends, several of whom work for various intelligence agencies, they mentioned there’s a new and improved version out there.

So here you go—this one’s a Google maps mashup.

If you select D.C. from the drop-down menu, it defaults ground zero to the middle of 9th Street NW at the Mall. Centrally located sure, but I doubt that’s where any terrorist would choose—unless they really, really wanted to blow the Hirshhorn off the map.

More likely would be closer to either the Capitol or the White House, I’m thinking.

So how would we City Paper folk do here in our Adams Morgan offices, according to the latest and greatest in blast-simulation technology? Pretty well, in the event of a Capitol-area strike under 50 kilotons—we’d probably get nothing more than shattered windows. A White House strike of that magnitude would be a bit more serious, with “Severe damage to ordinary houses, and light to moderate damage to reinforced concrete structures.”

Log your own fortunes in the comments…

Someone has glued this model of the White House to the south railing at Scott Circle. In the distance, you can kinda see the real White House. Not sure what the X on the top means. Aliens land here? The location of the national treasure? Someone should tell the NSA.

One evening last month, a Glover Park resident lifted the lid of her basement toilet to find a drenched rat the size of a 20 oz. Coke bottle scurrying around the bowl. She screamed, slammed the lid, stacked books on top, ran upstairs, and Googled the phrase “what to do about a rat in the toilet.”

The Internet advised lubing the toilet with dishwasher detergent and flushing, so the woman and her husband doused the rat with Dawn. “We did a flush, and we could still hear him scrambling around,” she says. “Now he was all puffed up and angry.”

An exterminator friend instructed the couple to smash the rat’s head with a broomstick. But the husband and wife, worried the rat would jump out of the toilet and bite them, declined the advice. They piled the books back on the lid.

The next day, they poured two cups of bleach into the toilet, and waited for the scrambling to stop. After a few minutes, they poked the rat with barbecue tongs. “He was completely stiff and totally dead,” she says.

The woman, who declined to be named, says she learned an important lesson from the incident. “You better believe I flush that toilet once in the morning and once at night,” she says. And the lid stays down.

Nobody wants to hate on homeland security dogs. They’re heroes, too. They risk their lives to sniff for explosives. And that’s no joke. But to deploy dogs to eject Union Station patrons is another story. There’s just way too much room for error.

This week I have a story on two high school kids who were ejected from a Union Station’s men’s room by a pair of Amtrak cops and a dog. In interviewing the two teenagers, they recounted several other instances of questionable dog practices at the commuter hub. One time, they watched an Amtrak police dog used to evict an old homeless man from the McDonald’s. They say the man was just trying to buy a burger. After he was refused service, the dog was called into action.

Another time, a cop was walking his police dog just outside the station. The dog repeatedly barked, growled, and scared any child that passed. After complaining to the cop about his dog, the cop just replied that the dog doesn’t like kids.

An Amtrak spokesperson says that the dogs are often used on routine patrols.

Do you think Amtrak uses their dogs too much? Have you all had any run-ins with Amtrak dogs?

Most of the District is a no-fly zone, with the exception of military aircraft, right? So how do hospital-to-hospital emergency transport helicopters fit in? They must have to fly over the Mall and major federal buildings all the time. Do they have to take a circuitous route to miss those buildings? Are they a potential terrorist threat?

Relax. When you’re hemorrhaging blood and need transport from one hospital to another, your helicopter will be able to fly over the Mall, across the Ellipse, or above any other area within the District’s 15-square-mile restricted flight zone—as long as the hospital or charter company that owns the helicopter has applied for the proper waiver.

“Security is our key mission, but we realize that life-threatening situations are also an important consideration,” says Transportation Security Administration spokesperson Amy Kudla.

The waivers come in two forms—advance and emergency. To get advance clearance, companies apply for a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) waiver, which is then vetted by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Based on the National Capitol Region Air Space Control’s assessments of the current intelligence, the District’s threat level and a handful of other considerations, the FAA approves or disapproves the waiver within seven days. When a helicopter needs to dispatch, the pilot registers his or her name, tail number, and exact flight plan with the TSA along with the pre-approved waiver number.

For emergency clearance, helicopters must be equipped with a two-way radio and maintain two-way radio communications at all times; the helicopter must be equipped with an operating transponder, obtain a specific transponder code from air traffic control and continuously transmit it; the pilot must file instrument flight rules and visual flight rules prior to departure or prior to entering the District; and the aircraft operator also register their name, tail number, and flight plan with the TSA.

And when helicopters veer from their flight plans, TSA responds instantly to curtail any threat, Kudla says.

Every Monday, the ‘Huh?’ Bub takes your questions. Got one?

Here’s a helpful little Web page that will help you determine whether you will face instant annihilation, horrific flash burns, or merely delayed-onset radiation sickness in the event of a nuclear explosion in the D.C. area.

In one likely scenario—a 20-kiloton terrorist bomb exploding on the ground near the White House—we at City Paper would be subject to “flying debris…caused by the blast wave” at our offices in Adams Morgan.

If you live in Tenleytown or Deanwood, you’re golden!

On March 27, Mojgan Hajmohammadali was stopped by a police officer for jaywalking, after dashing across K Street NW against the light. The cop demanded her ID; she refused. They went back and forth on the issue until he reached for his handcuffs and threatened to arrest her. She relented. When he read her name on the license, says Hajmohammadali, who is Persian, he got nasty.

“He said, ‘Why don’t you go back to your country?’” she says. “’What are you doing here if you are complaining so much?’”

Hajmohammadali, an American citizen, has lived in the U.S. for 13 years. “I was in a state of shock,” she says. There were about 10 other officers writing tickets that day, and they were all having courteous conversations with their offending jaywalkers, she says.

Master patrol officer Jeffery Clay, who stopped her, says he he’s been on the force for 25 years and has never had a complaint. “I don’t know nobody’s race. That’s ludicrous,” he says.

Hajmohammadali plans to write a letter of complaint to Chief Charles Ramsey about Clay’s alleged behavior. The one upside of the situation? “He only gave me a warning,” she says.