Washington DC

At some point, Goose ate the yellow petals from a nearby Carolina jessamine vine, a plant known to be toxic to pets and humans. Within minutes, the dog was fatally ill, said Rini Sampath, 30, a Lurgan resident who is friends with Goose’s owner. “At Georgetown, the doctors were able to revive him,” Sampath said. “But later they told the owners at that point euthanizing him would be the most humane thing.” Since the incident, a group of tenants have been locked in a battle with the building’s management over...

For more than four months, Laura Dorsey has been searching for answers about what happened to the remains of her late husband, Ronald Francis Dorsey, after she sent his body to the Heaven Bound Cremation Services crematory in White Plains, Maryland. She never received his ashes or a death certificate. Her follow-up calls have not been returned. No one has contacted her with any information about the whereabouts of her husband’s remains, even after state officials closed Heaven Bound in mid-January after an inspector discovered abysmal conditions at the facility,...

Moody’s Ratings announced this week that it was downgrading Washington, D.C.’s credit rating amid a wave of mass federal workforce cuts and hits to the local economy. Moody’s said in a new report that it was downgrading the District’s issuer rating from Aaa to Aa1, a blow to the city that will likely make it more expensive for the local government to borrow money and cost taxpayers more. The downgrade comes from the “mounting negative pressure that cuts to federal spending, workforce and real estate are having on the District’s...

An Army helicopter pilot who federal prosecutors say shipped nearly 1,800 orders of LSD to buyers on the “dark web” argued in court Wednesday that he has a religious right to sell the drug, deploying an unconventional legal strategy in an attempt to stave off his indictment. Kyle Norton Riester, a first lieutenant on active duty with the 12th Aviation Battalion at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, argued in legal papers this month that “the Divine guidance and instruction he had received while communing with LSD” drove him to sell the hallucinogenic...

For the fifth year in a row, the oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay is doing well after decades of combating drought, disease, loss of habitat and overharvesting. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources said in March that its annual fall oyster survey showed that the “spatfall intensity index” — a measure of how well oysters reproduced and their potential population growth — again hit above a 40-year median. “We seem to be making some headway,” said Lynn Waller Fegley, director of fishing and boating services for the Maryland Department...

Washington, D.C., is one of many areas across the country preparing for major energy bill increases this summer. Washington Gas, which serves more than a million residents in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area, is proposing a 12% rate increase for customers, or almost $200 more a year on gas bills for the average customer, starting in August. Pepco, which is part of the PJM Interconnection, raised electricity rates for more than a million customers in Washington and Maryland in January. Washington customers saw a 5% increase while Marylanders experienced an average spike...

David Ng held back tears as he approached the stone steps of North America’s largest Roman Catholic Church, its bells tolling in the Monday midday gloom. The news of Pope Francis’s death had reached him hours earlier in a message from his family in the Philippines. He’d spent the morning rewatching videos of the leader’s visit to his country a decade ago, praying with typhoon-battered residents. “He’s the pope of the people,” said Ng, 44, before joining the stream of people flowing into the Basilica of the National Shrine of...

For more than a decade the D.C.-born musician Nick Hakim has been wading deeper and deeper into a mind-bending sonic vortex. While studying at Berklee College of Music, the singer and multi-instrumentalist débuted fully formed, in 2014, on “Where Will We Go,” a two-part EP that outlined a rich neo-soul sound, robust yet seemingly out of focus. Hakim then released his opus “Green Twins,” in 2017, establishing himself as a purveyor of foggy psychedelic music. The albums that followed, including one with the jazz saxophonist Roy Nathanson, only furthered a...