Latest news with #Potomac
Washington Post
a day ago
- Business
- Washington Post
Potomac, Md., adds 85 townhouses with elevators, upscale touches
In a way, the new-build townhouses now selling with alacrity on the Rockville edge of Potomac, Md., have been 15 years in coming. Developer EYA first entered the space that long ago with the Brownstones at Park Potomac, a mixed-use community separated from EYA's new Northside at Potomac only by a small shopping center. Northside continues Park Potomac's aesthetic with English-themed brownstones the developers hope will be just as popular as the originals.
Washington Post
4 days ago
- General
- Washington Post
Tim Lilley spent his life flying. Then his son died in a plane crash.
While other kids had posters of movie stars or rock bands on their walls, Tim Lilley covered his with pictures of aircraft. He took his first flying lesson at age 13, got a private piloting license at 17, joined Army flight training at 19. He started out flying Black Hawks, then made a career in the cockpit of choppers and planes. So on the evening of Jan. 29, as he saw news that an Army helicopter had collided with a passenger plane over D.C., he was struck by the enormity of the disaster. Tim reached out to someone else who would understand: his son Sam, who followed in his footsteps and became a pilot for PSA Airlines. Sam didn't respond. Tim realized the plane that had plunged into the Potomac was a PSA jet. After a series of frantic calls to family he learned that he had just watched on television the death of his youngest son, the first officer on the flight. In those first moments of raw grief, and every day since, Tim has found himself in two roles. He's a dad in mourning. He's also an aviation expert — one who has flown both types of aircraft in the Jan. 29 collision at Reagan National Airport, and both routes — focused on finding answers and accountability for the families of all 67 people killed in what was the deadliest domestic plane crash in over two decades. 'I started — even though I let my emotions get in — I started trying to think critically about it right from the get-go and try to, you know, be a problem solver,' Tim said. 'I still miss Sam terribly, and that will never be solved. But … most aviation regulation is written in blood. That means somebody had to die in order for us to figure out a better way to do things. And that's probably going to be part of Sam's legacy.' Less than 24 hours after the crash, Tim was talking not just about how Sam raised money for charity and was about to get married but about how night-vision goggles, combined with the light from the city, might have blinded the helicopter crew to the passenger jet. He hasn't stopped talking, digging, pushing for answers that he thinks could help prevent another tragedy — including stricter protocols for Army maneuvers around passenger flights and an updated and fully staffed air traffic control system. The former service member is particularly upset with what he sees as a lack of responsibility from the Army. From the beginning, he said it was clear the helicopter crew made 'a grave error,' probably mistaking a farther-away plane for the jet they were told to avoid. But he wanted to know why Army leadership and the Federal Aviation Administration allowed them to be so close to another aircraft and rely only on their eyes to navigate around it. Initial reporting from the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that the helicopter crew were probably wearing night-vision goggles, were flying too high and may have had a faulty height reading. The report also found that they were not broadcasting their location with a satellite system and may have lost crucial messages from air-traffic control. Tim hopes a three-day NTSB hearing this week will answer more of those questions. In the meantime Tim has analyzed the air traffic, listened to podcasts from veterans of the Black Hawk's battalion, made charts of the air traffic at National. At an air safety conference, he rolled out a tape measure to illustrate how close Army helicopters and commercial planes were supposed to fly in the airspace at National — a mere 58 feet apart, which he called 'unacceptable' and 'insane.' He also privately contacted military leaders, including a veteran who served with him in Panama, where he witnessed a crash between two Black Hawk helicopters that led his unit to require four-person crews rather than the three that were flying at DCA. 'I knew my dad was smart, I knew my dad had a lot of knowledge, but I'm just amazed at how much, in the middle of grief, and in the most horrific time that any of us have ever experienced, I'm amazed at his wherewithal to be able to think about, okay, this should have happened, this should have happened, this is not what should have went on,' Tiffany Gibson, Sam's older sister, said. 'I'm just very, very proud of him.' 'Gary, my name is Tim Lilley, my son Sam Lilley was the first officer on flight 5342. I want you to know that we grieve with you. At some point when you are ready, maybe we can get together for a good cry.' Gary O'Hara received that message in March. It took him until May to reply. O'Hara's son was the crew chief on the helicopter that crashed into Sam's plane. While Staff Sgt. Ryan O'Hara was not piloting the craft, his father felt the entire crew had been pitted against the PSA victims in the public eye. But by the time he and his wife met Tim and his wife, Sheri, at a restaurant in Richmond Hill, Georgia, it was clear there would be no such division. 'There's really nobody else that can relate to what we're going through other than another parent dealing with this,' he said. They realized that their children, both 28 and living less than 20 miles apart, in another reality might have been friends. Tim reached out because he wanted the families of the three service members who died to know that he does not blame them for Sam's death. He blames Army leadership for allowing them to train in such a crowded airspace without making sure they did everything possible to mitigate the risk of a collision. He told O'Hara that when he flew those routes in the 1990s they would never rely on visual separation — pilots using their own vision and discretion to avoid other aircraft. 'We knew better,' he said. 'But when all that experience left after the wars ended, you know, nobody passes on the notion that asking for visual separation is a dangerous thing to do.' At first, Tim and Sheri were encouraged by the response from the Army, from everyone. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy immediately restricted helicopter traffic around the airport and vowed to address the lapses that occurred in the tower at National through better equipment and staffing. The Lilleys met with members of Congress and watched as their representative described Sam on the House floor as 'a charismatic and intelligent young man who loved his fiancée, Lydia Coles, flying, his family and the Lord.' But as Tim's questions got more pointed, and his emails to military personnel started featuring phrases like 'ineffective leadership,' the Army stopped engaging and 'started to ghost me,' he said. Only after 168 family members and loved ones, the Lilleys among them, wrote a letter saying the Army is 'persistently refusing to accept responsibility or even acknowledge the families throughout these ordeals' did Army Secretary Dan Driscoll agree to meet them. The Army declined to comment on the letter. Driscoll said at a hearing in June that the Army is 'doing everything we can to learn from the incident to ensure that it never occurs again' but needs to let the legal and investigatory process 'play out.' Sam and his father always shared a love of adventure, but as Sam approached his 30s, the resemblance between them grew. Most obviously, Sam decided to become a pilot. But he also started wearing Hawaiian shirts and making the same corny jokes. He had gone from saying he might never get married to preparing to start a family. Now Tim is following in his son's footsteps. He was the only member of the family to view the autopsy. He would like to know Sam's last words, not sanitized in an NTSB readout as some kind of expletive. Last month he and his wife went to the rocky cliff in Dublin where Sam proposed to his girlfriend a few months before the crash. He has thought about something his pastor once wrote: that we are not humans with spirits but spirits having only a brief human experience on Earth. He likes the idea that when he dies, Sam will be the one to show him around. Sam had six tattoos, none of which his father was crazy about. But about a week after the crash, while he was still waiting to bring Sam's body home, Tim woke up from a dream he can't remember convinced that he should get a tattoo in Sam's honor. On his bicep he now has a black ribbon bisected by a plane, next to the name of the flight — a symbol shared by the families of the victims. A month after the crash, Tim went back to work flying private planes. Sometimes his passengers recognize him or ask a question that leads back to the crash. Any time he flies American Airlines, which owns PSA, it happens. He doesn't mind. 'I talk about it every day. That's my therapy,' he said. 'All my co-pilots get to hear about Sam.' This summer he has been all over Europe — Milan, Paris, Majorca, Sicily, Nice, Innsbruck. He thinks about texting Sam to tell him how beautiful it is and how different the flying rules are, to tease him about being stuck on a layover in Kansas while his dad was on the Cote d'Azur. Sam would have countered that he flew the bigger plane. Sometimes Tim would forget and send the message anyway until one day he pocket-dialed Sam's number and was startled to receive a text in reply. The number had been reassigned. The new owner said they had been getting messages from Sam's friends and knew the pain of losing a son. Tim could message the number any time, they said. 'And also thank you for your service.' Ian Duncan contributed to this report.
Washington Post
23-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Jamie Stockwell named a Deputy Managing Editor of the News Hub
I am pleased to announce that Jamie Stockwell will join the leadership team of the News Hub as a Deputy Managing Editor, where she will help drive our digital news day and chart our next chapter as we look to deepen engagement with our audience. Jamie brings a wealth of experience and innovative thinking to this critical role at the center of the newsroom. Working in close partnership with other senior leaders, she will help guide our journalism in real time, shape our coverage priorities, elevate our storytelling and ensure The Post's report is urgent, ambitious and essential to readers across platforms. She is passionate about helping to find new ways to connect our world-class journalism with an ever-larger audience, and will draw on her experience as a leader at several news organizations. Jamie – who began her journalism career as an intern and then reporter at The Post – has for the past year and a half been our Executive Local Editor, where she has overseen coverage of major local news including the collapse of the Key Bridge last spring and the midair collision over the Potomac in January, storylines that included round-the-clock reporting, investigations and narrative reconstructs. She also has focused the staff on distinctive and enterprising big swings across a range of beats, including political scoops about the ill-fated arena deal in Virginia, an examination of the unregulated Hajj tourism industry after last summer's pilgrimage left more than 1,300 people dead and the moving story behind a photograph from the 1970s of a group of friends celebrating life with breakfast near the Reflecting Pool. Before her recent return to The Post, Jamie served as executive editor of Axios Local, where she led an ambitious nationwide expansion and pursued many of the same opportunities we now have as we adapt for the digital road ahead. She was also a deputy national editor at The New York Times, where she oversaw award-winning coverage, and before that, held senior leadership roles at the San Antonio Express-News, including serving as managing editor for more than six years. Jamie is a seventh-generation South Texan of Mexican descent who was raised on the border. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. Jamie will move to her new role next week. Please join me in congratulating her. Jason
Gulf Today
21-07-2025
- Business
- Gulf Today
For California, a summer of discontent
California is having a bummer of a political summer. With the state under daily siege by the Trump administration, Los Angeles occupied by federal troops and our gallivanting governor busy running for president, is it really any surprise? A recent UC Irvine poll found that residents, by a 2-to-1 margin, believe California is headed on the wrong track, a mood consistent with other gauges of Golden State grumpiness. Why the sad faces? 'We are so divided as a country that people feel like there's no common purpose and the other guys are out there about to do mayhem to the things that they believe in,' said Jon Gould, dean of UC Irvine's School of Social Ecology. 'Number two, there is a substantial portion of people who feel that their economic situation is worse than it was four years ago, two years ago, one year ago.' Gov. Gavin Newsom also gets some credit, er, blame for the state's darkened disposition. A poll conducted by UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies found California voters have little faith in their chief executive as he rounds the turn toward his final year in office. (Which may be one reason Newsom would rather spend time laying the groundwork for a 2028 White House bid.) Only 14% of voters surveyed had 'a lot' of trust in Newsom to act in the best interests of the California public, while another 28% trusted him 'somewhat.' Fifty-three percent had no trust in the governor, or only 'a little.' Not a strong foundation for a presidential campaign, but Potomac fever is a powerful thing. The Democratic-run Legislature fared about the same in the Berkeley survey. Forty-four percent of respondents had either a lot or some degree of trust in Sacramento lawmakers — not a great look, but a number that positively shines compared to attitudes toward California's tech companies and their leaders as they increasingly try to spread their overweening influence to politics. Only 4% had a lot of trust in the companies acting in the best interest of the California public; nearly six in 10 did not trust them at all. (There was similarly little faith in business groups.) But it's not just the state's leaders and institutions that fail to engender much trust or goodwill. A survey by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found residents have also soured on the three branches of the federal government. Fewer than a third of Californians expressed approval for President Donald Trump and the conservative-leaning Supreme Court. Just 2 in 10 Californians approved of the job Congress is doing. Some of that is colored by partisan attitudes. Registered Democrats make up the largest portion of the electorate and, obviously, most aren't happy with the GOP stranglehold on Washington. But that distrust transcended red and blue loyalties. Overall, 8 in 10 adults said they do not fully trust the federal government to do what is right. A nearly identical percentage said they trust the government to do what is right only some of the time. That, too, is part of a long-standing pattern. 'It's a concern, but it's not a new concern,' said Mark Baldassare, who directs research for the Public Policy Institute. 'It's been around in some form for decades.' Back in 1958, when the National Election Study first asked, about three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing almost always or most of the time — a level of faith that, today, sounds like it comes from people in another galaxy. Starting in the 1960s, with the escalation of the Vietnam War, and continuing through the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, that trust has steadily eroded. The last time the Pew Research Center asked the question, in the spring of 2024, just 35% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents nationwide said they trusted the federal government just about always or most of the time. That compared to just 11% of Republicans and Republican leaners. What's new — and perhaps most troubling — in the recent batch of opinion surveys are growing fears for the state of our democracy.
The Guardian
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
New book sheds light on Lincoln's misunderstood killer: ‘He's not that person at all'
Scott Ellsworth's new book, Midnight on the Potomac, is about the last year of the American civil war and 'the crime of the century': the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the actor John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865. Asked how the book came to follow The Ground Breaking, his acclaimed history of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, Ellsworth said his thoughts focused on two areas: historical parallels to the modern-day US, and the true crime genre. 'One thing that was driving it was the sense that in the past few years, the nation has never been that divided in my lifetime, and I'm old enough to remember the late 60s and early 70s,' Ellsworth said. 'And the only other time we had been so divided was in the 1850s and 1860s, so that was a natural draw right there. 'And I was thinking about, 'What was the crime of the 19th century in the United States? And it was clearly the murder of Lincoln. And once I dug in and started to turn up some stuff, I realized there was something there.' A professor in Afro-American and African studies at the University of Michigan, fascinated by the civil war since childhood, Ellsworth knew full well Lincoln is one of the most-written-about figures in history. But Ellsworth is not your average professor. Having been described as 'a historian with the soul of a poet', and having won a PEN/ESPN award for literary sports writing too, he knew he could tell the story his way. 'I'm trying to reach a broad audience,' he said. 'I'm trying to reach readers who wouldn't necessarily, or very rarely, pick up a piece of nonfiction, certainly history. And I was lucky in the sense that I had this surfeit of material that is so great and so dramatic, the question is just how to put it together. Story is very important. 'I've got some early responses from folks who've read a lot on the subject and said, 'I never really thought of it in these ways.' I think I managed to turn up some stuff that most civil war readers aren't aware of.' In the popular imagination, Booth has come to be seen as a dysfunctional personality turned lone assassin, the first in a line that includes Lee Harvey Oswald, who killed John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, and Thomas Michael Crooks, who tried to kill Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, just a year ago. Ellsworth set out to shatter that idea. 'On the image of Booth, I go into detail about the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, everybody calling him this genius – people getting turned away by the hundreds from his performances, women trying to storm into his dressing room. The popular conception of who he is [is] just wrong. He's not that person at all. 'It lives on today. On Broadway right now, there's the show, Oh Mary! [about Lincoln's wife] which is very raunchy and very hilarious. But in that, again, Booth is this kind of loser. That's ingrained in us – that's who he was, a disturbed loser. He wasn't. He was a star. 'And so if I can help change your mind and open your eyes to a different version of Booth, then you can start to see him in a different light.' Booth did not act alone. Confederate conspiracies ranged wide, from planners in Richmond, Virginia, to agents in Canada and in northern states with whom Booth schemed. In November 1864, agents attempted to burn down New York City, an incident Ellsworth recreates vividly. Confederate agents plotted first to kidnap Lincoln, then to kill him. Last year, as Ellsworth worked, the national spotlight found the Confederate plot, when the leading Trump ally Steve Bannon told a reporter Trump's frequent use of the word 'retribution' on the campaign trail was a nod to codewords used by the plotters. Events during the plot are familiar too: a near-miss as Lincoln rode from the White House to the Soldiers' Home in northern DC; Booth's presence in the crowd for Lincoln's second inaugural on 4 March 1865, visible in a famous photograph; the actor's response to remarks Lincoln gave on 11 April, the promise of citizenship for Black men prompting Booth to tell associates: 'That is the last speech he will ever make.' But among aspects Ellsworth holds to new light is a much less-known near-miss, on a frigid night in January 1865 when Lewis Powell, one of Booth's co-conspirators, hid in the shadows outside the war department, close by the White House, and waited for Lincoln to show. Ellsworth writes: 'Here was his chance. A well-aimed shot, even from behind the bushes, might work. That, or a quick dash for one at close range. 'Only he had not counted on the second man. Probably a bodyguard, and more than likely armed. And then there was the ground itself. 'Could he even run on it at all? What if he fell? Powell hesitated. The two men walked away. The moment was lost.' Follow Ellsworth to his extensive notes, and they reveal a 1907 memoir by David Homer Bates, one of the first military telegraphists in Lincoln's war department. That obscure volume and another, on Civil War Weather in Virginia, furnish key details. Elsewhere on Ellsworth's wide canvas, a little less obscure but no less fascinating, is Lois Adams, a Michigan newspaper reporter who worked as a government clerk in Washington and sent detailed letters back to her state, which Ellsworth uses to enrich his picture of wartime DC. 'There was this wonderful librarian at Central Michigan University who discovered Adams's letters and put them together in a book,' Ellsworth said, referring to Evelyn Leasher. 'I ran into the book, and the more I read, I just thought of Adams, 'She's just dynamite.' She is a keen observer of lots of things … about Washington during the war. She added such a richness to things, and she saw through things immediately. 'And so I kept inserting her throughout the book, because I think she adds such a fascinating perspective but she sees she's really undeservedly forgotten. She needs a lot more attention.' Ellsworth also presents the stories of the former slaves who followed the Union armies to freedom as the war neared its end, and of African American leaders who sought to seize the chance of liberty, the remarkable Henry Highland Garnet prominent among them. After Lincoln's killing, Booth escaped into Virginia. After a 12-day chase – the subject of the recent Apple TV miniseries Manhunt – the killer was killed in turn. Lincoln's body was taken back to Springfield, Illinois, the funeral train retracing his journey to Washington in 1861. Ellsworth concludes his own story at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac from DC, on the grounds of the home of Robert E Lee, the leading Confederate general. In doing so, Ellsworth asks readers to look beyond the death of Lincoln, to the country he left behind, the 'Rebirth of America' of the subtitle to Ellsworth's book. At the cemetery, in section 27, people once enslaved lie with Black and white soldiers who died for the Union cause. Ellsworth said he set his final scene there in order 'to remind Americans of the glories of our past, and of the incredible Americans that have built this country. 'One thing I want people to know is how close we came to losing our country to the Confederacy, of slavery surviving in some form, for a while at least. It's just by the skin of our teeth that the Union is held together, but it was held together by this remarkable coalition which we'd never really seen before, in the US, of men and women, Black and white, native-born and immigrant people putting aside differences to come together, ultimately, to work for a common goal. 'We need to honor the courage and grit that these loyal citizens showed, to endure those four years of hell. One out of every 50 Americans died during the war. Every family in the north lost somebody, and they were able to hang in there through it all. I want us to recognize that, and to recognize that we have plenty of heroes in our past, and I think it's helpful to look toward them as some of our institutions are under attack now, and remember that they paid a very high price. 'The runaways, the formerly enslaved, the Union soldiers, they could not have imagined the America that we have today. But we wouldn't have it, had it not been for them. They helped to build it, and we owe them something.' Midnight on the Potomac is out now.
