August 2 — 8, 2018
FA LLS CHUR C H, V I R G I NI A • WW W. FC NP. C OM • FR EE
FOU N D E D 1991 • VOL. XXVIII NO. 24
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Finalists in more than 70 categories selected by readers in the 2018 Best of Falls Church have been announced. Now, readers will vote on the winners to be featured in a special “Best Of” edition of the News-Press publishing August 30.
Shields Optimistic Meeting With State Commerce Chief Will Yield Results
Economic Development Issues Unique to Small
Jurisdictions Discussed
BY NICHOLAS F. BENTON
SEE PAGES 12 – 13
FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS
only scratching the surface when it comes to Russia’s information warfare.” Facebook, in reporting its rooting out of 32 divisive, incendiary and false pages aimed at the November election, said it could not establish definitively that the pages came from Russia, but Warner said they did. Facebook said that “some of the tools and techniques used by the accounts were similar to those used by the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-linked group that was at the center of the indictments earlier this year,” according to a report in the New York Times.
Falls Church Mayor David Tarter, City Manager Wyatt Shields and a select group of key economic development figures from the City had an extensive exchange with Virginia’s Secretary of Commerce and Trade Brian Ball and members of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP) this week, and Shields told the News-Press afterwards that he was heartened by what transpired. “We are thankful for the state’s outreach to us to learn of our economic development issues. These folks can be very instrumental in helping to streamline the permitting process for us, sending prospective corporate tenants to occupy our new office space, and working through the usually complicated process of financing for affordable housing projects,” Shields said. The two-hour session that also included leaders from the nearby, and similarly-sized City of Fairfax, focused on the issues of workforce development, transportation and transit, and affordable housing. Mayor David Meyer of the City of Fairfax quipped that his city and Falls Church “share a common property line,” being I-66, though a half-dozen miles apart. Both cities share the challenges of “economies of scale,” he said, and have highly-educated and wellpaid populations. But Secretary Ball stressed the importance of other commonalities of the two jurisdictions that from his standpoint in Richmond “no one else in the state has.”
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Police say a man broke in and robbed a Falls Church home and then walked in on the sleeping resident before fleeing early last Tuesday morning. SEE NEWS BRIEFS, PAGE 9
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The DMV 2 Go bus offering a selection of DMV services returns to Falls Church this month with three visits scheduled for The Little City. SEE NEWS BRIEFS, PAGE 9
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John Marshall knew his mother biked unimaginable distances, but when he decided to join her annual 192-mile cycling challenge, he didn’t anticipate it being so intense or exhausting. SEE PAGE 8
INDEX
Editorial............... 6 Letters................. 6 News & Notes 10–11 Comment ...... 14-15 Business News . 17 Calendar ..... 18–19
Classified Ads ... 20 Comics, Sudoku & Crossword ........ 21 Crime Report ......22 Critter Corner....22
VIRGINIA SECRETARY of Commerce and Trade, Brian Ball (center), is shown flanked by Fairfax City Mayor David Meyer (left) and City of Falls Church Mayor David Tarter following a two-hour discussion on economic development for smaller jurisdictions held Tuesday in Fairfax City. Each mayor presented Ball with a copy of a semi-official history of their respective burgs. (P����: C��� �� F���� C�����)
Warner Sounds Alarm of Russian Hacking Threat to Nov. Elections BY NICHOLAS F. BENTON
FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS
One day after it was reported by executives at Facebook that over 32 covertly-crafted fake pages on its site were designed to influence this fall’s midterm elections in the U.S., the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, with Virginia’s Senator Mark Warner as its vice-chairman, conducted hearings on just such developments yesterday. The “Foreign Influence on Social Media Platforms” hearing featured three third-party social media experts, Renee DiResta of New Knowledge, Philip Howard of the Oxford Internet Institute and
Laura Rosenberger of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. Warner, in an opening statement to the committee, cautioned that with just three months to go before the critical November 2018 midterm elections, “Russianbacked operatives continue to infiltrate and manipulate social media to hijack the national conversation and set Americans against each other. They were doing it in 2016. They are still doing it today.” He stated that even after 18 months of investigating the phenomenon, and the indictments of 13 Russians and three Russian companies as a result, “We are still