Good Morning, RVA: Wear two coats

Don’t let the brilliant blue sky fool you, it’s cold out there!

February 3, 2015; 6:59 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: Kat Cole

Good morning, RVA! It’s 23 °F–that’s cold! It will remain cold until this afternoon, when temperatures might decide to break 40 °F. Then, this evening, it’ll be cold again. However, the sun will shine brightly throughout the day–so that’s something.

Water cooler

As promised, Mayor Jones announced our new chief of police: former Department Deputy Chief Alfred Durham. Durham joined the Richmond police department last November and has 25 years of experience with the DC police department. He’ll take office on February 21st.

The city’s Planning Commission “recommended approval of an ordinance to create a $300,000 fund for designing and building dedicated bike lanes along 15 blocks of Franklin and Main streets.” These would be true, protected bike lanes sandwiched between the sidewalk and a row of parked cars. While definitely a step forward, past experience shows that spending the money to design infrastructure doesn’t necessarily mean the city ends up with that infrastructure (RIP Hermitage-Laburnum roundabout, circa 2008).

Richmond’s school board voted to extend the open enrollment date for Binford Middle to March 6th from the citywide deadline of February 13th. The first step in the city’s plan to improve the failing middle school is to increase the number of students attending. The RTD’s Zachary Reid has a detailed look at the numbers and enrollment goals behind the extension.

I’m guessing that when you sell the controlling interest in a frozen yogurt chain with 348 franchises around the world, you make a boatload of cash.

Vox has some good headlines today shaming anti-vaxxers, with this one leading the pack: “Even ISIS supports getting kids vaccinated.” No one’s ever been convinced of anything by reading an article on the Internet, but here’s a good run down of the bogus research linking vaccines to autism #science.

Sports!

• #3 Hoos handled the #12 Heels, 75-64, and return to their winning ways.
• Caps host the Kings at 7:00 PM.
• Hokies travel to Syracuse to take on the Orange tonight at 9:00 PM.

This morning’s longread

Why Did the Chicken Make You Sick?

Get ready to never eat food again.

In response to that decision, in 1996 the F.S.I.S. enacted a series of new rules to curb pathogens like salmonella. For whole chickens, the salmonella “performance standard” was set at twenty per cent, meaning that one in every five bird carcasses could be contaminated. That standard has since been lowered to 7.5 per cent, but the performance standard for salmonella in ground chicken is much higher–44.6 per cent–and for ground turkey it is 49.9 per cent. “Which means that almost half of all your ground chicken that goes off the line can actually test positive for salmonella,” Urvashi Rangan, the director of food safety at Consumer Reports, told me.

This morning’s Instagram

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February 3, 2015 6:59 AM 0