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AMC today provided the first of several planned updates on the “Breaking Bad” prequel

Former Secretary of State and expected 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be in Arlington on Saturday, signing copies of her new memoir.

Hard Choices will go on sale on Tuesday. The book chronicles Clinton’s four years as Secretary of State and the “crises, choices, and challenges she faced.”

Clinton will be signing copies of the book at the Pentagon City Costco store from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on June 14.

Following Hillary to the signing will be a large tour bus paid for by Ready for Hillary, the Arlington-based political action committee that’s supporting Clinton in her expected 2016 presidential run.

The Virginia Dept. of Motor Vehicles today sent cease and desist orders to Uber and Lyft, ordering the popular ride-sharing services to stop operating in the Commonwealth.

The DMV asserts that the smartphone-based services, which allow drivers to make money by using their own cars like a dispatched taxicab, are illegal because they have not received the proper authorization from the DMV to operate in Virginia.

In letters to company officials, the DMV says it will “enforce existing laws by companies… and by individual drivers that lack authority to provide passenger transportation.”

Tonight the Arlington County Police Department said it plans to assist in that enforcement, effective immediately.

“We will enforce it, but it will not be a primary focus of our operations,” ACPD spokesman Dustin Sternbeck told ARLnow.com. “We are going to take a soft approach, but we will not turn a blind eye.”

Both Uber and Lyft, meanwhile, told news outlets that they’ll keep operating in Virginia.

Sternbeck did not clarify how, exactly, officers plan to single out Uber and Lyft drivers for enforcement. While Uber drivers typically operate discreetly, with nothing to outwardly distinguish their vehicles, Lyft drivers are supposed to drive around with a large, pink moustache attached to their car’s grille.

Jon Liss, Executive Director of Tenants and Workers United, which has been rallying local cab drivers against Uber and Lyft, applauded the DMV’s action and called on the Arlington County Board to do more to protect cab drivers.

“It is time for Arlington to get in sync with the state DMV and enforce one set of rules for all taxi-like services,” he said. “Drivers in Arlington deserve ‘dispute resolution’ protections and fair and enforced regulations.”

Arlington Falls Church Young Republicans slammed the state’s response to Uber and Lyft, placing blame on Virginia’s Democratic governor.

“The DMV’s decision to crack down on Lyft and Uber is reprehensible,” said AFCYR Chairman Matthew Hurtt. “During his campaign, Governor McAuliffe emphasized the importance of efficient government and transportation in making the Commonwealth the best place for business. Yet, less than six months into his term, he stands idly by while his administration cracks down on a thriving industry that not only brings jobs to the region, but also provides safe and efficient transportation at an affordable price.”

“The DMV should withdraw their cease and desist letter along with their preposterous interpretation of this law,” Hurtt concluded.

Sharks. Sharks. Everywhere – sharks! From the eagerly anticipated premiere of Sharknado 2: The Second One (July 30)

“I haven’t had a close relationship with my grandparents since I graduated from college 14 years ago,” writes Lindsay in Nashville. “I only see them a couple of times a year, so it’s typically pretty awkward when we get together. I have nothing against them, but they haven’t been involved with my life in so long it’s almost like we’re acquaintances, rather than family.”

This masterpiece is what Lindsay received this year for her birthday.

Adds Lindsay: “They have written me, my sister and my mother out of their will multiple times — though we’re all reinstated now, as far as I know.”

related: Smack! Right in the feels.

Booze Delivery Service Coming to N. Va. — Ultra, a web-based service that facilitates the delivery of beer, wine and liquor, is launching this week in D.C. and is planning on launching in Northern Virginia “within a couple of weeks.” Ultra promises that most orders will be delivered in 30-60 minutes. The deliveries are made by licensed stores that partner with the company. [Washington Business Journal]

Shuttleworth Releases Poll Results — Former Democratic congressional candidate Bruce Shuttleworth has shared the results of a district-wide poll his campaign conducted earlier this month. The poll shows Don Beyer well in the lead among likely voters, but it also shows a sizable group of undecided voters. Shuttleworth dropped out of the race after the poll results came in, concluding that even if he “went negative” against Beyer he could not overcome the former Va. lieutenant governor’s lead. [Blue Virginia]

Congressional Candidates to Debate — The seven remaining Democrats in the congressional race will face off tomorrow (Friday) in a debate at the Arlington County Democratic Committee meeting. The meeting starts at 7:00 p.m. at the NRECA building (4301 Wilson Blvd) and is open to the public. [InsideNova]

Arlington Issues $105 Million in Bonds – Arlington County yesterday issued $105 million in bonds at an average interest rate of 2.8 percent. The bonds will be used to fund capital contributions for Metro, Neighborhood Conservation projects, WalkArlington, BikeArlington, ConnectArlington; street paving, utility projects and Arlington Public Schools projects. The county will also save nearly $2 million thanks to refunding prior debt at a lower interest rate. [Arlington County]

In anticipation of its highly-awaited second season premiere of Orange is the New Black on June 6, Netflix has released the first batch of never-before-seen Season 2 character posters of Alex, Nicky, Sophia, Lorna and Big Boo!

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s some very good news: After two decades of steady decline, teen pregnancy rates have hit a record low in the US, plummeting in every state and across ethnic groups, according to new research from the Guttmacher Insitute. The study, released this week, found that just six percent of women between the ages of 15 and 19 got pregnant in 2010, which means that there were 57 pregnancies for every 1,000 teenage girls. That’s a stunning 51 percent drop from the peak rate in 1990, and a 15 percent decrease from 2008 alone.

Teen abortion and birth rates have similarly declined from their respective peaks, although the drop off has been less dramatic.

Image courtesy of the Guttmacher Institute 

“We’ve known that birth rates were falling, but this is something different—now we know that it’s because fewer teens are actually becoming pregnant in the first place,” said lead author Kathryn Kost, a Guttmacher researcher. “The takeaway is that it appears teens are taking control of their sexual and reproductive lives.”

“I think we’re probably seeing the wider impact of efforts to ensure teens can access the information and contraceptive services they need to prevent pregnancies,” Kost added. But she conceded that the report doesn’t offer much to explain the trend. “This is basically a statistical report to put on the table, and look at what we have,” she said. “Really the next step is asking why? What can we do to figure out what is causing these declines?”

It’s easy to see the numbers as proof that progressive sexual health policies, like expanding health care coverage for birth control and cutting off funding for abstinence-only education, are working—and that conservative opposition to said policies is just backwards paternalism and vagina fear-mongering. But while birth control and comprehensive sex ed obviously play a role in lowering the teen pregnancy rate, that’s not the whole story. A deeper look at the data on teen sexuality reveals a much more nuanced picture, raising big questions about what is actually behind the dramatic drop in teen pregnancies, births, and abortions. Clearly some teenage girls have figured out a way to avoid getting pregnant. But what exactly it is that they are doing—and why—remains a mystery.

Of course, it’s not all good news. Despite the downward trends, the US still has more teen births than any other industrialized nation. According to the report, there were still some 614,000 teen pregnancies in 2010—a huge number that doesn’t include 11,000 pregnancies among girls aged 14 and below. The study also found that while teen pregnancy declined nationally, progress from state to state has been uneven, and pregnancy rates among black and Hispanic teens remain twice as high as rates for white teens.

“One of the nation's great national success stories over the past two decades has been the truly stunning declines in teen pregnancy and childbearing,” said Bill Albert, the chief program officer for The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancies. “But when we talk about all of this good news, we do have to temper it a bit with a glass half-empty interpretation.”

The most obvious, albeit slightly surprising, explanation for the decline in pregnancy rates is that teens are actually having less sex than they used to. According to federal data, 57 percent of teen girls reported that they were virgins in 2010, up from 49 percent in 1995. That timeline closely corresponds to the heyday of abstinence-only sex ed, which started getting federal funding as part of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and turned into a billion industry under the George W. Bush administration before the Obama administration slashed abstinence spending in 2009. Interestingly, CDC studies have found that since 2002, the number one reason most teens, male or female, give for not having had sex is that it is “against their religion or morals.” All of which suggests that telling kids they should wait to have sex—or alternatively, warning them that premarital sex will turn you into a prostitute and/or junkie, as the Las Vegas Police Department did at a “Choose Purity” event last weekend—might actually be working, at least for some teens.

“The Guttmacher report doesn’t really address the fact that there is an increase in the number of high-school students who are waiting to have sex,” said Valerie Huber, president of the National Abstinence Education Association. “Anyone who wants to have an honest dialogue about this has to acknowledge the fact that in the midst of a highly sexualized cultures, teens are holding off on having sex.”

Abstinence-only or otherwise, sex ed is horrifying, so it’s not totally surprising that it has scared kids out of having sex. Add to that the Teen Mom tabloid horror show and crying-toddler PSAs, and it’s safe to say teen girls are getting the message that having a baby is really fucking terrible.

But while the overall teen pregnancy rate includes a substantial number of young women who have never had intercourse, the Guttmacher report also found that pregnancy has also declined among teens who are having sex, dropping 43 percent from its 1990 peak to a rate of about 127 pregnancies per 1,000 women. It’s worth noting, too, that most girls haven’t had any sex education by the time they lose their virginity, according to a recent CDC report, which calls the mistiming a “missed opportunity to introduce medically accurate information on abstinence and effective contraceptive use.”

It is true that kids are using contraception way more than they did back in the days before AIDS and the Moral Majority, when bras were optional and everyone was having cowboy sex. But just because teen pregnancy rates are falling doesn’t mean that teens are practicing safe sex. About half of new STD infections in the US are contracted by people under age 25, and girls ages 15-19 have the largest number of reported cases of gonorrhea and chlamydia, according to the most recent CDC statistics. Moreover, data shows that rates of contraception use among teens didn’t change much between 2002 and 2010, although teen pregnancy rates fell by about 18 percent during that period.

“There seems to be an unsolvable mystery here,” said Bill Albert. “Teen sex has gone down, but it has leveled off, contraceptive use continues to creep up a little bit. But pregnancy rates have fallen off the charts. And yet the STD rates remain quite high.”

So what exactly is it that teen girls are doing to avoid getting knocked up? Maybe it’s as simple as taking Plan B, which wasn’t available at pharmacies until 2006 (and even then, only with a prescription for women under age 17.) Or maybe teen girls are just telling their boyfriends to pull the fuck out. Maybe it’s some combination of factors, and teen girl magic. Whatever it is, finding the answer could unlock the secret to helping the too-high number of teen girls that are still getting pregnant.

“As with all things, the more targeted you can get, the narrower you can refine the message, the more successful you can be,” said Albert. “The wrong message to take from the new data is that we can pack up our tents and go home. It's not like we found a vaccination.” 

GOP Rep. John Mica assuring himself a place in the history books. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Debates about drug legalization tend to take place in exotic places like Uruguay and the state of Colorado that US political elites in Washington, DC, can dismiss as far away dens of nefarious hedonism. So it hit a bit closer to home a few weeks ago when the local city council voted overwhelmingly to decriminalize pot in the streets of DC, raising the specter (in the most paranoid minds, at least) of choom gangs harassing lawmakers as they make their way between Capitol Hill and swanky parties with corporate lobbyists.

Mayor Vincent Gray quickly signed the bill, which would render most possession offenses civil violations with fines rather than jailtime, as is already the case in 17 states ranging from Alaska to New York. And normally, that would be that. But because this is our nation's capital, one where the mostly black population has lacked legitimate representation since America's founding, federal lawmakers on Friday morning held a goofy hearing about what the crazy natives have been up to. In fact, if both houses of Congress were to pass a bill blocking the DC law before it goes into effect this summer, all it would take is a signature from Mr. Choom Gang himself to negate it entirely.

Given the way the hearing started, that outcome did not seem completely beyond the realm of possibility.

"Marijuana is an addicting substance. There’s a myth out there that it’s not," said Republican Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana, who annnounced plans to introduce a bill blocking the decriminalization law during a break from the proceedings. The GOP chair of the House Oversight Committee that conducted the hearing, Rep. John Mica, went so far as to brandish a fake joint apparently assembled by his staff—"They have more experience," he said—and warn that pot is a gateway to more serious drugs, a refrain most of us have been hearing from cranky old people our entire lives. (Mica complained there was no way to submit the doobie to the congressional record: “I can’t submit this … as I said, it’s a faux joint.")

But legalization advocates I canvassed immediately after the hearing are confident the law will survive, in part because the national trendlines are clear at this point—even many Republicans don't want to look like old school drug warriors anymore, as it just kills them with young libertarians. And advocacy for the DC bill centered on the fact that weed arrests disproportionately affect black youth even though they use the drug no more often than whites, not the idea that we should be free to get high.

"The DC decriminalization bill is fundamentally about racial justice," said Seema Sadanandan, program director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation's Capital and one of the experts who testified at the hearing. "We don't want this to become a flashpoint for some partisan battle." (To his credit, Rep. Mica acknowledged the racial bias in drug arrests to be a problem, even if he was skeptical decriminalization would fix it.) The strategy is poised to bear fruit.

"DC decriminalization will take effect in mid-July," Bill Piper, director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, e-mailed me confidently. "There's no way Congress can stop it before then. Fleming's resolution will never pass, and even an appropriations rider would come long after decriminalization takes effect."

The rider he's talking about is a more surreptitious way lawmakers might block DC's decriminalization plans. Indeed, it's how they gutted a medical marijuana ballot initiative city voters passed in 1998. Each year, the House of Representatives passes a financial services funding bill that includes money for the District of Columbia, and theoretically lawmakers could include language prohibiting any of that cash from being spent on enforcing the new law. But because the spending bill isn't likely to pass until late this year—if it passes at all, no slam dunk given how dysfunctional Congress has been lately—DC's new law will have already become reality. Turning back the clock on drug policy would be a stretch given the way the national winds are blowing, especially when combined with the crystal clear implications for the city's youth.

"It seems increasingly unlikely that congressional leadership will see interfering with DC's decriminalization law as a smart political move," said Tom Angell, founder of Marijuana Majority, a national legalization advocacy group. Of course, that doesn't mean the old dudes who run this country can't keep acting like reactionary buffoons to remind us how out of touch they are.

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Andrew Alford, a third-grader at Long Branch Elementary School, died for still-unexplained reasons on April 11. This Saturday several groups around Arlington are organizing fundraisers and events to honor his memory.

This Saturday at 6:45 p.m., Arlington Little League, in cooperation with the Mothers of North Arlington, Long Branch PTA and Evolve All Martial Arts, is coordinating a memorial ceremony at Barcroft Sport and Fitness Center (4200 S. Four Mile Run Drive) on baseball field No. 1. Those in attendance are asked to wear orange, Andrew’s favorite color, and to write remembrances of Andrew for his family to keep.

“While for me this is a personal tragedy that I will never recover from, the community has been amazing in their support of Andrew and me in their efforts to honor his memory and the amazing boy he was,” Louisa Marinaccio, Andrew’s mother, told ARLnow.com in an email. “Andrew loved orange, the Pittsburgh Pirates and his momma. He dreamed of pitching for the Pirates in the World Series and owning a mint condition Honus Wagner card.”

In addition to the event Saturday night, the Arlington Little League has pledged to transform the dirt field at Long Branch in Lyon Park into a full-fledged baseball field in an effort they’ve named the Andrew Alford Memorial Project. Marinaccio said Frank Coonelly, the president of the Pittsburgh Pirates, reached out to her and pledged to donate to the fund.

In addition, MONA will start the Andrew Alford Buddy Bench Project, according to Marinaccio, “as an annual community service project with a goal of installing an orange Buddy Bench in Andrew’s honor at every elementary school in Arlington.”

Arlington Little League President Adam Balutis recounted his favorite Andrew story in an email he wrote to the parents of little leaguers.

“He was playing catcher on a close play at the plate, and an opposing player slid hard into Andrew, accidentally hitting him in the face with his cleats,” Balutis wrote. “With dirt and blood all over his face, Andrew’s mother told him that all the girls at school would say he looked cute and tough and cool. She said Andrew refused to wash his face for hours.”

Photos courtesy Louisa Marinaccio