Last week Michael O’Hanlon a senior fellow at the Brooking Institute for Defense and Foreign Policy  talked about the Syrian civil war and compared it to Bosnia in the late 1990’s. The US was eventually shamed into intervention in Bosnia with air power. In Syria the longer the civil war, the larger the outside Muslim terrorists foot hold in Syria will become, and the bigger the terrorist threat will be to us, Europe, and Israel. But this time the solution won’t be from the air. Michael said the US will intervene in Syria with European and Muslim countries as allies. After about 10 minutes, Michael opened up for questions which he took 3 at a time. He talked about Iran, sanctions and Israel’s lack of patience and about Israel/Palestine negotiations. He was asked “what effected the fact that by 2015, due to fracking technology, the US will be the largest producer of oil and natural gas will have on the Middle East situation?” He said that it is already having an effect on sanctions in Iran.

Last Week, Jonathon Smoke, Chief Economist of Hanley Wood (a DC based national media and data company) shared data and insights on DC and MD area housing and new construction. Hanley Wood collects data on all types of home sales and tracks new construction in the DC/MD region and the country. Jonathon shared multiple key data points about DC/MD. The DC region is one of the healthiest housing Markets in the US. (Editors note: this makes sense in that median government workers have twice the income than private sector workers in the 5th year of the recession. ) Resale houses are up and new home construction has started to rebound. Meanwhile, foreclosure activity has declined while banks sold off foreclosed homes and left little foreclosure inventory. The market has very limited supplies of homes for sale of both new construction and existing homes causing higher prices in 2013. Home prices should not go up more in 2014. Consumer confidence is strong even after the government shutdown. Life events (ie: bigger family, higher income) seem to be what is driving new home demand again, back to normal times.

Last week, our newest member, Jorge Urrutia was scheduled to give his Classification talk but unfortunately he did not make it to the meeting.

Past president Lasse Syversen and also responsible for the website agreed to be the speaker with help from Steve Vaccarezza. The two of them made a live demo of the site and explained how to use it.  It turned out to be a needed session only a few of our members are using the website on a regular basis. We probably have one of the best maintained websites in Rotary and the members will benefit from making www.nbrotary.org their homepage. We should probably ask the team to come back soon for more Q&A and a more teaching.