By Jonathan Ernst

Police were shutting down intersections. Tensions were high as I begged an officer to let me down a back alley to a secret parking lot I know about – this is Capitol Hill, but it’s also my home. I found my way to the church’s back lot, threw open my trunk, grabbed a pair of bodies and lenses and made sure I had a few memory cards.

The U.S. Capitol was a blur on my right behind the pulsing lights of police cruisers as I hustled over to Pennsylvania Avenue. In the tony northwest quadrant of the city, the White House is this street’s most important landmark, but here in the gritty Southeast is where the real city rubs up against the federal government.

It was brisk, and the wind was really blowing through the breaks in the buildings around me. I was excited. My blood was pumping. This is the city where important people do important things. A city of naked ambition, exposed agendas, bold truths and bald lies.

This is the city built on Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and, well, Washington. I could see the four of them up ahead me, in fact. In their boxer shorts. Surrounded by mostly naked people. Who had been drinking. Which is also, if you dig up a collection of the city’s more sordid headlines, pretty much par for the course.

The four ex-presidents, the Washington Nationals baseball mascots known as the Rushmores, had joined about 1,000 runners in their skivvies as they poured out of bars and taverns to start Cupid’s Undie Run, an annual charity event to raise money for the Children’s Tumor Foundation. Co-founder Bobby Gill corralled runners with a bullhorn, wearing a bright red top hat, bright (and tight) red “I’m with Cupid” briefs and nothing else. He told me they had filled all 1,000 slots for this year’s run in Washington, and since starting the event in 2010, have already expanded to 18 cities. Runners across the country raised over $1 million on Saturday, Gill told the cheering crowd.

A modest few wore their underwear over running clothes, but apparently it didn’t take an act of congress to get the rest of them into bikini briefs, bras, panties, lacy things, and other assorted unmentionables – most in Valentine’s Day shades of red and pink. They took off at a very modest pace, past the venerable Library of Congress, north to the Supreme Court, which, ironically, is not naked these days, but covered with a construction tarp. There were many stops along the way for runners to take snapshots in front of the Capitol dome as they passed it on the way out and back on the 1.5-mile (2.4 km) route.

This is a neighborhood where serious breaches of decorum can get you indicted, disbarred, censured, recalled or even impeached. But on this day, for these cheeky Capitol Hill mischief-makers, they bypassed the usual tearful press conferences and simply retired at the end of their term. All were re-admitted to the bar.

I arrived in Dadaab, Kenya, well after the story broke.

It is the world’s largest refugee camp with a population of over 400,000, almost exclusively Somali, refugees. Its originally capacity was only for 90,000. Dadaab became front-page news this summer as the population spiked as a wave of “New Arrivals” crowded into the camps at a rate of more than 1,500 people per day as they fled the famine in their home country.

It’s a huge place, and getting around even requires a commute. Convoys roll from the main aid compounds only at certain hours for security reasons. Aid workers talk about how safe and peaceful it has been over the first 20 years, but the internal politics and demographics of the camp have changed dramatically in the past three or so years, as new arrivals outnumber the original shelter-seekers.

When I got there, the crush of new arrivals was still being processed, but the crush of international media had already left town. One of my first nights in the camps, at the bar in the UN compound, I met the crew who operated the satellite television transmissions for networks around the world whenever they wanted to “go live” from Dadaab. They had just rotated in and were prepared to be there as long as one month. But they left after just four days, as there was no longer any demand for them. Anderson Cooper of CNN was one of the last big names to pass through, and he had left a week or so before.

My primary work for Reuters is in the halls of power in Washington, where it’s usually a lot more fun being in the middle of the biggest stories, but in Dadaab I was happy to be there without the hoopla of a lot of other media around. It gave me a little more freedom to find things that interested me — and that I thought readers would also find interesting — and not just chase the story of the day.

While reading some of the UN statistics reports, I noticed that they reported “New Births” on the same line every day as they did “New Arrivals” — the starving people materializing from the desert. I hadn’t known much about Dadaab before I arrived there; about its history and how it had been there for 20 years and looked to be there another 20. I thought one way to illustrate that life will go on in Dadaab was to show the maternity ward at one of the hospitals.

Even if the flow of new arrivals stops tomorrow, Dadaab will continue to grow just from the natural circle of life. The Somalis have one of the highest fertility rates of any nations in the world. The UN, U.S. government and the World Bank all rank Somalia in the top ten countries, with each mother averaging over six births.

I also felt that showing healthy children in the maternity ward would make a more hopeful counterpoint to the images of starving and malnourished children that had been seen around the world in recent weeks, which were no doubt newsworthy but also horrifying.

I made arrangements to go to the hospital at the one of the three main camps, Hagadera, which is run by the International Rescue Committee. Doctor Beldina Jakundi allowed me to shadow her while she completed her rounds that morning.

(Listen to Doctor Beldina Jakundi talk about her work at the maternity ward here)

It’s telling that the maternity ward has a capacity of 30, while the stabilization ward for malnourished children has a capacity of only 21 — and it’s not full currently. The maternity ward, however, did not appear to have an empty bed.

The visit there accomplished what I hoped it would — it was a way to show another angle of a big story, but at the same time it was a nice break from some of the other things I was photographing at Dadaab: the long lines of people waiting to be processed every morning, fisticuffs at food distribution centers as people tried to jump ahead in line, the vast expanses of “tukuls,” or improvised dwellings made of sticks and cloths that looked more like bird’s nests than homes — the whole dehumanizing process for these thousands of people.

Experts say the population at Dadaab will top half a million by next year. Even after the famine abates, there will be stories to be told here.

The 48-year-old Muhammad was put to death by lethal injection at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia, said Virginia Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor.

“Death was pronounced at 9:11 p.m. There were no complications. Mr. Muhammad was asked if he wished to make a last statement. He did not acknowledge us or make any statement whatsoever,” Traylor told reporters.

“Things went very normally,” Traylor added.

Three journalists who witnessed the execution said a clean-shaven Muhammad was stoic as he was strapped down and as the lethal injection was administered.

Muhammad was convicted of killing Dean Harold Meyers at a gas station near Manassas, Virginia, during a three-week shooting spree in October 2002 that spanned Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Paul Ebert, the Virginia prosecutor who won the death penalty conviction against Muhammad, was among the officials and family members of victims to witness the execution.

“He died very peacefully, much more than most of his victims. I felt a sense of closure and I hope that they did too,” Ebert told reporters.

As witnesses spoke to reporters gathered outside the correctional center, an ambulance carrying Muhammad’s body to the medical examiner office in the state capital Richmond left through a gate behind them.

Muhammad’s teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, also was convicted in a separate trial of another killing in Virginia and is serving a life sentence in prison.

Malvo was 17 at the time of the shootings.

There has been uncertainty over exactly how many of the victims were shot by Malvo and how many were killed by Muhammad, though courts have found they acted together in all of the sniper slayings.

The random shootings terrified many people in and around the U.S. capital a year after the hijacked airliner attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and the mailing of deadly anthrax-laced letters to politicians and media organizations.

The pair shot innocent people who were going about the ordinary tasks of daily life in places like gas stations, shopping mall parking lots and outside restaurants and schools.

Authorities said Muhammad and Malvo cut a special hole in the back of a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice and fired rifle shots from the trunk of the car.

The execution took place after Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine rejected Muhammad’s request for clemency based on his claims of mental illness.

“I find no compelling reason to set aside the sentence that was recommended by the jury and then imposed and affirmed by the courts,” Kaine said in a statement.

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a request by Muhammad’s lawyers to halt his execution and also rejected their appeal.

Muhammad’s current lawyers argued that his attorneys at trial were ineffective by allowing Muhammad to briefly represent himself at the start of his trial. They said he was too mentally impaired to act as his own lawyer.

(Reporting by James Vicini and Joanne Allen, Editing by Chris Wilson)