Guest List: Today’s Newsmakers

The Washingtonians in headlines today we’d like to have dinner with tonight By Alyssa Rosenberg

Comments () | Published January 27, 2011

• Holly Petraeus. General David Petraeus’s wife has gone from supporting one soldier to supporting all of them. As chair of a task force that’s creating the military families’ office within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mrs. Petraeus is taking her crusade to the New York Times and to Katie Couric. Her husband is the one often talked about as a presidential candidate, but she may be emerging as a Washington power player in her own right.

• Christopher Barclay. The president of the Montgomery County Board of Education is facing an interesting challenge: the school system, the largest in the state, doesn’t have any charter schools. But that could change soon: The Maryland Board of Education told Montgomery County to reopen its deliberations on two applications to open charter schools in the jurisdiction. With lawmakers in Congress working to jump-start DC’s lapsed school-voucher program, school-choice discussions in Washington are about to heat up.

• Maya Robinson. The District native is an accountant by day—and organizer of an alternative farmers market by night. The Grey Market, so named because not all of its vendors are strictly licensed, got a shot of legitimacy when Kushi restaurant agreed to host it. Robinson’s work and Kushi’s sponsorship are reinvigorating debate about what it means to truly eat locally.

• Nathan Wilson. The founder of Richmond’s Project Meridian Foundation is part of a coalition ramping up the fight against human trafficking in Virginia, a group that ranges from liberal Democratic lawmakers to Governor Bob McDonnell to professors from Liberty University. Some analysts have argued that because Maryland and the District both upped their anti-trafficking enforcement, the trade in women shifted to Virginia. If Virginia catches up with the region, will trafficking just move somewhere else?

• Laura Govan. Gilbert Arenas may be gone from Washington, but his newly revealed and wildly acrimonious split from longtime girlfriend Govan has their Great Falls house as its ground zero. Their on-again/off-again relationship provided plenty of gossip fodder while the pair were still together, but after throwing Arenas out, Govan turned to high-powered lawyers. Let the fighting over the shark grotto commence. We only hope their Columbus-based shark tender has other work lined up.

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