Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Nats go over .500 the hard way by beating the O’s and Corbin Burnes

A look at what has changed since the Nationals were last above .500

Baseball can crush rookies. Why hasn’t it crushed Trey Lipscomb?

Middle East conflict live updates: WHO says health services in south Gaza will run out of fuel in three days

Commerce Department revokes more export licenses to China’s Huawei

U.S. signals optimism for Gaza cease-fire as Israel moves into Rafah 

The FTC’s noncompete clause rule goes too far

The next global crisis could come from the sun. We should prepare now.

The crisis Biden and Trump don’t want to deal with

Postal worker finds WWII-era letters, drives 5 hours to deliver them

Strangers help Sesame Street puppeteer after heirloom necklace was stolen

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

France tries to shed its rude reputation ahead of the Olympics

Don’t be a jerk at the airport: A guide for headphones

The new cure-all for vacation excess: the IV drip 

In Arizona, election workers trained with deepfakes to prepare for 2024

Election 2024 latest news: Biden back in the battleground state of Wisconsin

How Trump’s allies amplify his Truth Social messages to the wider world

‘Look at the U.S.A.’: A photographer’s reflection on post-9/11 conflict

In photos: The scene after tornadoes struck Michigan and Oklahoma 

RFK Jr’s ‘history lesson’ on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flunks the fact test

The Trump-Biden battle over the 2017 tax cut

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

Ask Amy: I want to be closer with my brother. He never reaches out to me.

Miss Manners: I’m offended by a golfer’s skirt choice

Carolyn Hax: Family pushes siblings to ‘make amends’ after their mother’s death

A college professor wants to use Section 230 against Big Tech

Apple plays up AI potential in new iPads

In court, Stormy Daniels pulled a Trump on Trump 

Social Security has to be fixed. But you still need your own savings.

An I bond is now at 4.28 percent. Are they still a good deal?

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

US-VOTE-POLITICS-ECONOMY-BIDEN

Family photo

As a child during World War II, Priit Vesilind escaped Nazi-occupied Estonia with his family ahead of an advancing Soviet army bent on recapturing their homeland and dragging it back into the U.S.S.R.

The family’s flight to the West culminated in a harrowing trek across Germany to American lines, followed by four years in a refugee camp and, eventually, resettlement in Pennsylvania.

Years later, as a senior writer and editor for National Geographic magazine, Mr. Vesilind slipped back into Estonia on one of a series of trips to chronicle life behind the Iron Curtain. He covered the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, even taking a sledgehammer to it as crowds dismantled the barrier between East and West Berlin that physically symbolized the separation of the Moscow-controlled Communist bloc from Western democracies.

“I couldn’t hold back the tears,” Mr. Vesilind said later of the intense experience that heralded the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “I could only scribble and weep, scribble and weep.”

Mr. Vesilind died Nov. 3 in Manassas, Va., of complications from strokes and a cranial fistula following dementia, said his daughter, Emili Vesilind. He was 80.

During a three-decade career at National Geographic, Mr. Vesilind served as the magazine’s adventure and expeditions editor and European specialist. He circled the globe and explored the oceans, diving to the wreck of the battleship Arizona at Pearl Harbor and descending four miles into the Atlantic in a Russian submersible in search of a Japanese submarine sunk by U.S. forces during the war.

He dived deep into fresh water in the Yucatán to explore ancient Mayan caves, hunted seal with Inuits, retraced the travels of the Vikings and chased twisters in Tornado Alley across 10 states of the Plains and Southwest.

In his first major story for National Geographic, Mr. Vesilind journeyed the length of the Ohio River, which he had fished in as a child, and stopped in cities and towns along the way. For that assignment, he worked for a while on a towboat, toiled at a West Virginia coal terminal and sold peanuts at a ballgame in Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium.

But his most impactful reporting took place behind the Iron Curtain, notably his risky foray into his native Estonia on a tourist visa in 1980, followed by trips to other realms of the Soviet bloc.

Those journeys not only helped Americans understand the plight of inhabitants of the Baltic states, but also offered a glimmer of hope to those citizens. His April 1980 piece, “Return to Estonia,” was passed around clandestinely in his Soviet-occupied homeland, inspiring Estonians by capturing their aspirations for freedom.

After Estonia declared independence amid the Soviet Union’s collapse, the country’s new president, Lennart Meri, awarded Mr. Vesilind a medal, the Third Order of the White Star, in recognition of “his contributions to the liberation of Estonia,” a citation said.

“He was like a national hero in Estonia,” Glenn Oeland, an editor at National Geographic, told The Washington Post. “People were very heartened by that story. Priit helped get the word out about what was going on there” under Soviet rule, “and Estonian people felt like they had not been forgotten.”

Priit Juho Vesilind was born in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, on Jan. 4, 1943. His father was an engineer for an automaker, and his mother worked in a bank.

The next year, after Soviet bombers struck Tallinn and Red Army troops attacked, Mr. Vesilind’s mother fled with Priit and his older brother by train to Czechoslovakia. His father stayed behind but later jumped on a ship bound for Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland) and eventually met up with his wife and sons.

From Czechoslovakia, they made their way west across southern Germany on foot along a rail line, the toddler pushed along in an old wheelbarrow with the family’s meager belongings. The family took cover as Allied bombers destroyed the rail lines, sometimes hid in barn haylofts and subsisted on dried bread before finally encountering U.S. troops in May 1945.

One of Mr. Vesilind’s earliest memories, according to his wife, Rima Vesilind, was receiving a can of peaches from American GIs who stopped in their jeep.

The family reached a camp for displaced people in Geislingen, West Germany, and stayed there for four years with more than 4,000 other Estonians. In September 1949, the Vesilinds were sponsored for immigration by a Lutheran church and arrived in the western Pennsylvania town of Beaver on the Ohio River.

Mr. Vesilind graduated in 1964 from Colgate University with a bachelor’s degree in English, then joined the Navy. He later received a master’s degree in communications photography from Syracuse University under the GI Bill.

In 1966, he married Rima Treviño Ford. Besides his wife, survivors include two sons, Paul Vesilind of Annandale, Va., and William Vesilind of Alexandria, Va.; a daughter, Emili Vesilind of Fairfax, Va.; and six grandchildren.

After leaving the Navy, Mr. Vesilind worked as a sportswriter for the Atlanta Journal and as outdoor editor for the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. He joined National Geographic in 1973 and moved to the Washington suburbs.

His books included “On Assignment U.S.A.,” about the adventures of National Geographic writers and photographers; “Lost Gold of the Republic: The Remarkable Quest for the Greatest Shipwreck Treasure of the Civil War Era,” describing the search for a gold- and silver-laden vessel that sank in 1865; and “The Singing Revolution,” about Estonia’s fight for freedom from the Soviet Union.

When news broke in November 1989 that the Berlin Wall was about to come down, Mr. Vesilind boarded a flight on two hours’ notice and headed to the divided city. Overcome with emotion, he soon became a participant in that defining moment in history.

“I helped knock it down,” he recalled later. “I took a sledgehammer and knocked the daylights out of it.” He was photographed in Berlin holding a chunk of the wall, a big smile on his face.

“I started out as one of those people potentially stuck behind the Iron Curtain,” he told a Beaver Rotary Club audience in 2007. “And when I witnessed that, I thought, ‘My God, it’s finally over,’” the Beaver County Times reported.

But Mr. Vesilind faced a dilemma in Berlin. While television networks were covering the event live, and newspaper stories would be published within hours, the lead time for publication in National Geographic was at least four months. So Mr. Vesilind set off to cover what was happening along the length of the border between the two Germanys.

“The German-German border had separated brothers and sisters, villages and neighborhoods, brass bands and soccer teams,” he wrote in his story titled “Berlin’s Ode to Joy” in the April 1990 magazine. “When the gates opened, both governments were astonished to find a German nation intact. From the border zone, where neighbors again met face-to-face, a network of connections spread inland, like needles pulling thread.”

National Geographic, meanwhile, had its own conundrum. It was coming out with a new atlas, which had to stand the test of time because it would be years before the next one was issued. Should Germany be shown as one country, or still divided in two? The editors consulted Mr. Vesilind. Based on his reporting, he was emphatic: one country.

“They trusted Priit, and he got it right,” said Scott Elder, a former staffer at the magazine.

The new atlas went to press in July 1990. It showed Germany as a single nation, the former border erased. Formal reunification occurred in October that year.

Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for Foreign Correspondence, 1983, for coverage of Afghanistan

Korn/Ferry International Journalism Award for United Nations reporting, 1993

Eugene Katz Award for immigration coverage, 2000

L.J. Hortin Distinguished Alumnus Award, E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, 2002

Ohio University, BSJ, 1974

William Branigin writes and edits breaking news. He previously was a reporter on The Post’s national and local staffs and spent 19 years overseas, reporting in Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East and Europe.

William Branigin

washpost

Priit Vesilind, longtime writer for National Geographic, dies at 80

the-washington-post

ob-main-vesilind

handout

Search Death Notices

Place a Death Notice

Request a News Obituary

Obituaries

prism://prism.query/obits-stream&limit=20

The Washington Post Obituaries section has Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia obituaries, appreciations and death notices as well as historical obits and celebrity obituaries.