By The Anniston Star, Ala.

May 17–Neighborhood schools have been part of Anniston’s landscape since the days when children played in Quintard Avenue’s wooded median. That educational tradition hasn’t changed.

Today, Anniston’s five public elementary schools are important parts of their surroundings. Families who live close to some of the oldest schools have strong emotions about them — they’re “their schools,” people are apt to say.

They’re right, of course.

Unfortunately, Anniston City Schools no longer needs five elementary schools. The city’s population has dwindled, and the number of children in the early grades can’t support five campuses. In the name of fiscal health and consolidation, the system needs to close an elementary school. Trust us when we say that closing a neighborhood school — which Anniston has done before — is unavoidably a painful event.

It’s understandable that Superintendent Joan Frazier prefers not to close an elementary school; she told Board of Education members that during Tuesday’s board meeting. Keeping all five elementaries open solves the dilemma of deciding which one to shutter.

But that option isn’t feasible. The quicker Frazier and the board settle on a system-wide consolidation plan that retains only four elementary schools, the better the Anniston system will be.

(Annistonians must remember that the idea of closing an elementary school is one part of a multi-piece puzzle that includes smarter use of all campuses. At the center of that puzzle is the middle school that sits on prime real estate north of downtown. Any worthwhile discussion must include strong consideration of moving middle-school students elsewhere and selling that McClellan-area property.)

If you’re wondering how contentious it will be for the board to select an elementary school to close, reporter Laura Camper’s story in Wednesday’s Star offered a primer for what lies ahead.

When Board President Mary Harrington suggested closing Tenth Street Elementary, Board Member Jim Klinefelter vigorously disagreed.

When Klinefelter suggested closing one of the “less successful” schools, Board Member William Hutchings opposed the notion and introduced race as a possible reason why Klinefelter would want to protect Tenth Street and close a school in the city’s majority-black wards.

President Obama should expect a debt ceiling fight unless he agrees to matching spending cuts, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday.

Boehner, at a news conference, said Obama has failed to take the lead on reining in the nation’s debt and spending.

“The largest tax hike in American history is scheduled for the end of this year, so are defense cuts that President Obama’s secretary of defense has said will hollow out America’s armed services,” the Ohio Republican said.

“Listen, America’s faced tough challenges before. And every time we’ve been able to meet them. We can do it again. But it will take a president willing to lead, or at least show up.”

Boehner accused Democrats of using “drama or brinkmanship” to push their agenda.

“Our debt and our deficit act as a wet blanket over our economy,” he said. “The sooner we deal honestly with our long-term debt and our budget deficit, the sooner the skies begin to clear, more certainty comes, so that American employers can do what they do best, put Americans to work.

Obama told congressional leaders Wednesday he will not allow a replay of last summer’s debt-ceiling fight that nearly put the United States in default and resulted in a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating.

The president said he expected a “serious bipartisan approach” to tackling the budget and growing federal deficit this year, White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

Obama told congressional leaders he intended to ask Congress to raise the debt ceiling without offsetting the increase dollar for dollar.

“When the president told me yesterday that he wanted a clean increase in the debt limit, it almost took my breath away. We had this debate last year,” Boehner said. “The White House wants to raise the debt limit without a single dime of spending cuts or reforms,” he said.

The debt-ceiling battle had been widely expected to begin after the November elections, when the country will again need to raise the borrowing limit.

The U.S. debt is expected to hit its current limit of $16.4 trillion in January.

President Barack Obama told congressional leaders he would not allow a replay of last summer’s debt-ceiling fight that nearly put the United States in default.

Over hoagie sandwiches at the White House, Obama called the political deadlock last July “simply not acceptable” and said he expected a “serious bipartisan approach” to tackling the budget and growing federal deficit this year, White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

The debt-ceiling battle had been widely expected to begin after the November elections, when the country will again need to raise the borrowing limit. But House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio — who clashed with Obama over the debt ceiling last summer — told an audience Tuesday Obama lacked the “courage” needed to reduce the nation’s deficit.

Boehner stood by his position at Wednesday’s White House meeting, telling Obama, “as long as I’m around here, I’m not going to allow a debt-ceiling increase without doing something serious about the debt,” an aide said.

Obama had told those at the meeting he intended to ask Congress to raise the debt ceiling without offsetting the increase dollar for dollar.

The U.S. debt is expected to hit its current limit of $16.4 trillion in January.

After last summer’s dramatic standoff — which ended with Obama signing the Budget Control Act Aug. 2, the date the U.S. Treasury Department estimated the U.S. borrowing authority would be exhausted — the Standard & Poor’s credit-rating agency downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating for the first time in the country’s history.

Financial markets around the world then experienced their most volatile week since the 2008 financial crisis, with the Dow Jones industrial average plunging 635 points, or 5.6 percent, in one day.

“You have to ask the speaker of the House whether or not he intends or he believes that it is the right thing to do for the American people, the American economy, to play chicken with the full faith and credit of the United States government.” Carney told reporters Wednesday.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., were also at the meeting, which was supposed to be about Obama’s wish for Congress to act on proposals he said would immediately spur the economy.

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WASHINGTON — U.S. presidents have long sought relief from battles inside the Beltway and have entertained visiting heads of state at Camp David, the presidential retreat nestled in a mountain range in nearby Maryland.

Now, President Barack Obama will welcome world leaders to the secluded getaway as economic chaos in Europe continues to roil global markets, prompting fears that Europe’s misfortunes could threaten the U.S. economic recovery, and possibly Obama’s chances at re-election.

Solving Europe’s woes is likely to dominate talks at the G-8 summit among the leaders of the world’s richest democracies.

The White House is billing the get-together at the secluded retreat in the Catoctin Mountains as a “back to basics” gathering, saying the “intimacy” of the retreat will allow for candid talk. Analysts say the administration is hoping to hear embattled European leaders voice support for growth measures, as well as the tough austerity measures that have yet to stem the crisis.

“European leaders have signaled they intend to do whatever it takes to reinforce the foundations of their monetary union,” said Michael Froman, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. But, he added, that “serious risks remain and the markets are skeptical that the measures taken so far are sufficient to secure the recovery and remove the risk of the crisis deepening further.”

The White House has put the onus on Europe to take action and has offered advice, but analysts say the stakes for a recovery are critical for the White House.

“In the next six months, his fate for a second term will be decided and there’s a good chance Europe could highjack the electoral campaign,” said Domenico Lombardi, president of the Oxford Institute for Economic Policy in England and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. “The truth is so far, the Europeans have been only modestly effective in tackling the crisis.”

Analysts expect Obama to continue a path of quiet diplomacy, prodding European leaders to find a way out of the economic turmoil that could rattle U.S. markets. He’s expected to continue to press for growth measures, along with the austerity measures championed by German chancellor Angela Merkel.

By BEN FELLER

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama will find his diplomatic clout tested at twin summits on his own turf beginning Friday. The big global problems are the economic mess in Europe and finding scarce money to boost a postwar Afghanistan – and in both cases the solutions lie mostly overseas.

Still, given a home field advantage in an election year, Obama will try to use it.

By offering solidarity with Europe and reminders that he is steering the Afghan war to a close, Obama will be promoting his re-election interests as well as national ones, underscoring contrasts with Mitt Romney, his rival for the presidency.

Summit locations rotate around the globe, and Obama has ended up with a bounty of them – first an Asia-Pacific gathering in his birthplace of Hawaii last November and now both the G-8 economic summit at the presidential retreat in Maryland and a NATO security conference in Chicago, his hometown and re-election headquarters.

For four days, Obama will host global meetings on his stages, though the most pressing problems reflect how much is out of his hands.

For voters, Obama will keep the focus on the economy. For the watching world, he will embrace the trans-Atlantic alliance as a cornerstone of U.S. policy at a time when Romney has accused him of taking inspiration from “Socialist Democrats in Europe” and has declared: “Europe isn’t working in Europe. It’s not going to work here.”

Europe’s debt crisis poses huge potential to drag down the American economy and Obama’s bid for a second term. The financial worries will dominate discussions at the Camp David summit of major industrialized nations on Friday and Saturday, with Obama expected mainly to listen and prod Europe toward more growth and less budget-slashing austerity.

The United States is not in the lead of that fight and does not want to be, strapped with its own unemployment concerns and mounting debt. The White House has put more focus on insulating itself from the contagion by pursuing jobs ideas it hopes to get through a divided Congress at home.

“If he can’t offer his wallet, he can at least offer his shoulder,” said Lauren Blumenfeld, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, a think tank that focuses on relations between North America and Europe. “He can feel their pain and offer inspirational support. I think there is an opportunity.”

China has a secret: It owes American investors hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Chinese government doesn’t like to talk about it and the U.S. government doesn’t want to raise it. But decades ago, Beijing defaulted on debt owed to Americans, as well as investors and governments around the world. In one case, it was paid. In the rest it was not. More than 20,000 American investors own this debt. The U.S. government may also own Chinese war debt, unpaid since World War II.

With the simple stroke of an executive proclamation, President Barack Obama can begin the process of addressing this issue. A 1930s-era law has established a quasi-public agency within the Securities and Exchange Commission, known as the Corporation of Foreign Securities Holders, which can arbitrate this dispute, much as a predecessor agency did for decades. China can both afford and benefit from this solution; it will afford goodwill at a time when relations between the world’s two superpowers are strained.

The story begins nearly 100 years ago, in 1913, when the government of China began issuing bonds to foreign investors and governments for infrastructure work to modernize the country. As the country fell into civil war in 1927, paying these debts became increasingly difficult and the government fell into default. Even so, in April 1938, the Nationalist government of China began to issue U.S.-dollar denominated bonds to finance the war against Japan’s brutal invasion.

Locked in a pitched battle for survival, the government issued these bonds into 1940. As part of its wartime financial aid, the U.S. government further provided a $500 million credit to China in March 1942, shipping gold there and helping to stabilize the currency. In return, it appears that the U.S. government redeemed some of these dollar-denominated bonds. But China doesn’t appear to have repaid this debt either, according to State Department records, and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 ended decades of political, military and financial cooperation.

By Daniel C. Vock, Stateline.org

May 16–This week’s collection of #StateReads covers why Louisiana has the highest imprisonment rate in the world, the rise of education advocacy groups that often combat teacher unions in statehouses and questionable investments by the teachers’ pension fund in Texas.

These examples of extraordinary journalism about state government were recommended in tweets using the #StateReads hashtag on Twitter and in email submissions to dvock@stateline.org.

“Louisiana Incarcerated” — The Times-Picayune

“Louisiana,” writes Cindy Chang (@CindyChangTP), “is the world’s prison capital.” The state has twice the number of people in prison per capita as the national average, which means it leads the world, too. The Times-Picayune is running an eight-part series on the factors for the high rate and its consequences. Counties and private prison companies benefit from building new prisons for state prisoners and offer the inmates few services. Meanwhile, a state penitentiary in Angola offers far more generous programs, such as training for vocational skills, but the programs are of little use, because the vast majority of prisoners there are serving life sentences.

“The changing face of education advocacy” — Education Week

Reporters Stephen Sawchuk (@TeacherBeat) and Sean Cavanagh (@EdWeekSCavanagh) examine the sudden rise of groups lobbying state legislators and getting involved in statehouse races to push their recipe for improving schools. Groups such as Stand for Children, StudentsFirst and Democrats for Education Reform champion ideas including increased use of charter schools, performance reviews for teachers and higher academic standards for schools and students. “Though the record of their electoral success is mixed,” Sawchuk writes, “such groups’ overall influence appears to be growing, and it has already helped alter the landscape of education policy, particularly at the state level.” Education Week’s series also looks at how the groups made headway in states and how they are funded.

“Texas teachers’ pension fund invests in casinos, loses $99 million” — The Dallas Morning News

By The Daily News, Jacksonville, N.C.

May 15–Camp Lejeune Marines used websites like eBay, Craigslist and Lejeune Yard Sales to sell more than $2 million in stolen combat equipment to the highest bidder, including those in China, Naval investigators said Monday.

Altogether, more than 60 people have been implicated in a two-year undercover operation by agents with Naval Criminal Investigative Service to staunch the flow of stolen guns and gear aboard Lejeune and other military installations, said Ed Buice, public affairs officer for NCIS in Quantico, Va.

“The case is still active and ongoing in partnership with several other local, state and federal law enforcement agencies,” he said. “I can’t go into much detail.”

The NCIS probe has spilled over into the Army and Air Force with soldiers and airmen being investigated as well, as first reported in The Daily News.

The operation so far has resulted in the recovery of $1.8 million in stolen weapons and equipment and ballooned to include the FBI; Homeland Security; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Defense Logistics Agency; the N.C. State Bureau of Investigations, and several local law enforcement agencies including the Onslow County Sheriff’s Office and the Jacksonville Police Department.

Buice said it all began with a tip to the NCIS Carolinas Field Office aboard Lejeune that stolen government property was being sold on auction websites.

The special agent-in-charge of NCIS Carolinas, Joe Kennedy, could not be reached for comment.

NCIS agents found equipment not only was being sold online, but guns and ammunition were being sold at yard sales and in clandestine face-to-face deals.

“NCIS did an in-depth analysis of the cases and saw there was definitely a growing problem,” Buice said. “Undercover agents have worked extensively to build cases against those involved during the last two years.”

Agents found that some military members were selling guns, or attempting to sell guns, to street gangs in North Carolina and elsewhere, according to a government official familiar with the operation.

So far 47 service members and 21 civilians have been charged. About half of those have been to trial with many pleading guilty to the offenses, Buice said.

The Daily News has requested but not yet received a complete list of those who have been charged.

By Karen Heller, The Philadelphia Inquirer

May 16–This may well be Temple’s moment, even with slashed state funding and the search for a new leader. The university has soared in popularity, moving beyond being a commuter school to attracting students from across the state and nation, the tuition a bargain compared with that of private institutions.

During the last decade, undergraduate enrollment exploded by more than a third, students spilling into the surrounding North Central Philadelphia neighborhood of handsome 19th-century brick rowhouses. Currently, 7,000 students reside right off campus — more than live in the dorms.

Real estate speculators, some from New York and California, are feasting on the demand. It’s Northward Ho! Most students left last week at the end of spring semester, but the area’s narrow streets remain clogged with cranes, trucks, Tyvek-enveloped structures, and hillocks of debris, a situation residents say has intensified in the last six months. You’d be hard-pressed to find a neighborhood with a higher volume of construction.

And a neighborhood North Central Philadelphia is. The area, with a rich African American history, is in danger of losing its identity and residents to absentee landlords and transient renters with nominal personal investment in the community. Even the area’s name is a source of friction: Rental properties are draped with “Templetown” banners. Efforts have been made to brand it as “Temple” as opposed to the names residents call home, North Central Philadelphia or the Cecil B. Moore Community.

“This was Philadelphia’s Harlem,” says the Rev. William B. Moore as we tour the myriad construction sites, silt spilling into sewers, bricks tumbling onto the sidewalk, few Dumpsters, four electric meters affixed to housing designated for one family. It’s the Wild North of speculation.

“We’re not against development,” Moore says. “What we’re against is out-of-control development that’s thumbing its nose at the residents.”

DHAKA, Bangladesh – Bangladesh says a four-member commission will investigate 54 businesses linked to the pioneering microlender Grameen Bank.

Finance Minister A.M.A. Muhith recently said the bank’s board had not authorized most of the affiliates. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Bangladesh’s government on a recent visit here to not to do anything that might undermine the effectiveness of bank.

A Finance Ministry statement on Wednesday said the commission will suggest “future steps to be taken about Grameen Bank and its affiliates.” It will be headed by a former government official and must submit a report in three months.

The bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the bank’s efforts to lift people from poverty.

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