New America in the News: 2007

Before he could begin to lead the fifth-largest school district in Maryland, Eric J. Smith was told he needed to make time to speak with one Severna Park family: the Sniders.

Smith sat across the dining table from Terra Ziporyn and Jim H. Snider, parents of three school-age children, and got an earful about the value of the arts and the need for new algebra textbooks and greater transparency in the district's decision making.

WASHINGTON — The 44th president will move into the Oval Office with an agenda defined in large part by the 43rd president.

In many ways, it will be George W. Bush's third term.

Among pressing issues left on the table: What's next in Iraq. How to restore America's reputation around the world. Whether to extend tax cuts that expire in 2010. What to do about Medicare's looming shortfall. And how to complete the job of helping the Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Katrina...

Among top items on the next president's agenda:

•The Bush tax cut

WASHINGTON -- In their most aggressive action yet in response to problems in the student loan industry, U.S. Department of Education officials said Monday that they have sent warning letters to more than 900 colleges and universities reminding them not to limit student choice in picking a lender.

The letter was sent to campuses where 80 percent or more of the federal student loan volume in 2006-2007 was handled by one lender.

WASHINGTON - Before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Ken Bacon was a lonely voice calling on White House policymakers to consider the possibility of a major refugee crisis as Iraqis sought sanctuary from the war.

For three years, Bacon, president of Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy group, was proved wrong. In fact, about 300,000 Iraqi refugees returned home after the regime of Saddam Hussein was toppled.

WASHINGTON -- Did it seem strange to anybody else -- everything seems pretty strange to me these days -- that President Bush used this year's July Fourth celebration to compare our war against Iraq to the American Revolutionary War against England?..

WASHINGTON, July 6 (UPI) -- The displacement of Iraqi refugees -- close to 4 million -- represents the most serious crisis involving population movements in the Middle East since the exodus of Palestinians in 1948, when fleeing the creation of the state of Israel, hundreds of thousands established themselves in decrepit refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, as well as in Gaza and in the West Bank.

WASHINGTON - The weekend's attempted attacks in London and Glasgow are a distressing sign that Osama Bin Laden's expanding influence has instigated a two-tiered terror war, with Al Qaeda organizing 9/11-like attacks and its homegrown cronies carrying out limited, random strikes.

"If you're a counterterrorism official in Washington this morning, you have two concerns: the big attacks and the small ones," Al Qaeda expert Peter Bergen said yesterday.

[Mortimer B. Zuckerman] is right that our nation needs to "equip Americans with the skills to make them mobile and give them greater economic security." Helping Americans learn better job skills will increase salaries, mobility, and prosperity. Job training is the sleeper issue of the 2008 presidential campaign. While candidates from both parties are talking about middle-class anxiety and inequality, neither party is addressing job skills. The party that begins to focus on job training and provides real solutions will reap a great political reward.

TOM FOREMAN, ANCHOR, THIS WEEK AT WAR: Hamas' military victory in Gaza prompted an urgent meeting this week among moderate Arab leaders and the Israeli prime minister. They tried to bolster support for the new Fatah-led Palestinian government to figure out how to isolate the radical Islamic group.