Week In Review

A new report from the Indiana University Center for Evaluation and Education Policy (CEEP) finds that achievement gaps among high ability students from different economic, racial and linguistic backgrounds in the U.S. are large and growing, and some of the top achieving groups aren’t performing as well as in the past.

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A 22-year-old Virginia woman who said she once thought her only talent was singing is the nation’s newest Miss America, emerging from a field of 53 contestants picked for their beauty, compassion and interview savvy.

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The debate over international adoption, already a bitter one, has intensified in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake and the arrest of 10 Americans for trying to take children out of the devastated country without permission.

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A law enforcement official says prosecutors plan to charge Michael Jackson’s doctor with manslaughter rather than take the case to a grand jury.

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A Fulton County judge has reinstated the former Southern Christian Leadership Conference chairman and treasurer who were removed last month after allegations of financial improprieties.

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Declaring “I don’t quit,” President Barack Obama fought to recharge his embattled presidency with a State of the Union vow to get jobless millions back to work and stand on the side of Americans angry at Wall Street greed and Washington bickering. Defiant despite stinging setbacks, he said he would fight on for ambitious overhauls of health care, energy and education.

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More than 40 years after her family was forced from their home because they were black, Sallie Sanders received the keys to a new house built to settle one of the longest-running cases of housing discrimination in the United States.

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Abandoning the health care overhaul is not an option, the top White House political adviser said last Wednesday, after President Barack Obama’s signature issue took a devastating hit with the Democratic loss of a Massachusetts Senate seat.

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A double standard? Republicans seeking Sen. Harry Reid’s resignation as majority leader over racial remarks he made about Barack Obama say yes — that Reid should be held to the same standard as former GOP Sen. Trent Lott, whose own racial gaffes cost him the Senate leadership in 2002.

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Once upon a time, the people’s faith in the church as an institution was as rock solid and unassailable as their belief in the Divinity. But in recent years, the notion of the infallibility of the church has been shattered as sorted tales of clergy members’ improprieties and sexual misadventures have exploded in the press with disturbing frequency…

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