The James Logan Courier

By Richard Simon
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

WASHINGTON — Congress, in a rare display of bipartisanship, on Friday sent to President Barack Obama a roughly $105 billion transportation bill that lawmakers from both parties touted as perhaps the largest jobs measure of the year.

The measure also would avert a doubling of interest rates for millions of college student loans that was threatened to hit Sunday.

"The American people finally will have a jobs bill from this Congress," said Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who is Washington, D.C.'s delegate to the House.

By Mike Anton
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

LOS ANGELES — An Irvine, Calif., couple who became upset with a parent volunteer at their son's elementary school have been arrested and charged with conspiring to frame her by planting drugs in her car and calling police.

Kent and Jill Easter, both 38 and both attorneys, are charged with three felonies. If convicted, they could face up to three years in state prison.

Orange County prosecutors say the story began in 2010 when Jill Easter was angered by the unnamed school volunteer, whom she accused of not properly supervising their son. In retaliation, the Easters allegedly hatched a plot to have the volunteer arrested.

By Rick LaPlante, New Haven Schools Direct of Parent and Community Relations

For the second time in just over a year, a substantial majority of New Haven Unified voters supported a parcel tax that would have helped mitigate cuts forced on the school district because of the ongoing state budget crisis, but the measure once again fell short of the two-thirds majority necessary for passage.

Measure H, which would have raised approximately $3 million to help the District minimize cuts to the school year and increases in class sizes, received 62.3 percent of the vote, falling 939 votes short of passing. A similar effort, Measure B on the May 2011 ballot, lost by 82 votes.

"Once again, a large majority of voters voiced their support for our schools and our students," Superintendent Kari McVeigh said, "but the bar for a local parcel tax is set very high. We needed everyone who supported us to get out and vote, and that obviously didn’t happen."

Courier Staff Report

Measure H, the bond issue that would have increased local parcel taxes by $180 per year for four years, went down to defeat Tuesday.

According to the Alameda County Registrar of Voters, the measure got 62.29 percent of the vote, or 4453 "yes" votes. It needed 66 percent to pass. "No" votes totaled 2696, or 37.71 percent. All of the votes have been counted, according to the registrar's website.

It's the second failed attempt in as many years to raise parcel taxes to benefit the New Haven Unified School District. This year's measure. like last year's, would have raised $3 million per year for the school district.

By Rick LaPlante, New Haven Schools Director of Parent and Community Relations

Dr. Arlando Smith, a statewide leader in school district leadership who has worked with New Haven Unified teachers and principals for the past three years and was instrumental in the creation of the Union City Kids’ Zone, has accepted an offer to become the District’s Chief Academic Officer.

The appointment was approved Tuesday night by the Board of Education, which also approved the appointment of Nancy George, principal of the New Haven Adult School for the past eight years, as Executive Director of the Kids’ Zone. The appointments are effective July 1.

By Robert Channick
Chicago Tribune (MCT)

CHICAGO — Fast-growing online music service Pandora has been touted as the future of radio, offering more than 150 million registered users customizable stations built on individual preferences.

The future of Pandora, however, may look a lot more like "WKRP in Cincinnati," where sales managers in plaid sport coats pitch car dealers to buy radio spots. Hoping to turn an incessant tide of red ink, Pandora has added a local sales staff in Chicago and other major markets to go head-to-head with old-school radio stations for advertising dollars.

"We are now one of the biggest radio stations in every market in the U.S.," said Pandora founder Tim Westergren. "We're actually big enough to really think about ourselves as a local radio (station) as well as a national one."

By John Boudreau
San Jose Mercury News (MCT)

BEIJING — On the walls of the stunning new multimillion-dollar Stanford Center here are hand-painted Chinese landscapes and scenes from the Palo Alto, Calif., campus — signs of a new cross-Pacific partnership that offers great promise as well as some perils for the university.

The facility — which provides Stanford with its first center for research and teaching for its faculty and students in China but will not offer degrees — blends traditional Chinese courtyard architecture with state-of-the-art classroom technology. Stanford, one of many Western universities scrambling to set up outpost in the world's second-largest economy, begins its experiment in just a few weeks, when the initial wave of Stanford faculty begin arriving to use it for the first time as a base for research and lectures.