JERUSALEM — A deadly border incident this month that drew a threat by Egypt to recall its ambassador to Israel has starkly revealed the changed political terrain in the relationship between the two countries. Israeli officials who relied on former president Hosni Mubarak as a partner in upholding the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty are now contending with the newly assertive voice of public opinion in Egypt and its influence on that country’s leadership. There is a growing realization in Israel that maintaining ties with post-revolutionary Egypt no longer depends solely on cultivating the relationship with its leaders. Adopting stances that are more acceptable to ordinary Egyptians and the various political forces emerging in that country after Mubarak’s ouster has become important as well. Read full article > >

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Israel mulls ties with a changed Egypt

BEIJING — China formally protested over a Pentagon report on the Chinese military Friday, calling it a major distortion that flew in the face of a warming trend in relations between the two nations and their militaries. The United States’ annual assessment of China’s military capabilities and doctrine “seriously twists the facts and doesn’t have a leg to stand on,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement read on national television. The Pentagon report issued Wednesday said Beijing is on track to achieve its goal of building a modern, regionally focused military by 2020, citing the development of a new stealth fighter, an aircraft carrier and a record number of space launches over the past year. Read full article > >

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China protests Pentagon report on military, labels it distortion

MOSCOW — North Korea is ready to impose a moratorium on nuclear missile tests if international talks on its nuclear program resume, a spokesman for Russia’s president said Wednesday after talks between the two leaders at a Siberian military base. Russian news agencies, meanwhile, reported that North Korean leader Kim Gong Il said his country is ready to resume talks “without preconditions.” Kim and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met Wednesday at the hotel of a military garrison near the city of Ulan-Ude in Buryatia, a predominantly Buddhist province near Lake Baikal. It was Kim’s first trip to Russia since 2002. Read full article > >

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Russia says North Korea ready to impose moratorium on mass-destruction weapons tests

The first showdown between the two Mormons running for president will take place this week in Utah, where Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman Jr. will hold competing fundraisers only a couple of hours and a few blocks apart. Huntsman will launch his campaign Tuesday near the Statue of Liberty. He and Romney are trying to tap into the wealth of the Mormon community, one of the Republican Party’s ripest donor pools and one that both are laying special claim to. Romney and Huntsman are trying to parlay their status in Utah — the former as the turnaround artist who saved the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, the latter as a recent governor and both as scions of wealthy and influential Mormon families — to give themselves an advantage in the 2012 race. Read full article > >

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Romney, Huntsman try to tap wealth of Mormon community

After six weeks of talks with congressional leaders aimed at restraining the spiraling national debt , Vice President Biden emerged Thursday with a blunt message: Now, the hard part begins. Next week, Biden said, negotiators from the White House and Capitol Hill will begin working “around the clock” to bridge the yawning philosophical divide between the two parties, as Democrats press for fresh revenue and Republicans push for significant cuts to federal health programs as part of the debt-reduction package. Read full article > >

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Biden on debt-reduction talks: Negotiators ‘getting down to the real hard stuff’

Hewlett Packard sues Oracle over a chip dispute as the animosity between the two companies continues to grow.

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HP sues Oracle over chip dispute

If you wonder what kinds of beverages you should allow your kids to drink, a report published Monday morning in the journal Pediatrics makes things crystal clear: That’s just one of many useful nuggets of information from the report’s informative review of sports and energy drinks, the differences between the two and the way they should and, more important, shouldn’t be consumed. In short, the report, by the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Nutrition and the Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness, notes that sports drinks and energy drinks are not interchangeable and that most kids shouldn’t drink either of them, ever. Read full article > >

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Report: Kids should stick to water, low-fat milk

Parliamentary elections are taking place in Cyprus with opinion polls indicating a tight race between the two main rivals.

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Cyprus polls set for ‘close race’

Parliamentary elections are taking place in Cyprus with opinion polls indicating a tight race between the two main rivals.

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Cyprus polls set for ‘close race’

The US says it will not withdraw their CIA chief in Pakistan, whose name was leaked to media last week, amid strained relations between the two countries.

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CIA ‘not to pull Pakistan chief’

The division of authority between the two leaders has seemed to work smoothly and soothe tensions for the past three years, but it has recently shown signs of breaking down.

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Memo From Moscow: Bulldogs Under the Rug? Signs of a Putin-Medvedev Rift

TEHRAN – Apparently bowing to unprecedented pressure from Iran’s clerical establishment, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad welcomed an intelligence minister he had ousted in April back into his cabinet meeting on Sunday. While Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had publicly reinstated intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi following his dismissal by Ahmadinejad, it took more than three weeks for the two men to officially meet in a cabinet session. Following the supreme leader’s decision, Ahmadinejad did not go to his office for eight days. He returned to work a week ago, publicly pledging his allegiance to Khamenei and denying that a rift had developed between the two men. But when the cabinet met on Wednesday, the president and Moslehi apparently avoided being in the same room, Web sites reported, citing “busy schedules” as their reason for not meeting. Read full article > >

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Iran’s Ahmadinejad affirms Khamenei decision, tensions remain

Although the Obama administration says Pakistan was not involved or given advance warning about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, top U.S. officials said the al-Qaeda leader never would have been found and killed without the counter-terrorism cooperation between the two countries over the past few years.

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For U.S., Pakistan: Crisis, opportunity

The Pakistani government would like the CIA’s aggressive drone campaign “suspended” and only resumed under “new rules” and “formalized terms,” according to a Pakistani military official familiar with discussions between the two nations.

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Pakistan wants to cut CIA drone strikes

I think this USA Today story  on Crosby S. Noyes, a much congratulated public school in D.C., is a problem: When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student. In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates.  The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY. And I think Michelle Rhee’s response… “It isn’t surprising,” Rhee said in a statement Monday, “that the enemies of school reform once again are trying to argue that the Earth is flat and that there is no way test scores could have improved … unless someone cheated.” …is silly, if typical. Mark Kleiman goes further .  Initially, I thought Michelle Rhee just didn’t know how to talk–that she was effective, but impolitic. But sometimes there’s no difference between the two. There’s a point toward the end of the story where two parents note that their suspicions were raised after their kids scores shot up, while their kids were still struggling in math: A former Noyes parent, Marvin Tucker, says he suspected something was wrong in 2003, when the test scores his daughter, Marlana, brought home from school showed she was proficient in math. Tucker says he was skeptical because the third-grader was getting daily instruction from a private tutor yet struggled with addition and subtraction. “She was nowhere near where they said she was on the test,” he says. “I thought something was wrong with the test.” He questioned Ryan, the principal, and teachers about his daughter’s scores but no one could explain how she had scored so high, Tucker recalls. Ultimately, Ryan barred him from the school for a year, saying he had threatened staff members, Tucker says. Tucker denies that.  Tucker also points out that if his daughter was proficient as a third-grader, that didn’t last. When Marlana moved on to middle school elsewhere in D.C., her test scores fell and she no longer was considered proficient in math, he says. This is not a matter of being politically correct, or speaking with sensitivity, it’s a matter of not speaking at all. Communication is part of the job. And when you start alleging grand conspiracies to explain away criticism, I start to think that communication may well be the least of your failures.

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Testing, Testing