Advocates from across the nation to meet with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (above) to demand school closure moratorium.

New York City education advocates, along with activists from 17 other cities, are bringing their fight against school closures to the U.S. Department of Education today.

The advocates have filed complaints with the Office of Civil Rights arguing that school closure policies in their cities have disproportionately impacted poor students of color, English Language Learners and special-education students. Thus, they are demanding a national moratorium on all school closures.

Zakiyah Ansari, a public school parent and founder of the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, filed complaints in July and earlier this month with the OCR documenting the failed and discriminatory results of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 12-year reign of closure on city public schools.

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WASHINGTON D.C. - Every year, during the hot, humid, heat waves of summer, my father and I plan a historical trip of some sort to escape the hustle and bustle of New York for a few days and surround ourselves with nothing but some good ol' Founding Father lovin'. 
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Last night at the inaugural OWS Spokes Council, a piece of paper was thrust into the Voice's hand. We opened it: "Occupy The Highway," it said. "OWS hits the road this Wednesday at noon! The Congressional Super Committee meets Nov. 23, we'll be there to protest the Bush tax cuts that only benefit the top 1%!"

Turns out that a contingent from OWS is really planning to march all the way down to Washington D.C. this month. They're leaving tomorrow from Zuccotti, taking the ferry into New Jersey, and walking for two weeks solid. Per their blog:

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The dreaded political co-opting of Occupy Wall Street began in earnest yesterday when Nancy Pelosi appeared on Christiane Amanpour's Sunday morning show and (kind of) lent support to the Zuccotti campers. "I support the message to the establishment, whether it's Wall Street or the political establishment and the rest, that change has to happen," she said. "We cannot continue in a way that is not relevant to their lives."

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via Washington Post

Justice Department officials have released a statement establishing the legality of the drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki, an al Qaeda leader who was born in New Mexico, was killed in Yemen yesterday in an authorized drone strike. Some questioned the legality of killing an American without trial, but the Washington Post reports the Justice Department released a "secret memo" asserting the acceptability of the attack. "What constitutes due process in this case is a due process in war," an anonymous official said. [Washington Post]

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Mei Xiang and Tian Tian

While the rest of the animals at the National Zoo in D.C. freaked out about yesterday's earthquake, the giant pandas were just sitting around, totally indifferent. If they even noticed. Mei Xiang and Tian Tian were just lolling about on their adorable well-padded rear ends while the other animals shrieked and "belch-vocalized" and generally carried on.

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Ever confused about just what the Obama administration's legal reasoning is when it comes to LGBT rights? So are we! And when we can't quite make out just what it is Obama is trying to do legally, we often turn to lawyer-journalist Chris Geidner of Metro Weekly and the Poliglot blog.

Geidner says that, convoluted as it may seem, there is a certain legal logic to the administration's approach, which appears to be building towards something. We asked him to explain it in the above video to the Voice audience.

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Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Congress declared the Smithsonian the official repository for materials related to the tragedy, so that they could be permanently preserved. Now, from September 3 to September 11, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History will be displaying some of the items. The New York Post reports that the exhibit will include "airplane fragments, objects from Pentagon offices, and a door from a crushed New York fire truck." Objects will be displayed on tables instead of in traditional glass cases to make the exhibit more personal and intimate. The museum will also host a forum on July 26 addressing "The Public Memory of September 11," featuring presentations from the directors of the memorials in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. [NYP]

via Good Men Project

​The government was this close to shutting down last night but managed to reach an eleventh-hour (literally) compromise before the midnight deadline. House Speaker John "Smarmy" Boehner presented the laundry list of spending cuts and revisions and got Congress' positive response just before 11 p.m. What does this mean? It means that our government is still functioning -- for now -- and it means $38.5 billion in spending cuts. More »

​The D.C. political reporter is a changing animal. It's using the Internet to get ahead instead of clawing its way towards a column on the Washington Post's op-ed page; it has lived in "squalid houses" and read comic books; sometimes it drinks beer out of cans or even jars! As iconoclastic as it may seem, people now take it seriously. Do you kind of feel like you've heard this before? More »