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The Loya Jirga, or grand assembly in Afghanistan, will gather 2,000 delegates from across the country to Kabul on Wednesday. The event has long been cast by opponents of President Hamid Karzai as the first step in his attempts to increase his power and perhaps extend his term beyond 2014. The Loya Jirga has no legal force, but with parliament suffering legitimacy problems, members of parliament fear Karzai is starting to establish an alternative over which he has much more control. The Jirga is supposed to consider a future strategic partnership with the U.S. as well as ways to re-start peace talks.

New Orleans has become the center of an education revolution, where more than 70 percent of students attend a charter school. By many measures, student achievement has improved. But the city's new system has led to questions about whether the district is truly open to the most challenging students.

The former House speaker says the troubled mortgage giant paid him the consultant fee in 2006 for his "advice as a historian" — and that he was not a lobbyist. Strictly speaking, that's right. But one expert says what Freddie really wanted was "political protection and cover."

Steven Chu says even in hindsight, he sees no way his department could have known the solar energy company would go bankrupt.

The U.S. House unveiled a spending bill that would unravel some of the Obama administration's efforts to revamp school lunches. Under the bill, pizza would still count as a vegetable. Nutrition advocates say if the rule stays, it will be a win for industry and a loss for kids.

The 2012 presidential campaign is already being shaped by new rules for political money. That means corporate involvement in presidential politics on a scale not seen since the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, which ended Richard Nixon's presidency. The key difference: This time, it's legal.

They want lawmakers to narrow loopholes in the background check system for people who buy firearms. Supporters of the legislation say that might have made a difference last January, when a gunman in Tucson, Ariz., killed six people and wounded 13 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu will face scrutiny on Capitol Hill Thursday over loans to the failed solar firm. But the government has a long history of subsidizing many kinds of energy, from coal to oil to wind. Still, different sectors disagree on whether tax deductions should be considered a subsidy.

Despite threatened attacks by the Taliban, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has convened a grand assembly in the capital Kabul. Among other things being discussed, is the prospect of a strategic partnership with the United States that would keep American troops in the country after the 2014 drawdown.

One of Japan's most venerable corporations is facing possible bankruptcy and its executives face jail time. The corporate scandal has stunned the nation. Olympus, a maker of cameras and medical equipment that is a household name in Japan, has been cooking its books and covering losses dating back to the 1990s.