Each school year, more than 700,000 California students — predominantly black and Latino — are suspended or expelled.

Robert, a talkative sixth-grader in the city of Richmond, has been suspended three times from his elementary school in the West Contra Costa Unified School District. If he gets suspended one more time, he says, he might get expelled. [NPR has withheld his last name because he is a minor.]

The United States named its 19th poet laureate today: Natasha Trethewey, a professor of English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. She is the nation's first poet laureate to hail from the South since the initial laureate — Robert Penn Warren — was named by the Library of Congress in 1986.

Since Republicans took back the U.S. House in the 2010 elections, abortion has been a fairly constant theme. The House took eight separate abortion-related votes in 2011 — the most in a decade, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Damon Lindelof was a producer on the 2009 reboot of Star Trek, which seemed to win over loyal Trekkies. And this weekend Lindelof will earn the devotion — or wrath — of Alien fans. He helped write the screenplay for the new film Prometheus, an origin story for Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi classic.

First of two parts

As Mexico approaches its election day on July 1, polls indicate the candidate for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is well ahead and appears likely to return his party to power.

The PRI governed Mexico for seven decades until 2000, when it was tossed out by an electorate tired of a corrupt political machine. Now, discontent with the current leadership and the rampant drug-related violence has created an opening for the PRI to come back. Still, some Mexicans are queasy about the prospect of the party's resurgence.

The National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center issued an El Niño watch, today.

That means there is a 50 percent chance that El Niño — warmer than normal temperatures in the Pacific Ocean near the equator — will develop by next winter. As The Baltimore Sun reports, if this happens it will be the first time El Niño rears its head since 2009.

Last.fm and eHarmony became the latest websites to suffer security breaches that put the passwords of some of their users at risk.

In a statement on its website, Last.fm, which tracks and recommends music, said it was investigating the leaked passwords and asked all its users to "change their passwords immediately."

The dating site EHarmony said it had reset the passwords of those members whose passwords had been compromised.

Big-city mayors need to be able to do some basic things to keep their jobs.

Get the streets plowed. Fill the potholes. Make sure garbage is picked up. Take a bite out of crime. Love your local teams and extol the accomplishments of their heroes.

Apparently, Boston Mayor Tom Menino (D) can get away without doing very well on that last requirement.

The state of Idaho's Liquor Division has changed its mind about Five Wives vodka.

The vodka, which as we said last week had been banned from Idaho's liquor stores because its name and label might offend women and Mormons, is going to be allowed to be sold in the state.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has just wrapped up a 10-day visit to China, its seventh trip to the country over the past four decades.

But this trip was different.

The orchestra is preparing to come out of bankruptcy, and this tour was about its survival. It hopes to balance its books by building new audiences and new revenues in the world's second-largest economy.