(Reuters) – The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran’s nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead.

Those conclusions, drawn from extensive interviews with current and former U.S. and European officials with access to intelligence on Iran, contrast starkly with the heated debate surrounding a possible Israeli strike on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

“They’re keeping the soup warm but they are not cooking it,” a U.S. administration official said.

Reuters has learned that in late 2006 or early 2007, U.S. intelligence intercepted telephone and email communications in which Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading figure in Iran’s nuclear program, and other scientists complained that the weaponization program had been stopped.

That led to a bombshell conclusion in a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate: American spy agencies had “high confidence” that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003.

Current and former U.S. officials say they are confident that Iran has no secret uranium-enrichment site outside the purview of U.N. nuclear inspections.

They also have confidence that any Iranian move toward building a functional nuclear weapon would be detected long before a bomb was made.

These intelligence findings are what underpin President Barack Obama’s argument that there is still time to see whether economic sanctions will compel Iran’s leaders to halt any program.

The Obama administration, relying on a top-priority intelligence collection program and after countless hours of debate, has concluded that Iranian leaders have not decided whether to actively construct a nuclear weapon, current and former officials said.

There is little argument, however, that Iran’s leaders have taken steps that would give them the option of becoming a nuclear-armed power.

Iran has enriched uranium, although not yet of sufficient quantity or purity to fuel a bomb, and has built secret enrichment sites, which were acknowledged only when unmasked.

Iran has, in years past, worked on designing a nuclear warhead, the complicated package of electronics and explosives that would transform highly enriched uranium into a fission bomb.

And it is developing missiles that could in theory launch such a weapon at a target in enemy territory.

There are also blind spots in U.S. and allied agencies’ knowledge. A crucial unknown is the intentions of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Another question is exactly how much progress Iran made in designing a warhead before mothballing its program. The allies disagree on how fast Iran is progressing toward bomb-building ability: the U.S. thinks progress is relatively slow; the Europeans and Israelis believe it’s faster.

U.S. officials assert that intelligence reporting on Iran’s nuclear program is better than it was on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which proved to be non-existent but which President George W. Bush and his aides used to make the case for the 2003 invasion.

That case and others, such as the U.S. failure to predict India’s 1998 underground nuclear test, illustrate the perils of divining secrets about others’ weapons programs.

“The quality of intelligence varies from case to case,” a U.S. administration official said. Intelligence on North Korea and Iraq was more limited, but there was “extraordinarily good intelligence” on Iran, the official said.

Israel, which regards a nuclear Iran as an existential threat, has a different calculation. It studies the same intelligence and timetable, but sees a closing window of opportunity to take unilateral military action and set back Iran’s ambitions. Israel worries that Iran will soon have moved enough of its nuclear program underground — or spread it far enough around the country — as to make it virtually impervious to a unilateral Israeli attack, creating what Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently referred to as a “zone of immunity.”

While Israel would not be able to launch an effective offensive in this analysis, the U.S., with its deeper-penetrating bombs and in-air refueling capability, believes it could still get results from a military strike.

Israel has not publicly defined how or when Iran would enter this phase of a nuclear weapons program. Barak said last month that relying on an ability to detect an order by Khamenei to build a bomb “oversimplifies the issue dramatically.”

CONFIDENCE IN INTELLIGENCE

U.S. confidence that Iran stopped its nuclear weaponization program in 2003 traces back to a stream of intelligence obtained in 2006 or early 2007, which dramatically shifted the view of spy agencies.

Sources familiar with the intelligence confirmed the intercept of Fakhrizadeh’s communications. The United States had both telephone and email intercepts in which Iranian scientists complained about how the leadership ordered them to shut down the program in 2003, a senior European official said.

U.S. officials said they are very confident that the intercepts were authentic – and not disinformation planted by Iran.

“Iran has been a high-priority intelligence target for years. Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes we really are good,” said Thomas Fingar, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council when it compiled the 2007 intelligence estimate.

While declining to provide specific details, Fingar, now at Stanford University, said: “We got information that we had never been able to obtain before. We knew the provenance of the information, and we knew that we had been able to obtain it from multiple sources. Years of hard work had finally paid off.”

The judgment that Iran had stopped work on the weapons program stunned the Bush White House and U.S. allies. Critics accused U.S. spy agencies of over-compensating for their flawed 2002 analysis that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had active nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.

The 2007 report gummed up efforts by the Bush administration to persuade the U.N. Security Council and others to add pressure on Iran with more sanctions. It was greeted with disbelief by Israel and some European allies.

“It really pulled the rug out of our sanctions effort until we got it back on track in 2008,” recalled Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to Bush.

Overlooked by many was that the report said Iran had been pursuing a nuclear weapon and was keeping its options open for developing one, he said. “The problem was that it was misinterpreted as an all-clear when it wasn’t that at all,” Hadley said.

A November 2011 report by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency said suspected nuclear weaponization efforts led by Fakhrizadeh were “stopped rather abruptly pursuant to a ‘halt order’ instruction issued in late 2003 by senior Iranian officials.”

The reasons for this are not clear. Western experts say it was probably related to a fear of being next on the hit list after the United States toppled Saddam next door.

Iran emphasizes its nuclear program is for civilian purposes. Ayatollah Khamenei this week said Iran does not have nuclear weapons and will not build them.

DISMEMBERED AND BURIED

Some key U.S. allies were never entirely comfortable with the 2007 U.S. intelligence estimate. The Europeans conceded that a centrally directed weaponization program probably stopped, but believed pieces of the program were being pursued separately.

Many European experts believed the Iranians had dismembered their bomb program and scattered and buried its parts, some of them in military or scientific installations, some in obscure academic institutions.

Under pressure from both European allies and Israel’s supporters, U.S. intelligence agencies late in the Bush administration and early in Obama’s tenure began to take a second look at the 2007 estimate. Some consideration was given to bringing it more into line with European views. Intelligence received after publication of the 2007 estimate suggested that in 2006, Iran believed the United States was going to have to abandon its troubled venture in Iraq. Wisps of information were gathered that Iranian officials were talking about restarting elements of the bomb program, a U.S. intelligence official said on condition of anonymity. But analysts were divided about the significance of the new information. The revised estimate was delayed for months. Eventually, at the very end of 2010, an updated version was circulated within the government. Unlike the 2007 estimate, the White House made public no extracts of this document. A consensus emerged among U.S. experts that the new intelligence information wasn’t as alarming as originally thought, according to officials familiar with the result. The 2010 update largely stuck to the same assessments as the 2007 report, these officials said. U.S. intelligence chiefs issued a vague public acknowledgement of the ambiguities of their latest assessment.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress in February 2011 that “Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so.”

TIME FRAME

The United States and Israel are on the same page in judging how long it would take Iran to have a nuclear weapon that could strike a target: about a year to produce a bomb and then another one to two years to put it on a missile.

Both countries believe Iran has not made a decision to build a bomb, so even if Tehran decided to move forward, it would be unlikely to have a working nuclear device this year, let alone a missile to deliver it.

“I think they are years away from having a nuclear weapon,” a U.S. administration official said.

Three main pieces are needed for a nuclear arsenal: highly enriched uranium to fuel a bomb, a nuclear warhead to detonate it, and a missile or other platform to deliver it. For Iran’s program, the West has the most information about the first.

Iran has a declared nuclear program for medical research and producing energy, is a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allows U.N. nuclear inspectors into its facilities.

The inspections are conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and its reports provide some of the best snapshots of where Iran’s program stands.

Iran conducts uranium enrichment at the Natanz plant in central Iran and at a site at Fordow buried deep in a mountainous region near the holy city of Qom. Both sites were built secretly and made public by others.

Natanz was unveiled in 2002 by an Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Obama and other world leaders announced the existence of the Fordow site in 2009.

Natanz houses about 8,800 centrifuge machines spinning to increase the concentration of U-235, the type of uranium that yields fissile material. Fordow is built to contain about 3,000 centrifuge machines, but the most recent IAEA report says about 700 are operational.

Most of Iran’s stockpile is 3.5 percent low enriched uranium. When Tehran declared in February 2010 that it would begin enriching uranium up to 20 percent purity, that sharply increased the anxiety of Israel and others.

Nuclear experts say that enriching uranium from the naturally occurring 0.7 percent concentration of U-235 to the low-level 3.5 percent accomplishes about 70 percent of the enrichment work toward weapons-grade uranium. At 20 percent concentration, about nine-tenths of the work has been completed. For Iran, getting to 90 percent would require changing some of the plumbing in the centrifuges, experts said.

“From 20 to 90 is exponentially easier,” a U.S. intelligence official said.

An IAEA report last month said that Iran has produced nearly 110 kilograms (240 pounds) of uranium enriched to 20 percent. That is less than the roughly 250 kilograms (550 pounds) that nuclear experts say would be required, when purified further, for one nuclear weapon.

Iran’s enrichment program was set back by the Stuxnet computer virus, which many security experts suspect was created by Israeli intelligence, possibly with U.S. assistance. It wormed its way into Iranian centrifuge machinery as early as 2009. The Institute for Science and International Security estimated that Stuxnet damaged about 1,000 centrifuges at Natanz and stalled its enrichment capability from growing for about a year.

But it isn’t clear how lasting an impact Stuxnet has had. Reuters reported last month that U.S. and European officials and private experts believe Iranian engineers have neutralized and purged the virus.

EYES IN THE SKY

U.S. officials and experts are confident that Iran would be detected if it jumped to a higher level of enrichment.

The IAEA monitors Iran’s enrichment facilities closely, watching with cameras and taking measurements during inspections. Seals would have to be broken if containers that collect the enriched material were moved or tampered with.

U.S. and European intelligence agencies are also keeping tabs through satellites, sensors and other methods. They watched for years as a hole was dug into a mountainside near Qom and determined – it is unclear precisely how – late in the Bush administration that Fordow was likely a secret uranium enrichment site.

Obama was briefed on Qom when he was president-elect and was the one to publicly announce it to the world in September 2009.

“They had a deep understanding of the facility, which allowed them to blow the whistle on Tehran with confidence,” a U.S. official said.

Rumors periodically pop up of other secret enrichment sites, but so far they have not been substantiated. “Most of the people who make the argument that they might have a covert facility or a series of covert facilities are doing that to justify bombing them sooner rather than later,” said Colin Kahl, a former defense official focused on the Middle East.

“We are very confident that there is no secret site now,” a U.S. administration official said. But given Iran’s history of secretly building facilities, the official predicted Tehran would eventually construct another covert plant.

THE UNKNOWN

One of the biggest question marks is how far Iran advanced in designing a nuclear device – a task considered to be less complicated than producing highly enriched uranium.

The more primitive the device, the more enriched uranium is required. Making it small enough to fit on the tip of a missile would be another challenge.

The IAEA has information that Iran built a large containment chamber to conduct high-explosives tests at the Parchin military complex southeast of Tehran. Conventional weapons are tested at that base, and the U.S. government appears convinced that any nuclear-related tests occurred prior to the 2003 halt.

But Iran denied the IAEA access to the Parchin site in February, raising more suspicion, and the nuclear agency seems less confident that weapons work has halted altogether.

IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said recently, “We have information that some activity is ongoing there.”

In its November 2011 report, the IAEA said it had “serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”

It cited Iran’s efforts to procure nuclear-related and dual-use equipment, acquisition of nuclear-weapons development information and work on developing a nuclear weapon design in the program that was stopped in late 2003.

“There are also indications that some activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device continued after 2003, and that some may still be ongoing,” the IAEA said.

While Iran does not yet have a nuclear warhead that can fit on a missile, it does have the missiles.

Iran has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East, and many of those projectiles could be repurposed to deliver a nuclear device, intelligence director Clapper said in congressional testimony.

Western experts also point to Iran’s test firing of a rocket that can launch satellites into space as an example of a growing capability that could potentially be used for nuclear weapons.

“The nuclear threat is growing. They are getting relatively close to the place where they can make the decision to assemble all three parts of their program — enrichment, missile, weaponization,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said in an interview. Khamenei “hasn’t said ‘put it together’ yet,” said Rogers, a Republican. “Have they decided to sprint to making the device that blows up? Probably not. But are they walking to a device that blows up? Yes.”

The debate over air strikes, supercharged by Israel’s anxiety and U.S. election-year politics, has raised the specter of the Iraq war. The White House justified that conflict on the grounds of weapons of mass destruction, as well as significant ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Both proved to be mirages.

“There are lots of disturbing similarities. One has to note the differences, too,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst.

“The huge difference being we don’t have an administration in office that is the one hankering for the war. This administration is not hankering for a war,” said Pillar.

(Editing by Warren Strobel.)

Geraldo Rivera provoked outrage on Friday when he said that slain teenager Trayvon Martin was partially responsible for his death because he was wearing a hoodie. The Fox News host later revealed that even his own son was dismayed by the comments.

Speaking on Friday’s “Fox and Friends,” Rivera said, “”I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.”

Martin was unarmed when he was shot dead by a self-appointed neighborhood watch volunteer named George Zimmerman in late February. His death has become a national tragedy, fueled by the police’s controversial handling of the case.

After making his original comments about Martin’s hoodie on Friday morning, Rivera weighed in again in a series of tweets. He revealed that his own son — whom he referenced when speaking about Martin — disagreed. “My own son just wrote to say he’s ashamed of my position re hoodies,” he tweeted.

However, he maintained that Martin’s hoodie was to blame for his death. He deniedthat he was “blaming the victim” and called it “common sense” for minorities to avoid wearing hoodies. He said that he was “reminding minority parents of the risk that comes with being a kid of color in America.”

Rivera made his original comments to Brian Kilmeade, Steve Doocy and guest host Juliet Huddy. He said that he believed George Zimmerman should be “investigated to the fullest extent of the law” and “prosecuted” if criminally liable, but blamed Martin’s parents for letting him go outside wearing a hoodie.

“But I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies,” Rivera insisted.

When asked to clarify his remarks, Rivera said that he cautioned his own son against wearing hoodies. He explained, “When you, when you see a kid walking — Juliet — when you see a kid walking down the street, particularly a dark skinned kid like my son Cruz, who I constantly yelled at when he was going out wearing a damn hoodie or those pants around his ankles. Take that hood off, people look at you and they — what do they think? What’s the instant identification, what’s the instant association?”

“Uh-oh,” remarked Doocy, who nodded in agreement.

Rivera argued that avoiding certain types of attire was a necessary deterrent against racial profiling. “It’s those crime scene surveillance tapes. Every time you see someone sticking up a 7-11, the kid is wearing a hoodie,” Rivera said. “You have to recognize that this whole stylizing yourself as a gangster, you’re gonna be a gangster wannabe? Well, people are gonna perceive you as a menace.”

He stressed that Martin was an “innocent” and “wonderful” kid who “didn’t deserve to die.” However, he reiterated, “I’ll bet you money, if he didn’t have that hoodie on, that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn’t have responded in that violent and aggressive way.”

Rivera prefaced his “Fox and Friends” appearance with similar comments on Twitter on Thursday night. He had tweeted, “His hoodie killed Trayvon Martin as surely as George Zimmerman,” and “I’m trying to save lives like Trayvon’s-Parents Alert: hoodies can get your kid killed.”

Moments before he died, Martin was on the phone with his girlfriend. She recalledhim saying that he put his hoodie up because Zimmerman had been following him.

ATLANTA (AP) — Rapidly becoming a mere footnote in the presidential race, Herman Cain sent mixed signals Friday on whether he would abandon his beleaguered White House bid on Saturday after a woman’s allegation of an extramarital affair.

He said he would make a “major announcement” on whether he would press on – at an event still being billed as the grand opening of a new headquarters.

It is the latest – and perhaps final – twist in a campaign saga that has taken the Georgia businessman from unknown longshot to surprise frontrunner to embattled tabloid subject.

He arrived at his suburban Atlanta home on Friday afternoon to talk with his wife of 42 years, Gloria, about whether to press on after his campaign was rocked by multiple sexual harassment allegations and this week’s claim that he had a 13-year affair. He denies wrongdoing. It was their first face-to-face meeting since the allegation was made public.
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Senator John A. Girgenti (D-35) of Hawthorne today thanked the many residents from around the State who donated clothing and other essential items to the victims of the recent hurricane and flooding.  Girgenti opened his Hawthorne district office as a drop-off location for donations last week.  The clothing collected was picked up and distributed throughout Passaic County on Wednesday September 14^th.  The Senator reiterated the need for food and canned goods for hurricane victims, and asked all residents to kindly donate what they can spare.

Senator Girgenti’s District Office is located at:

507 Lafayette Avenue

Hawthorne NJ

07506

Email: SenGirgenti@njleg.org

Phone: (973) 427-1229

“People were very generous in giving what they could spare, and we received donations from concerned and compassionate residents not just in the 35^th District, but from all over the State.  It is truly moving and inspirational to see the kindness exhibited by New Jersey’s citizens.  Many of my constituents are affected by the flooding, especially in the City of Paterson.  While there is still much work to be done, the items that we collected will provide them with at least a small amount of comfort and normalcy as they rebuild their lives.  I would like to say thank you to everyone who came by my district office to drop off donations.”

“Today we distributed the items that were collected, but this is by no means the end of our efforts.  I ask all residents to continue to donate items, most especially canned goods, food, and drink.  The victims are still in great need, and food supplies are running low.  Anything you can provide would be most appreciated, and my office will continue to function as a drop-off center for these items.”

 “Again, I thank everyone who has dropped off donations, and I thank in advance those of you who will in the coming days.  In the aftermath of a terrible storm, it is humbling to see the people of our State continuing to come together in the spirit of community to help our neighbors in need.” 

The past two weeks of flooding have wreaked havoc on Passaic County‘s largest food pantry for the needy.

“After the Labor Day weekend we normally see about 20 families a day. Right now we’re seeing 50. We’re packed from nine in the morning until 2:30 every afternoon,” said the Rev. Patricia Bruger, executive director of CUMAC. “Normally we put 20 to 21 non-perishable items in the bags, but we’re down to eight. We’ve literally had no stuff to put in them.”

The staggered economy and government cutbacks had already stretched CUMAC thin before the flooding hit, Bruger added. The number of people seeking food help in the first eight months of 2011 was up for the fourth consecutive year, and donations were off.

“You already had a lot of people with frozen salaries, declining salaries, less hours of work — the underemployed and the unemployed, who were a significant part of our mix of donors,” she said. “You and I might have put $5 worth of groceries into a food drive bag at the grocery before, now it’s just $2. Then the hurricane hit.”

Patricia Espy, executive director of the Center for Food Action — Bergen County‘s largest food pantry — said her organization is suffering from the same effects of the economic downturn but has seen only minimal impacts from the floods. “We saw a spike in demand right after the hurricane, not just for food but from people who lost bedding or all their winter clothing or their washer/dryer,” said Espy. “We’ve had a number of families who were displaced.”

But CFA’s food supply, while down significantly because of the economy, hasn’t seen the continued effects of the flooding that have hit CUMAC, she added.

Low-income communities like Paterson have been hit hard, but Bruger said CUMAC is also seeing families from unexpected locations. “We’ve been seeing people from places we’ve never seen before, people from upcounty Passaic, from Lincoln Park, even from Bergen County,” she said.

The demand on her staff just to collect and distribute food is so intense, Bruger added, that they haven’t had any time to calculate precisely how many more people have come seeking help.

“We’re so far behind the eight ball we can’t put the numbers together because my staff is so overstretched,” she explained.

Even before the floods, Bruger added, the pantry had run out of critical supplies like dry cereal and canned meat products. And those foods are particularly needed by flood victims. “We’re seeing people with no power in their homes, no way to store food or cook it. They need food they can eat right now without preparing it. They need that pop top can of meat or that cereal,” she said. Now, “many of our food shelves are filled instead with donated clothing for us to give out.”

The foods CUMAC needs most are cereal, high-protein items (particularly canned tuna, canned chicken, frozen meats and canned beans), peanut butter and jelly, pasta and tomato sauce.

Anyone wishing to donate food can call CUMAC at 973-742-5518. To give cash, visit cumacecho.org and click on the “Donate Now” button or send a check payable to CUMAC at PO Box 2721, Paterson, NJ 07509.

To help CFA, visit cfanj.org and click on the “Ways to Give” button, call 201-569-1804, ext. 25, or send a check to the Center for Food Action, 192A W. Demarest Ave., Englewood, NJ 07631, attention:

In late June, Gov. Chris Christie flew to Colorado and motored out to Vail, where he gave the keynote speech to a group of wealthy conservative donors shepherded to the playground of the rich and famous by David Koch.

Koch along with his brother Charles is the owner of Koch Industries and a founder of Americans for Prosperity.

Mother Jones magazine obtained the audio of Christie’s speech, which until the magazine obtained recordings of it, had gone unreported.

The governor had the affluent crowd rolling in the aisles as he regaled them with tales of derring-do in his never ending battle with New Jersey’s Democratic legislature.

The Christie-shtick that drew the most laughs, however, was not when he called the Democrats “stupid” for pushing the millionaire’s tax when they knew he’d wipe it out with one stroke of the veto pen, but when he did a (damn good) impression of former Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine wheeling his cot into the governor’s office to wait out the government shut down.

Among the revelations in the leaked audio is Christie’s account of a conversation between him and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver where he said Oliver told him she might not survive the pension and benefits vote about to take place in her house. The bill to reform pension and health benefits for state workers was wildly unpopular in her caucus and Oliver knew she was risking her neck in ramming it through.

At the speaker’s request, Christie said he had lined up enough Republican votes in the lower chamber to keep Oliver in power should her caucus have tried to take her out.

“I said Sheila Oliver is under siege. And she wants to do the right thing. And we cannot be slaves to party or partisanship. She is right on this issue and she is with us on this issue,” Christie said he told Assembly Republicans. “So if they take a run at her on the floor, I need all of you to vote for her for Speaker.”

Several Democratic sources said at the time Oliver was in little actual danger because no potential opponent for the speakership had lined up enough votes to take her out. Nevertheless, according to Christie, Oliver was nervous enough that she sought Christie’s assurance that his party would back her.

Here is the Mother Jones story as well as a link to the audio of the event.

Below is a transcript of Christie’s speech courtesy of Brad Blog.

David, thank you very much for the introduction and thank you all of you for the great welcome. Not just now but throughout the day today. I’ve had an opportunity to meet many of you and to be able to thank you personally for what you’re doing to support folks like me who are out there on the front lines fighting for the principles and the values that we believe in. Believe me, now’s the time, and I’ve heard this repeated many times today, now’s the time when we need to fight even harder because the opponents of what we want to try to maintain in our country are fighting harder than ever. And I’ll state to you why I think it is that they’re fighting even harder than ever as we discuss these issues tonight.

Paterson’s underperforming schools would be the focus of an ambitious plan this year to bring “innovation zones” aimed at boosting student achievement scores by double digits.

Schools Superintendent Donnie W. Evans outlined the plan at Wednesday’s Board of Education workshop.

The plan calls for targeting 17 schools, including one charter school, that would undergo what Evans described as “managed instruction.” It would also try to streamline and reform basic school processes.

“Our processes stink,” Evans told the board, using the example of one mother who, earlier in the meeting, described an excruciating experience she had with the district’s school choice program.

Evans said the plan calls for the district to directly manage instruction to ensure that all students are taught the same comprehensive curriculum, and that all teachers know how to teach it.

To do so, the district would hire the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute of Learning to providing training and support.

In its first year, the plan would include elementary schools Nos. 5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18. 20, 23, 25, 26 as well as the Frank Napier Jr., Norman S. Weir and the New Roberto Clemente schools.

It would also include Eastside High School with its three academies for culinary arts, technology and government, plus the International/Garrett Morgan school and the Community Charter School.

Evans said the schools were chosen because either the district or the state education department identified them as low-performing.

“If done right, we can’t help but improve student achievement,” Evans said.

Irene Sterling, president of the Paterson Education Fund, a non-profit advocacy group, described the plan as a major change for the district. She urged the board to adopt it even though it will likely spark criticism.

School Board member Christopher Irving questioned why the charter school was included in the plan, instead of an additional district school.

Evans replied that there would be no additional cost for including the charter in the program.

The new plan comes at a time when the most recent New Jersey ASK (Assessment of Skills and Knowledge) scores showed overall improvement in math proficiency in the district, but a decline in science and a slight decrease in language arts.

It also comes at a time when the state education department has offered Evans a one-year contract extension after which he would be judged on progress in student academic achievement.

If Evans declines the offer, state education officials said he will not be offered an extension when his current contract expires next year. Evans, who made $205,000 last year, has until Oct. 1 to decide whether to take the offer.

CLIFTON — Police arrested an 18-year-old and are seeking another suspect in two stabbings that happened during a brawl that broke out after a house party this weekend, authorities said.

The brawl stemmed from a comment made about someone’s song selection during the house party on Highland Avenue near Van Winkle Avenue, but police said underlying animosity between two groups in attendance fueled the dispute, said Detective Sgt. Robert Bracken. Investigators also believe gang members were at the party.

The party let out about 12:30 a.m. Sunday, and a huge fight ensued. The altercation spanned a block as at least 20 people fought each other while bouncing off cars with at least two people stabbed and at least one person injured while trying to flee, Bracken said.

Police were called to a Clifton Avenue gas station where two victims in the fight were sitting in a car filled with five people. A 17-year-old Clifton boy was suffering from several stab wounds in his upper and lower back, and a 19-year-old Clifton man had cuts on his arms and hands from what police believe was a fall while he fled from the flight.

Both victims were taken to St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center and were released later in the day.

A 17-year-old male from Passaic, who also was repeatedly stabbed in the back, was driven to St. Mary’s Hospital in Passaic with stab wounds. He later was taken to University Hospital in Newark and also was released later in the day, Bracken said.

Police arrested Felix Bonilla, 18, of Passaic in his stabbing, Bracken said.

Bonilla was charged with aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a weapon and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose. He was being held in county jail on $150,000 bond, police said.

Police are seeking a suspect — but do not have an identity — in the stabbing of the Clifton teen in the ongoing investigation, Bracken said. The stabbing victims were from either side of the feuding factions, he said.

“Both of them are extremely lucky,” Bracken said about the stabbing victims. “The slightest margin either way: if the wound was the slightest bit to the left or right or a little deeper, you would have had a different outcome.”