Citigroup Inc. has told about five former top executives that it won't pay them tens of millions of dollars in promised severance payouts...

Citigroup has received $50 billion in taxpayer-funded capital, and the U.S. government soon will own as much as 34% of the company's common shares. Company officials have briefed the Treasury Department on their plans to halt the severance-related payments. Government officials didn't demand that the bank end its payouts, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Under the terms of exit agreements with the departed executives, Citigroup is contractually obliged to make the payments. But bank officials essentially are wagering that the former executives will conclude that it would be publicly embarrassing for them to file lawsuits against the struggling, taxpayer-backed company seeking the money.

The bill is named after its sponsors, Congressman Fernand St. Germain, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Senator Jake Garn, Republican of Utah. The bill had broad support in Congress, with co-sponsors including Charles Schumer and Steny Hoyer. The bill passed overwhelmingly, by a margin of 272-91 in the [Democratic-controlled] House.

...does the steepening yield curve mean investors are worried about the deterioration in the U.S. fiscal outlook, or the potential for a collapse in the U.S. dollar as the Fed floods the world with newly minted currency as part of its quantitative easing program. This might be an argument to augment to step up asset purchases.

Reporting from Oakland -- Not many schools in California recruit teachers with language like this: "We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply."

That, it turns out, is just the beginning of the ways in which American Indian Public Charter and its two sibling schools spit in the eye of mainstream education. These small, no-frills, independent public schools in the hardscrabble flats of Oakland...mock liberal orthodoxy with such zeal that it can seem like a parody.

School administrators take pride in their record of frequently firing teachers they consider to be underperforming. Unions are embraced with the same warmth accorded "self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best effort," to quote the school's website.

It would be easy to dismiss American Indian as one of the nuttier offshoots of the fast-growing charter school movement, which allows schools to receive public funding but operate outside of day-to-day district oversight. But the schools command attention for one very simple reason: By standard measures, they are among the very best in California.