These are excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:

The Sun News, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on the National Hurricane Center:

A bureaucratic turf war is roiling Miami's National Hurricane Center at the worst possible time — the heart of the hurricane season.

... The centre's mercurial director, Bill Proenza, seems the likely candidate for bad guy. But he could actually be the hero.

Proenza's predecessor, readers will recall, was Max Mayfield, whose calm demeanour and air of authority inspired public confidence in the work of the Hurricane Center and the accuracy of its forecasts. Proenza, who replaced Mayfield in January, seems to delight in raising public doubts about the centre's ability to give coastal residents the information they need to survive bad storms. ...

So — is Proenza a histrionic attention-seeking bureaucrat or a courageous whistle-blower? Are his rebellious employees indulging in a classic bureaucratic cover-up or is the Hurricane Center's storm-forecasting prowess truly undiminished?

We're siding with center staffers — for now. But it's possible that wishful thinking played a role in making this call. We'll know come October, when storm season is mostly ended, whether our confidence in the centre's senior employees was well-placed.

Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, on Chinese imports>

The expanding list of problem goods in recent months indicates an urgent need to strengthen the US Food and Drug Administration's inspection capabilities. Just as important, the scares raised by Chinese food imports point to a basic need to cultivate multiple supply sources, thus reducing undue dependence on any one source.

Unchecked, the escalating safety issues promise to undermine consumer confidence in imported foods, an expanding sector of the economy.

In the past few months, American consumers have heard enough about melamine-tainted animal feed, contaminated seafood and cancer-causing chemicals on fruits and vegetables from China to know tougher measures must be taken to ensure the ingredients in their food are safe for consumption. For the FDA to meet that expectation, it must have more inspectors immediately. It also needs the authority, similar to that of the Department of Agriculture, to deny foreign exporters access to the US market until they prove they meet safety standards.

Chicago Tribune on the Bible in schoolB>

Knowledge of the Bible is an important component of cultural literacy.

Yet many people, particularly young people, have little or no working knowledge about the Bible. So it makes great sense to teach the Bible in schools as history and literature. That goes as well for public schools, as long as its teaching doesn't push a religious agenda.

That very distinction is getting a test these days in Odessa, Texas. Eight parents have sued seeking to stop the Ector County School Board from teaching a Bible curriculum developed by a North Carolina-based group called the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. The lawsuit is likely to have impact outside the county. The National Council says its curriculum has been adopted by 395 school districts around the country.

Mark Chancey, a professor of biblical studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, did a study of the curriculum in 2005. He found that the National Council promotes a fundamentalist Protestant interpretation of the Bible that often ignores the differing beliefs and practices of Catholics, Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians and mainline Protestants.

The National Council is not the only option school districts have. A competing curriculum offered by the Bible Literacy Project, a non-profit group, has been vetted, accepted and praised by a wide range of scholars, critics and education officials.

The folks at the National Council are right on one count: The Bible should be taught in public schools. But they shouldn't be the ones to do it.