Dave DeWitt

The race for President is ratcheting up in North Carolina, as both campaigns are making the state a central focus.

Dave DeWitt: In 2008, the presidential race in North Carolina came down to 4-tenths of a percentage point. The race in 2012 looks like it could be just as close, and both candidates are likely to spend a lot of time here in the next few months.

Two new single-gender academies are set to open in Wake County. The schools are designed to serve students from low-income areas.

Dave DeWitt: More than 800 students applied to be in the first classes at the Wake Leadership Academy for Boys and a similar school for girls. Just 300 will walk through the doors when they open on Monday.

North Carolina hit an all-time high graduation rate in 2012. More than 80 percent of high school seniors earned their diplomas.

Dave DeWitt: The 4-year graduation rate went up by more than two full percentage points from 2011. In six years, the graduation rate has gone up by nearly 12 percentage points.

School officials pointed to a wide range of local efforts to propel students to graduation. Hispanic students made the largest gain in the graduation rate.

N.C. Central is getting ready to search for a new permanent replacement for Chancellor Charlie Nelms, who abruptly announced his retirement late last week.

Dave DeWitt: When James Moeser announced he was stepping down as UNC-Chapel Hill's chancellor in 2007, he did so eight full months before he officially left the job. Chancellors at other UNC system schools typically give at least several months' notice, even if they are leaving for other positions.

A lower percentage of North Carolina's young adults are getting college degrees. That's according to census data released earlier this month.

Dave DeWitt: At the end of 2009, 37.9 percent of the state's 25-to-34 year old residents had some sort of college degree. A year later, that number fell by three-tenths of a percentage point. That comes as the national trend is going the other way.

There's a new Dean of the Duke University Chapel. The Reverend Doctor Luke Powery is the first African-American to hold the position.

Dave DeWitt: Powery comes from the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was an assistant professor. He replaces Samuel Wells, who left Duke Chapel to return to England.

Powery was one of several who gave guest sermons at Duke Chapel in recent months. The one he delivered in June was called "Why Are You Afraid?"

North Carolina will get about $14 million of the nearly $800 million the federal government is giving out to update transit systems across the country. The grants are part of the US Department of Transportation's "State of Good Repair and Bus Livability" effort.

DOT Secretary Ray Lahood says the grants will have a transformative effect.

Researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill are helping communities develop better plans for dealing with floods. The result could be lower flood insurance rates for homeowners.

Dave DeWitt: Flood insurance is a major consideration for many in eastern North Carolina, where some entire counties lie in the floodplain. Since private insurers won’t offer policies, homeowners get flood insurance through National Flood Insurance Program, run by FEMA.

Lawyers representing several media outlets and UNC-Chapel Hill argued today over what constitutes a public document. At the center of the case are the personal cell phone records of former football coach Butch Davis. Dave DeWitt reports.

Dave DeWitt: The media outlets contend that Davis was acting as a public official when he conducted the business of managing the UNC-Chapel Hill football program over his personal cell phone. Their attorneys argued today that that means those records should be public.

A former professor at UNC-Chapel Hill has resigned from the University of Michigan amid allegations he fabricated research while in Chapel Hill.

Dave DeWitt: Lawrence Sanna is a social psychologist. In 2011, he published several papers that showed people who stood in an elevated position were more altruistic. One of his experiments showed that people who rode to the top of an escalator were more likely to give to the Salvation Army than those who rode the escalator to the bottom.