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President Obama will surround himself with college students at the White House on Friday and warn that the cost of student loans is about to go up.

Interest rates on government-backed college loans are set to double July 1 — unless Congress agrees on a fix before then. Obama has threatened to veto a House-passed bill that would let the cost of student loans go up and down with the market.

If the alarm bells over rising student loan rates sound familiar, that's because the same thing happened last year. Back then, the president went on a barnstorming tour of college campuses, warning that a doubling of interest rates would cost the average student borrower $1,000 for each year of college over the life of his loan.

"I'll do a quick poll. This may be unscientific," he said. "How many people can afford to pay an extra $1,000 right now?"

Eventually, Congress agreed to keep rates where they were — at 3.4 percent for one more year. That year is almost up, and students again face the prospect of rates doubling to 6.8 percent July 1. Obama is urging Congress on Friday to block that increase.

Tobin Van Ostern, who's with the campus arm of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, says students will make the case themselves when they descend on Washington, D.C., next week.

"All day, we'll have people going in and out of Congress buildings, meeting with senators and bringing their personal stories and experiences directly to those who have the ability to keep interest rates low," he says.

Van Ostern says lawmakers do seem to have learned a lesson from last year's showdown. No one is eager to see rates double overnight.

"Everyone seems to be in agreement that we need to do something about student loan interest rates to keep them low and affordable for borrowers," he says.

The president and congressional Republicans have offered different plans to do that, though they both start the same way: tying rates on student loans to the interest on a 10-year Treasury note. That rate is expected to be about 2.5 percent next year, climbing to just over 5 percent in 2018.

Under the GOP plan, a student who borrows money next year could see his interest rate rise every year after that, like an adjustable mortgage. In contrast, the president's plan would let students lock in rates for the life of their loan.

Beth Akers of the Brookings Institution says she thinks students might like that predictability.

"It simplifies the math they need to do when they're considering going to college," she says.

On the other hand, Akers gives the Republicans credit for setting an upper limit on interest rates of 8.5 percent. There's no such cap in the president's plan.

"I do think that a cap makes sense, because in a period of economic expansion, where we do have interest rates rising rapidly, we wouldn't want to see less college-going among students who are on the margin of being able to afford to go to college," she says.

Lower-income students would continue to get a break under the president's plan, with interest rates 2 percentage points lower than what others are paying. Under the GOP plan, Van Ostern of the Center for American Progress notes, all students would pay the same rate.

"In reality, that ends up meaning that lower-income folks pay a little bit more, and then it will save people who are middle- or upper-income folks some money," he says.

Compared to some other fights in Washington, these differences don't seem insurmountable. But unless lawmakers and the White House can agree on the details quickly, Van Ostern says, another temporary stopgap measure may be necessary.

"If we can't come up with a long-term plan by then [July 1], and time is ticking, then we certainly need to at least pass a short-term extension of current interest rates to give folks in Congress more time to figure out how to deal with it long term," he says.

The whole idea behind the switch to market rates is to take some of the politics out of the student loan business. For now, though, it's clear that politics is still standing in the way.

NPR has learned that former Justice Department official James B. Comey is in line to become President Obama's choice as the next FBI director, according to two sources familiar with the search.

Comey, 52, has an extensive track record at the highest levels of federal law enforcement. He served as the deputy attorney general — the second in command at Justice — in the George W. Bush administration, and as the top federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, where he filed charges against housewares maven Martha Stewart for lying about stock trades, among other notable cases. As a young prosecutor in Virginia, he pioneered an effort to remove guns from Richmond's streets.

In recent years, Comey has worked in the private sector, as general counsel at defense contractor Lockheed Martin and at Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund, before leaving that post early this year to teach at Columbia Law School. Comey is a Republican, but he famously threatened to resign in the Bush years over a program that's been described as a form of warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

"I couldn't stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis," he told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2007, years after the episode. "I simply couldn't stay."

He also angered some in the Bush administration by expanding the mandate of a special prosecutor investigating a leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame — a case that resulted in the prosecution of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a longtime aide to then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

In recent weeks, the White House narrowed the search to just two candidates — Comey and White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco. Monaco is a former assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department who only arrived at the White House earlier this year. The Daily Beast recently reported a new assignment in her portfolio — helping to resume transfers of detainees and eventually try to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Monaco would have been the first woman nominated to lead the FBI. It is a familiar place for her; she worked closely with the outgoing FBI director, Robert Mueller. Mueller took office only days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and proved so hard to replace that the Senate passed special, one-time-only legislation to extend his 10-year term.

Mueller is on track to leave this fall, and the White House needs to nominate a replacement soon to finish the confirmation process in time for the Senate's summer break. The choice of FBI director could be one of Obama's most lasting legacies in national security.

Matt Lehrich, a White House spokesman, declined comment on any personnel decisions regarding the FBI, and another source told NPR it could be several days before Obama makes a formal announcement.

As the American military winds down its efforts in Afghanistan, grand plans for nation building are giving way to limited, practical steps: building up the Afghan forces and denying the Taliban key terrain, especially the approaches to Kabul.

About an hour south of the capital Kabul, one Green Beret team returned to a village where American forces had pulled out.

Lt. Col. Brad Moses, who was in the Sayed Abad district four years ago, wandered around the government center and expressed disappointment at the scene.

Glass is shattered at some buildings. The roof of one has caved in. Across the yard are stacks of scorched and twisted cars. All this damage is the work of a truck bomb in 2011 that killed five Afghans and injured nearly 80 U.S. soldiers. After that, the American forces pulled out.

"This was the agriculture building over here, and the women's affairs and all the line ministers that were working out of here," Moses says. "It was nice ... the glass fronts, that was all civil affairs projects put in there, the flag pole, demonstrating their resolve."

The small team of Americans here now is riding around in all-terrain vehicles and large armored trucks, wearing body armor and carrying weapons. One of the Afghan government workers greets them.

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Only a few years ago, even large commercial vessels wouldn't take on the ice-bound Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific via the Canadian north — but climate change has changed all that.

Now, a group of hearty adventurers hopes to be the first to row the 1,900-mile route this summer.

"Several people have kayaked it [a section at a time] over several years. But no one has ever done this under human power in a single season. Not even close," Kevin Vallely, who is heading up the rowing team, told The Globe and Mail on Wednesday.

Vallely has completed his last shakedown cruise and plans to set off at the beginning of July from Inuvik in northern Canada with three crew mates in a custom-built, 23-foot rowboat. They expect to take 75 days to reach their eastern destination, the town of Pond Inlet. Along the way they're bracing for encounters with dangerous ice, storms and polar bears, not to mention the psychological challenge of four men in a small boat in those difficult circumstances.

"We have guns" as a precaution against polar bears, Vallely tells The Globe and Mail. "But we'll have rubber bullets and bear bangers ... we don't want to kill a bear."

The newspaper says Vallely, "who has done numerous wilderness treks over the past 20 years, said if your physical conditioning is just right, body fitness peaks during a long journey and then slowly deteriorates."

" 'Obviously you have to train enough that you don't get injured [by the exertion of the expedition]. But you don't want to train too much, because if you go into it Tour de France fit, in a couple of weeks you would be fried,' he said. 'So you go into it fit, but not crazy fit, and you build up and you get really strong about half-way through. And then you slowly start to fall apart. By the end you want to be tired, happy to be done, but not completely baked.' "