Category: National News

The NAACP is charging that BP is primarily hiring minorities for the dangerous jobs in the oil spill clean up and putting them at risk for various health problems. A letter written by NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous urged BP CEO Tony Hayward to take further steps to address the spill and its impact on […]

Former Detroit Public School (DPS) Board President Otis Mathis III was arraigned on an obscenity charge Tuesday. He was released on a $50,000 bond, but was ordered to surrender his passport and cannot travel outside of Michigan. DPS Superintendent Teresa Gueyser claims the 55-year-old Mathis fondled himself in front of her during a June 16 […]

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote next week on whether to extend unemployment benefits through November for those who have been out of work longer than 26 weeks. This would be the fourth vote on the bill. A Republican voting block objecting to the $33 billion cost to taxpayers stalled the other three. State-funded […]

Michael Steele has maintained a Teflon-like resistance to criticism since he became the Republican National Committee chairman in 2008. And it appears he again will brush off calls for his resignation in the wake of his biggest gaffe to date, his criticism of the Afghanistan war, which he called “a war of Obama’s choosing.” But […]

The Department of Justice this week filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona, claiming that its immigration law, S.B. 1070, unconstitutionally interferes with the federal government’s authority to set and enforce immigration policy. S.B. 1070, which made failure to carry immigration documents a crime and allows police the discretionary power to detain anyone suspected […]

A Los Angeles County jury is to resume deliberations July 6 in the murder trial of a White, former Oakland, Calif. mass transit officer charged with killing a Black man who was lying facedown on a train platform. An Alameda County judge moved the trial from the Oakland area to Los Angeles due to intense […]

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently awarded $30.2 million to 29 HIV/AIDS housing programs across the nation, which it said would allow more than 1,000 low-income citizens living with the virus to maintain permanent housing. Over the next three years, the funds will also help provide permanent support for over 1,232 households, […]

Civil rights attorney William Taylor, an avid supporter of education and social equality, died June 28 in Bethesda, Md. He was 78. Taylor’s career, which spanned more than four decades, began in 1954 when he worked as a lawyer on the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund. NAACP President Todd Benjamin Jealous labeled the attorney […]

The United States government is accepting offers of assistance from countries around the world to help contain a runaway, deepwater well in the Gulf of Mexico and clean up the spill which has pumped oil into the gulf for more than two months. “The United States will accept 22 offers of assistance from 12 countries […]

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is once again in hot water, this time over comments he made about the U.S.’s role in the ongoing war in Afghanistan, which he called, “a war of Obama’s choosing.” “This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in,” Steele said during a […]

The U.S. saw mild improvements in the national unemployment rate last month, but the news is mixed for minorities who continue to be hit hard in the jobs arena, according to the Labor Department’s monthly joblessness report. Unemployment fell nationwide for the second straight month, declining to 9.5 percent from 9.7 percent in May, according […]