The cost of fuel may have dropped since its surge last year, but saving money on gasoline is always a top priority for consumers. While you may have no control over prices at the pump, the Oregon Society of CPAs advises that there are steps you can take to be a smarter gas consumer. Of course, the most obvious choice might be to consider a more fuel efficient vehicle if you're driving a gas guzzler. But if an auto purchase isn't on your current agenda, here are some of tips that will lower your gas costs no matter what type of car you're driving ...

Over 3,500 people celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at the 27th Annual Martin Luther King March and Rally at Garfield High School on Jan. 19, the eve of the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States ...

Witnesses say that Oscar Grant's last words to the officers were, "Please don't shoot. I have a daughter." Family photo/Amsterdam News ...

Tom Peavey of the Office of Youth Violence Prevention, John Canda of Brothers and Sisters Keepers, and Gang Outreach Worker Pernell Brown of CREW, hold an afternoon protest last week after an eruption of gang violence claimed the lives of at least three people in Portland ...

WASHINGTON (NNPA) - Civil rights leaders and a leading scholar on Black politics said that if the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of a case that challenges a central provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Blacks will encounter widespread discrimination in trying to assert their political rights.
The high court has agreed to hear the case of Northwest Austin Municipal District Utility No. 1 vs. Mukasey, which argues that a utility district located in Texas does not have a history of discrimination and, therefore, should not be subjected to the VRA's Section 5 preclearance requirements, a provision at the heart of the law ...

For nearly 150 years, the autobiography of William Grimes sat in relative obscurity on the shelves of a New Haven, Connecticut Historical Society.
It wasn't until the late 1990s when Regina Mason, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Grimes uncovered her familial link with a man who had chronicled his life's story as a freed slave nearly four decades before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed ...

Middle College program manager Damon Hickok, a Portland Community College and Portland Public Schools program that targets low-income and first generation college students and allows them to obtain college credits before finishing high school, says 91 percent of students are successful ...

When Cornel West gave us his first book, "Race Matters," the world in 1993 was a much different place than it is today. "We are in a new day. I couldn't have said that 15 years ago with Race Matters because I wrote Race Matters in the middle of the bleak ages, political Ice Age," West said.
But with the transcendent election of President Barack Obama, it is clearly a new day for America and the world. And with this new day, West has given us a new book, "Hope on a Tightrope: Words & Wisdom."
"I think it's a metaphor for our lives, for our nation and for the world that is hanging in the balance ...

After a blistering report released early this month confirmed that a senior official in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department illegally hired and fired career attorneys based on their political alignment with President Bush, Civil Rights lawyers around the country say the new head of the Civil Rights Division – yet to be named by President Barack Obama – will likely be "pivotal" in the presidential administration.
"The assistant attorney general heading the Civil Rights Division will perhaps occupy a pivotal seat in the Obama administration. President Obama has been quite publicly critical of the DOJ's positions on civil rights issues and with three major cases raising important race issues, that person will have a full plate from  the beginning,"  ...

LAUREL, Mississippi (AP)  The work has always been stupefying and hard. Hour after hour standing on the line, soldering or welding or drilling in screws.
Even in today's nightmare economy, most people wouldn't want this daily grind that steals the soul in 12-hour shifts paying as little as $280 a week, before taxes.
But such labor prospers here in mostly rural Jones County, home to Laurel, where the area's biggest employer, Howard Industries, maintains a sprawling factory that builds electrical transformers and other big equipment behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. ...