Today, a brutal recession which dictates the need to cut budgets and proof that mass incarceration does not reduce crime is changing conversations in legislative halls around the country. Some politicians, who in the past have only paid attention to fearful constituents who want to make sure people who commit crimes are locked up, are beginning to consider alternatives to imprisonment.

The Supreme Court of Virginia has overhauled its Website for Virginia's courts with the aim of making it more "user friendly." But one thing has not changed on the high court's redesigned site at www.courts.state.va.us: The state's highest court still clings to its practice of using sexist language to describe members of its administrative staff.

This week marks the 46th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963. Nearly a half century since the march that drew more than 200,000 to Washington, D.C., Black activists confess they have changed their strategy in the wake of an African-American President, but they contend that their commitment remains the same.

I must personally share with you that I've had enough of the misinformation and, frankly, misleading statements coming from those who oppose the transformation of a health system that currently renders the best health care to the wealthiest, depletes the savings of solidly middle-class Americans, and leaves 46 million people with no health-care coverage at all.

President Obama's town hall was part of the White House's stepped up efforts to address the inaccuracies and so-called "myths" that are being circulated by critics trying to derail health care reform.

A group of African-American businesses is asking the White House to withhold federal funds from three Wichita-area governments until they agree to spend more with minority contractors.

The 1990s saw the rise and fall of the virulently antigovernment "Patriot" movement, made up of paramilitary militias, tax defiers and so-called "sovereign citizens."
Sparked by a combination of anger at the federal government and the deaths of political dissenters at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the movement took off in the middle of the decade and continued to grow even after 168 people were left dead by the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City's federal building — an attack, the deadliest ever by domestic U.S. terrorists, carried out by men steeped in the rhetoric and conspiracy theories of the militias ...

NEW YORK (NNPA) - The public may never know if Shem Walker, 49, knew that the man he scuffled with on his mother's steps one evening in mid-July was an undercover narcotics officer.
The officer was using the stoop to monitor a "buy-n-bust" operation a few doors away from the Walker home. What happened may never be known because Shem Walker is dead.
The New York Police Department and some witnesses say the men scuffled after Walker told the man in plainclothes to move on. Somehow the officer's weapon fired and a 15-year Army veteran died defending his mother's home, something he had done many times before in an area known for drug trafficking ...

A federal judge last week threw out a free-speech lawsuit brought by a former Tennessee high school student who wore clothing bearing the Confederate flag ...

William Jefferson, Louisiana's first Black congressman since Reconstruction, was found guilty on 11 of 16 counts in a high-profile case that attracted national attention after federal investigators recovered $90,000 in cash hidden in a freezer in the congressman's home.