Complaints allege that H&K Financial takes advance payment from consumers for debt consolidation services, including lowering credit card interest rates. Once the fee – ranging from $595 to $895 – is paid, the consumer either has trouble getting straight answers about why promised services have not been provided or never hears from the company again. In some cases, refunds have not been provided, leaving consumers further in debt.

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- One by one, gleaming motorcades pulled up outside of a white-columned home on a farm just outside this city, each depositing the wife of a foreign leader here for an economic summit. Inside, Michelle Obama waited for her first turn as international hostess...

Drug courts have in many places become an obstacle to making cost-efficient drug abuse therapy available to addicts, particularly minorities, and reducing criminal case loads, the nation's largest association of criminal defense attorneys said today.

BARTOW, Fla. (AP) -- An African American homeless man with a long, mostly misdemeanor criminal record received a 15-year sentence for stealing a box of cereal and a can of evaporated milk...

WASHINGTON (NNPA) - For soft-spoken honors student Derrion Albert, death came at the hands and feet of a savage mob of his peers. Albert, 16, of Chicago, was brutally beaten as he walked home from school Sept. 26. The church-going teen's death has brought to light the ongoing war Black youth wage against one another. Even President Obama, whose former Chicago residence is less than an hour away from the site of Albert's death, has called the grainy, two-minute cell phone video "chilling."

CHICAGO (NNPA) - Neighborhood and school rivalries have been going on in Chicago for decades, yet the Chicago Public Schools continue to break up boundaries by closing schools and mixing longtime rival students together, sometimes with deadly results. That's the assessment from dozens of community leaders, parents and students who say CPS officials have not listened to the community and African American kids are being put at risk.

Nearly one in three borrowers who applied for a mortgage last year was denied as lenders kept their standards tight while the mortgage crisis accelerated, the government reported Wednesday.

The nation needs to give the same urgency to making sure all Americans have broadband access as the Eisenhower administration did in building an interstate highway system a half-century ago, a report released Friday concluded.

Despite an oft-circulated email warning of an impending onslaught of telemarketing calls to your cell phone, the Federal Communications Commission says the claim is false.

WASHINGTON (AP) _ Democrats sought to give government the right to sell insurance in competition with private industry Tuesday as the Senate Finance Committee opened a second week of debate over massive health care legislation...