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...

In an exhibit designed to charge emotions and insight action, award-winning Time Magazine photojournalist, Steve Liss, together with other notable photojournalists, chronicles the plight of regional poverty in modern-day America in "In Our Own Backyard: U.S. Poverty in the 21st Century," ...

WASHINGTON (AP) _ They call her "President Snowe" in the blogosphere.
Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe is the only Republican in Congress who might vote for President Barack Obama's effort to overhaul health care and extend coverage to those who lack it ...