Stateside

Eighth graders at a Los Angeles middle school tap their rulers and nod their heads to the rhythm of the rap video projected on a screen. It’s not Snoop Dogg or Jay-Z. It’s their math teacher, LaMar Queen, using rhyme to help them memorize seemingly complicated algebra and in the process improve their grades.

Read More

Obama aimed high in his prime-time Oval Office address last Tuesday night — perhaps higher than the facts support and history teaches — as he vowed to restore livelihoods and nature from the still-unfolding calamity in the Gulf of Mexico.

Read More

Next Sunday will mark the 60th day since BP’s Deepwater Horizon Rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, costing 11 lives and untold Billions of dollars in damage to what has been called the greatest ecological disaster in U.S. History.

Read More

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, released the following statement after President Obama addressed the nation from the Oval Office about the response to the BP oil spill.

Read More

Further, with the state being the largest supplier of schoolbooks in the country, up to 40 percent of the rest of the nation could adopt the same curriculum for their school districts. The vote ended, at least for now, several months of heated debate and charges of attempting to rewrite history in a way that…

Read More

The shooting death of a black man whose body was dragged for several miles is being investigated as a possible hate crime after the arrest of a white man he worked with, South Carolina’s state police chief said.

Read More

Tea Party-backed Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul was blasted by Democrats and GOP officials last Sunday for his comments that the federal government, through the Civil Rights Act, has no right to tell private businesses that they can’t discriminate.

Read More

Decrying American race relations as a near-war, Malcolm X expressed hope that his tumultuous life story could help blacks and whites, according to a never-published introduction to his best-selling autobiography.

Read More

Well, that was predictable. As we saw last year with the nomination of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, few events unleash a bigger torrent of conservative misinformation than when a Democratic president nominates someone to the Supreme Court.

Read More

Warren Evans, who was hired last summer in part to make sure Detroit’s police change the way they use force, cut short an overseas vacation and returned to the city Tuesday, just as an attorney for the family of Aiyana Stanley-Jones announced two lawsuits claiming officers violated the girl’s rights.

Read More