By Jackie Jones
You may not be able to get rid of all the fees, but you can make a dent in the pile and put a little more cash in your pocket or your savings account.

By TaRessa Stovall
On December 1, in a contest described in the media as “one of the tightest political contests in decades,” 30 percent of Atlanta voters elected Reed, 40, as the city’s sixth consecutive African-American mayor since the late Maynard Jackson made history as the first African-American to lead a major Southern city in 1973.

Sadly, Frank Lee Smith did not live to see his exoneration nine years ago this week. Smith died of cancer on Florida’s death row while fighting for access to DNA testing that would eventually prove his innocence Eleven months after Smith’s death, DNA tests proved his innocence and cleared his name. The results also implicated the real perpetrator of the murder for which Smith had been convicted.

By Mark Lassiter
In September, Forbes announced that Tiger Woods had become the first athlete to earn one billion dollars over the course of his career. Now, just two months later, and approximately forty years after the setting for Mad Men, real life advertising executives at Nike, EA Sports, Gillette, Gatorade and AT&T have been carefully monitoring the sagging ratings for the soap opera being played in the national media with their superstar pitchman, Tiger Woods, in the role of leading man.

By Paula Woods
In presenting the true story of the 1995 South African Springbok’s underdog run at the Rugby World Cup, director Eastwood and Morgan Freeman (who stars as Nelson Mandela and served as an executive producer) aim to not only honor the spirit and achievement of Nelson Mandela but also to humanize his drive to reconcile a country torn apart by apartheid and years of violent resistance.

By Ralph Richardson I am an NYC-based filmmaker, so I come to this Top 25 list with a wonderful joy and love for film, and since my mother took me to the movies every week since I was 3, I also have a pretty good knowledge of this grand art form

By Stacey Patton
Ugandans don’t like homosexuals.

That simple phrase is a gross understatement to the country’s 500,000 gays and lesbians living in the heavily Muslim and Christian nation of 30 million, where 95% of the population opposes legalizing homosexual acts. The Ugandan parliament is trying to further crack down on the lives of gays and lesbians as it debates a draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill that would require its citizens to peep behind bedroom doors and tell on people who engage in “unnatural” consensual sex.

By Lee A. Daniels
Now that millions of white Americans are out of work, enduring the sense of desperation that poverty and joblessness bring, I can’t believe I’m not hearing the faux-moralists lecture them about taking “personal responsibility” for their own circumstances.

By Bryan Monroe
Journalism is not dead. Not by a long shot. It is, however, in the process of painfully shedding its old skin for a new one. But, in the battle for its soul between old media and new media, something important is being lost: we are now living in a new America.

By Jackie Jones
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), heralded as welfare reform during the Clinton administration, comes up before Congress next year for reauthorization.

Whether the program, which was purportedly intended to assist the needy while gradually moving them off assistance and into the workplace, will continue as presently constructed or morph into something else remains to be seen.