By Lee A. Daniels
There is no good news in last week’s federal jobs report. The situation its statistics outline is largely unchanged from that of August or even of several months earlier. But that is precisely why it’s seemed to produce a noticeable sag in the spirits of Democratic Party partisans, who had hoped for a political boost going into the mid-term elections early next month – and in the hopes of millions of American workers.

By William E. Kirwan
Today the U.S. ranks 12th among industrialized nations in college completion rates, with approximately just 40 percent of American young adults— to 34 years old—holding an associate’s degree or higher. For African-American and Hispanic students, the numbers are even more disconcerting at 30.3 percent and 19.8 percent, respectively.

By The Editors
Effective gun laws sharply reduce the likelihood that illegally trafficked guns will end up in the hands of criminals, a new study claims. It concludes that if more states followed the lead of those with strong gun laws and enacted such measures, it could substantially reduce the number of murders involving guns and save thousands of lives.

By George E. Curry
Are African-Americans less supportive of homosexuality than other racial and ethnic groups? The answer is an emphatic yes. But the reasons have more to do with religion than race.

By The Editors
The momentum may be increasing for substantive reform in two areas of the criminal justice system that have fostered significant injustice.

One area involves eyewitness identification. The other involves suspects who confess to a crime during police interrogation – even though they’re innocent. Both have played a critical role in producing the crisis of mass incarceration that has overwhelmed the criminal justice system, damaged the lives of many individuals and their families, and especially undermined the stability of many individual black communities and Black America as a whole.

Last evening, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rendered a decision in Farrakhan v. Gregoire that leaves a racially discriminatory disfranchisement law in place.

By Lee A. Daniels
This week the U.S. Supreme Court turned the final key in the lock behind which sits James Ford Seale, one of the most violent of the white racist extremists who operated with impunity in much of the Deep South well into the 1960s.

By TaRessa Stovall
When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton apologized on Friday, October 1, to the nation of Guatemala for the United States government’s use of hundreds of their citizens as guinea pigs in the 1940s, millions of Americans—particularly African Americans—had a flash of déjà vu. And few were surprised to learn of common links between the two medical travesties.

By The Editors
They’re a people who’ve endured centuries of enslavement, and even after their emancipation in the nineteenth century, endured decades of discrimination whose effects are visible and felt down to the present day.

In broad outline, those words describe the great part of black Americans’ history. But it also describes the history – and the present – of the Roma, an Indo- European people commonly and often derisively called gypsies.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
It’s not a new phenomenon – children being raised primarily by their grandparents or other close relatives. About six million are, according to the Kinship Care Legal Research Center, an initiative of the American Bar Association.