By The Editors
The legal reconstruction of and punishment for the whirlwind of lawlessness that coursed through the New Orleans police department in the wake of Hurricane Katrina five years ago took another step forward on Thursday, December 9.

By Lee A. Daniels
The deal between President Obama and the Congressional Republicans has been struck. Whether it will hold amid fierce criticism from some Democratic Party activists and liberal pundits and some Democrats in Congress remains to be seen.

By Doug Miller
African-American and Latino borrowers – already staggering under greater financial losses than whites in the wake of the U.S. mortgage foreclosure scandal – face an additional loss of an estimated $360 billion in cumulative family wealth from an associated decrease in neighborhood property values, according to recent testimony before Congress.

By Lee A. Daniels
Data accumulating in a growing pile of reports map the devastating consequences of the Great Recession on millions of Americans.

Among the most recent is a study from The Urban Institute, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, full of alarming statistics and findings about the “threat” to America’s social fabric of the persistence of child poverty.

By Lee A. Daniels
Given the stand-still overall unemployment rate of 9.6 percent – unchanged for the fourth consecutive month – some might think there’s nothing new to report about the country’s economic crisis.

They are wrong; for with each passing month the threads of the looming social catastrophe grow simultaneously clearer, denser and more knotted

By Lee A. Daniels
The popular belief that poverty and joblessness exist only in the inner cities and not in the suburbs is being overthrown by a new reality. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, the nation’s lengthening economic crisis is expanding the reach of poverty into America ’s suburbs.

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 Lee A. Daniels
A two-year-long program just begun by New York City’s agency for the homeless to test how good its services are has provoked harsh criticism because it appears to arbitrarily deny help to some needy families.

The effort is part of the city Department of Homeless Services’ “Homebase” program whose specific purpose is to help homeless families. The experiment involves 400 families whose financial situation has deteriorated so badly they are nearly destitute and had applied to the agency this summer for help.

By The Editors
How many canaries can a mine hold?

By now, the U.S. economy must have enough of those early-warning sentinels of impending disaster to make up a symphony orchestra – with more joining the ensemble seemingly every day.

But the tune they’re tweeting sounds ominously like a dirge.

By Lee A. Daniels
There’s been a considerable stir in the last week over the findings of a recent study that shows a remarkable narrowing of what its authors call the “happiness” gap between blacks and whites.