By Lee A. Daniels
Thursday the U.S. Senate refused to pass legislation extending unemployment benefits for jobless workers coming to the end of their regular benefits period. As a result, by the end of next week, more than a million jobless Americans will have lost their benefits this month.

By The Editors
Black farmers’ years of litigation and political lobbying to try to right an egregious wrong endured another frustrating setback Thursday when the Senate once again refused to appropriate the funds necessary to settle their long-decided discrimination lawsuit against the federal government.

By Seth Freed Wessler
After an afternoon of long-winded speeches from both sides of the aisle, the Senate voted to move forward with the extension of unemployment benefits.

By Doug Miller
After a recent meeting with U.S. Senate majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, John W. Boyd, Jr., the head of the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA) said roughly 80,000 new claims have been filed under a re-energized suit to compensate black farmers for discrimination suffered at the hands of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), but funds earmarked to settle the claims apparently have been misplaced in the year-end budget shuffle.

By Rev. Susan Newman
One of the best lessons my mother taught me as a child is “It is better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.” This is how I feel about the looming threat of abortion restrictions being reintroduced in the Health Care Reform bill when debate begins on the Senate floor.

By The Editors
After nearly a month of wrangling, on Thursday the U.S. Senate shelved an eleventh-hour attempt to add a new question—about citizenship and immigration status—to next year’s Census population survey.