Politics

When Hurricane Katrina forced Charity Hospital to close four years ago, it was a dream come true for many officials in Louisiana’s state government who had long wanted to see it shuttered. Charity was the troubled medical facility that poor and uninsured residents of New Orleans turned to as their last resort for medical care.…

President Barack Obama led the nation Saturday in mourning and remembering “the greatest legislator of our time,” celebrating the indelible impact of Edward M. Kennedy as a senator for nearly a half-century and leader of America’s most famous family during tragedy and triumph. Delivering an emotional, simple eulogy for Kennedy that capped a two-hour Roman…

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is being lionized as an extraordinary legislator, a champion of civil rights, health care and education, and the caring patriarch of America’s royal family. He was all that. For African Americans, however, he was even more. Ted Kennedy was a white liberal who believed in black power, black political power, and…

For the last several years, New Orleans has been working to bill itself to the movie industry as the “Hollywood South.” Yet with a wide-open mayor’s race to replace the term-limited and oft-investigated C. Ray Nagin on the horizon for next February, New Orleans might be bringing an unwanted side effect from its California courtship:…

A piece of gruesome history is on its way to Washington DC. From the Chicago Tribune: Plans are in the works to exhibit the casket that once held the body of lynching victim Emmett Till at the Smithsonian Institution’s planned National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington when it opens in 2015.…

Sen. Edward Kennedy’s skills were never more successful and constant than in the area of civil rights: for minorities, for women, for the disabled and for immigrants. Over nearly five decades, the Massachusetts Democrat, who died Tuesday at age 77, assumed an increasingly important role in framing the nation’s civil rights laws and in leading…

Missouri is redfining the way juvenile detention is done. From CNN: Getting arrested for stealing cars after his 16th birthday may be the best thing that ever happened to Terrence Barkley. It got him out of gangs and headed to college. While in one of Missouri’s juvenile facilities, Barkley became editor of its student newspaper,…

What if there was a pill you could take once a day to keep from contracting HIV? That idea may not be as crazy as it sounds. In countries around the world, scientific studies involving thousands of participants are looking at whether a person who does not have HIV can take a once-a-day, anti-retroviral pill…

Rush Limbaugh responds to Jay-Z’s ‘Off That’ in which Mr. Carter raps: Please tell Bill O’Reilly to fall back Tell Rush Limbaugh to get of my balls It’s 2010, not 1864 Not to be outdone, Limbaugh of course brings up Barack Obama and wants to remind Jigga that the nation’s penises need to be saved…