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Justice Department threatens legal action against Ferguson

The Justice Department said Wednesday it is exploring "legal actions" against the city of Ferguson, hours after the city council in the St. Louis suburb called for several revisions to a tentative agreement to revamp its police department and municipal court operations.

The Justice Department rebuked the move and could file a civil rights suit against the city to enforce the agreement. Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department civil rights division, said in statement that the department will take "necessary legal actions to ensure that Ferguson’s policing and court practices comply with the Constitution and relevant federal laws.”

A big story of the Democratic primaries is the rise of the so-called pragmatic black voters who revived former Vice President Joe Biden's flagging presidential campaign. But there's a flip side to this story that no one is paying attention to: What happened to all those radical black voters who should be rallying to Sen. Bernie Sanders' side?

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a socialist, according to many historians.  W.E.B. DuBois was a socialist,  and so were civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and  Bayard Rustin. The most prominent black philosopher today,  Cornel West,  is a socialist and Sanders' supporter. Hip-hop artists, such as rapper "Killer Mike" and Chuck D of Public Enemy, are also big Sanders supporters. Read More .pg.t-light .zn-body-text h3 { text-align: center; font-weight: 900; } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .zn-body-text h3:not(.el__headline):not(.cd__headline):before { margin: 60px auto 10px; } } There is  arguably no group in America that should be more suspicious of unfettered capitalism than blacks. Slavery, for example, was driven as much by greed as racism. And blacks lost half  of their wealth due to the 2008

"You can't have capitalism without racism," Malcolm X once  said.

Merrick Garland faces multiple crises to address and politically tough decisions to make as he belatedly takes the reins at the Justice Department as attorney general.

He'll try to heal a workforce that was battered during the Trump era, deliver on President Joe Biden's liberal priorities and campaign promises and oversee some of the most complex investigations in a generation.

Garland got a bipartisan nod of approval of 70-30, earning the support of 20 Republicans in a Senate where zero-sum partisanship is the new normal. But that was the easy part for Garland, who's been a federal appellate judge since 1997.

Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg will now attend Martin Luther King Day celebrations in Columbia, South Carolina

Buttigieg had originally planned to attend events in South Bend, Indiana, -- Buttigieg's hometown and where he formerly served as mayor

But South Carolina Democrats criticized the former mayor after the South Carolina NAACP released this year's schedule for the annual King Day at the Dome in South Carolina and Buttigieg's name was not on it.

In his single term, he fought to improve his state’s education system. He later threw himself into civil rights work.

Democrats during the civil rights era and used his single term as governor to address injustice in the state’s education system, died on Friday at his home in Jackson, Miss. He was 97.

At the time, Mississippi’s governors were limited to a single term, and Mr. Winter was determined to make the most of his. He had run on reforming the state’s dismal education system: Mississippi was the only state without public kindergarten, and it was the only state without funding for compulsory public education, a vestige of its extreme reaction to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation.

Jeff Sessions Wanted to ‘Drop the Case’ Against KKK Lynching, Attorney Testified

they’re sure to include questions that were raised when he was nominated for a federal judgeship in 1986. His confirmation was derailed largely by the testimony of Thomas Figures, an assistant U.S. attorney in Alabama when Sessions was U.S. attorney.

Sessions and his supporters, then as now, defend his civil rights record based on several cases to which Figures was also assigned, including the conviction of Henry Hays for the 1981 murder by lynching of a Donald Figures.

The issue at hand was—and still is—the city’s nine elite public high schools. Like most public high schools in the city, these schools can choose who attends. But the elite schools are their own animal: Whereas other schools look at a range of criteria to determine students’ eligibility, eight of these nine elite institutions admit applicants based exclusively on how the students score on a rigorous, two-and-a-half-hour-long standardized test.

The test-only admissions policy is touted by supporters as a tactic that promotes fairness and offers the best way to identify the city’s most gifted students. But the complaint, which is still pending, tells a different story—one of modern-day segregation, in which poor kids of color are getting left behind.

Public schools in cities across the country—schools intended to break down the walls typical of expensive, elite private institutions by opening up access to stimulating, quality education for kids of all means—are closed in their admissions. In other words, kids aren’t just automatically enrolled because they live in the neighborhood—they have to apply to get in

Del Berg nearly died around 10 a.m. one sunny day in August 1939.The 23-year-old American was staying at a monastery outside Valencia, Spain, when Italian bombers flew over and dropped their payload.

Berg was last, and it was only when he’d gotten down he realized his shirt was soaked in blood. Shrapnel had struck his liver.

Although the bombardment was not intended for Berg and his compatriots, the Italians wouldn’t have shed any tears. Mussolini’s air force was flying sorties in Iberia on behalf of General Francisco Franco, the Fascist fighting for control in the Spanish Civil War.

Senate scraps No Child Left Behind; education battle moves to states

The Senate sent a bill to the president’s desk Wednesday that replaces much of the widely disliked No Child Left Behind Act and shifts more power over education to states and school district

The bill — which the president is scheduled to sign Thursday — would dump the current law’s intense focus on test scores and the well-intentioned but impossible goal of having all students reading and calculating at grade level.

Taking a page from the liberal playbook, Mr. Horowitz and others recommended that conservative donors support groups similar in their ambition and structure to public interest organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, that had enjoyed great success in the 1960s and 1970s by actively looking for clients with potentially precedent-setting cases, then pouring resources into litigating them.

The Center for Individual Rights became one of the earliest public interest groups to grow out of this reassessment, focusing initially on defending academic free speech amid what it considered to be overweening political correctness. It began to attack affirmative action policies a few years late

That level of strategic savvy foreshadowed the more recent efforts of conservative political and policy groups.

Voting rights advocates observe somber King holiday

While most of the country will spend the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday remembering the peaceful nature and civil rights successes lodged by the late leader, voting rights advocates say this is a dark time for them.

Many might spend Monday reflecting on King's 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march to push for voting equality for black Americans,

oe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

After the Voting Rights Act was passed, in 1965, the revolution’s center of gravity shifted north, along with the stragglers of the Great Migration—toward de facto as opposed to de jure racism. Baldwin’s frequent premonitions of unrest in the streets began to come true. In his 1966 essay, “A Report From Occupied Territory,” he discussed the “powder keg” of poverty, joblessness, and discrimination in urban ghettos and warned that it “may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.” King, by then, had sensed the same trouble brewing in the slums as Baldwin had. In his 1966 campaign against segregated housing in Chicago, which moved his strategy of nonviolent protest from the South to the North, he tried to wield his activism machine against the social and economic troubles that Baldwin described. He was repaid with violent counterprotests.

King spoke of a “white backlash”—a term he helped popularize—to his movement. But in retrospect, the strength of the reaction he predicted and endured often receives short shrift. The support of white moderates who recoiled at images of Negro children sprayed by hoses and attacked by dogs was instrumental in passing laws that ended legal segregation and protected voting rights.

President Trump has denied that he is racist, after a row broke out over his alleged use of the word "shithole" to describe African nations.

The row broke out after lawmakers from both parties visited the president on Thursday to work on a proposal for a bipartisan immigration deal.

Mr Trump was said to have told them that instead of granting temporary residency to citizens of countries hit by natural disasters, war or epidemics, the US should instead be taking in migrants from countries like Norway.

The Trump administration early Wednesday morning executed Lisa M. Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, whose death marked the first federal execution of a woman in nearly 70 years.

Ms. Montgomery, 52, was sentenced to death for murdering a pregnant woman in 2004 and abducting the unborn child, whom she claimed as her own

In pleas to spare her life, Ms. Montgomery’s supporters argued that a history of trauma and sexual abuse that marred her life contributed to the circumstances that led to the crime.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- known as the DC Circuit and dubbed the country's "second highest court" -- handles a distinctive caseload testing the power of federal regulators and the executive branch.

Either way, in classic DC Circuit style, both sides have laid down markers on the fundamentals of congressional investigations, likely with an eye to the Supreme Court and to future litigation. The Tatel opinion for the majority was 66 pages; Rao's dissent was 68 pages.

The court's robust interpretation of Congress' oversight power arose in litigation that began before the Democratic-led House initiated its impeachment inquiry and started focusing on Trump's Ukrainian dealings. The subpoena fight involving Trump's longtime accountants, Mazars USA, had been simmering for months.

In 2015, after a failed attempt to shutter almost every polling location in a county three times the area of Atlanta, the Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration tried to remove 174 voters, almost all of them African American, ahead of a Sparta city election. The board even sent deputies to homes, summonsing voters to prove eligibility.

The city's roll at the time included only 988 voters, so it meant about one in five potential ballots.

many county residents could have been disenfranchised, he said last month.

The outrage and condemnation came fast in September when President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to commit voter fraud. “Let them send [a mail-in ballot] in, and let them go vote,” Trump said in Wilmington, N.C., urging backers to test the mechanics of North Carolina’s system by voting twice.

A U.S. President encouraging citizens to commit a felony is alarming enough, but in the next breath, Trump acknowledged intentions that were arguably more pernicious: he said Republicans in the state would also fight in court to halt “unsolicited votes.”

This election cycle, Trump allies have gone to court to defend a restrictive voter-ID law and to make it more difficult for voters to correct mistakes on mail-in ballots. Those measures have been shown to disproportionately affect Black voters.

Law enforcement officers used pepper spray on Saturday to break up a march to a polling place in Graham, North Carolina, a decision that has drawn criticism from the state's governor and civil rights groups.

aw enforcement pepper sprayed the ground to disperse the crowd in at least two instances -- first, after marchers did not move out of the road following a moment of silence, and again after an officer was "assaulted" and the event deemed "unsafe and unlawful."

the event's organizers and other attendees have said they did nothing to warrant the response,

The Black Lives Matter movement got a favorable ruling Monday from the Supreme Court.

The justices tossed out a federal appeals court decision that allowed a Black Lives Matter protest organizer to be sued by a police officer injured by an unknown assailant

The officer, who suffered injuries to his brain, jaw and teeth, also sued Black Lives Matter. That was tossed out on the theory that BLM is a social movement and cannot be sued.