Week In Review

The next president of the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights group needs to be energetic, charismatic and willing to make a personal sacrifice, NAACP leaders say. The group’s board is beginning its search for a successor to outgoing President and CEO Benjamin Jealous, who announced this week that he will step down at the end of the year. 

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President Barack Obama conditionally endorsed a Russian offer for international inspectors to seize and destroy deadly chemical weapons in Syria as efforts to avert retaliatory U.S. missile strikes shift from Washington to the United Nations.

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The Cleveland man serving a life sentence for kidnapping three women and raping them in his home for a decade hanged himself in his prison cell, officials said Wednesday in another startling twist in the case that horrified and transfixed the city.

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A secret meeting between a representative of the Wyoming chapter of the NAACP and a Ku Klux Klan organizer ended with the Klan organizer paying $50 to join the civil rights organization, participants said. Last Saturday’s meeting between Jimmy Simmons, president of the Casper NAACP, and John Abarr, a KKK organizer…

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After just one year, some schools around the country are dropping out of the healthier new federal lunch program, complaining that so many students turned up their noses at meals packed with whole grains, fruits and vegetables that the cafeterias were losing money.

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Lawyers for hundreds of black financial advisers have reached a $160 million settlement in a lawsuit accusing Wall Street brokerage giant Merrill Lynch of racial discrimination, a plaintiffs’ attorney said Wednesday. If approved by a federal judge in Chicago as expected, the payout by Merrill Lynch to around 1,200 plaintiffs…

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Lee Thompson Young, who began his acting career as the teenage star of the Disney Channel’s “The Famous Jett Jackson” and was featured in the film “Friday Night Lights” and the series “Rizzoli & Isles,” was found dead Monday, police said. He was 29.

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House Republicans are preparing legislation that would cut food stamps by as much as $4 billion annually in an effort to downsize a program that many conservatives say has become too bloated in recent years.

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The New York Police Department deliberately violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of New Yorkers with its contentious stop-and-frisk policy, and an independent monitor is needed to oversee major changes, a federal judge ruled Monday in a stinging rebuke…

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U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has announced a major shift in how the federal government plans to prosecute nonviolent criminals involved in drug crimes, with the aim of easing overcrowding in the nation’s prisons.  

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