The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that child rapists cannot be executed, concluding that capital punishment for crimes against individuals can be applied only to murderers.
Record the CNN Special Investigations Unit Classroom Edition: MLK Papers -- Words That Changed a Nation when it airs commercial-free on Monday, June 23, 2008, from 4:00 -- 5:00 a.m. ET on CNN. (A short feature begins at 4:00 a.m. and precedes the program.)
Analysis: Economic inequality, not racism, drove the wave of anti-immigrant violence that shook the post-apartheid order. And that's a global problem
In claiming victory in West Virginia last night, Hillary Clinton reiterated her last best argument as to why she should be the Democratic nominee: because only she can win in November.
The Supreme Court focused Wednesday on whether "evolving standards of decency" in the United States forbid a resumption of capital punishment for any felony but murder. But the justices offered no clear indication of how they will rule in the case of a man who is on Louisiana death row for raping a child.
He is not a killer, but the state of Louisiana is determined to execute Patrick Kennedy for his crime.
CNN Presents: Black in America: Eyewitness to Murder: The King Assassination airs Saturday, April 5 and Sunday, April 6 at 8 p.m. ET on CNN
South African college campuses are in turmoil after anti-integration white students are shown humiliating black service staff
A child killer received a reprieve Friday from the Nebraska Supreme Court, which ruled that electrocution, the state's only means of capital punishment, is unconstitutional.
Even as voters in South Carolina headed to the polls Saturday to deliver a beat down to Sen. Hillary Clinton for Sen. Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton continued to stoke the racial fire, hoping an ember would ignite his wife's campaign and lead it to victory.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that child rapists cannot be executed, concluding that capital punishment for crimes against individuals can be applied only to murderers.
Record the CNN Special Investigations Unit Classroom Edition: MLK Papers -- Words That Changed a Nation when it airs commercial-free on Monday, June 23, 2008, from 4:00 -- 5:00 a.m. ET on CNN. (A short feature begins at 4:00 a.m. and precedes the program.)
Analysis: Economic inequality, not racism, drove the wave of anti-immigrant violence that shook the post-apartheid order. And that's a global problem
In claiming victory in West Virginia last night, Hillary Clinton reiterated her last best argument as to why she should be the Democratic nominee: because only she can win in November.
The Supreme Court focused Wednesday on whether "evolving standards of decency" in the United States forbid a resumption of capital punishment for any felony but murder. But the justices offered no clear indication of how they will rule in the case of a man who is on Louisiana death row for raping a child.
He is not a killer, but the state of Louisiana is determined to execute Patrick Kennedy for his crime.
CNN Presents: Black in America: Eyewitness to Murder: The King Assassination airs Saturday, April 5 and Sunday, April 6 at 8 p.m. ET on CNN
South African college campuses are in turmoil after anti-integration white students are shown humiliating black service staff
A child killer received a reprieve Friday from the Nebraska Supreme Court, which ruled that electrocution, the state's only means of capital punishment, is unconstitutional.
Even as voters in South Carolina headed to the polls Saturday to deliver a beat down to Sen. Hillary Clinton for Sen. Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton continued to stoke the racial fire, hoping an ember would ignite his wife's campaign and lead it to victory.
After a week of at times bitter campaigning, Sen. Barack Obama faces a crucial test of his support from within the party Saturday as South Carolina Democrats head to the polls in a race that features black voters for the first time this presidential primary season.
A day after New Jersey banned executions, newly released figures show that capital punishment dropped this year to a 13-year low.
The man who raped and killed 7-year-old Megan Kanka -- the 1994 crime that inspired "Megan's Law" -- is one of eight men whose sentences were commuted to life in prison this week as part of New Jersey's new ban on execution.
New Jersey becomes the first state in modern times to abolish capital punishment, as momentum builds nationwide to reconsider seldom-used death-penalty statutes
New Jersey lawmakers have voted to abolish the death penalty in the state, sending the governor a bill he has already said he will sign. The measure will make New Jersey the first state in more than 40 years to outlaw capital punishment.
Thousands of demonstrators encircled Justice Department headquarters in the nation's capital Friday to demand the government crack down harder on hate crimes.
Hundreds marched through Charleston, W.Va., to urge prosecutors to add hate crime charges against six white people charged in the assault of a 20-year-old black woman
The Rev. Al Sharpton says he is willing to meet Duane "Dog" Chapman, the A&E reality star who is under fire for making racist remarks, and would like Chapman to join in an upcoming march on Washington, D.C., to demonstrate his opposition to hate crimes and racism.
The media spotlight might have shone most intensely on Jena, Louisiana, but a symbol of racial violence has been hung across America lately, spurring anger, resentment and a big question.
A student who videoed a re-enactment of the "Jena 6" incident apologized and said the video was not intended to make fun of the six black students arrested in the beating of a white classmate, according to The News-Star newspaper of Monroe, Louisiana.
Sen. Barack Obama said Friday the fact he is viewed as a legitimate presidential candidate is testament to the progress America has made on race relations.
A longtime critic of Rutgers University's drive into big-time sports is being criticized over a newspaper article comment that university officials have branded as racist.
The convoy of buses pulled onto the shoulder Thursday morning, about 25 miles from Jena. Niele Anderson, the Los Angeles DJ and newspaper editor who made last-minute arrangements to get me on the bus, motioned to follow her, "C'mon, let's get out."
Oh my, this summer has not only seen a return of the race card in sports. Unfortunately, it seems as if the whole race deck has been dealt.
Mychal Bell, the sole defendant who remains behind bars from the group of teens known as the "Jena 6," will not be released Friday, a court decided.
Even though more countries are renouncing the death penalty, more people were put to death last year -- 5,628 -- than in the past two years, an anti-death penalty group reported Thursday.
Their daily journeys take them in opposite directions. Seth Dewboys, 7, and Howard Brim, 16, gladly pay the price for a good education.
A contestant on Britain's "Big Brother" reality TV show, has been kicked off for using a racially offensive word against another housemate.
Some are starting to wonder whether Mayor Daley's ambitious pledge of four years ago was more politics than policy
Hip-hop's alleged vulgarity, sexism and misogyny have been formally and informally challenged from the halls of Capitol Hill to the streets of Sugar Hill. Those outside the black and Latino communities, as well as those inside the hip-hop family have challenged it. Despite over a decade of engagement, many would argue that the images of women in hip-hop have become progressively and destructively more negative than at any other time in history.
No one would have thought that when Rosa Parks opted not to give up her seat to a white man in 1955, a dozen years later blacks would have the full right to vote, the ability to eat in hotels and restaurants and see Jim Crow destroyed.
Dr. Thomas Perls is a leading expert on aging, so I was a little nervous when he arrived recently at my house at 6:20 a.m. He was there to assess how the daily decisions I'm making are affecting my life expectancy.
For most of human history, long life was exceedingly rare.
You're rushing to drop the kids at school, fumbling with coats and lunch boxes, when you get the call. Mom's had a fall, and she's in the E.R. Your dad is panicked and asking you to come home, now.
One of the many joys of the World Cup is engaging in a 30-day frenzy of flag-hugging nationalism. Many Americans root for more than one team: the U.S. and the country of their ancestors. If you're ...
Later this year, PBS will host two presidential forums, and the moderator might be a new face to many Americans.
In 1982, transplant surgeon Dr. Clive Callender and his colleagues sat down to took a look at African-American organ donation numbers, and they were grim.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it plans to seek a reversal of Tuesday's decision by a federal appeals court to approve class-action status for women who claim the retailer was biased in pay and promotion.
Decades after integrated schools, voting legislation and historic civil rights marches, what does it mean today to be black in America?
British broadcaster Channel 4, already facing a backlash for alleged bullying and racist remarks by contestants in "Celebrity Big Brother," is at the center of a new row over comments made in another of its reality shows.
Mobile phone giant Carphone Warehouse has suspended its sponsorship of TV's "Celebrity Big Brother" as a result of row over the alleged "racist" treatment of an Indian actress.
Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty has spoken for the first time of her fears that she is the victim of racism in the "Celebrity Big Brother" house.
A British television channel boss has said "Celebrity Big Brother" will stay on the air despite a row over the alleged "racist" treatment of an Indian actress on the show.
Tony Blair spoke out against racism "in all its forms" after complaints about the treatment of an Indian film star housemate on the British TV show "Celebrity Big Brother."
Channel 4 attempted to cool an escalating row over alleged bullying of Indian Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty on "Celebrity Big Brother," saying there was no clear evidence of racism.
I was a member of the audience at a recent CNN forum on racism held in Beaumont, Texas. ("Out in the Open: Racism in America," December 19). I believe that the show's focus on racism in southeast Texas was much too narrow.
How serious a problem is racism in the United States? A new CNN poll finds that black people and white people have dramatically different views on the subject.
Most Americans, white and black, see racism as a lingering problem in the United States, and many say they know people who are racist, according to a new poll.
Michael Richards says he is "deeply, deeply sorry" for using racial epithets, including the "n word," after being heckled at a comedy club.
Since the U.S. population crossed the 200 million mark in 1967, America has grown into a more sprawling, more southern and western, suburban nation with more crowded highways.
You know you're officially part of a trend when someone gives you a catchy label, and there's a new one out there: the 60-year-old kid. It means someone who is just short of retirement age and stil...
It appears that another of the Clintons' 1990s goals has come a cropper, to wit, ending the "Politics of Personal Destruction." It is election time in the Great Republic, and that means that for a few months candidates for high office might be beset by charges that have never heretofore been an issue. If they do not respond to those charges with great adroitness, even deviousness, they might be defeated and perhaps spend the rest of their lives under a moral cloud.
The battle over illegal immigration promises to rage on until Election Day and beyond.
Members of the black clergy face a challenge in the upcoming political season to refrain from being used by any political party or ideological agenda to further their aims at the expense of the critical issues facing our communities.
During my 2004 presidential campaign, I was fond of saying that it was high time for the Christian right to meet the right Christians. That sentiment is even more appropriate today, more than a year-and-a-half after evangelicals catapulted George W. Bush back to the White House.
As the nation pays its last respects to Coretta Scott King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., CNN.com asked readers what they think will be the civil rights struggles of the 21st century. Here are some of those responses:
At dawn on Friday, a hangman at Changi Prison in Singapore placed a hood over the head of drug trafficker Van Nguyen, put a noose around his neck and opened a trap door in a "long-drop" procedure that killed the Australian citizen.
Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens steered the debate over President Bush's nominee to a new subject -- capital punishment -- sharply condemning the country's death penalty system.
Standing at what was once a U.S. Revolutionary War battlefield, about 125 Neo-Nazis and sympathizers held a rally Saturday while two groups of counter demonstrators protested.
In 1909, while listening to a Mother's Day sermon, Sonora Dodd thought of her father, William Smart, who had been left to raise his six children after his wife died.
The hooded man rushed up to the doorway of Temple Bnai Israel, a Molotov cocktail in his hand. Seconds later, he threw the firebomb and ran off.
A committee vote in the New York state assembly this week -- and the impact.
The next contentious end-of-life issue: assisted suicide. How Oregon offers a way out.
A couple of hours up the road from where some September 11 hijackers learned to fly, the new head of Aryan Nation is praising them -- and trying to create an unholy alliance between his white supremacist group and al Qaeda.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone says he will not apologize or express regret for likening a Jewish reporter to a Nazi "concentration camp guard." The following is the full text of his statement:
Use of the death penalty by states continued a five-year decline in 2004, according to an annual report by a nonprofit group that opposes capital punishment.
The political stakes have made the issue of possible U.S. Supreme Court retirements part of the election-year rhetoric, thanks to aggressive outreach by a number of special-interest groups.
Richard Girnt Butler, the white supremacist who founded the racist Aryan Nations organization, has died at 86.
German President Johannes Rau appealed to European governments to step up the fight against anti-Semitism as he opened a 55-nation conference in Berlin.
The power of wishful thinking guarantees that just about anything can be successfully marketed as an elixir of youth. Pee, for instance. A multitude of websites extol the ability of "urine therapy"...
Charles Pickering, the judge temporarily appointed by President Bush to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, denies allegations that he is racist, an accusation leveled against him by Democrats who stalled his nomination in the Senate.
Jewish and European leaders have called for concrete action to combat a resurgence of the "monster" of anti-Semitism on the continent.
The Supreme Court Monday agreed to again decide the constitutionality of executing people who were juveniles at the time they committed murder.
It may seem like an obvious question to ask. But when we went to ten of the country's best-known African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic business owners for their views on the changing role ...
Until recently Sekou Kaalund, 28, was like many New York City bachelors: He ate out a lot. Hung out a lot. And between making payments on his Duke University graduate school loans and adjusting to ...
The small brick church on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery may seem modest--it has only 250 members--but in fact it is legendary. In a previous life it was the headquarters from which a young Martin Lu...
Time was, Americans grew old at home. When our health failed, we could rely on our family to prepare meals or pay a visit, dispensing equal measures of care and comfort. Most of us still cling to t...
I am 34 years old. On the face of it, there is nothing particularly interesting about this fact--certainly nothing unusual. By current U.S. Census estimates, there are approximately 4 million 34-ye...
A group of scientists from Lucent Technologies' vaunted Bell Labs are eating lunch and talking about the most delicate subject in corporate America, or anywhere else in America: race. Over sandwich...
Bounded by pine-covered hills, sparkling lakes, and mountains whose rounded peaks rub the bellies of passing clouds, the small city of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, should be known best as a tranquil touri...
Larry Ellison has the good life down pat--health, youthful good looks, vast wealth, a fast sailboat, airplanes, and more gorgeous amours than a Hollywood hunk. But like every potentate from King Tu...
It's known as "The Crisis" around Texaco's sprawling office headquarters in a leafy suburb north of New York City, which is certainly apropos. It was the embarrassing and expensive saga that forced...
Baby-boomers have ushered in most every major trend over the past 50 years. But it was their grandparents who initiated the most radical demographic change of the past half-century--a dramatic decl...
Chin up, fellow boomers, aging has its compensations. Our fingernails are growing slower, so we don't need to clip them as often. Our sweat glands are waning, so we have less body odor to worry abo...
Plan as you may, it pays to remember the poignant line from poet Robert Burns, pointing to the "best-laid schemes o' mice and men," which often go awry. Could your retirement plan be on a similar c...
FIVE YEARS AGO, STAN AND BETTY HIROTA OF OREGON CITY, ORE. got the phone call everyone with aging parents dreads. A cousin who lived near Stan's parents in Honolulu told Stan that his father, Eijir...
The racial-preference policies lumped together under the label "affirmative action" seem to be reaching the end of their collective road. The Republican majority in Congress and most GOP presidenti...
WHEN SHIRLEY HINTON LEARNED OF the double murder of her aunt Hazel Gleese and Hazel's husband Leo early this year, she suspected their preacher. "He promised to check on them every single day," she...
Hope I die before I get old. PETE TOWNSHEND 1966
AS A FORMER wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, Jerry Richardson, CEO of Flagstar Cos., knows what it's like to get hit. Still, nothing could have prepared him for the walloping his food service...
WHY can't we all get along?'' Rodney King's question still resonates six months after the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers who beat him, a verdict that triggered the worst riot in the ...
T'S SUNDAY NIGHT. Time to make the weekly how're-you-doing phone call to your mother living alone back in Omaha. But when she finally answers, something is wrong. Her speech is labored and slurred,...
It was not until he was deep into Judge Gerhard Gesell's recent decision in Ann B. Hopkins v. Price Waterhouse that your correspondent began twitching. Up to page 23, he found that he could equaliz...
Clear your mind for a moment of all the notions you've ever held about blacks, whites and racial discrimination. Now take a look at these stark statistics: -- A black household with an annual incom...
A recent survey found that, of the 3.7 million American families now taking care of an elderly relative or friend, more than a third get no assistance from any outside service, agency or home healt...
When his wife died three years ago, Robert Shimmin, called Bob-Bob by his friends and relatives, moved out of his San Diego home and in with his son Phil's family in Woodland Hills, Calif. Reliant ...
Psychiatric social worker Phyllis Sharlin, 45, of Potomac, Md. helps people solve personal problems for a living. But she was at a loss for a solution when her own arthritic 79-year-old mother Bert...
NO NOVELIST would dare put into a book the most extreme of the dizzying contrasts of wealth and poverty that make up the ordinary texture of life in today's American cities. The details are too out...
WEREN'T these characters supposed to have gone out with the Depression, even with Dickens's London? What are they doing among the suave urban towers of postmodern America, these dirty, disheveled f...
''Did Uncle Ned turn off the stove?'' ''Has the doctor seen my mother yet?'' Such questions preoccupy an increasing number of American workers, affecting productivity. So elder care could soon repl...
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