Blacks | featured news

After raising eyebrows by going to North Korea, former U.S. basketball star Dennis Rodman is continuing his bizarre global tour by visiting Rome - purportedly to help Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson become the first black pope....

More than 20 percent of black and Hispanic teens say they have used their cellphones to send a "sext" message showing a nude or semi-nude photo or video of themselves to another person, and more than 30 percent say they have received such sext messages, according to a new study.

A sharp decline in incarceration rates for African-Americans from 2000 to 2009 marks a significant shift in the racial makeup of America’s prisons, according to a report released Wednesday.

More than half a century after she sat defiantly on an Alabama city bus, Rosa Parks has a permanent place in the U.S. Capitol — the first black woman to be honored with a statue there.

After more than a century, the Census Bureau is dropping its use of the word "Negro" to describe black Americans in surveys. Instead of the term that came into use during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, census forms will use the more modern labels "black" or "African-American".

In the quarter-century that Armentha Cruise has run her Silver Spring staffing firm, the nation has made strides toward racial equality. Voters have twice elected a black president, African Americans shine among Hollywood’s brightest stars, and the number of blacks who graduate from college has tripled.

Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not. Those views could cost President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found, though the effects are mitigated by some Americans' more favorable views of blacks.

Britain's government has written to European soccer authorities demanding "tough sanctions" against Serbia after racist chants - including monkey noises - were heard at an international match with England on Tuesday night.

Ask Americans how race relations have changed under their first black president and they are ready with answers. Ashley Ray, a white woman, hears more people debating racial issues. "I know a lot of people who really thought we were OK as a nation, a culture, and now they understand that we're not," she says.

New government data shows only a quarter of Americans with the AIDS virus have the infection under control. Young people and blacks are least likely to get effective care. That's slightly lower than previous estimates, and means more than 800,000 people aren't benefiting from life-saving drugs that also would lower their level of infection.