Canada’s prime minister has issued an apology for a longstanding policy of forcibly schooling Indian children in Christian residential schools where they were sexually and physically abused.

Stephen Harper made the apology in a speech today at the Parliament in Ottawa. Several survivors of the schools traveled across the nation to attend.

According to a [...]

Opposition already is forming to Gov. David Paterson’s directive that all New York state agencies immediately recognize gay marriages performed in other states and countries.

Gays in this state say that as tax-paying, law-abiding New Yorkers, they should not be denied the more than 1,300 rights automatically accorded to heterosexual married couples.

They and their advocates [...]

Nine years before he successfully argued the Brown v. the Board of Education case that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s desegregation of public schools, Thurgood Marshall argued a similar matter in Hillburn.

As chief counsel for the NAACP, Marshall visited Rockland to press for the integration of the Main School, the facility for white students, [...]

America’s currency may have to be modified following a federal appeals court ruling today that said the blind and visually impaired are discriminated against by the format of paper currency.
“This is an important victory for people who are blind and visually impaired,” said Mark Richert, director of public policy for the American Council of the [...]

The Council on American-Islamic Relations today “repudiated” the use of Islam’s most holy book as target practice by a U.S. soldier who has been removed from his position in Baghdad.

According to the Associated Press, U.S. commanders moved swiftly to avert a crisis after the sniper was found to have riddled a copy of the Quran [...]

Mildred Jeter, known to all as “Bean” because she was tall and slim, and Richard Loving, were childhood sweethearts in Virginia. They got married in 1958, and she was already pregnant with the first of their three children.

There was only one problem. Jeter was black, and Loving was white.

The couple had married in the [...]

Many people mistakenly think Cinco de Mayo is Mexico’s Independence Day. (It’s not. That day is Sept. 16.)Cinco de Mayo actually commemorates Mexicans’ victory over the French army at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. Mexico had accumulated heavy debts to several nations, and France, eager to add to its empire at that time, invaded [...]

Tomorrow will mark the 40th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

It was just one day prior — on April 3, 1968 — that King gave his seminal and celebrated “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, in which he foreshadowed his own death.

Speaking at the Mason Temple in Memphis, where [...]

A shadow has been cast over the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing in the wake of strict Chinese crackdowns on Tibetans who are calling for greater autonomy.

In the last few days, news of violent clashes between protesters and Chinese authorities has been broadcast across the world.

It is feared that athletes and spectators may boycott the [...]

The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has condemned an alleged bias attack on a Jewish man in a Brooklyn subway station.

According to news reports, the suspect was charged with aggravated harassment as a hate crime after he allegedly snatched a yarmulke from the head of an assistant rabbi on Tuesday.

Uria Ohana, [...]