After juror B29 said in an interview on Thursday that she feels George Zimmerman “got away with murder” in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, his mother, Sybrina Fulton, released a statement calling the comments “devastating,” CBS News reports. Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, released a statement saying, “It is devastating for my family to…

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former chief of the International Monetary Fund, will face charges of aggravated pimping in a French court, the Associated Press reports. Strauss-Kahn was thrust into the media spotlight in 2011 after he was arrested on charges that he sexually abused a maid, Nafissatou Diallo, at a Manhattan hotel. A New York City…

AIDS activists recently staged a protest in New York City about the medication that could dramatically reduce the rate of HIV infection after exposure, Colorlines reports. Over at New York Magazine, Tim Murphy recounts a recent action by ACT UP outside of a city hospital for the confusion surrounding a pill that could dramatically reduce the rate…

Nine-year-old Asean Johnson, who made a splash earlier this summer when he criticized the Chicago Board of Education for massive school closures, returned on Wednesday to appeal to officials to save teachers, the Huffington Post reports. The emotional plea came after the board announced thousands of teacher layoffs last week. The Marcus Garvey Elementary student…

Texas Gov. Rick Perry expressed outrage at the Department of Justice on Thursday, after the attorney general announced plans to try to persuade a federal court to subject his state to election-law scrutiny in order to protect minority voters, MSNBC reports. Thursday morning, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would try to persuade a…

More than a dozen Caribbean countries are organizing an effort to seek compensation from Britain, France and the Netherlands to pay for what they call the lasting legacy of the Atlantic slave trade, the Associated Press reports. The Caribbean Community, a regional organization that typically focuses on rather dry issues such as economic integration, has…

The Washington Post is reporting that in an attempt to blunt the impact of a Supreme Court ruling that struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department is preparing to take legal action in a series of cases across the nation. The decision to challenge state officials marks an aggressive…

Contending that the closing of 49 Chicago elementary schools violates children’s human rights, activists have sent a letter to the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights asking investigators to look into the city’s decision, according to WBEZ. The “letter of allegation” sent Tuesday evening to Geneva, Switzerland, asks U.N. officials to investigate…

Salon is reporting that one of the nation’s largest long-term studies on the “crack baby” epidemic of the 1980s has found that there are “no statistically significant differences in the long-term health and life outcomes between full-term babies exposed to cocaine in-utero and those who were not.” Instead, researchers found poverty to be a key…

While addressing the inaugural hearing of the Congressional Caucus on Black Men and Boys on Wednesday, Tracy Martin, Trayvon Martin’s father, vowed not to give up fighting for his son and other “black and brown boys” in the country, MSNBC reports. “I vow to do everything in my power not to give up the fight…