Albina Community Bank has been selected to receive a CDFI Fund Bank Enterprise Award of $675,000 for their 2007 community development work. The bank's award is for its support of Portland's local businesses through small business loans, home improvement loans and commercial real estate loans to underserved areas of the city....

There were fewer jobs in Oregon this August than during the same month last year, an indication that the state may have slipped into a recession, according to the Oregon Center for Public Policy....

Over 3200 people walked 20 miles a day for 3 days through Bellevue, Kirkland and Seattle to raise money to fight breast cancer. The walkers raised $8.6 million this year. A thousand more people participated in this year's event than last year.

Los Angeles sketch comedy troupe "Slow Children Crossing" present their comedy at SketchFest Seattle ... They are described as Kids in the Hall meets In Living Color. For ticket information go to...

Women of War & Destiny Ministries presents the 2008 Empowerment Conference Saturday, Sept. 20 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Westin Seattle,1900 Fifth Avenue. ...

WASHINGTON (AP) _ Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Sunday that U.S. credit markets remain frozen and Congress must move quickly to pass a $700 billion bailout package for financial firms. But key Democrats said the legislation needs changes to provide better protections for taxpayers and homeowners in danger of losing their homes...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of White Democrats harbor negative views toward Blacks -- many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.
The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 -- about 2.5 percentage points.
Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He's an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation's oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all White Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward Blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.
Such numbers are a harsh dose of reality in a campaign for the history books. Obama, the first Black candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, accepted the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, a seminal moment for a nation that enshrined slavery in its Constitution.
"There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean there's only a few bigots," said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey....

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (AP) _ The history of the Mosaic Templars was believed to have drawn to a close in the 1930s, when the Great Depression swallowed one of the largest benevolent societies for blacks in the nation and likely the world.
Its finances ruined, the organization created by two freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War left little behind other than its iconic brick building in Little Rock's black business district. But even that relic is now gone, left in disrepair until transients trying to stay warm burned it down in March 2005.
However, 2,500 miles (4,023 kilometers) away in the tropics of the West Indies, a lodge still bears the Templar's name _ one of the chapters that had once popped up in 26 states and six countries _ and has kept the society's fire going while all others faded out.
"One seed was planted and from that seed, much fruit has been reaped,'' said Angelina Thornhill, a member of that surviving Mosaic Templars' lodge on the island of Barbados.
Members of the Barbados chapter came to Little Rock to attend the grand opening Saturday of the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, a new building on the site where the organization's headquarters once stood. The new center offers a museum detailing black Arkansan history and the society...

Andrew Hacker was the author of the bestselling book Two Nations : Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.

This is really chilling information, a detailed, capsule history of voter supression in the US: Read here Hacker's article
and the transcript of his interview....

In June, the school district released a report that spelled out Jefferson High School's problems – problems that had long been talked about by many of the teachers, students and even administrators.
The report mirrored many of the findings of The Skanner's investigative piece that was published several weeks before the district's official report.
Among them, Jefferson suffers more theft and vandalism than any other school, and excessively high staff turnover. According to the report, Jefferson's administrators are unprepared to start the school year without problems...