Daily News Feed 3.11.2010/Vocab: salient

Saving Boston’s ‘Banner’ newspaper
Next Street is a rare breed in the financial world. Its chief executive, Ronald L. Walker, built the merchant bank not around corporate clients–the typical core customer–but high-performing small businesses in the inner city. Making it rarer still is the fact that Next Street is a bank trying to save a local newspaper, The Bay State Banner. When the advertising recession caught up with the Banner last year, its publisher announced that the 45-year-old African-American weekly would close. That’s when Walker, working with Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree, began his quest to save the paper. The Banner kept publishing after the city came up with a $200,000 loan. (Continue Reading…)

Study: More minority babies likely to be born in US
Minorities make up nearly half the children born in the U.S., part of a historic trend in which minorities are expected to become the U.S. majority over the next 40 years. In fact, demographers say this year could be the “tipping point” when the number of babies born to minorities outnumbers that of babies born to whites. The numbers are growing because immigration to the U.S. has boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years. Minorities made up 48 percent of U.S. children born in 2008, the latest census estimates available, compared to 37 percent in 1990. “Census projections suggest America may become a minority-majority country by the middle of the century. For America’s children, the future is now,” said Kenneth Johnson, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire who researched many of the racial trends in a paper being released Wednesday. (Continue Reading…)

Mandela let South African Blacks down, ex-wife says
Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife has bitterly criticized the 92-year-old anti-apartheid icon as having “let us down,” prompting outrage Wednesday in South Africa. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela said she could not forgive him for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 alongside F.W. De Klerk, according to Tuesday’s Evening Standard, a British newspaper. The white president released Mandela and went on to participate in negotiations that ended apartheid. “He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside. The economy is very much ‘white.’ It has a few token blacks, but so many who gave their life in the struggle have died unrewarded,” Madikizela-Mandela was quoted as saying. (Continue Reading…)

Poll: African Americans need less time to sleep
Florida state lawmakers want to ban public display of noose
Red Cross: Zimbabwe back to brink of food crisis
Wife of Rep. John Conyers sentenced to jail
Black Caucus to meet with Obama about jobs
Allegations of police brutality in NYPD-Yonkers dispute