An African-American ex-Atlanta Police sergeant is suing the city, alleging that Chief Richard Pennington discriminated against her when he let her go two years ago. When the Atlanta Police Department dismissed Karen Wells in April 2007, officials attributed it to a “lie” she had told, she says in her suit. But Wells, who had been with the Atlanta Police Department for 25 years — the last 14 as a sergeant — at the time, says she never lied about anything, only that she misunderstood the question and made a mistake in her response. In her lawsuit, Wells says that her firing was triggered by an internal investigation about whether another city department had paid police officers properly for working additional hours to guard a water main break. In May 2005, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, a water main broke on Peachtree Street in Buckhead. Wells was granted the extra work hours she had requested to guard the water main break. When asked whether she kept copies of paperwork for “extra jobs,” she said no. Less than two weeks later, the lawsuit contends, Wells told police officials she made a mistake because she was distracted by her mother’s surgery and was suffering from anxiety and depression. The department notified her on April 25, 2007, that she was being terminated, the lawsuit said. Wells, who is Black and 40, argues that she was punished more harshly because of her age, gender and race.

The NAACP, which contends that several major mortgage lenders forced African Americans into bad loans that have sparked an epidemic in foreclosures, filed a class-action suit Friday in a Los Angeles court. Among the culprits, says the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization, are Wells Fargo and HSBC, which steered Blacks into sub-prime mortgages, even in cases when their credit qualifications – such parameters as credit scores, incomes and down payments – were better or identical to those of White borrowers. Read more.

The NAACP sues Bush. The NAACP said that the Bush administration had no authority to shift $570 in federal hurricane recovery funds from housing programs to pay for the expansion of the Port of Gulfport, Miss. “Though the storm did not intentionally discriminate, the damage did reveal the impact of decades-long discrimination” in housing for the poor, Derrick Johnson, state president of Mississippi NAACP, said in a statement. “Now is not the time to pull the carpet back over the ugly stain of segregation.” The Department of Housing and Urban Development should have done a more thorough review into how the switch would affect low- and moderate-income housing in the state, according to the complaint filed in federal court in Washington. Congress approved $5.48 billion in disaster relief grants for Mississippi following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, with much of the money intended to address housing shortages. Diverting funds is contrary to this purpose and the needs of the Community Development Block Grant program, the NAACP said. Joining the NAACP in the lawsuit are four displaced residents and the Gulf Coast Fair Housing Center who argue that the money should be used exclusively to rebuild low-income housing.

Black preacher sues Klan store on his church’s property. A Black South Carolina church has sued a Ku Klux Klan store, which is selling robes and pointy hoods, racist T-shirts and other anti-African American paraphernalia from the space it rents from the house of worship. The Rev. David Kennedy, pastor of New Beginnings Baptist Church in Laurens County, S.C., acknowledges that a clause in the deed entitles John Howard to run the store from the building until he dies. But Kennedy says that a Klansman, who was clashing with fellow members of the hate group, transferred property rights back to the church more than a decade ago. Kennedy is seeking to shut the store down. As it stands now, he says he can’t even inspect the store, even though it’s on his property. “We’ve been outright denied,” he told The Associated Press. “Right now what we’re focusing on is removing this cloud of doubt and this whole lie that we are not the real owners of the Redneck Shop building.” If Kennedy is successful, his church will be deemed the owner of the property. It would also preclude Howard and his cohorts from continually trying to transfer the property to various members of the Klan. “We think the actions they did were willful,” Kennedy’s attorney, Rauch Wise, told AP. Howard says he’s a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon for South Carolina and North Carolina. In addition to the Klan garb, his shop features pictures of burning crosses and of men, women and children in Klan clothing. “Martin Luther King said this: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,”‘ Kennedy said. “It’s going to be a good day to see them in court.”

It marks the first time in 50 years a U.S. leader goes to the North African nation.
Secretary Rice will visit ex-enemy Libya. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heads to Libya this, it will mark the first time a U.S. secretary of state has visited the former enemy in more than a half-century. It’s a historic stop,” spokesman Sean McCormack said, noting that Rice will be the first secretary of state to visit Libya since John Foster Dulles in 1953 and the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit since then-Vice President Richard Nixon in 1957. “In that period of time, we’ve had a man land on the moon, the Internet, the Berlin Wall fall, and we’ve had 10 U.S. presidents.” The trip to the oil-rich North African nation is designed to open a new era of U.S.-Libyan relations at a time when the United States is desperate for new sources of petroleum. The State Department removed Libya, once dubbed by President Ronald Reagan the “Mad Dog of the Middle East,” from the international terrorist list after Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi began renouncing terrorism and owning up to the infamous bombings, such as that of Pan Am Flight 103, for which he compensated the families of victims $3 billion. While in Tripoli, Rice is expected to raise the case of Fathi al-Jahmi, 67, a seriously ill political prisoner, who has been jailed or held in a hospital for the past six years. His brother, Mohammed, lives in Boston and has been prodding Bush administration to get involved in securing his release.  Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights have sent Rice a deluge of recent letters urging her to raise Jahmi’s case and other human rights issues when she meets with Gadhafi, The Washington Post reports. “We have followed this case,” said Assistant Secretary of State C. David Welch. “We have been discussing it for some time with the Libyan government. We expect it to be discussed [by Rice] in forthcoming meetings in Tripoli.”