ATLANTA – If the United States is going to regain its global leadership position in higher education, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) will need to play a major role, says a White House official on education.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nasir Ahmad Ahmadi was hired to work as an interpreter alongside American troops in Afghanistan. But soldiers were alarmed by his strange behavior, his inability to do the job and the foul condition of his living quarters, and they suspected he used drugs.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The top two Republicans in Congress sought Tuesday to put the onus on President Barack Obama for failure to resolve a fight over how to increase the government's borrowing authority. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said a deal with Obama is "probably unattainable" and House Speaker John Boehner said the specter of default is "his problem."

BALTIMORE (AP) --For many people in the black community, where unemployment has risen since the end of the recession, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. Some analysts even see a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.

ELK GROVE, Calif. (AP) -- Kamaljit Atwal's neighborhood seems like an unlikely place for a hate crime. His street in this Sacramento suburb seems a model of diversity.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Betty Ford said things that first ladies just don't say, even today. And 1970s America loved her for it.

TITUSVILLE, Fla. (AP) -- It was a tailgate party for the ages. They came packing tents and camp chairs, coolers and snacks, Sodoku books and laptops, parking cars and RVs in almost every available space along U.S. 1 to witness history blasting off in the haze across the Indian River.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- Two young white men were looking for a black man to assault in Mississippi's largest city when one of them ran over a 49-year-old African-American with a pickup truck after he had been assaulted, killing the man, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- Civil rights groups sued Friday in federal court to block Alabama's new law cracking down on illegal immigration, which supporters and opponents have called the strictest measure of its kind in the nation.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- The Union's first black hero of the Civil War wasn't one of the African-American soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, famously depicted in the 1989 film "Glory," but rather a merchant ship's cook who took up arms to prevent being sold into slavery after a Confederate raider captured his vessel.