Free Republic

More than a year ago, before most people had ever heard of Trayvon Martin, Miniard Culpepper didn’t want his son going around with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over his head. “I told him that people need to be able to see who you are,” Culpepper, regional counsel for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs, said Friday during a panel discussion of racial profiling conducted during the 2012 Fair Housing and Civil Rights Conference at Western New England University. Culpepper, who is also an ordained minister and part-time pastor of Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Dorchester,...

Springfield and its surrounding cities and towns lost a collective 5,600 jobs in July, a further sign of a stalling economy. “It’s a continuous story. There is just too little demand for goods and services,” said Karl J. Petrick, an assistant professor of economics at Western New England University. “Probably the best we can hope for is slow growth. The best we can hope for is to just narrowly avoid sliding back into recession.” Springfield’s unemployment rate rose last month to 12.5 percent from 12 percent recorded in June, according to the state Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development...