Good morning, Washington, and welcome back to work after a nice long holiday away. We hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving vacation as much as we did ours. That is if you can take a long enough break from all the online shopping you’ll supposedly be doing from your desk today to tell us about it. Stay tuned until the week before Christmas for your next update on the holiday shopping habits of Americans — we…

Civil rights leaders like Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III and others are gathering with supporters on Freedom Plaza at 10 a.m. this morning to march to the Justice Department in a “March Against Hate Crimes.” NBC4 says that organizers hope the march will bring attention to racism and recent hate crimes against African Americans that have been popping up around the country. The march was also designed to bring attention to the Jena…

Good Morning, D.C. Remember the news we told you about back in August, about an investigation into a potential prostitution ring at D.C. firehouses? Well D.C. Fire Chief Dennis Rubin acknowledged yesterday under fire from the D.C. Council that “sex for overtime” allegations in his department are “potentially true.” The Council also expressed concern about the abnormally high rate of disciplinary action against African American firefighters in the department. African Americans were the subjects of…

Tuesday and today Howard University is hosting the Children’s Defense Fund National Summit, which includes panel discussions on the Cradle to Prison Pipeline® Initiative, a project that seeks to end the cycle of poor minority children ending up destined to be shuffled in and out of the country’s prison system. Yesterday Bill Cosby appeared on a panel titled “The Need for Personal and Community Responsibility” in conjunction with the summit, along with NPR’s Juan…

Good morning, Washington. Have you recovered from yesterday’s local sports emotional rollercoaster yet? The Nationals bid farewell to RFK, and managed to close out their time there with a 5-3 victory over the Phillies. The Redskins, on the other hand, well … we might still not be ready to talk about that last drive. Yet despite the despondent football fans across the region this morning, we get the sense that no one is sadder than…

Happy Friday, Washington! Oh, wait. It’s Tuesday. But we’re not going in to work tomorrow! Oh, wait again. We have to come in on Thursday. And Friday. This is confusing. We’ll have some more info for you later today on how to avoid the crowds and have a stellar 4th of July celebration — just as soon as we can wrap our heads around the idea of stumbling to our desks on the 5th, totally…

From the front page of this morning’s Washington Post, it seems the last person anyone expected to be right about anything, perennial whack-a-doo mayoral candidate Faith, wasn’t actually that far off the mark during last year’s campaign: Chocolate City is rapidly becoming Vanilla Villa. The District of Columbia will likely no longer be majority-African American within the next 13 years. The 14 percent increase in non-Hispanic white District residents and 6 percent decrease in blacks…

No, these adorable critters don’t have anything to do with the last post of the day. We just finished watching many hours of Planet Earth and are now looking for ways to make blogging “green”. See, Al Gore, DCist loves Mother Nature and all her creatures. Well, most of them. >> We also love all sorts of maps. Now we’ve been informed that National Geographic’s awesome array of maps are online. Let the cartographic…

Good morning, Washington. Need something to warm your funny bone (or at least your sense of outrage) on this appropriately cold winter morning? Well, look no further that the hijinks of Virginia’s legislators. We thought that Virgil Goode’s silly attacks on Rep. Keith Ellison were all the entertainment that the commonwealth was likely to offer in the short term. But, as NBC4 reports, state representative Frank Hargrove has come to the rescue, committing two enormous…

Washington D.C. lost one of its favorite adopted sons over the weekend as Arnold “Red” Auerbach passed away at the age of 89. Best known as the patriarch of the Boston Celtics, Auerbach had close ties to D.C., the city he called home for much of his life. Auerbach attended George Washington University from 1937-1940, starring on the basketball team as the team’s top scorer. In 1946, after stints in the Navy and as…