A federal appeals court rejected today a black woman's request to remove "Huckleberry Finn" and a William Faulkner story from the required-reading list at her daughter's Arizona high school.
     Courts cannot "ban books or other literary works from school curricula on the basis of their content . . . even when the works are accused of being racist," the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.
     The court allowed the parent, Kathy Monteiro, to sue the Tempe Union High School District for allegedly failing to respond to complaints that white students were harassing blacks with racial slurs and graffiti. But the judges said the school could not be required to remove the books as a way to reduce harassment. 

Bracing for potential violence, Wyoming officials have brought out bomb-sniffing dogs and banned protests in hopes of protecting the family of Matthew Shepard on Friday, the day of the slain student's funeral.
     Shepard, 21, died Monday at a Colorado hospital, five days after he was found tied to a fence in near-freezing temperatures outside Laramie. The University of Wyoming student had been pistol-whipped and abandoned.
      Two 21-year-old men have been charged with murder in Shepard's death. Police say their primary motive was robbery, but that Shepard was singled out because he was gay.
      Casper has reportedly received threats of violence from groups and individuals protesting Shepard's homosexuality. In addition, an anti-homosexual Baptist group from Topeka, Kansas, has threatened to demonstrate during Shepard's funeral, scheduled for Friday afternoon.

The owners and managers of a Richmond, Virginia, apartment complex who were accused of refusing to rent to African Americans have agreed to a $480,000 settlement - the largest settlement ever in a rental discrimination case in Virginia, the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced.
     The agreement settling the discrimination complaint, which must be approved by a judge, requires the owners and managers of Wedgewood to pay $480,000 in damages, including: $200,000 to compensate any persons identified as victims of the alleged discrimination; $195,000 to Housing Opportunities Made Equal, Inc. of Richmond (HOME), a fair housing group funded by HUD that tested the apartment complex for housing discrimination; $45,000 to compensate two African Americans who filed complaints; and $40,000 in civil penalties to the U.S. Treasury.

The Supreme Court allowed Cincinnati to deny homosexuals specific protection from discrimination Tuesday, an order likely to create confusion over government policies on gay rights.
     The action came just two years after the justices struck down as unconstitutional a similar measure in Colorado. Unlike the 1996 ruling, Tuesday's action set no national precedent but caused outrage just the same.
     ``The Supreme Court has given up. That's horrible,'' said Alphonse Gerhardstein, who represented opponents to the Cincinnati city charter amendment. The voter-approved measure bans policies or ordinances that give homosexuals claims for legal protection from discrimination -- in housing, employment or otherwise -- based on their sexual orientation. It also bars ``any claim of minority or protected status, quota preference or other preferential treatment.'' 

Police Commisssioner Howard Safir followed through on his threat Saturday to fire a police officer for riding on a racist Labor Day parade float in Queens.
     ``It is my considered decision that Police Officer Joseph Locurto does not deserve to wear the shield of a New York Police Officer and should, in fact, be dismissed,'' Safir said in a statement issued early Saturday afternoon.
     The city suspended Locurto and two firefighters without pay on September 11 after they were identified as being among the nine people on a Labor Day parade float in Broad Channel, a predominantly white community in an isolated area of southern Queens.
     The men wore blackface and Afro-style wigs, threw watermelon and fried chicken and mocked the bias murder of a black man in Texas, all under the banner ``Black to the Future 2098.''