links for 2010-07-01

"To the former residents, the suggestion that they cannot coexist with the wildlife on Harris Neck is absurd. 'Wildlife was a part of us all of our lives,' said Kenneth R. Dunham Sr., 80, who was a child when the federal government gave Harris Neck families two weeks to leave before their houses were bulldozed and burned. 'In my back door, I could hear the wild geese coming. We left food in the field so they would have something to eat.'

"Harris Neck was deeded by a plantation owner to a former slave in 1865. Black families who settled there built houses and boats and started crab and oyster factories. But the community, many descendants suspect, was too independent for the comfort of McIntosh County’s whites."

"AGM, while perusing the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website and discovered that the U.S. government has seen fit to illustrate various jobs with photographs.  The photographs reveal quite dramatic assumptions about who does what jobs."

The National Bar Association, the main organization of black lawyers, has refrained from endorsing Kagan, giving her a lukewarm rating. The group's president, Mavis T. Thompson, said it "had some qualms" about Kagan's statements on crack-cocaine sentencing and what it regards as her inadequate emphasis while dean at Harvard Law School on diversifying the school along racial and ethnic lines. Others have expressed reservations about Kagan's views on affirmative action, racial profiling and immigration.

"Mrs May said the cap was just one of the measures being considered by the coalition Government in order to meet the Conservatives' election pledge to reduce net immigration to the 'tens of thousands.'
"'Introducing this temporary limit is necessary to ensure that we don't get a rush of people trying to come through into the UK before that permanent limit is put in place next year,' she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme."

"'It perpetuates this misconception that people have that Eric is some kind of super exception — that the majority of immigrants are criminals and drug runners, but there is one or two super special, and we should keep those," says Conrado Santos, who's been studying at the University of Massachusetts. 'But like I say, that's a misconception.'"

"This fertility flight, echoed in other gentrifying neighborhoods like Chelsea and the Lower East Side in Manhattan and Jackson Heights, Sunnyside and Astoria in Queens, shows how when it comes to picking hospitals, consumers are powerfully affected by intangible forces like reputation and marketing. It is also one more measure of New York’s transformation from a place where people are defined by their neighborhoods to one where people are more likely to be tied by culture, class, education, profession and like-mindedness."