links for 2011-04-22

"The back-and-forth culminated when Hannity told Ellison: 'You seem unwilling to identify radical Islam as being at war with America.'
"Ellison countered: 'Al Qaeda is at war with America, but Al Qaeda is not the only enemy of America. They're not the only violent extremists. And I would ask you to stop making it like only Muslims are the problem.'"

"The report by Clearcast, the body that vets all commercials before they are broadcast, found that TV advertising is 'drastically under-representing' the ethnic minority groups. Black, Asian and those of other ethnic minorities account for about 13% of the UK population.

"Only 1,130 ads used actors from an ethnic minority background in the main role, such as in the Premier Inn commercials featuring comedian Lenny Henry."

"'Technically, the Gullah people never used that term (Gullah) until about the 1980s, when academicians started using the term,' says Veronica Gerald, a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University who has spent 30 years studying the culture. 'Early on, the term and the culture did not find prestige in either African-American or white culture, partly because of misunderstanding. Many thought that their dialect, as it was called at that time, was an inability to speak ‘proper English.’ So for most Gullah people, one of their primary efforts was to remove evidence of the dialect from their speech patterns.'”

"The whole financing system of culture is wrong in this city – all the money is here and not where the art is born. The organisers make out that this bit of Sao Paulo is an explosion of culture but it's not really like that. People in the favelas are not being helped at all, and that is where most the real creativity is going on. I'm afraid Sao Paulo will get [to be] like many African cities: big and rich in the centre with very, very poor people around the edges. This is what I see now in Sao Paulo."

"A US federal agency has filed lawsuits over the unequal treatment of more than 500 migrant workers from India brought into the country to work at shipyards in Mississipi and Texas, and over 200 Thai farm labourers brought in to work in Hawaii and Washington state.

"The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said on Wednesday that the workers were forced to live in substandard housing and were exploited with fees that meant that for some their net earnings were almost zero.

"The EEOC termed the treatment of the workers as amounting to human trafficking, even though they had been brought into the country on work visas."