links for 2011-06-22

"The Police Minister, Mike Gallacher, said he would ask the Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, to recommend strategies to improve identification standards. Laws would be 'tidied up' to allow alternative identification methods, such as the taking of fingerprints, for people who for social or religious reasons, could not show their face."

"The percentage of approximately 23% people of color for ABC exceeds CBS’s 17% and NBC’s 22%, but not FOX, which has a percentage of 27.5% people of color employed next fall."

"A three-part reality television series that debuted this week on the SBS network in Australia is tackling this most heated of topics in a novel way — by sending six native-born Australians with differing views on immigration on punishing journeys that retrace the voyages of asylum seekers seeking safe haven in their country.

"The series hopes to rise above the din of the sometimes sensationalist news coverage, said Peter Newman, commissioning editor at the SBS, to show the human side of what drives people to pay smugglers as much as $10,000 for passage to Australia aboard a rickety boat."

"The Southern Poverty Law Center's 2010 study, Injustice on Our Plates, based on in-depth interviews with 150 immigrant women who have worked in the U.S. food industry, found that sexual harassment and even brutal sexual assaults by male co-workers and supervisors are a constant threat. In fact, virtually every one of these women reported sexual harassment to be a major workplace problem. Many of these women, who worked in various states, saw it as a constant danger that must be endured for a day's pay.

"A separate study published in 2010 found that among 150 women of Mexican descent working in the fields in California's Central Valley, 80 percent said they had experienced sexual harassment. That compares to roughly half of all women in the U.S. workforce who say they have experienced at least one incident."

"Nevarez said that the contradiction between Huppenthal’s ruling and the findings of the audit only confirmed what ethnic studies program supporters had been saying all along—that the effort to shut down the program was political.

“'He is completely lying about the program being illegal, and there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason as to how he made the connections.'”

"The city does not keep data on the ethnicity of the preschoolers until they start kindergarten in September. But the programs have been growing less ethnically diverse over time. This year, for example, about 73 percent of gifted kindergarteners were white or Asian, up from 68 percent in 2009-10 school year. (White students were 46 percent of the gifted kindergarteners in 2010-11; Asian students were 27 percent.)

"Black children made up 11 percent of this year’s gifted kindergarten classes this year, down from 15 percent in 2009-10. Representation of Hispanic students was 12 percent in both years."

"The economic downturn has propelled a striking demographic shift: black New Yorkers, including many who are young and college educated, are heading south.

"About 17 percent of the African-Americans who moved to the South from other states in the past decade came from New York, far more than from any other state, according to census data. Of the 44,474 who left New York State in 2009, more than half, or 22,508, went to the South, according to a study conducted by the sociology department of Queens College for The New York Times."