From New America Media: President Barack Obama asserted his commitment to achieving comprehensive immigration reform should he be re-elected in 2012. “I will make this a prominent part of my campaign and I’ll talk about it extensively,” Obama vowed. In a recent White House meeting with media reaching the Latino community, he stressed, “It’s going to be hard to have a more clear contrast between what the Republicans stand for on a whole range of issues and what I stand for and Democrats stand for.”




 

 From New America Media and Investigative Reporting Workshop:  New numbers released Monday (Nov. 7, 2011) by the U.S. Census Bureau paint a fresh and complex picture of poverty in America. For the first time, the figures count the impact of benefits like food stamps, tax credits and housing assistance. The data also reflects not only income but spending, factoring in medical expenses and child-care costs.

 

From New America Media and Inter Press Service: Bangkok's 8 million people are paying the price of ignoring warnings over many years concerning the city's climate vulnerability and the incapacity of its soggy foundations to handle flooding. [Since late October] large swathes of the Thai capital, built on a flat marshy delta with some sections below sea level, have been submerged by floodwaters.

Seven weeks ago, protesters gathered in Zucotti Park in Manhattan to fight against “the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations”. The movement  has swelled since then, with as many as 15,000 people involved in an October 5^th  demonstration, in addition to protests occurring in Madrid, Rome, and Berlin. But what do the protests really offer?

From New America Media: When Washington announced recently that it had uncovered an Iranian plot that allegedly targeted the Saudi ambassador to the United States, efforts began in earnest to devise new ways to punish Tehran. Such efforts, however, overlook one glaring fact: Iranians have long been their own worst enemies, allowing their best and brightest to leave the country in droves to the sole benefit of corporate America.

 

From New America Media: In Mississippi, voters go to the polls today to decide whether the state constitution should be amended such that a human egg, at the point of fertilization, becomes a person. When combined with Alabama’s recently enacted HB 56, widely seen as the nation’s toughest anti-immigrant piece of legislation, the result is a uniquely bad situation for migrant women.

 

From New America Media: MERIDA, Mexico -- In an unprecedented move, Mexican members of Anonymous, the renegade group of hackers responsible for breaching the security of banks, financial institutions and government agencies, have issued a direct challenge to Mexican narcos: Because we can’t fight you with weapons, we will destroy you by destroying your privacy.
 

From  New America Media and  Final Call: WASHINGTON – [African-American] buying power is expected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2015, according to The State of the African- American Consumer Report, recently released, collaboratively by Nielsen, a leading global provider of insights and analytics into what consumers watch and buy, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a federation of more than 200 Black community newspapers across the U.S.

From New America Media: A Latino radio host and blogger is calling for Cecilia Muñoz to resign from the White House for her defense of the administration’s deportation policies. Presente.org, the immigrant rights group that led the petition to get CNN’s Lou Dobbs off the air, is demanding that Muñoz denounce the Secure Communities program. In response, a group of some of the nation’s leading immigrant advocacy organizations released a statement [this week] in support of Muñoz.

From New America Media: As Congress’ deficit-cutting "super committee" considers whether to recommend reducing Social Security benefits, two reports released recently expose the declining retirement security of aging Americans—especially among women and people of color.