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A new report from NDN highlights how society as a whole, and Hispanics specifically, are increasingly using mobile media to connect to the issues they care about. The report ties the demographic rise of Hispanics with the rise in the community’s increased use of mobile media technologies.
A recent story about the global rise in living solo says while countries like Sweden have the most number of singletons (47 percent), the countries where single person households are growing the fastest are Brazil, China and India. Living solo has usually been regarded as something profoundly abnormal, especially in a culture where a parent’s job is not done until the children are “settled,” ergo married. We like to think we were designed to live communally even if it’s in shared misery.
As the tragedy of Trayvon Martin's death calls the country to examine the racial inequities of the criminal justice system, it must go beyond our common, and justified, focus on the racist zealots or inept police officers. It has to go where the real power lies – with the prosecutors – the ones who control the levers of the system in counties and states across the country. In Martin’s case, it was prosecutor Norm Wolfinger who allowed his killer to walk free.
2011 saw a record number of laws restricting abortion in U.S. states. It also saw a record number of state anti-immigrant laws. Coincidence? Maybe not. In 2000, 13 states were considered “hostile” to reproductive rights; by 2011, that number had doubled to 26 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute. 2011 was also a record year for anti-immigrant legislation.
There was never much doubt that if the Supreme Court ever got a chance to decide the constitutionality of the health care reform law that it would be in for rough sledding from the court’s five conservatives. The judicial torpedoing of the law will hurt millions of poor, working-class Americans who desperately need health care, but couldn’t get affordable care before the law was passed, and are just as unlikely to get affordable care if it’s struck down. It’s no mystery who among those millions will be hurt the most.
The shooting that killed seven at a private Christian university in Oakland would never have happened in Korea, where owning a firearm is outlawed. That at least is the assessment of community members who point to America’s own thriving gun culture as a causal factor in this and other incidents. The shooting, the Bay Area’s worst mass murder in nearly two decades, occurred Monday morning at Oikos University, in a business park between Interstate 880 and Oakland International Airport. Another three were injured in the slaughter, according to police.
In a darker reality, you would not be reading this. I would not be a writer. Nor would I be a husband to my wife or a father to my new son. Because if the shaky hands of a police officer had deemed otherwise, my brains would have been splattered all over the backseat of a tan Ford Mustang years ago. I don’t purport to know all the facts of the admitted recent killing of unarmed Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. But I can tell you what it’s like to be a young man of color in a world that too often criminalizes us.
What drove Binh Thai Luc, 35, to be charged this week with slaying five people in a San Francisco home last week? The grisly murders have rocked the city and left investigators and the public searching for a motive. News media reports have suggested that the killer may have been trying to collect on gambling debts. Although gambling addiction affects every group, researchers have found unusually high levels among Asians.