May
20
2013
Chicago is braced for a critical vote by the Board of Education this week to determine if 54 schools will be closed.
Last week, parents of three children, two who have disabilities and a third who is black, filed a lawsuit at the US District Court in Chicago alleging the school closings violate the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Illinois Civil Rights Act.
A second complaint, filed by the parents of three more children with disabilities, …
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May
20
2013
Last fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called “Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream.” It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th. The movie had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation. “Park Avenue” is a pointed exploration of the growing economic inequality in America …
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May
20
2013
Two cases of racially charged graffiti at a high school in upscale Agoura Hills are being investigated by a hate crime unit, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials said.
Deputies were reviewing surveillance footage and providing extra patrols on Thursday around Agoura High School, where officials found racist graffiti against black students on Sunday and Wednesday.
The scrawls were first discovered on Sunday on at least 10 buildings on the campus, which has 31 African-American students among …
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May
20
2013
Karl Rove is offering America a super-sized serving of political cynicism.
Since the controversy over the targeting of grassroots tea party groups for extra scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service arose, Rove has engaged in the sort of political sleight of hand that could only be practiced in a country where elite media have no skepticism—and no memory.
Just a few months ago, after the 2012 election, Rove was widely portrayed as having declared war on grassroots …
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May
20
2013
When two Swedish economists set out to examine whether economic freedom made people any more or less racist, they knew how they would gauge economic freedom, but they needed to find a way to measure a country’s level of racial tolerance. So they turned to something called the World Values Survey, which has been measuring global attitudes and opinions for decades.
Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, …
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May
20
2013
Austerity has failed in Europe, where the European Union just racked up 18 months of negative growth with no end in sight. It is failing in the United States, where this year’s deficit reductions will cut the growth rate in half.
But austerity is succeeding as politics. The German government shows no signs of taking its heavy foot off Europe’s oxygen hose, and President Obama seems determined to strike a 10-year deal with the Republicans that …
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May
20
2013
Twelve-year-old Judeline crouches at the feet of a much younger girl, lifting high a makeup kit so the little girl, Boubou, can apply a colored pencil to her brow. Boubou studies herself intently in the kit’s mirror; Judeline, hidden to her, stares at us with a look that seems both humiliated and beseeching.
Taken by the photographer Vlad Sokhin for a series called “Restavek: Child Slavery in Haiti,’’ it is one of the most haunting images …
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May
17
2013
Move over, mobile phones. There’s a new technological fix for poverty: biometric identification. Speaking at the World Bank on April 24, Nandan Nilekani, director of India’s universal identification scheme, promised that the project will be “transformational.” It “uses the most sophisticated technology … to solve the most basic of development challenges.” The massive ambition, known as Aadhaar, aims to capture fingerprints, photographs, and iris scans of 1.2 billion residents, with the assumption that a national …
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May
17
2013
TOKYO — Seismologists said Wednesday that a nuclear reactor in Tsuruga, in western Japan, stands above an active seismic fault, a finding that could lead to the first permanent shutdown of a reactor since the Fukushima crisis two years ago.
Japan’s newly installed Nuclear Regulation Authority also said Wednesday that it would issue an order that would effectively keep a separate unit, the Monju experimental fast breeder reactor, closed until its operator overhauled safety measures …
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May
17
2013
A group of researchers from the Floating Sheep project – who also mapped racist tweets surrounding President Barack Obama’s re-election – have geotagged racist and homophobic tweets in the United States and plotted them on an interactive map.
Students at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., looked at 150,000 geotagged tweets that contained slurs and were in North America between June 2012 and April 2013. The students read each individual tweet and manually coded the sentiment …
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