News Day

Photo of pink mustache car by Quinn Dombrowski, photo of taxi by Jeffrey Zeldman, both Creative Commons license.

The Minneapolis city council’s new regulations for Lyft, Uber, and the city’s cab companies offer legalization for the transnational, multimillion-dollar Uber and Lyft “Transportation Network Companies,” some breaks to the city’s taxi companies, and next to nothing for hard-working taxi drivers. Continue reading →

Links are the best thing the internet has given journalism. They lead back to the original quote, the book, the article, the report, the statute, the data. Like footnotes in academic writing, links keep the writer honest.  (Except when they don’t — like students with footnotes, some journalists do misrepresent what linked sources say.) Continue reading →

During the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Central American refugees arrived in the United States. Like the child refugees fleeing Central America in 2014, they were met with hostility, rejection and deportation. Though entitled to protection under international law, the Central American refugees of the 1980s and the child refugees today do not receive that protection in fact. Continue reading →

Dave introduced himself to my college writing class: he had a new baby, a full-time job and plenty of confidence. Rose asked for patience: she couldn’t afford the textbook and her student financial aid wouldn’t arrive for a couple of weeks. She was also living in a homeless shelter. Ann arrived with cheerful enthusiasm and what she told me was a sixth grade reading level. Louis was working full-time and needed to get a degree to continue to be employable in the field he had worked in for decades. Henry was still wearing an ankle bracelet as a condition of parole, and had excellent writing skills, but huge challenges in family situation and housing. Bonita was returning to college after 22 years, urged on by her now-college-graduate children.

I’ve changed the names to protect their privacy, but the stories are real. Continue reading →

The BBC just told top managers to stop inviting crackpots to give “the other side” of the climate change debate. The Telegraph reported that the BBC Trust firmly rejected an “‘over-rigid application of editorial guidelines on impartiality’ which sought to give the ‘other side’ of the argument, even if that viewpoint was widely dismissed.” Continue reading →

The plight of tens of thousands of children coming from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala is a political football, with slogans substituting for understanding. On July 9, AP published Young immigrants or refugees: 5 things you need to know — but their list omitted crucial information. Here’s essential information you need to know, but wouldn’t find in the AP article. Continue reading →

When I was young, sex education was known as talking about “the facts of life” or “the birds and the bees.” The metaphors might have been a little strange, but today’s birds-and-bees news is all about the facts of life. If we don’t do something — now — to protect the birds and the bees, the facts are that we could lose both their lives and our own.   Continue reading →

The European Court of Justice just made it legal to bury the past. Got an inconvenient disorderly conduct conviction? A history of domestic abuse? Politically inconvenient statements you made ten years ago about — pick one — women’s whining, African American athletic ability, gay marriage? Or maybe just photos of drunken spring break at Fort Lauderdale during your college years? Continue reading →

Never has the promise of the Statue of Liberty seemed more hollow than this summer, as mobs scream invective at frightened children fleeing their home countries to what they hoped would be safe haven in the United States. The contrast between the poem at the Statue of Liberty and the continuing Republican blockage of immigration reform, coupled with the angry hostility toward the waves of Central American child refugees could not be more stark. Continue reading →

Long ago and not so far away, I celebrated the Fourth of July religiously each year. I was a wholehearted patriot, deeply convinced that my country was committed to liberty and justice for all. Even after the news intruded, with realities of segregation and racism and war, I wanted to believe that the real United States was the country of Martin Luther King, Jr., and not the country of Strom Thurmond. I believed that we would win the struggles for civil rights and for fair pay for workers and farmers and farmworkers and for an end to wars. Continue reading →