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First Indian-Woman President Sworn In
By Yoji Cole
July 26, 2007
First Indian-Woman President Sworn In
India's first female president, Patribha Patil, was sworn in Wednesday on a platform of empowering women and eliminating the practice of aborting female fetuses. Despite being touted as an important step for gender equality, Patil's election to the largely ceremonial post has elicited only a lukewarm response from many women who say it has given them little more than a symbol--certainly not a leader who represents them. The 72-year-old Patil had been largely silent on her goals, particularly after drawing criticism for calling on Indian women--Muslims and Hindus alike--to abandon wearing head scarves. 'Empowerment of women is particularly important to me as I believe this leads to the empowerment of the nation,' Patil told lawmakers, calling for universal education in India. 'We must banish malnutrition, social evils, infant mortality and female feticide.'
U.S. Schools Fear End of Affirmative Action
Seventeen-year-old Quantae Williams doesn't understand why the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his school district's racial-diversity program. Now he'll have to return to the inner-city school where he used to get into fights. School officials nationwide are scrambling to find a way to protect diversity in their classrooms following last month's 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court that ended programs that used race as a factor to determine public-school placements. Critics have called the decision the biggest threat to the ideals of the Brown v. Board of Education case yet, which outlawed racial segregation in U.S. public schools and led to often divisive efforts at many schools, including busing kids from black schools to white schools and vice versa. John Powell, executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in Ohio, said many blacks are shut out of better white neighborhoods by systemic housing discrimination, and since U.S. school funding is based on local tax receipts, poor neighborhoods beget inadequate schools. Read more. (See also: The Hot News About Affirmative Action)
Are Schools Giving Muslims Special Treatment?
Schools and universities are providing prayer spaces for Muslim students, which critics say is a double standard and an organized attempt to push public conformity with Islamic law. The University of Michigan at Dearborn is planning to build foot baths for Muslim students to wash their feet before prayer. An elementary school in San Diego created an extra recess period for Muslim pupils to pray. At George Mason University in Virginia, Muslim students using a "meditation space" laid out Muslim prayer rugs and separated men and women in accordance with their Islamic beliefs. "The whole issue is to provide for a religious foundation for those who are observant while respecting separation of church and state," says Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Read more.
Phoenix Sheriff Accused of Racial Profiling
Latino leaders and faith-based organizations are asking Phoenix's Sheriff Joe Arpaio to disconnect the hotline he created for people to report information about undocumented immigrants, saying it raises the chance of racial profiling. The hotline began last Friday and has received about 300 messages, which include tips about family and friends, employment, day laborers, drop houses and crank calls. The hotline is part of an expanded immigration-enforcement plan Arpaio unveiled last week that also includes sheriff's deputies cross-trained to enforce immigration law. Some Latino-advocacy groups will launch a hotline of their own to take tips from people who believe they've been unfairly reported to Arpaio's hotline.
Generations Collide in Corporate America
In corporate America, summer is the season of culture shock. Managers tell stories of summer associates who come to meetings with midriffs exposed, baring a belly ring, walking through the halls engaged with iPods. "They have an attitude toward work that looks like laziness and looks like impatience," said Janice Smith, who leads an Ernst & Young seminar that carefully puts the best light on Generation Y qualities that are flummoxing managers, "but they don't understand that's how it looks." (Ernst & Young is No. 43 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list.) Surveys over the last few years have found that this group is looking for work that includes a "flexible work schedule" (92 percent, according to a Harris Interactive poll), "requires creativity" (96 percent) and "allows me to have an impact on the world" (97 percent). And when the polling firm Roper Starch Worldwide did a survey comparing workplace attitudes among generations, 90 percent of Generation Y said they wanted coworkers "who make work fun." No other generation polled put that requirement in their top five. For the real scoop on Four Generations in the Workplace, read the May 2007 issue of DiversityInc magazine. Read more.
Immigrant Wages Dip
Immigrant wages are declining as a larger influx of immigrants with less education enter the work force, said the study by the Economic Mobility Project, an initiative of the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts. The study also said, however, that immigrants continue to experience upward mobility in the United States and become more affluent with each generation. "The economic assimilation machine continues to be a powerful force," said John E. Morton, managing director of economic policy at Pew. "But in recent years we have seen notable downward trends. Wages are decreasing substantially for both first- and second-generation immigrants, raising questions about the degree of future potential economic mobility." Reported by The Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Fiancée of Man Shot More Than 50 Times Sues NYPD
A civil case has been filed against the New York Police Department by a Brooklyn woman whose fiancé was shot more than 50 times by police officers on the day they were to be married. Sean Bell was killed last November when five police officers opened fire on him and two friends outside a strip club in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, where he was attending his bachelor party. A criminal case is under way in Queens Supreme Court against three of the five officers. The civil suit accuses all five officers, as well as the NYPD, of negligence, recklessness and civil-rights violations. According to Sanford Rubenstein, who filed the civil suit on behalf of Bell's fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, and the two other men who were fired upon, the criminal case remains the victims' "primary priority right now." Read more.
Unmarried Couples in Ohio Covered Under Domestic-Violence Law
In a 6-1 decision Wednesday, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected an argument that the domestic-violence law was unenforceable in cases involving unmarried couples because the law refers to them as living together "as a spouse." "The state does not create cohabitation; rather it is a person's determination to share some of life's responsibilities with another that creates cohabitation," Moyer wrote. "The state does not have a role in creating cohabitation, but it does have a role in creating a marriage." The decision came in a case in which a man accused of assaulting his live-in girlfriend argued he could not be charged with domestic violence because the ban on gay marriage, adopted as a constitutional amendment in 2004, prohibits the state from assigning legal status to unmarried couples. Twenty-seven states have constitutional language defining marriage as between a man and a woman, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Ohio's amendment bans civil unions and denies legal status to all unmarried couples and gay marriages. Told by The Houston Chronicle.
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