US getting younger and less educated immigrants. Why and what’s up?

I just posted a large piece on my George Mason blog site about the latest Gallup survey about immigration and who goes where and why.

US attractive to younger less educated immigrants. What’s your neighborhood like?

And to be honest I really don’t want to repeat it all here. So just click on the hede above and take a look at what I posted at Mason.

Bottom line is that Canada is getting the older and better educated immigrants. And the competition for younger immigrants is no cake walk for the US either.

As I said but did not go into with the Mason blog, there are policy immplications here. I would think that some enterprising journalist in the DC area should be able to do several good stories about this issue. He/she just needs to follow up on the Gallup numbers, tie them in with Census data and conduct a few a interviews.

Oh, and convince an editor that there is much more here than just numbers and survey results. There is a local-global connection as well as policy issues that should keep even the most jaded DC wonk happy.

World Press Freedom Day: May 3

This year the organizers of World Press Freedom Day are focusing on journalists in exile.

The day is organized by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.

In a note to WAN members, global affairs director Timothy Balding explained why WAN was emphasizing exiled journalists this year.

World Press Freedom Day 3 May 2010 Journalists in Exile

Dear Colleague

Despite the existence of rights enshrined by national and international conventions, journalists continue to find themselves in frequent peril for simply doing their job, as they strive to report the truth in the passionate belief that reporting what they see is the foundation of a healthy democracy.

That’s why we’re dedicating our 2010 World Press Freedom Day campaign to Journalists in Exile.

We urge you to explore with your readers these issues by visiting http://www.worldpressfreedomday.org and downloading our free, ready-to-publish materials made available to you over the next few weeks.

Thousands of publishers worldwide will run press freedom stories, features and special supplements on 3 May. We hope you will join us.

The World Press Freedom Day site has some moving interviews with journalists forced into exile.  And a contest for the best use of World Press Freedom Day material in a school newspaper.

World Press Freedom Day 2010 Competition

Deadline: May 10

Here are a couple editorial cartoons:

Follow up: Brazil upset with Google stats

Last week Google started releasing data about requests it received to take down material from its servers. (Who is asking Google to take down stuff and why)

In the first report, Brazil came out #1 in data and removal requests.

And the Brazilians are not happy with that title.

Brazil: Google data gives bad censorship rap

By Bradley Brooks

Rio de Janeiro

Brazilian prosecutors said Monday a new Google tool showing government requests for data on users of the Internet giant’s services or the removal of content is giving their country a bad rap.

Google Inc. released an online tool last week showing where it faces the most government pressure to remove material and turn over personal information about its users.

Brazil led the roughly 100 countries in which Google operates by making 291 requests to remove data and 3,663 requests for information on users during the last six months of 2009, the period analyzed.

Rest of story

When you look at the removal requests, 165 of the 291 requests are because of court orders. And, by and large, the Brazilian courts are trustworthy in enforcing enforce local laws.

And it is the local laws that may be causing Brazil’s high ranking in requests for Internet take downs.

Brazilian law punishes inciting discrimination or prejudice based on race, color, ethnicity or religion on the Internet with penalties up to five years in prison. No action has to be taken on the statements. The statements alone are sufficient grounds for prosecution.

Back in 2006 Brazil looking into Orkut communities to prosecute those associated with racism, homophobia and pedophilia. Judges handed down orders for Google to turn over its Orkut database or face fines of $23,000 a day.

In a case decided yesterday, Google was fined $8,500 by a Brazilian court after an Orkut user accuses a priest of pedophilia.

The judge said:

“By making space available on virtual networking sites, in which users can post any type of message without any checks beforehand, with offensive and injurious content, and, in many cases, of unknown origin, (Google) assumes the risk of causing damage” to other people.

Back to the latest complaint from the government.

Priscila Schreiner, a Sao Paulo-based federal prosecutor, said in the article, most of Brazil’s requests relate to child pornography and racism cases on the Internet.

But Google says it automatically removes these types of items and those pull-downs are not included in the numbers. They make that point in the FAQ section for the tool:

The statistics we report here do not include content removals that we regularly process every day across our products for violation of our content policies (for example, we do not permit hate speech in Blogger and other similar products) in response to user complaints. In many cases, those removals result in the takedown of material that violates local law, independent of any government demand or court order seeking such removal.

The local prosecutor wants Google to turn over how it compiled its statistics. She said it is important for the public to know that the Brazilian government is not attempting to censor speech.

Perhaps one of the reasons Google may get a large number of take-down requests from Brazil and India is because the Google social network Orkut is very big in those two countries.

Brazil represents 50 percent of all Orkut users in the world. And Google is learning from court case after court case that even anonymous Orkut postings can cause the company a lot of grief.

One of the real downsides to this tool is that it does not include requests to block items. Google says it is working on a separate tool to report on demands from governments to block items on the Google servers.

Once that happens, just watch how far down Brazil goes on the list.

It is interesting the Brazilian government is upset with its ranking in terms of removal requests when its own prosecutors and independent judiciary keep filing judicial orders to remove material or impose penalties  for anonymous posting.

For now, we have a tool — albeit clearly in beta — to look at the raw number of requests by governments to take items off the Internet.

Local-Global: Threat to South Park creators came from DC area

Foxnews.com got an exclusive on the guy who threatened Matt Stone and Trey Parker for their attempt to use and image of Mohammed in the 200th episode of South Park.

Seems the guy is not from New York. (The website RevolutionMuslim.com is based in New York.) Rather he is from Fairfax County, just outside Washington, DC. (Road to Radicalism: The Man Behind the ‘South Park’ Threats)

This is a big story.

Comedy Central — over the objections of Trey and Parker — censored the episode because of the death threat. Once again the issue of censorship and religion hit the airways and newspapers.

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show did his take on the situation, telling the Revolution Muslim group to go F*&k Themselves as only JS can.

April 22, 2010: South Park Death Threats

(Sorry, I am having difficulty getting the video to embed properly in this site.)

And Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin talked to the animators just before the episode aired.

Now that you have the background, we come back to the local nature of this story for the Washington, DC area.

Only Foxnews.com had the DC-area connection. Fortunately a student journalist at Connect2Mason at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., saw the piece and did some digging on her own.

Seems the threat came from not only a resident of the same county as GMU but he also attended the school for one term. (Former Mason Student Responsible for Threats to South Park Creators)

And that is all there is about the case from the Washington, D.C., media.

I would think that more news outlets in the nation’s capital would be interested in the local nature of someone who wants to revisit the killing of a Dutch movie maker and the threats to Danish cartoonists.

More on this at the DC SPJ chapter web site: Threat to South Park creators came from DC-area

Thai situation dangerous to journalists and media freedom

Anyone who has an interest in events in Asia has been following the running battle in Thailand between the “red shirts” and the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.

The “red shirts” are holed up in an upscale shopping center in Bangkok and are demanding the end of the current. government. The protesters are from the rural areas and feel they have been excluded from the decision-making process. Weaker agricultural prices and higher costs for agricultural inputs have not helped the situation.

And caught in the middle, trying to report on the situation are the Thai media.

Reporters Without Borders issued a statement (Media beset by both violence and state of emergency) over the weekend calling on the Thai government to stop harassing the domestic and international media covering the situation. It also called on the government to end censorship of web sites favorable to the “red shirts.”

At last count, the government had shut down access to 2,500 websites and the number is growing.

The danger to the safety of journalists has gotten so severe that many are now wearing protective helmets provided by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand.

A Japanese cameraman was killed in a bomb blast over the weekend. Another was killed a couple of weeks ago by gun shot.

Reporters are regularly pelted with bottles and other debris tossed by the “red shirts.”

The protest leaders say the only way to guarantee the safety of the journalists is for them to wear green armbands that say “Dissolve Parliament.”

Journalists are refusing to do so.

Another factor has been injected into the already volatile situation: Tourists are entering the demonstration areas with their mobile phones and digital cameras hoping to be able to sell pictures to news outlets. These “citizen journalists” have little understanding of the dangers they face in what is now being described by seasoned journalists as a war zone.

Some additional reading on the situation

• FCCT Statement on the Press Situation in Thailand, 11 April 2010 – Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand
• Analysis – Thailand’s ‘Red Shirt’ uprising echos bloody class wars of past – The Globe and Mail
• Grenade attacks in Bangkok, Chiang Mai – Bangkok Post
• Protesters block roads in provinces amid Thai deadlock – BBC