Guerilla Innovation brings you a different kind of story about Dane-Muslim relations:

As an attempt to bridge the communication-gap between Danes and the local muslim community, a group of academic muslims have launched a novel form of home-service.

The service is called 'Book en Muslim' (Book a Muslim) and it enables people to book a meeting with a young Danish muslim. The meeting takes place either at people's own homes or at their workplaces.

The objective is to create a platform for dialogue between Danes and Danish muslims who feel caught in between the religious and political fronts that emerged as a result of the Mohammed cartoon saga.

Bookings can be placed through the internet, free of charge.

Source: Guerilla Innovation

Image by [n], licensed under Creative Commons.

Maybe you don’t pay much attention to the folks at the Cato Institute, the Libertarian think tank. But what if they made a map of bungled police raids in the United States from 1985 to 2008? Peep the craziness; there’s a lot of it.

(Thanks, io9.)

Source: Cato Institute

Image by davidsonscott15, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Arizona Republic has posted the full text of the new Arizona immigration law with notes from a University of Arizona law professor. It’s not very long and the presentation is very reader-friendly.

“If you read it yourself,” writes Marian Wang over at ProPublica, “you’ll have done better than several top Obama administration officials who’ve expressed disagreement with the law.”

Source: Arizona Republic, ProPublica

Every year, graduate programs across the country reject oodles of applications from terrifically smart and qualified individuals. How to create a more equitable admissions process, one that doesn’t draw arbitrary distinctions between equally qualified candidates? John L. Jackson Jr. over at The Chronicle of Higher Education ponders a lottery for admissions. As he says:

This [graduate admissions] isn't about finding a needle in a haystack, the one gem that objectively shines brighter than all the rest. It can feel more like throwing a dart at a far away dartboard and then subsequently drawing a bullseye around it.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Image by foundphotoslj, licensed under Creative Commons.

Earlier this year, the Texas Board of Education went all “we’re the deciders” on U.S. history textbooks, demanding a decisively conservative slant on certain aspects of our nation’s history. More recently, Arizona went all “stuff white people don’t like” on Latino immigrants. The good people over at We Are Respectable Negroes have taken these gestures at face value and turned the implications of Texas and Arizona’s decisions into a Tea Party timeline: What Would U.S. History Look Like If It Were Written By Texas and Arizona? The sarcasm is kind of obvious awesome:

1941–Patriotic Japanese Americans volunteer to place themselves in gated communities so that America will be safe from Imperial Japan.

Source: We Are Respectable Negroes 

Image by Tony the Misfit, licensed under Creative Commons.

From New America Media, a report on the courageous activism of immigrant students in Arizona:

Dressed in blue graduation caps and gowns, four students were arrested Monday evening at Sen. John McCain’s office as they called for passage of legislation to assist immigrant students wanting to attend U.S. colleges.

Tucson police arrested and booked the youth on trespassing charges, but they were released after several hours. Federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued an order for them to appear in court.

“We’re putting ourselves on the line, for people we really believe in,” said Mohammad Abdollahi, 24, an undocumented immigrant from Iran, who was arrested. He lives in Ann Arbor, Mo., and is the co-founder of DreamActivists.Org.

“This is not about us,” he said. “This is about the hundreds of thousands of young people who have the same dream, and we want to provide them with the same opportunity.”

The protestors were calling on McCain to support the Dream Act, a bill that would allow youth who enter the country illegally before age 16 to legalize their status by continuing to pursue higher education or enrolling in the military.

Source: New America Media

Legalized gambling has always been a struggle between morals and Mammon.  Slots, lotteries, horse racing, and card games have been a guaranteed way to swell the coffers of any state that decides to accept social cost of gambling revenues.
 
However, that bubble may have burst.  Maryland tried to staunch its financial bleeding in 2008 by passing a referendum allowing slot machines into the state, expecting a return of $90 million up front and $660 million a year.  It turns out that those expectations were over-optimistic. According to the Urbanite, in the two years since the referendum, not one is open—all the construction that wasn’t scrapped has been severely delayed.
 
Failed attempts like Maryland’s have triggered what the Urbanite calls a “gambling arms race” where states losing casino revenues up the stakes by legalizing new forms of gambling to attract out-of-state gamblers. Here’s what that looks like:

Pennsylvania slots took money away from Atlantic City’s boardwalk casinos. Delaware snatched horse-racing revenue away from Maryland tracks by using slots as a draw. And when Maryland passed its own pro-slots law, a county in West Virginia—worried that new competition might cut into the 96 percent of Charles Town gambling revenues that come from outside the state—voted in blackjack and poker. Delaware upped the ante further by trying to corner the East Coast market on professional sports betting, a matter that is winding its way through the courts. And now Pennsylvania is expanding table games beyond slots.

If you’re a state legalizing gambling, it seems the more you permit, the more you’ll soon need to allow to keep bettors coming back.

Source: Urbanite

(Image by  Lisa Brewster , licensed under  Creative Commons ) 

Human Rights Watch has launched a campaign to end child labor in US agriculture. "Children can legally work on any farm at age 12, with their parents’ permission, and it's not uncommon to see children as young as 7 and 8 in the fields," according to a new Human Rights Watch report, Fields of Peril. "During peak harvest season, the children work up to 14-hour days, and earn far less than minimum wage. There is no minimum age for children working on a small farm with parental permission."

The organization has produced a short video on the issue. Pass it around!

Over at the Bitch blogs, Jessica Yee has a short burst of analysis on the fight over Arizona immigration law. Here's the nugget that caught my attention:

What's been happening in Arizona is horrific on so many levels to so many people and communities – but it has really had me reflecting. When do certain issues get considered "feminist" and when do they not? And when do they require a real feminist response in action?

There have been several excellent female responses to the situation in Arizona by way of intersecting the impacts to women and children, sexuality, and even religion (read all of the amazing stuff the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health is posting here), yet so much of the mainstream media we've been hearing is of course way too predictably patriarchal in nature; people making excuses for enacting racist legislation, utilizing fear-based tactics to legitimize white supremacy to "protect" the women and children, etc., etc.

So here I am responding to it and asking you frankly: Does an issue have to have an identified or presenting woman involved to truly be considered feminist? When abortion rights are threatened, we're out in the masses online and offline to protect them repeatedly, blog post after Facebook link, clinic defense after pro-choice club initiation, without question–and we certainly come together on it even if we disagree on tactics.

Source: Bitch

Image by Fibonacci Blue, licensed under Creative Commons.