By Mackenzie Carpenter / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It’s known as the “Good Enough Diploma,” born in 1942 to help out GIs in World War II, but the high school equivalency test known as the General Education Diploma, or GED, is heading into a perfect storm — with adult literacy providers trying to ride it out.

In January, the cost of taking the newly revised GED will double. The test also will be computerized, and it will be harder — aligned with the Common Core State Standards Initiative, as agreed to by 47 states, which emphasizes more critical thinking and writing.

All this is coming together as funding for adult literacy providers has plummeted by more than half in Pennsylvania alone since 2007-08, even as demand for GED instruction has risen by 11 percent in the past five years at the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council.

Anisia Williams, 18, of Homewood signed up with the literacy council in February to take GED classes, but as she whiled away months on a waiting list, she found her motivation faltering.

“I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought maybe I just wasn’t really qualified to get a high school diploma and should try something else,” said Ms. Williams, whose family had moved to Georgia when she was in ninth grade. When she changed high schools, the second school refused to accept the first school’s credits.

“They told me I’d have to retake two years of high school, so I talked to my mom and grandmother, and when we came back to Pittsburgh we decided I should try for a GED instead. My grandmother kept giving me speeches telling me not to give up.”

Finally, Ms. Williams got a spot May 6 in a GED class at the literacy council, but now she and other current students face a new challenge — passing the current five-part GED test before the Jan. 1 deadline. Otherwise students who have taken portions of the current test will be forced to take — and pay for — the entire new test.

“The clock is ticking,” said Don Block, executive director of the literacy council, which is trying to get out the word about the new test, scrambling to get the council’s current students — who average about 1,000 a month — through the pipeline.

“If you work in a library or in social services, share this information with your clients or patrons. If you have a relative or friend who didn’t complete high school, share this information with that person.”

Otherwise, he added, those affected “may become discouraged and give up on their dreams.”

In Pennsylvania, the number of literacy providers runs the gamut. Publicly funded GED instruction programs in Allegheny County include Goodwill Industries, the Allegheny Intermediate Unit and Community College of Allegheny County.

Then there are literacy councils that rely on private and public funds — Pittsburgh’s literacy council gets 48 percent of its funding from government sources — and who employ volunteers along with paid staff, although since 2009 the council has had to eliminate five teaching positions — three full-time and two part-time — and reduce the number of classes it offered by almost half, from 61 to 36 classes.

In Pennsylvania, 40,000 people are registered to take the $60 GED test, according to figures from the state Department of Education. But it’s not clear how many of these people know about the deadline or the price increase.

“Losing that resolve is one of the biggest things we’re worried about,” added Colleen Duran, transition manager at the literacy council who helps guide students into post-secondary education, job training or the workforce after they obtain their GED.

So, Ms. Duran has swung into action. To more efficiently handle learners who are at different levels, she’s started putting higher-scoring students into one group, so instructors can give more one-on-one time to those who might be struggling.

“I fast-track them, run the class myself, and boom, get them into a GED test and out,” she said. “The people who come in with pretty high scores, they’ve proven they already know a lot, most of the skills they would have learned already. If we wait too long, they’ll have to start all over again.”

These days, the council, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, isn’t just about helping the illiterate middle-aged student — or, as it’s known more respectfully in the field, the “adult learner” — learn to read and write after spending years of hiding it.

And the stereotype of the unemployed, hapless loser isn’t true either.

“I don’t hang around losers,” declared Lewis McCullough, 58, who dropped out of Peabody High School roughly 40 years ago but went on to become a successful electrician, managing five people. “I’ve always been a go-getter, but if I could do it over I would have stayed in school.”

Last year, he went back to the literacy council to get his GED.

“I could read what I needed to read, but this makes me more comfortable getting through the day,” Mr. McCullough said.

If he were starting out today, it would be much harder to make it without a high school diploma, with employers demanding a more skilled workforce. While the 2008 recession has created high unemployment, more than 3.8 million skilled jobs are going unfilled as of the end of March, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s up from 3.5 million a year ago.

President Barack Obama has said he wants to increase the number of post-secondary degree holders in this country to 60 percent, and add 5 million new college degrees, noted Armando Diaz, a spokesman for the GED Testing Service in Washington, D.C.

“That’s not possible when you have 40 million people in this country without a high school diploma,” he said.

But funding cuts in the past decade have left literacy providers no choice but to consolidate services, so enrollment has declined from 3 million to 1.8 million nationally. Congress hasn’t reauthorized the Workforce Investment Act since 2002, when federal funding under the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act was at its highest, at around $600 million. That money was channeled to states which then distributed grants to local providers to help low-skilled adults improve their basic skills and English language proficiency. In the past, considerable state matching funds were provided.

“Nationally, the picture for adult literacy funding has always been dire, but recently it’s been getting more so,” added Marcie Foster, a policy analyst with the Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success in Washington, D.C., noting that while adult education’s funding has remained flat in the past decade, when adjusted for inflation that means a 25 percent cut in purchasing power for providers.

Locally, nothing illustrates the shift in priorities more than the decision in 2004 by the Pittsburgh Public Schools to close Connelley Technical Institute and Adult Learning Center Vocational School after losing $2.4 million in state funds, so the district could aim its attention on K-12.

“There is this perception, these adults had their chance,” said Sharon Darling, head of the National Center for Family Literacy in Louisville, Ky. “The thinking goes, ‘We paid to educate them already.’ And yet, with more and more people in this bad economy in the pipeline to get retraining, it’s assumed their literacy levels are a lot higher than they are.”

Adult literacy is nonetheless inextricably linked to poverty in the United States, Mr. Block said.

“In low-income homes, survival is the priority, not education. So many of our students have no role model in their lives for a good education. One of our students told me she was the first in her family to get a high school diploma — think of that,” he said.

Ms. Duran sees this every day.

“Guess what, when a young woman gets pregnant, she’s the one who has the baby, has to drop out of school and take care of the child. It makes sense for us to educate her, help her get a job and get off welfare and become a taxpaying citizen.”

One of those women is Rachelle Walch, who dropped out of Highlands in Natrona Heights when she became pregnant at 16. Now she’s 21, her son is in preschool, and after a series of odd jobs — at a carwash and a movie theater — she got her GED at the literacy council and is now enrolled at the Empire Beauty School in Monroeville.

Ms. Walch’s work schedule is challenging, to say the least: She cares for senior citizens in a home care program, sometimes working the overnight shift, then works a half-day shift before heading to beauty school in the evening.

“You do whatever you need to do,” she said, when asked when she had time to sleep.

“I needed to make a better life for me and my child. Everybody deserves a second chance. I passed my GED with flying colors, and now I’m where I want to be in my life. I make enough to pay my bills and make ends meet.”

 

Mackenzie Carpenter: mcarpenter@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1949 or on Twitter @MackenziePG.

Google outstripped its arch-rival, Apple, with the launch of a subscription music streaming service on Wednesday while simultaneously mounting a threat to other providers such as Spotify.

The service, labouring under the full name of Google Play Music All Access, was unveiled at Google I/O, the tech giant’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, where delegates also heard about significant updates to its search and mapping services.

Revealing the music service, Chris Yerga, Google’s engineering director, said users would be able to stream from a vast library on any device, using the Android operating system. “This is radio without rules. It’s as ‘leanback’ as you want to, or as interactive as you want to,” said Yerga. Users will be able to search for an artist and add tracks to their library. A “listen now” feature will create a mix of favourite artists or genres based on previously listened-to songs.

In the US, All Access will cost $9.99 a month after a 30-day free trial. Spotify Premium, a similar service, costs $9.99. Users who sign up by 30 June will get a reduced price of $7.99 per month. There was no immediate announcement of pricing in other territories. Google has signed licensing deals with music companies including Sony, Universal and Warner, and millions of songs will be available for the service, which will go live from Wednesday.

The announcement comes as Apple considers its own music service. The tech giants have become increasingly interested in subscription services thanks to the popularity of Spotify, which has more than six million paying subscribers and more than 24 million active users in 28 countries.

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the UK-based BPI, which represents record labels, welcomed the announcement by Google. “Streaming is the fastest growing part of the £330m digital music sector in Britain,” he said, “with more than a million paying subscribers already and millions more enjoying free and ad-supported music. The entry of a player with the reach of Google will persuade many more consumers to experience having millions of songs to play instantly on their phone, tablet or PC.”

Google’s announcement was greeted with loud applause by developers in San Francisco, who began lining up to attend the sold-out Google I/O at 5am. Larry Page, the Google CEO, who has been suffering from a vocal-cords defect, made an unexpectedly long appearance at the conference, where he bemoaned the “negativity” which he believes is holding back the technology industry.

The company revealed that more than 900 million devices using Android had now been activated, up from 400 million a year ago. Hugo Barra, vice-president of Android product management, said 48 billion Android apps had now been installed worldwide. The 900m figure does not include tens of millions of smartphones in China which also use Android’s basic software – called “Android Open Source Platform” – but do not connect to Google’s services, and so cannot contact its “activation” servers.

Google unveiled new tools for developers including the ability to track people’s physical activity when they are carrying an Android device, a move that will usher in a new generation of fitness applications.

The company’s search service also received an update. Saying “OK Google” to an Android device will now trigger a voice recognition system. Personal information like flight reservations, package deliveries and theatre bookings will be easier to find with the improved search service.

Brian McClenden, Google’s head of maps, said its mapping service had been rebuilt “from the ground up”. Google Maps will pay greater attention to each individual’s personal use of the maps, highlighting places they frequently visit and making suggestions for other venues. The maps will change as they are used. Clicking on a museum will highlight other museums in the area, and users’ photos will also be displayed in the maps. The new functions will be rolled out in the coming months.

OneWire, a leading career site for finance professionals, has another installment of its Open Door video interview series out. This time, OneWire CEO Skiddy von Stade sits down with Deborah Wright, the President and CEO of Carver Bancorp.

Wright discusses her fascinating life story, from becoming one of the first African American children to integrate the Bennetsville, South Carolina school system, to running the largest publicly traded African American bank in the United States.

Wright recalls of her childhood,

“I think for me it was first or second grade when all of the big court decisions came down striking down ‘Separate But Equal.’ And so one Sunday morning, my father volunteered us to be one of the families that would be the first to integrate the Bennetsville elementary school system.”

After earning an AB, JD, and MBA from Harvard University, Wright went on to pursue an incredibly successful career that has spanned both the private and public sectors. Deborah began her career as an Associate at First Boston.

From there, she joined the business advocacy group, New York City Partnership, and was soon named to the New York City Housing Authority Board by Mayor David N. Dinkins. She went on to serve in the Giuliani administration and then headed the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation in 1996.

In 1999, Mayor Dinkins asked Wright to join Carver Bancorp as President and CEO. Wright says of Carver, “The black banking industry…really comes out of an era of segregation… But that was then, and now is now…”

Watch Skiddy’s interview with Deborah Wright below or visit OneWire to watch more videos from the Open Door series, including interviews with executives such as Tony James, President and COO of Blackstone, and Bill Comfort, Former Chairman of Citigroup Venture Capital.

 

Credit: Shawna Nelles on Flickr, under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 2.0).

(WOMENSENEWS)–Most women in Amatlan consider themselves, their neighbors and their friends to be good mothers.

Almost all the women in the community labor in the domestic sphere–they cook the food, wash the clothes and generally look after the house and children. Making lonches — lunches for the men in the fields and for the school-age children — is an integral part of their mothering. A good mother frets about what she is feeding her children. Though the terms the women use to talk about each other’s mothering are similar to the good-bad dichotomy used by the main­stream, their interpretations and the reasons behind their interpretations are more nuanced.

For the state, good mothers follow the rules, have few children and invest in them emotionally; they are also expected to live in a nuclear family. For the women I met, good motherhood entailed a significant amount of investment, but also drawing from one’s extended-kin network to achieve a child’s success; abuelas and ahuis (grandmothers and aunts) were frequently key to the socialization process of any child . . .

Not Suffering in Silence

In Amatlan, many mothers suffer alongside, or because of, their children. While marianismo – -the all-suffering, passive motherhood epitomized in the Virgin Mary — is very present in many corners of Latin America, it is not much in evidence in this region. The mothers who do struggle with their children neither view themselves as martyrs nor do they suffer in silence.

Esperanza often despaired at the laziness of her son Adrian, one day exclaiming, “He is no use to me here. He should go away to work but he doesn’t want to. I don’t know what to do with him.” I suggested, “You should stop feeding him.” She replied, laughing, “That’s true, then he’ll go away. . . . [If he is here] I worry when he doesn’t get back [or] whether he has been beaten or something. But when he is far away I don’t worry. My head can rest.”

All the mothers I spoke with worried about their children’s future. Emma said, regarding one of her sons who was attending university in the city of Morelia, “A student is a lot of money. My son always asks me for money, 70 pesos, or 50, and it is a lot of money. As he doesn’t work. . . . And when there is money we can [help] but often there is none. I tell [my husband] to go to Mexico and to work in a house, or as a bricklayer, to make some money.” She added with a smile, “But he says he is too old.”

Women in Amatlan were the primary caregivers to children, whether their own or their extended kin; their main duties were domestic. Emma’s eldest daughter, Cristina, irritably pointed out that mothers, and women, had to do everything with never any rest.

Exhausting Anxieties

She constantly worried about her children and hoped that they would be able to make something of their lives. But her anxiety was exhausting, as she said, extending her emotion to all aspects of motherhood:

“It’s just that as women we have to do everything, get pregnant and be nauseated for the first few months and when everything makes you feel sick. And [cleaning] the pigsty made me feel so sick. And then in the last [months] it is difficult to stand up and do everything. It is so much trouble. And then the pain of the birth, and to breastfeed, and to get up to change the baby in the middle of the night. Your husband is happily asleep but not you. And then to have to control yourself so you don’t get pregnant. We [women] have to do everything. There is only the condom and the vasectomy for men, but they don’t want them. We have to do it if we don’t want to get pregnant. And well, one has to satisfy the husband and also not have so many children.”

This centrality of women as caregivers and men as providers is echoed in the structure of Oportunidades, a federal social assistance program in Mexico. When some of the men of the village on occasion asked to receive the money alongside the women, they were scolded by the authorities and told that it was only for the women. They were told that they should work, not be lazy and support their families. This response somehow implied that women’s natural job at the home could be rewarded and encouraged with money, but men needed to be out in the public sphere without complaint.

Excerpted from the new book, “Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico,” by Vania Smith-Oka, published by Vanderbilt University Press, 2013. Reprinted with permission. For more information:www.VanderbiltUniversityPress.com.

Cornel West, the firebrand of American academia for almost 30 years, is causing his hosts some problems. They are on a schedule but such things barely move him, for as he saunters down the high street there are people to talk to, and no one can leave shortchanged. Everyone, “brother” or “sister”, is indeed treated like a long lost family member. And then there is the hug; a bear-like pincer movement. There’s no escape. It happens in New York, where the professor/philosopher usually holds court. And now it’s the same in Cambridge.

The best students accord their visitors a healthy respect, but West’s week laying bare the conflicts and fissures of race and culture and activism and literature in the US and Britain yielded more than that during his short residency at King’s College. There are academics who draw a crowd, but the West phenomenon at King’s had rock star quality: the buzz, the poster beaming his image from doors and noticeboards; the back story – Harvard, Princeton, Yale, his seminal work Race Matters, his falling-in and falling-out with Barack Obama.

Others can teach, and at Cambridge the teaching is some of the best in the world, but standing-room-only crowds came to see West perform. He performed. Approaching 60 now, he is slow of gait. But he always performs.

“Britain is in trouble,” he tells me. “Britain is in deep trouble. The privatising is out of the control, the militarising is out of control and the financialising is out of control. And what I mean from that is you have a cold-hearted, mean-spirited budget that the Queen just read; you have working and poor people under panic, you have this obsession with immigration that tends to scapegoat the most vulnerable rather than confront the most powerful. And it is not just black immigrants, but also our brothers and sisters from Poland and Bulgaria, Romania; right across the board.” He isn’t ranting. He doesn’t rant. He smiles, he growls gently, he leans in and whispers conspiratorily. There is an upside, he says. “Britain has a rich history of bouncing back too.”

They looked after him at King’s, he says. Incongruous in his trademark black three–piece suit, with fob watch and old-time, grey–flecked, fly-away afro, he berthed in the understated splendour of the Rylands room in the Old Lodge. Named after Dadie Rylands, the literary scholar and theatre director educated at King’s and a fellow until his death in 1999, it was where Virginia Woolf lunched with Rylands and John Maynard Keynes. West likes such evocations. “I feel her spirit,” he says, leaning back on a chair.

Activist … Cornel West is arrested during a protest against policing methods in Harlem in 2011. Photograph: Stephanie Keith/AP

 

But then he is accustomed to the star treatment. A graduate of Harvard University in 1973, he received his PhD at Princeton; returning to both as professor of religion and director of the programme in African-American studies at Princeton and later professor of African-American studies at Harvard. He departed Harvard in 2002 after a bitter dispute with the then president of the university, Lawrence Summers, Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, who was later picked by President Obama to head the US National Economic Council. Some claim Summers’s clash with West formed part of the spiral that led to his own departure from Harvard. West says Summers had an agenda to cut African American studies, and him, down to size. He “tangled with the wrong Negro”, the professor said later. He returned to Princeton, from which he has recently retired. Now his centre of academic operations is the Union Theologiocal Seminary in New York, where he began his teaching career.

But he is multi-platform, which, critics contend, added something to the fall-out with Summers at Harvard. He is the author of 19 books and editor of another 13. A regular TV pundit. Co-star of the popular public radio show Smiley and West. Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. He even played the wise Councillor West in The Matrix Reloaded. While the right throws the socialist tag at Obama like a poisoned dart, West wears it as a badge of honour. A “non-Marxist socialist” eschewing Marxism in favour of Christianity. A complex package. Hence the enthusiasm atCambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities to invite him over and peel the layers.

Last week West appeared three times in conversation: on race and politics, with academic Paul Gilroy – their double header had to be moved to a larger venue and ended with a standing ovation; on philosophy and the public sphere, with philosopher MM McCabe; and with Ben Okri on literature and the nation. The fact is that he’ll talk indefinitely and on anything. In between Cambridge appearances, he headed to Sheffield University to unveil a memorial to a previous visitor there, “my brother Malcolm X”. Also to London to an event hosted by former race chief Trevor Phillips.

‘White supremacy is still operating in the US, even with a brilliant black face in the White House’ … West with Barack Obama in 2007. Photograph: Jemal Countess/WireImageFor his radio show in the US, he also travelled to the Ecuadorian embassy for an encounter with Julian Assange. Exhilarating, by his account. “Boy, that was a rich one,” he says. “Oh my God, we went on for an hour and a half: about the militarising of the internet and the use of US imperial power. They’re trying to squelch any whistleblower who wants to reveal the secrets of the dirty wars of the US empires and other governments. We talked primarily about courage. He is a very smart man and very courageous too.”

They found points of contact. “He talked about Martin Luther King’s courage and how he has been inspired by Martin Luther King. We talked about the 3 June case with brother Bradley Manning and the witnesses the US government has lined up. I wanted people to hear his voice and to revel in his humanity; revel in his wrestling with his situation and to see what his vision is.”

He found some optimism, he says. “He has this situation with the sisters in Sweden and that’s got to be resolved, and I think that’s in the process of being resolved. We have to be concerned about someone accused of violating anybody, but I think for the most part that is going to be resolved, and that was probably an attempt of the powers that be. One woman has already said she is pulling back and the other one admits it was consensual, so it is not as ugly as it was projected in the press. But once that is over he has got the big one coming. He has got a behemoth coming at him; the US empire and its repressive apparatus. That is a behemoth, man.”

Race matters, West famously wrote. Does race still matter? “I think race matters deeply but it is in many ways denied,” he says. “The form of institutional racism and informal racism is very much there. White supremacy is very much alive in Britain. If you scratch below the surface you can still see how race matters. It is not as raw and coarse as it is in the US. You have 10,000 professors in Britain and 50 professors of colour. Ten women. This is pathetic; this is ridiculous. The ‘meritocratic’ brothers and sisters say: ‘It’s just a matter of merit and if they were doing the work you would have a higher percentage.’ And you say: ‘Please, get off the crack pipe.’ There are brilliant black and brown people who could gain access to these professorships. Something is happening.”

He doesn’t rant. He smiles, he growls gently, he leans in and whispers conspiratorially … West in Cambridge. Photograph: David Levene for the GuardianOf course, concerns extend beyond teaching staff. Cambridge, with Oxford, is regularly accused of doing too little attract minorities. Both say they are trying.

But he acknowledges green shoots too. “There are the magnificent relationships between black and white and brown and Asian, and the different marriages and relationships that flower. Those are beautiful. But that doesn’t mean institutional racism is not strong.”

What of America? “We elected a black president and that means we are less racist now than we used to be. That’s beautiful. But when you look at the prison industrial complex and the new Jim Crow: levels of massive unemployment and the decrepit unemployment system, indecent housing: white supremacy is still operating in the US, even with a brilliant black face in a high place called the White House. He is a brilliant, charismatic black brother. He’s just too tied to Wall Street. And at this point he is a war criminal. You can’t meet every Tuesday with a killer list and continually have drones drop bombs. You can do that once or twice and say: ‘I shouldn’t have done that, I’ve got to stop.’ But when you do it month in, month out, year in, year out – that’s a pattern of behaviour. I think there is a chance of a snowball in hell that he will ever be tried, but I think he should be tried and I said the same about George Bush. These are war crimes. We suffer in this age from an indifference toward criminality and a callousness to catastrophe when it comes to poor and working people.”

Can you not cut the president some slack, I ask? Think of what he faced. What did you expect? “I worked to get him elected,” he says, almost indignant. “And I would do it again because the alternative was so much worse. But at the same time, I have to be able to tell the truth. I thought he was going to be a dyed-in-the-wool liberal rather than a weak centrist. I thought he would actually move towards healthcare with a public option. I thought he was going to try to bail out homeowners as he bailed out banks. I thought he would try to hit the issue of poverty head-on.”

He and Obama, the first-time candidate, talked. And then West attended 65 events drumming up support. “He talked about Martin Luther King over and over again as he ran. King died fighting not just against poverty but against carpet-bombing in Vietnam; the war crimes under Nixon and Kissinger. You can’t just invoke Martin Luther King like that and not follow through on his priorities in some way. I knew he would have rightwing opposition, but he hasn’t tried. When he came in, he brought in Wall Street-friendly people – Tim Geithner, Larry Summers – and made it clear he had no intention of bailing out homeowners, supporting trade unions. And he hasn’t said a mumbling word about the institutions that have destroyed two generations of young black and brown youth, the new Jim Crow, the prison industrial complex. It’s not about race. It is about commitment to justice. He should be able to say that in the last few years, with the shift from 300,000 inmates to 2.5 million today, there have been unjust polices and I intend to do all I can. Maybe he couldn’t do that much. But at least tell the truth. I would rather have a white presidentfundamentally dedicated to eradicating poverty and enhancing the plight of working people than a black president tied to Wall Street and drones.”

Unsurprisingly, he and team Obama no longer speak. “They say I’m un-American.”

His appearances on the platform are more scholarly. Alongside Okri, he talks poetry and theatre. They reference Chekhov, Shakespeare, Pushkin, Kierkegaard, the Bible and Shelley. Dante and Toni Morrison get weaved in. As do the merits of John Coltrane set against smooth jazz saxophonist Kenny G. West lauds Stephen Sondheim, and then his past collaborators in hip-hop, such as KRS1, Talib Kweli and Lupe Fiasco. The room is full, reviews are effusive. “His whole way of being an academic is different to Britain and different to Cambridge,” says Malachi McIntosh, himself the first black fellow at King’s in recent history. Critics in the US say West is too busy being a celebrity to be a top-ranked academic. McIntosh, an English lecturer, sees him differently. “The focus on the moral imperative and the lack of ego. Black students have felt catered to,” he says.

Ahmad Husayni, 24, studying medicine, also detects stardust. “There’s a sincerity that’s missing from much of the public sphere. And then there is his way with words.”

His tour ends in London, where even a man who looks like Cornel West can be anonymous if he needs to. But he didn’t come to hide his light and so, after dinner at the high table at King’s, he takes his encore in the studios of BBC Newsnight. Sitting with Gavin Esler, Obama’s image dwarfs them both on a screen in the background. But West stands out here, as he stood out at Cambridge; as Esler frames the questions, he rocks back and forth, eyes narrowed, head nodding. One who had not seen it all before might be alarmed. But this is merely West in the zone, as sportspeople call it. Ready to go “deep”. Primed for something “rich”. The questions and answers are familiar to anyone who has seen him, as is the appearance: whip-sharp suit, watch and chain, the shock of steel-flecked hair; but what strikes is how he narrows the space between himself and his interlocutor. Esler becomes “my brother Gavin” and as the credits roll West grips the presenter’s hand. The two chat, as if they had spent the previous hour over drinks and dinner. We don’t get to see, but no doubt the encounter ended with a hug.

by NPR STAFF

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A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

On 3 May 2013, at the UNESCO World Press Freedom International Conference 2013, ARTICLE 19 launched The Right to Blog - a new policy paper that calls for lawmakers to better promote and protect the rights of bloggers domestically and internationally. The Right to Blog also gives practical advice to bloggers about their rights and explains how – and in what situations – they can invoke some of the privileges and defences that traditional journalists have found vital to the integrity of their work.

“Blogging plays an invaluable role in the free flow of information worldwide and is a true example of the democratisation of publishing in the online world,” said Agnes Callamard, Executive Director of ARTICLE 19.

“In the 21st century, many bloggers will take their place as watchdogs, alongside traditional media. The international community and individual states must develop protection for bloggers, just as they have developed protection for traditional media. Similar protection must be provided to bloggers. ARTICLE 19′s policy, The Right to Blog, offers recommendations on how this should be done in practice,” added Callamard.

Over the last two decades, the Internet has transformed the way in which we communicate. Where the printed press and broadcast media were once the main sources of information, the Internet has made it possible for anyone to publish ideas, information and opinions to the entire world instantly.

Blogging and social media now rival newspapers and television as dominant sources of news and information. The emergence of these new forms of online expression has called into question the very definition of ‘journalism’ and ‘media’ in the digital age.

Difficult questions have been raised. How can the activities of bloggers be reconciled to existing models of media regulation? Should bloggers be held to the same professional and ethical standards expected of a professional journalist? In what circumstances can bloggers be held liable for what they say online? Should bloggers benefit from the kinds of protection programmes that are usually available to professional journalists in order to prevent them from being physically attacked? How would this work?

The Right to Blog answers these and other complex questions through drawing on international standards of freedom of expression.

The Right to Blog argues that it is no longer appropriate to define journalism and journalists by reference to some recognised body of training, or affiliation with a news entity or professional body. International human rights law must protect bloggers just as it protects journalists.

The policy suggests ways to address the key issues that bloggers are likely to face, including:
* Licensing
* Real-name registration (in contrast to anonymity)
* Accreditation
* The protection of sources
* Protection from violence
* Legal liability
* Ethical responsibility

Why is The Right to Blog important?

The need for The Right to Blog policy is heightened by many cases of recent violations of bloggers rights.

* In Brazil, ARTICLE 19 documented cases of violence against journalists and human rights defenders. The most serious cases of violence against journalists were directed towards people who were writing for popular blogs (44%). Among those cases was the murder of blogger Décio Sáon on 23 April 2012 in São Luís. Sáon denounced the relationships between moneylenders and local politicians in his blog. Other bloggers who received death threats in 2012 include Neto Ferreira, Gilberto Leda, Júlio César de Lima Prates, Gerlice Nunes, Armando Anache and Marcio Rangel.

* In Tunisia, in March 2013, Olfa Riahi, a blogger and a university professor, was charged with criminal defamation and the offence of “harming others or disrupting their lives through public communication networks” after posting information about alleged misuse of public funds by a former foreign minister, Rafik Abdessalem, before he stepped down from the post. She is facing a penalty of one to two years in prison and a fine of up to 1,000 dinars (app. £450).

* In Bangladesh, blogger Asif Mohiuddin, whose blog won the best social activism blog from the Deutsche Welle Best of Blogs Awards 2012, was brutally attacked by unknown perpetrators in January 2013. The police later found out that he was attacked for his writing on the instruction of a religious extremist. In March 2013, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission requested somewhereinblog.net – the largest blogging platform in Bangladesh – to remove Mohiuddin blog from their side. The platform complied with the request.

* In Chad, Jean Laokolé, author of one of the most popular blogs in the country, was arrested in March 2013 by the security forces in N’Djamena, the Chadian capital. He has been held without trial in an undisclosed location ever since. On his blog, Laokolé repeatedly criticized corruption, poor governance and nepotism in the country.

Download the policy brief:
a19_right_to_blog_en.pdf (203 KB)