Two years after Luis Ramírez—an undocumented immigrant from Mexico—was beaten to death in Shenandoah, PA, a guilty verdict has been reached. The New York Times reports:
“A federal jury found two young Pennsylvania men guilty of a hate crime on Thursday in the 2008 beating death of a Mexican immigrant. The verdict was welcomed by Hispanic organizations, which saw the trial as a national test case for the treatment of Latinos.
“The men, Derrick Donchak and Brandon Piekarsky, were found guilty of violating the civil rights of Luis Ramírez, an illegal immigrant, when they and a group of football players beat him in Shenandoah, Pa., in July 2008. He died shortly after from head injuries.
“The men were acquitted of the most serious charges in a state trial last year, a verdict that angered Hispanic advocacy groups and drew criticism from Gov. Edward G. Rendell. The Justice Department later indicted the men on the hate crime charges on the grounds that they beat Mr. Ramírez because he was Latino and they did not want Latinos living in their town.
“Prosecutors said Mr. Donchak and Mr. Piekarsky, both teenagers at the time of the crime, hurled ethnic slurs at Mr. Ramírez and told him: ‘This is America. Go back to Mexico.’”
For the second consecutive year, Social Security benefits will not increase. The Washington Post reports on projections for 2011:
“For the second year in a row, the nearly 54 million retirees and other Americans who receive Social Security benefits will not get any cost-of-living increase in 2011 in their monthly checks, government officials announced Friday morning.
“The absence of any growth in Social Security checks for consecutive years is unprecedented in the 3 1/2 decades that payments have been automatically adjusted according to the nation's inflation rate. The Social Security Administration made the announcement moments after the Labor Department released the latest figures for the consumer price index. They show that prices for the third quarter of this year rose by 1.5 percent compared with a year earlier, but fell by 0.6 percent compared with the same time in 2008.”
The U.S. Department of Education has seen a spike in civil rights complaints, and USA Today looks into what may be causing them:
“The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights received nearly 7,000 complaints this fiscal year, an 11% increase and the largest jump in at least 10 years, according to data provided by the department. The increase comes as the office proceeds with 54 compliance reviews in districts and institutions of higher education nationwide, including cases involving disparate discipline rates and treatment of students with disabilities.
“Why the spike?
“Russlynn Ali, director of the Office for Civil Rights, said the reason for the increase in complaints is unclear, but believes students, parents and administrators have more faith that officials will take action.
“Gerald A. Reynolds, head of OCR for the Bush administration from 2001 to 2003, said the increase is more likely a reflection of the different approach taken by Democrats—with Republicans running the civil rights office as a law-enforcement shop, and Democrats focusing on social change.
Does raising children in a bilingual environment benefit their brain health? A new editorial published in Science gets some attention from the Los Angeles Times:
“Should parents raise their children bilingually – teaching them two languages from a very young age? It’s a thorny subject, but as UCLA linguist Jared Diamond writes in an editorial in the journal Science, knowing more than one language could improve your multitasking skills from infancy and delay the onset of Alzheimer’s in old age.
“Here’s how it works, according to the editorial published online Thursday: When a bilingual person hears a word, it starts a mental flitting between two language systems to figure out what that word means, how to put it in the context of the conversation and how to respond. That high-level ability is governed by a process called executive switching, which happens in the prefrontal cortex.
“Executive switching is also the process that enables “multitasking” – which isn’t really doing multiple things at the same time, but rapidly switching from one to the other.”