Month: December 2020

Attached is my second article for the semester on Poland’s abortion ban protests.  Thank you!  Poland Article

Hi Professor! I emailed this to you but am posting it in case it needs to be posted on the blog. Here’s the link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-HORjhpfza4ufONc0xuJKDkelR3tR3YTD4hDhFJ7u68/edit?usp=sharing

Racial disparites during Covid-19

courtesy of https://www.caribbeanequalityproject.org/queens-gets-counted

Far From Home, International Students Make Thanksgiving Their Own

When his college, the Stevens Institute of Technology, told him that host families were inviting international students to their homes for Thanksgiving, Dheemanth Sriram signed up for the program twice. And twice, he didn’t wake up. 

“I just woke up late two years in a row and I missed it, so 2020 is the real first time I celebrate,” he said.

View from the apartment where the group spent thanksgiving, Crown Heights NY.

Despite the recommendations from the C.D.C. to minimize trips and social interactions, 50 million Americans traveled to celebrate Thanksgiving with their family, according to Statista. But for international students away from home and well aware of the increase in Covid-19 cases, the celebrations looked quite different. 

Originally from India, Sriram found himself home alone after his two roommates left New Jersey for the holidays. Because five of his international peers were in the same position, they decided to spend this American celebration together and in their own way.

 And if Thanksgiving meant to learn about American culture, the date wasn’t of major importance to the group. Pierre Tholoniat, 23, a graduate student at Columbia University native from France, said that celebrating the day after was just as joyful. 

“For us, the celebration is more about being with our friends than about the event in itself,” he said.

 So, on Friday the students gathered in Brooklyn to shop all the ingredients necessary to cook a turkey, some mashed potatoes and mac and cheese.

 Passionate about cooking and excited to learn new recipes, Soyoung Oh, a graduate student at Baruch College saw the day as “a good excuse to meet with friends,” and to cook a larger amount of food than she would otherwise.

 “It’s hard to find a reason to cook 21 pounds of turkey, it’s very occasional,” said Oh.

 Originally from South Korea, the 23-year-old had only celebrated the American holiday once before, but this year after facing the possibility of deportation, the celebration held a different meaning for the international student. 

“If I were not to celebrate I would feel like I’m just a visitor and that I wouldn’t really care about what’s going on in the US,” she said.

 While the group had the chance to meet in person, for CUNY students who feared the virus, some campuses offered them options not to spend the holiday alone. 

 The Student Government Association (SGA) at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) opened a virtual week of thanks on their website to allow everyone to express their gratitude during a challenging academic year. 

 Events were also organized. On November 24, the SGA welcomed students to participate in online activities, discussions and meditation through a workshop called, “The Power of Giving Thanks.”

 At Brooklyn College, student volunteers were encouraged to give back to the community.

 During an event, in collaboration with the organization Tanger Hillel, various campus clubs organized a coat drive where 23 students gave their time and collected more than 70 coats. The items were then donated to a homeless shelter. 

In the same week, around 60 students packed Thanksgiving meals for New Yorkers in need. The food was then delivered with the help of local delivery companies as well as Uber eats.

For the friends who celebrated together, the plan was to avoid deliveries and cook everything in its entirety. 

Not knowing how to separate the different parts of the turkey, the cooking experience quickly turned into a learning session through YouTube tutorials. But cooking typical Thanksgiving dishes rather than mixing their own roots around fusion meals came from the desire to honor American culture.

“If I have the most American things like turkey and mac and cheese I would slightly feel like I’m part of the culture,” said Oh.

Dariush Namazi, learns how to remove the turkey’s spine on his phone.

Once the battle of preparation was over, came the battle of the oven. While the first hour of cooking didn’t cause any problems, halfway through getting a golden and crispy skin, a wine leak from the turkey’s marinade caramelized in the oven and set the fire alarm off. 

“Cooking a turkey isn’t easy,” said Oh, after she installed two fans in the kitchen area to clear the gray smoke.

Soyoung Oh and Dariush Namazi clean the oven, after a leak set the fire alarm off.

Spending this holiday together was also a reminder for the friends that despite not being able to see their family they were thankful for their health in the midst of a pandemic that affected millions around the globe.

 Sriram said the Indian government recently declared it was no longer able to help its citizens contain the spread of the virus and that people would have to take their own safety measures. 

“I’m really thankful none of my family members or friends are infected. One of the worst pandemic is happening and we are staying safe, so I’m very happy about that,” he said.

And even though Covid-19 was the main topic both at the table and on zoom, for Dariush Namazi it was important not to let the crisis impact his experience in the USA.“It’s not because of covid that we have to ruin all these moments, I will keep celebrating those special occasions,” he said.

After a few hours and much effort, the friends gather at the table around the turkey.

JRN 3700 Paper #2 final edition

Matthew Ramos Story 2 for JRN 3700

“Mexican Students & Educators in America Suffer Amidst an Ongoing Pandemic”

2020 has been a very challenging and depressing year for Mexican people. Both in the country of Mexico, and in the United States of America, Mexicans saw many of their relatives and closest loved ones die because of Covid-19. In the fall of 2020, students and educators resumed school in America while the pandemic is still going strong and taking lives. Schooling has proved to be a major challenge this fall, because the severity of Covid-19 seemingly gets worse each day, and education departments make tough calls to re-close schools shortly after they reopened. Educators are just as anxious and confused as the students are during this strange time in American history.

In New York City, the Covid-19 era proved to be more challenging than ever for young Mexican-American students. Unfortunately, Mexican people in New York City were already struggling with receiving proper educations. According to The New York Times, Mexicans in New York are the ethnic group who have the highest rates of school dropouts; forty-one percent aged sixteen to nineteen. So, the post-Coronavirus world added even more challenges to students who were already suffering.

The fall 2020 semester saw many students staying home for virtual schooling, while many students returned in person for school. For many Mexican students, they have parents who work long hours, and the students are usually at home for most of the day with only their older teenage siblings to watch over them. “My mother and father work very late”, said Sofia Mendez, a senior in a Brooklyn high school, who has a sister in seventh grade. “Me and my sister both do school online. I’m a senior, so I have anxieties about finishing high school online, graduation being virtual, and what I’m going to do after high school.”

On November 19th, 2020, New York City chose to close public schools out of concerns that the Covid-19 virus would rapidly spread. In a quick turnaround, Mayor DeBlasio announced schools would reopen for elementary schools on December 7th, 2020, while middle and high school kids would not return until 2021. The NYC Mayor abandoned the three percent threshold that was formerly required for schools to shut down.

Students are not the only people who are struggling in this unprecedented era. Teachers also feel much of the same confusion that the students do. One such teacher is Melissa Rojas, who had a unique experience as a New York City educator in 2020. Rojas was a fifth-grade teacher in a Brooklyn public school when the school went fully online by mid-March. Over the summer, Rojas was hired by a public elementary school in Staten Island, to be a fourth-grade teacher. Before the November 19th shutdown, Rojas would go into the school physically, while her students remained home to be taught virtually via Zoom.

In an interview with Rojas, she expressed concern for the Mexican students in the school. Rojas said, “there is a Mexican community at my school. The neighborhood I teach in, Rosebank, has many Mexican families. I worry for some students who frequently miss assignments. When I attempt to call their parents, in many cases, it’ll be a teenage sibling answering the phone. The siblings usually stick up for the students without addressing the problems of missing work and lack of attendance. I want all students to succeed.”

Rojas is concerned about the state of the virus, as she believes schools should remain closed for public health reasons. Staten Island being labeled a hot zone for Covid-19 is extremely worrying for Rojas. She elaborated by saying, “I am worried about schools reopening. I understand for some families having their children remote is a big inconvenience, but safety is my main concern. I would hate to have kids back next week just for schools to close again because of an influx in Covid-19 cases. As a remote teacher, I make sure they are receiving an excellent education at home.”

Opinions on school shutdowns are divided. In a scathing critique of school shutdowns, Fox News Anchor Tucker Carlson said, “According to the latest numbers from the CDC, 123 Americans under the age of 18 have died from the Coronavirus. That’s 123 people out of a population of 328 million. Didn’t matter. We shut down the schools anyway, crushing millions of kids and affecting their futures in ways we can’t even understand at this point.”

While certain students, parents, pundits, and President Trump might hate the notion of school shutdowns, teachers who are actively on the frontlines of modern education vouch in favor of school shutdowns. Pedro Calixto Lucero is a teacher in Providence, Rhode Island who offered his perspective on the current state of teaching during the Covid-19 era. Lucero explained, “I work in an elementary school with multilingual learners, general education, and special education students in Providence, Rhode Island. I’m a third-grade Spanish bilingual teacher who works with 24 multilingual learners. I’m working with both in-person and virtual students in my classroom.”

Reminders and Upcoming Dates

Last class of the semester! Whew.

Your final drafts of your stories are due next Thursday by midnight. If you want additional editor feedback on your story before you file it, you can sign up for a one-on-one meeting with me here.

For our final class today, we’ll be quickly going over how to send encrypted email and then finishing by doing a few risk assessment scenarios.

Encrypted Email

If someone were to hack my email today, they would see that I received this message:

It looks like total nonsense to the hacker, which is the goal. But if I use a browser extension called Mailvelope and enter the password for my private key, I can decrypt the message and see that it says this:

Hello Emily Johnson,

please verify your email address [email protected] by clicking on the following link:

https://keys.mailvelope.com/api/v1/key?op=verify&keyId=fa3abceedb22a2a5&nonce=d4461f188cb521264a9c315f7ffd4d1f

After verification of your email address, your public key is available in our key directory.

You can find more info at keys.mailvelope.com.

Greetings from the Mailvelope Team

Not the most exciting reveal. I just set up a new public key with Mailvelope, and this was the confirmation. But it works the same way if I’m, say, receiving sensitive information from a source and worried about a foreign government (or my own) accessing that information.

From Mailvelope’s tutorial:

In order to communicate through encryption, you have to “seal” your message in such a way that only the recipient can access it. You need the so-called “public key” of the recipient so that your message can be encrypted and sent securely.

Only this recipient has the “private key” associated to this public key. This “private key” allows the recipient to decrypt and read the message. In PGP / Mailvelope we therefore always speak of key pairs:

• Public Key – used to encrypt messages. It can and should be accessible to everyone!
  
• Private Key – used to decrypt messages. It must be securely stored on your computer (this is handled by Mailvelope). Access to your private key is also protected by the password that you chose when creating the key.

If you want to send an encrypted email to someone, you need to know their public key, or know their email address is linked to a public key that is already in a database like Mailvelope’s.

I want you all to take a few minutes and follow these instructions to install the Mailvelope browser extension, set up your public and private keys, and send an encrypted email to me at my [email protected] email address (which is already in the public key database). I’ll be using encrypted email to send you your final grades, so make sure you learn to do it correctly! 🙂 And don’t lose your private key password, because it cannot be reset.

Risk Assessment

ACOS Safety Standards can be found here, along with a list of signatories:

https://www.acosalliance.org/the-principles

Item #4 is this:

Journalists should work with colleagues on the ground and with news organizations to complete a careful risk assessment before traveling to any hostile or dangerous environment and measure the journalistic value of an assignment against the risks.

The Rory Peck Trust has a helpful and very thorough breakdown of what a risk assessment might include, along with a template: https://rorypecktrust.org/freelance-resources/safety-and-security/risk-assessment-security-protocol/

In-Class Exercise:

Creating a risk assessment and risk mitigation plan

Split into breakout rooms to discuss three real-life reporting assignment scenarios. Come up with lists of risks and corresponding mitigations.