The GNU Operating System
Youth Programs
STREAT is fundamentally about helping marginalised young people make positive change in their lives. We do this by operating a number of successful hospitality businesses and using the profits to fund a range of training and life skills programs. We work with young people aged between 16 and 25 years who are experiencing homelessness or other kinds of disadvantage.
Aussies raising poverty awareness
Anti-poverty week is a campaign run by non-for-profit organisations such as the Australian Red Cross and Brotherhood of St. Laurence, to help promote awareness of this undesirable problem. It was originally established in Australia as an expansion of the UN’s annual International Anti-poverty Day on October 17, and gives people the chance to address the issues of poverty in Australia and across the world.
Activists Petition Goodwill to Pay Disabled Workers the Minimum Wage
(Photo: Chriss Haight Pagani / Flickr)Leaders of national advocacy groups for the disabled delivered a petition to Goodwill Industries on Thursday demanding that the company stop using a 75-year-old section of federal labor law to pay disabled employees less than the minimum wage. About 170,000 people signed the Change.org petition. Representatives from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) delivered copies of the petition to Goodwill's headquarters in Maryland and to stores across the country as pickets were held outside.
What is Graphic Journalism?
A new crop of comics artists are merging their craft with the journalistic process to create stunning works of reportage that depict everything from war torn countries to wineries. They work in ink, watercolors, and Wacom, telling stories that might not make the front page, but offer a level of nuance and meditative depth often reserved for the best investigative reporting. They are “graphic journalists,” and their work is a little-known facet of the infographic revolution that is sweeping the journalism world. In two weeks, I’ll be at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston, presenting on the role that comics play in the future of journalism as part of a panel I’m co-organizing with Sarah Jaffe. Since HU is dedicated to comics analysis and scholarship, I’d like to give you all a sneak peak at the ideas we’ll be grappling with.
Soldiers battle addiction after the horrors of war
Private John Hill wasn’t coping with his first deployment. Rifle exchanges on the Timorese border, hauling dead children’s bodies and the stress of patrol was taking a toll. When the 19-year-old cried openly, he says he was ridiculed by a section commander. “I basically said if you don't leave me alone I'm going to kill you and he wouldn't leave me alone so I held my rifle to his head” That act was enough to have John Hill restrained, hospitalized and sent home.
The Price of Precious
The first child soldier pops out of the bush clutching an AK-47 assault rifle in one hand and a handful of fresh marijuana buds in the other. The kid, probably 14 or 15, has this big, goofy, mischievous grin on his face, like he’s just stolen something—which he probably has—and he’s wearing a ladies’ wig with fake braids dangling down to his shoulders. Within seconds his posse materializes from the thick, green leaves all around us, about ten other heavily armed youngsters dressed in ratty camouflage and filthy T-shirts, dropping down from the sides of the jungle and blocking the red dirt road in front of us.
What price justice with the immigration laws?
At what point does a story cease simply to be absurd and begin to become sinister? Last week's Observer story about the plight of David MacIsaac, the gifted primary school headteacher in Dumfriesshire who is facing deportation by Britain's Home Office is, on the face of it, absurd. But a patina of menace soon becomes apparent as you read the details and digest the implications. Mr MacIsaac, an American who has taught in Scotland for eight years on all the proper permits, was actually encouraged to apply for permanent residency in the United Kingdom by officials following a spot-check by UK border control.
