Source: The New York Times

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than any other race on personal traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday in federal court in Boston by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found.

“It turns out that the suspicions of Asian-American alumni, students and applicants were right all along,” the group, Students for Fair Admissions, said in a court document laying out the analysis. “Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s.”

Harvard’s own researchers cited a bias against Asian-American applicants in a series of internal reports in 2013. But Harvard ignored the findings, the court papers said, and never publicly released them.


Read more: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html#click=https://t.co/Lc98XzalRR

Source: New York Times

ALBANY — With exactly three months to go until the Democratic primary for governor, the two-term incumbent, Andrew M. Cuomo, has slightly stretched his sizable lead over his Democratic rival, the actress Cynthia Nixon, according to a new poll.

Mr. Cuomo, 60, holds a 35-point advantage among likely voters over Ms. Nixon — 61-26 percent — according to the Siena College poll released on Wednesday. His lead over the Republican candidate, Marcus J. Molinaro, is narrower: 19 points, 56 to 37 percent, though Mr. Molinaro, the Dutchess County executive, is little known by most voters, the poll found.

Ms. Nixon had trimmed Mr. Cuomo’s lead to 31 points in an April poll by Siena, continuing a steady rise in voter surveys since declaring her candidacy in March. But the last month has seen Mr. Cuomo’s glossy coronation as the party’s preferred candidate at the state convention in late May, forcing Ms. Nixon — making her first run for public office — to begin petitioning to challenge him on the Sept. 13 ballot.

There were some off-putting findings for Mr. Cuomo, including a 44 percent unfavorability rating, a tie for the highest result found by Siena’s pollsters during the governor’s seven-plus years in office. Only 40 percent rank his performance as governor as “excellent” or “good” while 59 percent rate it as “fair” or “poor.”

Read more: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/nyregion/cuomo-cynthia-nixon-poll.html

Source: The Miami Herald

WASHINGTON
David Richardson, the self-styled progressive Democrat seeking to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in Congress, says he stands shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity with his campaign staff after they became the first political campaign in Florida to unionize last week.

But there are fewer campaign workers standing with Richardson today. That's because he laid off eight paid campaign employees at the end of a contentious months-long unionization effort.

"David wanted to be able to fire anyone at will and that wasn’t acceptable to us," said Isaiah Ghafoor, who worked as a field organizer for Richardson from March until he was one of eight Richardson staffers laid off two weeks ago. "Two days after a heated bargaining session, seven field organizers were laid off and the finance manager."

Though the unionization effort was ultimately successful, the timing of the layoffs and the Richardson's campaign's argument to staffers that existing Florida labor laws were sufficient enough to protect staffers' rights contrasts with public statements by his campaign that he will "oppose efforts that are anti-union or that weaken the ability to organize and bargain collectively" if elected to Congress.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article212822109.html