“Daddy, do not worry if you don’t have money now,” Fernandez’s daughter said, “you can take me out another day.”

Soon afterward, among tears, Fernandez realized that he needed to change how his life was going.  His habit had gotten out of control. He was 31years old.

Today, Fernandez is 39 and living a completely different life in New York. With two jobs and working more than 12 hours a day, Fernandez does not complain. He is glad of being in New York.

Fernandez is one of more than 1.5 million immigrants that increasingly arrive to North America each year. Like the others, he is just looking for a better opportunity to support his family back in Peru.

“The majority of immigrants come to America to work, leaving a loved family in their countries,” Fernandez said.

Fernandez came to America in 2001 because he had lost his job in the Wiesse bank, where he had worked as superintendent in the bank vault. After 12 years working there, the bank had gone bankrupt.

When he arrived to New York, he worked for 6 months as a dishwasher in the cafeteria of Dowling College, in Oakdale, NY. Because he had enjoyed working and it was good money he decided to stay longer.

What Fernandez had never imagined is that he was going to end up sleeping in the carpet of the Dowling College’s cafeteria for twenty days. At the beginning of his days in America, he didn’t have car and he had the night shift. His only choice was sleeping in the carpet. “I can believe that in this country the busses don’t run until late in the day,” he said.

Fernandez recalls how Gerard Nacea, his boss, gave him a car because his son bought a new one. “This is for you so you won’t sleep any more here,” Nacea said.

Nowadays, he has two jobs: one in a cleaning company and another one in the cafeteria of Stony Brook, Long Island, NY. He works from 7.00 a.m. until 11.00 p.m.

One workmate, Jose Diaz, who is from Dominican Republic and has been working in the cafeteria at Stony Brook University with Mr. Fernandez for six months, talks about sometimes he is not a good workmate. “Dicen que en la cárcel, el que es amigo de los policías, no es amigo de los presos.” (There is a saying; a friend of the police men is not a friend of the prisoners). He fears that he can be an informant for the bosses.

He got divorced more than 13 years ago. His ex-wife now lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is the father of two. Elisabeth, 22, who has studied law and lives with her mom, and Joseph, 24, who lives in Lima with Fernandez’s mom, Francisca Salazar of 80 years old.

After a year in America, Fernandez’s son fell ill with testicular cancer. As he burst into tears, something deep inside of him shifted. Now he just could think about earning enough money to pay Joseph’s treatments.  “In the beginning, the chemotherapy was every fifteen days, but after two years it is every three months,” Fernandez said.

Fernandez remembers how he had to ask Gerard, his boss, for more money to pay his son’s treatments and return it with more work. “Thanks to the money I have earned working here, I have been able to pay the treatments for Joseph and the university of my Elisabeth,” said Fernandez.

According to his daughter, he is very maternal to the point that sometimes he can be really obnoxious. He is so overprotective even though we are already grown up. “The first impression he gives is of having a strong character, however, his gruffness is just a front; he’s very sweet,” Elisabeth said.

Elisabeth doesn’t judge him, but she knows that he feels remorse and blames himself for his divorce. “He cheated on my mom not one, but several times,” she said, “he was such a womanizer and had many vices.”

When Fernandez was in Peru, he had dabbled in many vices: women, gambling in casinos and betting on horse races. “He frequented one of the most expensive casinos in Peru, where he would bet in dollars,” she said, “ betting in dollars at that time made for higher stakes as the dollar had triple the value of the Peruvian currency, the sol.”

According to Elisabeth, Fernandez also used to drink and go out every weekend. He did not spend too much time with them. However, he always made sure that they were well fed and properly clothed. When he didn’t have a steady job, he used to work as a taxi driver to pay for there schooling.

When Elisabeth would go out a Saturday night, he used to wake her up on Sunday angrily calling her name from his bedroom. She thought that she had done something wrong. Once she arrived to the door of his bedroom, he said “Have you cleaned your butt?” He just started to roar with laughter by seeing her frightened face.

A thing Elisabeth dislikes the most, it is when he sends money to friends to drink during festivities and they do not even call him to see how he is doing. He also sends money on his birthday to his whole family so they can all celebrate, even though he is not there.

One year ago, Fernandez met one of his bosses at the cafeteria of SBU, Andres David Calvache, who said that what he admires from Fernandez is “his ambition to improve his state of life in the U.S.”

“I want to open a restaurant when I come back to Peru in approximately one year,” he said, “I give thanks to America for giving me the opportunity that it has given to me, even though I am separated of my family for such a long time.”

In 2004, 15 cases of hate crimes were reported against Latinos in Suffolk County, according to statistics of the Hate Crimes Unit of the Suffolk Police Department. In the 4 years that followed, including 2008, the complaints were reduced to slightly less than half. In 2009, 12 crimes were reported. And this year, until September, 10 were the alleged crimes.

Domingo Nabor, a Mexican undocumented immigrant from Riverhead, reported to police that he was the victim of an attack in which two black people stole and cut off part of his lower lip.

“’Mexican, give me your …. money,’ one of them told me,” says Nabor. “I have no money,” he said, ‘Oh do not you have any money? Let me see it.’ “It was dark and one of them grabbed me and had a knife or something. The last thing I remember is a very strong pain.”

“I think they [reported hate crime numbers] reflect reality to an extent because you obviously see an increase. So, that’s clear. How accurate these numbers are is questionable,” said Renee Ortiz, the Chief Deputy Clerk of Suffolk County Legislature and a member of the Hate Crime Task Force Committee. “I think that there are some questions as what they [numbers] are accounting. If they are accounting actual reported incidents, if they are accounting only incidents where there were actual charges filed.”

Racial violence peaked in Suffolk County with the murder of Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant, killed by seven teenagers between 16 and 17 years old on November 2, 2008, in Patchogue.

Just weeks after the second anniversary of Lucero’s death, Luis Almonte, the administrator of Lucero’s estate, has filed a $40 million lawsuit accusing Suffolk County, its Police Department, the town of Brookhaven and the village of Patchogue for violating Lucero’s civil rights and failing to protect Hispanics in the same manner that they had protected the whites.

“The seven young men who killed Lucero themselves reported being involved in at least 27 attacks against Latinos prior to Lucero,” says Luis Valenzuela, the Executive director of Long Island Immigrant Alliance. “So, it quickly dispels the myth that there were only 8, only 6 hate crimes when these young men are admitting to so many.”

Before Lucero’s death, the statements of some public officials, along with some policies that they were trying to push, were creating a very negative environment towards immigrants and the Latino community. But now she says things are changing.

“I think the Legislature has taken a different path and they are looking differently at it. And I think they are recognizing that they have to be careful even in the laws they pass and how they are perceived,” Ortiz said.

Of the nearly 462,000 foreigners in Long Island, about 161,000 are Latinos born in Latin America and about 189,000 are of Hispanic origin but were born in this country, according to census figures analyzed by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a think tank organization in New York.

“There’s big numbers [immigrants], so we get panicky because we look at the numbers and say ‘there are more of them than us, what are we going to do?’” said Sister Margaret Smyth, who works for the North Fork Hispanic Apostolate and sees more than 30 undocumented immigrants a day in her Riverhead office. “So, we have to find a way to get rid of the ‘them’. Maybe we need to deport them, maybe we need to make it hard for them to live here.”

It is very hard to report a hate crime because for a long time authorities didn’t accept reports and nobody knew how to describe it, according to Sister Margaret. But now, she says, more people are reporting them and it’s not so much the number as the fact that the police are now naming it a hate crime.

“How do you explain that people would say to me, and see this would never get reported, that when they walk the streets, Americans and people have spit at them. Isn’t that a hate crime?” added Sister Margaret.

The Hispanic community felt and continues to feel afraid to report crimes against them because of the consequences of reporting and perhaps the authorities were misclassifying or minimizing the reports that were made, according to Valenzuela.

“We have deployed more police patrols in the communities, we have provided courses in Spanish crime prevention and safety seminars in different cities,” said Christopher Bergold, a spokesman for the Office of the Commissioner of the Suffolk County Police. “We believe these measures have resulted in a significant impact.”

Romulo Guerron, an Ecuadorian undocumented immigrant of Patchogue, says that even though he trusts police, he fears that what happened to Marcelo Lucero could happen again

“I don’t go out as much as I used to or I don’t stay in the streets that much. My friends and I hang out in my place,” said Guerron. “I avoid going out much. I don’t want to have problems.”

.

Almost fifteen years ago in Lisbon, Portugal, a seven year-old child sat in front of the television set. He was watching “The Lion King”, a Disney movie, for hours. It was the seventh time he rewound the tape of his new Blaupunkt VCR.

“Diogo, where are you?” his mother shouted from another room.

 “I’m here,” he said.

 “It’s time to go to sleep. It’s almost 8.00 pm.”

“Please, let me finish the movie. This is the first time I’ve seen it.”

“Ok, I’ll give you half an hour more. That’s it.”

It was Monday, the only day off Diogo’s mother had, and a day that she devoted to bringing her son to the movie theater. And like every Monday, upon their return, Diogo would tell his mother his impressions about the movie they just had seen.  He talked about what he liked most and how the story should have ended. He visualized the entire plot in his head.  He wanted to be part of it.

Today, 20-year-old Diogo Martins, is living in the United States as an international student at Stony Brook University, New York, where he has been attending classes since August 2008. He is one of the 2,600 F-1 students on campus. One of the many who struggle every day trying to live in a place where so much is different.

Diogo, who a five-day growth of beard, thick lips and brown hair, takes a Coronita and sips slowly. With his three-day long beard and his thick lips, Diogo takes a Coronita and sips slowly. The music playing in the background is “Fado” – typical Portuguese music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics. While waiting for a friend in his apartment, he passionately sings the lyrics of a Fado song. He seems as if he is going to burst into tears. He feels the music in his heart and conveys his homesickness through it. Portugal, my dear Portugal, he sings.

In Portugal he had his family and his car.  He used to get together after dinner every night with his friends. He had his own life and total control of his stuff. “I feel like a prisoner here,” Diogo said.

The first two months at Stony Brook were awful, Diogo said. He would spend two hours of the day in his room without doing anything. He would just laying on his bed thinking. He felt he wasn’t being himself. The worst moment took place on September,17, 2008. It was his little sister’s birthday. She was turning 6 years old. His family called him up to sing happy birthday to his sister and he realized he was so far from his family. “I know that if I would have called my mother to come back, she would have welcomed me back,” he said.

The experience of studying abroad is like taking students out of their support system at home and putting them in a totally new experience where they have no support, according to Erin Keffeler, an international students and scholars advisor at Stony Brook. “Sometimes students fall into depression and no one tells us. We don’t know about it and the student fails out of school.”

Diogo feels like most of the American people are superficial, distant and committed to keeping up appearances. In the United States, people are always reminding him that he is not from America. Everything seems temporary. His first days in America, he thought that people were like shadows. “Everyone seemed to have a façade or that they weren’t real.” He was used to human contact all the time. “Here people pass around you and don’t say anything.”

Keffeler says Americans have a different way of relating to people from other cultures. “You say hello to someone or you have a conversation with someone and you think you are great friends but really there is like levels of friendship. Americans think about the personal space. It’s only after you are kind of proving yourself to be a genuine friend, then that personal space becomes smaller.”

Diogo is currently majoring in Cinema Studies with a minor in Theater Arts. When Diogo was little, his mom left the house early and arrived late. He spent time in the school and watched movies such as, Indiana Jones, Dumbo, Bambi and James Bond.

In high school, he had a Portuguese teacher who liked the way Diogo used to read poetry written by Portuguese dramatists. When he was 13 years old, he started a theater group with this teacher. He kept performing until he moved to America. It was then that he understood how much he loved cinema and theater. The movie directors who most inspired him are François Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman. His favorite movies are “Jules and Jim”, “Citizen Kane”, “The Godfather” and “The Seventh Seal.”

 Diogo was 12 or 13 when he performed in his first play, “Gulliver’s travels.” He was Gulliver. The play was in a very big hall. It was the 35^th anniversary of the”Campo de Flores” School in Lisbon. One hour before the play he thought that he was going to give up because he was very nervous. His teacher taught him an exercise for relaxing. She told Diogo to visualize his place on the world. The exercise made him realize how small he was on the planet and how insignificant the play was. “It’s a weird feeling because you feel really insecure but at the same time very powerful,” Diogo said. “It’s like an addiction. After you do it and enjoy it, you keep wanting that rush again and again.”

Jeet Singh, a 28- year-old Pakistani student and one of Diogo’s best friends at Stony Brook, remembered the first days of their coexistence. “Whenever I would be having meals, he was there and I would offer him Pakistani food. He introduced me to Portugal, to the language and to the cuisine and even to the different types of wines.” Portugal is one of the many places that have very high quality grapes.

“Diogo is proud of being Portuguese, not like many students on campus that don’t even want to speak in their mother language,” Singh said. “I think is sexy to know more than one language. I was born here, but most of my friends at school are international. We are like a family because we all are in the same situation.”

When Diogo told his family that he wanted to go to America, his parents’ reactions were better than he expected, he said. They supported him because they knew that theater was what he liked. It was his mother who instilled in him the passion about movies and theater. When she was young she took part in a few plays with her friends. ”My father never let me study theater because it is not like any other profession. You have to work really hard to be successful,” his mother Paula said.

Nowadays, Diogo is going to rehearsal every week. He is part of “Figaro, Figaro,” a play being held at Stony Brook. “His character on the stage is kind of sexy and romantic and he tries to seduce Susanna, Figaro’s wife, and it works,” said Robert Shilling, a Stony Brook student and the play’s co-star. “His accent is there but it works very well for the character.”

According to Deborah Mayo, the director of “Figaro, Figaro” and an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies of Theater Arts department, Diogo displayed a great deal of talent in her acting class last semester and she encouraged him to come to the auditions because  she thought he may read well for this role. This is the first time Diogo has acted in English. “I cannot imagine acting in a foreign language myself,” she said. “It’s hard enough to do it in your own language.”

After one year away from home, I couldn’t wait to see my family and friends again. Finally, Christmas time had arrived and I was going home. Leaving the cold of Long Island was a Christmas gift within itself.

It was a long, eight-hour flight, but thanks to the man next to me, I was able to sleep because he gave me his window seat.

When I arrived in Spain my friends were excited to see me after a long year away.
Nothing changed, they welcomed me home with open arms and tears of joy.

When I arrived home to Guadassuar, Valencia I was relieved to feel my cold. It’s a different cold then New York cold. It’s a cold different from Stony Brook’s. It was an American autumn.

My boyfriend, Frankie, had been saving money during the whole summer to come to Spain for a month. Because we come from different backgrounds, I wanted to show him my culture, so he could better understand me and the way I am. I was excited to show him my homeland.

We planned to travel throughout Spain, and our most exciting destination was the beautiful city of Barcelona.

The place I fell in love with most was the monumental church “Sagrada Familia.” The building stands hugely in the centre of Barcelona and is visible from miles away. Antonio Gaudí started building it in late 1883, and, over the years, it has become an icon of the city’s identity. This is especially true because as the city grows, so does the “Sagrada Familia.”

When we arrived there, we were astonished by the church’s majestic appearance. The exterior is ringed with cranes, and inside, there are many tools and bricklayers. In every stage of its development it has been magnificent and incomparable.

The façade is not unlike any other church in terms of subject matter. It expresses the Catholic faith with depictions of Jesus, Mary, apostles and saints. If you look closer, it looks like any other Roman relief. The sculpted statues are very life like. Each one represents scenes from the Bible. But if you look at it from far away, the elaborate relief sculptures begin to look more organic, resembling a bee colony or an anthill.

It made me think that perhaps this is what Gaudi wanted us to see. We are human beings and part of an exceptional species. But we tend to separate ourselves with our cultural norms and traditions. Guadi successfully unites us through his use of natural forms rather than alienating us with dark facades and hard edges.

Most of the churches I’ve seen in my life all seem like they want to strike the fear of God in you. They are dark and ominous cluttered with gory depictions of Jesus on the cross, I thought. But this one is different. The “Sagrada Familia,” Gaudi takes a different approach. While retaining its mystery, the church depicts life and welcomes you to wonder. The elements inside of the church reflect Gaudi’s fascination with repetition. Everything is round and bubbled. It is inviting.

The ceiling connects directly with the windows in an attempt to echo the pattern made by the rays of light. It is wonderful and whimsical. Gaudi was drawing inspiration from structures found in nature, and the pillars look organic. Similar to Roman columns, the pillars look like they were inspired by plant stems. The ceiling, instead of having man-made paintings and frescos typical of Renaissance, shows shapes of flowers and leaves. It is something we can all relate to, even people that do not believe in God. The building connects nature with religion and belief.

Barcelona is a close-knit community of adjacent buildings and narrow winding streets adhering to its mountainsides. It’s bathed in the salty waters of the Mediterranean Sea. It has remains from the Middle Age, the Renaissance and the Modern era. The city flaunts its charms while tourists admire its art and co-mingle with the locals ambling around its narrow streets.

On the stroll down from the Plaza de Catalunya to the Columbus monument at Port Vell, flower and animal stalls and all sorts of artists, are “Las Ramblas.” It is the social center of the city where everyone can come together. The sidewalks are laden with street performers who design very elaborate costumes and pretend to be statues to make a Euro.

There are many stores on both sides of the street such as Custo Barcelona and Nike. On one side is the Barrio del Raval— loaded with traditional cafes, bars and rows of intimate restaurants where we had lunch one day— and on the other side, is el Barrio Gotico, which has narrow streets full of antique shops, bookstores, craft booths and souvenir shops.

Park Guell, another one of Gaudi’s creations, is located in the north part of city. It is situated on a steep hill in the neighborhood el Barrio de Gracia. It is a garden complex with many different architectural elements. To get there, we had to walk up three steep city blocks. We were not quite prepared for this type of exercise, so we were pleasantly surprised to find an escalator in the middle of the neighborhood.

In the main entrance to the Park Guell, there are two buildings that resemble gingerbread houses. They have checkered-tile roofs and the shapes are very round and exaggerated. They are made of stone and they seem to come right out of a children’s book. The windows are decorated with brightly-colored stones that seem like candy. It is as if you are inside of a colorful fairytale tale.

Gaudí’s multi-colored tile mosaic decorates long benches that make up the main terrace. Here, there was a street performer dressed as the invisible man. He was apparently popular. Everybody was crowding around waiting for their turn to take a picture with him. Finally, at the top most part of the trail, there is a beautiful view overlooking the whole city and the coast of Barcelona.

Walking around the Park Guell was exciting because of all the architecture seated in nature. It seems huge and hard to navigate because you don’t know where you are on the map.

On our way out, there were children who had just gotten out of school, and they were climbing all over the park. It was funny to think that they all just live there and go to school right down the block from Park Guell. To them, it’s a routine part of their lives, but it’s a really big deal for everyone else in the world.

The trip went by really fast. I was headed back to Stony Brook for another long and cold semester, but this time I had no window seat. The girl next to me didn’t let me sit there. And I realized that everything was going back to reality after my storybook vacation.

At the end of the trip, Frankie told me that he was grateful for the time we shared and the opportunity to find out who I really am.

“We’ll always have Barcelona.”

“I never recycle, not at all”, said Roytman, a biology student at Stony Brook. “Part of it is because I’m too lazy and also because I don’t see a reason to do it.”

Across the nation, universities such as Stony Brook are trying to trim down the amount of waste that they produce each year. In its efforts to reduce solid waste output, Stony Brook faces an uphill challenge due to the large student population, student apathy, a large infrastructure and surrounding community resistance.

Since 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has conducted 51 inspections of college and universities in New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. These actions have resulted in $2,700,000 in penalties for violations uncovered during these inspections. Consequently, the universities’ role is a key element in the sustainable development of the environment and essential to lessen global warming.

Stony Brook began its recycling program in 1987. It was started in response to the Solid Waste Management Act of 1988 issued to reduce the amount of garbage produced by Long Island. Beginning with a program that was primarily focused on collecting paper and cardboard, Stony Brook has continued to evolve and expanded collection of recyclable materials to also include bottles and cans, wood debris, yard waste, scrap metal, clothing, motor oil, lead-acid batteries, fluorescent bulbs, and printer cartridges.

According to Michael Youdelman, the Manager of the Recycling and Resource Management at Stony Brook, the university has a comprehensive recycling program, which consists of recycling construction materials in a three-acre facility on campus called “South Pilot.”  This facility allows a significant amount of asphalt and broken concrete to be recycled for new construction works.

“We save the university millions of dollars by doing stuff like this,” said Youdelman, “just in a few years we saved $ 5 million.”

Stony Brook has 24,000 students, including 10,000 students who live on campus, who generate 4.000 pounds a week of trash. “Our numbers are no way near the same way as Harvard or other places because they do not have the infrastructure we have,” said Youdelman. He added that Stony Brook has a university medical center, veteran’s hall and other installations that other campuses may not have.

To raise awareness, Stony Brook has implemented recycling programs like RecycleMania, a national recycling and waste minimization competition that involves more than 500 universities. The program’s goal is to increase recycling participation by students and faculty, but Rabkin holds no support for the programs.

“It’s a silly program designed to give someone something to do and as an engineer, I have real work,” said Ilya Rabkin, 21, a student at Stony Brook.

Roytman doesn’t participate in these programs because are mostly focused in plastic. “Since is not profitable for companies to recycle plastic, it is up to the government to subsidize it because we lose money recycling.”

R. Lawrence Swanson, an Associate Dean and Director of the Waste Reduction and Management Institute at Stony Brook, asserted that to certain degree it’s probably correct that people recycle because it’s fashionable. “It may cost us extra money to recycle plastic, but we are not extracting oil from the ground to make a new bottle,” Swanson said, “ you are recycling that old one, so you can preserve for your grandkids a little bit of oil that may be left; this is the idea of sustainability.”

Michelle Pizer, president of the Student Environmental Club and a member of the Sustainability Task Force, said that Stony Brook has the logo “wear red, think green.” “Stony Brook may be thinking green but they certainly don’t act green a lot of the time,” said Pizer. “It would make a huge impact if Stony Brook would make similar changes to Southampton campus, which is a school based on sustainability and environmental progress.”

According to Swanson, the university and the employer’s unions should rewrite the contracts and allow the employers to participate in recycling activities. “It isn’t simply starting a recycling program; you have to get the personnel lined up to know how to do it.”

Another point that Swanson, who has been working 22 years at Stony Brook, emphasized is that one of the things that Stony Brook presidents have constantly grapple with  is the intent to keep peace with the community around the university.

“When we had opportunities to do research in many ways more efficiently, our president typically says no because he is afraid that the community would say that we are dealing too much with pollution issues and it’s ruining the community that surrounds the university” he said. “Another important fact is that, in 1963 this community was here and the campus was plugged down in the middle of it, so there is a certain resentment of the community around.”

According to Swanson, Stony Brook is on the top campuses, between 15-20 percent of all campuses in U.S., when it comes to recycling. “We are not number one, but we have a difficult environment to work too,” he said. “We could probably do better if we were in New Hampshire.”

 Furthermore, I found this class very interesting and creative. The blogs and the business news were the best. The only thing I didn’t really enjoy was the amount of presentations.  I would have liked for Prof. Selvin to have lectured more instead of having so many presentations.

In this class, I have learned that because of the information society in which we are immersed, it’s evident that the news organizations have to adapt faster than other industries to the new technologies in order to not die out.

I think it is sad that print is disappearing. Even though I am aware that computers and other devices are really useful and necessary in our daily lives, I love books. I get really tired of being in front of a computer the whole day and it gives me a headache.

Finally, I would like to add it that has been a nice experience taking this class and I hope to have time next semester to keep posting on this blog.

Happy Christmas!

   I found an article in the New York Times in which Apple is planning to buy Lala,

   a four-year-old start-up based in Palo    Alto, California.

 Lala offers users to play the music they own from the Web. This is a way to store and play digital music.

According to Lala’s engineers, Lala examines the hard drives of its users and allows them to have their musical library online that matches the user’s collection. It is an simple and free way for people to get their music in the Internet.

In this way, people will be able to sync their iPods from any Internet source without constantly downloading the music to their computers.

As we all know, Comcast is the biggest owner of cable systems in the country. With this merger, it will hold the most important cable television assets in the world and also it will get NBC, which is a broadcast network.

Furthermore, Comcast has always had interest in owning content. Consequently, thanks to the deal NBC Universal would support Comcast digital media presence in the market. With this deal it will combine content and distribution, which is called vertical integration.

According to Ammori, putting so much power in the hands of one company is bad for democracy because of three main reasons (which I completely agree with):

The first reason is how these giant media companies can censor any idea that they oppose by not covering them or covering them unfairly. This reason clearly affects the public’s right to know. Media companies are supposed to present information to the audience and then, the audience makes its own decision.

The second reason is that this consolidation may affect gravely independent networks. These independent networks claim that Comcast is going to discriminate against them and therefore obliging to renounce some ownership of their company. The ideal structure would be cable channels owned by many independent networks.

The third reason is that the merger will support one-way communications over open two-way communications.  Comcast has less incentive to support wide open two-way communications available on an open Internet. So, the audience won’t be able to have different views of the same issue.

Finally, for these reasons, many associations like the Free Press want to block this merger, which endangers our democracy. I am not sure if they may block it, but maybe Obama or the FCC may do it.

The Spanish telecommunications minister, Miguel Sebastián, declared on Tuesday , in the “Foro Internacional de Contenidos Digitales (Ficod),” that broadband would be added to the country’s so-called “universal service,” which guarantees to citizens of the country an affordable price on telephone service.

The service providers that get universal service funds will have to include broadband services as part of their services offered to any home in the country.

Finland has announced a similar plan, which offers the Finnish the right to have a 1 Mbps connection by July 1, 2010.

The goal of this plan is to encourage service providers to offer a faster broadband because at the moment the service providers offer an expensive and slow broadband in the country.

On the other hand, in U. S. we can see a similar policy because the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is designing a national broadband policy to provide universal broadband to every American. The plan will be presented to Congress in February 2010.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10402643-266.html?tag=mncol;txt

With regard to their current Class A shares, the company has the intention of selling them in an initial public offering, which will carry one vote. But the company said that it has no intention to go public at the moment.

Apparently Facebook is introducing a dual-class stock structure because current shareholders want to maintain control over voting on certain issues while selling shares to the public. Companies such as the New York Times and Ford use this kind of structures. This a way to ensure that the company will continue growing and will remain a profitable business. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/technology/internet/25facebook.html?scp=2&sq=Facebook&st=cse