We live in a six years post-9/11 world, but honour students are still a threat!

[cimorene]

Via kyuuketsukirui, Congressional medalist robotics student at MIT wearing Career Day circuit board jewelry arrested outside Boston airport while waiting for her boyfriend.

Diagnosis? Racial profiling. Observe her appearance in the photo. Her name is "Star Simpson"; she's probably half black and has dark hair and pale skin. If she'd been wearing chav jewelry and a fuckton of makeup and blond hair and a circuit board pinned to a pink blouse, I bet she'd never have been questioned beyond the "jewelry" explanation. (I wonder what was going on with the Play-Doh, though. I mean, was she that bored?)

Comments

[dunautremonde.livejournal.com]

Well, it always is the smartest ones who are first seen as "threats". :/

[dunautremonde.livejournal.com]

Btw have you heard about the American family that fled to Finland for asylum? There hasn't been (since I read about it) any info released about why exactly they fled for asylum, but hopefully they release it. Hell if I had known I'm eligible to apply for assylum I wouldn't have gone through the mess of becoming a student. :P Maybe not being able to even register a partnership is reason enough?

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I don't think it is, though. From what I remember when I looked into it three years ago, the Finnish registered partnership laws still required three years of cohabitation before it could be registered, or perhaps that was just for me since I'm not a citizen. I wonder if I can find any information about it? I hadn't heard a thing, but then, I don't really read the (Swedish) paper so much as skim it.

Don't you actually want to be a student, anyway? I keep hearing that college education is useful in the job market. At least it will give you time to perfect your Finnish. It might give me time to eventually learn to be able to carry on a conversation with the little old people who stop me when I'm walking the dog...

[dunautremonde.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough I read about this article in the semi-trashy Uutislehti 100, and there was only like two paragraphs about it. You'd think strange news like people from developed countries seeking asylum status would make the bigger papers, but then maybe not.

Yeah of course I want to be a student, college education is definately useful in the job market. :D I just don't like that I have to re-apply for the residence permit each year, the process makes me really anxious, plus the work-limit bothers me. Not that I'd even work part-time during the school year anyways, but still, it's all about options dude!

Old people Finnish (or Swedish? can't say anything about that..) is hard to understand. It's probably like that for most languages, too.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

That's true; perhaps I should aim for understanding toddlers. They talk slow, too. It's a much easier goal, even if they have that weird babytalk accent sometimes.

I found a bunch of copies of the article online - the source seems to be Helsingin Sanomat's international English edition. I think the original press release included very little information, though. That might be why nobody's picked it up.

The residence-permit reapplying is a huge headache and it always made me feel awful too. Especially with the requirement that you show you're registered again, because I originally applied too early in the year and my permit expired in August and it was always hard to get it renewed in time after the school finally opened for registration, with a lot of running around to the bank and the police station within a couple of days. But thank goodness for the police, because last year they called me to tell me I could have a family member visa instead as soon as Wax and I had been living together two years, and the policewoman filed a little hold order or something until the two weeks had passed and I was eligible. I missed the deadline by like a week the year before that, too, and they were really nice about that too. I suppose the legal stuff has to be quite scary and strict but they aren't actually that worried about throwing college students from wealthy first-world countries out, especially ones who are cohabiting with Finns. This year my visa was finally a permanent four-year one, too. \o/

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Last I heard there wasn't a draft in the US. Could be the family of an army reservist? One place speculated they might wish to escape being pressed into the war in Iraq, but another said it "probably" didn't have anything to do with Iraq. Huh.

[dunautremonde.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I don't know, it seems weird that a country that forces its males into either the army or social service wouldn't grant assylum to people trying to flee their own military "duties".

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I don't know if they would (but on the other hand that's a contentious issue in Finland, so they'd quite possibly get some sympathy - plus everyone thinks the Iraq stuff is crazy, even if the army itself isn't). But it doesn't force them to war, you know. And for that matter, I don't think it ever goes into much conflict at all. I mean, it has a big reserve of people who were trained for the army during their one year, but it doesn't so much actively intend to make them fight. And they're at least allowed to do their social service instead of the army.

The Army has a kind of freeze on now too, you know, where people whose contracts are supposed to expire legally aren't allowed to get out, but are automatically renewed? I don't know if they do that to reservists, but they force the active dudes to go out for more tours of duty. Very Vietnamesque! Even if they registered voluntarily in the first place that is hardly fair.