Sunny Yang, a recent immigrant from South Korea, studies English at a school in Manhattan, but finds that the best way to improve her language skills is to interact with native speakers. So she uses Meetup.com, a popular social networking site, to meet English speakers. In exchange for helping her to learn English, she offers to teach them to speak Korean.

For some immigrants, social networking has become not just a means of sharing photographs or staying in touch with old friends but a valuable tool for assimilation. Sites like Meetup.com and Facebook help immigrants to establish themselves in America by connecting with others who speak the same language and face similar challenges.

In an e-mail, Yang, 25, wrote that even though she and other immigrants could meet people the old fashioned way — at clubs, parties, bars and other social events — recent immigrants often feel marginalized by differences in language and customs.

“For us, the foreign students who don’t know American culture and people, it is not that easy to go in any bars or clubs and get along with them,” she wrote. “On the other hand, the Internet is easy to access and you can even say hello to anyone, anytime, anywhere. There is no one who is staring at you when you make mistakes because of your language or culture difference.”

Net Effect For Asians

Traditionally, Asian immigrants in New York — and particularly Queens, which has the largest Asian population of all the boroughs — have connected to other immigrants, improved their English or integrated into American society through the community and public institutions.

“When there was no Internet,” Yang wrote, “the only way to meet people and make friends in the foreign country was just being introduced a friend of friend, going to church or attending school.”

But now Chinese and Korean immigrants in Queens, are increasingly using social networking websites to meet people and make friends.

Yang could do that without the Internet, she admits.

“For foreigners like me, it is way more difficult and something we need big courage to do,” she wrote. “Or maybe I am too shy?”

Facebook Fans

Yang belongs to The New York City Korean Language group on Meetup, which boasts 651 members. Several Facebook groups dedicated to immigrant groups each claim more than 100 users.

Andrew Dong Hyuk Hahm, 19, started a Facebook group that connects 114 users interested in the Korean-American Presbyterian Church of Queens – it’s called “I went to KAPCQ yea yeah.” Based in Flushing, the church is more than 35 years old and has a weekly attendance of between 2,000 and 3,000 congregants, most of whom are immigrants. The Facebook group allows former church members to stay in touch.

“A group like the one I created connects people,” Hahm wrote in an on-line interview conducted through Facebook. As an example he cited an uncle who, having attended KAPCQ in the early 1990’s, recently opened a Facebook account and joined Hahm’s group. Now, the two keep in close contact.

But not every Facebook group has worked out as its founders wanted.

A little more than a year ago, Linny Fang, who moved to Flushing from Taiwan in 1990 when she was eight, created “Chinese in Queens NYC,” a group on Facebook with 153 members.

“I had many plans in mind for the group when it was first established,” Fang wrote in a Facebook message. She had hoped, for instance, to post frequent updates about community events so that the members of the group could meet.

But the group hasn’t succeeded as Fang had hoped.

“It is a big effort to try to maintain the ideal group,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, and I am mildly ashamed, I haven’t been doing my part to really actualize my plans and thoughts.”

Common Goals

Other Internet-based social groups have had more success. For three years, Al Jeannot, 54, a paralegal and trained linguist, has organized language groups through Meetup.com, which allows users to join groups with the purpose of sharing a common goal — in this case, learning and preserving an immigrant’s language.

“In New York, (immigrants) are isolated and often room with people whom they have no affinity with, so they go to the Internet to find their own kind,” he said on a recent afternoon at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where about 10 members of the Meetup group he founded, “Chinese Chat,” met. Based in Flushing, the group’s members primarily live there and in neighboring Bayside.

Jeannot, who moved to New York from Haiti in the 1970s, speaks seven languages: Haitian Creole, Spanish, German, Japanese, Italian, French and English. Next up? Perfecting his Mandarin.

“The best way to learn a language is to meet up with people and speak to them,” he said.

No one knows that better than Sunny Yang, who considers the social networking she does on Meetup.com to be indispensable to her assimilation into American culture.

“I can’t even imagine my New York life without the Internet,” she wrote.

(To read an interview with Dr. Julia B. Carroll, deputy chairwoman of the Basic Educational Skills program at Queensborough Community College in Queens, click here.)

Ken Bernard, 43, came to New York City from Guyana when he was five. A father of three girls, he runs Sybil’s Bakery and Restaurant in Jamaica, established by his late mother in 1978. Sybil’s is the most well-known Guyanese restaurant in New York with additional locations in Forest Hills and Prospect Park South.

How do you hold up working seven days a week?

It’s dedication. You’re not going to make it if you’re not dedicated in this kind of business. I watch a lot of the chef shows now. It’s a learning experience just watching them because they’re looking for perfection in food. Food is an 18-hour job.

How did Sybil’s come to be?

My mom, she was nine of us with her alone. She got laid off — she was a mold cutter of jewelry. My older brother, he knew some Guyanese people and they had a big family and we started delivering to them from our house, in Far Rockaway. And then maybe a year after she rented a place, and took off from there. I guess it’s a blessing.

How many other Guyanese restaurants are there in New York City?

Now? Oh, dime a dozen. We remain No. 1. Everyone knows Sybil’s. You go to England and ask Guyanese, “You know Sybil’s?” they’ll say, “Yeah!”

How important is food to the Guyanese culture?

My mother, she’s East Indian. Her father was from India. Even in India, the poorest homes you go to, the first thing you go in, they offer you something to eat. And that has traveled here. When I go to people’s homes they’re like, “Come on, eat, eat!”

Are most of your customers Guyanese?

Most. But we have all nations coming here at this point. We cater to everyone. It’s rapidly changing though, this community is. First it was Greek, and Puerto Ricans. Then the Guyanese took over. Now it’s more changing to the Muslims from the Middle East and the Hispanics, Mexicans, Guatemala. I see the Guyanese community going more toward Richmond Hill.

What do you think the Guyanese population is shifting to Richmond Hill?

To me it’s like nightclubbing — if that the hot spot at the time, everyone’s going to go with it.

What else has been going on with the Guyanese community?

A lot of Guyanese from here have been getting deported, for a lot of different reasons. When you get arrested here now a few times and you serve some time if you’re not a citizen, you get deported. That’s the law now. Could be anything. Your time is up.

Why do you think Guyanese have done as well as they have in New York?

Always comes back from the roots – from not having. I just want to make sure that my girls get their education. Because I didn’t get a chance to do mine. From not having, you’re climbing a mountain – slow. Might not be this generation, but the next one will be a little stronger.

Cathy Douglas recently moved to Pennsylvania – but on her shopping trips back to New York she makes sure to stop by Sybil’s Bakery and Restaurant, a popular Guyanese eatery in Jamaica.

Colorful awnings and signs proclaiming Sybil’s house specialties jut onto a treeless stretch of bustling Hillside Avenue. Inside, customers point to dishes behind a glass counter and eat at the booths that line the wall filled with paintings of Guyana – or take their orders to go. The line is often long.

Douglas immigrated to Queens when she was 16 and missed the food she grew up on in Guyana. She soon discovered Sybil’s.

“When I first came I went totally crazy,” Douglas, now 35, recalled while picking up a meal with her son. “I went for something that’s called black pudding.”

Food to ‘Believe’ in

A variation on British blood sausage, which Guyana, a former English colony, adopted and adapted, black pudding is made by mixing rice seasoned with traditional Caribbean herbs like thyme and basil with cow’s blood, stuffing it into animal intestine and boiling it until firm.

Fred Richards, another customer on a recent Saturday, used to come for the black pudding too, which he laughingly calls a “poor man’s delicacy.” Now 66, he said he’s lost his craving for the dish and is more likely to order oxtail.

Richards emigrated from Guyana in 1969 to study in New York, and started eating at Sybil’s when it opened in 1978. After retirement he moved to Maryland but often visits his mother in a nursing home in Brooklyn. “I come here to eat because I believe in the food,” he said.

As Richards sat and ate his oxtail, Douglas continued perusing the dozen or so hot dishes in the steam table behind the counter. She recommended cook-up, pointing to a dish of rice flecked with a green vegetable, cooked with coconut milk.

“And the curry!” she said. “You have to try the curry.”

Manager Ken Bernard, a ruggedly handsome man with an easy smile, whose mother Sybil Bernard-Kerrut started the business, explained how he makes the rich and velvety curry sauce, which is served with chicken or beef.

With no formal culinary training, he learned the trade from his mother and has worked for her business since he was 10. His mother died in 2000 but her restaurants continue to prosper. Bernard’s brother manages the Richmond Hill branch and his sisters run a Brooklyn branch.

To make the curry, he starts by seasoning the meat with fresh garlic and peppers. “We let it sit as long as possible,” he said. “That helps with the taste.”

Next, he fries a homemade curry powder in oil, which he says mellows the taste. “Because if you was just to throw it on the chicken it would be raw,” he said, “it’d probably be a burned stomach and stuff like that.” He said other cooks boil the curry, which he believes gives it an unappealing grainy texture, rather than fry it.

“If it’s burning at the bottom you could add water and let it dry back down,” he said. “Then you throw the chicken in it and you fry that down good—you let it really get into the meat. Then you add your water at the end and let it boil with your potatoes. When your potatoes is done, your chicken curry’s done. So go home and try it!”

Sybil’s Story

His mother immigrated to New York in 1969. Bernard and his eight siblings followed two years later. When she lost her job as a jewelry mold-cutter, his mother asked relatives who were running a bakery out of their house in Canada for recipes. She baked pastries in her home in Far Rockaway and sold them to neighbors, enlisting her children’s help.

Word of Sybil’s knack for baking spread quickly, and she soon had more orders than her kitchen and basement could handle. In 1978, she opened her first restaurant, the branch Bernard manages today.

His mother started out by making what Bernard says are Guyana’s three best-loved pastries, which he continues to bake and sell.

The first is a round pastry with a red circle of food coloring the size of a nickel. “Guyana’s made up of a lot of different cultures,” he said. “That’s called Chinese cake. The Chinese put black bean inside. You boil the black bean, then you grind it, then you boil it with sugar and you fry it with oil and flour and you put it in that crust. That’s a double-crust pastry.”

Next to the Chinese cakes is a row of spicy cheese rolls. “That’s the sharp white cheddar cheese we would get in Guyana,” he said, “and we mix that with pepper and a little bit of seasoning, a little bit of butter.”

The third pastry is a pineapple tart. “Guyana, we’re not famous for it but we have the sweetest pineapple,” Bernard said.

Sybil’s also makes their own bottled juices, including peanut punch, which tastes like a peanut-butter milkshake, and sea-moss juice, which is sweet and creamy.

Bernard said Guyanese food reflects the melding of different ethnic backgrounds. His maternal grandfather was an Indian immigrant. “He died because he was an older man,” Bernard said. “Then my grandmother remarried, a man from China, that immigrated from China to Guyana. So that’s how come we have Chinese, Indian.”

Recipe for Success

In his speaking voice one, can hear the tug of different cultures. He speaks prim and proper English at home in Brookhaven, Long Island, with his wife, who is also Guyanese, and slips into a guttural patois at work. “I’ve been with these people all day and I come home speaking like them, she’s like, what?” he said of his wife.

Guyana is South America’s only English-speaking country, but in rural areas people speak a Creole patois. “I can be American when I want to be and I can be raw,” he said. “My wife can’t stand when I’m raw, because she tries to teach my kids to speak proper.”

Bernard works long hours, seven days a week. “If a customer had came the first time and they had something,” he said, “and when you go back you’re going for that same thrill and if you don’t get it one, two, three times, they’re not going to come back. It takes everyday dedication to get in these products like this.

“Food is a great thing. People enjoy food more than . . . some other things,” Bernard said with a mischievous grin. “You know what I mean? It’s very important.”

(Click here to read an interview with Ken Bernard.)

Dr. Julia B. Carroll, deputy chairwoman of the Basic Educational Skills program at Queensborough Community College in Queens, talks with us about language issues and the challenges Korean and Chinese immigrants face at Bayside, where there is a large Asian population.

What are the challenges of learning English as a second language?

I think that some of the challenges are that students are living in communities where they are only speaking their own language most of the time. They are hanging with their friends and speaking their native language, or even working at a job where they are speaking their native language, and they have this feeling that somehow when they come to class, their language issues are going to go away miraculously. We find that happens a lot.

They are also living in a generation where everything is instantaneous and they want to learn the language faster and faster. But at the same time, their actual exposure to English is limited.

As an educator, how do you address that?

Well I give them a lot of reading and writing and work outside the class because I think they are just not getting enough exposure to the language. I tell them to get a job where you can speak English at least 65 percent of time, and watch television in English and listen to music in English and try to speak English to your friends.

What immigrant populations do you teach?

We have a little of everything here. There is a large population of Asian students, Koreans and Chinese, and we have quite a few South Americans too. Probably because we are in Bayside, which is pretty much a Chinese and Korean area so there are a lot of Asians here.

What do you think it is about Bayside that attracts Chinese and Korean immigrants to the area?

There is already a well-established community here. They got the stores, the restaurants, the businesses and lots of people have been living here for a long time. So when you have relatives that are already here, and people speak your native language around you, that’s very appealing.

Do you find that Chinese and Korean immigrants come to this country knowing more or less English than other immigrant groups? Or is it about the same?

It depends on the other immigrant groups. For example, you’ve got Haitian immigrants from Haiti where there’s a broken system with a huge literacy problem, and then you have Russian students who are very well read and their language is much closer to English than Chinese or Korean is, so they have fewer problems.

I think Chinese and Korean immigrants are very serious students and they study very hard. The language issues they have have to do with the grammar and the structure of the language. It’s very, very different than English and it takes them longer to master.

Do you notice a pattern among Chinese and Korean immigrant students in terms of the time it takes to learn English?

I think it depends. You take students from Hong Kong where they have had a lot more exposure to English than students from Central China. I hate to stereotype. I think they have very good study habits and they are coming from backgrounds and families that support them and encourage them to study.

But I think if they memorize information their whole lives, when they come here it’s a big shock because a lot of the assignments don’t involve just memorization. It’s actively using the language to interact and participate in class discussions. I think that’s a challenge for a lot of students.

Henry Steinway is the great-grandson of the Steinway & Sons founder and the last family member to lead the firm. Although he’s 92 and retired, Steinway still spends most mornings at the Steinway piano showroom on W. 57th Street in Manhattan.

What was it like growing up in the Steinway family?

I was one of six children. My mother was a Yankee. We were raised in the American Yankee manner. When I got out of college, 1937, it was the Depression. Then I said, “Should I try the piano business?” My old man said, “Sure.” So, I tried it.

I’m the inheritor, I can continue the tradition I guess. I have five children – some tried the business and didn’t like it. Now they are all over the country. So we sold it to CBS.

Can you talk about your family’s immigrant experience?

I don’t see myself as an immigrant. I was raised by a Yankee mother in an upper class New York way. I went to private schools, went to Harvard. I never thought of myself as “German-American,” which I suppose I am.

In 1937, when I started, there were still many workers of German origin. Then the Italians came in. Roman Catholic Germans and Italians married so we had many issues at that time, then of course the Greeks moved into Astoria and now it’s the League of Nations out there.

Has Steinway employed a lot of immigrants over the years?

Lots of South Americans recently, but I can’t tell you from where. They work their way up gradually. Some are foreman and supervisors. Now it’s a pretty general group representing New York and Queens. I think I heard Queens is one of the most diverse areas — various types, Thai and Korean. So it’s a very international community.

Do you think Steinway provides immigrants with opportunity to live the American Dream?

They do and they always have. I remember years ago when someone would die and there was a local funeral home that was used by a lot of the workers. I would attend some of these wakes. You’d see this guy who was a worker in the plant and his two sons who were lawyers. I mean the upward mobility.

We do have a few father-to-son relationships still. The family name Drasche has three generations there. The most recent one started his own business fixing up pianos somewhere out in Queens. So it has always been a very interesting community.

How has it changed?

The employees naturally move off the island. That’s why we have that big parking lot. I remember we built that years ago. We’d study the license plates to see who lives where and by then about half of them had moved off the island. About 20 years ago.

In the old days, the Steinway Street trolley — which [was] one of the last in New York —
went across the Queensboro Bridge. I used to take it…. There was a track and I could get on there and go across the bridge to Steinway Street where the factory is. So that was the great means of transit for all the local people.

We were raised in Manhattan. My trips were to the Steinway mansion mostly. It was a lovely estate. About the early 20s, I couldn’t have been more than six, seven years old, they decided to sell it and my father was designated to clean out the stuff that was there so we’d sometimes go out and I remember playing around on the then-expansive grounds. Now it’s all wire fence and all that stuff. We didn’t have any close connection to Astoria other than that. I’m the last guy that’s intimately connected with the business.

Does that make you sad?

No. It’s the normal American story. And a very good story. The guy comes over here with an idea. The family runs it. Then I sold it to CBS in ’72 and I haven’t regretted it for a minute even though CBS was going through all kinds of changes. So it’s a rather unique thing and I think it’s an American thing to be proud of because it’s gone through this typical American history of a family that was able to carry it on for a period of time, and then they put it in the hands, ultimately, of professional investors. And that’s the way to go. I’m happy with it.

A Bronx-based fast-food franchise has steadily risen over the last two decades, its growth tied to West Indian immigration to New York.

Golden Krust, a Jamaican-style restaurant and bakery, has filled a niche by providing inexpensive and familiar food for Caribbean immigrants – and it’s customer base is now expanding to non-West Indians.

“It’s the only franchise that really sells Caribbean food,” said Annette Runcie, who owns a Golden Krust franchise in Queens Village. “I think there was a big demand, especially in New York City, and it was just a perfect thing to do.”

She added, “Most Caribbean folks get home-cooked meals every day, there’s really not much fast food for them to eat.”

Going Mainstream

Still, the company has been able to expand to non-Caribbean neighborhoods as well as beyond New York.

The Caribbean population was critical for the growth of the company, said Golden Krust President and CEO Lowell Hawthorne. “I know we have gotten that base and have been successful in it,” he said. “It helps to propel the organization to the mainstream market.”

Hawthorne, a Jamaican immigrant, opened the first Golden Krust bakery in the Bronx with his family in 1989. Three years later, there were 17 Golden Krust stores. Now there are more than 115 spread across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Maryland.

Yet Golden Krust thrives most in areas like eastern Queens, which has one of the most concentrated populations of West Indians in the city. More than a fifth of the immigrant population came from Jamaica, and a large bulk of the rest originated in Haiti, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, according to the 2000 census.

In Community Board 13 alone, there are five Golden Krust restaurants.

“The company’s going to consistently grow its brand in our core market, which is basically the large Caribbean community, which are in a couple of new states,” said Hawthorne. “We’re going to expand from our market to the mainstream market. The company plans to open about 30 to 40 stores per year.”

Runcie, who was born in Jamaica, credits her store’s success to heavy amounts of foot traffic and a nearby bus stop. She said while most of her customers are Caribbean, her restaurant attracts a strong mix of other ethnicities.

Fast Food Friendly

“If you locate in a certain area where people are, you have a clientele already, that is No. 1, that’s key,” said Vera Weekes, education director of the Immigration Center at Medgar Evers College.

Jamaican food lends itself well to fast food, said Ramin Ganeshram, Caribbean food expert and strategist for Iconoculture, which studies consumer trends. Beef patties are cheap and can be eaten with one hand, which makes them both portable and convenient.

“On a more cultural level, you can say anything that’s a street food in the country of origin has a very good chance of becoming a fast food in the United States,” she said. “Street food is the fast food of the rest of the world.”

And non-West Indians are catching on. “We are gaining acceptance from pretty much all markets right now,” said Golden Krust spokeswoman Candice Richards. “North Americans are just gravitating towards West Indian cuisine as they become more familiar with the Islands through their vacations and just interacting with the many West Indians that live in New York and the United States.”

The ‘Real Deal’

Golden Krust’s fast-food environment helps, Ganeshram said. “If you go into a place and see a light board of food and photos and there are trays,” she said, people understand that “it’s a comfortable environment to try something new.”

At Golden Krust, you get full meals. “You get the real deal,” Weekes said.

“The real deal” is anything from the festival, a fried corn fritter about a half a foot long, to the oxtail stew. Customers can find the super salty and peppery ackee with salt fish, a dish that resembles scrambled eggs but is made with ackee, a highly poisonous fruit that takes special care to harvest just right.

Golden Krust also offers basic fare like spicy (and non spicy) beef patties, curried goat, stew chicken, ginger-infused ice tea and an array of West Indian colas.

“It is very good, instead of the fast food, hamburgers and stuff like that, I think this is more appropriate,” said Margery Baptist, who immigrated from Haiti and stopped off at the Queens Village Golden Krust one recent day. “If one parent can’t cook the rice, beans and vegetables, at least they can pick it up, they have it here, instead of the fried food.”

Even non-West Indians appreciate Golden Krust’s homemade taste. “It’s hard to find a restaurant that serves this kind of food,” Long Islander Angel Figueroa said outside the Golden Krust on 8th Ave. in Midtown. “When you have it here and it taste like homemade, you got a winner,” he said about his favorite item, oxtail, which he said he first tried at a Jamaican party.

Though Ganeshram believes Golden Krust may hit America the way of Chipotle, the popular Mexican food franchise, did, she does not see it branching out worldwide.

“The taste literally for American things is why Burger King and McDonald’s and Pizza Hut have become globalized, it’s not the food itself,” she said. “If you look at with that logic I don’t think something like Golden Krust will become global because it doesn’t represent something American — it represents the Caribbean.”

Before Father James K. Cunningham relocated to Far Rockaway in 2001 he barely spoke Spanish and had served a predominantly white congregation in his six years of priesthood.

Now the 39-year-old pastor, known as Father Jim, leads a multi-ethnic parish at Saint Mary Star of the Sea with a growing number of families from South and Central America and the Caribbean.

And he celebrates Mass in Spanish as well as English.

“When they first sent me here I thought they made a mistake,” Cunningham said with a laugh as he sat inside the 88-year-old rectory. “You usually had to be 25 years a priest and I was only six years ordained at the time. But I guess they figured I could adapt – that adaptability was one of my strengths.”

New Flags Wave

Saint Mary embodies the sea of cultural and economic changes that have occurred on the Queens Peninsula since the early 1970s. As the bulk of second- and third-generation Irish, Germans and Italians packed up and left over the past four decades, a growing number of Hispanics and Caribbeans have made Far Rockaway their home.

Today, the most recent immigrant groups – including Guatemalans, Mexicans and Guyanese – make up more than 70 percent of the 1,400-member congregation.

During a recent Mass, as Cunningham alternated between English and Spanish, more than a dozen children lined up to receive their First Holy Communion. Flags representing 37 different countries lined the inside of the church.

“The parish has had two or three turnovers since I’ve been a member,” said Josephine Kelly, 81, who moved to Far Rockaway from Buffalo in 1964. “Each turnover has caused a bit of an exodus among older members.”

And as those new members came in, so did new customs: from clapping and cheering to outward displays of affection among families.

New Economic Pressures

“Back when it was predominantly white and European families the most you would hear was an occasional whisper,” Kelly added. “Now during services people tend to be a lot more expressive. You’ll often see a son put his arm around his father without giving it a second thought.”

While new groups appeared, old money faded.

“Far Rockaway has faced the classic phenomena,” said Joseph Barden, executive director of Margert Community Corp., a neighborhood preservation group dedicated to helping struggling homeowners in the area. “In the 1970s there was a lot of white flight followed by a high concentration of poverty and a growth in public housing. Those forces plus immigration drove the original people who used to live here out. The problem for the church has been that most of the new immigrants don’t have the same economic base.”

One of the most apparent cultural and economic shifts can be seen in the fall off of donations to the church.

“A lot of the churches in South America and the Caribbean are supported by their governments,” Cunningham said. “In the United States, that’s not the case and people aren’t as accustomed to tithing. A lot of the new members put a few dollars in the basket a week and think that’s enough of a donation. As a result, it’s become hard to pay bills when our collection is good, but still not good enough.”

Raul Hernandez, a 33-year-old construction worker who came from Mexico with his wife and two children, is part of the newest wave of immigrants to join the church. While some of the congregation members see a link between their parish’s financial struggles and the growing proportion of immigrants, Hernandez links it to external forces.

“Today things are really difficult,” he said. “The economy is really bad. Before maybe I could give $10 a week, now it’s $5.”

A Joyous Day

Jason Fernandez, 7, was one of the first children in line to receive communion. After Mass, his mother, Maria, shed tears of joy while the rest of her family waited to take pictures with Cunningham.

“When I have, I give, and it’s from the heart,” she said. “Without the church and without God, I don’t think we could survive in this country.”

The city is cracking down on folks who swipe recyclables left on curbsides, increasing fines to $2,000 from $100, putting more sanitation officers on the streets and impounding vehicles used in thefts.

Still, scrap metal theft goes on – particularly in Brooklyn, home to the Sixth Street Iron & Metal recycling plant.

Artist Dread Scott’s latest exhibition tackles politically charged topics, including Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq, with such frank images as a black baby doll, face down in a tank of water, and five shallow graves.

But he’s drawn the most fire for his depiction of police brutality in the form of shooting-range silhouettes abutting motorized police batons striking a coffin.

The piece, titled, “The Blue Wall of Violence,” is featured his “Welcome to America” exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts.

To hear an audio podcast, click below

It could be the most important 20 minutes of your life.

Doctors at Jacobi Medical Center want to get the word out about a program they’ve created that allows people to be tested for HIV - quickly and confidentially - while getting important lessons on AIDS prevention.

The idea behind Project BRIEF is to boost the number of people tested for the AIDS virus by offering the test in emergency rooms via individual, portable “HIV kiosks.”

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