• On Tuesday, Sasha Chavkin of the New York World (a publication of the Columbia Journalism School) reported that women in Brooklyn were being forced to sit at the back of the B110 bus, a public bus route operated by a private company between Williamsburg and Borough Park. The New York Times picked up the story and, disappointingly, framed it as a clash of religious and women’s rights because the bus bends the rules to accomodate the religious sensibilities of local Hasidic Jews. In fact, there are no religious rights at stake here. As Mayor Bloomberg said in a news conference, sex discrimination is “obviously not permitted” on public transit. BeckySharper of the Persuit of Harpyness puts the conflict in context with an informative post on the status of women in Hasidic Brooklyn.
• UK Labor MP Tom Watson will travel to a NewsCorp shareholders meeting in Los Angeles to reveal previously unreported allegations about the company’s illegal surveillance program, Ed Pilkington and Dan Sabbagh report in the Guardian. Watson is a member of the House of Commons committee that investigated NewsCorp. He has the right to address the meeting because he is serving as a proxy for the AFL-CIO. [HT: Boing Boing]
• U.S. Tom Watson, our friend and digital consultant, has some thoughts on Occupy Wall Street as a start-up. So far, the Zuccotti Park protesters have done incredibly well at drawing a crowd and spreading their message and their model across the country and the world. Now, everyone wants to tell them what to do: Issue demands, work for Democratic candidates, join organized labor. Tom, who knows a thing or two about tech ventures from his days as a journalist on the start-up beat, disagrees with the conventional wisdom: “But all this [advice] sounds exactly like the early days of Twitter to me. Do this, be that, fit into our idea of what you should be. And this is where Fred Wilson’s longstanding advice to Internet entrepreneurs is instructive: time and again, he’s urged startups to focus on building usership and serving customers. The revenue model will be there, if you do those things right.”
• Risa L. Goluboff and Dahlia Lithwick explain why the GOP is fighting a bogus crusade on non-existent voter fraud. The short answer? Twenty-five percent of African Americans lack government-issued photo ID, vs. 12% of Americans at large. Voter ID laws surgically disenfranchise a core Democratic constituency.

Suggest a story for next week’s #Sidney’s Picks by tweeting #Sidney to @hillmanfoundation.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]