70% of Americans Have High-Speed Internet

WASHINGTON - The percentage of Americans with high-speed Internet connections at home has reached 70%, while just 3% still use dial-up to go online, a study showed Monday.

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project said the percentage of high-speed users represented a small but statistically significant rise from the 66%of adults who said they had home broadband in April 2012.

The percentage using dial-up as of May 2013 has held steady at 3% for the past two years, Pew found, but is down sharply from a peak of 41% in 2001.

Overall, 85% of Americans use the Internet, the report said. Of those who lack a high-speed connection at home, 10% have smartphones that can access the Web.

As previous research has found, those with the highest rates of home broadband use continue to be college graduates, adults under age 50, and adults living in households earning at least $50,000 per year. Whites and adults living in urban or suburban areas also had above-average rates.

"We've consistently found that age, education and household income are among the strongest factors associated with home broadband adoption," said Kathryn Zickuhr, research associate for Pew and lead author of the report.

"Many dial-up users cite cost and access as the main reasons they don't have broadband, but for adults who don't use the Internet at all, a lack of interest is often the main issue."

The survey notes that more than half of all American adults own a smartphone, but it did not determine whether this constitutes "broadband" speed.

"Broadband users can consume and create many types of content in ways that dial-up users cannot, and our research has long shown major differences in these two groups' online behavior," said Pew's Aaron Smith, a co-author of the report.

"Smartphones may offer an additional avenue for Internet access that surpasses the dial-up experience in many ways, but those who rely on them for home Internet use may face limitations that are not shared by those with traditional broadband connections."

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2013

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For Unemployed Black Americans, MLK 'Dream' Unfinished

WASHINGTON - Fifty years after the "dream" of racial equality invoked by Martin Luther King at the March on Washington, the reality is that African-Americans still suffer the most unemployment.

Government statistics show the overall U.S. unemployment rate stood at 7.4% in July.

But while whites had a jobless rate of 6.6% last month, the rate was nearly double for blacks at 12.6%.

By comparison, the Hispanic, or Latino, minority fared better, with 9.1% unemployed.

Asian-Americans were the least affected by the woes in the U.S. labor market after the Great Recession; only 5.7% lacked jobs.

"Discriminations against African-Americans are still very pervasive, it's a major force of the economy," said Heather McGhee, vice president of Demos, a Washington-based think tank on equal rights.

The yawning gap between majority whites and blacks is nothing new and has persisted through periods of economic expansion and recession.

Since 1972 the jobless rate for blacks has held at roughly double that of the entire workforce.

Even at the end of 2000, amid full employment in the U.S., when the jobless rate was 3.9%, 7.3% of African-American workers were unemployed.

The weight of this joblessness has pushed blacks into the majority of the 27.6% of Americans living in poverty, although they represent only 13% of the population of some 316 million.

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