Free Republic

Bryant Swenson and his wife Lauren, from Utah, were driving near Mai Mahiu on November 30 when three masked men attacked their car. The couple, who moved to Nairobi with their three children to open a CrossFit gym, spotted a white van which the gangsters are believed to have been trying to rob. Bryant said in a Facebook post about the attempted robbery, that one of the men was carrying a gun but “couldn't get it out of his waistbelt in time”. As the bandits rushed towards their Toyota Land Cruiser, Bryant had to reverse backwards to give himself time...

San Lorenzo Park in Santa Cruz had zero homeless campers Friday for the first time in months. Rain turned the trampled park into a giant mud pit and a flock of geese waddled around the puddles. A large dumpster was the last remaining piece of the 4-month-old encampment. The city required all campers to move out of San Lorenzo Park and shifted them over to a newly-opened encampment on River Street. During those four months, a total of 40 tons of trash was removed from the camp, known as the Benchlands. "Currently the field is in very poor condition, with...

Just like during the last economic crisis, homeless encampments are popping up all over the nation as poverty grows at a very alarming rate. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than half a million people are homeless in America right now, but that figure is increasing by the day. And it isn’t just adults that we are talking about. It has been reported that that the number of homeless children in this country has risen by 60 percent since the last recession, and Poverty USA says that a total of 1.6 million children slept either in...

Update 10:35 P.M. 1/19/2016 Without warning, dozens of public works employees raided Tent City. "They just coming in and taking all their personal stuff. People's life is in that box that they're throwing in that garbage can. Might mean nothing to nobody else, but it does to them," said Tim Walker. Walker lived in Tent City for years but was recently able to get an apartment through Covenant House. Tuesday, about 30 homeless were camped out on a strip of land which legally belongs to Waste Management. "Who knows what might be in there, your baby pictures, pictures of your...

Ending homelessness isn't just about finding a home. Sometimes, it's about finding a nice home — a place that's bright, modern and healthy to live in. That's the idea fueling the development of a number of buildings around the country, as communities try to move chronically homeless people off the streets. In downtown Washington, D.C., one of those buildings is currently going up right beside NPR's headquarters. Still under construction, the structure looks a little like four huge blocks, stacked atop each other and slightly askew. At 14 stories high, it will have a striking view of the U.S. Capitol...

...Although bread is one of the easiest, most reliable items for which to dumpster dive — it’s thrown away all the time, it’s dry, non-perishable, and relatively non-pathogenic — I also scavenge produce, chocolate, and flowers from the garbage. Sometimes it can be pretty icky; various slimes attend the decay of vegetables and fruit, and dumpsters are occasionally coated in unidentifiable goo.... Although I’m not by any means rich (after earning an expensive college degree, I am, like many of my generation, right back to where I started: in the service industry... But, you might protest, (as have many of...

A week ago, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, a Democrat, called homelessness in his city and the rest of King County a "full-blown crisis." Based on the numbers presented in coverage of the area's situation, we can certainly add the Emerald City to the list of areas where homelessness has been on the rise. Odds are that many readers here didn't know that, because the national press hardly ever pays attention to homelessness when a Democrat occupies the White House. Now imagine the firestorm which would erupt if a Republican or conservative proposed the "solution," however allegedly temporary, Murray is advancing...

In Harlem River Park in Manhattan, homeless men can be seen sleeping on benches around the basketball courts and sprawled out on a soccer field by day, then hunkering under an overpass at night. In Brooklyn, dog owners in Fort Greene Park have had ugly confrontations with homeless people after their dogs woke them up in the early morning when they are allowed off-leash. And in the Bronx, there are so many homeless people in one small park, Devanney Triangle, that the community board and parks department are discussing the removal of all benches. After a decade in which the...

For Michael Powell, a 53-year-old ex-convict, his tent off the highway in Camden, N.J., is what he has called home for nearly a decade. But on Tuesday, he and dozens of others living in homeless encampments known as “tent cities” throughout Camden were forced out—leaving many of them homeless all over again. The eviction was conducted by the state of New Jersey, as well as Camden county and city, for health and safety reasons. […] Amid the commotion on Tuesday, Gino Lewis, director of housing at the Camden County Improvement Authority, assured people that the county would work to find...

Shootings on the city's South and West sides left two people dead and at least five others wounded late Tuesday and early this morning. About 9:50 p.m., two men were shot in the 7900 block of South Vincennes Avenue in the Gresham neighborhood. Two assailants approached on foot and started shooting, police said. A witness told relatives the two had been inside the restaurant when the two walked in.

Homeless Tent Cities have proven a disaster in Seattle, Portland, Sacramento and other mainland cities where they have been tried. Homelessness Industry organizers set up their tents in an area--and the meth-addled denizens generate a crime wave targeting local businesses and residents as they seek out anything they can steal to buy drugs. Exasperated local officials pay the organizers off in order to get them to move into a different jurisdiction where the cycle of crime and shakedown begins again. In Honolulu, unofficial tent cities are now set up in strategic locations designed to pressure the tourism industry, the Chinatown...

VIDEO: Just another day in America...

The road most traveled: Most of the settlements Marcin photographed were by waterways, railway tracks, Walmarts, gas stations and liquor stores. (Daily Mail) As America suffers through its worse recovery on record, a homeless camp has cropped up on the outskirts of Baltimore. Daily Mail reported: A sheet of plastic laid over a clothesline. A mini-fortress of milk crates stacked under a tree. A thin mattress on a flimsy crate lying in a dark tunnel. On the edge of Baltimore’s woodlands, dozens of the city’s transients live in makeshift homes which they consider safer than homeless shelters. Photographer Ben...

A sheet of plastic laid over a clothesline. A mini-fortress of milk crates stacked under a tree. A thin mattress on a flimsy crate lying in a dark tunnel. On the edge of Baltimore's woodlands, dozens of the city's transients live in makeshift homes which they consider safer than homeless shelters. Photographer Ben Marcin has captured some of the shanties in his thought-provoking photo essay, 'The Camps', documenting the struggle, loneliness and ingenuity of Maryland's people of the woods.

At some point in our lives, each of us has said to ourselves, “Wow I really wish I didn’t have to work.” Shortly after making that statement, we snap back into reality and understand we should be productive members of society. This typically includes being employed. Because of this basic economic fact, I found it alarming that more than 1/3 of the work force just doesn’t want a job. The Wall Street Journal has the numbers: 34.3%: Share of Americans over age 16 who say they don’t want a job, up from about 30% two decades ago. Americans aren’t just...

Camden, New Jersey (My9NJ) - Tent cities have popped up across New Jersey including the state's poorest city. Meg Baker chased the story of Camden's tent city. Residing off Route 38 at Wilson Boulevard under an overpass, through woods and down a path of trash lays a community of people living in tents. This particular community was relocated from Federal Street and it's inhabited by an array of people: addicts, people who have fallen on hard times and some with mental illness. Baker took a tour of this run down community and the pictures show just how heart-wrenching this situation...

The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged Tuesday that it released personal information on potentially thousands of farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, following concerns from congressional Republicans and agriculture groups that the release could endanger their safety. According to a document obtained by FoxNews.com, the EPA said “some of the personal information that could have been protected … was released." Though the EPA has already sent out the documents, the agency now says it has since redacted sensitive details and asked the environmental groups to “return the information.”

That America created only 88,000 jobs in March, less than half the number anticipated, was jolting news, indicating the recovery that the White House has boasted about may not be at hand. But in that March jobs report, there was more disturbing news. While unemployment fell to 7.6 percent, the reason it fell is alarming. Half a million U.S. workers (495,000) disappeared from the labor force. They dropped out. They are no longer even looking for a job. Worse, this appears to be an inexorable trend. The participation rate of eligible workers in the United States has fallen to 63.3...

Thousands of Americans are sent to jail not for committing a crime, but because they can't afford to pay for traffic tickets, medical bills and court fees. If that sounds like a debtors' prison, a legal relic which was abolished in this country in the 1830s, that's because it is. And courts and judges in states across the land are violating the Constitution by incarcerating people for being unable to pay such debts. Ask Jack Dawley, 55, an unemployed man in Ohio who between 2007 and 2012 spent a total of 16 days in jail in a Huron County lock-up...

Seventy-percent of the White House staffers who made the top annual salary of $172,200 in 2012 were men and 30 percent were women, according to a White House report on staff compensation. In addition, men on the White House staff are paid, on average, $86,260.89 and women are paid, on average, $76,162.65. That means the average man on the White House staff is paid about $10,098--about 13 percent--more than the average woman. In Obama's White House, women on average earn only 88.3 percent of what the men earn.