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The Antioch Police Department has been named in a federal lawsuit alleging the department's Community Action Team unfairly targets African-American families enrolled in the subsidized-housing program known as Section 8. Filed in U.S. District Court earlier this month by Bay Area Legal Aid — a civil legal service for low-income families — the suit alleges the city and police department are engaged in a "concerted and unlawful campaign to seek evidence which could lead to the termination of participants' Section 8 voucher benefits." Four individuals and a group of Section 8 families are named as plaintiffs. The suit seeks unspecified...

BOCA RATON — A crowd of more than 500 people waiting for hours this morning for housing voucher applications were dispersed by police in riot gear at the Boca Raton Housing Authority when the applications ran out sooner than expected. The action prompted complaints that officers used excessive tactics and housing authority officials were incompetent in their planning. Two people were arrested and six to eight people hospitalized for exhaustion during the ordeal. Hundreds of people, mostly mothers who had spent more than eight hours in line, were forced to leave the property at 2333 W. Glades Road by 30...

The Section 8 housing program - is funded by the federal government and administered by local housing authorities across the nation - is supposed to provide a hand up for needy or disabled people to make ends meet. It's not supposed to be permanent and, most of all, it's not supposed to be for people with criminal records, or people who use illegal drugs, or people who invite in unauthorized tenants or people who receive unreported income to cheat the system. Yet, as we've been reporting for the last two years, all these activities are rampant in Section 8 housing....

McCain's love of amnesty will be a key issue. He supported amnesty in 2003 by name, proposed it in 2006 and 2007 without calling it amnesty, and says that anyone who says that he ever supported amnesty is a liar. He has insulted Americans who advocate border security and has cursed at the thought of building a border fence. The presence of Juan Hernandez in the background of the McCain campaign tells us that John McCain is as weak on border security now as he ever was. Dr. Juan Hernandez, a dual citizen of the US and Mexico, and past...

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 29 (OneWorld) - U.S. war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have announced they're planning to descend on Washington, DC this March to testify about war crimes they committed or personally witnessed in Iraq. "The war in Iraq is not covered to its potential because of how dangerous it is for reporters to cover it," said Liam Madden, a former Marine and member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. "That's left a lot of misconceptions in the minds of the American public about what the true nature of military occupation looks like." Iraq Veterans Against the...

Mortgages set up to fail Hub crisis fueled by scams, unprepared buyers By Scott Van Voorhis Monday, October 1, 2007 - Updated 12h ago Many Boston homeowners now facing foreclosure bought their properties less than a year ago, a Herald review found, raising questions as to the legitimacy of many of those sales. About 1,770 Boston residents were handed foreclosure notices by their lender over the past year, a wave of distress that has slammed heavily into the city’s poorer neighborhoods. More than a third of those homeowners received notices just months after buying their homes, statistics compiled by local...

Subsidized housing tenants who say they have been harassed by the Antioch Police Department descended on City Hall on Tuesday night, demanding a change in law enforcement tactics. Carrying signs that read "Stop Harassment" and "We Want Respect," about two dozen Section 8 recipients took part in the protest. Members of Antioch's United Citizens for Better Neighborhoods gathered for a counterdemonstration, protesting eyesore properties and nightmarish neighbors. "This turnout validates that the voice of the people needs to be heard," organizer Darnell Turner said. "The fact the opposition also showed up in large numbers shows they don't care to hear...

The state housing agency’s “deep and systemic failure” to properly oversee the rapidly dwindling supply of subsidized middle-income housing has led to the deterioration of the buildings, an increase in rents and a waste of taxpayer money, according to a report issued yesterday by the state inspector general, Kristine Hamann. The Division of Housing and Community Renewal’s mismanagement and lack of oversight at 80,000 apartments in 189 projects built under the state’s middle-income Mitchell-Lama housing program also led to unqualified applicants getting subsidized apartments at the expense of legitimate tenants, the report said.

LOS ANGELES—Siding with subsidized tenants, a federal judge ruled poor renters getting federal help are protected by Los Angeles rent control laws. U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins said in a tentative ruling Monday that the city's rules apply even though federal rules allow landlords to opt out of the so-called Section 8 program if they want to charge more money. The decision was in response to a Legal Aid Foundation lawsuit filed on behalf of 22 tenants of an Echo Park building whose owners include a University of California, Los Angeles, real estate professor. But the ruling, expected to...

Nearly 100 Antelope Valley households have lost their Section 8 subsidies in the first five months of 2007, a result of intensive local enforcement efforts aimed at identifying recipients who defraud the aid program or break program rules, officials say. Lancaster and Palmdale, with matching contributions from 5th District County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, have spent their own money to hire Section 8 investigators - a move that has netted hundreds of tenants defrauding the system. "We're very happy with our level of enforcement," said Kelly Long, a spokeswoman for Palmdale's Public Safety Office. "We have worked with Section 8...

... "Any rape case is horrible but this takes it to another level, something you can't think of even in your worst dreams," police spokesman Ted White said. According to the police report, a man knocked on the woman's door at about 9 p.m. and told her he had a flat tire. The mother and son, whom police have not identified, went outside and were ambushed by a group of gun-wielding suspects. The victims told police they were forced back into their home and beaten and sexually assaulted. According to authorities, the men raped, sodomized and beat the woman, then...

After scoring poorly on several key indicators, the Section 8 housing program run by Los Angeles County's Housing Authority has received a "troubled" rating from the federal government. The program receives funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which monitors its performance. On a recent HUD assessment, the county's program scored 73 points out of a possible 145 to earn the rating. The county's Section 8 program offers housing vouchers to some 21,000 low-income households, including about 3,000 in the Antelope Valley. The vouchers allow recipients to pay a portion of their monthly income - often about 30%...

Serious movement in D.C. – and if I hadn't been there, I would not have believed it. For several months Joan Wire and her daughter have been trying to secure an appointment with a highly effective government official we'll simply call Mr. Washington. Joan Wire is the stalwart wife of Mike Wire. Mike is the storied "man on the bridge," the single most critical eyewitness in the saga of TWA Flight 800, the 747 that was inexplicably blown out of the sky on the night of July 17, 1996. The CIA built its notorious zoom-climb animation around Mike's position on...

A number of college athletes, including several football players at the University of Iowa and other Top 25 schools, are living in apartments set aside for the poorest Americans. The investigation found some of the most successful programs in college athletics have players living in subsidized housing, including Virginia Tech, which has 19 players living in Cambridge Square apartments, a federally-subsidized Section 8 complex in Blacksburg paid for by the government to house needy people. Section 8 refers to federal code that includes subsidized housing. As first brought to light by the Des Moines Register, dozens of full-scholarship Hawkeyes players,...

Residents Protest Apartment Living Conditions Contractors Walk Off Job POSTED: 5:26 pm EDT August 18, 2005 UPDATED: 7:09 pm EDT August 18, 2005 COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Residents of a local apartment complex continued to protest what they say are unsafe and unhealthy conditions, NBC 4's Mike Bowersock reported. Contractors installing heating systems at Woodland Meadows apartments said they walked off the job Thursday morning after being told they won't be paid. They've been working at the complex for about a month and have yet to be paid. Residents have been protesting the living conditions all week. "This is America," said...

LEGISLATION PENDING in Congress that would convert a popular federal rent-assistance program into a fixed grant program has public housing authorities around the country worried - and with good reason. Under the legislation, public housing agencies would be limited by caps in the number of poor people they could help, and unable to move thousands off waiting lists for subsidized housing into affordable apartments. Given the nationwide shortage of affordable housing and other recent funding cuts to federal public housing programs, changes to the rent-assistance program known as Section 8 are sure to worsen the problem and force people to...

Tenants told last October to get jobs or else Starting Friday, the Atlanta Housing Authority will begin evicting tenants who are not working, in school or in a work force training program. The authority, which began notifying residents about the new rule last fall, said it is trying to end concentrated poverty by encouraging public housing tenants to become more self-sufficient. Critics of the new rules, however, fear the plan will create a new generation of homeless people as a result of thousands of evictions. "This is going to mean that you will have so many people on the streets...

Matt Damon and George Clooney come back together for political thriller Matt Damon and George Clooney, who are currently working together on Steven Soder-bergh's Ocean's Eleven sequel - Ocean's Twelve, will reteam for the Stephen Gaghan-helmed political thriller Syriana. In addition, Amanda Peet is in final negotiations to join the project. Set up at Warner Bros., Clooney and Soderbergh's studio-based Section Eight will produce the project with shooting slated to begin during the summer. Gaghan adapted the script, which is loosely based on the Robert Baer non-fiction novel See No Evil: The True Story of a Foot Soldier in the...

WITH 14,000 FAMILIES on a waiting list for a federally funded rent-assistance program, it is unfortunate that the Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) allowed portions of its allotted rental vouchers to go unused, triggering a permanent reduction in the total number of vouchers paid for by the federal government this year and in subsequent years. What's worse is that the cut in voucher funding comes at a time when federal support for affordable and public housing programs nationwide is being slashed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The city's working poor and low-income families can hardly...

Calling all ant-capitalists. This is to alert you to a new film – “Capitalism and other Kids’ Stuff” – that has recently been uploaded to the www and can be seen at www.socialist-tv.com , and which argues the anti-capitalist case in simple language.