Construction Maison

In 2013, Randy Dillard was living with his four sons and a daughter in an apartment at 198th Street and Bainbridge in the Bronx. The windows were broken; mold and mildew streaked the walls. In the winter, Dillard’s family had to boil water on the stove to bathe; there was no heat or hot water. When the New York City Housing Authority conducted an inspection of the apartment on behalf of Section 8, the federal rent assistance program that financed Dillard ’s rental, the unit failed the test, and Section 8 stopped paying Dillard ’s landlord, demanding that he make repairs. That winter, Dillard was hospitalized for two months with a bout of emphysema; when he came out, he was served with eviction papers for nonpayment of rent. advertisement “I stood in the middle of my hallway looking around my apartment thinking: What am I going to do with my stuff?” Dillard tells Fast Company . “I told myself: I’m going to end up homeless. I’m going to wind up in a shelter.” Dillard got word of a Bron...

NEW ORLEANS — On Tuesday, Housing Secretary Dr . Ben Carson toured two mixed- income housing complexes in New Orleans and addressed concerns over budget cuts that could affect those who rely on low income- income housing . Dr. Carson got an inside look at apartments in Bienville Basin, which is the old Iberville projects, and Columbia Parc, which is the old Saint Bernard projects . Carson believes these "mixed-income" complexes are what's working in the city. Mixed-income means some people are on Section 8, while others pay full market value. Advertisement Both Bienville Basin and Columbia Parc were able to rebuild and renovate due in large part to federal assistance grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Local HousingNOLA representatives fear that, with potential budget cuts on the federal level, the loss of that essential funding could make it impossible to continue their efforts. Keep up with local news, weather and current events with the W...

Every metropolitan area in the nation is racially segregated, and Los Angeles is no exception. We tolerate residential segregation because we’re convinced that it happened informally — because of personal choices and private discrimination. But what cemented our separate neighborhoods is something most of us have forgotten — government’s unconstitutional and systematic insistence on segregated housing in the mid-20th century, establishing patterns that persist to this day. The 2010 census data show that 60% of Los Angeles’s African Americans live in neighborhoods where few whites are present. The exposure of blacks to whites is as minimal as it is in Chicago or Newark; concentrated African American poverty is as common in L.A. as in New York or Pittsburgh. The New Deal created the nation’s first civilian public housing in the 1930s, segregated not only in the South, but nationwide. In his autobiography, the African American poet Langston Hughes recounted his adolescence in Worl...

LAWRENCE — A man and woman who live 46 miles away in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, were among 43 people teams of detectives arrested on Wednesday during another targeted drug suppression sweep throughout the city.  Teams of local detectives, state troopers and federal agents descended on various neighborhoods in Lawrence in the third organized operation of its kind this summer.  Previously, 80 arrests were made in July and August during similar sweeps. Wednesday's operation may be the last such operation involving local , state and federal authorities this summer, said police Chief James Fitzpatrick .  Detectives from Lawrence, Methuen, Andover and North Andover along with state troopers, county correctional officers and federal agents were involved in Wednesday's efforts, police said.  Randy Cheever, 26, and Hallie Wilson, 28, both of 16 Mobile Coach Lane , Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, were both arrested and charged with heroin offenses after an investigation in the ...

P ilots dislike the term “near-miss”. It’s a phrase that conjures in laymen minds two planes, inches apart, averting catastrophic disaster by a matter of seconds. Perhaps one aircraft’s wing scrapes the undercarriage of another, sending sparks flying . Enter “near miss” into a search engine and the results in the news section would have you believe that planes are regularly dodging each other in a sky filled with chaos. The reality is much drier. “We don’t use the term near-miss,” explains Martin Rolfe , chief executive officer of NATS, in charge of air traffic control in the UK. This is fine Credit: © Roger Bamber / Alamy/Roger Bamber / Alamy “We call it a loss of separation. Broadly speaking, that is when two aircraft have gotten closer together than they should have done. And that doesn’t mean it is hugely dangerous.” Loss of separation is certainly less sexy than near-miss - but what should the separation be? How far apart should planes fly? The separation protocols are govern...

- Some university vice chancellors in Nigeria have condemned the new cut-off marks introduced by JAMB - Also the Academic Staff Union of Universities has rejected the new cut-off of 120 for UTME - According to those critical of the new directive, it is said that it would mean a lowering of educational standards in the country Following the announcement that the cut-off marks for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) has been reduced to 120, there has been some backlash from Nigerians and those in the educational sector. Vice-Chancellors and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have spearheaded the rejection of the decision of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board to peg admission cut -off mark at 120 for universities and 100 for polytechnics, monotechnics and colleges of education. ASUU said the action was in tandem “with the dream of the present government to destroy public universities in the country.” Below are some quotes from some vice chanc...

Photo by Andrea Yori | CC BY 2.0 In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance , agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations , and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year. Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus . According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “b...