Homeless population in city of 12 million grew rapidly during the pandemic, in what activists say is a humanitarian emergency
ALT
Latin America’s largest city, São Paulo, is reportedly planning to open a campsite for rough sleepers in response to a Covid-fuelled homelessness crisis that has forced thousands on to the streets.
The homeless population in Brazil’s economic capital, which has about 12 million residents, grew by more than 30% during the coronavirus pandemic in what activists have called a humanitarian emergency.
On Saturday morning one of São Paulo’s 31,000-plus homeless residents stood outside the city’s Museum of Sacred Art with a tatty sign that spoke to the scale of the social catastrophe. “Estou comendo do lixo,” it read. “I’m eating from the trash.”
According to a report in one local newspaper on Monday, the city hall is now planning to create a campground where São Paulo’s homeless can erect tents and be given access to bathroom and laundry facilities. “The mayor has said that, given the acuteness of the city’s circumstances, money would not be an obstacle,” the city’s new human rights and citizenship secretary, Soninha Francine, told the Folha de São Paulo.
Francine said it was an emergency that so many families were having to sleep rough because they could no longer afford to pay rent or for cooking gas.
Official statistics reveal a dramatic situation in Brazil’s biggest city: according to São Paulo’s city hall, there were people living in tents and wooden shacks in nearly 6,800 different areas last year, compared with only about 2,000 two years earlier. Their inhabitants reportedly include a growing number of women, families and elderly citizens.
Forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam liberated Saigon, soon renamed Ho Chi Minh City, from the last remnants of the U.S. puppet regime there on Apr. 30, 1975, now celebrated annually as Reunification Day.
just wanted to remind people of this in the current context of banning abortion and the recent gun violence by a man believing great replacement theory.
racists desperately want more white babies to be born. they live in absolute terror of becoming a racial minority in America.
This isn’t anything new either, with Rand Paul openly discussing having civil rights “handled locally” and comparing desegregating a lunch counter to bringing a gun in to a restaurant back in 2010.
“I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall; not seeing the wall, looking past the wall; looking at this night, inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff.”
As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. […]
The CIA presence in Mogadishu is part of Washington’s intensifying counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which includes targeted strikes by US Special Operations forces, drone attacks and expanded surveillance operations. The US agents “are here full time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told me. […]
According to well-connected Somali sources, the CIA is reluctant to deal directly with Somali political leaders, who are regarded by US officials as corrupt and untrustworthy. Instead, the United States has Somali intelligence agents on its payroll. Somali sources with knowledge of the program described the agents as lining up to receive $200 monthly cash payments from Americans. “They support us in a big way financially,” says the senior Somali intelligence official. “They are the largest [funder] by far.”
2016
Every time I see something about Obama Admin stuff in Somalia I just remember how the US government backed a bunch of enthnonationalist former dictators in their bloody attempt at re-conquering Ethiopia and how those same dictators were essential in maintaining US influence and dominance in Somalia during this period and how the entire africa section of the US state department is currently stacked with people who think that Meles Zenawi was like, an okay non-evil dude because he helped them out in Somalia
The essence of Siad Barre’s foreign policy was Somali nationalism and irredentism, with a focus on uniting all Somali people under one flag. This policy constituted a major threat to Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, where the vast majority of the inhabitants are Somalis. […]
With a key communications’ base in Asmara, the United States countered the Somali arms buildup with a major military assistance program to the Ethiopian regime of Emperor Haile Selassie. Armed clashes between Somalia and Ethiopia took place on a regular basis, mainly in the Ogaden region […]
In 1975, U.S. policy toward Somalia took an ironic 180-degree turn, when a military coup in Ethiopia overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in favor of a Marxist pro-Soviet group known as the DERGUE, under the leadership of Mengistu Haile Merriam. […]
As U.S.-Ethiopian relations cooled in the aftermath of the 1975 Mengistu coup, U.S.-Somali relations warmed. The United State increased military and economic assistance to Somalia, and the U.S. Embassy in Mogadishu became one of the biggest American diplomatic missions in Africa. However, the U.S. faced a dilemma in its relations with Somalia because Washington did not want to be responsible for supporting Somali aggression against the Ethiopian Ogaden. Thus, Washington had to walk a fine line between the supply of defensive weapons to the Somali army, while parrying Siad Barre’s constant demand for offensive weapons with which to attack Ethiopia. […]
Siad Barre attacked Ethiopia in the aftermath of the 1975 Mengistu takeover, hoping to take advantage of the disarray in the Ethiopian military. In order to counter Somalia’s initial military successes in the Ogaden in 1977, Ethiopia called for assistance from the Soviet Union, who financed the arrival of 5,000 Cuban troops. The Cubans helped defeat the invading Somali army. […]
Human rights groups in the U.S. and elsewhere criticized the American policy of providing military support to the Siad Barre regime. There were efforts in Congress to cut off military assistance to Somalia. These succeeded in 1989, so Washington had to maintain relations with Siad Barre solely through the supply of humanitarian and economic assistance.
“A German interior ministry report says a three-year-long review found 327 employees linked to right-wing extremism.”
“A total of 860 staff were reviewed during the survey period. Preconditions for further intelligence processing were met in 38 percent of those cases.”
ALT
