Apartment Choice

By Sarah Butrymowicz and Meredith Kolodner Alduha Leon and Jared Sanders, roommates at Savannah State University , dined on hot dogs in their apartment on Thanksgiving Day of their sophomore year. They had decided to skip feasting with family in Atlanta to pick up extra hours at their airport jobs loading luggage onto planes. Payday wasn’t until Friday, though, and Leon only had $5 left on his food stamps card . During the three years they spent at Savannah State , Sanders and Leon struggled to pay their tuition, fees and living expenses. They accumulated more than $50,000 in loans between the two of them, despite working up to 40 hours a week. After exhausting themselves working late or overnight shifts so they wouldn’t have to miss class, and finding their grades suffering, they dropped out in 2015, joining a growing pool of Georgians who have debt but no degree. More than 108,000 students who had taken out federal loans withdrew from Georgia’s public colleges and universities bet...

Mexico's surveillance scandal widened Wednesday to encompass a pair of prominent human rights attorneys probing a multiple homicide case whose victims include a photojournalist and an activist. The internet watchdog Citizen Lab said Karla Micheel Salas and David Pena were targeted in 2015, weeks after they questioned prosecutors ' handling of the killings of activist Nadia Vera , journalist Ruben Espinosa and three other women in a Mexico City apartment in July that year. The victims were tortured and shot to death. The lawyers' cellphones were targeted by messages designed to infect them with the same spyware that Citizen Lab previously determined was sent to 19 Mexican individuals or groups, the cyber-sleuths said in a research note. One said she believed she was infected by it. Other Mexican targets of the sophisticated Pegasus spyware , made by Israel- based NSO Group , have included journalists investigating high - level corruption , opposition ...

Another ‘nonsensical’ proposal from Levine Assemblyman Marc Levine reminds me of that absurd bobble-head dog in the back of my grandmother’s Buick. Ever-present, he is reliably nonsensical in both logic and form. His most recent grand idea to create yet another corporate tax to generate revenue for affordable housing is destined to become one more unworkable scheme of the very same California government that cannot even afford to provide its citizens with a decent level of basic services, due in large part to the graft, cronyism and vote-buying that pervades the entire system. And Levine’s plan provides the added bonus of making California an even more inhospitable environment for job creation. While California government coffers swallow money with reckless abandon, the state can barely provide even sub-par services. Levine remains perfectly content to spread California’s tax spoils to the politically well-connected and a panoply of poorly managed, highly wasteful (and often counte...

Manchester Arena to reopen, with fundraising concert helmed by Noel Gallagher Her next of kin will receive $324,000. "The money is given as a gift, so it's up to them what they do with it", Murphy said. The fund , which was established after the horrific incident at Grande's show on May 22, has raised more than $23 million. US Allies Warn NKorea Against Firing Missiles at Guam The US territory in the Western Pacific Ocean is used as a strategic military base and 6,000 American troops are stationed there. There's a sense of patriotism among those who cite the island's history of Guam residents serving in the US military. Trump business policy forum says disbanding due to 'distraction' And a third, the former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick , left the council when Trump issued his immigration ban earlier this year. Trump had doubled down on his position that the violence in Charlottesville was perpetrated by " many sides". SpaceX, NASA, and ...

When American doctor Stephen Yoon thinks of North Korea, he does not think of ballistic missile tests or the threat of nuclear war. He remembers instead a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, who suffered from spastic quadriplegia that made her unable to stand or sit. Five years ago, she went to Yoon's developmental-disability program at Pyongyang Medical University Hospital , where she received treatments from Yoon and his team of local doctors. After almost a year of exercise therapy and some surgeries, she walked out of the hospital on her own. The event was heralded in North Korean state media as a national victory, but it received no notice in the U.S., where few people even know about the roughly 200 Americans like Yoon who work and live under the rule of Kim Jong Un. Carefully monitored by the regime, they have come and gone for years, doing educational, medical or infrastructural work, and sometimes raising families in a nation that has been officially at war with the ...

MOUNT PLEASANT - A fire at a 20-unit apartment complex Saturday morning left nine families displaced and sent one man to the hospital. The fire started at about 5:30 a.m. in Indian Hills Apartments , 4824 Indian Hills Drive , said South Shore Fire Department Chief William Bouma. It's the same building where a large fire took place in 2003, but the damage was not as bad this time because of safety precautions, Bouma said. The fire Saturday morning entirely gutted the apartment where it started and there was smoke and water damage to some of the other apartments, he said. Nine of the 20 units were left uninhabitable , said Anne Tabbert, a public support coordinator with the Red Cross, which responded to the scene. Grace Church, 3626 Highway 31, Caledonia, was prepared in case a shelter was needed, but it wasn't, Tabbert said. People were able to find alternative temporary shelter , she said. The man in the apartment where it started was taken to the hospital, Bouma said. His ...

UConn’s place in the Hartford skyline . Hartford — For nearly a half-century, the University of Connecticut has had no place to call its own in the state’s capital city. Today that changes as Connecticut’s flagship university opens the doors of its new $140- million downtown branch campus on Prospect Street . The arrival of the campus, which comes after five years of false starts and setbacks, is a milestone for the university and the city of Hartford. Hundreds attended the grand opening ceremony downtown Wednesday morning . For UConn, it marks the institution’s return from the suburbs into the heart of the city – where the school first opened its Greater Hartford branch in 1939. It moved to West Hartford in 1970. The university, in the years since, had been able to continue to claim a “presence” downtown. Some of UConn’s graduate business programs are housed in a space it leases in 100 Constitution Plaza, and the university’s basketball and ice hockey teams play games in the XL ...

by Alec MacGillis Maryland’s two U.S. senators and four of its U.S. House representatives , all Democrats, sent a letter today to the large real- estate company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump ’s son-in-law and senior adviser, demanding information about the company’s management of 17 apartment complexes it owns in the state. The letter to Kushner Companies came in response to a May 23 article co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine investigating management practices at the rental complexes, most of which are in the suburbs of Baltimore, as well as an article this week in The Baltimore Sun that revealed additional details . The original story described the highly aggressive legal tactics that Kushner Companies has used to pursue tenants who owed back rent or had left their leases early — even tenants who left the complexes well before the company bought them in 2012 and the years following. In many of the hundreds of cases brough...