homeless

Criminalizing Homeless for Sleeping Outside Is Cruel, Federal Appeals Court Rules

A federal appeals court ruled the Eighth Amendment against cruel and inhuman punishment prohibits the city of Boise from prosecuting homeless individuals who sleep outside on public property when they have no home or bed in a shelter.
Six current and former residents of Boise, Idaho, sued the city over two ordinances that were used to criminalize them between 2007 and 2009.

San Francisco: Major Convention Cancels Due to Homeless Problems of Drugs, Behavior and Feces

Tourism is San Francisco’s biggest industry, bringing in $9 billion a year, employing 80,000 people and generating more than $725 million in local taxes.  A major convention canceled future plans due to the open drug use, threatening behavior, and mental illness that are common on the streets. [...]

Hepatitis Spikes as Poverty and Isolation Take Hold Among America’s Forgotten

DETROIT — The first signs that something was amiss surfaced in the weeks before the 2016 election, when public-health officials began to notice one patient after another walking into a clinic, or hospital emergency room in the Detroit metropolitan area complaining of the same symptoms: nausea and vomiting, pains in their stomach and joints, fatigue, fever, loss of appetite, yellowing of the skin and eyes, dark urine, and pale-colored feces.
It didn’t take long for the medical community to hone in on the culprit: hepatitis A.