Fresh protests erupt in Belarus ahead of national strike ultimatum

Issued on: 25/10/2020 - 

People attend an opposition rally to reject the Belarusian presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus October 25, 2020.présidentielle, le 25 octobre 2020. © Stringer, Reuters

Text by:NEWS WIRES

Tens of thousands of people marched through Minsk and other cities on Sunday, keeping pressure on Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko a day before the opposition threatens to launch a national strike if he refuses to resign.

Crowds streamed through the capital shouting "strike", waving red-and-white opposition flags and beating drums on the 11th straight weekend of mass protests since a disputed election plunged the country into turmoil.

Twelve metro stations were closed, helmeted riot police patrolled the streets and mobile internet services were disrupted in Minsk. Two journalists were detained ahead of the protest, a local journalists' association said.

Tens of people were detained and security forces used tear gas in the western town of Lida, the Russian news agency RIA quoted the regional branch of the interior ministry as saying.

A former Soviet collective farm manager, Lukashenko has ruled Belarus for more than a quarter of a century and has shown little inclination to quit, buoyed by loans and the offer of military support from traditional ally Russia.

The president's main opponents have been jailed or fled into exile following the Aug. 9 election, which Lukashenko's opponents accuse him of rigging to win a sixth straight term. He denies electoral fraud.

Nationwide strike ultimatum

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, his main electoral challenger, has led calls from exile for a national strike to begin on Monday if Lukashenko refuses to release all political prisoners and resigns to make way for a new election.

"Today at 23:59 the term of the People's Ultimatum will expire, and if the demands are not met, the Belarusians will start a national strike," she said in statement.

Lukashenko has signalled that he would ignore the ultimatum.

The United States, the European Union, Britain and Canada have imposed sanctions against a string of senior officials in Belarus accused of fraud and human rights abuses in the wake of the presidential election.

Lukashenko has accused Western countries of meddling in the internal affairs of Belarus and trying to instigate a violent uprising against him.

In a call with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday, he said Belarus and Russia were ready to respond jointly to external threats, Belarusian state television reported.

(REUTERS)  

Belarus: Over 100,000 protest against Lukashenko ahead of strike ultimatum

Police used stun grenades and reports say nearly 130 people were arrested. The rally drew more than 100,000 protesters, a day before the opposition's deadline for strongman Alexander Lukashenko to resign.


Watch video 02:50  https://p.dw.com/p/3kPsr

Tens of thousands rally again in Belarus

More than 100,000 Belarusians flooded the streets of the capital Minsk on Sunday, on the final day before a deadline set by the opposition for President Alexander Lukashenko to resign, following months of protests. 

People streamed in from different directions along Victors' Avenue to the Hero City Obelisk on a central square that commemorates World War II.

Read more:Lukashenko: Belarus and Russia will face external threats together 

Videos taken by bystanders at the demonstrations in Minsk showed a convoy of buses carrying security personnel to the city center, along with metal cordons. Meanwhile, officials shut 12 metro stations and restricted mobile internet in an effort to stop people from gathering. 

The Interior Ministry issued an advance warning that people should not attend demonstrations for which no permit has been issued.

Nearly 130 arrests

Human rights group Vesna-96 said 128 people were detained, and shared a list of their names online.

Journalist Hanna Liubakova told DW that, as with previous protests, police moved in toward the end of the day to make arrests.

"Riot police attacked peaceful protesters with stun grenades and we also heard shootings — police shot rubber bullets as well — and there is at least one confirmed wounded person," she said.

An interior ministry spokeswoman said it was too early to say how many people had been injured or detained. "We will only know by the morning if there are any injured people," Olga Chemodanova was cited by the Russian news agency RIA as saying.

Some journalists covering the protests were also arrested, local media reported. 

Several protesters were detained by police in the town of Lida in western Belarus, RIA cited the regional branch of the interior ministry as saying. Police reportedly fired tear gas at protesters. 

Read more:Belarus: Thousands turn out for protests despite police threat to open fire 

'Resign or face strike'

Exiled civil rights activist Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and opposition protesters this month gave embattled strongman Lukashenko a deadline of two weeks to resign, put an end to police violence and release political prisoners, warning that he would otherwise face a general strike. 

Although some members of the opposition have been released from prison, there are no more concessions in sight from Lukashenko's administration. 

Read more:Opinion: EU's Sakharov Prize for Belarus dissidents sends a strong signal 

Tsikhanouskaya said later in the day that the national strike would begin on Monday after the government responded with force to the protests.

"The regime once again showed Belarusians that force is the only thing it is capable of," she wrote in a statement. "That's why tomorrow, October 26, a national strike will begin."


Watch video 02:10  https://p.dw.com/p/3kPsr

EU agrees to target Belarus with new sanctions

Tsikhanouskaya fled Belarus after an August vote saw Lukashenko claim victory for a sixth term. During a visit to Copenhagen on Friday to meet Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod she called for a repeat ballot “as soon as possible,” and in a separate statement said a date for the next vote must be determined by the end of the year. 

Uniformed police have repeatedly cracked down on protesters, demonstrating against Lukashenko’s rule, following the vote which several western countries and officials denounced as rigged. 

Read more: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya on wanted list in Belarus, Russia 

Lukashenko: Belarus and Russia will face external threats together

Embattled Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has told the US that his country and Russia are united against external threats. Opposition protesters gathered again to rally, and have called for a national strike.



President Alexander Lukashenko spoke with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a phone call on Saturday, in which the Belarusian leader said his country and Russia were ready to respond jointly to external threats. 

The remarks, reported by Russia's Interfax news agency, come as protesters continue to call for Lukashenko's resignation and as he faces the prospect of a national strike that could begin on Monday.

Read more: Putin pledges a $1.5 billion loan while meeting Lukashenko in Sochi

"Russia does not interfere in the internal affairs of Belarus. At the same time, the countries are ready to jointly respond to emerging external threats," Lukashenko is said to have told Pompeo, according to Interfax which cited Belarus state television. 

"By mutual opinion, after Pompeo's February visit to Minsk, the situation has changed dramatically, new challenges have arisen and are emerging," the president said.

Read more: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya calls for German mediation in Belarus

The US has already imposed sanctions on Belarusian officials, following violent crackdowns at demonstrations in Minsk and across the country. 

During the call, the US State Department said it had urged Belarusian authorities to ''engage in a meaningful dialogue with genuine representatives of civil society,'' including Lukashenko's leading election opponent, opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. 

The US also reiterated its "strong support for the independence and sovereignty of Belarus,'' the State Department said. 

Read more: Opinion: EU's Sakharov Prize for Belarus dissidents sends a strong signal

Watch video 05:12 https://p.dw.com/p/3kOYt 
Tsikhanouskaya reacts to Sakharov Prize win

Protests persist 

Hundreds of women marched across the capital, Minsk, in heavy rain on Saturday, as protesters continue to demand Lukashenko's resignation. The protests have been going on continuously since the disputed presidential election in early August.

Read more: Belarus opposition wins European Parliament rights award

The women carried umbrellas in the white and red colors of the opposition flag, holding placards that stated their professions and chanted ''Go away!'' as a demand for the president's resignation.

According to the Viasna human rights center in Belarus, some 10 protesters were arrested on Saturday. 

The Belarusian political crisis was triggered by official results of the August 9 presidential election, which gave Lukashenko a victory with 80% of the vote — a result the opposition has insisted was rigged.

Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist since 1994, has blamed the US and its European allies of fomenting unrest in the ex-Soviet country.

Read more: Belarus: Thousands turn out for protests despite police threat to open fire

Watch video01:59 https://p.dw.com/p/3kOYt
Violent crackdown on Belarus protests

jcg/shs (Reuters, AP)

Protesters and police clash as thousands mark one year of Iraq demonstrations

Thousands of anti-government demonstrators took to the streets in the capital Baghdad, demanding an end to corruption and Iran's intervention. Violence broke out between police and demonstrators.





Clashes broke out between Iraqi security forces and protesters in Iraq's capital city Baghdad on Sunday, as thousands took part in nationwide demonstrations on the one-year anniversary of anti-government protests.

In Baghdad, security forces fired tear gas canisters to disperse crowds. Some protesters hurled rocks as well as Molotov cocktails at police.

Security forces "were armed with only clubs and batons," Interior Ministry spokesman Saad Maan told press.

About 50 police and protesters were slightly injured, reported AFP news agency, citing police and medical sources.

Peaceful demonstrations went ahead in several cities in the south including Basra, Najaf and Nasiriyah.

The cross-sectarian, youth-led protest movement first broke out in October 2019.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets to decry government corruption, poor services and high unemployment in Baghdad and the country's south.

They also accuse Iraq's ruling class of permitting Iranian intervention in their country.

During the last round of protests, about 600 protesters were killed and 30,000 wounded in nationwide clashes after Iraqi forces used live ammunition and tear gas to disperse crowds.

The protests helped usher in Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in May, but he has yet to deliver on any major reforms.


Watch video02:32 https://p.dw.com/p/3kQlQ

Iraq: Biggest protest day since fall of Saddam Hussein
'We still want our country back'

The violence broke out after security forces stopped protesters from crossing a bridge leading to the heavily fortified Green Zone, home to foreign embassies and government offices.

Security forces deployed water cannon to block demonstrators from bridges leading to the zone.

"It's been a year and we still want our country back," said Batool Hussein, a female demonstrator in central Baghdad's Tahrir Square — the heart of the protests. "We still want to unseat the corrupt from power, and we still want to know who killed the protesters last year."

Activists have long complained of a campaign of kidnappings and killings to intimidate them into halting demonstrations.

Uday Jaberi, an activist in the southern city of Nasiriyah, sent an angry message to politicians: "These young people didn't come out for nothing; they came to shake up the thrones you've been sitting on, you corrupt people!" he said.

"Young people who have been wounded and their families lost loved ones all for Iraq," he added.

After sunset, Nasiriyah's main square, fireworks shot up into the air as protesters pitched tents to camp out.

Kadhimi warns protesters, security forces

On Saturday, Kadhimi gave an address attempting to appease protesters while warning against an escalation. He repeatedly urged security forces not to fire at demonstrators, but also called on protesters to "respect the uniform."

Parliamentary elections scheduled for June 2021 — brought forward partly in response to protesters' demands — would go ahead, Kadhimi added.

Watch video05:43  https://p.dw.com/p/3kQlQ
Iraq: Consequences of corruption
kmm/shs (AFP, dpa)

Chileans celebrate clear referendum win for rewriting Pinochet-era constitution


Issued on: 26/10/2020 -

Text by:NEWS WIRES|

Video by:FRANCE 24

Chileans poured into the country's main squares on Sunday night after voters gave a ringing endorsement to a plan to tear up the country's Pinochet-era constitution in favour of a new charter drafted by citizens.


In Santiago's Plaza Italia, the focus of the massive and often violent social protests last year which sparked the demand for a new magna carta, fireworks rose above a crowd of tens of thousands of jubilant people singing in unison as the word "rebirth" was beamed onto a tower above.

With more than three quarters of the votes counted, 78.12% of voters had opted for a new charter. Many have expressed hopes that a new text will temper an unabashedly capitalist ethos with guarantees of more equal rights to healthcare, pensions and education.

"This triumph belongs to the people, it's thanks to everyone's efforts that we are at this moment of celebration," Daniel, 37, told Reuters in Santiago's Plaza Nunoa. "What makes me happiest is the participation of the youth, young people wanting to make changes."

Chile's President Sebastian Pinera said if the country had been divided by the protests and debate over whether to approve or reject plans for a new charter, from now on they should unite behind a new text that provided "a home for everyone."it

In Santiago, ‘huge party’ welcomes end of ‘dictatorship chapter’ in Chile

02:26
https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20201026-chileans-vote-in-favour-of-changing-pinochet-era-constitution-according-to-partial-results

The centre-right leader, whose popularity ratings plummeted to record lows during the unrest and have remained in the doldrums, spoke to those who wanted to keep the present constitution credited with making Chile one of Latin America's economic success stories.

Any new draft must incorporate "the legacy of past generations, the will of present generations and the hopes of generations to come," he said.

He gave a nod to fears that the high expectations placed in a new charter cannot be met, saying: "This referendum is not the end, it is the start of a road we must walk towards a new constitution."

As votes were counted on live television around the country, spontaneous parties broke out on street corners and in squares around the country. Drivers honked car horns, some as revellers danced on their roofs, and others banged pots and pans. The flag of the country's indigenous Mapuche people, who will seek greater recognition in the new charter, was ubiquitous.

Four fifths of voters said they wanted the new charter to be drafted by a specially-elected body of citizens - made up of half women and half men - over a mixed convention of lawmakers and citizens, highlighting general mistrust in Chile's political class.


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Members of a 155-seat constitutional convention will be voted in by April 2021 and have up to a year to agree a draft text, with proposals approved by a two-thirds majority.

Among issues likely to be at the fore are recognition of Chile's Mapuche indigenous population, powers of collective bargaining, water and land rights and privatised systems providing healthcare, education and pensions.

Chileans will then vote again on whether they accept the text or want to revert to the previous constitution.

The National Mining Society (Sonami), which groups the companies in the sector into the world's largest copper producer, said it hoped for "broad agreement on the principles and norms" that determine the sector's coexistence with Chilean citizens and that the regulatory certainty that have allowed the sector to flourish would continue.

She Couldn’t Afford Her Rent And Had Nowhere To Turn. That’s When She Joined A Tenant Union.

“I don’t know how people do it alone without some sort of community backing.”

Lam Thuy VoBuzzFeed News Reporter


Posted on October 21, 2020

Rene Morrison courtesy of SMC Tenants Council


The documents arrived paper-clipped and folded in Tiana McGuire’s mailbox in early September. She owed three months’ worth in rent, $3,050, it said on the packet of pages that her landlord, Sullivan Management Company (SMC), had shoved into her and her neighbors’ mailboxes in their apartment building in Oakland.

“Pay rent in 15 days or quit,” the first page read.

This was the notice McGuire had dreaded ever since she stopped paying rent in June. Even though she knew evictions had been suspended in Oakland since late March, the letter made it clear: She had two weeks to pay the rent she owed or she had to vacate her home of the last seven years.


She felt her stomach drop to her knees when she read the notice.

“With the loss of work and facing uncertainty at every angle,” McGuire said, she was at the end of her resiliency. She didn’t know where she’d live if she were kicked out. The long-term Bay Area resident had seen her chosen home, Oakland, gentrify and become unaffordable for her, a 40-year-old service worker. If she had to leave this apartment, she’d have to leave the region altogether.

“It felt like shit when it happened,” said McGuire, whose income as a body piercer and cocktail server dried up when the COVID-19 pandemic brought much of the US economy to a grinding halt. “I’d been hedging my bets ‘til this happened.”

Across the country, millions of out-of-work renters like McGuire are unable to pay rent and are amassing an increasingly insurmountable debt. Roughly a third of all US households rent their homes, with rates being higher in urban areas. A recent study by national housing experts suggested 30–40 million renters are at risk of being evicted in August. And like McGuire, many don’t know where to turn for help.

For McGuire, relief came two days after the letter arrived. But not from the government officials. Not from authorities who could potentially stop illegal evictions. It came from her neighbors and fellow SMC tenants.


Courtesy of Tiana McGuire
McGuire in her garden


Over the last couple of months, tenants who found themselves in a similar situation as McGuire had begun to organize a council that spanned across several units. They set up an encrypted communications platform to safely talk about their collective demands. They had written three letters to the company, asking for rent forgiveness. They got no meaningful responses from the landlord, but then, six months into the pandemic, SMC suddenly asked for people to pay their debt or leave.

McGuire had been loosely aware of the tenants’ efforts to collectively address issues with their landlord, but this eviction notice gave her the necessary push to get involved. And so she contacted the SMC tenants council.

It turned out that, according to the council, at least 100 other people had received the same paperwork. While the council’s organizers did not have an immediate answer for McGuire as to whether this notice was legal or not, they immediately activated their network of lawyers, tenant advocates, and neighbors to find out whether McGuire and other SMC renters were at risk of being booted from their home.

McGuire attended an emergency Zoom meeting with the tenants council and other renters and came away from it with a sense of relief.

“The meeting did not necessarily answer questions,” said McGuire. But “I had space to take a breath because there were people in conversations with different lawyer groups, and they were all going to report back. […] I had enough space to let a week go by without it having it at the forefront of my mind.”


Erik Mcgregor / Getty Images
A housing protest in Brooklyn, New York, July 5, 2020.


With the pandemic ripping its way through the US, and the economy in freefall, many renters find themselves navigating legislative chaos that involves all levels of government, local, state, and federal.

On local and state levels, moratoriums varied wildly, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. The state of Oregon, for example, will protect tenants from late fees for nonpayments while Minnesota will not. In Montana, landlords can start the process of eviction if tenants don’t pay rent, even if they can’t physically remove the tenants who are experiencing hardship due to COVID-19. The list of pressure points for landlords that the Eviction Lab tracks is long and includes things like cutting off utilities or reporting tenants to credit bureaus. And each state seems to protect tenants from some, but not all, of these methods to apply pressure.

On a federal level, the CARES Act protected renters from evictions temporarily, but the Trump administration took the biggest step to protect renters in early September, when it tasked the CDC to issue a national eviction moratorium — intending to keep renters like McGuire from being kicked out of their homes.

But it’s not as simple as that.

Renters have to jump through a number of hoops in order to stop from being evicted. For instance, to be protected under the moratorium, they have to sign a letter to their landlord, agreeing to a series of statements under perjury. One of these statements reads:


I understand that I must still pay rent or make a housing payment, and comply with other obligations that I may have under my tenancy, lease agreement, or similar contract. I further understand that fees, penalties, or interest for not paying rent or making a housing payment on time as required by my tenancy, lease agreement, or similar contract may still be charged or collected

Additionally, housing industry lobbyists and landlords have launched a barrage of lawsuits in local, state, and federal courts, challenging protections of renters from evictions and arguing that the federal government does not have the power to issue a blanket ban on evictions, according to the Washington Post. One of the cases was reportedly brought forward by an organization with financial ties to conservative billionaire and political donor Charles Koch. Facing increased pressure, the CDC amended its guidelines, allowing for landlords to begin eviction filings, even if they wouldn’t be executed until 2021.

Advocates across the nation are warning that the national moratorium is a temporary measure at best and that renters are facing an inevitable eviction tsunami once those protections are lifted. And a preliminary analysis from the Eviction Lab, which tracks evictions in 17 cities found that the new moratorium slowed down the number of new evictions filed to housing court, but didn’t entirely stop them. Since the pandemic, the Eviction Lab has collected data on more than 50,000 evictions in these 17 cities, which gives a sense of the scale of the problem faced all across the country.

All this legal chaos has forced a lot of people to take manners and form tenants councils like the one that is helping McGuire.

One month after McGuire received the notice to “pay or quit,” she found herself skating through the street in front of her landlord’s office during a car rally organized by the SMC tenants council, holding a sign that read in all caps: “CANCEL RENT. HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT.”

“It felt invigorating, honestly,” said McGuire about going to the protest. “The instant camaraderie, seeing people’s faces real-time in the flesh that I had only seen on Zoom calls — it was so empowering. We’re all real, and we’re all really here together doing this.”


A few days after the rally, McGuire got a message from the council. Its efforts had paid off. SMC had not only addressed the tenants collectively through the council, it had also dismissed the notice it had sent out. In an email to residents, the company wrote:

“There has been some confusion between State and County laws. Please let this email serve as a formal remission of the 15 day notice previously served upon you.”

In a statement provided to BuzzFeed News, SMC acknowledged the actions of the council and said it was, “committed to ensuring a stable living environment for all our tenants clientele. We do rely on rent in order to cover all expenses as well as ensure a safe and habitable dwelling for all tenants. Recently, we served the California Statute 3088, 15 Day Notices seeking either payment of rent or confirmation of Covid-19 related hardship. In light of the response we received, a decision has been made to rescind the served notices.”

“We remain hopeful that Covid-19 pandemic will soon pass and our tenants can, once again, be more confident and their abilities to timely pay the rent. For those tenants who remain in a difficult financial situation, Sullivan Management remains confident that a meaningful compromise can be reached that meets all parties’ objectives,” the statement read.

McGuire is ecstatic about this outcome and said she was “going to throw those papers in the recycling and feel really good about not having those papers in the house.”

“It’s done for me, and it’s done for everyone else who received that letter and is on the council,” she said. “And it’s done for tenants who don’t even know that we have a council. And that feels awesome.”

Jordan Rome never thought she’d find herself going through a spreadsheet of tenants, calling each one of them to see if they’d sign a letter of demands to their landlord. She never considered herself an organizer.


Adam Blaszkiewicz courtesy of Jordan Rome
Jordan Rome


But in the spring of 2020, Rome was left with two choices: either get her Chicago neighbors on board to organize a campaign to reduce rent or end up on the street.


A filmmaker and restaurant worker, Rome had applied for unemployment in March but didn’t receive anything in June. “There was fire under my ass,” said Rome, who didn’t have anyone else to fall back on for financial help. “I didn’t come from a trust fund.”

As she was searching online for information about the pandemic, she stumbled on a document put together by the Autonomous Tenants Union (ATU), a volunteer-run organization in Chicago that educates tenants on forming unions to collectively make demands from their landlords. The document read like a blueprint for organizing, said Rome, who suddenly found herself thrust into a leadership position she never thought she’d take on.

She began to canvass her neighborhood with flyers that said “cancel rent” and slid outreach letters under her neighbors’ doors in her apartment building, which she said has around 100 units. When she started, she had two people who were on board to meet and talk. Soon they had meetings in the laundry room, each time recruiting more people who happened upon them while folding clothes or throwing a load into the wash. The Chicago Reader and other local media picked up on Rome’s activism, and her email account began to fill up with pleas from other renters for help.

With assistance from the ATU and another Chicago-based organization ONE Northside, Rome’s operation became more sophisticated. When she realized her landlord — a company called Hunter Properties — owned several buildings, housing advocates helped her cobble together spreadsheets of tenants by looking up registered voters at those addresses. She cold-called dozens of tenants, as did other volunteers who signed on to her efforts, and was able to bring together 30 people by the end of May. Hunter Properties did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.


Courtesy of Jordan Rome
Jordan Rome speaking at a rally

“It became a refuge. You’re definitely not alone,” Rome told BuzzFeed News about the group that formed from these efforts. People were “not just talking,” she said — they found ways of “showing up” consistently.

“Initially, it was about saving myself, but then, as this grew, there was genuine community and purpose built through our organizing,” said Rome. “People were there for me through this entire process because everyone was going through something.”

Rome’s efforts are emblematic of a national movement that is brewing and that aims to assist renters who are facing a lack of protections.

Tenant unions are cropping up around the country and are increasingly forming statewide and national coalitions. They are collecting information about the latest policies in near real time and training one another about tenant rights on Zoom. Many have never been a part of this kind of grassroots organizing before.

The sophistication and rapid spread of Rome’s tenants movement is a testament to how the internet has accelerated this type of organizing. BuzzFeed News spoke to more than half a dozen tenant organizers in New York City, Oakland, Houston, Omaha, and Chicago who all organized in a similar manner: Many of them found resources written by long-term housing advocates or volunteer tenants organizers on public Facebook groups or anti-eviction websites.

You just have to google “how to organize tenants” and the internet will serve up a plethora of material. There are spreadsheets that track local moratoriums; documents that lay out clear marching orders for tenants to organize their neighbors; and flyer templates that people can modify to canvas their neighborhoods. Tenants use social media to exert pressure on landlords and have even begun to write up press releases for their latest rent-relief activities. And some Zoom meetings have seen as many as three to four dozen tenants convene in one sitting.


These documents can be used to mobilize dozens and hundreds of people on a hyperlocal level — whether it’s to coalesce entire neighborhoods or just one apartment building.

Tenant unions like Rome’s are stepping in where they feel the government is failing. All the organizers that spoke with BuzzFeed News have seen cases of harassment from landlords and an uptick in people seeking help to either organize rent strikes or seek help.

Even though numerous housing courts are not processing evictions, landlords are still finding ways to harass tenants for the money they owe. In Oakland, one landlord hired several men on motorbikes to remove the furniture of tenants who were behind on rent and locked the furniture up in a storage unit. Three immigrant families that occupied the home were without shelter for a night and only got their furniture back 10 days later after advocates intervened. Another landlord in the Bay Area removed a fence from a home in a neighborhood that had high rates of crime to intimidate nonpaying residents. In Sunset Park, a neighborhood in Brooklyn with a high immigrant population, advocates told BuzzFeed News that landlords have called ICE on tenants and shut off utilities like cooking gas.

In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where a landlord changed a lock in a single-room occupancy building while the tenant was away, union organizers responded by summoning dozens of volunteers to protest in front of the home.


The protest was staged by the rapid response team of the Brooklyn Eviction Defense, made up of lawyers, organizers, and other volunteers who respond to landlord harassment and illegal eviction attempts.

Esteban Girón has been organizing tenants in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, since 2013, but has seen the number of people participating in their community meetings quadruple in recent months. His hyperlocal volunteer group, the Crown Heights Tenant Union, which covers one neighborhood, joined forces with the Brooklyn Eviction Defense during the pandemic.

As the armada of volunteers grows, tenants unions have increasingly begun to work with long-term housing advocates from NGOs and other organizations to attack the issue of housing insecurity from various angles. Girón and his peers are now working with NGO-based advocates to lobby for legal protections for tenants in the state of New York.

“We are able to do way more outreach than we have ever been able to do,” said Girón, who is hoping to push for a rent cancellation bill. “Coalitions are moving as a single unit right now.”

These legislative efforts are much needed, they say. While citywide and now federal eviction moratoriums have been introduced throughout the pandemic, most of them act as a way to delay an inevitable financial fallout. For many renters, this means that even after they move away, they are on the hook for the rental debt that they amass over time, said Leah Simon-Weisberg, legal director for anti-displacement and land use programs at the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

“We stopped the bleeding. [...] it kept people living there,” said Simon-Weisberg. But she worries that renters will face debilitating debt from months of not being able to pay rent. Most recently, her team of lawyers has started to explore bankruptcy as a way for people to get debt relief and are hoping to build toolkits for people to file for bankruptcy.


Advocates like Simon-Weisberg argue the only way to meaningfully address the looming housing crisis is to provide renters with assistance. This would help both renters who are worried about debt while also assisting landlords to keep their properties.

For some, even this kind of assistance would be too little too late. At the beginning of the summer, Rome decided to leave and temporarily move to Mexico. Before she left, she handed the reins of Hunter Properties Tenants Union to Hana Urban, a 27-year-old former barista, who had joined Rome early in her organizing efforts.

The union is still growing, even three months after Rome left, proving that the ad hoc organization now has a life of its own. The group has now grown to 50 active members under Urban’s leadership and they still convene on Zoom, closely monitoring developments in housing policies and writing letters to their landlord. With no clear end to the pandemic and its economic repercussions in sight, Urban finds solace in the fact that they have now found support and community through their work.

“I don’t know how people do it alone without some sort of community backing,” said Urban. “Knowing that there are a bunch of people with you in the same boat and want to do something about it [...] is much more empowering.”


Lam Thuy Vo is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

Katie Porter Said Parenthood Has “Always Been Considered Unpaid Work,” And That Needs To Change

“What I’m trying to do is engage more Americans in speaking up about what they need,” said Katie Porter.

Venessa Wong BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on October 22, 2020

Mario Tama / Getty Images

Katie Porter is the only single mom with small children in Congress — and she wants people to understand that childcare will be key to America’s recovery from the recession caused by the pandemic.

Porter isn’t surprised that a wave of women, after trying their best over the last seven months, exited the workforce this fall. Of the 1.1 million workers who dropped out of the labor force in September, about 80% were women, and this is bad for our recovery from this economic crisis, the lawmaker said.

Working parents “have been hanging on [during the pandemic], and doing all these things we tell women to do — have a strong support network, be organized, make meals in advance, juggle, be flexible. And at some point, it just becomes overwhelming,” said Porter in an interview with BuzzFeed News. Their recent withdrawal from the workforce “is a huge issue, not only for equality in the workplace and opportunities for women, but also for our economy as a whole. Women in the workforce are a major driver of growth in GDP, and we can't have a meaningful economic recovery without those women coming back into the workforce.”

The struggles of pandemic parenthood can be felt across the 33.4 million American families, or two-fifths of all families, with kids under age 18.

It is a subject Porter frequently returns to, even if she didn’t have her meme-making whiteboard to demonstrate her points when she spoke. A survivor of domestic violence who divorced her husband in 2013, Porter has often discussed the difficulties of being the only single parent with young children in Congress.

Porter, elected in 2018 in California, has made a name for her searing and revealing interrogations of the country’s wealthiest, most powerful people at Congressional committees hearings in which she breaks down complicated subjects with simple language and shocking data on a whiteboard. “Rep. Katie Porter's Whiteboard Will Dry Erase Your Dignity,” wrote Elle.com. Last year, she grilled Wells Fargo’s then-CEO Tim Sloan, earning her social media fame. She asked JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose compensation was $31 million, to explain how the bank’s lowest-paid workers are supposed to make ends meet. And her whiteboard recently went viral when she asked a pharma exec why he made $13 million in 2017, including a $500,000 bonus for increasing the price of Revlimid, a cancer drug. “The drug didn’t get any better. The cancer patients didn’t get any better. You just got better at making money,” she said.




Public Citizen@Public_Citizen

Oh my god, Katie Porter.07:00 PM - 30 Sep 2020
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Throughout the pandemic, the 46-year-old member of Congress and former law school professor has spoken repeatedly about the struggles of working parenthood in video interviews from her own home, telling Yahoo News, “With three kids, the maximum in-person learning, the sum total of minutes that I will have all three children in school, so I can focus solely on my job — zero.” Indeed, the virus has had an outsize impact on single parents’ ability to work: Last month’s labor report shows the jobless rate was 10% for unmarried women who are caregivers compared to 6% of married women — suggesting many more single mothers had no choice but to leave their jobs to care for their children.

“What I’m trying to do is engage more Americans in speaking up about what they need,” she said about her favorite whiteboard. “Part of my goal is to try to, in concise ways, in a few seconds, in a couple of minutes, help working parents understand that we see them, that we value what they're contributing to our economy, and that we know they need help and support.”

While the pressures of pandemic childcare have disproportionately forced out working women, Porter doesn’t see this as a gender issue — bottom line, it’s just “extremely expensive to have talented, trained workers exiting the economy,” she said. “Just like we talk about needing to invest in green energy to keep up with China, you could make the exact same argument about childcare.” This is an infrastructure investment as she sees it.

The childcare industry is in crisis. The impact is disproportionate, as about 93% of childcare workers are women and half of these businesses are minority-owned, Politico reported. Thousands of programs have closed and fewer than 1 in 5 expected to survive longer than a year in a June survey by the NAEYC, raising serious concerns about how parents who relied on these programs can return to work.

While Congress has proposed various amounts of emergency relief for childcare businesses to prevent them from closing during the pandemic, Porter said it’s far cry from what working parents, many who could barely afford care before the pandemic, really need: systemic change. “There's this lack of seeing how this connects to our economic productivity, and the stability of our society. People are always told, ‘This is up to you to figure out.’ So in the workplace, women are told, ‘Go to your employer with a plan for how you'll continue to work after you have children,’ or ‘What’s your plan to come back to work after the birth of the child?’ We've always put these responsibilities on to women,” she said. “But I think what is obscured is any sense that these are collective problems. I think you hear a lot of women say, I can't figure it out. I just can't do this anymore. I’m out of ideas, instead of understanding childcare in a crisis nationally, and our country needs to make an investment.”

She pointed specifically at ongoing investments for universal preschool, bigger tax breaks for childcare expenses, funding for things like bus transportation and after-school programs, and paid family leave. “We just have to make sure that we're really understanding that we need structural change to support, women and men, parents of young kids in the workforce.”


This election, she said, could be a critical one for working parents, and she said she is “pleased” that caregiving is a larger part of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. One of the main issues to address is the cost of care, which has become unaffordable for many families. Families with children under age 5 spend about 10% of their income on average on childcare, but that percentage gets higher as income gets lower, according to the Center for American Progress. The average cost of center-based childcare for two children is 42% of median income for Black families.

Biden’s plan would cost $775 billion over 10 years to fund the care of young children and the elderly; it’s about as much as Trump requested ($740.5 billion) for national defense in the 2021 budget. “We’ve heard absolutely nothing, no alternate plan, no different proposal, we’ve simply seen President Trump ignore these issues,” Porter said.

And as Congress has become more diverse, “I think we're seeing and hearing a lot more diversity of perspectives on what women need to be able to be successful and how that really pays off.”


Venessa Wong is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

Why are people protesting in Nigeria and why does Rihanna care?

Endemic police brutality sparked the latest bout of public anger but grievances against authorities go further

A protester waves a Nigerian flag during a protest against police brutality on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway at Magboro, Ogun State, on October 21, 2020. AFP


On October 4, a video of Nigerian police brutality circulated on social media showing two men being dragged from a hotel, one of whom was shot dead.

The police force blamed was Nigeria's notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad, or Sars.

The footage reopened an old wound in Nigerian society, that of endemic police brutality.

These allegations are not new. In 2016, Amnesty International accused police of routinely “torturing detainees to extract bribes”.

By 2017 a hashtag had appeared on twitter, #EndSARS, but the recent outrage has turned online anger into a major movement.

The Sars unit has provoked particular anger and there were growing calls to disband it.

The squad was abolished on October 11, but it was too late to stop growing unrest.

Protests began on October 7 with crowds gathering at the Lekki Toll Gate junction in an upscale neighbourhood of Lagos known for shopping malls and the homes of government officials.

On October 20, security forces opened fire on demonstrators at the toll gate without warning, killing at least 12. Some accounts put the toll far higher.

The shooting led to a major escalation, with arson and the looting of government buildings, including warehouses storing food in the city of Jos.



Nigerian protesters are seen in the streets of Alausa Ikeja after the authorities declared an open-ended lockdown in Lagos in the face of spiralling protests. AFP






What has the international response been?

The spokesman for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for authorities to “swiftly explore avenues to de-escalate the situation” after the violence.

The US will be sending a fact-finding mission to review policy in one of their most important allies in the fight against ISIS and their Nigerian affiliate, Boko Haram.

The recent violence received a mention in the US election campaign. Joe Biden called on Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari to “cease the violent crackdown”

#EndSARS has also drawn the attention of celebrities including Beyonce, who said she intended to help those affected in a post on her Instagram account, which was “liked” almost 1.5 million times.

Not to be outdone, Rihanna chimed in the next day, tweeting an image of a bloodied Nigerian flag and expressing her outrage at the “torture and brutalisation” on the streets of Lagos.

Rihanna

@rihanna

#ENDSARS

5:20 PM · Oct 20, 2020

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224.2K people are Tweeting about this

What will the government do next?

Mr Buhari was initially silent on the allegations of police brutality and instead said demonstrations were being infiltrated by “subversive elements” to cause trouble for the government.

Mr Buhari, who was elected in 2015, also ruled Nigeria before the country’s transition to democracy.

He has been accused of bringing back tough crackdowns on political dissent, associated with the country’s former military rule.

The government appears to have launched a two-pronged approach, firstly disbanding Sars and pledging to investigate its crimes, but also warning that further demonstrations will not be tolerated.

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari addresses the nation on a live televised broadcast on October 22, 2020 but made no mention of the shooting of peaceful protesters at Lekki toll plaza. Nigeria State House via AP

Could the crisis escalate?

There is a risk that the #EndSARS movement could spill over into wider discontent.

Nigeria has been racked by economic turmoil in recent years as successive governments failed to contain corruption or build an economy that is not dependent upon oil revenue.

Fitch Ratings says the government needs an oil price of $133 a barrel just to pay recurring expenses.

READ MORE

Nigeria shooting fans long-simmering anger at the state

For Mr Buhari, the danger is that protesters will turn on the political elite because public anger goes far beyond police brutality.

By the government's admission, 40 per cent of Nigerians live in poverty.

Financial consultancy PwC says Nigeria needs to create three million jobs a year just to keep unemployment from increasing.

Sars may have been disbanded and the investigations that the government has promised might go ahead.

But even if this appeases protesters, the country’s economic problems and almost annual protests, are going nowhere.



Updated: October 26, 2020 01:32 AM