Day: June 30, 2024

NEW YORK — When Damien Carchipulla started his first school year in New York City in September, the first grader’s family was living in a Manhattan hotel for migrant families.

In the 10 months since, the family of four from Ecuador has moved shelters three times under a policy Mayor Eric Adams imposed in the fall that limits the number of days migrants can stay in a single place. Every 60 days they must give up their shelter beds and reapply for housing or leave the system.

With a fourth move expected in a matter of weeks, Damien’s mother Kimberly Carchipulla hopes the family isn’t pulled too far from the 6-year-old’s school in Harlem this summer. Her son is set to attend a summer program starting in July.

“A lot has changed because new laws were put in place,” Carchipulla said in Spanish while picking up Damien after school one day. “They get stressed. They get upset. Every 60 days, it’s a new home.”

The New York City school year ended Wednesday, but for thousands of migrant families the shuffle from shelter to shelter continues. With it come the concerns about how they’ll navigate their children’s education needs, both this summer and into the next school year.

“These families were already coming in with a great deal of trauma, which was impacting their children’s attendance at school and their ability to engage once they’re there,” said Sarah Jonas, a vice president at Children’s Aid, a nonprofit that provides mentoring, health services and after-school programs at city schools. “With that added burden of the 60-day rule, we’ve seen even more disruption for our families getting these eviction notices and all of the anxiety that comes with that.”

Like the Carchipullas, most families chose to stick with the same school through the year, even if they were reassigned to shelters in a different part of the city. The tradeoff for many was longer and more complex commutes, leading to children who were exhausted before the school day even started. Absenteeism spiked too, as parents struggled to get their children to school on time.

Carchipulla, who is 23, counts her family among the lucky ones: the three moves they made during the school year were all to other midtown Manhattan hotels, so her son’s daily commute remained relatively the same.

For the grandchildren of Rosie Arias, the moves were more disruptive.

The 55-year-old from Ecuador said her daughter arrived in January with her 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter. They were immediately placed in a shelter and enrolled in a local school where Spanish was widely spoken.

But when their 60 days ran out, they had to move to another shelter and transfer to another school, Arias said. Then when the family secured their own apartment in Brooklyn, the children had to switch schools again, this time to a smaller one where few people spoke Spanish.

“As a grandmother, I’m worried. The children don’t want to go to school. They’re not adjusting because of the language and because they don’t have friends.,” Arias said in Spanish. “They cry.”

School officials didn’t have a final tally for how many migrant students were affected by the shelter time limits.

As of the first week of May, 44% of migrant students had remained in the same shelter and same school since February 14, according to Tamara Mair, a senior director with Project Open Arms, the district’s program supporting asylum seekers and other new students in temporary housing.

Another 40% of migrant students moved shelters but remained enrolled at the same school, while 4% moved both schools and shelters, she said. Roughly 10% left the school system entirely, with the “vast majority” of those dropping out because they left the city.

District officials will be keeping tabs on migrant families in the shelters through the summer, Mair said.

“The one thing we want to remain constant for our kids is school,” she said. “But we also want to support our families with their choices, because the families have the right to remain in their school, or they may choose to go to a new school closer to their new residence.”

Adams, a Democrat, instituted shelter limits to encourage migrant families to leave the city’s emergency shelter system, which includes huge tent shelters and converted hotels that have swollen with thousands of newcomers to the U.S.

Over the summer, more needs to be done to prepare newly arriving families for the next school year, immigrant advocates say.

That includes better outreach to migrant parents and more investment in translation services, said Liza Schwartzwald, a director at the New York Immigration Coalition.

Schools also need more specialists to assess and help get migrant students up to grade level in their studies, said Natasha Quiroga, director of education policy at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs.

Damien Carchipulla’s mother remains optimistic about her son’s future.

Eventually, she said, the family hopes to save up enough money for their own place, perhaps in Queens, where her husband recently found steady work.

“He is learning more and more every day,” Kim Carchipulla said of her son. “Even if he misses school, his teacher tells me, he catches up quickly.”

JAMMU, India — The putrid smell of burning garbage wafts for miles from the landfill on the outskirts of Jammu in a potentially toxic miasma fed by the plastics, industrial, medical and other waste generated by a city of some 740,000 people. But a handful of waste pickers ignore both the fumes and suffocating heat to sort through the rubbish, seeking anything they can sell to earn at best the equivalent of $4 a day.

“If we don’t do this, we don’t get any food to eat,” said 65-year-old Usmaan Shekh. “We try to take a break for a few minutes when it gets too hot, but mostly we just continue till we can’t.”

Shekh and his family are among the estimated 1.5 million to 4 million people who scratch out a living searching through India’s waste — and climate change is making a hazardous job more dangerous than ever. In Jammu, a northern Indian city in the Himalayan foothills, temperatures this summer have regularly topped 43 degrees Celsius.

At least one person who died in northern India’s recent heat wave was identified as a garbage picker.

The landfills themselves seethe internally as garbage decomposes, and the rising heat of summer speeds and intensifies the process. That increases emissions of gases such as methane and carbon dioxide that are dangerous to breathe. And almost all landfill fires come in summer, experts say, and can burn for days.

At the Jammu landfill, small fires dotted the massive pile, sending up plumes of smoke as two men hauled a frayed tarp loaded with garbage on the day Associated Press journalists visited. A 6-year-old boy clutched an armful of plastic sandals. As other pickers occasionally sheltered from the heat, birds wheeled overhead, occasionally touched down in their own search for scraps.

India generates at least 62 million tons of waste annually, according to federal government records, and some of its landfills are literal mountains of garbage, like the Ghaziabad landfill outside New Delhi. And while a 2016 law made it mandatory to segregate waste so that hazardous material doesn’t make its way to landfills, the law has been poorly enforced, adding to the risk of waste pickers.

“Since they mostly just use their hands, they are already contaminated by touching everything from diapers to diabetes syringes,” said Bharati Chaturvedi, founder of the New Delhi-based Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group.

Chaturvedi, who has worked with waste pickers for more than two decades, said extreme heat has added new risks to waste pickers who are already victims of social discrimination and appalling work conditions.

“It’s been a terrible, terrible, terrible year,” she said. “They already expect to suffer from the heat and that gives them a lot of anxiety, because they don’t know if they’ll make it, if they’ll survive it (the summer).”

Chaturvedi said this year’s heat has “been the most catastrophic thing one could imagine” adding that “It’s really very sad to look at how the poor are trying to live somehow, just take their bodies and try to reach the end of this heat wave in some form of being intact.”

Heat planning and public health experts say that people who are forced to work outdoors are at most risk due to prolonged heat exposure. Heatstroke, cardiovascular diseases and chronic kidney diseases are some of the risks from working outdoors during high heat.

Waste pickers “are among the most vulnerable and highly exposed to heat,” said Abhiyant Tiwari, who leads the climate resilience team at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s India program.

In New Delhi, some people who work the capital city’s estimated 4.2 million annual tons of garbage have cut back from two meals a day to just one, said Ruksana Begum, a 41-year-old waste picker at the Bhalswa landfill in the city.

“They are trying to avoid work because of the heat since if they go to work they end up spending more at the hospital than for their food,” Begum said.

Tiwari and Chaturvedi both said it’s essential to give waste pickers access to a regular water supply, shade, or a relatively cool building near the landfills. They should also be encouraged to avoid working at high heat and given prompt medical care when they need it, they said.

Tiwari said India has taken significant steps to devise heat action plans but implementing the plans all across the country is a challenge.

“As a society, we have a responsibility to protect them (garbage pickers),” said Tiwari. Simple steps can help, such as offering them water if they’re standing outside people’s homes, rather than asking them to leave, he said.

Geeta Devi, a 55-year-old garbage picker also at the Bhalswa landfill in New Delhi, says when she feels dizzy in the heat she takes shelter and sometimes someone gives her water or food. But she has to work to earn the 150-200 rupees ($1.80 to $2.40) per day that puts food on the table for her children.

“It is difficult to do my job because of the heat. But I have no other job,” she said.

Угроза атаки БПЛА также была отменена.

(NewsNation) — President Joe Biden raised money and tried to calm fears in multiple appearances Saturday, while many top donors expressed concern over Biden’s status as the Democratic nominee following his poor debate performance on Thursday.

“I didn’t have a great night, but I’m going to be fighting harder,” Biden told attendees at a private fundraiser at the Red Bank, New Jersey home of Gov. Tim Murphy.

“Donald Trump is a genuine threat to the nation,” Biden emphasized, saying that his predecessor would undermine democracy if returned to the White House and his economic ideas would worsen inflation.

Biden and his wife, Jill, also attended two private events in East Hampton, New York at the home of Avram Glazer, an owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the home of investor Barry Rosenstein.

Public calls to quit the race; family meeting

The fundraisers came a day after The New York Times called on Biden to quit the race. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution made the same call in a front-page editorial for Sunday’s paper. But the Philadelphia Inquirer published an editorial calling on former President Donald Trump to quit his campaign.

And there are hints that the president is taking the public and private concerns to heart. The Biden family will get together Sunday at Camp David, a source tells NewsNation. That source says the president, first lady and others are expected to discuss the state of the campaign.

NBC quotes “five people familiar with the matter” in a similar report, saying the discussion will focus on “the future” of the campaign. A Biden official disputed the notion that the first family is doing anything more than having a family gathering.

“The premise of the story is not accurate,” the official told reporters traveling with the president on Air Force One.

DNC Chair spins, donors share concerns

As Biden raised money and promised to continue the campaign, Democratic National Committee Jaime Harrison held a call with dozens of committee members across the country, a group of some of the most influential members of the party. He did not acknowledge Biden’s weak showing Thursday night or the avalanche of criticism that followed.

Multiple committee members on the call, granted anonymity to talk about the private discussion, described feeling like they were being gaslighted – that they were being asked to ignore the dire nature of the party’s predicament. The call, they said, may have worsened a widespread sense of panic among elected officials, donors and other stakeholders.

The Biden campaign also released a memo Saturday that said Biden’s poor showing in Thursday night’s presidential debate “did not change the horse race.”

“Flash polls from CNN, 538, SurveyUSA, Morning Consult, and Data for Progress show what we expected: The debate did not change the horse race,” Biden campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in the memo. “This mirrors what the campaign’s internal post-debate polling showed: The president maintained his support among his 2020 voters and voters’ opinions were not changed.”

But not everyone in the party is buying it.

Democratic donors across New York, Southern California and Silicon Valley privately expressed deep concerns about the viability of Biden’s campaign. They even discussed a short list of possible replacements, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump his social media, lawmakers talk 25th

Trump was off the campaign trail Saturday but was busy on his social media platform.

“This past Thursday night was a defeat not only for Biden but for the entire Radical Left Democrat Party and the Fake News Media who have been lying to the American People as our Country was being destroyed,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

“The whole world should know that while Biden is the worst president in the history of our Country, America will be strong again, and very soon!”

Trump surrogates aren’t waiting for Biden to voluntarily step aside. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., called on the cabinet to remove Biden from office under the provisions of the 25^th Amendment.

“If Biden cannot speak coherently, articulate his policies, and is unfit to perform after weeks of preparation, how will he perform when America is truly tested?” Tillis wrote in a letter to his Senate GOP colleagues on Friday.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, added that he would file a resolution calling on Harris and the Cabinet to declare Biden incapable of fulfilling his presidential duties.

The Hill and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Вице-премьер Великобритании Оливер Дауден выразил “серьезную озабоченность” в связи с сообщением медиакомпании ABC о вероятной кампании влияния на выборы со стороны РФ.