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DENVER (AP) ― Denver's mayor and workers at about a dozen businesses are wearing pajamas to work Thursday to raise awareness about homelessness.

While many U.S. cities worry that their economies are deteriorating to the level of the 1930s Great Depression, New York City fears reliving a more recent decade that features strongly in city lore. The 1970s were a low point in city history as a fiscal crisis almost pushed it into bankruptcy, crime rates soared, and homeless people crowded sidewalks as public services crumbled. Almost a million people fled New York's Mean Streets during the decade for the safer, more stable suburbs, a population decline that took more than 20 years to reverse. When discussing the current crisis, Mayor Michael Bloomberg,...

This Christmas, many Americans did not get a chance to enjoy warm hot cocoa, presents and a good meal. Many were forced to sleep on the streets or in crowded shelters and missions. Throughout America many are feeling the pinch of the economic downturn. But liberals, with their medeling and their compasion for those who are evil and degenerate are to blame for much of the homelessness on our streets. In the past several years, affordable housing units in particular, boarding houses have gone into decline. These places, flop houses, boarding homes, rooming homes, some just call them slums were...

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (AP) -- The number of homeless families in Massachusetts has surged -- a spike that has overwhelmed the state's shelter capacity and forced it to again place homeless families in motels.

Maine is notorious for having one of the strongest environmental regulations on the planet. Mainers care more about rats birds bugs weeds and puddles than they do about unemployment, poverty, budget deficits and homelessness. Maybe that's way the later four are so common in Maine. Similarly in states like California where citizens and its agriculture must suffer a drought to protect a bunch of sucker fish or in Florida where a big swamp matters more than new jobs or agriculture the welfare and rights of human beings are compromised along with their jobs and homes to protect useless dumb animals...

After spending $5 million on its five automated public toilets, Seattle is calling it quits. In the end, the restrooms, installed in early 2004, had become so filthy, so overrun with drug abusers and prostitutes, that although use was free of charge, even some of the city’s most destitute people refused to step inside them. The units were put up for sale Wednesday afternoon on eBay, with a starting bid set by the city at $89,000 apiece. The dismal outcome coincides with plans by New York, Los Angeles and Boston, among other cities, to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars...

Last week, this blog stood in solidarity with Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and the rest of the newspapers in Denmark who reprinted his cartoon after police uncovered a conspiracy by radical Islamists to murder him. Now Westergaard has gained a reward for his courage in confronting radical Islam and demanding freedom of speech -- homelessness. Der Spiegel tells the story: Draw a picture offensive to Muslim extremists, and you might find yourself without a roof. Ask Kurt Westergaard, one of the twelve Danish cartoonists whose autumn 2005 Muhammad caricatures lead to violent protests throughout the Muslim world. He was booted...

Summary: Brain Researchers Link Mental Woes, Alcoholism To Long-Ago Blows. ...That severe head injuries can lead to cognitive and behavioral problems is widely accepted. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 5.3 million Americans suffer from mental or physical disability that is due to brain injury. What's new is the contention of some researchers that there are many other cases where a severe past blow to the head, resulting in unconsciousness or confusion, is the unrecognized source of such problems. "Unidentified traumatic brain injury is an unrecognized major source of social and vocational failure," says Wayne A. Gordon,...

Homeless haven, or hellhole? Nicole Brodeur Seattle Times staff columnist Related Nicole Brodeur's columns via RSS You don't want to go down there. Not even in broad daylight, and certainly not alone. That was the warning I got from some Seattle Parks and Recreation employees the other day. And they were right. On a tour of several homeless encampments Thursday with a group of parks people, I could have been stabbed, raped, infected, or fallen to my death. But for these city workers, it's all in a day's work. In the current hue and cry over whether the city of...

I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and "they" were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives. ... The best predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior, yet we regularly grant parole to murderers, serial rapists, chronically assaultive individuals and habitual pedophiles. Even when we do attempt to segregate low-impulse multiple offenders with effective tools such as with three-strikes laws, liberationist clamor never ceases. Talk to anyone who's tried to commit a dangerously violent child or parent for...

As service members afflicted with psychological disorders return from Afghanistan and Iraq, several organizations are pressing Congress to increase funding for programs to help prevent homelessness among veterans, an issue that has affected many who fought in Vietnam and elsewhere. Combat stress, traumatic experiences and brain injuries, as well as protracted deployments — particularly among reservists who may not have been as prepared for war as active-duty troops — place returning veterans at a risk. Mental-health issues are a potential precursor to substance abuse, loss of employment and homelessness. Community-based organizations and housing and service providers have served a critical...

Robert Van Kampen and Brian Krause were at the end of a long line of homeless men who flowed into the shelter at Grace Episcopal Church on Wednesday as darkness and a piercing cold settled onto the Capitol Square. The shelter is a lot more crowded these days than when Van Kampen spent time there last summer, he said, making the experience even more trying. "It's harder to sleep, and you have to wait for showers and laundry," Krause said. "It's loud," said Van Kampen. For reasons yet to be explained, demand for homeless shelters has risen significantly.Despite a mild...

The French cabinet has adopted a bill to create a legal right to housing, after a series of high-profile protests by campaigners. The demonstrations prompted President Jacques Chirac to promise action in his New Year's address. If approved by parliament, the bill will legally oblige local authorities to provide accommodation for the homeless from the end of next year. People facing eviction or living in squalid conditions will also be helped. The bill would also create a new repatriation and resettlement package to allow immigrants with no family ties in France to return home. Election issue? President Chirac has said...

Three months ago, Kisungu Gloire considered himself fortunate. A 13-year-old refugee, he had a house to sleep in, food to eat, and a stepmother who took care of him as one of her own. Then one day, Kisungu's fragile world fell apart. His stepmother delivered a baby that was stillborn. She blamed Kisungu, calling him a witch. She had a dream that Kisungu was trying to kill her, and then tried to burn him with a flaming plastic bag. She took him to a priest to perform an exorcism, but when that appeared to have failed, she finally stopped feeding...

LAS VEGAS -- A battle is brewing over a new Las Vegas ordinance that bans providing food or meals to the indigent at city parks. The Las Vegas City Council unanimously passed a law, which went into effect Thursday, making it a crime to feed the homeless at city parks. It carries a maximum penalty of $1,000 and six months in jail. Video: Vegas: Don't Feed The Homeless The law bans giving away or selling food to anyone who could get assistance from official sources under state law, and officials said city marshals will get specialized training to enforce it....

Alarmed at the very idea that military recruiters can make direct appeals to high school students, a prominent anti-war academic is making some misleading statements of his own. “Recruiters promise cash bonuses, good salaries and benefits, job training, and money for college,” Scott Key, a faculty member at Fresno Pacific University writes in the summer 2006 issue of the magazine Rethinking Schools. “Some recruiters go further, promising enlistees excitement and travel, choice of jobs and locations, and anything else to convince someone to sign up.” “There are cases where recruiters promise enlistees that they will not have to go to...

ANTIOCH: Police crack down on transient camps; pastor criticizes approach, suggests more transitional housing - Being homeless in Antioch is getting harder. With Mayor Donald Freitas leading the charge, the city has been aggressively disbanding homeless camps and issuing citations to panhandlers.Sweeps are not new, but they have become more frequent. City Park, long a homeless enclave, has been cleared out and so have other encampments.Freitas has also asked city staff members to create a two-year plan to curb homelessness in coordination with church groups. The homeless problem will also be addressed at a community forum on quality of life...

DENVER — Arthur Sena spent years living in a hole that he had dug near the railroad tracks. He would probably still be there, defying offers of help from social workers and using cardboard to ward off the chill, if Denver had not adopted a radical strategy of putting homeless people into apartments of their own, no strings attached.

Nearly every other day, the Seattle Fire Department responds to an apartment house for chronic street alcoholics to administer emergency medical aid to an ailing resident. The $11.2 million housing project, located at 1811 Eastlake Ave., puts to test a unique concept in housing homeless hard-core alcoholics because residents are allowed to drink in their rooms. The 39 aid calls to the building since it opened in mid-December far exceed what backers of the controversial project anticipated. And that raises questions about whether one of the key theories behind the project — saving taxpayer money by reducing visits by homeless...

A former state worker pleaded guilty on Monday to charges related to her taking more than 866 (t) thousand public funds meant for a housing and rental-assistance program. Robin Wheeler-Hicks pleaded guilty in state Superior Court in Mercer County to second-degree bribery and theft by deception. The 46-year-old Elizabeth resident is a former Department of Community Affairs senior field representative in Union County. In pleading guilty, she admitted she submitted at least 428 false applications to the state's Homelessness Prevention Program. Under the terms of her plea, Wheeler-Hicks faces up to seven years in state prison and a nearly 831...