GWEN MAYSE leaned against her Honda Accord and looked around nervously with her small Yorkshire terrier tucked under her arm. She was too scared to sleep. Mayse, 59, normally sleeps in her car with her two small dogs. She lies in the driver’s seat, reclined all the way back. She parks next to her daughter’s Jeep Cherokee in a cul-de-sac of a north Sacramento business park. Half of the cul-de-sac is surrounded by barbed wire. The warehouse that used to house a city homeless shelter sits empty only feet away. As Sacramento struggles to find a solution to its growing homeless problem – opening and closing shelters, converting hotels to help the homeless, occasionally clearing out homeless encampments – a new problem confronts the county. The number of people, including families with children, living in their cars in Sacramento County has drastically increased in the last four years. Volunteers canvassing the county in January found four times the number of vehicles where people were living than they counted in 2015. Researchers estimate people were sleeping in at least 340 vehicles in the county. This included approximately 100 children. Most of the vehicles were in the city of Sacramento. The problem illustrates the complex task of reducing the homeless population in Sacramento, which has seen rents and housing prices rise dramatically even as it budgets tens of millions of dollars on shelters and support services. The city is scrambling to avoid problems like those in San Francisco, where scenes of squalor have become a symbol of the divide between the rich and the poor.
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Libya’s civil war in 2011 ousted and eventually killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi and in the aftermath and chaos the country was split between two rival administrations. A U.N. backed administration in the capital, Tripoli, oversees the country’s western regions, and a opposing government in the east is supported by the so-called Libyan National Army whose leader is Khalifa Hifter. Each is backed by an array of militias and armed groups currently fighting over resources and territory. The conflict exploded on 4 April when the head of the eastern-based militia known as the Libyan National Army (LNA), General Khalifa Haftar, launched an offensive against the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), based in Tripoli. Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are backing Hifter while Turkey and Qatar are supporting militias allied with the Tripoli-backed government. Several Western nations have partnered with militias to combat extremists and stem the flow of Europe-bound migrants. To add to the downward spiraling situation, on 25 July, up to 150 migrants lost their lives after a boat they were traveling in capsized off the coast of Libya. Predicting that the ‘days ahead will prove foundational to the years ahead for Libyans and the region”, Ghassan Salamé the top United Nations official in the country told the Security Council, that it was no exaggeration to describe the oil-rich nation as having reached ‘a crucial juncture.’
