AFP

In mid-May, Paula Sevilla and her roommates joined the many New Yorkers suffering under the city’s crushing housing crisis, which has seen rents soar in the pandemic’s wake.

The tenants argued their landlord had violated rules requiring sufficient notice but ultimately were told if they would have to pay an additional $800 per month if they wanted to stay at their Brooklyn rental.

Sevilla and one roommate began a grueling search for new housing in a market that over the past year has spawned countless apartment search horror stories.

After two months of searching, some 30 apartment visits and constant stress, they finally found a two-bedroom spot for $3,000 dollars per month.

Renting in New York has long been a struggle, but recently costs have skyrocketed, jumping an average 20.4 percent in the second quarter of this year alone, according to the housing search website StreetEasy.

And finding a home increasingly takes longer, with long lines of applicants vying for space.

“One time we lost an apartment because we turned in an application four minutes too late,” recounted Sevilla, a 26-year-old originally from Spain. 

– Boiling point –

Draconian prerequisites to rent in New York aren’t new: earn income 40 times the monthly rent, have perfect credit history, present the last two years of tax returns and current bank balances.

And the city’s housing crisis has been simmering for years, with construction of units lagging behind a growing population. 

Now, as hundreds of thousands of people who fled the city during the pandemic’s early days return — along with the normal flow of transplants to America’s cultural and economic nexus — the situation is growing untenable.

There are “too many clients and not enough apartments,” said Miguel Urbina, a real estate agent.

In some cases, it’s not even enough to arrive first or offer more than the asking price to owners, which are often large firms or investment funds, especially in Manhattan.

Sevilla makes $75,000 annually, slightly more than the average salary in New York — but it’s not enough to rent on her own.

In New York, renters must often also pay significant broker fees to rental agents, generally at least between one month and 15 percent of the annual rental cost.

Many people who stayed in the city in 2020 and 2021 signed leases at a discount, but now many landlords are bumping those prices back up — pushing out more than a third of tenants who can’t afford the increases, according to StreetEasy.

Even New Yorkers lucky enough to live in rent-stabilized apartments — approximately one million units and two million tenants, according to city data — are not immune to the increases.

Those rents can only be raised based on a vote by the city’s rent guidelines board, whose members are appointed by the mayor. 

For eight years under Bill de Blasio, the highest increases were 1.5 percent for one-year leases — but under the board appointed by new mayor Eric Adams, rents are set to see their sharpest rise in nearly a decade.

In June, the board approved a 3.25 percent increase for one-year contracts and five percent for two years, which will affect many of the city’s residents with limited means and triggered outrage among housing rights advocates.

– ‘Staggering financial burden’ –

Manhattan families spend some 55 percent of their income on rent, a figure that is 43 percent in Queens and 60 percent in Brooklyn, according to StreetEasy data.

“Rent is becoming a staggering financial burden,” read a recent report from the online real estate portal.

Gia Elika, the owner of a real estate agency, says average rent in Manhattan is some $5,000 a month — but in a city of stark class division, some agencies are offering monthly rents of $140,000 on Fifth Avenue.

The shocking price tags are driving more middle-class families and young people like Sevilla to seek housing in neighborhoods historically occupied by immigrants, Latinos and African Americans, fostering relentless gentrification.

Elika told AFP that while “there is always a shortage of housing” in New York, “now it’s magnifying” with unprecedented prices.

According to the Washington-based policy research group Up For Growth, in 2019, the New York metropolitan area needed some 340,000 more units.

Rising interest rates in the face of rampant inflation has aggravated the crisis by pushing would-be buyers to rent, in a market “hampered by historically low inventory,” according to Lee’s report.

Decades-old zoning restrictions limit building size in some areas is one barrier, along with construction costs, limited public housing and legislative foot-dragging that has seen state and local politicians largely put off solving an increasingly pressing problem.

And the outlook is grim: much of the skyscraper boom in Manhattan has been for luxury and commercial purposes, and despite high-rise construction in Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey, agents don’t foresee prices to quit rising any time soon.

Former US president Donald Trump said Monday that his Mar-A-Lago residence in Florida was being “raided” by FBI agents in what he called an act of “prosecutorial misconduct.”

The FBI declined to comment on whether the search was happening or what it might be for, nor did Trump give any indication of why federal agents were at his home — a situation that adds to the legal pressure on the ex-president.

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a statement posted on his Truth Social network.

Aerial footage of Mar-a-Lago showed police cars outside the property.

“It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024,” said the former president, who was not present during the raid, according to The New York Times.

“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries,” Trump said, adding: “They even broke into my safe!”

Multiple US media outlets cited sources close to the investigation as saying that agents were conducting a court-authorized search related to the potential mishandling of classified documents that had been sent to Mar-a-Lago.

The National Archives said in February it had recovered 15 boxes of documents from Trump’s Florida estate, which The Washington Post reported included highly classified texts, taken with him when he left Washington following his reelection defeat.

The documents and mementos — which also included correspondence from ex-US president Barack Obama — should by law have been turned over at the end of Trump’s presidency but instead ended up at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

The recovery of the boxes raised questions about Trump’s adherence to presidential records laws enacted after the 1970s Watergate scandal that require Oval Office occupants to preserve records related to administration activity.

The Archives had requested then that the Justice Department open a probe into Trump’s practices.

– ‘Accountable’ –

White House staff also regularly discovered wads of paper clogging toilets, leading them to believe Trump was trying to get rid of certain documents, according to a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

Since taking his last Air Force One flight from Washington to Florida on January 20 last year, Trump has remained the country’s most polarizing figure, continuing his unprecedented campaign to sow falsehoods that he actually won the 2020 election.

For weeks, Washington has been riveted by hearings in Congress about the January 6 storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters and his attempts to overturn the election.

The US Department of Justice is also investigating the January 6 attack.

While Attorney General Merrick Garland has declined to comment on growing speculation that Trump could face criminal charges, he has insisted that “no person is above the law” and that he intends to “hold accountable every person who is criminally responsible for trying to overturn a legitimate election.”

Trump is also being investigated for his efforts to alter the 2020 voting results in the state of Georgia, while his business practices are being probed in New York in separate cases, one civil and the other criminal.

The real estate mogul has not yet officially declared his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election, though he has dropped strong hints over the past few months.

With President Joe Biden’s approval rating currently below 40 percent and Democrats forecast to lose control of Congress in November midterm elections, Trump is apparently bullish that he could ride the Republican wave all the way to the White House in 2024.

Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson has accused an unauthorized television drama of stealing his life story, comparing the streaming platform behind the upcoming series to a “slave master.”

“Mike,” which premieres on US streamer Hulu August 25, is a scripted drama that re-enacts moments from the controversial fighter’s life, from his early childhood and through his 1992 rape conviction.

“Hulu is the streaming version of the slave master. They stole my story and didn’t pay me,” wrote Tyson on Instagram.

He added: “I don’t support their story about my life. It’s not 1822. It’s 2022. They stole my life story and didn’t pay me.”

“To Hulu executives I’m just a n****r they can sell on the auction block,” he wrote, using asterisks in place of letters.

Hulu, which is only available in the United States, is majority-owned by Disney.

The show depicts Tyson being bullied as a young child with a lisp, his teenage years in and out of prison after joining a Brooklyn street gang, and his early start in boxing.

While the eight-part limited series shows Tyson in the ring during various famous bouts, it concentrates on his turbulent private life.

One episode focuses on Desiree Washington, the 18-year-old beauty pageant contestant who accused Tyson of rape in 1991. He was convicted the following year, and jailed for three years. 

The episode tells the events of the rape in an Indianapolis hotel room, and the ensuing trial, from Washington’s perspective and with her narration.

Creator and screenwriter Steven Rogers said the filmmakers actually “couldn’t talk to” Tyson because “his life rights were already taken” by another project.

But he also pointed to the benefits of an unauthorized take on Tyson’s life, saying “I don’t like to be reliant on just one source.”

“I really like to do the research, and get all these different opinions, and then put a story around all of that,” he told a recent Television Critics Association panel.

“I don’t like to be beholden to just one person.”

Trevante Rhodes, who plays Tyson in the eight-part limited series, said “it feels best at least to detach yourself as much as you can.”

Asked if he was worried about angering Tyson — considered one of the best heavyweights of all time, who infamously bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear in a 1997 bout — Rhodes simply replied: “Nah.”

– ‘Baddest man on the planet’ –

While confronting allegations of domestic violence, the show also contextualizes the violence Tyson suffered as a child, the early loss of his mother to cancer, his drug addiction issues, and efforts by establishment figures to take advantage of Tyson’s lucrative success in the ring.

“When I was researching it, I found that a lot of the issues that we’re struggling with today — like Black Lives Matter, and MeToo, and prison reform and addiction and mental health issues all the stuff that we’re struggling with — have their roots in this one man’s story,” said showrunner Karin Gist.

“So it felt like a really good time to tell it, through the lens of the baddest man on the planet.”

Rogers added: “I would hope that if he watches it, that he would change his opinion.”

In Lost Creek, Kentucky, Joe Biden promised flood victims Monday that their shattered lives will be restored — a message of optimism he hopes to beam right through a divided America three months before elections that will decide the fate of his presidency.

A disaster zone, where floods have killed at least 37 people, might seem an odd place for optimism.

The presidential motorcade rolled past scenes of savage natural violence — trees torn to pieces, yellow school buses tossed like toys, and fragments of people’s houses and belongings festooning the banks of a minor creek that had transformed into a sort of tsunami.

But after visiting victims, including one family whose mobile home had floated clean off its foundations before being wrecked up the street, the Democrat said the natural calamity was a moment to recall deep bonds.

“Everyone has an obligation to help,” Biden said. “I promise you, we’re staying, the federal government, along with the state and county and the city, we’re staying until everybody’s back to where they were. Not a joke.”

Championing unity in an era when Democrats and Republicans are barely able to talk might also seem like fantasy.

But Biden is on a roll.

If he was being written off as a lame duck only a few weeks ago, the 79-year-old is now celebrating a string of successes, including likely passage of the biggest climate change bill in US history and an extraordinary intelligence operation culminating in the killing of the last top Al-Qaeda leader involved in 9/11.

His administration has even delivered several landmark bills, including on infrastructure spending and gun ownership reforms, that won Republican support — something earlier considered all but impossible.

And the Democrat is clearly bursting to get back into the country after spending nearly two weeks in isolation due to Covid-19 and a rebound infection.

With November midterms rapidly approaching and Republicans, who are threatening to scuttle what’s left of Biden’s first term, forecast to take control of Congress, the sense of urgency is growing.

– Empathy, unity –

          

So in Lost Creek, Biden did one thing he has long been known for doing well: he comforted the grieving. A man with a long history of his own family tragedies, Biden rarely seems more at ease than with fellow sufferers.

He hugged adults, high-fived a toddler, and joked with a small boy whose home had been smashed that he would become president himself one day.

Then in a speech delivered in searing heat, with sweat gathering through his blue shirt, Biden broadened to a political message he wants the entire angry — many say broken — country to hear.

Recounting how one of the survivors had modestly told him that “Kentuckians don’t want to ask for too much,” he insisted that Americans across the 50 states should not even wait to be asked.

“They’re Americans,” he said of the stricken locals. “This happened in America, it’s an American problem. We’re all Americans.”

“So, I don’t want any Kentuckian telling me, ‘You don’t have to do this for me,'” he said. “Oh yeah we do. You’re an American citizen. We never give up, we never stop, we never bow, we never bend — we just go forward.”

This was the centrist, unity platform that got Biden elected to replace Donald Trump after just one term. It’s a message he hopes voters will embrace again in the midterms, maybe even saving Democrats’ control of Congress.

Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear echoed Biden, saying the tragedy has seen the people of his state “lean on one another in times of need — neither red nor blue, Democratic or Republican.”

Beshear may be a rare Democratic official in the heavily Republican state, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020.

But Kentucky’s veteran Republican congressman Hal Rogers, who also attended the disaster zone visit, warmly praised Biden, calling him someone “doing what he can to ease the pain.”

Is the rest of America listening?

With Biden’s approval ratings stuck below 40 percent, it doesn’t seem so.

“The fact is we’ve been divided for a long time,” Biden responded, when asked by AFP why his message hasn’t got through.

Then, the eternal optimist, he added: “I think you’re going to see a lot of change.”

The United States on Monday returned 30 stolen works of art and antiquities to Cambodia that had been looted from the southeast Asian nation, including from an ancient Khmer city, and illegally trafficked around the world for decades.

Manhattan federal prosecutor Damian Williams officially handed over the looted antiquities to Cambodia’s ambassador to the United States, Keo Chhea, in front of press.

“We celebrate the return of Cambodia’s cultural heritage to the Cambodian people, and reaffirm our commitment to reducing the illicit trafficking of art and antiquities,” Williams said.

Among the 30 works was a 10th-century sculpture of the Hindu deity Skanda, seated on a peacock, as well as a 10th-century sculpture of the Hindu god Ganesha. Both were stolen from Koh Ker, the ancient Khmer capital located 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the renowned temples of Angkor, Williams’s office said in a statement.

The antiquities, which range from the Bronze Age to the 12th century, had been stolen along with thousands of others during the wars in Cambodia in the 1970s and when the country reopened in the 1990s.

The federal prosecutor’s office said that thousands of Khmer statues and sculptures that were trafficked out of Cambodia over the course of decades to antique dealers in Bangkok, before being illegally exported to collectors, businessmen and even museums in Asia, Europe and the United States.

One of the dealers, American Douglas Latchford, was charged in 2019 with art trafficking, but the case was tabled after his death.

The New York prosecutor’s office is involved in the restitution of a vast array of works. From the summer of 2020 to the end of 2021, at least 700 pieces have been returned to 14 different countries, including Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Greece and Italy.

In 2021, American collector Michael Steinhardt returned about 180 antiquities stolen from around the world in recent decades as part of a deal with the government.

The pieces had a total value of $70 million.

The agreement between the US judicial system and Steinhardt, 80, allowed him to escape an indictment but prohibits him from acquiring works on the legal art market for the rest of his life.

Angkor, which at 400 square kilometers (154 square miles) is the largest archaeological site in the world, was the capital of the Khmer empire, which lasted from the ninth to 14th centuries.

The site, which recently reopened to tourists after a two-year pandemic-induced closure, was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992.