The horrific slaughter at Crocus City Hall, in which gunmen with automatic weapons and explosives killed over 130 people last Friday, has jolted Muscovites out of a sense of complacency that they have enjoyed, despite two years of war in next-door Ukraine.

In an address to Russians the day after the attack, President Vladimir Putin hinted that Ukraine might have been involved in the atrocity.

But he failed to mention a more plausible suspect: the group known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), a sworn enemy of Russia generally associated with the kind of ruthless, face-to-face massacres that occurred in the Moscow concert hall.

The four prime suspects, who fled the scene in a car, were apprehended in Russia’s southwestern Bryansk region, near the borders with Ukraine and Belarus. On Sunday night, the suspects, who are from the former Soviet central Asian state of Tajikistan, were hauled before a Moscow court – all of them very badly beaten – and charged with terrorism, with a trial date set for late May.

While many Russians seem eager to embrace a Ukrainian connection to the attack, it looks like exactly the sort of threat emanating from Afghanistan that Russian security experts have been warning about for years.

The ISIS-K group is dedicated to creating a caliphate in the former Khorasan region of central Asia, which stretches from Iran to Tajikstan and includes parts of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, as well as all of Afghanistan. With Afghanistan once again under Taliban rule, the group has been moving into neighboring former Soviet states and infiltrating Russia through the stream of migrant workers, many of them Tajiks, who keep Russia’s construction and service industries running. Statistics are unreliable, but it’s estimated that over 1 million migrant workers are currently in Russia, many of them in Moscow, and are relatively free to move around.

In early March the United States warned Russia that ISIS was preparing an attack, and specifically mentioned a concert venue. Mr. Putin rejected the warning as a “provocation,” saying “these actions resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.”

But, in fact, the Russians were already aware of the threat from ISIS. In early March, the Federal Security Service claimed to have raided and killed members of an “ISIS cell” near Moscow that was planning to bomb a Russian synagogue.

Now, experts say, the attack will almost certainly lead to tough security measures and stepped-up surveillance that the city hasn’t seen since a wave of terrorist attacks more than 20 years ago.

“There are so many questions and very few answers” about the Crocus City Hall attack, says Alexei Kondaurov, a former Duma deputy and former KGB major general specializing in anti-terrorist operations. “Any terrorist attack that isn’t caught at the stage of preparation represents a failure of special services. You can speak of solving 99% of crimes, but if one is not prevented, there is no justification. Particularly when the number of casualties is so high.”

Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters

An electronic screen installed near the Russian Foreign Ministry headquarters reads, "We mourn. 22.03.2024," in Moscow, March 23, 2024.

A threat from Afghanistan

In the 1990s, Afghanistan under the Taliban was a haven and incubator of various extreme Islamist groups – such as Al Qaeda – who exported Islamist insurgencies to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and beyond.

After NATO occupied Afghanistan and Russia put down its own Islamist rebellion in Chechnya, things stabilized. The mass-scale terrorist attacks that had hit Moscow and other parts of Russia during the Chechen wars receded. But experts say the danger never completely went away.

Russia’s military intervention in Syria in 2015 again pitted Moscow against Islamist groups, and a planeload of Russian tourists was destroyed, reportedly by an ISIS bomb, over Egypt’s Sinai Desert that year, killing 224 people.

“What happened in that Moscow concert hall was a terrible tragedy,” says Grigory Shvedov, editor of Caucasian Knot, an independent online journal that reports on Russia’s mainly Muslim Caucasus region. “But, cynically speaking, it will be seen by some as an effective example and could revive this kind of extremism” within Russia, which has a very large Indigenous Muslim population.

The threat from ISIS-K, which is based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is particularly acute for Moscow, due to the Russian economy’s reliance on migrant labor from central Asia. Afghan ethnic groups include Uzbeks and Tajiks, who may move easily into the neighboring states and then join the stream of migrant workers into Russia, as the four alleged Crocus City Hall attackers appear to have done.

Once in Russia, migrant workers may be subject to police harassment and extortion, but actual security measures that might prevent terrorist attacks are sorely lacking. Mr. Shvedov gives the example of dozens of illegal hostels, whose existence is an open secret in Moscow. Migrants live there without observing the requirement to register with authorities.

“The rules exist, but realities are very different,” he says, alluding to pervasive corruption in the system.

Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

People line up to lay flowers at a makeshift memorial to the victims of a shooting attack set up outside the Crocus City Hall concert venue in Krasnogorsk, just outside Moscow, March 24, 2024.

Consequences from Crocus City Hall

Depending on whom Russia officially decides to blame for the calamity, the terrorist attack may further sour relations with the U.S. Alternatively, it may improve them if the two adversaries acknowledge that they have a dangerous common enemy in ISIS.

At home, Russians will likely face the security crackdown that, ironically, they have largely avoided over two years of war in Ukraine. That would mean a further tightening of the screws on speech and make it much harder to use public transportation or gather in large groups. Communities of migrant workers will likely face a real crackdown.

“I expect more repression, inside the country and outside, and a new level of brutality,” says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security services expert who is presently a senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. “We’ve seen it before – the tactics once adopted to deal with terrorists became quickly accepted as a new norm to treat political dissent.

“Thus the torture the Russian security services used against four suspects might be used against all sort of people in the country. This is the most direct consequence of the attack.”

David 'Dee' Delgado/Reuters/File

A flag depicting former President Donald Trump is placed at Trump Tower in New York City, Oct. 1, 2023.

Donald Trump’s sprawling Trump Tower triplex isn’t headed to the auction block after all.

Not yet, at least.

On Monday, a state appeals court gave the former president a big break by slashing the bond he must post to block enforcement of the recent fraud judgment against him while he appeals.

A five-member panel of appeals court judges allowed Mr. Trump to put up only $175 million to cover the nearly half-billion-dollar civil verdict. Mr. Trump’s lawyers had argued that obtaining a bond big enough to cover the entire judgment, plus accrued interest, would have forced him to unload valuable real estate assets at fire-sale prices.

The appeals panel may have been comfortable with allowing the smaller bond due to those very assets. Mr. Trump’s well-known buildings and golf courses are visible and valuable, and aren’t going anywhere. They would be easy for New York Attorney General Letitia James to seize if the full judgment is upheld on appeal and the former president does not have the cash to pay the full amount.

“Trump is a real estate magnate, and that is a thing that makes him particularly easy to hold accountable,” says Will Thomas, assistant professor of business law at the University of Michigan.

Mr. Trump now has 10 days to come up with the $175 million bond under Monday’s appeals court ruling. That means he has postponed a possible financial crunch, in which the cash demands of this case collide with the $91 million sexual assault and defamation judgment against him and in favor of writer E. Jean Carroll. Together, the bond costs could possibly drain him and his company of most of its liquid assets.

Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Former President Donald Trump stands outside the courtroom before a hearing at New York Criminal Court, March 25, 2024, in New York.

On Monday, that bit of good news for Mr. Trump may have been counterbalanced by events in his criminal New York case on charges related to his alleged payment of hush money to a porn star. The presiding judge rejected Trump lawyers’ arguments for delay due to a late delivery of documents related to the case from federal prosecutors, and reiterated that the trial will start April 15. It will be the first time in American history a former president has faced criminal charges in a courtroom.

In the New York civil trial, Judge Arthur Engoron found that Mr. Trump, his elder sons, and his business had knowingly falsified the values of some real estate assets to obtain lower interest rates. The $454 million judgment in the case was based on the money that prosecutors estimated the Trump Organization had saved via the falsehoods, and profits from two buildings sold during the period covered by the charges.

Under state law, Mr. Trump is required to post a bond equal to the judgment in order to stay collection of what he owes while he pursues an appeal. Monday’s appellate order did not explain why judges reduced the amount necessary. But experts noted that they may simply have decided to split the $350 million difference between Judge Engoron’s full judgment and the $100 million bond that Trump lawyers last week said was all the former president could afford.

Whether the reduction presages anything about Mr. Trump’s appeal prospects is unclear.

Judge Engoron’s determination that the Trump team grossly overstated the values of its holdings is likely to be affirmed by the appeals court, says Gregory Germain, director of the bankruptcy clinic at Syracuse University College of Law.

However, there may be legitimate legal issues for review on appeal about how the trial judge determined damages in the case, says Professor Germain.

“So the [$175 million] amount probably doesn’t tell us what Trump should have to pay,” he says. “Rather, it was an arbitrary figure set in an amount that Trump could likely afford, but more than Trump asked for, to make sure that he is afforded a fair opportunity to make his case on appeal.”

The joke making the rounds in Israel’s political circles goes something like this: Everybody knows Joe Biden’s top priority is the two-state solution – the two states being Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The play on President Biden’s insistence that a path to a Palestinian state figure in any “day after” planning following the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza hints at the chafing that some Israelis feel over growing U.S. pressure on its close Middle East ally.

But the joke’s punchline also suggests the mounting dismay over what some here see as Mr. Biden’s political motivations as he faces criticism on his left for his pro-Israel stance – and a daunting electoral map in his reelection bid.

“The U.S. is the best friend of Israel, but – we now see Biden is trying to do cheap politics on our backs,” says Hodaya, a Jerusalem resident sharing a sunny park bench with her father recently. “Real Americans love Israel because we share a love for freedom, democracy, and peace. Biden used to be like that,” she adds, “but now he changes because he wants to win again” in November elections.

As part of the Biden administration’s shifting posture toward Israel, it has increased its distance on the international stage, changing the consistent use of its veto in United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting Israel.

Craig Ruttle/AP

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield (center) abstains during a Security Council vote on a Gaza cease-fire resolution, at U.N. headquarters in New York, March 25, 2024.

After last week sponsoring a resolution calling for an “immediate and sustained cease-fire” in Gaza that was vetoed by Russia and China, the United States abstained Monday, allowing a more toughly worded measure to pass. The new resolution did not condemn Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack against Israel, nor did it link the cease-fire to the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, both previous U.S. requirements.

In a statement explaining the U.S. abstention, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that while the U.S. did not agree with all provisions in the text, it did consider the resolution “consistent with our principled position that any cease-fire text must be paired with text on the release of the hostages.”

Responding to the lack of a U.S. veto, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a trip to Washington by two of his top aides to participate in talks on alternative Gaza policies, in particular, alternatives to an assault on overcrowded Rafah.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was already in the U.S., issued a statement before meetings with national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Mr. Blinken saying that Israel has “no moral right to stop the war in Gaza until we return all the hostages to their homes.”

Hodaya’s sentiments (she offered only her first name) may be unusually harsh, but they nevertheless underscore what is true here: Israelis’ love affair with Mr. Biden – sparked by his unquestioning support of Israel in the days following Hamas’ traumatizing attack – ain’t what it used to be.

There is still widespread appreciation for U.S. support, and that includes gratitude to President Biden for maintaining military and other assistance even as Israel has lost much of the world’s sympathies as the war in Gaza has dragged on.

But Israelis are keenly aware that the close bond between their country and the U.S. is fraying over a war that they in their large majority support. Many are quick to echo Mr. Netanyahu by insisting Israel is ready to “go it alone” to “finish the job in Gaza” if need be.

Paul Sancya/AP

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march during a visit by President Joe Biden to a key constituency in a 2024 battleground state, in Warren, Michigan, Feb. 1, 2024.

And there is a growing sentiment that the widening breach with the U.S. is not based on a legitimate critique of the war, but on U.S. domestic politics.

“We see Biden is changing when it comes to Israel, and what can we say? This is politics,” says Eli Avidan, a jeweler standing behind the glass case of his shop in downtown Jerusalem.

Mr. Avidan says he remembers warmly Mr. Biden coming to Israel just days after the Oct. 7 attack. But he also recalls hearing more recently the president describe Israel’s military operation as “over the top.”

“I feel the pro-human side of Biden is still with Israel,” he adds, “but we know there are lots of Arabs in America, and so for the politics he has to pay attention to them and take care of himself.”

Indeed, some observers of Israeli society say Mr. Biden remains generally well viewed, but they worry that hyperpartisan actors in both countries are responsible for dragging down relations.

“Most Israelis still appreciate the Biden administration,” says Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “But we have a minority on the hard right that stupidly thinks we can go it alone, and then in the U.S. there are politicians on the left saying, ‘Make my day, Israel.’”

A roller-coaster dive in relations has been on display both in Israel and in Washington.

Mr. Blinken, on the last day of a Middle East swing Friday, told Mr. Netanyahu the U.S. does not support an anticipated Israeli assault on Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than 1 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

Israel can achieve its goal of dismantling Hamas as a military and governing force – a goal the U.S. supports – without deepening Gaza’s already horrific humanitarian crisis, Mr. Blinken said.

To which Mr. Netanyahu said no, later telling journalists that the Rafah assault will happen.

Mr. Gallant said before his departure Sunday he was undertaking the trip to hear U.S. proposals “in order to preserve the special and important relationship for both our countries.”

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Members of Congress hold signs calling for a cease-fire in the Hamas-Israel war while President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, in Washington, March 7, 2024.

More worrisome for some in Israel are the multiplying indications that bilateral relations are descending into bitter and damaging partisanship.

After Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor this month to call on Israelis to “save Israel” by electing new leadership with a different “vision for the postwar future,” furious Republican senators responded by inviting Mr. Netanyahu to address them last week.

In a closed-door video conference call Wednesday with Republican senators, Mr. Netanyahu called Mr. Schumer’s comments both “inappropriate” and “outrageous,” several senators later said. Mr. Netanyahu had already said publicly that despite what Mr. Schumer seemed to think, Israel is no “banana republic” that takes orders from abroad.

Not to be outdone, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday he intends to invite Mr. Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress at some point after the two-week Easter recess.

And former President Donald Trump strayed beyond politics into religion, saying Mr. Schumer – the highest-ranking elected Jewish leader in the U.S. – was emblematic of a Democratic disdain for Israel. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” Mr. Trump said in a radio interview last week, in remarks many found offensive.

Some in Israel are cautioning Mr. Netanyahu not to damage Israel’s relations with its closest friend and strongest supporter by playing into the partisan politics.

“Netanyahu, don’t go to Washington,” former Jerusalem Post editor David Brinn declared in a front-page commentary in the newspaper Friday. If the prime minister were to accept an invitation to address Congress in the current overheated atmosphere, he wrote, “Netanyahu will in essence surrender Israel’s bipartisan status and align himself with the narrow interests of conservative America.”

When Haiti’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry announced his resignation two weeks ago amid a wave of gang violence on the Caribbean island, citizens of an African country 8,000 miles away were paying close attention. 

That is because for Kenyans, Haiti’s future has recently become deeply entangled in their own. In fact, when Mr. Henry resigned, he was actually on his way home from Nairobi, where he had been to sign an agreement with Kenya’s government to deploy 1,000 police officers to Haiti to help restore law and order. 

Mr. Henry called it a brave act of “solidarity with the people of Haiti.” And Kenya’s government said the plan was a “bigger calling to humanity” in support of a “brother nation” in the African diaspora. 

But many Kenyans don’t see it that way. Since the deployment plan was first announced last year, it has been intensely controversial, with critics arguing it is reckless with Kenyan lives and not in the country’s national interest. 

Now, Mr. Henry’s resignation has put the deployment temporarily on ice, sparking renewed debate here about what should – or should not – drive the country to intervene in the affairs of a nation in crisis on the other side of the world. 

Andrew Kasuku/AP

Haiti’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry, second from left, during his visit to Nairobi, where he signed an agreement that Kenyan police would help combat gangs in Haiti.

Pan-African solidarity

Haiti has long struggled with political instability, but the roots of the current crisis date back to July 2021. That was when the country’s president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated, triggering a sudden vacuum of power. Mr. Henry took over temporarily until an election could be held.

But he kept pushing back the election date. As his authority wobbled, Haiti’s already-powerful armed gangs stepped into the void. They unleashed a campaign of terror, attacking infrastructure such as police stations and ports, and funding their operations with a spate of kidnappings. Today, the U.N. estimates that gangs control more than 80% of Port-au-Prince, the country’s capital. 

As the crisis escalated, Mr. Henry appealed to the international community for help. Last July, Kenya announced it was prepared to lead a multinational police force to restore law and order, which would be funded by the United States. President William Ruto explained that Kenya was doing so because of its “strong commitment to Pan-Africanism” and a desire to “restore the dignity” of Haiti, the world’s first Black-ruled republic. 

“The people of Haiti have borne the brunt of colonial plunder [and] post-colonial … exploitation, and suffered repeated geological, climatic and epidemic disasters,” he explained. 

But immediately, the deployment plan was met by hostility from many Kenyans. Their concerns boiled down to one key question: why?

Critics argued that Kenya had its own security issues to deal with first – for instance, along its northern border with Somalia. Although Kenyan army troops have been part of several international peacekeeping missions, its police force has little international experience. And because the Kenyan police are regularly accused of excessive force by human rights groups, many worry their actions in Haiti could damage the country’s reputation. 

“Peacekeeping missions around the world have faced criticism for failing to uphold standards of professionalism and human rights,” says Joseph Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank within the U.S. Department of Defense. He said Kenya would face “a high level of scrutiny.”

Kenyan critics also accused Mr. Ruto of being motivated by greed and power. They said he was putting the lives of Kenyan police officers on the line simply to make money. For the deployment, Kenya requested an upfront payment of about $240 million from the U.S. and other international partners, although it has yet to receive it. 

“We know for sure that the reason for this misadventure is money,” said opposition parliamentarian Opiyo Wandayi during last November’s debate on the government plan. “You cannot use our policewomen and men as guinea pigs at the altar of rent seeking.”

Finally, skeptics claimed Mr. Ruto’s rhetoric about pan-Africanism was just a smokescreen for his administration’s desire to strengthen ties with Western powers like the U.S. 

“America still wants to have a say in Haiti and they want to do that through proxies” like Kenya, says George Musamali, a Kenyan security consultant. “In reality this is not an African concern.”

Brian Inganga/AP

Kenya police patrol the streets of Nairobi. A plan to send 1,000 Kenyan police officers to impose peace on gangs in Haiti is currently on hold.

‘Shrouded in secrecy’

In October, opposition politician Ekuru Aukot challenged the deployment in court, arguing that Kenya’s Constitution didn’t allow the president to send police officers abroad. 

How the government justified the plan was not clear, he says. “The agreement is shrouded in secrecy.”

In January, the High Court agreed. It stated the planned deployment lacked “constitutional and legal foundation” because Kenya and Haiti didn’t have a necessary “reciprocal agreement” that would allow them to deploy police officers to each other’s countries. 

Kenya’s government forged ahead anyway. In late February, Mr. Henry arrived in Nairobi to sign the agreement the court required. 

But many Kenyans continued to argue this was not enough because Mr. Henry wasn’t elected, and therefore didn’t have the authority to sign on behalf of Haiti. It was a “worthless piece of paper,” Mr. Musamali says.

The Haitian prime minister’s authority to sign international agreements, however, soon became a moot point. While Mr. Henry was in Kenya, gangs in Port-au-Prince organized a prison break that freed nearly 5,000 inmates and shut down the country’s main international airport. Unable to even get back into the country, Mr. Henry announced on March 13 that he would step down as soon as a “transitional council” to govern Haiti was appointed. No such council had been created, despite lengthy negotiations, by March 25.

For the time being, Kenya’s police deployment plans are on ice. The foreign ministry admitted it couldn’t proceed while Haiti had no government. But Mr. Ruto insisted Kenya would move forward again soon.

“I assured [U.S. Secretary of State Antony] Blinken that Kenya will take leadership of the UN Security Support Mission in Haiti … as soon as the Presidential Council is in place under an agreed process,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on March 13.

Still, many Kenyans hope the pause will give the government time to reconsider. 

Maxwell Biwott, who works in an advertising agency in Nairobi, said he hoped Kenya would choose to prioritize its own people. 

“It would be good for our police first to restore peace [at home] ... before restoring peace elsewhere,” he says. 

Ian Christmann/Courtesy of Friends Center for Children

The first house built by the Jim Vlock program is completed Aug. 14, 2023, in New Haven, Connecticut. The village of rent-free homes for child care workers of Friends Center started in 2021 with two already constructed homes.

There’s a new type of community being built in New Haven, just a 10-minute drive from Yale University. From the ruins of an old rock quarry, a village of multifamily houses is sprouting on 2 acres of land. 

An open, shared courtyard will tie together the families, most of whom have young children. However, what sets this community apart is whom these homes are for. The budding village is only for child care workers. Friends Center for Children is building rent-free workforce housing as a salaried benefit for employees.

After five years working with young children, Paris Pierce was searching for ways to keep doing the work she loves. The 20-something had found her calling in caring for children under 3 years old, but her job came with challenges. 

The mother of three was spending an entire paycheck, plus half of another, on rent for a one-bedroom apartment in New Haven. After groceries and utilities, she was left with close to nothing.

“That’s still before anything the kids might need,” adds Ms. Pierce. “We made it work, but it was tough. I was always looking for ways to make more money while staying in child care.”

Workforce housing is being explored in the United States as a recruitment and retention strategy across the education sector. However, the potential solution is so new that most evidence of its effect is still anecdotal.

In Daly City, California, a school district built a 122-unit affordable housing complex to assist its educators and staff with below-market-rate housing. In Los Angeles, the school district built three housing projects and gave leasing priority to teachers to address rising housing costs and low wages in education. 

“This is still an innovation and an experiment that requires further study,” says Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association, a teachers union. Ms. Anderson applauds the efforts to overcome economic barriers.

She thinks it’s wise for school districts and employers to think about other benefits like workforce housing that can be added to a professional salary. But make no mistake, “there’s no substitute for a professional wage,” says Ms. Anderson. “We don’t have an absence of qualified individuals and educators in this country. We have an absence of fairly paid education jobs.” 

Still, early signs are promising. In Santa Clara, California, the unified district’s affordable housing complex – built in 2001 – has shown promising results. Since the 70-unit, below-market-rate housing opened, the attrition rate for teachers with the housing benefit has been less than one-third that of teachers with comparable experience. 

Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP/File

Jefferson Union High School District administrative assistant Taylor Garcia walks through her children's playroom in Daly City, California, July 8, 2022. The school district in San Mateo County is among those that offer educator housing.

Youngest children, least paid

The situation is even more acute for child care providers working with children under age 5.

In Connecticut, early educators with a bachelor’s degree are paid 31.3% less than their colleagues in the K-8 system, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. The poverty rate in 2020 for early educators was 14.1%, much higher than for Connecticut workers in general (7.3%) and seven times higher than K-8 teachers (2%).

In 2022, the median wage for child care workers was $14.04, up 18% since 2017, according to data from the Connecticut Department of Labor. However, the price of a one-bedroom apartment in New Haven increased nearly 30% during the same time. 

Allyx Schiavone, executive director of Friends Center, says the child care sector is “woefully underfunded,” despite rising costs, with educators expected to make do with poverty-level wages. She hopes Friends Center’s Teacher Housing Initiative will serve as a model to address the nation’s crisis in both education and housing.

The initiative, started in 2021, is a means-tested program. In order to qualify for housing, a single adult must have an annual salary of $38,500 or less, or $64,000 or less for one adult with children. For a two-parent household, the ceiling is $79,000.

Child care providers pay no rent, only utilities. Tenants apply annually to continue to live in teacher housing, which is intended to help them build financial stability.

“It gives me a sense of security,” says Ms. Pierce, who was among the first to move into the village in 2021. “Because these days, support is tough to come by. So having that community backbone, for us to rely on each other, is great because it really does take a village.”

Courtesy of Friends Center for Children

Paris Pierce, an early child care provider, reads a book to her class at Friends Center for Children in New Haven, Connecticut, March 13, 2024. Ms. Pierce and her children have lived in housing provided by Friends Center since 2021.

A community effort

If it takes a village to raise a child, what does it take to raise that village? That’s something Friends Center’s building partners at Yale considered when creating teacher housing.

“We’re not trying to create a single house, but a village where a community can thrive,” says Adam Hopfner, director of the Jim Vlock building program at Yale. “We’re creating a village of sorts, whereby collective living can benefit not only the families of teachers but also the children being taught by the teachers.”

Friends Center conducted an internal survey in 2019 to understand its educators’ main financial stressors. Housing, food, transportation, and utilities were the most common concerns. The survey also revealed that of the 29 surveyed educators – mostly single women of color with children – more than three-quarters were struggling with rent. Only one owned a house. 

When Friends Center launched its housing initiative, two properties were purchased with a donation from its Quaker founders. Within three months, four teachers moved in. 

The tenant teachers meet with a financial adviser every month to discuss their savings goals and an emotional well-being coordinator for weekly regular check-ins. 

“It takes courage to be the first of something,” says Aundrea Tabbs-Smith, the emotional well-being coordinator. “We’re trying to create something that we hope will reshape and revamp the child care system.”

Six teachers and their families currently reside in teacher housing. When the village is completed, Friends Center hopes to house 24 teachers, or 30% of its anticipated 80-teacher workforce, by 2027. In 2023, it penned a five-year agreement with the Yale School of Architecture to build four additional houses.

Each home – designed in winter and completed by fall – is created with a teacher’s needs in mind. Jessica Chen, a master’s of architecture student who helped construct the first house, drew her inspiration from “witnessing the chaos of the day firsthand” in the life of a teacher from her mother. She taught in Boston public schools for over 20 years.

“We made sure there was enough storage for all the things they need, because teachers are not only teachers in the school but also at home,” says Ms. Chen. 

In Ms. Pierce’s new home, she and her children have their own bedrooms, a luxury she never enjoyed growing up. With the extra space in her budget, she can afford extracurriculars like cheerleading for her 12-year-old daughter and swimming lessons for her youngest. 

Ms. Pierce’s main goal now is to build her credit so that she can purchase her own home, inspired by the one she lives in now. 

AP

The presumed winner of Senegal's presidential election, Bassirou Diomaye Faye.

In recent years, the band of African countries straddling the southern edge of the Sahara has struggled with military coups, violent Islamist extremism, and a rejection of regional cooperation on security.

Now Senegal, through a presidential election held Sunday, is showing the antidote to those seemingly intractable problems. It resides in the cornerstones of democracy, such as judicial independence, equality, and vibrant civic participation.

“We are very proud in Senegal to be able to face all our opposition, our difficulties, our misunderstandings, in a democratic way,” Abdoulaye Bousso, director of the civil society group Aar Sunu Election (Protect Our Election), told Al Jazeera. “We have strong institutions.”

The election almost did not happen. Facing term limits that he himself pushed through, President Macky Sall tried to postpone his departure indefinitely. That bid stirred immediate head winds in a country that has never seen a coup d’état and where trust in institutions like the national military runs deep.

Protesters filled the streets. The Constitutional Council, Senegal’s highest court, rejected the delay. Compelled to reverse course, Mr. Sall consented to step down as required by the constitution by April 2 and released two popular opposition leaders he had imprisoned on questionable charges of corrupting youth and fomenting insurrection.

Anger turned to celebration. In a truncated campaign season lasting less than two weeks, 19 candidates filled the ballot – including the first woman ever to run for the presidency. Voter turnout Sunday exceeded 60% – a significant increase since 2022, when a majority of voters frustrated with corruption and economic decline sat out parliamentary elections. Balloting was peaceful. As results were still being counted, a majority of the candidates, including Mr. Sall’s hand-chosen successor in the ruling party, conceded.

Behind bars just 12 days ago, a former tax inspector and anti-corruption leader named Bassirou Diomaye Faye is now Senegal’s presumptive next president. The harmony of that outcome is striking – and not just in Africa, where democracy remains a relatively new experiment. And in a country that is more than 95% Muslim, it rebuts a regional trend suggesting that Islam and democracy are incompatible.

“An instrumental factor in Senegal’s political landscape has been its active and organized civil society, characterized by vibrant youth and social group activism, which has held public officials accountable for upholding term limits and democratic progress,” Emmanuel Yeboah, a regional analyst at the West Africa Democracy Solidarity Network, wrote last month.

At a time when even the world’s most established democracies face internal challenges, voters in Senegal offer proof that when set on values such as transparency and rule of law, the unwritten norms of self-government are secure.