Zara’s Billionaire Owner Was Praised For Helping In The Coronavirus Crisis. Workers In Myanmar Paid The Price.

Fast fashion was always a problem. Now, COVID-19 has deepened the inequity between garment workers and fashion labels rebranding themselves as saviors.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING LONG READ FEATURE

Nishita JhaBuzz Feed News Reporter
Reporting From New Delhi Posted on May 7, 2020

Cameron Spencer / Getty Images
Zara's first store opening in Australia, in Sydney in 2011.

NEW DELHI — A woman immaculately dressed for quarantine reads on a plush sofa in her black crop top and anti-fit denim pants. Another, dressed in a flouncy floor-length peach dress, dances in her kitchen with joyous abandon. A third socially distances on a boat, her white poplin shirt dress a contrast to the lush green surroundings.

Meanwhile, in crowded factories located in chaotic, crime-filled industrial hubs, the workers making these clothes find themselves abandoned by Zara, the global retail brand that’s making quarantine look so glamorous.

When more than one-third of the planet went under coronavirus-related lockdowns, fashion changed. The globe-trotting, stylish woman from Zara’s campaigns moved indoors — or at least, that’s where you’ll see her in the slickly produced videos that the global fashion brand uploads to Twitter. It’s possible that no one will don a Versace cape anytime soon, but consumers are ordering clothes online to reflect their new lives: clothes to wear on work Zoom calls, athleisure for exercising at home, sweats and pajamas for lounging around, and clothes that simply make us feel good. The world might be full of uncertainty, but being able to choose the fit, color, and fabric of the shirt we pair with those comfy pajamas still offers the possibility of feeling in control.

The cost of this retail therapy, the longing for comfort and normalcy under lockdown, is being borne by workers thousands of miles away, faces you’d never see in a summer fashion campaign, even when the videos include token models of color. These workers cannot work from home and, in some cases, they are being forced to labor in factories in close proximity to each other without concern for protecting them from the coronavirus. While brands like Zara, which has stores in 96 countries, ramp up work at logistics centers, workers assembling clothes, swimwear, accessories, and shoes are being sacrificed to meet the demand

Zara / @Zara / Via Twitter: @ZARA, Zara / @Zara / Via Twitter: @ZARA, Zara / @Zara / Via Twitter: @ZARA A selection of still images from Zara's recent Twitter campaigns.

Issues with fast fashion far precede the emergence of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, but its rapid spread has deepened the incredible inequity between garment workers who work at one end of the supply chain and wealthy individuals like Zara’s Spanish billionaire owner Amancio Ortega, the world’s sixth-richest man, who are rebranding themselves as benevolent saviors.

At the height of the pandemic in Spain this year, Zara’s parent company, Inditex, closed more than 3,000 stores. Ortega pivoted his fashion empire to making hospital gowns and masks, and according to Forbes, flew in medical supplies worth millions from China. Ortega also made sure that Zara’s Spanish employees received their full salaries during the crisis — all of which won him plenty of great press and support in Spain. On March 28, ambulance crews gathered outside his home to wish him a happy birthday. But Ortega’s generosity and concern for Zara’s workers stopped at the borders of Spain.

Nacho Louro@NachoLouroLas ambulancias de La Coruña delante de la casa de Amancio Ortega para expresar el agradecimiento de toda la sociedad y felicitarle por su cumpleaños. Felicidades Amancio, Marca España 🇪🇦07:38 PM - 28 Mar 2020Reply Retweet Favorite

Although Inditex does not publicly disclose the list of factories it sources clothing from, BuzzFeed News has spoken to employees from two factories that form part of Zara’s supply chain in Myanmar, where workers put in 11-hour shifts, six days a week, for as little as $3.50–$4.74 per day.
While people sang “Happy Birthday” to Ortega from their balconies in Spain, more than 500 workers at the two factories were laid off when they asked to be supplied with durable masks and for social distancing to be introduced to protect them from the coronavirus. One of the factories, Myan Mode, fired every single member of a workers’ union, along with a woman who had complained of being sexually harassed at the factory last year.



Obtained by BuzzFeed News
Inside a Zara factory in Yangon, Myanmar.

Inditex told BuzzFeed News it was working with suppliers to ensure they were following official guidance to protect workers during the pandemic. A spokesperson said that the dispute at Myan Mode had been at least partially resolved, with 29 sacked workers reinstated.

Anxiety about being laid off or having your salary slashed because of the coronavirus crisis has led to thinkpieces, graffiti, and “eat the rich” memes. Britney Spears might be a communist now, and teenagers on TikTok are calling Karl Marx “daddy.” Jeff Bezos — memed mercilessly for losing a minuscule portion of his money — has in fact now added $25 billion, more than the GDP of Honduras, to his total wealth since the coronavirus crisis began. Billionaires in the US have seen their net worth increase by tens of millions of dollars in the last three months.

Many want the ultra-rich to do more, which might be why Rihanna, who has donated millions of dollars to coronavirus relief efforts, has been described as a “one-woman COVID-19 foe.” But the pandemic and its economic repercussions have laid bare the hypocrisy of the super-wealthy who do just enough to make sure they get good press, while treating workers who labor for their brands as disposable.

“We could all die, and for what? Making already rich brands super rich,” one worker said on the phone from Myanmar’s capital, Yangon, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The working class is being sacrificed so they can wear good clothes.”



Sai Aung Main / Getty Images
A man wearing a face mask walks on an empty road, amid restrictions put in place to halt the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Yangon on April 10.

The coronavirus has so far not spread extensively in Myanmar, despite the country sharing a nearly 1,400-mile border with China, and the fact that an estimated 10,000 migrant workers were crossing the border on a daily basis until late January. As of May 7, the country has officially recorded only 176 cases and six deaths.

The country’s first positive case of the coronavirus was recorded on March 23 — a Myanmar citizen living in the United States who had recently returned for a wedding. Until then, Myanmar’s government was still patting itself on the back because there were “no cases of coronavirus in the country” — something the health minister said the people owed to their diet and lifestyle. There was still no mention of social distancing. But like several parts of Southeast Asia, it is difficult to give a true picture because there is insufficient testing — as of May 1, the government had administered 8,300 tests. Experts fear that if the number of coronavirus cases increased dramatically, the country’s public healthcare system would collapse. The World Bank has estimated that Myanmar has only 249 ventilators for a population of almost 55 million.

Not a whole lot had changed in the working practices at Myan Mode, the Zara factory which lies in the heart of the industrial district of Hlaing Tharyar, in Myanmar’s capital, Yangon. Since the factory, whose owners are based in South Korea, opened in 2016, half of all orders have been from Zara.

Hlaing Tharyar is a crowded hub of garment factories and light manufacturers, home to gang violence, police violence, and union clashes. Most of Myan Mode’s workers are young women from rural villages — Myanmar’s garment workforce is over 90% women. At the insistence of the workers’ union, factory bosses had added a basin for workers to wash their hands, while temperature checks took place as workers entered the factory. Employees had been provided with cloth masks in February but they were not durable, and the factory did not supply any other masks.



Courtesy Ohmar Myint
Ohmar Myint


Then suddenly, in the last week of March, everything changed. “The husbands of two women who worked at the factory returned from Thailand and were showing symptoms of COVID-19,” Ohmar Myint, a 34-year-old sewing machine operator at Myan Mode, told BuzzFeed News. “The women and their husbands lived in the dormitory, so everyone found out.”

On March 28, the union decided to speak to the factory’s owners again. “We wanted masks to be made mandatory, an end to mandatory overtime while the crisis was on, and we wanted them to send home the two women whose husbands had COVID-like symptoms,” a veteran union leader named Mau Maung, who was part of the negotiating committee, said. “It was a half-day, Saturday, so the management told us it would come back with a decision soon.” A few hours later, an official came to the room where the workers were gathered and read out a list of 571 names. Everyone on the list, including Myint, Maung, and 520 union members, was fired on the spot, representing about half of Myan Mode’s workforce.

“We were given no notice at all,” Maung said.

Nearly half a million people in Myanmar work in garment factories, living cheek by jowl in dormitories that factories rent to them for half of their salaries. The country’s minimum wage is one of the lowest in Asia, and following a wave of strikes last year, approximately 50,000 garment workers have joined or formed unions. These unions are a lifeline for people who are treated by big brands as convenient, but ultimately disposable, cheap labor. Myan Mode’s union was able to negotiate small victories for the workers, like permission to be up to 15 minutes late for work, and more reasonable working hours than other factories demanded — 44 hours a week, with up to 14 hours of overtime.

Dig into Zara’s history, and you will find its owner Ortega’s origin story recounted in breathless detail. It always begins with poverty, the seed for his philanthropic nature was planted when as a 12-year-old boy he saw his mother being denied food on credit at a local shop in La Coruña.

That kind of poverty is familiar for Myint, who was one of the 571 employees laid off at Myan Mode.

When she spoke to BuzzFeed News on the phone from Yangon, she sounded defiant and sad in turns — the factory had fired every single union member, and a woman who had complained that a senior colleague at the factory had made sexual advances toward her.

Myint said sexual harassment was rampant at garment worker factories in Myanmar, and she admired the way the union stood by the complainant, their solidarity ultimately leading to the man’s resignation from Myan Mode. This, she said, was why she joined the union. BuzzFeed News has been unable to contact the complainant, who union members say has left Yangon and returned to her native village.

“Workers cannot oppress workers, but that’s what happens at the factories,” Myint said. “The factory owners have absolute power — we cannot talk back to them no matter how much they exploit us, or demand better pay, or even ask for leave. If we take even one day off, we lose money. On days we finish our work early, we cannot sign out of the factory, we’re simply given another task, and then another, and another...the work never stops.”

Being in the union gave Myint more bargaining power, she was part of a collective of over 500 people, most of whom were women. But at the end of each day, Myint said, she still felt as though she was a machine whose batteries had died. Her entire body ached from hunching over the zippers and lining she sewed into skirts, jackets, shirts, and hoodies for Zara and its rival Spanish brand, Mango. Once her shift ended, there was still housework to be done, groceries to be carried home, food to be cooked for her family. She had five hours to herself in the entire day, and those were meant for sleep.

Myint said she first learned about the novel coronavirus in January, while browsing Facebook.

“[I was reading about] how contagious it is, and that’s scary for me, because we work so close to each other all day, if one of us fell sick, everyone would fall sick,” she said.

By February, Myint and the other union members had heard that the supply of raw materials from China, things like zippers, fabric, buttons, rivets, and velcro, had stopped coming to Myan Mode. That’s when Myint and the union decided to talk to their employers at the factory.

“We told them, ‘If you have plans to close the factory or fire workers because of coronavirus, let the union know first so we can help people look for other work,’” she said. “The owners agreed, but said there was no plan to close the factory yet.” Myan Mode confirmed the details of this conversation.



Iago Lopez / AP
Amancio Ortega, founding shareholder of Inditex fashion group, in July 2013.

The reputation that Ortega, Inditex’s billionaire founder, enjoys as a small-town hero in Spain is bolstered by stories about his legendary humility. Stories like how his first fashion distribution network began in 1963 at the port city of La Coruña to help women earn money, while their husbands went out to sea to fish. At Inditex’s headquarters in Arteixo, northwestern Spain, he sits at a desk in a corner of a Zara Woman workspace. Ortega, now 84, is so reclusive that until 1999 no photograph of him had even been published. Until lockdowns in Spain forced everyone to stay indoors, Ortega still drank his coffee at his favorite local café.

But Ortega’s true gift is speed. Inditex owns several other brands, including Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Oysho, Stradivarius, Zara Home, and Uterqüe. But the company’s crown jewel is undoubtedly Zara. Last month Spanish media gleefully noted that even Pablo Iglesias, Spain’s second deputy prime minister and one of Ortega’s most vocal critics, was spotted wearing a black, fitted Zara Man jacket.

Over the years, as Zara evolved both its name — from Zorba to Zara — and its fashion ethos, the brand built its reputation by trend-spotting and delivering those trends to customers at warp speed: in fashion terms, weeks, instead of months.

Ortega’s quick thinking served him well even when the coronavirus hit Spain. He directed 11 of his factories in Galicia, northwest Spain, to immediately switch to making personal protective equipment (PPE). Zara also delivered washable, splash-proof, even arguably stylish turquoise hospital gowns to medical workers in the city of La Coruña. Soon after that, Ortega flew in another 3 million units of PPE from China, along with 1,450 ventilators for Spain.

In a pre-coronavirus world, Ortega’s way of doing business courted plenty of controversy. In 2015, Zara was accused of discriminating against black employees at its corporate offices (Zara denied the reports), while conditions in factories in Brazil were likened to “slavery” (Zara Brazil responded to the charges saying “the alleged criminal offences pointed out by the inspection report refer to third-party conduct that is not to be confused with Zara’s”). In 2016, Inditex was accused of tax evasion worth over 550 million euros, about $596 million (Inditex published a lengthy response denying the allegations). In 2017, workers making clothes for Zara in Turkey began sewing pleas for help into their lining.

When confronted by these allegations from Brazil and Turkey, Zara turned to the argument often used by big brands that rely on cheap labor for supply chains — they had a contract with the factory, and the factory alone. The way those factories treat their employees is not the brand’s business.

“That’s completely false, of course,” Andrew Tillett-Saks, a labor rights activist who lives and works in Myanmar, told BuzzFeed News. “If these brands were to indicate any interest in keeping workers safe, the factories would immediately follow suit. The fact is the brands have all the power to change things. They just don’t because they prioritize their financial profits over the people who make their clothes.”

To some extent, fashion’s exploitative practices looked like they were about to change following a massive factory accident in Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza in 2013, when an eight-story commercial building collapsed, killing over 1,000 garment factory workers. Inditex was among 200 fast fashion labels to sign a worker safety accord for Bangladeshi workers following the accident — but increasingly, that accord has ceased to matter. This month, for instance, thousands of workers including those who sew clothes for Zara are returning to garment factories in Bangladesh, even during the pandemic.

Courtesy the Myan Mode union
Workers protest unsafe conditions at garment factories in Yangon, Myanmar.

As Thingyan, Myanmar's annual new year water festival, began in April, hundreds of workers returned to their hometowns, uncertain of when they would return to work. Some had accepted a small severance from the factory; others had not. Myint said she and the other union members were growing increasingly certain that they were being punished. Another factory, Rui Ning, located in the same industrial complex as Myan Mode, had laid off 30% of its workers, most of whom were union members too. By this time, the coronavirus crisis was also growing: Yangon imposed a lockdown during the holiday season from April 10 to April 19, as well as a night curfew when it was discovered that 80% of the country’s positive COVID-19 cases were in the capital.

In the past, labor unions and NGOs have been wary of publicly calling out brands because they were afraid of precisely what happened at Myan Mode and Rui Ning — troublemakers would be fired, or the brand would shut that particular factory down and sign a contract with another. “Owners briefly shut down the factory only to quickly reopen with new, nonunion workers,” Tillet-Saks, the labor rights activist, said. “Often, they will change technical details such as the factory’s name or registrant to circumvent labor laws, while maintaining the same core operation.”

VIDEO

 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nishitajha/coronavirus-zara-spain-inditex-myanmar
A union leader in Rui Ning explains what happened at the factory.

But the prospect of being unemployed during a pandemic might change that. For the past month, around 30 members of the Myan Mode union who were sacked appeared daily outside the factory’s gates in protest, where they ate, slept, sang union songs. The union has also approached the South Korean consulate and Yangon’s Arbitration Council. “If that does not work, we might even sue,” one leader told BuzzFeed News on the condition of anonymity. BuzzFeed News also learned that union members from the Myan Mode and Rui Ning unions have reached out to union workers in Spain, who have assured them that they will add pressure to negotiations with Inditex and Mango.

“If the Spanish unions do help, this is a great step in the international labor rights movement. It will mean a lot to the union in Myanmar,” said Tillett-Saks, who was aware of emails exchanged between the unions in Myanmar and Spain. “With the employers and brands being so multinational, workers need to be united internationally as well if they are going to have any power to improve the garment industry. All they want is that workers who were fired should be reinstated and that they do not use the pandemic as an excuse to attack the union.”

Inditex’s own code of conduct states that the company supports unions and wants factories to treat workers in the supply chain with care for their health and safety. Days after BuzzFeed News reached out to the company’s ethics committee for a response on the sacking of workers at Myan Mode, a representative from Inditex said the dispute at Myan Mode with 29 workers had been resolved through dialogue, and that the factory had agreed to reinstate the protesting workers. The more than 500 workers who had accepted severance pay could possibly be able to return to the factory once it resumed work at full capacity — although it was unclear when that might happen.

“We have communicated with suppliers to follow local government recommendations and instructions and/or to implement measures to ensure they are following the health protection guidelines for workplaces detailed by the WHO regarding Covid 19,” the Inditex representative wrote.

“We are working closely with our suppliers at this difficult time and we expect continued compliance with our Code of Conduct, which clearly requires fair treatment of workers and no discrimination against workers’ representatives.”

But union workers said the olive branch from Zara, which arrived on May 6, more than a month after 571 workers were fired, was a belated attempt at damage control. “This union-busting case using COVID-19 as cover has not yet been resolved,” a union worker told BuzzFeed News, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The union worker said that the offer to reinstate 29 people fell short of the union’s demands.

For instance, more than 500 workers who were laid off still had no jobs, and the fact that they had accepted a paltry severance was being used against them. Myan Mode had failed to honor an agreement that it would not target the union and lay off workers during the pandemic, the union member said. Myan Mode is still refusing to recognize the union officially, while it has hired hundreds of daily migrant workers who are not members of any union.

Mango did not respond to a BuzzFeed News request for comment.


Sai Aung Main / Getty Images
Firefighters wearing protective clothing spray disinfectant along a street as a preventive measure against the spread of COVID-19 in Yangon, April 23.

Across Asia, countries have had two kinds of responses to the pandemic: complete shutdowns like India and Sri Lanka, or partial lockdowns with restrictions, like Cambodia, Indonesia, and Myanmar, where governments have banned gatherings but kept factories running. While these decisions have largely depended on the health of each country’s domestic economy, countries suddenly closing down their borders have caused panic — particularly among the poorest and most invisible populations of migrant workers, who cross domestic and international borders searching for work. This exodus of worried workers, desperate to return home as the worst economic and health crisis grows around them, is occurring in tandem with spikes in COVID-19 cases.

Everything is terrible — but the pandemic is particularly worrying for the people making our clothes, because readymade garment workers work on short-term contracts or are sometimes paid per piece of apparel, existing precariously close to poverty. Already, several brands have canceled orders of clothes that have already been made in factories, and many have reneged on payments promised to workers in Asia. The relentless consumer hunger for branded clothes and fast fashion means that when the worst of the crisis is over, and our appetite for shopping returns, all that a big brand has to do is find the next bunch of cheap laborers.

For too long, we’ve pretended that fast fashion and eco-consciousness can coexist, that the worst excesses of sweatshop exploitation are a thing of the past. Brands like Zara and Mango advertise sustainability all over their stores; other brands assure customers that they recycle all their packaging. But in the middle of a pandemic, it is no longer enough to wear faux concern. ●



Nishita Jha is a global women's rights reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in India.
Contact Nishita Jha

Betsy DeVos Changed The Title IX Rules For How Schools Handle Sexual Assault Reports

Victim advocacy groups say the changes will let schools off the hook and make it harder for victims of sexual assault to seek justice.

Ellie Hall BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on May 7, 2020

Jim Watson / Getty Images

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos on Wednesday finalized new federal regulations that give more protection and power to students accused of sexual assault — which advocates say will hurt survivors.

The new regulations lay out how schools must interpret the federal Title IX gender equity law. In particular, the law has guided how colleges and universities respond to allegations of sexual assault and harassment on campus.

Some of the key changes in the new regulations include narrowing the definition of what constitutes sexual harassment and mandating live hearings, during which those accused of sexual assault are given the new right to cross-examine their accuser via a third party.

DeVos said Wednesday that these new regulations will make the investigation process smoother and provide better protection to accused students.

"Too many students have lost access to their education because their school inadequately responded when a student filed a complaint of sexual harassment or sexual assault," DeVos said in a statement.

"This new regulation requires schools to act in meaningful ways to support survivors of sexual misconduct, without sacrificing important safeguards to ensure a fair and transparent process," she added. "We can and must continue to fight sexual misconduct in our nation's schools, and this rule makes certain that fight continues."

In 2011, the Obama administration implemented a number of steps schools were required to take when a student reported a sexual assault, such as 60-day time limits on investigations, increased protections for accusers, and a broader definition of what constitutes sexual harassment and assault.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who as vice president led the Obama administration's "It's On Us" campaign against campus sexual assault, said in a statement Wednesday that he would put a "quick end” to DeVos's Title IX changes if elected, saying that the new regulations "[give] colleges a green light to ignore sexual violence and strip survivors of their rights.”

Victim advocacy groups say the changes will let schools off the hook and empower them to ignore accusations of sexual assault and harassment.

"The final rule makes it harder for survivors to report sexual violence, reduces schools’ liability for ignoring or covering up sexual harassment, and creates a biased reporting process that favors respondents and schools over survivors’ access to education," Sage Carson, of Know Your IX, a group that combats gender violence in schools, said in a statement to BuzzFeed News on Wednesday.

In 2018, the Trump administration estimated that rolling back the Obama-era expansion of Title IX would save schools nationwide between $286 million and $368 million over 10 years as they were required to investigate fewer sexual misconduct cases.

The executive director of the advocacy group End Rape on Campus, Kenyora Parham, said on Twitter that the changes show DeVos and the Trump administration have "absolutely no regard for survivors."

In a column published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Wednesday, the presidents of the National Women’s Law Center and the NAACP said that new Department of Education regulations threaten "racial and gender justice."

"DeVos’s Title IX rules would make it harder for students who are sexually harassed to receive vital support and protection, while mandating unfair processes for investigating and addressing sexual harassment," the NWLC's Fatima Goss Graves and the NAACP's Derrick Johnson said in the op-ed, which they coauthored. "All these changes would particularly hurt black women and girls, who face even higher stakes when reporting sexual harassment."

"Both of our organizations have stated, again and again, that an attack on Title IX is an attack on all civil rights. DeVos’s rules would forbid schools from proactively addressing sexual violence, forcing too many student survivors into a broken criminal legal system in order to hold their abusers accountable. While some may choose to report their assaults to law enforcement, this cannot be the only option for survivors."

The new regulations will go into effect in August.


MORE ON THIS

Betsy DeVos Wants New Regulations That Protect Students Accused Of Sexual Assault And Their Schools

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The Trump Administration Has Revoked A Federal Directive On Campus Rape

Molly Hensley-Clancy · Sept. 22, 2017

Betsy DeVos Reveals Plan To Overhaul Obama-Era Campus Rape Policies

Tyler Kingkade · Sept. 7, 2017


Ellie Hall is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.
Contact Ellie Hall

Magician Roy Horn Of Siegfried & Roy Has Died Of The Coronavirus At 75

Horn was severely injured in an attack by one of his tigers in 2003.

David MackBuzzFeed News Reporter  May 8, 2020

Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images Siegfried & Roy in the 1970s.

Roy Horn — one half of the tiger-toting and extravagant German magic duo Siegfried & Roy, who became world-famous for their Las Vegas nightlife show — died Friday of the coronavirus. He was 75.

Horn died in the Mountain View Hospital in Las Vegas, according to a media statement to several news outlets.

“Today, the world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend,” Siegfried Fischbacher said in the statement. “From the moment we met, I knew Roy and I, together, would change the world. There could be no Siegfried without Roy, and no Roy without Siegfried."

Responding to Horn's death, magician David Copperfield described him as "a wonderful artist, a legend."

"Roy gave so much to entertainment and our community," he tweeted.


John Locher / AP
Siegfried Fischbacher, left, with Roy Horn in 2014, some nine years after he was attacked by one of their tigers.

Horn was born in Germany in 1944 as Allied bombs rained down toward the end of World War II. His mother, Johanna, left her three other children in a basement in order to cycle through the carnage to her sister's place to give birth, according to the magicians' website biography.

At a young age, he befriended his family dog, Hexe, while his stepfather struggled with alcoholism and the family sank into post-war poverty.

“I was a prince and Hexe was my unicorn,” Horn said. “We ran, we flew; out there we knew no boundaries—we were free.”

Sensing his affinity with animals, his mother's friends organized for Horn's birthday for him to have access to a zoo where they served as patrons. It was there that Horn grew an affinity to the zoo's tiger and cheetah, beginning his love for wild cats.

While working as a waiter on a cruise ship in the late 1950s, Horn met Fischbacher, who had been working performing magic shows, and teased him that his show needed scarier animals to be more entertaining.

It was the beginning of a multi-decade partnership that saw them tour first the seas, then Europe, then North America, and the world with their levitating tigers and vanishing elephants.

A 1989 New York Times piece on the pair described their show as "a sorcerer's extravaganza, a pageant of Las Vegas glitter and circus glitz."

The performance involved 55 cast members, 24 big cats, an elephant, a python, and an understudy python "just in case."

The pair established a decades-long residency in Las Vegas and were even parodied on The Simpsons.



In 2003, Horn was attacked by a 600-pound white tiger during a show at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. The animal mauled his neck and dragged him offstage, as crew members tried desperately to free him. But Horn was left partially paralyzed and permanently disfigured.

In 2009, after some 5,000 shows over 13 years, the pair performed one final farewell Las Vegas performance.

''We haven't done too badly for a couple of immigrants,'' Roy told the New York Times in 1989 as they performed in the city. ''When two guys come from Germany with absolutely nothing, it's a great thing to have your name in lights at the Radio City Music Hall, don't you think?''

David Mack is a deputy director of breaking news for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.
Contact David Mack 

Ukrainian Prosecutors Drafted Documents To Charge Paul Manafort With Corruption. Then The Case Disappeared.

Manafort and a former Obama White House counsel were on the brink of being charged for aiding the embezzlement of more than $1 million in Ukraine. And then they weren't.

Posted on May 8, 2020, at 1:28 p.m. ET

Timothy A. Clary / Getty Images
President Donald Trump's onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort arrives at Manhattan Supreme Court, June 27, 2019.

KYIV, Ukraine — A little over a year ago, in a pre-coronavirus pandemic world, Paul Manafort was convicted in the US of financial fraud, witness tampering, and lobbying crimes related to his work in Ukraine, and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.

The charges against him stemmed from, but were not directly related to, former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s 2016 election interference, which came to a close shortly after Manafort’s sentencing.

Many wondered at the time why prosecutors in Kyiv, ground zero for the crimes that landed Manafort behind bars in the US, had not charged Donald Trump’s former campaign chair with crimes in Ukraine.

It wasn’t for lack of trying.

As BuzzFeed News has reported, Ukrainian prosecutors made several unsuccessful attempts to get US law enforcement officials to turn over evidence from Manafort or make him available for an interview, as they pursued three separate corruption investigations in Kyiv in which he was a “key witness.”

But as the probes went on, Manafort quickly became more than just a witness in one case: he became a suspect.

BuzzFeed News can now reveal that in May 2019, as Manafort settled into his US prison cell, a special investigations unit inside the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office was preparing to wrap up a four-year-long investigation, drafting an indictment for him as well as for Greg Craig, a former Obama White House counsel and partner at the big-shot law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

The charge: aiding in the embezzlement of state funds.

“The managing partner of Skadden Law Firm Gregory B. Craig and Paul Manafort intentionally participated in the misappropriation of the funds from the State Budget of Ukraine totaling $1,075,381.41 (8,595,523.61 Ukrainian hryvnias and more than 600 times the tax-free minimum of citizens’ salaries), causing damage to the state,” reads the draft indictment for the two US citizens obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The document, which has never before been reported and would have been the first criminal charge brought against Manafort abroad, details in more than 4,000 words how and when Manafort and Craig allegedly facilitated the embezzlement of more than $1 million in Ukrainian state funds.

The draft indictment’s authenticity was confirmed to BuzzFeed News by Serhiy Gorbatyuk, the former top Ukrainian prosecutor for special investigations who led the effort to charge Manafort and Craig, and a second prosecutor involved in the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he continues to work in the prosecutor general’s office (PGO) and feared retribution for sharing details about the case with reporters.

“In the course of the investigation, enough data was obtained to decide about pursuing criminal prosecution, including that of [Manafort and Craig],” Gorbatyuk told BuzzFeed News.

Craig and Skadden were paid nearly $1.1 million in 2011 by Ukraine’s justice ministry, which at the time was headed by Yanukovych ally Oleksandr Lavrynovych. The firm’s task was to produce a report that justified the controversial imprisonment of the politician Yulia Tymoshenko, who had been jailed for allegedly brokering an unfavorable gas deal with Russia when she was Ukraine’s prime minister. (Tymoshenko’s sentence was viewed by much of the international community as political persecution by the Yanukovych regime. She was released in February 2014 and later reelected to Parliament.)


Win Mcnamee / Getty Images
Gregory Craig (left), former White House counsel to Barack Obama, arrives at federal court in Washington, DC, Sept. 3, 2019 .

Manafort was guiding Ukraine’s efforts to improve its international image at the time and helped connect Craig and Skadden with the Yanukovych government. Manafort had worked for Yanukovych and his Russia-aligned Party of Regions for the better part of a decade.

In June 2017, Skadden refunded $567,000 to the Ukrainian government — roughly half of the total it was paid by the Yanukovych government for the report, according to the Kyiv Post. Skadden told the New York Times that it returned the money because it had been placed “in escrow for future work” that never took place.

Manafort, who is currently serving out his sentence in a Pennsylvania prison, has sought early release because of the threat that the novel coronavirus poses to his health. He could not be reached through his lawyer for comment

Craig, who served as White House counsel for President Barack Obama, was charged in April 2019 with lying to the justice department about his role in the Tymoshenko saga and work for Manafort on behalf of the Yanukovych government, but he was acquitted by a jury in September. Reached by BuzzFeed News, Craig’s attorneys declined to provide comment for this story.

For Gorbatyuk and his team of prosecutors taking on many of the highest-profile cases in the country, seeing a portion of the money returned to Ukraine wasn’t enough. They were bent on pursuing a case against Manafort and Craig and getting back every penny.

After four years of investigating the case, a final push to possibly indict the men came at a particularly critical moment for Ukraine. It was May 2019, and the presidential office was changing hands in Kyiv.

The incoming president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and his team were well aware of the importance of keeping the US–Ukraine relationship strong and wary of offending Trump, who described Ukraine to his envoy at the time as being full of “terrible people” who “tried to take me down.” Trump would also be the one to give final approval for $391.5 million in US military aid to Ukraine that the country needed to continue the fight against Russia-backed separatists in its war-torn eastern regions. That assistance package was the one at the center of the Trump impeachment saga that would be set off by a phone call between the US president and Ukraine’s Zelensky in July — a call in which Zelensky said he was about to appoint a new prosecutor general who would be “100% my person.”

Around that time in July, Gorbatyuk said the criminal charges for Manafort and Craig were nearly ready but one of prosecutors decided to hold off because he wanted to send one more request for assistance to the US Department of Justice (DOJ). A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment, saying the department does not publicly speak about communications with foreign governments on investigative matters, including confirming or denying the very existence of such communications.

That decision to hold off may have been the thing that ultimately kept Manafort and Craig from being charged in Ukraine.

In August, Zelensky appointed Ruslan Riaboshapka as Ukraine’s new prosecutor general. Riaboshapka was an anti-corruption expert who vowed to clean up a dirty justice system and deliver high-profile corruption convictions.

“Riaboshapka came on. And in September, I reported to him about the prospects for all our cases, and in particular, in this case, I reported that we had actually prepared a draft notice of suspicion,” Gorbatyuk said, describing the Manafort and Craig indictment document.

But Gorbatyuk’s optimism was quickly dashed when Riaboshapka transferred to other departments the cases being pursued by his unit, which had been created to investigate high crimes committed during the 2014 Maidan revolution and corruption offenses committed by top officials during the Yanukovych presidency.

“He [Riaboshapka] destroyed our unit,” Gorbatyuk said. “I assume that it was done to intervene and destroy most of the investigations that we were conducting.” He said that included the case involving Manafort and Craig but he did not believe that that case was the sole reason behind the moves.

Riaboshapka told BuzzFeed News in an interview that he did not remember discussing an indictment being drafted for Manafort and Craig. And he said that Gorbatyuk’s unit was “not disbanded, it was reorganized and those people who wanted to work wrote a statement and were recertified [and] remain at work.”

Riaboshapka himself was fired from his post in March after falling out with Zelensky. Critics in Zelensky’s ruling party in Parliament said the prosecutor failed to make sufficient progress in prosecuting corrupt officials.

On Thursday, Manafort’s name was in the news in the US once again. The House intelligence committee released thousands of documents relating to the Russia investigation. In them, Hope Hicks, a Trump adviser, expressed concern that Manafort had been stealing from the Trump campaign.

“Was there ever any concern about Mr. Manafort stealing money from the Trump campaign," Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell asked. “Yes,” Hicks replied, adding that she had discussed it with several people, including Trump himself.

As of the time of publication, no charges had been filed against Manafort and Craig in Ukraine, and it is not known whether the indictment will ever be filed. For now, the case is sitting amid a pile of dozens of other corruption cases on a desk somewhere inside the national anti-corruption bureau of Ukraine. Prosecutors there did not respond to requests for comment.

Tanya Kozyreva is an investigative correspondent for BuzzFeed News based in Kiev, Ukraine.
Contact Tanya Kozyreva

Christopher Miller is a Kyiv-based American journalist and editor.

Contact Christopher Miller 

Costco Meatpacking Worker: "We’re All Worried About Getting Sick"

As concerns about a meat shortage mount, a meatpacking worker discusses her fear of getting the coronavirus while still needing to work.

Melissa Segura BuzzFeed News Reporter May 8, 2020

Nati Harnik / AP
Workers process chickens at the Lincoln Premium Poultry plant in Fremont, Nebraska, in 2019.

Costco announced Monday that it would be limiting the amount of meat and poultry each customer would be allowed to purchase because supplies had been affected by coronavirus outbreaks at meatpacking plants. On that same day, the first worker at one of Costco’s poultry producers, Lincoln Premium Poultry, died of COVID-19. The worker was one of 28 diagnosed at the Fremont, Nebraska, plant, which employs 1,100 workers, most of them immigrants.

With some plants closing because of the spread of the coronavirus, President Donald Trump has classified meat processing as critical infrastructure in a move to keep plants open and safeguard the nation’s food supply. The CDC reported nearly 5,000 meatpacking workers in 115 facilities across the country tested positive in April. At least 20 have died.

BuzzFeed News spoke with an employee of the Fremont plant. She asked that we not use her name for fear of retaliation by the company; BuzzFeed verified she worked for the company by checking her employee identification.

The employee arrived in the United States from Central America more than 10 years ago. She is an unauthorized immigrant who has mostly worked in meatpacking plants since arriving in the US. BuzzFeed News talked with her about what it’s like going to work in one of the virus’s hot spots, what she and her colleagues are talking about, and why she keeps showing up despite the dangers.

Below is an edited transcript of that conversation, translated from Spanish to English.

I know about 18 of the people who have tested positive for the coronavirus in the Lincoln Premium Poultry plant where I work.

They say the virus feels like death. That it brings about this deep cold in your body. Everyone says stay in your house, but if I stay in my house, how am I going to survive?

It’s a question without an answer.

I don’t feel safe going to work. Before the virus, I used to get to work early to start my 5 a.m. shift. Now I struggle to get to the plant. I worry about getting sick and bringing the virus home to my three children.

Fortunately I work in an area where we have a good amount of space, not like the place where they kill the chickens. In that area, they’re practically on top of one another. I stand at one of three conveyor belts where 120 chickens pass per minute. They’re mostly clean by the time they get to me, without their feathers. I look for the chickens that look purple or still have feathers and take them off of the belt. I make $16 per hour doing that. Sometimes if someone is missing, I’ll go to the area where they cut the chickens’ necks.

I first heard of the outbreak at Lincoln from Facebook. There were posts from the City of Fremont and from the media about the virus. Then when five people had been diagnosed with the virus, we had small meetings where supervisors told us to make an extra effort not to get too close to one another, not to touch our faces. The company put up dividers to separate us at the round tables in the lunchroom. They say they’re sanitizing the plant in the early morning hours, but people continue being contagious.

At Lincoln Premium Poultry, the majority of us are Latinos. For those of us who are unauthorized immigrants, in reality, there are very few jobs we can do. The owner of the plant smiles and says, “Without Latinos this plant wouldn’t exist.” That’s something [Trump] doesn’t value — the help that Latinos provide. We talk about the government a lot at the plant. Trump declared that meatpacking plants had to stay open; he doesn’t think of the workers, right? It’s when you go to the store that you see the importance of what we do. If we didn’t go to work, you wouldn’t have those products in the store.


Icon Sportswire / Getty Images

Chicken refrigerator cases inside a Costco Wholesale Club on March 13 in East Hanover, New Jersey.

But it’s really hurtful, for example, that I’ve been in the United States for more than 10 years and I’ve paid all my taxes and the government doesn’t recognize it. The government is giving money to a lot of people but as an unauthorized immigrant, I don’t qualify for anything.

We’re all worried about getting sick. Last week, I wasn’t feeling well and had to go to get tested. I had to stay home from work until the coronavirus test came back. I didn’t have the coronavirus.

Everyone is asking one another, “Do you think you’ll keep coming to work?” No one wants to fall behind on their bills. There are lots of people working because of that.

Since the virus, the company realizes that we’re falling behind on production. Now they’re offering us overtime. Logically, the more time we spend at work, the more likely we are to get sick. A lot of people in the plant are saying, if the coronavirus kills us, who are the ones who are going to die of hunger?

Response from Lincoln Premium Poultry: Spokesperson Jessica Kolterman listed a variety of measures to keep workers healthy and assist those who are sick. She said the company provides masks to employees and hand sanitizer in designated areas of the plant. In other areas, 20-second handwashing is required. Plant doors are propped open in areas to assist with ventilation but are not opened in zones where doing so would compromise food safety or violate regulations. Kolterman said that Lincoln provides sick pay, that those employees who test positive for the coronavirus are paid, and that days missed from work do not count against the sick leave that works accrue. The company will pay a $2-per-hour bonus in May for those who have worked during the pandemic. Additionally, the company says it provides housing and meals for workers who are ill or who are healthy but don’t want to risk infecting members of their households.

Melissa Segura is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New Mexico. Melissa Segura at melissa.segura@buzzfeed.com.

Mass unemployment is a failure of capitalism

May 8, 2020 By Richard Wolff, Independent Media Institute  - Commentary

The difficulties caused to workers by record unemployment during the pandemic are a product of capitalism. Most of the time, employers decide to hire or fire workers depending on which choice maximizes employers’ profits. Profit, not the full employment of workers nor of means of production, is “the bottom line” of capitalism and thus of capitalists. That is how the system works. Capitalists are rewarded when their profits are high and punished when they are not. It’s nothing personal; it’s just business.

Unemployment is a choice mostly made by employers. In many cases of unemployment, employers had the option not to fire employees. They could have kept all employed but reduced their hours or days or else rotated off-work times among employees. Employers can choose to retain idled employees on payrolls and suffer losses they hope will be temporary.

However, unemployment is received almost everywhere and by almost all as a negative, unwanted experience. Workers want jobs. Employers want employees producing profitable output. Governments want the tax revenues that flow from employees and employers actively collaborating.

So why has the capitalist system periodically produced economic downturns wherever it has settled across the last three centuries? They have happened, on average, every four to seven years. The United States has had three crashes so far this century: “dot-com” in 2000; “sub-prime mortgage” in 2008; and now “coronavirus” in 2020. Thus the United States conforms to capitalism’s “norm.” Capitalists do not want unemployment, but they regularly generate it. It is a basic contradiction of their system.

There are good reasons why capitalism produces and reproduces unemployment over time. It draws benefits (as well as suffers losses) from doing so. Reproducing a “reserve army of the unemployed” enables periodic upsurges in capital investment to draw more employees without driving up wages. Rising wages—and thus falling profits—would accompany investment surges if all workers were already fully employed before such surges. Unemployment also disciplines the working class. The unemployed, often desperate to get jobs, give employers the opportunity to replace existing employees with unemployed candidates willing to work for less. Unemployment thus operates as a downward pressure on wages and salaries and thereby a boost for profits. In short, capitalism both wants and does not want unemployment; it expresses this tension by periodically adding to and drawing down a reserve army of the unemployed that it continually maintains.

That reserve army exposes a stark reality that no ideological gloss ever fully erases. While unemployment serves capitalism, it does not well serve society. That key difference is most glaringly in evidence when unemployment is very high, as it is today. Consider that today’s many unemployed millions continue much of their consumption while ceasing much of their production. While they continue to take their means of consumption from socially produced wealth, they no longer produce nor thereby add to social wealth as they did when employed.

Unemployment thus entails wealth redistribution. Part of the wealth produced by those who are still employed must be redistributed away from them and to the unemployed. Taxes accomplish that redistribution publicly. Employees and employers, labor and capital struggle over whose taxes will fund the consumption of the unemployed. Such redistribution struggles can be and often are bitter and socially divisive. In the private sphere of households, portions of the incomes and wealth of the employed likewise get redistributed to enable consumption by the unemployed: spouses share, as do parents and children, relatives, friends, and neighbors. Working classes always redistribute their incomes and wealth to cope with the unemployment capitalism so regularly imposes on them. Such redistributions typically cause or aggravate many tensions and conflicts within the working class.

Many public and private redistribution struggles could be avoided if, for example, public re-employment replaced private unemployment. If the state became the employer of last resort, those fired by private employers could immediately be rehired by the state to do socially useful work. Governments would stop paying unemployment benefits and instead pay wages to the re-employed, obtain in return real goods and services, and distribute them to the public. The 1930s New Deal did exactly that for millions fired by private employers. A similar alternative to private capitalist employment and unemployment (but not part of the New Deal) would be to organize the unemployed into worker co-op enterprises performing socially useful work on contract with the government.

This last alternative is the best because it could develop a new worker-co-op sector of the U.S. economy. That would provide the U.S. public with direct experience in comparing the capitalist with the worker-co-op sector in terms of working conditions, product quality and price, civic responsibility, etc. On that concrete, empirical basis, societies could offer people a real, democratic choice as to what mix of capitalist and worker-co-op sectors of the economy they prefer.

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. His two recent books with Democracy at Work are Understanding Marxism and Understanding Socialism, both available at democracyatwork.info.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Trump’s refusal to wear a mask isn’t just vanity — it’s a manifestation of his fascism
May 9, 2020By Amanda Marcotte, Salon- Commentary

Despite knowing full well the furor that Vice President Mike Pence raised by not wearing a mask during a Mayo Clinic visit in late April, Donald Trump refused to wear a mask when visiting Honeywell factory in Arizona earlier this week — a factory that makes masks. This wasn’t just a symbolic nose-thumbing at people’s reasonable desire to be safe. Trump and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were putting the lives of Honeywell employees in danger.

After all, masks are not primarily meant to protect the mask-wearer, but to protect others, since there’s clear evidence that people who are infected but have no symptoms can spread the coronavirus. Trump is regularly exposed to the virus, in fact — one of his personal valets just tested positive — and is a prime candidate to be such a carrier.

Of course Trump doesn’t care about other people, only his ego and his appearance. Reporting from the Associated Press confirms this, as a Thursday article explained Trump told advisers that wearing a mask would “send the wrong message.

“The president said doing so would make it seem like he is preoccupied with health instead of focused on reopening the nation’s economy,” the AP reporters write.

This is another example of Trump’s false dichotomy between saving the economy and fighting the virus. After all, the economy isn’t going to recover if millions are sick and people are afraid to leave their houses — and early evidence from the states that have tried to “reopen” their economies makes that clear. But there’s also good reason to believe that the Trump-Pence antipathy to wearing masks signals to something deeper and darker.

Even before Trump started to make a big show out of not wearing a mask, it was common, at least in my South Philadelphia neighborhood, to see MAGA-hat-clad white men walking around without masks, delivering contemptuous sneers to the rest of us suckers who are covering our noses and mouths. Fox News host Laura Ingraham, in her friendly competition with fellow host Tucker Carlson to see who can be the most obnoxious, has started to demonize mask-wearing by claiming that public health advisories are somehow a conspiracy to sow “fear and intimidation.”

(Considering that mask-wearing to protect others took off in Asia long before Trump even ran for president, Ingraham’s conspiracy theory doesn’t possess even the most remote logical consistency.)

Between Trump and Fox News, the practice of mask-wearing is swiftly becoming another culture-war flashpoint. But the question is why. After all, masks seem to make people feel more comfortable with going out in public and going to work, and those are both things Trump dearly wants Americans to return to doing.

But Trump and his most ardent supporters seem almost physically repulsed at the very idea of wearing a mask. One Republican Ohio state legislator even claimed that since “we are all created in the image and likeness of God,” covering the face with a mask is an affront to God’s creation. (Many have noted that this same argument could be made against the practice of wearing pants.)

Ultimately, the rejection of mask-wearing really goes back to the fact that Trump, Ingraham and their most faithful followers are guided by fascist impulse, even when they don’t or can’t articulate a fully fleshed-out fascist ideology. Above all other things, the fascist personality is one that rejects even the possibility of sickness. To wear a mask is to publicly admit that one’s body is suspectible to illness, which is coded as “weak” and therefore unacceptable.

Natascha Strobl, an Austrian political scientist who is an expert in far-right organizing and rhetoric, had an important English-language Twitter thread in early April about why the far right was embracing the view that the coronavirus should simply be allowed to run wild. From the beginning, this has been the view Trump clearly prefers on an emotional level and has pushed federal policy toward all along. While Strobl didn’t mention masks, her observations also help explain why these same folks are repulsed by mask-wearing.

The fascist narrative, Strobl explained, is that “men aren’t men anymore, but nervous, urban, overly intellectualized and (here it comes) sickly weaklings.

“Weakness is never worthy of protection and has to be cast out. This is fascism,” she continues. The fascist believes that those viewed as “weak” have an obligation to die “without protest for the greater good” and that if “they don’t do it, they are weak and the weak drag everyone else down and therefore must be done away with.”

To wear a mask, in other words, indicates a belief that your personal body can become infected. A fascist-minded person like Trump cannot admit such a thing, either because he genuinely believes he is too strong to be affected by the virus or because he fears looking weak in public. Just as important, wearing a mask indicates care and concern for others, especially those who are high-risk. But the fascist-minded person doesn’t want to protect those viewed as “weak” — in fact, those people are expected to die so as not to be a burden on others. As Strobl points out, the far right believes that by becoming seriously ill or dying in service to some warped conception of the greater good, the “weak” can prove themselves strong through their sacrifice.

Trump hasn’t exactly concealed his impulse to see the coronavirus as a force that culls the herd of its weakest members, or to perceive that the “weak” can be redeemed through this morbid, sadistic ritual sacrifice. This week, he repeatedly insisted that Americans should think of themselves as “warriors” who bravely go forth and face the virus for the cause of, well, his re-election, which he is convinced depends on reopening the economy without bothering with the testing protocols, contact tracing and other precautions that could make doing so both safe and feasible.

(Even if people are willing to die for a noble cause, it’s worth pausing here and observing gently that Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is not such a cause.)

Moreover, Trump has always made a point of presenting himself as the fascist version of the Übermensch, even as he is likely too dim to know that word or what it signifies. Trump is forever bragging about his alleged “good genes,” which he often invokes as being so powerful as to render him a genius-level expert in any number of subjects, from medicine to economics to military strategy, without any need to do anything as weak and effeminate as learning stuff. Wearing a mask would go against his effort to present himself as possessing near-supernatural genetic powers to repel the sorts of viruses with which mere mortals must contend.

Of course, Trump doesn’t actually believe his own lies on this subject (nor on many others). As NBC News has reported, when Trump found out that a White House valet had the coronavirus, he became “lava level mad” at his staff and accused them of not doing enough to protect him. His public bravado is, as with all things Trump, a thin mask plastered over a deep well of insecurity. He may want you to believe his immune system is superhuman, but he knows full well that his obese and shattered 73-year-old physique puts him in the category of the high-risk people he and his fellow Republicans are treating as weaklings better off culled from the herd.

Unfortunately, because face masks have become such a potent symbol to far-right culture warriors of values they reject, such as equality and compassion, we can only expect the symbolic clash over masks to escalate. More and more conservatives, especially men, will try to prove their superior masculine strength and power by refusing to wear them. This is childish, selfish and entirely counterproductive, of course. What else can we expect from Trump and his followers, who are the real weaklings in this unhappy social equation?

‘We are invisible’: Greece’s artists struggle for state aid amid Covid-19 pandemic



Issued on: 09/05/2020

Musicians wearing face masks gather around the White Tower during a protest by workers in the music industry in demand of state aid to mitigate financial losses due to the Covid-19 pandemic in Thessaloniki, Greece on May 7, 2020. © Murad Sezer, REUTERS
Text by:NEWS WIRES

Despite being one of Greece's best-known folk singers, Natassa Bofiliou is among thousands of artists worried about the economic impact of coronavirus lockdowns that have only just begun to be eased.

In a country where art is widely seen as a pastime, and performers have long struggled to secure steady pay and royalties, the closure of theatres and cinemas, and the cancellation of summer festivals has wrought havoc.

Having lived through Greece's 10-year economic crisis, 37-year-old Bofiliou is no stranger to job insecurity.

"For us, there is no return to normality," she told AFP. "The state has never really seriously concerned itself with the problems of artists, who often need to have a second job to survive."

Unpaid or uninsured work is a reality for many in the profession, she notes.

With restaurants and hotels reopening in June, officials are now trying to salvage some of the season.

Greece's premier summer event, the annual Athens-Epidaurus festival, is set to open in mid-July, six weeks later than scheduled.

And organisers in Kalamata are "optimistic" that the international dance festival will begin on July 16 as scheduled.

The Thessaloniki documentary festival, originally to be held in March, will now be held online in late May.

The Greek culture ministry on Thursday announced a series of "corrective" measures to support artists after their apparent omission from income benefits sparked an outcry from opposition parties, and even Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis.

"I sincerely regret having lived to see that deeply obscurantist views still exist... in a civilised country, artists should be in the front row of appreciation," Theodorakis, the 94-year-old "Zorba the Greek" composer said in a statement last month.

When news broke in April that artists had been excluded from an 800-euro ($865) emergency stipend arranged by the state for furloughed employees, their representatives hit the streets in a symbolic protest outside the ministry of finance.

"Unfortunately, we are invisible to the government and culture ministry," said Costas Kehayoglou, head of the federation of Greek performers.

'People behind the puppets'

On Thursday, around 2,000 actors, musicians, puppeteers and other artists gathered outside the Greek parliament to protest the snub.

Some of the banners they carried read "Art's not dead", "We are not beggars" and "There are people behind the puppets".

Hours earlier, Culture Minister Lina Mendoni had announced that artists would be included in a 100-million-euro support fund, including 70 million specifically for staff.

"Our aim is to keep culture active... we don't want a scene without culture because of the pandemic," she told a news teleconference.

The performers' federation later called the measures "inadequate", noting that "those excluded are more than those included".

"Our civilisation is in peril," renowned singer Dimitra Galani told Athens municipal radio on Friday.

"Just look at how France and other European countries protect their national (cultural) product," she said.





Elise Jalladeau, director general of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, warns that Greece's audiovisual industry will carry the effects of the shutdown for some time.

"The sector is more fragile than in other European countries where there is more structure, especially as regards the protection of artists' (intellectual) rights," she told AFP.

Greek artists have long struggled to secure decent pay for their work.

The Greek intellectual property agency collapsed in 2018 in a mismanagement scandal, owing millions in unpaid royalties, and a new structure has yet to take hold.

(AFP)

Africa's forgotten World War II veteransMore than a million African soldiers served in colonial armies in World War II. Many veterans experienced prejudice during the war and little gratitude or compensation for their services afterwards.


This Senegalese soldier served with the French army in 1942


May 8, 1945, marks the 75th anniversary of the surrender of the German armed forces and the end of the Second World War in Europe.

Japan, a German ally, continued fighting and only conceded defeat in August 1945 when the Americans dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

More than a million Africans served as combatants as well as war workers and carriers in World War II for the colonial powers - more than half enlisted by Britain with the rest serving France and Belgium.

Some served in Africa or Europe; others fought on battlegrounds in the Middle East or as far afield as India, Myanmar and the Pacific Islands. Many were wounded or killed.

Their services have been rarely acknowledged by the governments of the former colonizers.

Some progress has been made - at least symbolically. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Allied landing in Provence in southern France, President Emmanuel Macron expressed gratitude for the contribution of African soldiers in defeating the German forces occupying France.

"Thousands of people sacrificed themselves to defend a distant land, an unknown land, a land they had until then never trod, a land they have forever marked with their blood," Macron said in a speech.

"France has a part of Africa in her, and on this Provence soil, this part was that of shed blood."


Forced recruitment

European newscasts of the time referred to the African soldiers as volunteers. But a considerable share of those recruited were forced into the colonial armed forces.

In an interview with DW in 2015, Albert Kunyuku, who served as Congolese corporal in the Belgian colonial army, explained how he and others were forced to enlist.

"I was working in a textile company when they came to take us away. Then they went to other companies. All the young workers were recruited. No one was younger than 30," said Kunyukua, who is now 97 and one to two surviving Congolese World War II veterans.

Read more: World War I: The 'Black Army' that marched in from Africa

Baby Sy, a veteran from Burkina Faso (then the French colony of Upper Volta), said at the time; he didn't understand what the war was really about.

"People didn't understand when they heard talk of fascism," he said in an interview with DW in 2015.

"We were just told that the Germans had attacked us and considered us Africans to be apes. As soldiers, we could prove that we were human beings. That was it. That was all the political explanation there was at the time."

Not always equal in war

In a recent interview with AFP, Congolese veteran Kunyuka remembered racial segregation the Congolese suffered even as they fought together with Belgians.

"We were like slaves because it was Belgium that brought us into this war. We could not say anything," Kunyuka was quoted as saying.

In 2019, an investigation by Al Jazeera discovered that African soldiers who served in the British army were paid a fraction of what their white colleagues were. The investigation called their treatment "akin to slavery".

Troops from the East Africa Division fought in Burma, today Myanmar

War experiences influenced independence movements

This close contact with European soldiers and with the reality of life in Europe changed the awareness of many of those Africans serving. It later sparked them to be politically active when they returned home.

Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, himself a former colonial soldier, put it like this in a 2015 interview with DW: "In war, we saw the white men naked and we have not forgotten that picture."

Read more: Léopold Sédar Senghor: From WWII prisoner to president

These kind of experience had far-reaching consequences, says German journalist Karl Rössel who spent 10 years researching the topic in West Africa.

During the war, the African soldiers saw Europeans lying in mud and filth and suffering and dying.

"As a result, they realized that there are no differences between people," he said. This. in turn, led to many former soldiers joining independence movements in their home countries.

African solidiers in Burma read about the end of WWII in Europe

Not all veterans, however, were accepted by the continent's burgeoning independence movements, says historian Raffael Scheck of Colby College in the USA. Many liberation fighters criticized that the African veterans for serving alongside the colonial oppressors.

The vast majority of veterans have died in the meantime.

Those who are still alive often feel a certain bitterness: although they have fought for the victory over fascism, they would hardly have received any recognition for it.

"I only get 5,000 Congolese francs (around five euros) per month in war pension. This is unworthy of someone who has fought for the interests of Belgium," complained veteran Albert Kunyuku.

Lack of recognition even today

The lack of gratitude and recognition in European countries - and especially in Germany, is something that needs to change.

"If there is to be a serious attempt to deal with the past, then one must treat the descendants of our liberators in a different manner than is the case under present refugee policy," Rössel says. "Compensation for the consequences of the war should be paid around the globe. But almost nowhere has postwar reconstruction taken place."

Albert Kunyuku speaks to DW in 2015

Congolese veteran Albert Kunyuku returned home in 1946 after fighting in Myanmar (then Burma) side by side with Belgian troops against the Japanese.

When asked if he was proud of his military service, he paused. With tears flowing down his cheeks, he replies: "No".

His grief for his fallen comrades is deep. Only a few of the 25,000 African soldiers who left with him for the front in Southeast Asia came back.

This article was originally published on May 21, 2015 and has been updated to include recent events.​​​​​​ Saleh Mwanamilongo in Kinshasa contributed to the report.

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Africa and World War I

A million people died in East Africa alone during World War I. Many Africans also fought in Europe, defending the interests of their colonial masters. Today, their sacrifice has been largely forgotten. (16.04.2014)

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Growing calls to acknowledge African troops who served UK army

Date 07.05.2020

Lead poisoning reveals environmental racism in the US
A recent study shows that being black is a bigger risk factor for lead poisoning than poverty or poor housing. 'Color-blind' health policy has exacerbated the environmental injustice, the authors say.



Reports that the new coronavirus is disproportionately killing African Americans in the United States are no surprise to the country's public health researchers. Numerous examples, from polluted water in Flint, Michigan, to parasites like hookworm in Alabama, have long shown that African Americans are more exposed to environmental dangers and ill-health than white Americans.

Read more: How austerity poisoned the people of Flint, Michigan

But a study into one of the most enduring of these threats — lead poisoning among children —provides a new measure of what many say is the toxic effect of systematic racism in the US.

There is no safe level of lead in the blood, which means even trace amounts can damage brain cells. But it is particularly dangerous for children in their pre-school years, when it can disrupt brain development. Overall, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that around 2.5% of children aged between 0 and six in the country have an "elevated blood lead level".

Read more: UK's 'Birdgirl' a voice for equality and against racism in conservation

Using publicly available data collected by the CDC from a representative sample of thousands of children aged one to five over an 11-year period, thestudy, published in February by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that black children living below the poverty line are twice as likely to have elevated levels of lead in their blood than poor white or Hispanic children.

The CDC did not offer a comment on the new study, on the grounds that it was not involved in writing it.

The danger of being African American

Statistically, the increased risk of lead poisoning associated with being black persists even when you correct for all other factors, from poverty to education levels to the presence of smokers in the home, to quality of housing.

"A lot of people had been saying: 'oh black children are just more at risk because they're more likely to be poor,'" said study co-author Deniz "Dersim" Yeter, an independent academic and undergraduate nursing student in Kansas. "Yeah, poverty's a problem, but it's nothing compared to being a black child in America."

Yeter was "astounded" by the results of their three-year analysis. "I knew it was bad, but I was expecting something like a marginal increase, something statistically significant, but ... not two to six times higher," they told DW. "That is obscene."

Read more: Investigating environmental racism

The study includes some surprising conclusions: The social condition of being African American is a bigger risk than living in an old house. In other words, black children living in buildings built between 1950-1977 are six times more likely to have elevated levels of lead in their blood than white children living in a building of that era.


African Americans are often more exposed to environmental dangers, such as water pollution in Flint, Michigan

That date is important. The US began putting restrictions on the lead content of paint in 1977. But leaded paint was never systematically removed from old buildings, and the US Department of Housing estimates that over 3.6 million homes housing children still contain lead hazards.
"It's so bad," Yeter said. "It deteriorates, it's little pieces of dust, you inhale it, kids touch stuff, touch their mouths, absorb it. [Before the 1950s] it used to be so bad that kids would go into seizures, go to the hospital and die, because there was so much lead in their blood."

Read more: The global injustice of the climate crisis

The consequences of 'redlining'

The figures Yeter unearthed aren't surprising to community workers in areas where lead poisoning is just one of many health hazards that African Americans face.

"You just have look around you," said Kinzer Pointer, pastor and health campaigner in an overwhelmingly African-American community in Buffalo, New York, a city where most of the housing is older than 1978 and 40% of children tested in 2016 had an elevated blood lead level.

Buffalo is a prime example of the effects of "redlining" — the exclusion of minorities in the US from everything from insurance, to grocery stores — which offers a clue to how racism leads to poor health.

Pointer said that in the neighborhood he serves, the nearest supermarket selling fresh fruit and vegetables is over five miles away, and 60% of people don't own their own transport. "People live on fast food," he said.


African Americans face higher rates of eviction than other groups

Redlining also extends to mortgages and home ownership — the US census shows that only around 42% of African Americans own their homes, compared to 68% of white Americans.

Rahwa Ghirmatzion, director of People United for Sustainable Housing in Buffalo, explained that when renters receive a letter from health authorities warning their building is contaminated, "the expectation is for them to either move … or get their landlord to remediate the issue."

Confronting your landlord can be more fraught for black people: A 2012 study in the American Journal of Sociology showed that African Americans face disproportionately higher eviction rates than whites in the same income brackets. And moving voluntarily may mean breaking a lease and losing a deposit, making it still harder to afford a lead-free home.

Read more: Climate change leads to more violence against women, girls

The 'color-blind' failure

David Rosner, co-author of the 2014 book Lead Wars, which traces the post-war history of lead poisoning, said racism has always been part of why lead poisoning has been tolerated.

As he explained, after the war, the Lead Industries Association even tried to blame black parents for letting their children eat paint: One 1956 letter showed the LIA arguing to government that lead poisoning was a problem of "educating the parents, but most of the cases are in Negro and Puerto Rican families, and how does one tackle that job?"

With their study, Yeter wants to show that hidden, structural racism can be just as dangerous, and that "color-blind" public health screening only exacerbates the problem.

Currently, blood lead screening is recommended (by organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics) when children live in old buildings or belong to a certain economic class. Yeter says not addressing race too, blinds authorities to the endemic discrimination.

"If you're ignoring black race as a leading risk factor — you're leaving so many black kids at far greater risk out of the local, state, and federal response." He added: "To act like there's no politics behind people being at risk, or what causes that, or how to solve that... it's political!"

ASBESTOS PHOTO ESSAY


ASBESTOS — AN OFTEN INVISIBLE DANGER
Actually it's a natural rock

Asbestos is a collective term for various naturally occurring silicate minerals. These include grunerite, anthophyllite, actinolite and chrysotil. The fibrous material was popular both in construction and industry because of its durability, fire resistance and because it could be easily processed in cement.

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