ARBEIT MACHT FREI
Meet the woman who spearheaded California’s recent back-to-work protests

Anti-lockdown protesters rally in downtown San Diego on May 1, 2020, calling on state and local officials to fully reopen the economy. Many in attendance waved branded signs provided by a new group called We Have Rights.
(Joshua Emerson Smith / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Anti-lockdown protests have simultaneously erupted all over California using the website wehaverights.com

By JOSHUA EMERSON SMITH MAY 10, 2020

A group calling itself We Have Rights has recently started organizing large back-to-work protests throughout California, calling on state and local leaders to end social-distancing orders aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

The group, which popped up in just the last two weeks, has a professional-looking website and growing social media presence, which provide details for upcoming events, instructions for dealing with the media, highly produced Instagram videos, as well as T-shirts and other branded merchandise for sale.

The campaign — which turned out hundreds of anti-lockdown protesters from San Diego to Sacramento starting May 1 and continuing through this weekend — also has had a charismatic front woman with something of a controversial past: 38-year-old Vivienne Nicole Reign.

Reign, who has been living with her husband in a $3 million home in Newport Beach, according to legal documents, is currently embroiled in legal challenges concerning several neuropathy treatment clinics she owns and operates with a chiropractor. The defendants have maintained their innocence, denying claims brought by former clients of medical negligence, financial elder abuse and fraud.

The Orange County-based entrepreneur recently told The San Diego Union-Tribune in a lengthy phone interview Thursday that she created the website wehaverights.com after having to layoff members of her staff as a result of the pandemic lockdown.

“I’ve had to let go of people that have worked with me for 10 years, and it happened overnight,” she said. “I’ll find a way to make it through this, but there are people who depend on me, and I feel a great sense of responsibility to provide them a paycheck.”

Reign did not cite political reasons as the driving force behind the campaign, however the rallies have overtly promoted President Donald Trump and conservative talking points.

Reign said the campaign has a wealthy backer but would not identify the person.

“Yes, we do have people who have contributed and we do have a benefactor who has contributed, and my husband and I have put money out of our own pocket,” she said.

The New York Times has reported that many of the anti-lockdown protests happening throughout the country are being bankrolled by wealthy conservative leaders and groups, including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots.

Members of the Michigan Liberty Militia, including Phil Robinson, right, join protesters at a rally at the state Capitol in Lansing, Mich., Thursday, April 30, 2020.
(Matthew Dae Smith / Lansing State Journal)

However, Reign’s campaign stands out compared to similar efforts in other parts of the country, said Jared Holt, an investigator with the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Right Wing Watch.

“If something like this is happening in other states,” he said, “it’s certainly not as slick and well-produced as it seems to be in California where this shadowy source of money is coming in with a very branded effort.”

In something of a twist, Reign sent an email to the Union-Tribune on Friday, a day after her interview, saying that she had decided to donate the website and social-media accounts to a unnamed nonprofit.

“I will let them decide when they would like to announce who they are,” she said in the email.

“We are happy to have contributed to helping all of the grassroots groups organize and get their message of preserving and protecting our rights out across California,” she added. “We have confidence the group we are handing it over to will do wonderfully at continuing the efforts even better than we did!”

Reign’s recent organizing efforts don’t appear to be directly connected to those of San Diego resident Naomi Israel Soria, who promoted similar rallies on Facebook.

The 27-year-old Soria is facing misdemeanor criminal charges, including up to six months in jail, for putting together protests in San Diego that law enforcement officials have said violated county public health orders around social distancing. She’s being represented by the high-profile conservative attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who has filed multiple lawsuits against the state of California over its stay-home orders.

Who is Thomas Paine?

Until recently, Dan Summers had never heard of We Have Rights or Vivienne Reign.

Summers, a 70-year-old resident of Ramona, has long been plugged in to conservative politics and activism in the San Diego region. He’s served on the Republican Party’s local central committee and currently heads up an umbrella group called The Circle, which coordinates efforts between prominent conservative and libertarian groups throughout the region.

So it didn’t surprise Summers when an organizer from We Have Rights contacted him out of the blue looking for his help, and his access to mailing lists of about 6,000 people across the region, to boost turnout at a rally that was planned for May 1 in downtown San Diego. The group was also organizing events for that day in Huntington Beach, Los Angeles and Sacramento.

“I got a phone call from the guy who organized these four rallies who wanted to know if I could help him in San Diego, and I said, ‘Yes, I can,’” Summers recently told the Union-Tribune.

The group’s representative called himself “Thomas Paine,” Summers explained, noting that this was also the name of the famous American revolutionary.

“They’ve got a very good website,” he added.

The website’s homepage urges: “Be part of the biggest movement in California.” It demands the ability to worship at church, earn a living and assemble freely at sporting events, conferences and other gatherings.

“The elderly, sick, and high risk are encouraged to quarantine while the healthy and the able have a right to live their lives,” the website states.

Protests gathered on May 1, 2020 in downtown San Diego demanding local and state officials fully reopen the economy despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
(Joshua Emerson Smith / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

LIKE THE NAZI LABOUR FRONT THIS ARBEIT MACHT FREI REVIVAL UNDERMINES MAYDAY AS A WORKERS DAY OF REVOLT AGAINST CAPITALISM TO ONE OF SUPPLICATION TO RETURN TO WAGE SLAVERY

The back-to-work rally in downtown San Diego ended up drawing hundreds of people, many waving American flags and few wearing face masks. Some flew “Trump 2020" flags and many wore the iconic red hats.

While many protesters cited financial hardship as a reason for coming out, those in attendance also criticized everything from vaccines to Gov. Gavin Newsom to socialism.

Summers addressed the boisterous crowd with a bullhorn, as cars and trucks circled the block honking.

During the event, a person dressed in We Have Rights-branded merchandise passed out dozens of signs, declaring slogans such as “Freedom is essential” and “Open CA now.”

A woman dressed in branded merchandise from the group We Have Rights hands out signs at a rally in downtown San Diego.
(Joshua Emerson Smith / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Other We Have Rights rallies that day across the state drew even larger crowds, including more than 1,000 people on the capitol steps in Sacramento.

“Over 40,000 Patriots took a stand against the lockdown to demand Newsom fully open California and restore our rights!” the website said of the May 1 actions.

While Summers was pleased with the turnout, he still didn’t know much about Paine. Although, the phone number he used to communicate with Paine traced back to a Thomas Knight Reign, 46, of Newport Beach, according to multiple legal and business records.

Reign, according to his IMDb profile, appeared to be a once-aspiring movie producer and director. Over the years, he started several film-production businesses, including Red Horizon Films LLC, Xposure Entertainment LLC and the still operative Agency X LLC.

However, he has almost no professional or personal online presence that the Union-Tribune could find.

When the Union-Tribune reached out to Reign, he declined to comment and directed all questions to fullyopenca@gmail.com, which used the display name Thomas Paine.

According to court records, Thomas Reign and Vivienne Reign were married in 2011 — although at the time their legal names were Thomas John Wozny and Nicole Melanie Anderson.

She adopted the last name Wozny, but then in 2018, they both legally changed their monikers to Reign.

Vivienne Reign said her husband changed his last name as part of his writing business, and at that point she, too, decided to change both her first and last names. She would not elaborate on what her husband does for work, other than to say he’s a “surfer” and “creative artist.”

“I thought Vivienne was just a pretty name,” she explained. “I thought it was a little timeless, and so I left Nicole as my middle name.

“I go by Viv now, unless it’s my father, and then it’s still Niki,” she added.

From entrepreneur to activist

Vivienne Reign grew up Nicole Melanie Ackermann in the Orange County city of Cypress. She said her mother still lives in her childhood home and her father lives in Redondo Beach.

Her parents were in the aerospace industry and worked hard to give her an education at a private high school, she said. That’s where, at 16, she met her first husband, Darren Anderson.

Anderson, who lives in Mission Viejo, said he and Reign have remained good friends over the years.

“She’s great,” he said. “She’s a hard charger. She’s highly ethical. She’s one of the people in my life that I respect the most.

After graduating high school in 1999, Reign started classes at Fresno City College. However, she said she quickly dropped out to work full time and eventually start her own business.

“I did attend college for a short time, but to be honest, the entrepreneurial bug kept getting at me,” she said.

She said that before joining We Have Rights, she had never been an activist or even attended a protest. In 2016, she donated $250 to help Rand Paul’s presidential run.

Today, Reign has at least eight active companies operating under 17 different business names. Her companies largely focus on medical procedures not covered by health insurance, from stem cell injections to treatments for neuropathy.

Most notably, she owns a company with Orange County chiropractor Philip Straw called Neuropathy Solutions, which has been the subject of at least one patient lawsuit alleging fraud and financial elder abuse.

Reign and Straw have worked together for years, including with his previous business Optimal Health Straw Chiropractic, which has been the subject of about a half-dozen similar lawsuits. Straw was cited by the Board of Chiropractic Examiners in 2012 for falsely portraying himself as a neuropathy expert and advertising his services in a potentially deceptive way.

The businesses have also been bombarded by angry online reviews and drawn the attention of the local media.

The company’s clinics currently go by the name Superior Health Centers, with locations in Corona, Gardena, Glendale and Placentia.

According to court records, Reign is in charge of handling front-office staffing and other administrative tasks, including organizing free dinners used to market the company’s neuropathy treatments to seniors.

Senior citizens Harvey and Donna Stone attended one of those dinners in 2016 where the married couple watched a presentation on peripheral neuropathy, a type of nerve damage that can cause weakness and numbness in hands and feet.

They were told at the dinner that if the condition was not properly treated, it could lead to gangrene and amputation, according to an ongoing lawsuit brought by the couple. When they followed-up with a free medical evaluation at one of the company’s clinics, they were told they both had the condition.

To pay for the treatment, which wasn’t covered by their insurance, they agreed to take out a line of credit and make monthly payments at nearly 15 percent interest for a final sum of $18,655, according to the complaint.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers have argued that the staff at the businesses were not trained or licensed to treat peripheral neuropathy and deceived the couple into thinking otherwise. The treatments included massages and exposure to light and electrical stimulation.

At one point, Harvey Stone was badly burned when staff used administered electrical shocks to his legs using a device dubbed the “HAKO-MED,” according to the lawsuit.

“It’s like the old West salesman setting up shop in a town and selling bottles of snake oil,” said Arnold Gross, senior trial attorney with State Law Firm, who is handling the couple’s case. “This is not a recognized treatment.”

After the Stones took out the high-interest loan, Donna’s primary care physician told her that she didn’t have neuropathy, Gross said.

Lawyer for the defendants Christopher R. Clark declined to comment on the ongoing litigation, other than to say in an email: “We are looking forward to prevailing in this case at trial on behalf of our client.”

According to the defense’s court filings, Harvey Stone received more than two dozen electro-stimulation treatments from the business, and he had acknowledged that “progress was being made and his symptoms were improving.”

Reign also wouldn’t talk about the lawsuit in detail, but said of the court battle: “Unfortunately, it is part of business in today’s age that those things do occur.”

Reign, who traveled to Sacramento for a big rally on May 1, said as recently as Thursday that she planned to focus her efforts on reopening the economy.

However, she has now changed her mind, according to the email she sent the Union-Tribune on Friday.

“I have enjoyed my time working on this, and I feel we made great strides in a short time,” she wrote. “However, as I mentioned, I have many demands on my time with various business investments and wanted to pass this to people who have this as a full time passion and can do the movement justice.”

Staff researcher Merrie Monteagudo contributed to this report.

AUSTRALIA & THE VIETNAM WAR

50 years on, the Vietnam moratorium campaigns remind us of a different kind of politics

May 7, 2020

Fifty years ago this month, hundreds of thousands of Australians assembled across the country to call for an end to the Vietnam War. The first of the moratorium campaigns, the demonstrations of May 8 1970 were the zenith of the anti-war movement in Australia that had been five years in the making.

The largest of the May 8 marches took place in Melbourne, confirming its status as the national capital of protest politics. An estimated 100,000 demonstrators clogged the city’s streets.

Despite scaremongering in preceding weeks by conservative politicians and large sections of the media about the threat of violence and mayhem, the event passed peacefully. Relieved and exultant, the movement’s leader, Jim Cairns, told the sea of protesters gathered in Bourke Street:


Nobody thought this could be done … The will of the people is being expressed today as it never has been before.

The moratorium movement was important in a number of ways.

First, and most obviously, it galvanised many ordinary Australians to join the protest actions, making a powerful statement about the collapse of support for the nation’s continued participation in the Vietnam conflict. Though the Liberal-Country Party government led by Prime Minister John Gorton obdurately dismissed the demonstrations and insisted they would have no material influence on its policy-making, it was no coincidence that 1970 marked the beginning of the withdrawal of Australia’s military forces from Vietnam. It was a policy reversal that mimicked the direction of the United States, which had witnessed its own massive anti-war moratorium demonstrations at the end of 1969.

Second, the demonstrations were a potent symbol of the larger culture of dissent that had flowered in the second half of the 1960s. The protests expressed a restless mood for change, and represented a key moment in the puncturing of the oppressive Cold War atmosphere that had dominated Australian public life for some two decades.

One contemporary observer of the moratorium marches captured their confounding spirit of anti-authoritarianism by referencing Bob Dylan:


Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?

Two years later, much of the yearning for change would be channelled back into institutional politics with the election of the Whitlam Labor government. But in 1970, the streets had become a major outlet for political expression.

 

Vietnam moratorium march in Melbourne, May 8 1970. Australian Living Peace Museum

Third, the success of the May 1970 moratorium was a watershed in legitimising protest in this country. As the anti-war movement developed from the mid-1960s, it found its activities circumscribed by provisions of the Commonwealth Crimes Act, state laws and local government regulations that severely constrained the right to demonstrate. Under the terms of a Melbourne City by-law, for example, it was illegal to hand out leaflets in city streets.

In that context, the moratorium’s mass occupation tactics struck a mighty blow for the right to public protest and enlarged the space for democratic action. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that demonstrators since, regardless of their cause, have been benefactors of the legacy created by the moratorium campaigners of the early 1970s.

Fourth, the leadership exercised by Cairns was remarkable and unique. Because he became a figure of derision over the circumstances that ended his ministerial career in the Whitlam government in 1975, it is easy to overlook what Cairns achieved as the spiritual leader of Australia’s anti-Vietnam War movement. He was that rare thing: a politician who managed to straddle the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary spheres. Perhaps the nearest parallel in more recent times has been the former Greens leader Bob Brown.

Jim Cairns was a strong leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Evatt Foundation

Cairns was critical to the success of the May 8 moratorium campaign. He stoically wore the slings of the radical, younger elements of the movement who were prepared to spill blood in the name of peace, while at the same time calmly rebutting the histrionics of his conservative political opponents who equated mass demonstrations with “mob rule”.

In a parliamentary debate on the moratorium in April 1970, Cairns articulated what was described as the movement’s “manifesto of dissent”:

Some … think that democracy is just Parliament alone … But times are changing. A whole generation is not prepared to accept this complacent, conservative theory. Parliament is not democracy. It is one manifestation of democracy … Democracy is government by the people, and government by people demands action by the people … in public places all around the land.

Half a century on, it is striking how quaint these ideas seem. We have mostly retreated to practising politics as a spectator sport. This is despite the evident limits of this passivity.

Consider climate change, for example. More than a decade of relying on our political representatives for progress has yielded little more than conflict, frustration and inertia.

Notably, throughout these years of missed opportunity, none of our political leaders have emerged to emulate the role that Cairns fulfilled in the era of the Vietnam War, namely, sustaining a campaign for action on climate change both in the parliament and out in the community.

But then they were different times and Cairns, notwithstanding his later follies, was a special kind of politician.

Author

Paul Strangio

Associate Professor of Politics, Monash University

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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CANADA
Do you have the right to refuse to return to work? Employment lawyers weigh in

Alexandra Mae Jones CTVNews.ca writer  Thursday, May 7, 2020 

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/do-you-have-the-right-to-refuse-to-return-to-work-employment-lawyers-weigh-in-1.4930305
Returning to work amid COVID-19

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Employment lawyers Muneeza Sheikh and Stuart Rudner join CTV News Channel to break down employees' rights when they head back to work.
Returning to work amid COVID-19

2 NOW PLAYING

3 NOW PLAYING

TORONTO -- As some provinces start to show promising signs of having flattened the curve of the pandemic, talk is turning to how we handle a return to the workplace, and what rights workers have in this tumultuous time.

Some provinces are already setting the wheels in motion for reopening non-essential businesses. For example, Manitoba has already reopened retail businesses, salons, museums, libraries and playgrounds; Quebec has allowed retail businesses outside of the Montreal area to open; and Ontario released a list on May 4 of businesses that could open, including golf courses and gardening centres.

Employers and employees across the country are looking ahead to plan what the new normal could look like in the workplace.

CTV News spoke to employment lawyers Muneeza Sheikh and Stuart Rudner in order to sift through some of the complicated questions about worker and employee rights.

MY WORKPLACE HAS REOPENED, BUT I DON’T THINK IT’S SAFE TO RETURN YET. DO I HAVE TO?

Yes, Rudner and Sheikh say. The law is on the employer’s side here, even in a pandemic.

“If work is available, you are expected to be there,” Rudner said. “And failure to attend for your regularly scheduled work hours [will be seen as] basically abandoning your job.”
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Employers are required to provide a safe work environment, which means that an employee has grounds to complain if no attempts at implementing physical distancing and cleaning procedures have been made in order to facilitate the return of workers.

Rudner added there may be exceptions to the rule.

“Most provinces have job-protected leaves in place if you have COVID-19-related reasons for not going back into work,” he said. “If you are immunocompromised, you may need the accommodation of your employer. Or if the workplace is unsafe, and you can prove that it is unsafe, then you may not have to go back to work.”

But if a workplace has the proper precautions in place, workers won’t be able to remain home without being penalized by employers.

“If [physical distancing] is not possible, and sometimes it’s not, you’re going to take whatever steps you can,” Rudner advised employers. “Constant cleaning, providing soap, providing hand sanitizer, providing masks potentially, gloves.”

He also pointed out that some areas are releasing guidelines for businesses that are preparing to reopen.

“While [employers] do have a legal obligation to accommodate a valid reason for not being at work, whether it’s medical leave, or whether it’s family status related … what [employers] don’t have an obligation to do is accommodate someone’s fear and anxiety about getting COVID-19 in the workplace,” Sheikh said.

DO I HAVE TO TELL MY EMPLOYER IF I’VE HAD COVID-19?

Under normal circumstances, an employer prying into the personal health of an employee would be considered a serious privacy issue. But Rudner and Sheikh emphasized that this situation is new territory.

“We’re balancing two different rights or obligations,” Rudner said. “There is the right to privacy, there’s an employer obligation to take reasonable steps to provide a safe work environment. And often these two rights or obligations collide.

“When we’re talking about privacy rights, one of the ways that employers are able to infringe upon those rights is in the name of safety.”

Sheikh said that because there has been community spread of this virus, and because the stakes are so high, employers may ask questions they wouldn’t before. And she believes it would be hard for them to “get in trouble” for asking whether an employee had COVID-19.

Rudner added that it will depend on the nature of the workplace and whether the employer has a good reason to ask as well.

Sheikh said that employers should still “tread carefully,” as they are still not entitled to a worker’s diagnosis.

IF I’VE HAD COVID-19, DO I HAVE TO HAVE A DOCTOR’S NOTE TO GO BACK TO WORK?

One pressing question for those who have recovered from COVID-19 is whether or not they will even be allowed to physically return to work if their workplace reopens.

According to Sheikh, it’s not a simple yes or no.

With a common cold or flu in the past, an employer might tell an employee to simply return whenever they feel better.

But with a virus like this, the stakes are higher for infecting other coworkers, particularly if the workplace in question is one where practicing physical distancing on the job isn’t possible. She said that due to these unique situations, her advice would be for employers to require a doctor’s note for an employee who previously had COVID-19 to return to work.

“Because this can be so highly contagious, and unfortunately the implications are so detrimental, I would say get a medical note before you bring them back to work,” she said.

Doctor’s notes have always been a contentious issue, particularly so during the pandemic. Many individuals do not have regular doctors they can procure a note from, or they aren’t able to get a doctor’s note at short notice, meaning that employers who require doctor’s notes are sometimes forcing workers to attend work while sick.

In Ontario, the provincial government introduced legislation to waive all doctor’s note requirements in mid-March, as a response to the severity of the pandemic.

Eliminating medical notes to excuse an absence allowed workers to prioritize their health without losing their jobs. But facilitating the return of workers to a physical workspace while still prioritizing the health of everyone is a different story.

Rudner pointed out that the Ontario Medical Association is strongly against requiring doctor’s notes, but that “this is entirely new and unprecedented and safety is paramount here.

“I would certainly not discourage an employer from asking for a doctor’s note where it’s appropriate,” he said. “In these situations, if someone was diagnosed [with COVID-19] and now they want to come back to work, that’s pretty appropriate in my view.”

I’M FEELING SICK AT WORK. WILL I GET SENT HOME?

“The employer has a right to send you home, perhaps even against your will,” Sheikh said.

An employer sending home a worker on unpaid leave because of one sneeze or cough is “problematic,” she said, but if there’s a genuine concern that a person might have COVID-19, that’s different.

Full-time workers with benefits will be able to get paid leave and then use their sick days if they do contract the virus.

However, contract workers may get left in the dust.

Sheikh called it “very, very difficult, if not almost impossible,” to get things such as paid sick leave from an employer if you are a contract worker who would not normally receive those benefits.

“We have a lot of people out there who are paid as contractors when really they’re employees in all but name,” Rudner said. “And a lot of times they do that because they get better tax treatment, but the reality is they don’t have the protections that [a full-time employee] does.”

Government assistance can hopefully fill in the gap, he said.

“The CERB will help a little bit, because the CERB will help out those who are self-employed.”

WHAT ABOUT PART-TIME HEALTH CARE WORKERS WHO HAVE LOST WORK?

Even as workplaces reopen, not everyone will be able to gain back the same amount of jobs as they held before the pandemic. For personal support workers and health-care workers who used to work part-time at multiple institutions, the landscape has changed.

In B.C., Dr. Bonnie Henry issued an order in late March requiring workers at long-term care homes to limit their work to one care home instead of working at several. In Ontario, the government made similar recommendations in March, but stopped short of requiring employees to stay at one facility.

Those who follow the guidelines to work in only one care home to prevent cross-contamination could be losing a significant part of their income.

Sheikh said that the problem is that employers do not technically have to do anything about this.

“Where they’re working the one part-time job, is that specific employer responsible for supplementing the income of the other part-time job? Absolutely not."

If a worker is part of a union, they may have more options, he said. But non-unionized workers can fall through the cracks.

Sheikh said that government funding might be able to fill in the blanks for some PSWs in this situation, but the hope is there will be more avenues soon.

“Because I can appreciate how unfair [this loss of jobs] might be, especially for those health-care workers that are not unionized,” she said.“The last thing you want to do is demoralize our health-care workers.”

Questions surrounding the rights of workers are increasingly complicated right now, Sheikh said.

“I think we’re in sort of the wild, wild west, so to speak, right now, in terms of how this virus and the implications for our workplaces is going to play out in the next few weeks,” she said.

Because of the increased murkiness around when workers can refuse unsafe work, and when employers can ask questions that would violate previous privacy rules, Sheikh anticipates that there could be “a significant amount of litigation and people filing lawsuits … around what was appropriate and what wasn’t appropriate during this time.”

FRANCE 24 takes viewers back to the biggest pandemics in history, which decimated entire populations. From the Plague of Athens in 430 BC to modern-day HIV/AIDS, FRANCE 24 journalist Florence Gaillard takes a look at the deadliest pandemics ever faced by humanity.

Author: Florence Gaillard
Design and development: Creative Department, France Médias Monde
Managing Editor: Ghassan Basile
https://graphics.france24.com/great-pandemics-plague-athens-black-death-cholera-spanish-flu-aids/#haut
All rights reserved France 24 © April 2020

 

THIRD WORLD USA 
Coronavirus is exacerbating America’s hunger crisis

Food banks and SNAP are completely overwhelmed right now.
By Li Zhouli@vox.com May 11, 2020


The images of thousands of cars, lined up bumper-to-bumper on otherwise-empty freeways, capture the shocking scale of the nation’s hunger crisis.

In San Antonio, Texas, 10,000 people waited for hours to receive meal boxes from a regional food bank in April. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hundreds of families have been showing up for weekly food pickups at the PPG Paints Arena. And in Sunrise, Florida, cars stretched for nearly two miles, while people waited at a Feeding South Florida food bank site.

The demand at food banks across the country has skyrocketed in recent weeks — increasing by as much as 600 percent at some — underscoring just how expansive the effects of the economic downturn have been: As of early May, more than 30 million people had filed for unemployment in just six weeks.


Hundreds of cars wait to receive food from the Greater Community Food Bank in Duquesne. Collection begins at noon. @PghFoodBank @PittsburghPG pic.twitter.com/94YFaO7dqX— Andrew Rush (@andrewrush) March 30, 2020

That means growing food insecurity in a nation where millions of people were already struggling to get sufficient food each month.

According to a 2014 Washington Post report, roughly 46 million people — or one in seven US residents — depended on food banks or meal service programs annually prior to the coronavirus pandemic. And in 2019, about 38 million people used the US Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

These numbers are now seeing a major uptick.

“The need in our state has gone from 800,000 Washingtonians before Covid to 1.6 million people,” says Christina Wong, the public policy director at Northwest Harvest, a food bank that serves Washington state. States including Texas, New York, and Louisiana have seen applications for SNAP double or more, Yahoo News reports.


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The current hunger crisis in the US, in photos

It’s a trend apparent across the country — and yet another one that reveals the vast holes in the government safety net. With SNAP unable to cover the overwhelming needs that have emerged, food banks (which have dubious corporate ties of their own) have stepped in to help support those who fall through.

“Food banks are the safety net under the safety net,” Andy Fisher, a food security expert and author of Big Hunger, tells Vox.
SNAP wasn’t providing enough money before the crisis — and it definitely isn’t now

One of the main problems this crisis has emphasized is just how tenuous America’s social safety net really is — and this is certainly the case with SNAP.

Even before the crisis, the amount SNAP was providing to individuals and families receiving benefits was often not enough to cover a month’s worth of groceries. This shortage is by design: the help is intended to be “supplemental” in nature. Because of this, however, many people have had to turn to food banks in the past to make up the difference. According to a 2016 study from the USDA, almost a third of SNAP recipient families visited a food bank every month. Currently, even more must do so.

People wait in line at a pop-up food pantry at the Bayview Opera House in San Francisco, California, on April 20. Scott Strazzante/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

Cars line up at a drive-thru food bank at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw shopping center in Los Angeles on April 17. Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

“The biggest weakness in SNAP is the amount of benefits — the degree to which they are inadequate,” says Ellen Vollinger, the legal director at the Food Research and Action Center. “It’s why food banks report that they serve a lot of SNAP customers.”

Like other safety net programs, SNAP limits the number of people who can participate in it based on criteria like income and work requirements. To qualify, individuals’ and families’ gross monthly income needs to be at 130 percent of the poverty line or below, coming out to $1,354 for an individual and $2,790 for a family of four.

“Able-bodied” individuals without dependents between the ages of 18 and 49 also need to either participate in a job training program or work 20 hours a week, on average, in order to use the program for more than three months, every three years. There is currently a waiver on the three-month limit previously put on these benefits, in light of the ongoing pandemic. And while the Trump administration has tried to make such restrictions even more stringent, these rule changes remain tied up in court.


Because of its limits on benefits and eligibility, SNAP ends up being insufficient to address the needs of some households, while cutting out others completely. According to a 2018 study from Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks across the country, these nonprofits serve as the only recourse for many families who can’t afford food — but don’t qualify for SNAP.

Benefits vary based on income and household size; according to CBPP, individuals received an average of $127 per month in 2018, and households overall received an average of $256 per month. The maximum amount individuals can currently receive is $194 per month, and the maximum amount a family of four can receive is $646 per month. On average, people on SNAP in 2018 had just $1.40 to spend per meal, CBPP estimates.

Currently, because of a provision lawmakers approved in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, states are working on automatically providing the maximum benefit to all individuals and families as one way to address income shortfalls they may be experiencing.

Vehicles line up at the Feeding South Florida food bank in Sunrise, Florida, on April 6. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Experts tell Vox that SNAP benefits overall have not kept pace with increased living costs — and that this gap is even more evident during the pandemic, when individuals may be relying on SNAP more and people are being told to stockpile groceries for longer periods.

“It’s real hard by the end of the month,” Joseph, a 59-year-old SNAP recipient in Baltimore, Maryland, told Vox. “By the time the check comes, it goes. ... I’m usually always broke.” In 80 percent of cases, the SNAP benefits households receive are spent in two weeks.

“We and many economists and policymakers recommend raising SNAP benefits and modestly expanding eligibility to address the effects of COVID-19 until the economy shows solid signs of recovering from the downturn,” CBPP senior fellow Dottie Rosenbaum writes in a blog post.


During the pandemic, applications for SNAP have gone more smoothly for many people than similar processes for unemployment insurance, though there have still been delays. Typically, states have to let people know if they qualify for the program within 30 days, and send them an Electronic Benefit Transfer card — which can be used to buy groceries — within seven to 10 days. But, as with other overwhelmed safety net programs, many places are seeing a logjam.

Jennifer, a SNAP applicant in Newark, New Jersey who’d been recently laid off, told Vox she was increasingly anxious while waiting for her EBT card, as she also tried to apply for unemployment. “In the richest country in the world, are we only going to hand out 1,200 [dollars] and assure everything is going to be okay? It is unfair,” she said.
Food banks are completely slammed right now

Because SNAP isn’t accessible to all households affected by the economic downturn — and doesn’t provide enough money even for those who can use it — food banks are now trying to fill in a much bigger gap than they usually have to deal with. As millions of people grapple with unemployment and business closures, they’re using food banks in order to address shortfalls.

“What’s been so challenging for food banks is that we’ve had this really dramatic and heartbreaking increase in need,” says Leslie Bacho, CEO of Second Harvest of Silicon Valley. “Fifty percent of people haven’t gotten help before.”

Jose Lopreto is directed by Cinthya Torres at a pop-up food pantry in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on April 14. Erin Clark/Boston Globe/Getty Images

Volunteers in Miami, Florida, organize groceries to be distributed at a drive-thru site on April 15. Eva Marie Uzcategui Trinkl/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

PennDOT workers pack boxes of emergency food at Helping Harvest in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, on April 30. Lauren A. Little/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle/Getty Images
People line up at a food bank in Waltham, Massachusetts, on April 11. Many people who use food banks are also SNAP recipients; however, the benefits rarely cover a full month of groceries. Erin Clark/Boston Globe/Getty Images

Those increases have been staggering at many organizations. Bacho says the group is serving roughly 100,000 more people than before the pandemic. Eric Cooper, president of the San Antonio Food Bank, notes the organization’s sites went from serving 60,000 people a week to 120,000 a week. And Anna Kurian, senior communications director at the North Texas Food Banks, says they’ve distributed 6 million pounds of food in about a month, compared to 1.5 million pounds in the prior two months.

Such huge amounts of need mean food banks have had to significantly increase the supply of food they have, and purchase much more than they normally would — leading to a massive uptick in their costs.


Wong, of Northwest Harvest, estimates that the food bank went from purchasing 10 percent of its food to 90 percent. This additional cost is putting pressure on food bank budgets, and for some, an uptick in donations isn’t enough to cover it. Feeding America expects to see a shortfall of $1.4 billion in the next six months, according to the New York Times.
What policy changes would help

There are several proposals in Congress aimed at improving the existing SNAP program — by making it more comprehensive and flexible. They likely face a roadblock from Republicans, who have expressed little interest in them, and even if they do make it into the next stimulus, that bill could be weeks away. If approved, though, these proposals could provide more comprehensive food aid and relieve some of the demand food banks are encountering.

Boosting SNAP also has noticeable economic impacts, since this money not only helps people afford food they need, but the spending goes right back to retailers, and has a multiplier effect as a result. Moody’s Analytics has found that every additional dollar of SNAP funding that people can access translates to a $1.70 boost in the economy.

A whiteboard displays what to include as volunteers pack up boxes of food to be distributed at the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington, DC, on April 9. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The changes lawmakers are pushing include a 15 percent expansion in the maximum SNAP benefit, which would be a direct and quick way to offer more support to millions of people.

“During the Great Recession, Congress made SNAP more generous” using the Recovery Act of 2009, says Duke University public policy professor Anna Gassman-Pines. “The evidence is that this helped a lot of people weather the recession and the same thing could be done now.”

That 13.6 percent increase on the maximum monthly benefit in 2009 was found to have a tangible effect on reducing food insecurity for households near the poverty line. According to FRAC, data also shows that families receiving the expanded benefit didn’t use them up until later in the month.


There’s a push, too, for more flexibility around how SNAP benefits can be used. Only a few states enable recipients to use SNAP at restaurants, or for online delivery, for example. Expanding both of these options could greatly widen how the program can help families during the pandemic, especially when shopping in person at stores can prove challenging for people who are more vulnerable to the coronavirus.

Democrats have made the expansion of SNAP a key priority for the upcoming stimulus package, though they’ve yet to pick up Republican support. If they can, it could prove to be one of the quickest ways to get stimulus help directly to people who sorely need it.

People wait in line to receive food at a food bank in Brooklyn, New York, on April 28. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Commemorating the abolition of slavery in France: ‘This is our history’

10/05/2020

A "memorial" sculpture, decorated with a ribbon in the colours of the French flag, was unveiled in the gardens of Bordeaux's town hall on December 2, 2019. © Georges Gobet, AFP

Text by:Stéphanie TROUILLARD

The commemorations of the abolition of slavery in France scheduled for May 10 will take place despite the coronavirus pandemic, but in small groups or virtually. A Facebook Live is being organised by the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery, in partnership with FRANCE 24.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, celebration of the National Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade, Slavery and Its Abolition, held every year in France on May 10, has been disrupted.

A ceremony presided over by Prime Minister Édouard Philippe was held on Sunday, but on a small scale. "We will not put this commemoration on hold, despite the health requirements," former prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, now president of the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery, told FRANCE 24.

Ayrault’s foundation was charged with overseeing the remembrances this year. In addition, regional prefects were asked by the Prime Minister to organise commemorative ceremonies for the public in each department, while respecting the rules of social distancing.

"There will be modest national ceremonies, in Paris with the Prime Minister, but also in provincial and overseas communes with the help of associations," Ayrault said. "A lot of things are going to happen on May 10, including the organisation of a live broadcast on Facebook.


The live broadcast, in partnership with FRANCE 24, will bring together politicians, artists and historians for discussion.

"This is not about creating division"

The theme of this year's commemorations is 'The Missing Page'.

"We don't know how the existing framework was established. We know that there was slavery and abolition, but we know less about the fact that it took three revolutions to achieve abolition," Ayrault said.

For the former mayor of the city of Nantes, a hub in the slave trade, the occasion provides an opportunity to recall the place that slavery occupies in our national history. "It leaves deep traces and wounds. They must be repaired. It is not a question of creating division nor of setting memories against each other," Ayrault stressed, referring to critics, who complain of an excess of repentance. "This is our history. And for us to share it, we must make it known.

"The aim is not to make people feel guilty, but to provide keys to understanding and to a way of living together based on justice, equality, the fight against all forms of discrimination and racism, but also fraternity," Ayrault said, adding that it was "a contemporary struggle".

An estimated 12 to 18 million slaves were taken from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. Under the impetus of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, a critique of slavery and the slave trade began to emerge in France in the 18th century. In his 1748 book "The Spirit of the Laws ", Charles de Montesquieu is sarcastic about "those who call themselves Christians and who practice slavery". In 1788, the Society of Friends of Blacks was created in Paris and campaigned for abolition.

A long road to abolition

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 abolished slavery but had no impact in the French West Indies. It was not until February 1794 that the Society of Friends of Blacks succeeded in winning abolition. Napoléon Bonaparte, however, very quickly re-established slavery and the slave trade in 1802.

It was not until 27 April 1848 that a decree by the provisional government of the Second Republic definitively abolished slavery in all the French colonies. The abolition of slavery was enshrined in the Constitution on November 4, 1848.

This article was translated from the original in French.

SLAVERY
FRANCE

Native American tribes reject coronavirus checkpoint threat

Two Sioux nations in South Dakota have said that Governor Kristi Noem is undermining both their sovereignty and their health. Indigenous populations have been especially hard-hit by the pandemic.

Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux, said he would not apologize for tribal land being an "island of safety"

The Ogala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux nations in the US state of South Dakota continued on Monday to reject attempts by Republican Governor Kristi Noem to force the tribes to take down coronavirus health checkpoints on their land.

On Friday, Noem had threated legal action if the checkpoints on federal and state highways were not removed within two days, a move that would violate both tribal sovereignty as well as existing agreements between the state and Sioux governments. The checkpoints are part of the measures the tribes have put in place to stop the spread of the pandemic in their territory.

Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux, said "we will not apologize for being an island of safety in a sea of uncertainty and death…You continuing to interfere in our efforts to do what science and facts dictate seriously undermine our ability to protect everyone on the reservation."

Read more: US blocks UN vote on coronavirus pandemic

His sentiments were echoes by Ogala Sioux President Julian Bear Runner, who said in a video posted to Facebook that "we have an inherent and sovereign right to protect the health of our people, and no one, man or woman, can dispute that right.

"Your threats of legal action are not helpful and do not intimidate us. The only way we can get through this is to work together as a nation."

State lawmakers call on Noem to back down

The governor had claimed that the tribes were defying a deal not to close or restrict highways without consulting the state government first.


Noem has tracked close to the president in her policy regarding the pandemic

However, as Frazier pointed out, the tribes have met with several state bodies to discuss the checkpoints, and the health controls are not restricting commercial trade, as Noem claims.

Over the weekend, 17 state lawmakers signed a letter requesting Noem seek a diplomatic solution and not a legal one, adding that a lawsuit would "cost the people of South Dakota more money." Despite the letter, Noem reiterated her intention to sue on Sunday.

Noem is one of many Republican governors analysts have accused of trying to restart their state economies too early under pressure from the party and the White House. South Dakota is the site of the Smithfield pork processing plant, the site of a major COVID-19 outbreak after US President Donald Trump forced meat factories to remain open throughout the crisis.

Data from several state with large Native American populations have shown that Indigenous groups, along with African American and Latino communities, are being hit especially hard by the pandemic. In Arizona, for example, Native people account for 16% of deaths despite being only 4.6% of the population.

Last week, more than a dozen tribes across the US announced they were suing the federal government over a delay in federal pandemic relief funding. According to the stimulus package agreed to by the US Congress and signed by President Trump, $8 billion was to be allocated to hard-hit Indigenous nations. However, lawyers for the tribes say they have not received any of the funding due a dispute with the Trump administration, which is arguing that for-profit businesses run by Native Americans in Alaska, a state valuable to US oil interests, should be allocated some of the funds. 

Cécile Rol-Tanguy obituary

One of the great figures of the French resistanceRobert Gildea THE GUARDIAN Mon 11 May 2020
 

Cécile and Henri Rol-Tanguy. They worked in tandem and he led the irregular French forces in the Paris insurrection of August 1944

Cécile Rol-Tanguy, who has died aged 101, was one of the great figures of the French resistance. She came from a communist family and worked in tandem with her husband, Henri Rol-Tanguy, who led the irregular French forces in the Paris insurrection of August 1944. Long in his shadow, she came into her own as a veteran and voice of the resistance in the years after his death in 2002.

Her father, François Le Bihan, a Breton who had worked in Les Halles market in Paris, joined the navy, trained as a radio electrician and met his wife, Germaine Jaganet, while based at Royan in the south-west of France at the end of the first world war. Returning to Paris, he joined the French Communist party (PCF) as soon as it was founded in 1920.

Cécile, who was born in Royan, was brought up in an environment dedicated to international communism. Her family’s home sheltered political exiles from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and as a girl Cécile joined the Jeunes Filles de France, set up by the PCF. In 1936, aged 17, she found a job as a shorthand typist in the engineers union of the Confédération Générale du Travail. There she met Henri Tanguy, a Breton like herself, who had been repeatedly sacked from car factories for fomenting strikes and now worked as a permanent official for the union.

Cécile Rol-Tanguy at the the ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation in 2009. Photograph: Horacio Villalobos/EPA

Cécile and Henri were soon plunged into the maelstrom of what they saw as a war between fascism and communism. When the Spanish civil war broke out in 1936, Henri went to fight in the International Brigades while Cécile worked with the Aid for Spain Committee and wrote him letters as his “war godmother”. Henri claimed to be a revolutionary who would never marry, but they wed in 1939. When the second world war broke out Henri was sent to the front at Sarrebourg, then to a factory in the Pyrenees as a skilled worker.

Cécile’s father was arrested as a communist in 1940 and her first child, Françoise, died as a baby in the same year, just as the German army closed in on Paris. Instead of collapsing, she decided to resist. “I had nothing left,” she said in a 2012 interview. “My father had been arrested, I didn’t know where my husband was, and I had lost my little girl. What could hold me back?”

Henri became an underground communist resister, first for the Organisation Spéciale, then the Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP). Cécile typed flyers and acted as his liaison agent, keeping the resistance network together and replacing those who were arrested.

Resistance was extremely dangerous. Those who fell into the hands of the Vichy or German authorities risked deportation or execution. Cécile’s father escaped after his arrest but was recaptured in 1941 and deported the following year to Auschwitz, where he died.

After two comrades were arrested in the autumn of 1942, Henri was sent away to the Poitiers area for six months. Cécile stayed in Paris with her mother, who, when necessary, cared for their two children, Hélène and Jean. Henri returned to Paris in the spring of 1943 and was appointed FTP chief in the Paris region, working with the Polish-Jewish resister Joseph Epstein. Cécile liaised between them and also with Boris Holban, the Romanian-Jewish leader of the Paris FTP-MOI, which mobilised communists of foreign origin. Epstein was arrested and executed on 11 April 1944.

In June 1944 Henri became Paris head of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), which brought together communist and non-communist irregulars. He adopted the nom de guerre of Rol after a comrade killed in Spain.

On 14 August 1944, Cécile took Henri’s machine gun from one part of Paris to another, avoiding German road blocks, while her mother took flyers in Jean’s pram and Hélène danced along the pavement. At dawn on 19 August the insurrection order signed by Henri was posted across Paris.

The liberation of Paris covered Henri in glory but General Charles de Gaulle was determined to reassert his own power and to prioritise the role of the Free French forces, which he had founded and which had fought outside France until they entered Paris under General Philippe Leclerc on 24 August 1944.

On 27 August, the day after he walked down the Champs-Élysées to rapturous crowds, De Gaulle invited 20 leaders of the internal resistance to the War Ministry. Each was tersely thanked before the general dismissed him with “Good. Next!” Cécile was the only woman present. “Personally, I did not find it very welcoming,” she recalled. “It was a very small reception, without even a glass of wine to finish with.”

The internal resistance was humiliated because it had a large communist contingent and because it detracted from De Gaulle’s personal glory. Henri continued in the army proper and fought his way to Germany, but he was then given a military desk job in Versailles.


Commemorations always celebrated the role of the Free French and of Leclerc in particular. On one occasion Cécile told the mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, that not giving her husband a seat in the front row of such commemorations was “an affront to history”.

In recent years Cécile enjoyed greater recognition. She became co-president of the Friends of the Spanish Republican Fighters, set up in 1996, of which her daughter Claire was general secretary. Frequently she gave talks in schools about the resistance, becoming the star turn after the death of Lucie Aubrac in 2007. In May 2014 she spoke at a conference to mark the 70th anniversary of the Liberation at the French Institute in London. She was made a Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2014 and was awarded the Grande Croix de l’Ordre National du Mérite in 2017.

She is survived by her four children, Hélène, Jean, Claire and Francis.

• Cécile Rol-Tanguy, French resistance agent, born 10 April 1919; died 8 May 2020

South Korea struggles to contain new outbreak amid anti-gay backlash

Fears people will fail to get tested out of fear after new cases linked to Seoul gay district

Nemo Kim in Seoul THE GUARDIAN Mon 11 May 202

Quarantine workers spray disinfectant in Itaewon neighbourhood on Monday. Photograph: YONHAP/Reuters


Authorities in South Korea are struggling to contain a new coronavirus outbreak linked to the capital’s nightclub district as a backlash against the country’s gay community increases, prompting fears LGBT people will fail to get tested out of fear of being outed.

South Korea had been praised for its innovative efforts to contain the pandemic, going from the second most infected region outside China to having just a handful of cases before the latest outbreak a week ago.

But the increasing number of cases related to nightclubs in Seoul is raising concerns about a possible second wave as well as over the high level of deeply entrenched homophobic attitudes in the conservative society.

Of 35 new cases, 29 were found to be linked to Itaewon, the capital’s gay district, according to officials from the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), bringing the total number of cases related to the clubs to 86.

The emergence of the cluster prompted officials to push back the re-opening of schools by one week, with students initially set to return to classes in stages starting Wednesday.

Vice-education minister Park Baeg-beom said the delay was “inevitable” in order to guarantee the safety of students.


After Kookmin Ilbo, a local media outlet with links to an evangelical church, reported that businesses visited by an infected man over the long weekend were gay clubs, many other South Korean media followed suit, revealing not only the identity of clientele but also some of their ages and the names of their workplaces.

The media frenzy reached a new level when another infected man was found to have been to an LGBT sauna in Gangnam, prompting a slew of homophobic content in newspapers and online.

Lurid reporting, along with South Korea’s use of the trace and test method, has led to members of the gay community reporting feeling scared to get tested and even suicidal. Officials said 3,112 people who were in the nightclubs were currently not contactable.

“I admit it was a huge mistake to visit the gay district when the corona situation was not fully over,” Lee Youngwu , a gay man in his30s, told the Guardian “But visiting the area is the only time when I can be myself and hang out with others similar to me. During the week, I have to pretend to like women.

“My credit card company told me that they passed on my payment information in the district to the authorities. I feel so trapped and hunted down. If I get tested, my company will most likely find out I’m gay. I’ll lose my job and face a public humiliation. I feel as if my whole life is about to collapse. I have never felt suicidal before and never thought I would, but I am feeling suicidal now.”


On Saturday the prime minister, Chung Sye-kyun, urged the public to “refrain from criticising a certain community as it will not help efforts to contain the coronavirus spread”.

Lee Jong-geol, the general director of Korean gay men’s human rights group Chingusai, told the Guardian that the group had begun counselling and legal aid services for those affected by the crisis, adding that Seoul city officials asked the group to encourage gay men who had visited the clubs to come forward to get tested.

“I understand that civil servants want to find a convenient way to do their jobs but they should realise that South Korea’s gay people do not all belong to one, single group. Civil servants are handling the situation in the same way as the Shincheonji cult situation, but we’re not a cult.”

Lee Jae-myung, governor of Gyeonggi province near Seoul, where many of the infected people live, said it would be possible for people to get tested free of charge by only saying they had been to the outbreak area and not having to mention the names of businesses they visited.

“It took me a whole week to get up the courage to get tested,” Min Jaeyoung, 27, told the Guardian, “I had to practise saying ‘oh, of course I’m not gay’ and even recorded myself several times to sound natural. I even put up photos of footballers and Korean hip-hop artists on my [social media accounts] to try to seem straight. I even got ready to look for another job. As it turned out, I was not infected but I cried when I got that text not because I was happy not to be infected but because I really hate being a gay man in this country.”

The mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, said on Monday that while he would guarantee anonymity when people got tested, there would be a fine of 2m Korean won (£1,320) for those who did not get tested . He also said anyone who did not come forward would be visited at home by officials accompanied by police.