FOR THOSE OF YOU WITH A DANCE POLE IN THE REC ROOM

AP PHOTOS: Turkish pole dance teacher moves classes online

By ZEYNEP BILGINSOY

In this Thursday, April 30, 2020 photo, Tuba Parlak, 39, a pole dancing performer and instructor performs at her studio in Istanbul, during an online training session for students watching from home, due to the coronavirus restrictions. To stem the spread of COVID-19, Turkey closed down sports facilities in March but Parlak's students continued their pole lessons, using video conferencing. For students not having a pole at home, Parlak has designed a special programme to make sure they stay strong and fit. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

To stem the spread of COVID-19, Turkey closed down sports facilities in March but Tuba Parlak’s students wanted to continue their lessons.

Using the video conferencing app Zoom, Parlak teaches the vigorous exercise from her studio in Istanbul’s hip Cihangir district. She limits her classes to five students as she did in the studio, and says Zoom has made it easier to critique her students’ moves with all video images lined up on her screen.

Some of Parlak’s students had poles installed at home, with a discount from a local pole manufacturer, and others are continuing with pole dance floor work. The classes, most of them advanced, are only available to students that Parlak already worked with.

Parlak, a former arts and culture journalist, started pole dancing in 2015 and turned her passion to full time profession. She says the pandemic, apart from taking her work online, has not altered her day-to-day because she already led an “isolated” life as an athlete.

Drop-out rates are high in this challenging exercise, Parlak says. Her students are looking forward to returning to the studio but it remains uncertain when Turkey will allow sports facilities to re-open.

In this Thursday, April 30, 2020 photo, Tuba Parlak, 39, a pole dancing performer and instructor performs at her studio in Istanbul, during an online training session for students watching from home, due to the coronavirus restrictions. To stem the spread of COVID-19, Turkey closed down sports facilities in March but Parlak's students continued their pole lessons, using video conferencing. For students not having a pole at home, Parlak has designed a special programme to make sure they stay strong and fit.
In this Thursday, April 30, 2020 photo, Tuba Parlak, 39, a pole dancing performer and instructor warms-up at her studio in Istanbul, as she prepares for an online training session for students at home, due to the coronavirus restrictions.To stem the spread of COVID-19, Turkey closed down sports facilities in March but Parlak's students wanted to continue their pole lessons. Using video conferencing, Parlak teaches the vigorous exercise from her studio in Istanbul's hip Cihangir district. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)


In this Thursday, April 30, 2020 photo, Tuba Parlak, 39, a pole dancing performer and instructor prepares at her studio in Istanbul, for an online training session for students at home, due to the coronavirus restrictions. To stem the spread of COVID-19, Turkey closed down sports facilities in March but Parlak's students wanted to continue their pole lessons. Using video conferencing, Parlak teaches the vigorous exercise from her studio in Istanbul's hip Cihangir district. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)


DOING THIS IN HER FORTIES IS AMAZING  AS THIS IS USUALLY A YOUNGER WOMAN'S SPORT

IN NORTH AMERICA POLE DANCING IS FAVOURED BY EXOTIC DANCERS

FOR THE REST OF THE PHOTOS GO HERE https://apnews.com/17783b9afb57deb22d26bc7158dd1e6d

PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX 

America’s business of prisons thrives even amid a pandemic

By ROBIN McDOWELL and MARGIE MASON

FILE - In this March 16, 2011, file photo, a security fence surrounds inmate housing on the Rikers Island correctional facility in New York. As of Wednesday, May 6, 2020, more than 20,000 inmates have been infected by the COVID-19 coronavirus and 295 have died nationwide, at Rikers Island and at state and federal lockups in cities and towns coast to coast, according to an unofficial tally kept by the COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project run by UCLA Law. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — As factories and other businesses remain shuttered across America, people in prisons in at least 40 states continue going to work. Sometimes they earn pennies an hour, or nothing at all, making masks and hand sanitizer to help guard others from the coronavirus.

Those same men and women have been cut off from family visits for weeks, but they get charged up to $25 for a 15-minute phone call — plus a surcharge every time they add credit.

They also pay marked-up prices at the commissary for soap so they can wash their hands more frequently. That service can carry a 100% processing fee.


As the COVID-19 virus cripples the economy, leaving millions unemployed and many companies on life support, big businesses that have become synonymous with the world’s largest prison system are still making money.

“It’s hard. Especially at a time like this, when you’re out of work, you’re waiting for unemployment … and you don’t have money to send,” said Keturah Bryan, who transfers hundreds of dollars each month to her 64-year-old father at a federal prison in Oklahoma.

Meanwhile, she said, prisons continue to gouge.

“You have to pay for phone calls, emails, food,” she said. “Everything.”

The coronavirus outbreak has put an unlikely spotlight on America’s jails and prisons, which house more than 2.2 million people and have been described by health experts as petri dishes as the virus spreads.

Masks and hand sanitizer often aren’t provided. Testing is rarely carried out, even among those with symptoms, despite fears that surrounding communities may be affected. And in some parts of the country, those sickened by the virus languish in sweltering buildings with poor ventilation.

The concerns extend to outsourced prison health care, frequently accused by experts of offering substandard treatment even in the best of times.

Sheron Edwards shares a dorm with 50 other men at Chickasaw County Regional Correctional Facility in Mississippi. Given his past experiences with the prison’s medical provider, Centurion, he worries about what will happen if coronavirus hits.

“I’m afraid they’ll just let us die in here,” he said.

When he was at the state’s notorious Parchman prison several years ago, Edwards said the company refused to pay for costly heart medication and only provided one session of physical therapy when he had to have a six-inch rod and screws placed in his broken ankle.

“Even though that wasn’t life threatening, it was serious,” he said. “With COVID-19, I could actually lose my life.”

More than 20,000 prisoners have been infected and 295 have died nationwide — from Rikers Island in New York City to federal, state, and local lockups coast to coast, according to an unofficial tally kept by the COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project run by UCLA Law.

On Wednesday, officials in San Diego announced the first death of a detainee in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.

When incarceration rates soared to record highs in the 1980s and ’90s, some corporations saw a business opportunity. They promised lower costs and, in many cases, profit-sharing agreements. Prison and jail administrators started privatizing everything from food and commissary to entire operations of facilities.

Proponents of for-profit prisons say it’s cheaper for private companies to run facilities than the government, arguing it’s easier to cancel contracts and there is more incentive to provide better service. They say that leads to improved living conditions and more effective rehabilitation of the incarcerated back into society with the ultimate goal of reducing recidivism.

But not everyone agrees. In 2019, criminal and immigration justice advocates successfully moved nine major banks, including J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, to stop lending money to private prisons.

Today, some of corporate America’s biggest names, and many smaller companies, vie for a share of the $80 billion spent on mass incarceration each year in the U.S., roughly half of which stays in the public sector to pay for staff salaries and some health care costs, according to the Massachusetts-based nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative.

A new report released Thursday by New York-based advocacy group Worth Rises detailed some 4,100 corporations that profit from the country’s prisons and jails. It identified corporations that support prison labor directly or through their supply chains. The group also recommended divesting from more than 180 publicly traded corporations and investment firms considered to cause the greatest harm to people behind bars and the communities that support them.

“The industry behind mass incarceration is bigger than many appreciate. So is the harm they cause and the power they wield,” said Bianca Tylek, the group’s founder and director.

“They exploit and abuse people with devastating consequences,” she said. “Of course, they aren’t unilaterally responsible for mass incarceration, but they’re part of the ecosystem propping it up.”

The report includes vendors that stock commissaries with Cup Noodles and Tide laundry detergent, along with contracted health care providers that have been sued for providing limited or inadequate coverage to those behind bars.

There are companies like Smith & Wesson that make protective gear for correctional officers and Attenti that supply electronic ankle bracelets. Other household names, such as Stanley Black & Decker, have entire units dedicated to manufacturing accessories for prison doors.

Incarcerated people also work, making everything from license plates to body armor vests and mattresses. In California, some even serve as firefighters. But in some places, they are employed by major corporations such as Minnesota-based 3M.

Billed as a cheap alternative to foreign outsourcing, inmates also previously provided goods to Starbucks, Victoria’s Secret and Whole Foods, sparking an uproar that caused many big-name companies to bow out.

Some people leave their lockups to do jobs in the community, such as fast food restaurants. State-owned businesses have also cropped up around the massive prison labor industries, including some with almost comical names, such as Big House products in Pennsylvania and Rough Rider Industries in North Dakota.

While some jobs might pay minimum wage as required by federal law for goods that enter interstate commerce, the take-home pay of workers in correctional industries can be as low as 20% of their stated wage after garnishment for room and board, restitution and other costs.

Meanwhile, private companies market catalogs full of products to lockups. One website advertises an array of pricey bondage items: Leather bed restraints for $267, ankle hobbles for $144 and a metal waist chain with handcuffs going for $76.95.

An Alabama company markets video conferencing systems as a replacement for in-person visits under a call box with the face of an elderly woman in glasses shown on the monitor inside. Beside it reads the slogan: “Keep Granny’s shank pies away from your facility.”

Bobby Rose, one of the report’s researchers, served 24 years in New York state prisons, where he spent a lot of time thinking about the role money plays in America’s legal system.

He was shocked to learn just how many big-name companies were involved and how much was being made off not only those behind bars, but also their families who are often poor and members of racial minorities — a particularly poignant concept during the pandemic.

“I feel,” he said, “that some of these companies that really profit could have provided ... sanitizer or even gave free soap.”

He still thinks about friends left in prison. Two of them have succumbed to the virus.

Facebook removes accounts linked to QAnon conspiracy theory

By BARBARA ORTUTAY May 5, 2020

In this Aug. 18, 2018 file photo man holds a sign that reads "Q-Nited We Stand" during a rally held by members of Patriot Prayer and other groups supporting gun rights near City Hall in Seattle. Facebook says it has removed several groups, accounts and pages linked to QAnon, taking action for the first time against the far-right U.S. conspiracy theory circulated among supporters of President Donald Trump. The social-media giant made the announcement Tuesday, May 5, 2020 as part of its monthly briefing on “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on its platforms. That’s Facebook's term for fake accounts run with the intent of disrupting politics elections and society. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, file)


OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Facebook says it has removed several groups, accounts and pages linked to QAnon, taking action for the first time against the far-right U.S. conspiracy theory circulated among supporters of President Donald Trump.

The social-media giant made the announcement Tuesday as part of its monthly briefing on “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on its platforms. That’s Facebook’s term for fake accounts run with the intent of disrupting politics elections and society.

In addition to the QAnon accounts, Facebook also removed accounts linked to VDARE, a U.S. website known for posting anti-immigration content, as well as accounts in Russia, Iran, Mauritania, Myanmar and the country of Georgia.


QAnon is a right-wing conspiracy theory centered on the baseless belief that Trump is waging a secret campaign against enemies in the “deep state” and a child sex trafficking ring run by satanic pedophiles and cannibals. For more than two years, followers have pored over a tangled set of clues purportedly posted online by a high-ranking government official known only as “Q.”

The conspiracy theory first emerged in a dark corner of the internet but has been creeping into the mainstream political arena. Trump has retweeted QAnon-promoting accounts and its followers flock to the president’s rallies wearing clothes and hats with QAnon symbols and slogans.

Facebook says it found the QAnon activity as part of its investigations into suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

“We are making progress rooting out this abuse, but as we’ve said before, it’s an ongoing effort,” the company said in its April report on coordinated activity. “That means building better technology, hiring more people and working more closely with law enforcement, security experts and other companies.”

Social media research firm Graphika, which receives funding from Facebook, said in a concurrent report Tuesday that the QAnon network promoted conspiracy theories and tried to sell merchandise, such as T-shirts, using Facebook. The network, Graphika said, appeared to be run by a small group of users who had both real and fake accounts.

The network focused primarily on the “Q” conspiracy theory, but dabbled in others — around the 5G wireless network, the U.S. presidential elections, Bill Gates and the coronavirus, Graphika said.

Full Coverage: AP Fact Check

The research firm found related activity on Twitter as well, but noted that in itself, such activity may not have violated Twitter’s rules. Twitter allows users to post under fake names.

Twitter said if it finds information-operation campaigns that can be reliably attributed to state-backed activity, it removes them. It said Facebook shared details of the accounts it removed, but Twitter didn’t find anything to conclude that an information operation took place on its platform.

__

Associated Press Writer Michael Kunzelman in Silver Spring, Maryland, contributed to this story.

Butler’s prescient sci-fi resonates years after her death

By HILLEL ITALIE

FILE - In this Feb. 4, 2004 file photo, author Octavia Butler poses near some of her novels at University Book Store in Seattle, Wash. Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, died Feb. 24, 2006, at age 58. Fourteen years after her death, Butler has never seemed more relevant. The rare black science fiction writer in her lifetime, she is now praised for anticipating many of the major issues of the day, from pandemics to the election of Donald Trump. (Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com via AP, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — Novelist N.K. Jemisin was a teenager the first time she read Octavia Butler, and nothing had prepared her for it. It was the 1980s, and the book was called “Dawn,” the story of a black woman who awakens 250 years after a nuclear holocaust.

“I remember just kind of being stunned that a black woman existed in the future, because science fiction had not done that before,” says Jemisin, whose “The City We Became” is currently a bestseller. “There was just this conspicuous absence where it seemed we all just vanished after a while.”

A revolutionary voice in her lifetime, Butler has only become more popular and influential since her death 14 years ago, at age 58. Her novels, including “Dawn,” “Kindred” and “Parable of the Sower,” sell more than 100,000 copies each year, according to her former literary agent and the manager of her estate, Merrilee Heifetz. Toshi Reagon has adapted “Parable of the Sower” into an opera, and Viola Davis and Ava DuVernay are among those working on streaming series based on her work. Grand Central Publishing is reissuing many of her novels this year and the Library of America welcomes her to the canon in 2021 with a volume of her fiction.

A generation of younger writers cite her as an influence, from Jemisin and Tochi Onyebuchi to Marlon James and Nnedi Okorafor, currently working on a screenplay for the Butler novel “Wild Seed” for the production company run by Davis and her husband, Julius Tennon. Davis, in a recent interview with The Associated Press, said she began reading Butler while attending the Juilliard school 30 years ago.

“I felt included in the narrative in a way I had never felt reading anything before,” said Davis, who has a deal with Amazon Studios. “There is something about seeing yourself in the imagination’s playground that opens up your world.”

Alys Eve Weinbaum, a professor of English at the University of Washington, says Butler broke open a genre “dominated by white men and white readers.” She is now praised as a visionary who anticipated many of the issues in the news today, from the coronavirus to climate change to the election of President Donald Trump. In her 1998 novel “Parable of the Talents,” the right-wing Andrew Steele Jarret runs for president in 2032 with a message familiar to current readers.

“Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, ‘simpler’ time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him,” Butler wrote. “There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.”

Jarret’s campaign theme: “Help us to make America great again.”

“She (Butler) seems to have seen the real future coming in a way few other writers did,” says Gerry Caravan, an associate professor at Marquette University who is co-editing Butler’s work for the Library of America. “It’s hard not to read the books and think ‘How did she know?’”

Butler’s own life trained her to think in new ways. Born and raised in Pasadena, California, she was black, poor and stood 6-feet-tall. “I believed I was ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless,” she once explained. Her feelings of isolation led her to the reading, and writing, of science fiction and fantasy stories even as an aunt told her, “Honey ... Negroes can’t be writers.”

At a writers workshop in the 1970s, Harlan Ellison read her work and became an early supporter, publishing one of her stories in a science fiction anthology. Her first novel, “Patternmaster,” came out in 1976, although it took her years to be able to support herself and for the industry to catch up to her. Jemisin and others remember that the original cover for “Dawn” featured a white woman, making Jemisin all the more surprised when she read the book and realized the protagonist was black.

Through the 1980s and ’90s, her readership and reputation grew. She became the first science fiction author to receive a MacArthur “genius grant” and her literary honors included Nebula Awards for “Bloodchild” and “Parable of the Talents.” She was shy and often reclusive and would describe herself as “A pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”

Some admirers have personal memories of Butler. Not longer before she died, in 2006, she was the keynote speaker at the Gwendolyn Brooks Conference on Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University. Okorafor was among hundreds in the audience. She had known Butler for years, dating back to a writers workshop where she first read Butler and sought her advice, beginning with a phone conversation.

“She was really kind and she was funny, and I just remember the conversation being really nurturing. She was very down to earth, but it was also like talking to someone who was way up there,” Okorafor says. “At the Gwendolyn Brooks conference, I remember how surprised she was at the turnout. The room is packed, this big room with so much love. I just wish she were here now to see how much more she is being honored.”

___

This story has been correct to show that the title of Butler’s first book was “The Patternmaster,” not “The Patternist,” and corrects the spelling of author’s last name to Okorafor, not Okarafor.

This combination of book cover images released by Grand Central Publishing shows, "Wild Seed," from left, "Parable of the Sower," and "Parable of the Talents," by Octavia e. Butler. Fourteen years after her death, Butler has never seemed more relevant. The rare black science fiction writer in her lifetime, she is now praised for anticipating many of the major issues of the day, from pandemics to the election of Donald Trump. Grand Central Publishing is reissuing many of her novels and the Library of America welcomes her to the canon in 2021 with a volume of her fiction. (Grand Central Publishing via AP)

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2006/03/octavia-butler-rip.html

Experts worry CDC is sidelined in coronavirus response

By MIKE STOBBE, JASON DEAREN and ZEKE MILLER

1 of 4

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pPrincipal Deuty Director Anne Schuchat, center, accompanied by National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, right, testifies before a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on the coronavirus on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, March 3, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

NEW YORK (AP) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly found its suggestions for fighting the coronavirus outbreak taking a backseat to other concerns within the Trump administration. That leaves public health experts outside government fearing the agency’s decades of experience in beating back disease threats are going to waste.

“You have the greatest fighting force against infectious diseases in world history. Why would you not use them?” said Dr. Howard Markel, a public health historian at the University of Michigan.

The complaints have sounded for months. But they have become louder following repeated revelations that transmission-prevention guidance crafted by CDC scientists was never adopted by the White House.

The latest instance surfaced Thursday, when The Associated Press reported that President Donald Trump’s administration shelved a CDC document containing step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the current pandemic.

The administration has disputed the notion that the CDC had been sidelined, saying the agency is integral to the administration’s plans to expand contact tracing nationwide.

But it’s clear that the CDC is playing a much quieter role than it has during previous outbreaks.

The nation’s COVID-19 response has seen a strange turn for the CDC, which opened in 1946 in Atlanta as The Communicable Disease Center to prevent the spread of malaria with a $10 million budget and a few hundred employees. Today, the agency has a core budget of more than $7 billion — a sum that has been shrinking in recent years — and employs nearly 11,000 people.

The CDC develops vaccines and diagnostic tests. Its experts advise doctors how best to treat people, and teach state, local and international officials how to fight and prevent disease. Among the CDC’s elite workforce are hundreds of the world’s foremost disease investigators — microbiologists, pathologists and other scientists dispatched to investigate new and mysterious illnesses.

In 2009, when a new type of flu virus known at the time as swine flu spread around the world, the CDC held almost daily briefings. Its experts released information on a regular basis to describe the unfolding scientific understanding of the virus, and the race for a vaccine.

The federal response to the coronavirus pandemic initially followed a similar pattern.

CDC first learned in late December of the emergence of a new disease in China, and the U.S. identified its first case in January. In those early days, the CDC held frequent calls with reporters. It also quickly developed a test it could run at its labs, and a test kit to be sent to state health department labs to detect the virus.

But February proved to be a disaster. The test kit was flawed, delaying the ability of states to do testing. A CDC-run surveillance system, meant to look for signs of the virus in people who had thought they had the flu, was slow to get off the ground. Officials at the CDC and at other federal agencies were slow to recognize infections from Europe were outpacing ones from travelers to China.

But politically speaking, one the most striking moments that month was something that the CDC — in the eyes of public health experts — got perfectly right.

In late February, Dr. Nancy Messonnier — a well-respected CDC official who was leading the agency’s coronavirus response — contradicted statements by other federal officials that the virus was contained. “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen – and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” she said.

Stocks plunged. President Donald Trump was enraged.

The White House Coronavirus Task Force moved to center stage. Vice President Mike Pence took control of clearing CDC communications about the virus. CDC news conferences stopped completely after March 9. Messonnier exited the public stage.

CDC Director Robert Redfield continued to keep the low profile he’s had since getting the job. Two other task force members — Dr. Deborah Birx, the task force coordinator, and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health — became the task force’s chief scientific communicators.

Health experts have praised Fauci, but they say CDC’s voice is sorely missed.

“At the White House briefings, they (CDC) should be talking about antibody tests and if they work. How long do people have the virus if they’re infected? What are the data for that? The issue ought to be front and center. These are the questions CDC can answer,” said Dr. James Curran, a former CDC star scientist who is now dean of Emory University’s public health school.

The government has continued to look to CDC officials for information and guidance, but there have been repeated instances when what the agency’s experts send to Washington is rejected.

In early March, administration officials overruled CDC doctors who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, the AP reported.

Last month, USA Today reported that the White House task force had forced the CDC had to change orders it had posted keeping cruise ships docked until August. The post was altered to say the ships could sail again in July, the newspaper reported.

And last week, officials nixed CDC draft guidance that was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.

The 17 pages of guidelines were never approved by Redfield to present to the White House task force, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They were only discussed at the task force level once the drafts leaked publicly, and no decisions about them were ever made.

Still, the CDC guidelines were the subject of intense debate at the upper echelons of the White House. Some officials saw them as essential to helping businesses and other organizations safely reopen.

Others, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, did not believe it appropriate for the federal government to set guidelines for specific sectors whose circumstances could vary widely depending on the level of outbreak in their areas, according to a person familiar with the discussion. What was necessary for a coffee shop in New York and one in Oklahoma was wildly different, in their view.

They worried about potential negative economic impact from the guidelines, and some aides expressed doubts about whether the government should be prescribing practices to religious communities.

The decision not to issue detailed sector guidance is also in keeping with the White House’s strategic decision to leave the specific details of reopening to states. While Trump had at one point claimed absolute authority to detail how and when states open, he’s adopted a largely hands-off approach as more and more states begin to lift lockdowns.

Trump suggests his decision is in keeping with the principles of federalism, but White House aides acknowledge that it also lessens the political peril for the president — who has come under pressure from conservative allies, particularly in states that haven’t experienced wide outbreaks, to swiftly reopen the country.

On a conference call Thursday afternoon with the House members on the White House’s “Opening Up America” panel, lawmakers in both parties pressed the White House to release sector-specific guidance of the sort currently held up by the administration.

“There was clear bipartisan support for the need to have CDC guidance and the need to have best practices,” said Rep. Ted Deutsch, D-Fla.

The CDC did not respond to a Thursday request for an interview with Redfield.

In a recent interview with the AP, the agency’s No. 2 administrator, Dr. Anne Schuchat, was asked to address reports that CDC recommendations were being ignored in Washington.

She paused, and then replied slowly.

“The CDC is providing our best evidence-based information to policy makers and providing that on a daily basis to protect the American people,” she said, without further comment.

___

Dearen reported from Gainesville, Florida. Miller reported from Washington.

Amid pandemic, the world’s working poor hustle to survive
By AYA BATRAWY and EMILY SCHMALL

1 of 13
In this April 7, 2020, photo, Rosemary Paez Carabajal, left, her husband Yonoma Saenz, their children Laisa and Leonardo pose for a photo at the room they rent in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Carabajal makes a living selling coffee on the street, and can no longer do her job after the government-ordered lockdown to curb the spread of the new coronavirus. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — From India to Argentina, untold millions who were already struggling to get by on the economic margins have had their lives made even harder by pandemic lockdowns, layoffs and the loss of a chance to earn from a hard day’s work.

More than four out of five people in the global labor force of 3.3 billion have been hit by full or partial workplace closures, according to the International Labor Organization, which says 1.6 billion workers in the informal economy “stand in immediate danger of having their livelihoods destroyed.”

The toll for families is hunger and poverty that are either newfound or even more grinding than before. Hunkering down at home to ride out the crisis isn’t an option for many, because securing the next meal means hustling to find a way to sell, clean, drive or otherwise work, despite the risk.

How the world’s poor get through this pandemic will help determine how quickly the global economy recovers and how much aid is needed to keep countries afloat.

Here are six stories from six corners of the world of people who saw their lives upended by the same invisible menace.

___

NAIROBI, KENYA

Judith Andeka. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

Judith Andeka has seen tough times before.

The 33-year-old mother of five lost her husband two years ago and was left to make ends meet on just $2.50 to $4 a day from washing clothes in Nairobi’s Kibera, one of the world’s biggest slums.

But things were never as tough as they are now.

Neighbors aren’t going to work because of restrictions on movement, so they can’t afford her services. Even if they could, they don’t want her handling their laundry due to virus concerns.

“I haven’t had a good day for the last two weeks,” Andeka said.

She’s been forced to send all five kids to live with relatives who are slightly better off: “I had no choice, because how do you tell a 2-year-old you have no food to give them?”

Like many others in Kibera, home to an estimated 300,000 to 800,000 people, Andeka wakes up early and rushes to a food aid distribution point to try her luck. Crowds often overwhelm the aid workers in their desperation, and men with sticks beat them back and police fire tear gas.

Each time she goes out looking for food or a chance to earn, she risks being robbed of the few belongings in her shack of cracked mud walls and rusty iron sheet roof. There’s a bed, two mismatched plastic chairs, a thin table, some buckets for collecting water from a communal tap and her two most prized possessions: a small gas burner and an old black-and-white TV.


Just a month ago, it didn’t seem life could be any harder. Now she knows otherwise.

“It’s better for corona(virus) to end and we continue living in hunger,” Andeka said. “Hunger is normal.”

- By Tom Odula in Nairobi.

___

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

Rosemary Paez Carabaja with daughter Laisa and son Leonardo. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Rosemary Páez Carabajal pushed a coffee cart on the streets of Argentina’s capital, until the lockdown forced her to stop.

Páez Carabajal, her blacksmith husband who’s also out of work and their two children rent a single room in a two-story brick building for the equivalent of $119 a month.

Now the cart sits idle in the hall, and the home is stacked with textbooks as the couple try to home-school their lone school-age child, a 7-year-old son.

They are dipping into meager savings and relying on a one-time government aid voucher worth about $150. For now, their landlord is not collecting rent.

Páez Carabajal worries her small business may not survive even after restrictions are eased.

“People are going to have doubts about buying because the disease is transmitted by grabbing things,” she said.

The coronavirus came at a time of already painful recession in Argentina, with more than a third of its 44 million residents in poverty, according to figures from late 2019. Some 3 million have requested food aid in recent weeks, adding to the 8 million getting such assistance before the pandemic.

“When the quarantine was coming,” Páez Carabajal recalled, “I said: ‘We’re all screwed, us day-to-day vendors.’”

- By Débora Rey and Víctor Caivano in Buenos Aires.

___

JAKARTA, INDONESIA

Budi Santosa with his young son. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

When Budi Santosa, a cook in a Chinese fast food restaurant, was told he’d be laid off, he wasn’t sure how he’d tell his wife.

“I am the breadwinner of the family. My children are toddlers. So they are the first things I thought about that day,” he said.

The 32-year-old is one of nearly 2 million who’ve lost jobs as a result of the pandemic in Indonesia, where poverty afflicts close to 10 percent of the country’s nearly 270 million people.

For Santosa the blow from the virus has been twofold: Not only has he lost the job, restrictions on movement mean he no longer earns extra cash moonlighting as a taxi driver, only from making food deliveries, which pays less.

“The government told us to stay at home, but if I stay home my wife and children will have no food to eat,” he said.

Santosa hasn’t had much time to dwell on his misfortune because he has to think about survival: Food, rent and paying down the debt on his motorcycle.

He now averages a little over $4 a day, down from $19 before the pandemic, from deliveries, just enough to buy food for himself, his wife and two young children. She stays at home to take care of the kids in their small, sparse, bare-walled home.

Santosa borrowed from friends to pay April’s rent. He’s not sure what he’ll do for May.

- By Edna Tarigan in Jakarta.

___

CAIRO

Hany Hassan, at right, and his friends. (Courtesy of Hany Hassan via AP)

In this sprawling and bustling metropolis of some 20 million people, the “ahwa,” or coffee shop, was among the first casualties of a shutdown order for many Egyptian businesses.

No longer were they allowed to offer “sheesha,” the hookah waterpipe so popular in the Middle East. Before long they were closed altogether.

That cost Hany Hassan his job. He hadn’t been making much — $5 a day — but it was enough to feed his family.

“We are financially ruined,” said the 40-year-old father of four.

Unable to find work in a relatively pricey Cairo he could no longer afford, he moved back to family in his hometown of Mallawi, about 190 miles (300 kilometers) to the south.

But his chances for work there are even dimmer. Chronic back pain means he can’t do the manual labor jobs many people work in the provinces.

Jobless for over a month, he goes out daily looking for work but comes back empty-handed every night. To keep afloat, he’s borrowed money.

Before the pandemic, one in three Egyptians or roughly 33 million people were living on about $1.45 per day, and around 6% were in extreme poverty, or living on less than a dollar a day, according to the country’s official statistics agency.

The government has created an emergency fund for vulnerable people, offering the equivalent of around $32 a month.

Hassan is one of 2 million who have applied. He’s grateful for that, but what he really needs is work. Otherwise, he fears, “there will be famine.”

“It’s not only me,” he said. “there are many people now who have nothing to feed their children.”

- By Samy Magdy in Cairo.

___

AMMAN, JORDAN

Khalil Yousef with his children, from left Nada, Hamza and Hazem. (AP Photo/Omar Akour)

Jordan’s wide-reaching lockdown has hit hard in al-Wehdat, a crowded, impoverished refugee camp in the capital.

Brothers Mohammed and Khalil Yousef used to scratch out a day-to-day existence as truck drivers. Mohammed, 40, hauled construction supplies. Khalil, 38, moved produce. Each earned between 10 and 20 dinars, or $14 to $28, a day.

Between them they have nine children, all under 16. In Khalil’s cement shack, the refrigerator is bare save for some tomatoes, onions and a few bags of pita bread.

Mohammed said residents usually help each other out in hard times, but borrowing from neighbors isn’t an option today. “The whole camp is without work now,” he said. “Everyone is broke.”

He opened his wallet to show its contents: ID cards, but no cash: “In the beginning I still had a little bit of money, but now there’s nothing.”

Al-Wehdat is Jordan’s second-largest camp for Palestinian refugees, the descendants of those who fled or were driven from their homes in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Over the years, Syrian refugees and Egyptian migrant workers have also settled here, and today about 60,000 people are crammed into the camp.

The government is implementing a program to support day laborers and says it has made payments to more than 200,000 families. The Yousefs have not received anything so far but say some neighbors have gotten the equivalent of $35.

After being idled for weeks, they are now only partially getting back to work as some restrictions on drivers are eased.

There are fears that loosening the lockdown could cause a spike in the virus in overcrowded al-Wehdat, but it’s unemployment that worries people most.

“People are afraid of going broke,” Mohammed said, “of not being able to put food on the table.”

- By Karin Laub in Amman.

___

LUCKNOW, INDIA

Mahesh and Gita Verma. (AP Photo/Biswajeet Banerjee)

Mahesh and Gita Verma ran a flower stall outside a Hindu temple honoring the monkey god Hanuman in this northern Indian city.

When authorities ordered a lockdown on nonessential businesses, the Vermas rushed to unload their stock, selling flowers to regular customers for just a few cents.

The money they got amounted to “nothing,” Mahesh said as the couple closed down the stall, covered beneath a blue tarp.

India has the world’s largest population of extremely poor people: 176 million living on less than $1.90 a day, according to the World Bank.

As of 2019, India had halved its poverty rate over the previous 15 years, fueled by growth topping 7% annually, but the crisis is expected to set that back. Economic activity in the country has fallen by 70%, according to French bank Société Générale.

Much of that activity was powered by workers in the informal sector -- rickshaw drivers, housekeepers, farm hands, shoeshiners and modest entrepreneurs like the Vermas -- who make up 85% of India’s labor force and now find themselves indefinitely sidelined.

The Vermas and their five children, ages 8 through 20, were already living hand to mouth before the coronavirus. Now they’ve canceled their cable TV — a small luxury that to them represented success — and are limited to eating mostly potato-based dishes.

“We cannot have food like we used to have,” Gita said.

The couple feared they’d run out of cash and food before the scheduled end of the lockdown May 18, so they took a small loan from friends to convert the flower stall into a bread and milk shop — the kind of business the government has deemed essential and thus exempt from the shutdown.

- By Biswajeet Banerjee in Lucknow and Emily Schmall in New Delhi.

Remembering humanity's triumph over a virus, 40 years on

AFP/File / LEILA GORCHEVVaccinations against smallpox helped eradicate the disease in 1980

As scientists scramble for a COVID-19 cure and vaccine, the world marks on Friday a pertinent anniversary: humanity's only true triumph over an infectious disease with its eradication of smallpox four decades ago.

On May 8, 1980, representatives of all World Health Organization (WHO) member states gathered in Geneva and officially declared that the smallpox-causing variola virus had been relegated to the history books, two centuries after the discovery of a vaccine.

Smallpox is a highly contagious disease that was transmitted via droplets during close contact with other people or contaminated objects, sparking high fever and a rash that left survivors permanently disfigured and often blind.

But many did not survive. The virus killed up to 30 percent of all those infected and is estimated to have killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone.

CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL/AFP/File / HOA close-up view of smallpox lesions on a person's leg

Smallpox is thought to have existed for thousands of years, with the earliest documented evidence of the vesicular skin lesions believed to be caused by the disease discovered on the mummy of Egyptian pharaoh Ramses V.

The devastating disease was also the target of the world's first vaccine, discovered by scientist and physician Edward Jenner in 1796.

- 'Public will' -

But the idea of fully eradicating smallpox only emerged nearly two centuries later, in 1958, amid a "momentary 'detente' between the Russians and Americans", US epidemiologist Larry Brilliant told AFP.

At a time when smallpox remained endemic in more than 30 countries and was still killing more than two million people annually, the Soviets proposed to show what global cooperation is good for and eradicate the disease.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/AFP/File / HOFree smallpox inoculations were being given to US Office of War Information employees in 1943

They made the proposal during a meeting of the WHO's annual assembly.

"Immediately America agreed," Brilliant said, juxtaposing the leadership and international cooperation seen back then, during the Cold War, to the "nationalism" colouring the current response to the novel coronavirus.

"There was public will," he said.

Four decades later, as the world reels from the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, decision-makers should look to the tireless efforts to isolate those infected with smallpox and trace their contacts for inspiration, said Rosamund Lewis, in charge of the smallpox file at the WHO.

- Lessons for COVID-19 response -

"We can learn a lot from smallpox for the COVID response," she told AFP.

The WHO initially did not have the funds needed to get to work seriously on rooting out smallpox, but when it finally launched the global eradication campaign in 1967, experts "went door-to-door" to find infected people, she said.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES/AFP/File / HOPre-schoolers in the US being inoculated against smallpox in 1946

She lamented that it had taken too long for many countries to realise the importance of this basic public health "weapon" against COVID-19, as it has spread worldwide, killing more than 260,000 people in a matter of months.

Experts stress that contact-tracing will be of vital importance until a vaccine against the new virus is developed and available -- something expected to take at least a year.

The discovery of the smallpox vaccine nearly a quarter of a millennium ago was a "principle element of the victory" against the disease, Angela Teresa Ciuffi, a microbiology professor at Lausanne University, told AFP.

Jenner came up with the idea for a vaccine after observing that milkmaids who previously caught cowpox did not catch smallpox, and used the usually fairly harmless virus to immunise against the far more deadly disease.

Before the emergence of the vaccine, people engaged in inoculation to immunise against smallpox, inserting powdered smallpox scabs or fluid from a patient into superficial scratches made in the skin, in the hope it would produce a mild but protective infection.

While this process did have an immunising effect, "the inconvenience was that it allowed smallpox to circulate," said Anne-Marie Moulin, head of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

Improvements to the vaccine, including the abolishment of the need for refrigeration, greatly increased its access and availability and paved the way for the eradication campaigns to come.

After a decade-long major push, the last known naturally occurring case of smallpox was seen in Somalia in 1977.

A year later, however, a British medical photographer working near a smallpox research lab became infected and died.

- Bioterrorism threat? -

Since then, a global debate has raged over whether or not variola virus samples should be destroyed.

Only two places in the world are authorised to keep samples of smallpox: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta in the United States, and the State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology (VECTOR) in Novosibirsk, Russia.

CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL/AFP /This image from the Center for Disease Control shows a transmission electron micrograph of smallpox viruses

Washington and Moscow have long maintained the importance of retaining the samples for research purposes.

But decades after its eradication, the threat of smallpox still looms large, with fears that the remaining virus samples could pose a bioterrorism threat swelling since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

Compared to smallpox, "COVID-19 is just a training exercise", David Evans, a virologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, told AFP.

If ever reintroduced, "smallpox could be devastating in the first weeks when entering a world of largely immunologically naive persons," warned Rosine Ehmann of the Institute of Microbiology from the German Forces.

"COVID-19 has illustrated how long it can take for public health systems to activate their logistics and crisis intervention management," she told AFP.

China supports WHO-led review of global

 pandemic response

AFP / STRChina did not say the WHO probe should look at the origins of the pandemic, only the global response to it

China said Friday it supports a World Health Organization-led review into the global response to the coronavirus outbreak, but only "after the pandemic is over".

The comments from foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying came as China faces increasing global pressure to allow an international investigation into the origins of the pandemic.

The review should be conducted in an "open, transparent and inclusive manner" under the leadership of WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Hua said at a press briefing.

She added that it should be at an "appropriate time after the pandemic is over".

But Hua did not say the review should probe the origins of the virus, despite growing calls led by the US and Australia for an international inquiry into the issue, which has become a key flashpoint in deteriorating tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Instead, the review should "summarise the experience and deficiencies of the international response to the pandemic, strengthen the WHO's work, enhance the construction of countries’ core public health capabilities, and provide suggestions to improve global preparedness against major infectious diseases," said Hua.

She said China would cooperate with WHO efforts to trace the origin, but rejected US calls for an investigation, accusing it of "politicising the issue".

Hua stressed that any inquiry should be based on the International Health Regulations, and be authorised by the World Health Assembly or Executive Committee -- the WHO's dual governing bodies.

WHO epidemiologist Dr Maria van Kerkhove said Wednesday the agency is in talks with China to send a mission to investigate the animal source of the virus.

Both US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have heavily criticised China's alleged lack of transparency, and have repeatedly pushed the theory that the virus emerged from a Wuhan maximum-security virology lab.

The claim has become a key point of contention between China and the US, with Beijing accusing US Republican politicians of shifting the blame as an electioneering strategy.

Most scientists believe the virus originated in animals before it was passed on to humans.

Numerous countries including France, Germany and Britain have also urged greater transparency from China over its handling of the virus.

China has strenuously denied accusations it concealed information relating to the initial outbreak, insisting it has always shared information with the WHO and other countries in a timely manner.