South Asia and Latin America endured another turbulent week at the heart of the global coronavirus pandemic, while COVID-19 increasingly roiled the southern and western United States. Cases were rising fastest across South Asia, where India stepped out of lockdown even as cases swept past 300,000: the fourth-highest case tally in the world, with more than 100,000 cases recorded in the past ten days. Pakistan was forced to implement ‘smart lockdowns’ amid a record-breaking surge in cases, and Bangladesh also suffered record infections and deaths. In Latin America the caseload was already precariously high with sweeping fatalities, and Brazil led the way, as the country with the second-highest case tally now became the site of the second-most deaths. Once the government of Jair Bolsonaro’s attempts at data suppression were upended by the Supreme Court, the figures in Brazil showed more than 40,000 deaths and 800,000 cases, as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro still strived to open up. Cases were also on the rise in Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Chile, where more than 160,000 infections prompted a new health minister, while Mexico exceeded 15,000 deaths.
By the end of the working week infections across the United States had exceeded two million, with let-ups in hard-hit New York and New Jersey as states in the south and west hastened the spread. The major states of Florida and Texas were reporting record highs in cases and hospitalisations, infections kept climbing in Alabama, and on Friday coronavirus swept the south as North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Arizona suffered record days. California was also witnessing a surge in cases, but the state proved reluctant to roll back a wave of business reopenings and cited increased testing as the curve passed 5,000 deaths. So Friday brought the return of gyms, hotels, museums, and outdoor leisure activities, while Hollywood production picked up the pace. Entertainments though continued to play second fiddle across America in light of George Floyd’s death. As demonstrations entered their third week, Minneapolis planned to remodel its police department and chokehold bans were touted from New York to Houston to L.A., before a funeral service in his hometown of Houston finally laid Floyd to rest. The death of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta prompted another outpouring, as protests flourished in Los Angeles and Brooklyn and became entrenched in Seattle, extending to London, Paris, parts of Africa and beyond.
Africa was attending its own spike in cases, with signs of growth in Nigeria and Egypt outstripped by South Africa’s soaring infection rate. Across the Middle East cases surged in Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, which considered halting the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and the crisis was ravaging war-torn Afghanistan and Yemen, but recoveries began surpassing infections in the United Arab Emirates. After urging fun and preempting the end of the virus, cases began climbing precipitously in Israel. Protesters in Sudan weighed restrictive measures against financial necessity, while across the globe there were creeping signs of political normalcy. Singapore and Russia prepared to go the polls, long lines marked primary elections in Georgia, and Donald Trump planned his first rally since March, with attendees assuming all the risks of coronavirus. The pandemic continued to impact sporting and cultural events, as the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay awards were cancelled in the Philippines, while Japan shifted the starting blocks and looked towards a simplified Summer Olympics.
Indonesia emerged as the outlier across Asia Pacific, as daily cases surpassed 1,000 for the first time and continued to rise, although the spike was tracked by an increase in testing and tracing. By contrast the recovery of the final patient in New Zealand saw the country become the first major nation to declare itself virus-free. Vanishing local cases in Australia saw the states of Victoria and New South Wales ease more restrictions. Japan, South Korea, and China anxiously tracked small clusters around Tokyo, Seoul, and a food market in Beijing. A divided Europe saw newfound stability in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and France, where Emmanuel Macron hailed a first victory over the virus, while cases were spiking in the eastern states of Poland, Ukraine, and Bulgaria, and Sweden remained cast out from the Nordic travel loop. Meanwhile in Russia the virus was subtly relinquishing its hold, with Moscow reopening as cases across the country stretched past 500,000, although high mortality in April and May raised new questions around the death rate.
A study by Imperial College London suggested that lockdowns across Europe had saved more than three million lives. In Bergamo, the epicentre of the virus in Italy, a sample survey implied the presence of antibodies in more than half of the province. Infection rates and antibodies were also the talk of the town in Tehran and Moscow, while the World Health Organization muddied the waters around asymptomatic infection. As experts urged face masks to prevent a second wave, research focused on vaccine candidates. The American biotech company Moderna planned for phase three trials, while AstraZeneca signed a deal with an alliance of France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy for 400 million doses of a vaccine currently under development at the University of Oxford.
Meatpacking plants remained hotspots in the United States, BAME communities were being disproportionately impacted by the virus in England, and a housing complex in the German city of Göttingen faced quarantine after an outbreak which was allegedly traced to a hookah bar and shared smoking. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that the world economy would contract by at least six percent in 2020, with the major European economies set to suffer the sharpest contractions. Britain’s economy had already slumped by more than twenty percent, India teetered on the verge of an economic crisis, Wall Street slouched to its worst week since March, and Japan was forced to enact a record extra budget. While Greece leapt ahead and Spain lagged behind, the expectation across the European Union was for internal travel to resume by Monday as the zone looked to revive a shattered tourism industry.
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Created by the World Photography Organisation and sponsored by Sony, the Sony World Photography Awards 2020, one of the most prestigious photography competitions in the world, saw more than 345,000 entries from 203 countries. The winner of this year’s award for Photographer of the Year was named on Tuesday as Pablo Albarenga. Albarenga’s series Seeds of Resistance paired aerial views of imperilled landscapes with top-down images of the environmental activists striving to protect them. For his mixture of documentary photography and portraiture, highlighting the plight of indigenous communities across Latin America, Albarenga, who is based in Uruguay, took home the $25,000 top award plus the inaugural prize for best Latin American photographer.
For his black and white portrait of Pixies frontman Black Francis, Tom Oldham won Open Photographer of the Year, while the student and youth prizes went to Ioanna Sakellaraki of Greece and Hsien-Pang Hsieh of Taiwan. Lily Dawson-Punshon was named the Alpha Female Award Winner for her modern twists on historical works of art, including Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer. Sandra Herber won the architecture award for her series Ice Fishing Huts, Lake Winnipeg, Chung Ming Ko received the documentary prize for exposing the Wounds of Hong Kong, and Brent Stirton triumphed in the category for Natural World & Wildlife photography thanks to his series on Pangolins in Crisis. Cesar Dezfuli was prized for his portraiture shots, while Ángel López Soto, also of Spain, won the sports award for the series Senegalese Wrestlers. Meanwhile in an award announced at the start of the year and honoured back in April, the publisher Gerhard Steidl was named for an Outstanding Contribution to Photography.
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Like something out of the best Nordic noir but with harrowing and potentially turbulent real-life consequences, at the beginning of the week Sweden announced that it would present its findings into the assassination of Olof Palme. Palme was 59 years old and the prime minister of Sweden when he was shot and killed close to midnight on 28 February, 1986, as he walked home with his wife from a central Stockholm cinema. Three years later a small-time criminal was convicted of the murder after being picked out of a lineup by Lisbeth Palme, but the man was subsequently released on appeal owing to a lack of motive or physical evidence. Amid widespread criticism over the police response and diverse theories regarding the potential culprits, for more than thirty-four years the assassination has remained unsolved, with the current prime minister of Sweden Stefan Löfven describing the case as an ‘open wound’ for the country.
In February Krister Petersson, the eighth chief prosecutor in charge of the case, suggested that he was close to wrapping up the investigation, perhaps without a prosecution, an indicator that the suspect was already dead. Police work at the time of the killing focused on the potential involvement of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, who Palme’s government had declared a terrorist group, later fixing on the man who was convicted but subsequently released. Competing theories since have tended in two directions: the assertion of a lone perpetrator, locally disenchanted with Palme’s politics; or allegations of international involvement stretching from South Africa and India to the CIA or KGB. In the midst of the Cold War, Palme’s stern criticisms of Soviet regimes and American conduct in Vietnam prompted consternation in Russia and a diplomatic freeze with the United States, while his murder has also been tied to the Bofors scandal, concerning bribery and kickbacks in a major arms deal between India and Sweden. The strongest allegations however have centred upon South Africa, with Palme a vehement critic of apartheid and a supporter of the African National Congress and Anti-Apartheid Movement.
In 1996, the notorious former South African Police colonel Eugene de Kock stated that Palme had been killed because of his opposition to apartheid, though investigators uncovered no substantiating evidence. This March, South African intelligence officials reportedly handed Swedish investigators a new tranche of information, raising hopes of a breakthrough in the case. At a news conference on Wednesday, Krister Petersson instead pointed the finger at Stig Engström, a well-known local suspect. Engström had been a witness at the time of Palme’s death, but was scarcely considered a murder suspect until the freelance journalist Thomas Pettersson wrote a series of articles implicating him in 2018. A capricious and self-publicising witness who became known as ‘the Skandia man’ for his place of employment in the vicinity of the murder, Pettersson pointed out that Engström also had ties to a collector of handguns of the type used in the killing, sharing a right-wing politics. Engström committed suicide in 2000. The investigation into the assassination of Palme has therefore been closed, with chief prosecutor Petersson citing ‘reasonable evidence’ that Engström was the assailant, while accepting that the lack of forensic evidence will continue to allow conspiracy theories to flourish.
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In the midst of the global pandemic, sport was making its return with more kicking than screaming. New Zealand proved the exception, as the elimination of coronavirus and the low level of restrictions allowed crowds to attend the resumption of Super Rugby Aotearoa in Dunedin and Auckland, the sight of throngs of flag-waving and beer-swilling fans intoxicating or stupefying to those still suffering virus-related curbs. In Spain and Italy, La Liga and Coppa Italia returned behind closed doors, with Sevilla triumphing over Real Betis in the Seville derby, while Juventus squeezed past Milan despite a missed Ronaldo spot-kick. Tennis was also back in a piecemeal fashion, as the Ultimate Tennis Showdown got underway at the Patrick Mouratoglou Academy in the south of France, featuring Richard Gasquet, David Goffin, Dustin Brown, and Matteo Berrettini, with an all-new ruleset, Black Lives Matter apparel, and piped-in crowd noise. Meanwhile the Adria Tour commenced in Belgrade, an initiative of the world number one Novak Djokovic, which boasts an all-star cast in Dominic Thiem, Alexander Zverev, and Grigor Dimitrov, otherwise distinguishing itself by the presence of spectators and scant regard for social distancing.
With travel restrictions and training limitations drawing prestige athletics to a halt, the Impossible Games in Oslo served as a small-scale Diamond League substitute. The international meet on Thursday night inside an empty Bislett Stadium featured elite athletes from Norway and Kenya, as Karsten Warholm set a world record in the 300 metres hurdles, while Filip Ingebrigtsen and Line Kloster broke Norwegian national records in the 1,000 metres and 200 metres hurdles, revelling in the irregular events. A unique 2000 metres contest saw teams led by the Ingebrigtsen brothers and Timothy Cheruiyot race live from their respective tracks in Oslo and Nairobi, while Olympic champion Renaud Lavillenie had to settle for second place against the pole vault record holder Armand Duplantis, the Frenchman competing from the confines of his back garden. Distance competition was becoming the norm, as the Comrades Marathon – the oldest and largest ultramarathon in the world, which usually takes place over approximately 90 kilometres between the South African cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg – enticed almost 40,000 runners from 86 countries to take part in this year’s virtual race.
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After confirming the PlayStation 5 last fall, and in the spring unveiling details about the hardware specifications and all-new DualSense controller, the Sony livestream extravaganza this week focused mostly on the games before providing the world with a first glimpse of the impending console. Taking the place of the annual E3 event, which was cancelled due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the 75-minute livestream heralded ‘The Future of Gaming’. Highlights included the announcement of Horizon Forbidden West, the hotly anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed role-player Horizon Zero Dawn, plus the latest iteration of familiar franchises from Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart to Gran Turismo 7 and Village: Resident Evil. Futuristic action-adventure games and time-tripping space fantasies came in the form of Ghostwire: Tokyo, Godfall, Deathloop, and Pragmata, while Sony also confirmed a remake of Demon’s Souls and another update of GTA V, which is now set to span its third generation of consoles.
The PlayStation 5 is set for release come holiday season 2020. The console will be powered by an eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU and a custom AMD RDNA 2-based GPU, with 16GB of RAM and an 825GB solid-state drive which will be used to boost in-game loading. While the specs were established back in March after months of innuendo and speculation, Thursday provided us with our first look at the console housing. The PlayStation 5 comes in sinuous black and white, curvaceous and cantilevered white sides enclosing a glowing black centre. While the standard console will incorporate an Ultra HD Blu-ray drive, a sleeker and presumably cheaper variant will spurn discs to rely solely on digital distribution. The new console pairs cannily with the DualSense controller, whose two-tone design and innovative use of haptic technology hopes to imbue gaming with good vibrations.
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On Thursday evening a recent performance by the stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle made a surprise appearance on Netflix. Described as an ‘impromptu purging of feelings and thoughts’ rather than a conventional stand-up special, the performance was filmed in Ohio on 6 June as Chappelle returned to the stage after 87 days to speak on George Floyd and the wave of protests sweeping America. The show in the village of Yellow Springs took place under strict social distancing measures, including face masks, temperature checks, and separate seating. Titled ‘8:46’ in an explicit reference to the length of time during which a police officer held his knee on George Floyd’s neck, and debuting on the Netflix comedy channel Netflix Is A Joke, the performance sees Chappelle discuss Candace Owens, Kobe Bryant, and the cases of John Crawford III and Christopher Dorner in addition to Floyd’s death, interweaving fiery accounts and aspects of personal history. In a disclaimer to the result, Chappelle added ‘Normally I wouldn’t show you something so unrefined, I hope you understand’, while encouraging donations to the Equal Justice Initiative.
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The fashion industry emerged mostly unscathed after hotfooting from Milan to Paris at the end of its annual itinerant tour of autumn/winter collections. Designers, models, and industry hangers-on descended haphazardly on Paris back in February just as northern Italy was suffering the first throes of coronavirus, but even before the pandemic issues of sustainability meant that change was underfoot. In the ensuing months an enforced period of reflection has allowed the likes of Gucci and Saint Laurent to reconceptualise the fashion calendar, with Alessandro Michele at Gucci confirming plans to reduce the number of annual shows from five to two. In such a future summertime menswear, haute couture, and cruise showcases might fall by the wayside, replaced by regular spring and autumn events and sporadic outpourings streamed online or shown in person to the select few.
For the time being however the industry is scrambling to rescue some of its best-laid hopes and endeavours, innovating on the fly with an inclination that the show must go on. So out of the ruins of London Fashion Week’s menswear edition the British Fashion Council have created a new digital platform which aspires to become something like fashion’s version of Netflix. Hosted by the sleek new London Fashion Week website at londonfashionweek.co.uk, a digital fashion week took place between Friday and Sunday, gender-neutral and shorn of many star names, instead offering video showcases and virtual showrooms, podcasts, and panel discussions. New designs by Marques’Almeida, Sinéad O’Dwyer, and FYODOR GOLAN juxtaposed with poetry readings from James Massiah, musical performances by ANGEL-HO, and playlists by Nicholas Daley, while online talks and podcasts from the musician Tinie Tempah and footballer Héctor Bellerín added an extra dose of celebrity. With Chanel’s first digital offering disappointing the critics, London Fashion Week provided a template for future gatherings, as Paris and Milan also prepare to go virtual.
