The new phase of life under coronavirus no longer sees rapid societal shifts and exponential spread, but rather stolid perseverance under creeping restrictions as deaths and rates of infection stabilise while exacting a hefty toll. At the start of the week cases in China climbed beyond 100 for the first time since early March, as the country reported 108 new infections including 98 from abroad, and the virus was stretching its limbs across Russia, where cases sprung by 2,558 while Vladimir Putin warned of worse to come. Elsewhere though the story was grimly predictable, with declining cases and hospitalisations in Spain, France, and Italy but a persistently large number of deaths. The 566 deaths reported in Italy on Monday were fairly typical, with the exception that given the country’s head start and status as the former epicentre of the crisis in Europe, the toll took total fatalities in the country beyond 20,000. Meanwhile the United Kingdom was firmly established as Europe’s latest hotspot as deaths remained high at 717. In France, Emmanuel Macron extended the country’s lockdown until 11 May, and Britain was also to stay pent-up at home, but measures were eased slightly in Italy and Spain, where some people in the manufacturing and construction sectors returned to work after a two-week ‘hibernation’ of the economy.
Amid political upheaval, North Korea continued to insist that it had contracted no cases of the coronavirus, while Australia and New Zealand appeared largely successful in halting its spread. Thais celebrated a subdued Songkran festival, ringing in the New Year sans water guns and alcohol from the cloisters of home. Deaths across the state of New York exceeded 10,000, but Governor Andrew Cuomo indicated that the worst was over as long as residents continued to adhere to social distancing measures, while fellow governors on the east and west coasts formed collectives to consider strategies for reopening. Signs of progress were threatened in characteristic fashion by Donald Trump, who at a fiery press conference on Monday evening attacked the media while asserting his ‘total’ authority to lift lockdown measures regardless of the wishes of the various states.
As the week progressed there were suggestions that numerous countries, including Brazil and the United Kingdom, were grossly understating the true scope of the virus. Cases in France surpassed 100,000 with more than 15,000 deaths, and the death tally in Britain surged past 12,000, with one in five deaths over the country now linked to COVID-19. Lockdowns were extended in India, which designated ‘red zone’ hotspots as cases passed 12,000, Malawi, Belgium, Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, which stretched its state of emergency nationwide. At least infection rates and intensive care admissions in Italy and Spain remained on a downward trajectory, while China reported zero deaths and Taiwan no new cases for the first time in more than a month. Meanwhile more European countries began to ease some restrictions, as non-essential businesses were allowed to reopen in Italy and Austria, Finland reversed the lockdown of its largest region Uusimaa, home to the capital Helsinki, and Denmark became the first European nation to reopen some schools. Poland, Switzerland, and Germany also unveiled plans towards the lifting of restrictions later in the month.
Global infections surpassed two million. Russia raced beyond the 20,000 mark, and issued travel passes and cancelled victory parades as cases continued to surge. As deaths exceeded 1,000 in Sweden, internal soul-searching and external criticism owing to the lack of hard lockdown measures was somewhat curtailed when parliament agreed to hand additional powers to the executive, with Prime Minister Stefan Löfven calling it ‘much too early’ to ease the restrictions in place. Revised counts saw an upsurge in recorded fatalities in France and New York City, which had now registered more than 10,000 deaths. And an overnight tally saw the United States record its most deadly day yet, with 2,405 fatalities in one twenty-four hour period, while President Trump responded by cutting funding to the WHO.
Iran reported fewer than 100 deaths for the first time in a month, amid some concern over the figures as the country made haste to open up, cases remained stubborn in Singapore where face masks became mandatory, Kenyans were forced to get innovative amid a crackdown over face coverings, and masks also became compulsory in the state of New York. A makeshift hospital in Wuhan waved goodbye to its final patients, and Greece began a programme to relocate unaccompanied migrant children, as the country received widespread praise for its coronavirus response. Alarm bells rang among economists, as Spain dealt with a surge in jobless claims, the economy in Canada shrank by nine percent, the IMF predicted the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and retail sales tumbled in America before the country announced another 5.245 million jobless claims, making a monthly loss of more than 22 million jobs. The G20 group of major economies generously agreed to freeze debt service payments for some of the poorest countries in the world. And after a practise run last week in the name of early voting, South Korea headed to the polls for a national election under strict distancing measures, with the ruling Democratic Party of Korea clinching victory in a landslide.
As the world prepared to swap working from home for weekend idling, unrecorded deaths in Wuhan saw the overall tally rise by half, the Chinese economy shrank for the first time in decades, Singapore began to see a second wave of cases centred around migrant worker dormitories, and Indonesia overtook the Philippines as the title for worst-hit country in Southeast Asia changed hands. Israel outlined an exit strategy, Iran unveiled a magic pointing device said to detect coronavirus at 100 metres, and India saw cases on the rise. Coronavirus brought political strife too, amid reports in Kenya of heavy-handed and extortionate policing, while Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil fired his popular health minister and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines threatened martial law. Donald Trump backed down in his argument with state governors, while daily deaths across the United States hit a record high of 4,591.
President Trump’s acceptance after picking a fight that the states would ‘call the shots’ did little to defuse growing protests in places like Michigan and Minnesota, where demonstrators hurled slogans and called for stay-at-home restrictions to cease. Meanwhile deaths hit 3,840 in New Jersey, almost doubling in the space of a week, while in Connecticut and California fatalities passed 1,000. The ups and downs continued across Europe, with Russia reporting record cases, deaths exceeding 5,000 in Belgium, and restrictions tightening in Greece and Bulgaria as Eastern Europe prepared for Orthodox Easter, but Denmark initiated the reopening of personal care businesses from hairdressers to dentists, and the infection rate in Germany dropped below 1. In Italy, Spain, and France, deaths remained resolutely high set against falling hospitalisations, while the United Kingdom recorded another 847 deaths and announced a vaccine task force. Fears grew for the situation in Ecuador, a petition by human rights groups over the lack of protection for the poor halted the lockdown in Malawi, the WHO offered a warning on testing and immunity, and the focus in Canada shifted to long-term care home deaths.
On Saturday, as Japan entered its first weekend under the state of emergency, infections topped 10,000 and the health system risked being overwhelmed. Cases in Singapore shot up to a new high of 942, the number of hospital patients in Thailand kept falling, and thousands defied lockdown to attend an imam’s funeral in Bangladesh. Hong Kong continued to arrest protesters in the midst of the pandemic. Cases across Russia proceeded to grow and grow. Deaths began to fall in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands, but the tally in Spain still topped 20,000, a figure France was fast approaching, while with more than 15,000 fatalities the United Kingdom lagged just a little way behind. By Sunday the death toll across all of Europe had surpassed 100,000, with cases in excess of one million. Europe remained the epicentre of the crisis as the outbreak rocked America and took hold in other parts of the world.
The United States and Canada agreed to extend their border closure, and in New York Governor Cuomo suggested the state may be ‘past the plateau’, while beaches in Florida began reopening amid a broader easing of restrictions in some predominantly southern states. Taiwan became the latest country to experience a naval outbreak. Forty members of staff in the presidential palace of Afghanistan reportedly tested positive for the coronavirus. Zimbabwe extended its lockdown by two weeks, while the extension of lockdown in Spain came with some provision for children het up indoors. On Sunday, as Orthodox Christians celebrated Easter as though Jesus resurrected but remained in his cave, religious bodies across the Middle East authorised exceptions for the month of Ramadan, with the Council of Senior Scholars and Grand Mufti in Saudi Arabia urging Muslims to pray from home, while in Iran the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei placed fasting second to health. Iran still eased restrictions in and around Tehran, even as the death toll in the country topped 5,000. In Latin America, as Bolsonaro attended anti-lockdown protests, cases in Chile rose beyond 10,000, the highest tally in the region after Brazil and Peru.
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Punctured tires and spokes in wheels and balls flying all over the place as coronavirus brought another week of postponements and cancellations in sport. Emmanuel Macron’s extension of the lockdown across France, including a de facto ban on large gatherings until the middle of July, meant that the French Grand Prix faced the guillotine, a fate which befell the Tour de France which was pushed back to late August at the earliest. Following the cancellation of the Open Championship and the rescheduling of golf’s three remaining majors until later in the year, the PGA Tour proposed resumed play in June, starting with the Charles Schwab Challenge sans spectators. Wimbledon has already fallen by the wayside, but the French and US tennis majors are still scheduled to take place, however organisers of the US Open suggested this week that a Flushing Meadows without fans seemed ‘highly unlikely’. Finally the Champions League final got given the go-ahead, with UEFA pencilling in the end-of-season showcase for 29 August.
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According to modern physics, some 13.8 billion years ago at the time of the Big Bang, every particle of matter in the universe should have been created with a counterpart of antimatter, carrying the same mass but an opposite electrical charge. When particles and antiparticles collide, it leads to their mutual annihilation, radiating energy but effectively cancelling both matter and antimatter out. However if we look around us and observe our bodies extended through space, stub our toe against the bed frame or feel the embrace of a warm touch, we notice that matter seems a decisive winner: we exist thus. The asymmetry between matter and antimatter is one of the greatest conundrums in physics. Now the T2K experiment in Japan, involving three French laboratories and the collaboration of hundreds of physicists, suggests that neutrinos may hold the solution.
Neutrinos are electrically neutral and so small that they pass through everyday matter unimpeded, proving exceedingly difficult to detect. Each neutrino carries a corresponding antineutrino, and neutrinos come in three forms or flavours, oscillating between different flavours in flight. In the T2K experiment, neutrinos and antineutrinos generated at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex on the east coast of Tokai have been beamed underground towards the Super-Kamiokande observatory on the west coast. During the course of their 295-kilometre journey, they pass through a 50,000-tonne tank of water, resulting in the detection of a fraction of neutrinos and antineutrinos based on changing patterns of light. Neutrinos interact with their surrounds so rarely that it has taken the T2K experiment a decade to detect just 90 neutrinos and 15 antineutrinos, but the provisional results suggest that neutrinos change flavour much more often than their counterparts. With such a small sample size, the results are not sufficiently significant to warrant the label of a discovery, but they offer a tantalising hint of fundamental differences between matter and antimatter, while data production in the coming years is expected to ramp up upon the construction of the Hyper-Kamiokande observatory in Japan and the DUNE observatory in the United States.
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The professional wrestling ring announcer Howard Finkel, whose voice provided the soundtrack to ring entrances and title changes in the heyday of WWE, died on Thursday at the age of 69 years old. Finkel made his debut as a ring announcer at Madison Square Garden in 1977, and when the World Wide Wrestling Federation became the World Wrestling Federation under the auspices of Vince McMahon Jr. in 1980, Finkel became the new company’s first employee. He remained with the WWF, later WWE, for forty years, declaring new champions from Hulk Hogan to Bret Hart to Stone Cold Steve Austin, and occasionally even competing inside the squared circle, as in 1995 when he triumphed in a tuxedo match by stripping Harvey Wippleman down to his underwear. Finkel later stooged for X-Pac and Chris Jericho, and as the 2000s progressed he was increasingly saved for old-school appearances and the annual Hall of Fame broadcast. He continued to work for WWE in a backstage capacity, and upon the announcement of his passing, former and current superstars paid tribute to a sports entertainment icon and enduring fixture and friend.
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The Tony Award-winning actor Brian Dennehy died on Thursday at the age of 81. Entering Columbia University on a football scholarship, Dennehy dropped out and spent five years in the United States Marines, graduating with a bachelor’s degree, working odd jobs from truck driving to bartending, and serving a stint as a stockbroker before community theatre led him to take up the acting profession relatively late in life, as he began picking up notices in New York. His first screen roles arrived in 1977 with bit-parts in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Semi-Tough plus a string of television appearances on series including Kojak, Lou Grant, and M*A*S*H. Dennehy often played everyman characters or authority figures, with physical heft and a roguishness by turns dissolute, tender, or cunning. On the screen 1982 proved a breakthrough year, as Dennehy played opposite Sylvester Stallone as Sheriff Teasle in First Blood, and won a lead role on the short-lived ABC sitcom Star of the Family. Subsequent films included Gorky Park, Cocoon, F/X, and Presumed Innocent, while his stature made him a perfect foil as the father of Chris Farley in the slapstick comedy Tommy Boy, the superior officer of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill, Russell Crowe’s father in the Paul Haggis thriller The Next Three Days, and another father figure opposite Christian Bale in Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups.
On the stage Dennehy regularly plied his trade at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, as the lead role of Hickey in productions of The Iceman Cometh in Chicago and Dublin preceded his Broadway debut, which came in 1995 courtesy of Brian Friel’s Translations. Dennehy won two Tony Awards, the first for Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in 1999, the second for Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 2003, both in productions directed by Robert Falls. With later performances in Hughie and reprisals of The Iceman Cometh, Dennehy became in the words of Variety ‘perhaps the foremost living interpreter of O’Neill’s works’. In 2000, Dennehy carried Death of a Salesman to television and won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards, while receiving one of five Emmy nominations. Dennehy gained plaudits for the television films To Catch a Killer, where he played notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and Our Fathers, about sexual abuse in the Catholic church, while featuring in diverse series from Miami Vice, The West Wing, and 30 Rock to recent recurring roles in Public Morals, The Blacklist, and Hap and Leonard. His death was confirmed by his daughter Elizabeth, while Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theatre, described Dennehy as ‘a towering, fearless actor taking on the greatest dramatic roles of the twentieth century’.
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Since 1955, the World Press Photo Foundation based in Amsterdam has held an annual contest recognising outstanding professional photojournalism from all corners of the globe. For the 63rd annual edition of the contest, an independent jury reviewed 73,996 photographs submitted by 4,282 photographers from 125 countries. And the title of World Press Photo of the Year, the contest’s most prestigious award, went to the Japanese photographer Yasuyoshi Chiba for the image Straight Voice, which depicts a young man reciting poetry as a form of protest during a blackout in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. The World Press Photo Story of the Year award went to the French photographer Romain Laurendeau, whose series Kho, the Genesis of a Revolt traces the birth of a revolution in Algeria. Battleground PolyU, a 360-degree immersion into the ongoing democracy protests in Hong Kong, won DJ Clark and China Daily the award for interactive photojournalism, while Francois Verster, Simon Wood, and Field of Vision’s collaboration on the water crisis in Cape Town won the award for online video. More photographers triumphed in the nature, environment, sports, and contemporary issues categories, with the winners and finalists scheduled for an exhibition at De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam from the beginning of June.
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Almost eight years after the truck stomper and swooning crescendos of The Idler Wheel… – a record whose uppermost acclaim may be the lofty position it attained on Culturedarm’s Albums of the Decade list – Fiona Apple returned this week with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, her fifth studio album released to rave reviews. In ramshackle percussion and faltering torrents of voice, recorded over the span of five years mostly at Apple’s home in Venice Beach using GarageBand, featuring themes of romance and depression and permeating gender imbalance replete with Apple’s usual excoriating humour and self-chastising wit, the title of the record is borrowed from a line from the Gillian Anderson crime drama The Fall. Apple confirmed the album in an extended profile with The New Yorker last month, while its release this week was accompanied by an interview with Vulture and a song-by-song breakdown incorporating everything from vipassanā chants and outré dinner party conversation to middle-school reminiscences and experiences of assault.
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NASA unveiled this week plans for the first crewed launch to the International Space Station from United States soil in almost a decade. Heralding ‘a new era of human spaceflight’, astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley are scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 27 May, flying on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft hoisted by a Falcon 9 rocket. Part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, the Demo-2 mission will make SpaceX the first private firm to send NASA astronauts into space, the culmination of years of planning and competition with rival Boeing, after billion-dollar contracts were awarded back in 2014. SpaceX – which will be embarking on its first crewed mission since the founding of the company eighteen years ago – successfully tested the Crew Dragon’s abort system in January, while Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has suffered repeated setbacks. The Demo-2 mission, with an unspecified duration, will prove the final hurdle before NASA certifies Crew Dragon for operational long-haul missions to the ISS.
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Curated by and starring Lady Gaga and organised by the poverty action platform Global Citizen, on Saturday the One World: Together at Home concert sprawled for a total of eight hours across streaming services and television screens. Featuring an array of famous presenters and musical performances from across the globe, the concert was positioned as a pick-me-up for viewers stranded in the confines of their houses, less a charitable endeavour than an attempt to promote social distancing while providing a little cheer. A six-hour online pre-show incorporated Jameela Jamil, Matthew McConaughey, Danai Gurira, Becky G, Laverne Cox, and Don Cheadle as hosts, with music from artists as diverse as Annie Lennox, Sheryl Crow, Kesha, Christine and the Queens, The Killers, Common, and Sofi Tukker. And by the time the main show made the move from YouTube to the traditional small screen, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert picked up the baton amid performances from Elton John, Taylor Swift, Lizzo, The Rolling Stones and more. Many of the musical pieces were maudlin, while Lady Gaga inevitably opened and closed the show, but the Stones were steady as always and the concert was lifted by Stevie Wonder’s rendition of his late friend Bill Withers’ classic ‘Lean on Me’. Two former first ladies made appearances, alongside the likes of LL Cool J, Awkwafina, Lupita Nyong’o, Beyoncé, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey.
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Boasting a hang time of twenty-two years, this week a documentary on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls splashed across television screens. The Last Dance draws from backstage footage which Jordan and the Bulls allowed NBA Entertainment to film during the 1997-98 season, when the Bulls were busy striving for an unprecedented second three-peat. Of course the trinity of Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman, the epitomes of scoring, assisting, and backboard prowess, achieved their goal under the auspices of head coach Phil Jackson, with Ron Harper, Scott Burrell, Steve Kerr, and Toni Kukoč rounding out the supporting cast. But the footage laid dormant until the director Jason Hehir managed to wrangle fresh interviews with the core players, weaving together the narrative threads. An ESPN and Netflix co-production, bumped by coronavirus to fill the ball-shaped scheduling gap, the ten-part miniseries premiered on Sunday to strong reviews.
