Coronavirus continued to spread this week following an increasingly familiar course. That meant surging cases across South Asia, Latin America, and parts of the contiguous United States, creeping infections in Africa, mounting caseloads across the Middle East, and an abundance of caution across Asia Pacific, with only Western Europe showing consistent signs of recovery. Infections across Latin America surpassed two million as Brazil became the second country in the world with more than one million cases, the tally climbing precipitously in Mexico while Chile and Peru continued to report staggeringly high per capita case totals. Infections were spreading rapidly across India, where cases raced past 400,000 as coronavirus continued to strike Pakistan and Bangladesh. Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California set bold new records as a resurgent virus beset the southern and western parts of America. And cases were also on the rise across Africa, with the situation worsening in Egypt, Morocco, and Nigeria while South Africa continued to bear the brunt. Together these regions accounted for an accelerating pandemic, with global cases routinely topping 150,000 per day by the end of the week.
Across the Middle East cases remained high in Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia while dwindling in the United Arab Emirates. Surging cases in Israel prompted fears of a second wave. Altogether infections remained low across Asia Pacific, where persistent outbreaks kept countries on edge. Nowhere was that more true than in New Zealand, which last week became the first major nation to declare itself virus-free, only to be left scrambling this week after two infected visitors from the United Kingdom skipped quarantine. In Australia, Victoria limited gatherings as cases eked up. Small clusters continued to afflict Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing, where an outbreak at a food market spurred school closures and travel limits. And infections stabilised in Singapore but flowed in a steady stream across Indonesia, now the worst-hit country in Southeast Asia. Cases slowed in Russia as they stretched past 580,000, although doubts lingered over the low death rate. But there were signs of an uptick in Eastern European countries like Ukraine and Poland, while Turkey lost ground as cases spiked.
That left mostly quiet on the western front, with low cases in Italy and Spain, whose state of alarm finally drew to a close. France welcomed the start of the week with reopened cafes and restaurants, subsequently setting its sights on cinemas and casinos, but from America to the Middle East and Africa, in other parts of the world cultural events and commercial activities resumed while cases surged. Bar permits were suspended in parts of Texas, while South Africa feared the financial hangover following a long ban on booze. Pakistan and Bangladesh experimented with smart lockdowns and localised red zones, while other countries pressed ahead with opening up. Hoping to revive their flagging tourism industries, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates resumed flights, and the European Union reopened most of its internal borders, but sans a few happy couples, the borders between Mexico, the United States, and Canada remained shut. As World Refugee Day came and went, there were protests in Greece over migrant evictions, the situation in Rohingya camps was reportedly under control, while migrant workers in Singapore remained confined to their dormitories. Indigenous Brazilian and Amazonian communities remained imperilled.
The United Kingdom ditched its tracing app as infections passed 300,000, but following a trial led by researchers at Oxford University, the country announced the first life-saving drug of the pandemic as the low-cost steroid dexamethasone. As part of the Recovery trial, the world’s largest randomised and controlled trial of coronavirus treatments, dexamethasone reduced deaths in patients on ventilators by one-third, and by one-fifth for those receiving oxygen. On the other hand halted trials and revoked authorisations finally laid the hype around hydroxychloroquine to rest. Treatments and vaccines remained the best prospects for overcoming the virus, as disparate studies in places like Japan and Sweden suggested that overall antibody levels remained surprisingly low. Meanwhile in America the changing face of the virus increasingly impacted the young.
Political strife continued to complicate the response to coronavirus, as violence surged alongside cases in Yemen, while health facilities were under attack in war-torn Afghanistan. A long-running border dispute between India and China suddenly turned deadly. Stuttgart rioted as the infection rate jumped in Germany, while Serbians prepared for loosely contested parliamentary polls. As protests in the United States over police brutality and racial injustice stretched to encompass LGBTQ and black trans causes, the Supreme Court began a busy week with a timely decision, affirming that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay and transgender rights in the workplace. Police reform made the presidential agenda following the shooting of Rayshard Brooks and the murder of George Floyd. But as Americans celebrated Juneteenth and demonstrators tore down Confederate statues, Donald Trump’s hotly anticipated Tulsa rally proved a damp squib.
New York City announced that Juneteenth will become an official holiday as the city prepared for outdoor dining, in-person retail, hairdressers, and barbershops. But while Bandcamp and musicians and corporations made Juneteenth pledges, cancellations and possible suspensions and viral outbreaks continued to wash out the world of sport. National Hockey League and Major League Baseball camps were impacted in Florida, and while the US Open received the go-ahead for the end of August following the resumption of the ATP and WTA tours, the Adria Tour exhibition in Croatia showed the potential pitfalls as Grigor Dimitrov returned home with a positive test. In athletics the Great North Run was cancelled, while world 100 metres champion Christian Coleman was provisionally suspended following a third missed drugs test. At least football offered a glimpse of greenery, as Bayern Munich clinched their eighth straight Bundesliga and Napoli beat Juventus to claim the Coppa Italia, while the Premier League and Brazilian football returned.
* * *
In a series of shakeups, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this week that the 93rd Academy Awards have been postponed for two months owing to coronavirus. Originally scheduled for 28 February, the ceremony will now take place from its usual home at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on 25 April, 2021. In accordance with the switch, the eligibility period for feature films has been extended, so that pictures released between 1 January, 2020, and 28 February, 2021, are now eligible for nomination. Studios heralded the decision, which impacted a host of other ceremonies, with the Academy’s Governors Awards and Scientific and Technical Awards indefinitely postponed. The Baftas, traditionally held two weeks before the Oscars, fittingly shifted to 11 April, while the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards are to take place as planned in September, with Jimmy Kimmel serving as host. Meanwhile the highly anticipated opening of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has been pushed back from December to coincide with the Oscars.
* * *
On Tuesday afternoon at the Parisian auction house Drouot, a letter by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin to the painter Émile Bernard was purchased for €210,600 by the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. The letter will be added to the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and shown from 9 October as part of the exhibition Your Loving Vincent: Van Gogh’s Greatest Letters. With at least 875 of 930 letters and associated documents, the Van Gogh Museum is home to the bulk of Van Gogh’s correspondence, but the acquisition on Tuesday filled a gap in the collection. Previously the museum did not possess any of the 22 letters written by Van Gogh to Bernard, most of which are in the Thaw Collection at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Moreover the letter by Van Gogh and Gauguin to Bernard was the only letter Van Gogh ever wrote with another artist, described by the Van Gogh Museum as ‘the most significant document written by Van Gogh that was still in private hands’.
The letter to Bernard was sent from Arles and dated 1 or 2 November, 1888, one week after Gauguin’s arrival on 23 October. Van Gogh had been pressing Gauguin to join him in Arles since the start of May, when he rented the Yellow House and conceived of sharing its four spartan rooms, intended to serve as both studio and living quarters. Van Gogh dreamed of establishing an artists’ colony in Arles, writing in a letter to Bernard from March, ‘Perhaps there’d be a real advantage in emigrating to the south for many artists in love with sunshine and colour’. Despite bouts of bad weather, he was both enchanted and amused by the colours and characters of the southern French city, inspired by its yellow suns, orange sunsets, and streaks of blue, writing to his brother Theo that ‘the Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlésiennes going off to make their first communion, the priest in his surplice who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the absinthe drinkers, also seem to me like creatures from another world’.
After arriving in Arles in February, Van Gogh spent a couple of months working alongside the Danish painter Christian Mourier-Petersen, was visited by the American artist Dodge Macknight, and was introduced by him to the Belgian painter Eugène Boch. He remained in correspondence with Bernard and Gauguin, in October agreeing an exchange of paintings with Bernard and the group of artists in Pont-Aven. In the meantime, anxiously awaiting Gauguin’s presence, Van Gogh set to work on his largest project to date, furnishing and decorating the Yellow House. He bought two beds, twelve chairs, and one mirror, while adorning the walls of Gauguin’s room with his Sunflowers. In their letter to Bernard, Van Gogh and Gauguin share first impressions, envisage an artists’ colony in the tropics, and revel in impending visits to local brothels. The relationship soon soured, and on the night of 23 December Van Gogh, in the throes of a mental breakdown, severed his left ear, hastening Gauguin’s departure for Paris.
* * *
Scientists believe that dark matter makes up approximately 85 percent of all matter in the universe, an essential but invisible force which structures all that surrounds us, necessary to understand known gravitational effects. Dark matter together with dark energy could constitute 95 percent of the energy content of the universe, helping to explain its evolution and why the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. Still dark matter remains uncertain, conjecturally giving off no light and proving almost impossible to detect. In their quest for dark matter, this week a team of physicists working with the Xenon Collaboration in central Italy reported strange flashes in a tank of liquid xenon, located far underground so as to be shielded from most conventional sources of radiation.
The Xenon Collaboration includes 160 scientists representing 24 nationalities from 27 institutions, whose centre of research at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory uses tanks of liquid xenon with photomultipliers and other sensors in an attempt to separate traces of dark matter from the surrounding tumult. Most of the flashes in the liquid can be explained by the interaction of everyday particles, but excess flashes serve as tantalising indicators of something new. Provisionally the physicists have been looking for WIMPs, the weakly interacting massive particles which have long been proposed as one of the candidates for dark matter, subatomic remnants from the Big Bang. Instead the team may have detected something smaller and livelier, in this case ultralight particles called axions which appear to have streamed out from the sun.
Axions are conceived as the subatomic particles giving symmetry to the strong nuclear force, one of the fundamental interactions which – alongside the weak nuclear force, gravity, and electromagnetism – shapes and structures the universe. As another candidate for dark matter, what axions lack in bulk they make up for in number. Still as cold dark matter axions would move too slowly to be identified by the Xenon Collaboration, suggesting that the excess flashes are the result of high-energy axions recently forged in the sun. There are other plausible explanations, including unusually magnetic neutrinos or tritium contamination within the detector. Still as the scientists refine their work and commission larger equipment, when it comes to breakthroughs in dark matter, axions increasingly provide the buzz.
* * *
From the Gobi desert in Mongolia to the mountains and lakes of Patagonia at the southern tip of Latin America, now to the icy wastes of Antarctica, paleontologists have been racing to uncover the fossils which might give us a greater understanding of how dinosaurs birthed and raised their young. The existing fossil record and analogies with modern birds and crocodilians have led researchers to assume that dinosaurs possessed hard, heavily calcified eggshells. Two separate studies published this week in the scientific journal Nature seem to upend that theory, suggesting that dinosaurs from diverse periods of prehistory in fact possessed eggshells which were soft.
For ‘The first dinosaur egg was soft’, a team of researchers including the acclaimed paleontologist Mark Norell, doctoral students at Yale, and a group led by Diego Pol whose expeditions in Patagonia were funded by the National Geographic Society, studied and compared the fossils they had uncovered across Mongolia and Argentina. The team realised that specimens of the early horned dinosaur Protoceratops and the long-necked leaf-eating Mussaurus, which lived more than 200 million years ago, showed a curious lack of evidence for calcified eggshells. Chemical data from the specimens allied to mineral and structural analysis subsequently indicated that their eggshells were soft, suggesting that these early dinosaurs buried their eggs in common with modern turtles and alligators. Tracing a family tree back 250 million years, the team have concluded that the first dinosaur eggs were soft-shelled, with at least three independent evolutionary processes responsible for the later prevalence of hard eggshells in theropods (including tyrannosaurs and velociraptors), advanced sauropods, and advanced hadrosaurs.
Meanwhile researchers based at the University of Texas at Austin have been busy analysing a mysterious fossil, uncovered by Chilean scientists on Seymour Island in 2011, and for its unusual shape provisionally dubbed ‘The Thing’. In the paper ‘A giant soft-shelled egg from the Late Cretaceous of Antarctica’, the researchers have identified the fossil as an egg measuring almost a foot long, 68 million years old, the first fossil egg ever found in Antarctica, and the largest soft-shelled egg ever discovered. In fact the find is the second largest egg of any animal on record, only surpassed by the egg of the extinct elephant bird from Madagascar. The scientists believe that the egg was probably laid by a giant marine reptile like a mosasaur, raising questions about where and how it hatched, on land or in the open water.
* * *
Following three albums of jazz standards, drawn with more than a nod to Frank Sinatra from the Great American Songbook, on Friday Bob Dylan released Rough and Rowdy Ways, his thirty-ninth studio album and the first full of original material since Tempest in 2012. From bar-room blues to extended elegies on the tattered but not forlorn pop-cultural past, the release of Rough and Rowdy Ways was preceded by three singles. ‘Murder Most Foul’, which uncoils the assassination of John F. Kennedy, evolving from a harrowing evocation of communal grief to a rhapsodic period-spanning playlist, scored Dylan his first Billboard number one when it topped the chart for rock digital song sales at the beginning of April. The spirited and steadfast ‘I Contain Multitudes’ followed several weeks later with its title from Walt Whitman, while ‘False Prophet’ draws liberally from ‘If Lovin’ Is Believing’, the B-side to a single released in 1954 by Sun Records artist Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson. Rough and Rowdy Ways features contributions from Fiona Apple, Alan Pasqua, Blake Mills, and Benmont Tench, and has received rave reviews from outlets including Pitchfork, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
* * *
Jim Kiick, who played running back for the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins, died on Friday at the age of 73. For the past few years he had been in an assisted living facility, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Kiick enjoyed a stellar career in college football at the University of Wyoming, leading the rushing for the Wyoming Cowboys between 1965 and 1967. He became the first player to earn first-team All-Western Athletic Conference honours on three occasions, and was named the Most Valuable Player in the 1966 Sun Bowl victory over Florida State, before co-captaining the undefeated side to the 1968 Sugar Bowl, where they finally succumbed to Louisiana State. He was selected for that year’s College All-Star Game, played between the NFL champions and standout college seniors, and though disciplinary issues meant that he never made the pitch, it was there that he first met Larry Csonka, the two running backs becoming fast friends. Csonka was named the College All-Star Game’s Most Valuable Player, and was selected by the Miami Dolphins of the American Football League as the very first pick of the 1968 Common Draft, whereas Kiick had to wait until the fifth round before the Dolphins beckoned.
With the six foot three Csonka entrenched in the fullback position, in his first four years with the Dolphins, Kiick was ever-present at halfback. From the 1972 season he had to share halfback duties with the speedier Mercury Morris, but Kiick had built a reputation for versatility and playing in the clutch. A capable blocker and pass receiver, in 1971 Kiick scored in the double-overtime divisional playoff victory over Kansas City, the longest game in NFL history, before the team were trounced by the Dallas Cowboys at Super Bowl VI. The following year the Dolphins recorded the league’s only perfect season, bolstered by Kiick in the playoffs, as he scored decisive short-yard touchdowns against the Cleveland Browns then the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Championship Game. At Super Bowl VII, Kick once more proved decisive, with a one-yard blast in the second quarter as the Dolphins triumphed by 14-7 over the Washington Redskins. Under the running game of head coach Don Shula, the Miami Dolphins reached the Super Bowl for three consecutive seasons in the 1970s, champions again the following year at Super Bowl VIII. Kiick added the second of three touchdowns versus the Minnesota Vikings, describing the score as ‘my specialty, the one-yard gallop’.
At the height of their success, the partygoing Kiick and Csonka published a book and were fondly referred to as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Then ahead of the 1975 season they shocked football by agreeing to sign with the upstart World Football League. Csonka, Kiick, and Dolphins wide receiver Paul Warfield signed for the Memphis Southmen in what was at the time the richest player deal in sport, a combined $3.5 million contract which furnished the players with cars and luxury apartments. Hobbled from the outset by financial difficulties, the WFL folded midway through the season, and Csonka departed for the New York Giants while Kiick saw out his career as a backup for the Denver Broncos and Washington Redskins. He subsequently worked as a private investigator and was president of Kiick Sports Promotions in Fort Lauderdale, described as ‘the best dad I could have ever asked for’ by his daughter, the professional tennis player Allie Kiick, upon news of his death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsLVOXH0VM4
* * *
A prolonged heatwave across the Arctic peaked on Saturday when the temperature reached an apparent record of 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit). The temperature was recorded in Verkhoyansk, a small town in the Sakha Republic in Siberia, which despite being located in the Arctic Circle possesses an extreme subarctic climate, meaning long and bitterly cold winters but short and surprisingly mild summers. Home to both some of the coldest temperatures and greatest temperature differentials on earth, Verkhoyansk already vies with its Siberian neighbour Oymyakon for the coldest temperature in the Northern Hemisphere, with a low of -67.7 degrees Celsius (-89.9 degrees Fahrenheit) recorded back in 1892. News of the prospective high for the Arctic quickly spread across social media, but the record awaits verification from the World Meteorological Organization.
The Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the globe, as ocean currents carry heat towards the poles. Reflective snow and ice melts to expose water, which absorbs more of the sun’s heat, while releasing heat-trapping carbon and methane in a series of positive feedback loops. The current heatwave in Siberia is helping to push the world towards its hottest year since records began, as economic slowdowns in the face of coronavirus have failed to halt record level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Warm temperatures and thawing permafrost have contributed this year to a major oil spill, where 21,000 tons of diesel fuel leaked into the Ambarnaya river near Norilsk in the worst spill in modern Russian Arctic history, and to raging wildfires across the region.
