Few parts of the world could keep a lid on coronavirus as cases continued to surge this week across the Americas, South Asia, and Africa while bubbling up in Europe and the Asia Pacific. Across Latin America, Chile and Peru persisted with some of the highest global caseloads per capita, rising cases in Argentina prompted a new lockdown for Buenos Aires, and hotspots emerged in Venezuela, with only Uruguay and Paraguay managing to buck the trend. Cases in Mexico stretched past 200,000. Yet it was Brazil who remained the world leader, now with daily cases in excess of 46,000, contributing to a tally of 1.3 million infections and 57,000 fatalities by the end of the week. That left the United States playing catch-up, with daily cases surpassing 45,000, taking the tally beyond 2.5 million as the country reported its own record-breaking increase. States in the south and west were driving the steep climb in cases, fresh peaks in Florida, Texas, and California forcing bars to close as reopening plans were put on hold. Black and Latino communities remained disproportionately affected by the virus, which was increasingly spreading among young people.
Infections across India poured past 500,000 and continued to flow at an unprecedented rate, while Pakistan reported a slight slowdown as the toll surpassed 200,000, and cases in Bangledesh kept on at a steady pace. After Brazil, the United States, and India, it was South Africa left shouldering the blame for the rapid global uptick. Even as cases soared particularly in the province of Guateng, the country began reopening cinemas and casinos, a course of action matched in more ways than one by Egypt. High deaths and climbing infections led to partial lockdowns and renewed restrictions in Iran, Palestine, and Israel, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia also hit hard across the Middle East. Even in Europe, the former hotspot briefly turned sanctuary, coronavirus once more started to spread. Spain strove for some semblance of normality amid repeated outbreaks, cases suddenly spiked in France, Germany mapped out domestic travel restrictions after a surge in slaughterhouse infections, while Sweden lamented being placed on the World Health Organization’s naughty list. The same scenario held for Eastern Europe, with record infections in the Ukraine and masks now mandatory in Croatia.
Asia Pacific continued to tell its own story, where deaths have remained low while authorities keep close track of localised outbreaks. Active infections eked up in New Zealand after two imported cases skipped quarantine to break the virus-free streak. Isolation facilities began feeling the strain, but the situation was more severe in neighbouring Australia, where surging cases in the state of Victoria elicited military aid. Small clusters continued to beset Tokyo and Seoul, while one county in Hebei province was sealed off in the aftermath of a food market outbreak in Beijing. Meanwhile recoveries fought valiantly to match infections across Indonesia. That left scant room for small mercies, but Hong Kong provided a minor success story with a run of no local infections for more than two weeks. Scotland declared itself close to ‘total elimination’ of the virus, making future outbreaks easier to control, while New York City entered phase two of reopening, banding together with New Jersey and Connecticut to consolidate northeast gains by way of a tri-state quarantine.
Otherwise countries held out hope for future respite in the form of vaccines and treatments. The AstraZeneca vaccine under development at Oxford University, currently the leading vaccine candidate according to the World Health Organization, is already being put through mid-stage human trials, with Brazil this week signing a $127 million production agreement. Another human trial commenced in the United Kingdom courtesy of Imperial College London. As cases began to rebound, the European Medicines Agency recommended remdesivir for authorisation across the European Union. Experimental treatments were the rage in other parts of the world, as Indonesia plumped for convalescent plasma, while the United Arab Emirates touted stem cell therapy. The financial implications of the virus forced the International Monetary Fund to slash global forecasts, while UNESCO warned of educational disparities and child hunger added to the devastation in Yemen.
Polls and protests continued to complicate the response to coronavirus, as following a belated Victory Day parade marking 75 years since the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany, hard-hit Russia prepared to vote on constitutional reforms which would allow Vladmir Putin to remain in power until 2036. Stability in Singapore heralded an early general election, while divisive presidential polls in Poland seemed set to result in a second round of voting. Primary polling continued across parts of the United States, while France held low-turnout local elections. Authorities in Seattle moved to dismantle the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone, but widespread protests across the United States and beyond were having some impact, as the House of Representatives passed police reform legislation. An outbreak on the premises prompted the suspension of parliament in Turkey. Saudi Arabia limited the annual Hajj pilgrimage to just 1,000 locals. Despite the inevitable disruption, whether activists took to the streets or marched virtually, Pride celebrations took place from New York and Berlin to Taiwan and Israel. By the end of another week in coronavirus, global cases had topped 10 million with deaths in excess of 500,000.
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As coronavirus continued to strike at the beating heart of sport, American athletes this week allied with the iconic activist John Carlos to call on the International Olympic Committee to revoke Rule 50, which bans protest and other political statements. The Ryder Cup was pushed back one year, while the Berlin and New York marathons were cancelled. Where sport was underway, the results were almost inevitably conflicted. Liverpool secured the Premier League title in England, but in Brazil the Rio de Janeiro state championships resumed under duress. As the NBA prepared to tip off in Orlando, 16 players tested positive for the coronavirus, while the pandemic cut short the record-breaking 22-season career of Vince Carter. An outbreak among the Pakistan touring squad could not halt the return of test cricket. But the world of tennis was more sheepish as the infected list from the Adria Tour grew to encompass Grigor Dimitrov, Borna Coric, Viktor Troicki, and world number one Novak Djokovic.
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The influential director Joel Schumacher died on Monday at the age of 80 following a year-long battle with cancer. After studying at Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology and working briefly for Revlon and Henri Bendel, Schumacher began his career in the movie industry as a costume designer, fashioning the wardrobes for films by Frank Perry, Woody Allen, Paul Mazursky, and Arthur Laurents. He began to devise musical extravaganzas inhibited at first by staging issues and small budgets, writing the scripts for Sparkle, a period picture inspired by the rise of The Supremes, the episodic comedy ensemble Car Wash which starred the comedians Franklyn Ajaye, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor, and the fantasy musical The Wiz, a reimagining of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow which brought down the curtain on seventies mainstream blaxploitation cinema.
In 1981 Schumacher made his directorial debut as a replacement for John Landis on the science-fiction comedy The Incredible Shrinking Woman, following up a couple of years later with the comedy caper D.C. Cab starring Mr. T. His next two films made his reputation, with the self-scripted St. Elmo’s Fire starring Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and Emilio Estevez the epitome of angsty Brat Pack coming-of-age filmmaking, while the black comedy The Lost Boys imbued vampire movies with youthful sex appeal. Working with a more established cast including Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini, Cousins in 1989 proved a more languorous affair, before Flatliners marked a turn towards psychological horror. Schumacher would prove one of the most prolific and polarising directors of the 1990s, as conventional fare like Dying Young and The Client buttressed the combustible Falling Down, before his indelible contribution to pop-cultural iconography came in the form of two Batman films.
Batman Forever with Val Kilmer as the caped crusader was buoyed by a villainous Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey’s brash hijinks. The film proved such a success at the box office that a sequel was rushed out two years later, Batman & Robin perhaps best remembered today for its rubberised nipples and codpieces. In the meantime Schumacher directed A Time to Kill, another successful John Grisham adaptation, rebounding somewhat in the shadow of Batman with 8mm, Flawless, Tigerland, and Bad Company. Shot in ten days on a small budget, the tense thriller Phone Booth starring Colin Farrell won critical and commercial acclaim in 2003. Veronica Guerin starring Cate Blanchett and a deluxe film version of The Phantom of the Opera followed before Schumacher and Carrey were panned for the potboiler The Number 23. Continuing to ply a trade in horror and teen drama, the 2011 thriller Trespass with Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman proved Schumacher’s last film. His death on Monday brought tributes from colleagues and collaborators including Carrey, Corey Feldman, and Matthew McConaughey.
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The Stonehenge Landscape is one of the richest archaeological sites in the world, beyond the famous ring of standing stones home to almost 400 ancient monuments including the Cuckoo Stone, the Cursus Barrows, and the henge and timber circle monuments of Woodhenge and Durrington Walls. Still the site yields new discoveries, as archaeologists unveiled this week a circle of deep shafts surrounding Durrington Walls, described as the largest prehistoric structure ever found in Britain. The twenty shafts each measure more than five metres deep and twenty metres wide, and were considered mere sinkholes and dew ponds until ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry showed their consistent size and arrangement. Coring and carbon dating of the shafts places them at around 4,500 years old, contemporary with nearby monuments.
Together the shafts align to form a circle spanning 1.2 miles in diameter, which presumably served as a guide or boundary to a site of sacred significance. Professor Vincent Gaffney, one of the leading archaeologists on the project, which is set to publish its research via the online journal Internet Archaeology, said ‘The size of the shafts and circuit surrounding Durrington Walls is currently unique. It demonstrates the significance of Durrington Walls henge, the complexity of the monumental structures within the Stonehenge Landscape, and the capacity and desire of Neolithic communities to record their cosmological belief systems in ways, and at a scale, that we had never previously anticipated’.
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Gravitational waves are disturbances in the curvature of spacetime, formed when massive objects accelerate, sending ripples across the universe at the speed of light. Proposed by Henri Poincaré in 1905 and predicted in 1916 by Albert Einstein, the first indirect evidence for gravitational waves came in 1974, when Russell Alan Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico discovered the first binary pulsar, a rapidly rotating, highly magnetised neutron star which alongside another neutron star formed a binary star system. Observations over the course of the next decade showed the stars in the system moving ever closer at a rate consistent with the emittance of gravitational waves. Hulse and Taylor Jr. received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993, and their work prompted a rush on construction, as researchers turned towards laser interferometers in an attempt to detect the elusive waves. After years without success, finally in September 2015 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in the United States detected gravitational waves caused by the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away.
While gravitational waves are emitted by objects in orbit and even by the rotation of stars which are not perfect spheres, the strongest waves whose ripples are most likely to reach earth are caused by cataclysmic events, such as supernovae or the collision of black holes or neutron stars. Both black holes and neutron stars are caused by the collapse of massive stars, differing in extent and consequence: whereas neutron stars typically possess a mass of about 1.4 solar masses, black holes are much heavier and possess such a strong gravitational pull that not even light can escape. Now scientists investigating gravitational waves at LIGO and the Virgo interferometer in Europe appear to have discovered an object which blurs the line between black hole and neutron star, weighing in at an unconventional 2.6 solar masses.
The object was detected by LIGO and Virgo as it merged with a black hole of 23 solar masses last August. The collision occurred approximately 800 million light-years away, giving rise to a black hole of 25 solar masses. While the smaller object straddles the mass gap, defying easy categorisation, the extreme mass ratio of 9:1 between the two objects is also unique for an observed gravitational-wave event. Vicky Kalogera, co-author of a paper which has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, said ‘We don’t know if this object is the heaviest known neutron star, or the lightest known black hole, but either way it breaks a record’, while co-author Patrick Brady suggested ‘The mass gap may in fact not exist at all but may have been due to limitations in observational capabilities. Time and more observations will tell’.
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Despite dwindling infections across the country and the voracious local appetite for cinema, San Sebastián still faces an uphill struggle as it prepares to host a physical edition of its international film festival in September. The small Basque coastal city plays host to the most prestigious film gathering in Spain, this year with added lustre as it will show some of the Cannes Official Selection, a group of films selected by Cannes in lieu of its own festival which are scheduled to tour partner sites in the fall. Earlier this month, organisers confirmed that films shown at San Sebastián as part of the Cannes selection will have the opportunity to win the top-prize Golden Shell.
Now the San Sebastián International Film Festival has announced that its 68th edition will be opened by Rifkin’s Festival, the premiere of Woody Allen’s latest film. Rifkin’s Festival was shot in San Sebastián last summer, the city and the international film festival serving as a backdrop to a romantic comedy starring Gina Gershon, Wallace Shawn, Christoph Waltz, Elena Anaya, and Louis Garrel. The premiere furthers Allen’s close relationship with the city, which now stretches back four decades, with Melinda and Melinda opening the festival in 2004 as Allen received the Donostia Award for career achievement.
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With the coronavirus situation stabilising in Iceland, this week Björk announced a series of four special matinee performances scheduled for the month of August. The performances in association with Iceland Airwaves will take place in front of a live audience at Harpa in Reykjavik, with proceeds from ticket sales and an online ticketed livestream going to Kvennaathvarfið, a domestic women’s shelter. The concerts will be unplugged, performed without beats and electronics, drawing from across Björk’s discography and serving as a celebration of her numerous local collaborators. Each concert will feature a different songlist, with Björk accompanied variously by brass and strings from the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, the flute septet Viibra, Katie Buckley on harp, Jónas Sen on piano, and the Hamrahlíð Choir. Concluding the announcement, Björk wrote:
‘i feel we are going through extraordinary times
horrifying but also an opportunity to truly change
it is demanded of us that we finally confront all racism
that we learn that lives are more important that profit
and look inside us and finecomb out all our hidden prejudices and privileges
let´s all humbly learn together
transform
humongous love
björk’
