COVID-19 continued to surge this week across Latin America and South Asia, which remained global hotspots. Daily deaths in Brazil began to surpass those in the United States, and by the end of the week the country stood fourth for fatalities, behind only the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy, and second for total infections, with a tally of 28,834 deaths and cases on the cusp of half a million. As deaths across Latin America passed 50,000 and health officials declared the region the new epicentre of the pandemic, cases continued to rise in Chile, Peru, and Mexico. Colombia extended a nationwide quarantine until the beginning of July, hoping to ease some restrictions outside the regional centres of BogotĆ”, Cartagena, Cali, Barranquilla, and Leticia. Meanwhile Nicaragua faced criticism for defiance in the midst of a crisis, with reports of face mask bans and midnight burials.
Infections stormed past 180,000 across India, now the seventh hardest-hit country in the world, as after enduring the worst of Cyclone Amphan, the coronavirus response was also beset by earthquakes, locust swarms, and millions of migrant workers making perilous journeys home. As the fourth phase of lockdown came to a close, states still scrambled in an attempt to salvage the economy while halting the spread of coronavirus. Bangladesh and Pakistan also reported record cases even as the countries resumed flights and returned to work, while infections were rising rapidly in war-torn Afghanistan.
It was a similar story across much of the Middle East, with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia seeing a steady stream of cases while tentatively easing restrictions, although by Sunday Saudi Arabia was able to report a slight slowdown as the country reopened mosques. Iran remained the most affected nation in the region, but the country also lifted restrictions on shopping malls and mosques as fatalities passed 7,500 with a caseload in excess of 150,000. ‘Fun’ was the operative word at the start of the week in Israel, amid the reopening of swimming pools, hotels, parks, and restaurants, but by the weekend the country was witnessing a spike in infections centred upon schools. Across Africa infections tipped past 140,000 on Sunday with more than 4,000 total deaths, and Egypt was vying with South Africa at the heart of the crisis, but as cases surged in the Western Cape, South Africa still kept to the start of June for further easing restrictions.
There was reason to celebrate in Barcelona and Madrid, as the largest cities in Spain finally emerged from the strictest form of lockdown on Monday, allowing larger gatherings and sidewalk cafes. As more regions progressed to phase two of the country’s deescalation plan, there was confusion over the death count and fresh outbreaks blamed on partygoers, but although Pedro SĆ”nchez requested one more extension to the state of alarm, the islands led the way as Spain continued to reopen. With the situation stabilising in Italy, crowds flocked to bars and beaches while cultural sites like the Tower of Pisa hoped to entice tourists domestic and far-flung. Dwindling hospitalisations allowed France to look forward to parks, bars, and restaurants, which were equally on the menu across Turkey. And cases were also on the decline in Belgium and the Netherlands, while Germany, Greece, Norway, and Denmark were among the countries eager to open their European borders by the middle of June.
No such luck for Sweden, which was barred from the mutual reopening of borders across Scandinavia as the country recorded the world’s highest per capita death rate, though numbers had slowed by the weekend. As the death toll in England rose beyond 38,000, reports suggested that the country had the highest death rate in the world, but the prime minister’s rulebreaking chief advisor Dominic Cummings continued to dominate the discussion. Infections across Russia appeared to be declining as the week progressed, but as the country planned Victory Day parades and Moscow took steps to open up,Ā record deaths and revised estimates made for a grimmer picture as the case tally swept past 400,000.
Deaths fell steadily in New York and New Jersey, the two most impacted American states. Mid-Hudson and Long Island began reopening, while five other regions across New York made a muddled move to phase two, and cities including Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco pressed their outdoor dining plans. Washington, D.C. scrapped its stay-at-home order and joined parts of Virginia and Maryland to welcome outdoor dining, curbside shopping, hairdressers, and youth camps. Nevada placed a bet on the reopening of casinos. However around a third of the states in disparate parts of the country were witnessing rising COVID-19 cases. Wisconsin and Texas reported record daily infections, even as Texas resumed overnight camping and outdoor spectator sports.Ā In Washington half of the state’s newly diagnosed cases were in people under the age of 40. And across California, much of the stateĀ including Los Angeles County moved onto the next phase of reopening, even while total cases swept past 100,000.
Still the outbreak was overshadowed across the United States and beyond by a legacy of discrimination and police brutality, whose latest manifestation was the murder in Minneapolis on Monday of George Floyd. Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed when in the process of responding to an alleged forgery, a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly eight minutes long while the victim repeatedly stressed ‘I can’t breathe’. After video footage of the incident went public, protests across the states of America and increasingly across the globe grew to climax over the course of the weekend, as officials blamed different groups for spates of violence, states implemented curfews, and health experts expressed concerns over a potential surge of coronavirus.
New Zealand was down to just one active case as social gatherings increased to 100, while minimal infections across Australia saw New South Wales stretch ahead with reopening. The lifting of the state of emergency across Japan’s remaining prefectures allowed Tokyo and Osaka to latch on to a wave of reopenings, although as cases crept upĀ the southwest city of Kitakyushu feared a second crest. Overall cases remained low as South Korea struggled to contain cluster infections, whose locus switched from the Seoul nightlife district of Itaewon to a Coupang distribution centre in the satellite city of Bucheon. Meanwhile China pressed ahead with its controversial Hong Kong security law, despite international condemnation and retaliatory action. Singapore saw fluctuating cases but record recoveries as it looked towards life after circuit-breaker mode, and infections hit record lows in Malaysia, as both countries faced a backlash for their treatment of migrant workers. Cases surged across Indonesia as the country reopened offices and malls, and while Thailand extended its emergency decree, the country planned for a complete end to lockdown as cases dwindled.
Flitting between the fault lines of protest movements and environmental disasters, the global response to coronavirus was also complicated by lingering Eid al-Fitr and Memorial Day celebrations, while Africa Day on Monday was held at some remove via livestreamed benefits. Denmark gave love a chance, allowing cross-border couples to meet again with written confirmation of their relationships. Tracing efforts inĀ Japan, France, England, and Qatar faced problems of privacy and reach, and while Wuhan, the original epicentre of the virus, reported a staggering 6.5 million tests in just nine days and Belgium offered antibody tests to all residents, testing was falling or lagging behind in Singapore, South Africa, and Sweden. Herd immunity remained a distant prospect even in places where COVID-19 had seemed prevalent, focusing minds on potential vaccines and treatments. The World Health Organization halted trials of the drug hydroxychloroquine citing safety concerns, but from the United Kingdom to Taiwan, countries were slowly beginning to approve remdesivir as a means of hastening convalescence. Meanwhile in parts of Asia temperature patches and ultraviolet light were being touted as ways to monitor and mitigate the virus.
Unemployment figures hit record levels in France, continuing claims in the United States remained just above 21 million, and Germany appeared set to enter recession. In the midst of this economic fallout, Japan, China, and Singapore supplemented record stimulus funds while the European Union unveiled a ā¬750 billion recovery package. Donald Trump was urged to reconsider his decision to sever ties with the World Health Organization, while closer to home the president engaged in a tug of war with North Carolina over his unrestricted plans for the Republican National Convention. A study in Louisiana showed higher hospitalisation and mortality rates among black patients, in Texas testing sites were disproportionately located in white neighbourhoods, and New York brought celebrity appeal to the push for face masks and increased testing. Global diplomacy faced further disruption as Trump postponed the G7 summit, extending invitations to friends, whileĀ the annual United Nations climate conference was pushed back by one year, with its destination in Glasgow turned into a temporary hospital. By Sunday evening cases of COVID-19 across the globe had surpassed six million.
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Following on the heels of Saint Laurent, amid conversations on the future of fashion which have focused on issues of sustainability and inclusivity and been hastened by the spread of coronavirus, this week Gucci announced that it will cut down on the familiar diet of seasonal fashion shows, for seventy years an industry staple. Elaborating on a series of oblique diary entries posted via the official Gucci Instagram account, the Italian luxury brand’s creative director Alessandro Michele confirmed on Monday that henceforth Gucci will reduce its number of annual shows from five to two. Portraying a ‘worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows’ and positing ‘a new path, away from deadlines that the industry consolidated and, above all, away from an excessive performativity that today really has no raison d’ĆŖtre’, Michele explained during a virtual press conference that the brand will hold two seasonless shows each year, spurning the usual delineations of spring/summer and autumn/winter and eliding the boundaries between womenswear, menswear, cruise collections, and haute couture. ‘We need new oxygen to allow this complex system to be reborn’, Michele said, potentially spurring a wholesale rethink of the conventional fashion calendar, which for all of its extravagance and communality and economic appeal has been increasingly condemned owing to an outsized carbon footprint.
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In the biggest match since the resumption of the football calendar, Bayern Munich travelled to Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday and scored a 1-0 victory in Der Klassiker, stretching their lead to an almost unassailable seven points at the top of the Bundesliga. Joshua Kimmich’s chip several minutes before half-time was enough to secure the win for the Bavarians, setting them firmly on course for their eighth successive league title. Elsewhere the Premier League and Serie A fixed their returns for the second half of June, while across the wider world of sport uncertainty ruled. European Tour golf hoped to resume at the end of July with a six-week ‘UK Swing’ tournament, and Austria looked set to open the Formula One season. On the other hand cancellations wrecked the Dutch Grand Prix and the Boston Marathon, which was called off for the first time in the race’s 124-year history, while the prospects for the T20 cricket world cup remained murky.
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Larry Kramer, the playwright and prominent AIDS activist, died on Wednesday at the age of 84 years old. A graduate of Yale who served as a United States Army Reserve, Kramer began his career in movie production with Columbia Pictures. In 1967 he scored his first screen credit, writing additional dialogue for the British comedy Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, and his breakthrough followed in 1969 when he wrote and produced Women in Love, a romantic drama based on the novel by D. H. Lawrence, which was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Adapted Screenplay. Lost Horizon in 1973, a musical remake of the Frank Capra film, brought critical disdain but financial security. Kramer turned his attention towards the stage, shining a spotlight on his experiences as a gay man in Fire Island and New York City. After a couple of commercial failures and plays which went unproduced, the novel Faggots in 1978 placed Kramer on the periphery of the mainstream, deplored by much of the gay community for its depictions of sexual promiscuity and recreational drug use.
In the 1980s as the AIDS epidemic began to assail New York, Kramer co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the largest support and advocacy group in the world at a time when the crisis was marginalised and the disease scarcely understood. Excoriating public health institutions including the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, local politicians, the New York authorities, and the practices of gay men in articles like ‘1,112 and Counting’ as well as via confrontational public appearances, Kramer succeeded in drawing attention to AIDS while alienating himself from the GMHC. The Normal Heart, an autobiographical play set between 1981 and 1984, traced the course of the fallout in fiery polemics, drawing responses and rebuttals from The New York Times and New York City mayor Ed Koch after debuting in 1985 at the off-Broadway Public Theater. In 1987 Kramer played an instrumental role in the formation of ACT UP, which tackled the AIDS crisis through direct action and civil disobedience, earning Kramer multiple arrests as the organisation spread internationally.
Just Say No, a thinly-veiled attack on Ronald Reagan and Koch, ended abruptly amid negative reviews, while Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist collected Kramer’s essays, letters, and speeches on civil rights and AIDS activism. The Destiny of Me served as a continuation of The Normal Heart, and Kramer published calls to arms and revisionist histories, while with an endowment from his brother Arthur, a lawyer and sometimes contentious character in Kramer’s fiction, he established at Yale the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies. Upon a hospital visit for an aggravated hernia after Just Say No closed in 1988, Kramer learned that he was HIV positive. The condition wrought further complications when he found himself with a terminal liver disease in 2001, but amid premature reports of his death, Kramer finally received a liver transplant and went back to work. His death on Wednesday of pneumonia was confirmed by his longtime partner David Webster. Writers, actors, political figures, and health professionals paid tribute, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who endured Kramer’s wrath and said of his friend with regards to the AIDS crisis, ‘In American medicine, there are two eras: before Larry and after Larry’.
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When widespread lockdown put paid to live tours, musicians faced the unenviable task of still trying to make a living, distanced from their audiences and cut out from their primary source of revenue. The musicians Zola Jesus and Devon Welsh and the web developer Erik Zuuring established Koir to guide and support digital performances, major outlets like Billboard and Pitchfork kept track of the daily goings-on, and Bandcamp waived its revenue share to send more money directly to artists, a gesture the company subsequently made monthly. Yet a gap in the market for live shows remained. NoonChorus allows artists to sell ticketed access to their livestream performances. Making stellar use of the platform, Waxahatchee announced on Wednesday that she will perform her entire discography over the course of the next five weeks, starting with her solo debut American Weekend from 2012, and progressing through Cerulean Salt, Ivy Tripp, and Out in the Storm to Saint Cloud, which was released back in March. Citing the financial burden on her band and a longstanding desire to revisit some of her old deep cuts, Waxahatchee noted that a portion of the ticket sales will be donated to struggling regional indie promoters.
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The historic NASA and SpaceX Demo-2 mission had its scheduled launch on Wednesday scrubbed due to bad weather. The mission promised a series of firsts: the first crewed orbital launch from United States soil in almost a decade, since NASA retired the Space Shuttle programme in 2011; the first time that a private firm has sent NASA astronauts into space; and the first crewed mission for SpaceX, Elon Musk’s upstart aerospace company. Since 2011, Russian Soyuz spacecraft have been the only means of transportation to the International Space Station, costing NASA approximately $90 million per seat. Seeking to break that monopoly and restore manned spaceflight from the United States, NASA established the Commercial Crew Program, a public-private partnership which in 2014 saw the awarding of multibillion-dollar contracts to SpaceX and its more established rival Boeing. NASA has spent more than $8.2 billion on the Commercial Crew Program since its inception in 2010, but while the Boeing Starliner spacecraft has suffered repeated setbacks, SpaceX successfully completed uncrewed demonstrations in March 2019 and last January, when the company tested its Crew Dragon spacecraft’s emergency abort system.
The Demo-2 mission hoped to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying the astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the International Space Station on a Crew Dragon spacecraft hoisted by a Falcon 9 rocket. When adverse weather including lightning strikes near the launchpad caused the late postponement of Wednesday’s liftoff, the mission was rescheduled for Saturday. In the meantime, on Friday in Texas, SpaceX suffered the loss of a Starship prototype in a massive explosion: part of an unrelated project which hopes to eventually supplant the Falcon 9 and Dragon 2 fleet, sending cargo and passengers to far-flung destinations like the Moon and Mars while navigating novel approaches to atmospheric reentry. A bad omen perhaps, but with the weather in check, on Saturday the Demo-2 mission went swimmingly. With Behnken and Hurley on board, the Falcon 9 lifted off at 3:22 pm Eastern time, and docked with the International Space Station nineteen hours later, the astronauts finally emerging from the Crew Dragon spacecraft at 1:22 pm Eastern time on Sunday to a warm reception from three of their colleagues.Ā Heralding a new era in human spaceflight, the Demo-2 mission has an unspecified duration, meaning the astronauts could stay in space for months, upon completion serving as the final hurdle before NASA certifies the Crew Dragon for routine trips to the space station.
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The artist Christo, famed with his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude for their globetrotting large-scale environmental installations, died on Sunday at the age of 84. Born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in the town of Gabrovo, Bulgaria, Christo studied realist painting at fine arts institutes in Sofia and Vienna, before moving in 1958 to Paris where he met and subsequently married Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. Following their first success in Cologne in 1961, in 1964 the couple relocated to New York City. By the end of the decade they had won international renown and local notoriety for the first in their series of wrapped installations: meticulously planned and environmentally conscious public artworks which saw the pair wrap, hang, and drape local landmarks in swathes of plastic and fabric. In 1969 they wrapped the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, while Wrapped Coast covered Sydney’s Little Bay as the first piece for the Australian nonprofit Kaldor Public Art Projects. Valley Curtain, in which billowing orange fabric ballooned over the mountainous Colorado State Highway 325, was hung in 1972, and although the installation was torn to shreds by the wind, the endeavour was preserved by the documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles whose short Christo’s Valley Curtain was nominated in 1974 for an Oscar.
Running Fence which ran white nylon across the foothills of northern California, Wrapped Walk Ways which gilded Loose Park paths in Kansas City, and Surrounded Islands which encompassed Biscayne Bay in pink polypropylene cemented Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s reputation in the United States of America. The Pont Neuf Wrapped in 1985 swaddled the iconic Paris bridge, attracting three million visitors. The Umbrellas in 1991 spanned California and Japan and carried similar appeal, but the exhibition was forced into an early closure after winds of forty miles per hour uprooted one umbrella, fatally crushing a Californian woman. Following decades of lobbying, in 1995 Wrapped Reichstag covered the Reichstag in Berlin, a symbol of the reunified city which has been described as the artists’ ‘most spectacular achievement’.
Flying separately at the height of their fame to mitigate potential disaster, eschewing public funds and instead financing their work through the sale of models and drawings, in their early years as collaborators the couple went by Christo’s name before retrospectively sharing the credit. In 2005, The Gates finally came to fruition in New York City, 7,503 vinyl frames hung with saffron nylon trailing colour over the pathways of Central Park in what The New York Times described as ‘the first great public art event of the 21st century’. Jeanne-Claude died in 2009 following a brain aneurysm, but Christo continue to realise both planned and original projects. The Floating Piers whose hidden walkways shimmered out over Lake Iseo near Brescia, and The London Mastaba which massed 7,506 oil barrels on The Serpentine in the shape of Ancient Egyptian mudbrick tombs, actualised conceptions long held by the couple, although an installation intended for the Arkansas River was cancelled amid administrative tumult and local opposition. L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, delayed for one year by the onset of coronavirus, is still scheduled to clothe the Paris landmark in red rope and silvery-blue fabric come next autumn.
