This is the first time that most of the world has gone into recession. Photo / Getty Images
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Happy reading.
Only six months ago, the world suffered a pandemic shock: sudden, unexpected, highly contagious, not particularly fatal, but nevertheless causing global health concerns. The pandemic hit the world's economy in a devastating way, causing an unusual synchronised contraction. The International Monetary Fund notes this is the first time that most of the world has gone into recession.
Where the world's economies go next depends on our success in containing Covid-19.
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Even as President Donald Trump had trouble getting enough oxygen and aides prepared to move him to the nation's top military hospital, some of his campaign advisers saw a potential opportunity.
His health crisis was a chance for a political reset, some advisers believed, to show a new, more empathetic stance toward the coronavirus.
But as The New York Times reports, Trump did not stick to the narrative.
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• For Trump, a pattern of denial, from the virus to Russia to climate change
• The untravelled high road of humility, and a president laid low
• For the Secret Service, a new question: Who will protect them from Trump?
Eddie Van Halen, the immensely influential guitarist whose band, Van Halen, was one of the most popular rock acts of all time, died this week at age 65.
Van Halen's razzle-dazzle approach made him the most influential guitarist of his generation. He structured his solos in roughly the same way Macy's choreographs its Independence Day fireworks shows: shooting off rockets of sound that seemed to explode in a shower of light and colour. His outpouring of riffs, runs and solos was hyperactive and athletic, joyous and wry, making deeper or darker emotions feel irrelevant.
"Eddie put the smile back in rock guitar at a time when it was all getting a bit broody," his fellow guitar ace Joe Satriani told Billboard in 2015. "He also scared the hell out of a million guitarists because he was so damn good."
The New York Times looks at what made Eddie Van Halen one of the best guitarists of all time.
Last week, the coronavirus pandemic hit a haunting milestone, with an official death toll of 1 million worldwide — almost half of those in the US, India and Brazil. The rapid spread of the virus has triggered fears among some scientific and medical experts that millions more will die.
Yet the death rate — how many people who have contracted coronavirus die — may be falling because of improved care, according to the World Health Organisation.
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• Nearly one-third of Covid patients in study had altered mental state
• No, the coronavirus is not like the flu
Tidjane Thiam's five years atop Credit Suisse, when he was the only Black chief executive in the top tier of banking, were shaped by a series of painful incidents.
Some moments were shocking, others disturbing; most had to do with tensions around being Black in a predominantly white industry and an overwhelmingly white city.
A tall, reserved, bespectacled polyglot, Thiam did the job he was hired to do: He made Credit Suisse profitable again after a long decline. But he never had to stop fighting for acceptance and respect, both within the bank and in Switzerland generally.
The New York Times examines the sudden scandal that took Thiam down.
Antitrust regulators are eager to dismantle the world's largest social network.
Their argument for doing so cites real harms, including the erosion of privacy, the spread of misinformation and hate speech, the acceleration of political polarisation and threats to the integrity of elections. Competition, they argue, will force Facebook to fix these problems. However, ill-conceived antitrust action, without structural reform, will not only fail to solve them, it will make matters worse.
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• Big tech's 'monopoly power' condemned
• The Social Network 10 years later: A grim online life foretold
There is not a lot of rhyme or reason to the chosen pursuits of the children born to world's great athletes.
Bronny James, Lebron's eldest son, is a top basketball prospect, but the children of tennis greats Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, who have 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them, never showed much interest in the sport.
Then there is Cameron Burrell, who won the NCAA championship at 100 metres in 2018. His best time is 9.93, making him one of the fastest sprinters in the world.
Burrell's father, Leroy, is an Olympic gold medalist and the former world-record holder in the 100 metres. His mother, Michelle Finn-Burrell, has a sprint relay gold medal from the 1992 Olympics, too. His aunt Dawn was an Olympic long jumper, and one of his godfathers is also a sprinter of some renown — Carl Lewis.
Sanda Dia saw a fraternity as a doorway into a different life. The son of an immigrant factory worker, he was an ambitious 20-year-old Black student at one of Belgium's most prestigious universities. The fraternity, Reuzegom, was home to the scions of Antwerp's white elites.
Access to that rarefied world, he decided, was worth enduring the fraternity's notoriously vicious hazing ritual.
He did not survive it.
More than three million people tuned into the daily Downing Street coronavirus briefing on April 8. It was given by Rishi Sunak, the whippet-thin young chancellor who, only a few months earlier, was an unknown junior minister in the unglamorous department of local government. Not yet 40, he was giving a remarkably assured performance inside the wood-panelled No 10 reception room as he stood at the centre of three socially distanced podiums carrying the warning message "Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives".
He then quickly skimmed over the figures: 19,438 more hospital admissions and 938 more deaths related to Covid. It was a record. In fact, as it later emerged, there were 1,445 Covid-related deaths that day in the UK — the most on any single day.
To put the scale in context, those 1,445 deaths were 20 times the toll of the Grenfell Tower tragedy and 25 times that of the July 7 bombings in 2005, Britain's deadliest terrorist attack of recent years.
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• 'It really was abandonment': Virus crisis grips British universities
• 'Keep calm and carry on' may not work in a time of pandemic
Since 2016, when Erie County gave a slim majority of its votes to Donald Trump after years as a Democratic bastion, this slice of northwestern Pennsylvania has been seen as an especially precise gauge of the national political mood.
The United States is separated into two mutually distrustful political camps, but in Erie, the camps sit side by side — friends, neighbours and family members who live and work together yet cannot fathom why the others believe the way they do. These days, Erie is carpeted with campaign banners and signs, one yard often facing off against the next, a battle posture borne out by national surveys finding the highest share of Americans in decades — more than 4 in 5 — who believe the outcome of the election "really matters."
But as the days lurch toward November, there is a remarkably bipartisan sentiment: dread.
Lili Reinhart has been outspoken for almost as long as she's been famous. The star of the popular teen soap Riverdale has openly discussed her struggles with anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia. She has also been vocal about women's reproductive rights, white privilege, her disapproval of President Donald Trump and the public's undying fascination with Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.
But she didn't set out to make candour her calling card.
The New York Times talks to the star about being a reluctant activist.
