— London, Uk
— From: Giles Whittell
Long stories short
- The US recorded a record one-day increase in Covid-19 cases of 59,880 for the sixth time in ten days.
- Park Won-soon, the former mayor of Seoul found dead at his home early today, is thought to have committed suicide after being accused of sexual assault.
- Wuhan, the original Covid epicentre, is now braced for floods as 55cm of rain since early June threatens to burst the Yangtze’s banks.
Whenever Rishi Sunak announces more borrowing to bail out the UK economy, he’s spoken of as the UK’s prime minister-in-waiting. People like the chancellor’s generosity with cheap money, but also his knack of seeming to level with the public.
That knack is going to be tested. The latest wave of job cuts announced by British household names (1,300 at John Lewis and 4,000 at Boots) came with a sting in the tail: Boots was planning a shake-up anyway. John Lewis’s eight stores now scheduled for closure were already “financially challenged”. Translation: redundancies would probably have been announced by both firms regardless of Covid.
If that sounds like a warning not to invest too much hope in a V-shaped recovery, there are others:
- British businesses have cut or announced plans to cut 68,000 jobs since the start of the pandemic as a direct result of Covid – and another 35,000 for reasons unrelated.
- 3 million jobs are still at risk in the UK’s retail sector if the government doesn’t slash business rates and underwrite rents, according to the retail property trade group Revo.
- The OECD says UK unemployment – currently still officially at 3.9 per cent thanks to Sunak’s furlough schemes – could rise to nearly 15 per cent with a second Covid surge, and more than 11 per cent this year even if there isn’t one.
That would put Britain somewhere in the middle of a horribly stressed European league table, with Spain facing nearly 20 per cent unemployment by the end of the year and Germany alone among the big economies avoiding a tsunami of job losses. The OECD says German unemployment will stay below 6 per cent even in the event of a second surge.
In the app today… Lose yourself in the final installment of The Reckoning, a forensic look in 8 charts at how age, gender, race and employment affected who has suffered most from Covid. Sign up for today’s Sensemaker Live ThinkIn at 1pm on Sunak’s (overdue?) arts bailout; and for others next week on Black Lives Matter in the UK and disappeared activists in China.
Wealth Investment, Fairness, Prosperity
Trump is not immune
The US Supreme Court has ruled that Donald Trump can’t keep his tax returns secret forever. That said, they almost certainly won’t be made public before the November election. The ruling allows New York prosecutors to subpoena them, upholding the principle that no one is above the law, but Trump’s lawyers will go on fighting the subpoenas well beyond polling day. So the president is off the hook – but only in the sense that voters won’t know how little he’s paid in tax nor how much he owes to whom. Speculation on both fronts will continue unabated, which might serve the Biden campaign as well as full disclosure.
Belonging Identity, Society, Beliefs, Countries
Carless in New York
Does anyone remember Autogeddon, by Heathcote Williams? For a formative anti-car culture polemic, look no further. But there is now an uplifting alternative in a wonderful piece of scrollytelling with text by Farhad Manjoo in the NYT, which shows how Manhattan – already the most car-free big city in America – could be transformed into a bike and walker-friendly paradise if it banned all but essential vehicular traffic and on-street parking. A space four times the size of Central Park would be opened up on an island whose land is already worth $1.7 trillion. We need post-Covid visualisations like this for every big city in the world.
Our planet Environment, Natural resources, Geopolitics
Extinction in progress
About one in four species on the Red List of Threatened Species now face extinction, according to an update by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). One of those is the North Atlantic right whale, of which only about 100 breeding females are thought to remain. Right whales have suffered terribly from trawler nets. Even so, last month the Trump administration lifted restrictions on commercial fishing in what had been the Atlantic’s only fully protected marine sanctuary – the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Marine Monument off New England. The area is frequented by right whales, which the IUCN says are now one step from extinction. This is entirely avoidable. Thanks to robust conservation efforts on America’s other coast, the population of California gray whales there has risen from fewer than 2,000 a century ago to around 27,000 now.
The 100-year life Health, Education, Living, Public policy
Witness protection
Ghislaine Maxwell, the alleged enabler of many of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, has been required to wear paper clothes in the New York jail where she’s being held following her arrest last week. The idea is to prevent her trying to take her own life as Epstein himself did last August, according to official records. For Epstein’s dozens of victims Maxwell represents their last best hope of justice, either in the form of a fair trial for her own alleged role, or in the form of her testimony against him and his other associates. Or preferably both.
New things Technology, Science, Engineering
Bliss
Barbados is offering one-year “welcome stamps” to remote workers to move there, keep working, enjoy the beaches and Barbadian culture, and support the local economy. 40 per cent of the island’s income usually comes from tourism, which has cratered because of the pandemic even though only 98 people on the island have been infected. Of them, seven have died. Flights to Barbados from the UK resume on Sunday.
Hero
Tired of social media posts on the emotional deprivation of lockdown? Kenya’s Elsa Majimbo may be the antidote.
Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend, and please join us for Sensemaker Live.
Giles Whittell
Editor and Partner
@GWhittell
