The Old Bailey heard how Bravery spent more than 15 minutes stalking possible targets at the art gallery viewing platform before fixing on a young visitor who had briefly left his parents’ side. The teenager, who is from Ealing, was said to have “scooped (the victim) up and, without any hesitation, carried him straight to the railings and threw him over”. – Local Guardian (UK)
Louvre To Reopen With A Fraction Of Its Usual Visitors
When the museum reopens, 70 percent will be accessible, including the large galleries of French and Italian paintings, the sculpture courtyards and the Egyptian antiquities section. But with France’s borders still closed to travelers from outside the European Union, visitor numbers will be a fraction of what they usually are in the peak summer season. – New York Times
American Nursing Homes Have Been Exposed As A Design Catastrophe
Even when there is no pandemic to worry about, most of these places have pared existence for the long-lived back to its grim essentials. These are places nobody would choose to die. More important, they are places nobody would choose to live. “People ask me, ‘After COVID, is anyone going to want to go into a nursing home ever again?’ The answer is: Nobody ever wanted to go to one.” – New York Magazine
COVID-As-Opportunity: Enough With Utopias, We Need Practical Ideas
“Maybe I’ve missed the more nuanced views, but if feels like the only people out there – in my echo chambered world at any rate – who admit that they can’t be sure are those with the most wisdom to express some degree of certainty – our epidemiologists and other medical scientists. Too many other people are using this crisis to justify their own existing view of the world’s dystopia, and already-formed hopes for a future utopia.” – Cultural Learning Alliance
How The Virus Turned This Ballet Master Into A Real-Life Phantom Of The Opera
Curtis Foley, who danced with the Royal Winnipeg ballet and Les Ballets Grandiva, was, until this year, a ballet master at the Polish National Ballet He had just arrived to coach the ballet company at the opera house in the Czech city of Ostrava when the COVID lockdown struck — and he’s ended up spending four months, much of that time alone, living inside the theater. – Dance Magazine
Director Kirill Serebrennikov Convicted Of Embezzlement In Case Many See As Trumped-Up
The 50-year-old Russian, celebrated at home and overseas for his productions of theatre, film, and opera, is artistic director of the Gogol Center, Moscow’s most celebrated stage for avant-garde and dissident work. (He is also a frequent critic of Vladimir Putin.) He and two colleagues were convicted of stealing 129 million rubles ($1.8 million) in government funding designated for projects that, prosecutors alleged (and the judge agreed), never took place — even though many people saw the productions and they were covered in the press. – Yahoo! (AFP)
Boris Johnson’s Government Releases ‘Roadmap’ To Restarting Live Performance; Arts World Says, Is That All There Is?
“On Thursday, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden published the five-stage plan for a ‘phased return’, which will initially let performances take place outdoors, with indoors performances to follow later.” The plan is being widely dismissed as inadequate: one theatre exec called it “as useful a map as a snakes and ladders board,” and the chair of the Writers’ Guild said that “a road map is only any use if you have enough petrol to get you where you need to go.” – BBC