The 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck central Myanmar on 28 March, followed minutes later by one almost as big, was the strongest in over a century. It sent multistorey buildings across Mandalay and nearby towns crashing to the ground, and caused devastation as far away as Bangkok, six hundred miles to the south. More than three thousand people have been confirmed dead in Myanmar, and unknown numbers are still missing. In Bangkok, rescuers continue to pull people from the rubble of a collapsed skyscraper.
Javier Milei’s popularity and legitimacy have been significantly eroded since he came to power in 2023, as pessimism over the economy has increased, with 37 per cent of Argentinians expecting things to get worse in the coming year. Inflation, at 67 per cent annually, is among the highest in the world – with food prices skyrocketing. In January twice as many Argentinians visited Brazil as in the same month last year, while tourism in Argentina has dried up. Unwilling to devalue the peso, Milei is asking the IMF for a loan.
Time-specific art extends the principles of site-specificity into the fourth dimension, by integrating circadian rhythms or extreme duration, say, into its performance language, or by staging a work to coincide precisely with when it’s set. There seems to be a lot of it about, at the moment, perhaps because it offers a live corrective to the always on, ever present homogeneity of digital culture. ‘The ephemerality and transitory nature is its power,’ as Séan Doran puts it. ‘You either got to it or you didn’t.’ Doran is the creative director of Arts Over Borders, who have just announced two new programming strands.
Last Thursday evening, more than twenty Metropolitan police officers broke down the doors of the Quaker meeting house in Westminster to arrest six young women. The women were attending a welcome meeting of Youth Demand, a small, non-violent activist group currently dedicated to action against climate change and the genocide in Gaza. None has been charged.
Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, was arrested early in the morning of Wednesday, 19 March, on two charges – one related to corruption and the other to terrorism. He released a video of himself shortly before the arrest, talking to the camera while nonchalantly adjusting his tie. ‘Hundreds of police officers have arrived at my door,’ he said. ‘I entrust myself to the people.’ The previous day, his diploma in business administration from Istanbul University was nullified, supposedly because of irregularities in his transfer from a private university in Northern Cyprus in 1990. More to the point, someone without a university degree cannot run for president.
France is the most visited country in the world, with over 100 million tourists a year. To welcome the merry hordes, property owners have converted vast amounts of housing into holiday rentals. There are more than 800,000 such listings in France; Paris alone has 60,000. Finding a place to rent to live in is a lot harder. Last year, France passed an ‘anti-Airbnb law’ that cuts tax breaks for holiday rentals and gives more powers to local authorities to regulate short-term lets and put quotas on tourist accommodation.
Last month, the Rwanda-backed March 23 Movement set up shadow administrations in key areas it has conquered in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rebels are closer to taking full control of the region’s minerals, especially its coltan reserves, which according to UN observers at the end of last year were providing them with $800,000 a month.