The New Zealand Herald is bringing back some of the best stories of 2020 from our premium syndicators, including The New York Times, Financial Times and The Times of London.
Today we look at empty streets around the world at the height of lockdown, the downfall of Wirecard, the Kiwi TikTok star taking on the world, how to get over a man and a record year of violence in Rio.
The great empty
Cafes along the Navigli in Milan hunker behind shutters along with the Milanese who used to sip aperos beside the canal. New York's Times Square is a ghost town, as are the City of London and the Place de la Concorde in Paris during what used to be the morning rush.
Photographs all tell a similar story: a temple in Indonesia; Haneda Airport in Tokyo; the Americana Diner in New Jersey. Emptiness proliferates like the virus.
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• Photos from a century of epidemics
• What New York looks like now: A photo journey
• Beijing in the time of coronavirus: No traffic, empty parks and fear
Wirecard and me: Dan McCrum on exposing a criminal enterprise
Wirecard was a pioneering payments processor from Munich that handled credit and debit card payments. A stock market darling that promised to make cash obsolete, the company had grown over two decades to become a member of the Dax index and, in the eyes of retail investors, a fintech giant that was the country's answer to Silicon Valley.
But in the end, it all came crashing down. The ex-chief executive, Markus Braun, is in jail, awaiting trial along with other colleagues, while the company's former chief operating officer, Jan Marsalek, is on the run.
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• Wirecard: Audacious plan that failed to hide billion-dollar fraud
• Wirecard: The rise and fall of a German tech icon
• The missing billions: How fraud brought a tech darling to its knees
Teen producer with TikTok hit brings NZ to the world
During the early months of pandemic isolation, there were few distractions as cathartic and cheering as the Culture Dance challenge on TikTok, set to the squelchy, loping Laxed (Siren Beat), by Jawsh 685.
While his song was soundtracking a worldwide feel-good session, Jawsh 685 was at home in Manurewa finishing up his last of high school from home, a bedroom producer stuck in his bedroom.
Jawsh talks to The New York Times about creating a global pop smash from his NZ bedroom.
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• The original Renegade: The teen who created the viral dance
Love, sex and not being nice: Rules for getting over men
She is one of the most outspoken and controversial young feminists on social media, and this year she published a guidebook to dating men.
Chidera Eggerue talks to Jonathan Dean of The Times about why women owe nobody niceness.
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• Confessions of a former serial dater
• Unmarried, happily ever after: Why women are opting out of relationships
'License to kill': Inside Rio's record year of police killings
Officially, police in Brazil are allowed to use lethal force only to confront an imminent threat. But an analysis of four dozen police killings in a violent Rio district shows that officers routinely gun down people without restraint, protected by their bosses and the knowledge that even if they are investigated for illegal killings, it will not keep them from going back out onto the beat.
The New York Times investigated the record year of violence in the city.
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• Where the police wear masks, and the bodies pile up fast
