Sunil Perera, Outspoken Star of Sri Lankan Baila Music, Is Dead at 68

Sunil Perera, Outspoken Star of Sri Lankan Baila Music, Is Dead at 68

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — In the end, it was only appropriate that Sunil Perera, who had entertained generations of Sri Lankans on the radio and on the dance floor with his distinctive Latin-fused tunes, would go out singing.

On his deathbed at a hospital in Colombo, the nation’s capital city, Mr. Perera had asked for a guitar, but one was not provided. So he turned to what couldn’t be denied.

“The doctor told me that the day before he died, he was singing and entertaining everyone there,” said Piyal Perera, Sunil’s brother and bandmate.

Mr. Perera died on Monday at Nawaloka Hospital, his brother said. He was 68.

While the cause of death was not clear, Piyal Perera said, Mr. Perera had been recovering from Covid-19 when he was rushed into intensive care.

Lebanon Gets New Prime Minister Amid Economic Meltdown

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Najib Mikati, a billionaire telecommunications tycoon, became the prime minister of Lebanon on Friday, seizing the reins for a third time in a country that has been without a government for more than a year while its people careened deeper into an economic abyss.

The formation of Mr. Mikati’s cabinet was announced from the Presidential Palace after Mr. Mikati and President Michel Aoun signed a decree to make it official in the presence of the speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri.

Dispensing with the tradition of reading prepared remarks, Mr. Mikati delivered an emotional speech, summarizing the suffering of the Lebanese and calling for unity to pull the country out of the crisis.

Appearing to choke up, he mentioned mothers who couldn’t find basic painkillers or baby formula, fathers who couldn’t explain to their children why so many of their peers had fled the country, and workers who had lost their savings in insolvent banks and whose salaries were now worth a fraction of what they were just two years ago.

Art Fairs Come Blazing Back, Precarious but Defiant

Even before Covid, the art world was changing rapidly. Sales that used to happen in New York or Basel, via hushed conversation, now happen through Instagram all over the world. Large galleries are merging to keep up with mega-galleries, while small galleries, somehow, keep multiplying.

From a strictly business point of view, this fall’s Art Week — which was postponed from spring and runs through Sunday — represents an attempt to carry on with the way things used to be, albeit with some adjustments. The Armory Show, the first major American art fair since the pandemic, has become even more American as travel restrictions and complications knocked 55 mostly European exhibitors into the fair’s new online-only component. Visitors to the sprawling Javits Center in Manhattan, the show’s new home, will have to prove that they’re vaccinated or have a recent negative coronavirus test, as they will at most of the week’s venues. (Check health protocols beforehand.)

When the Armory Show moved to the fall, satellite shows such as Spring/Break, Art on Paper, Clio, and the stylish little Independent followed it to September. The all-new Future Fair, founded in 2020, is finally happening in person, too. By and large, these are the New York art fairs as you’ve known and loved, or hated, them, and it simply isn’t clear yet if attendance and sales will keep their model viable.