LONDON — Four months after Britain went into lockdown, most office workers have yet to return to the City of London. The once heaving thoroughfares of this global financial hub, also known as the “Square Mile,” have remained largely empty since March. But just after 8 a.m. Tuesday, a yelling scrum of photographers, reporters and protesters spilled across the sidewalks and into the road outside London’s central criminal court, the Old Bailey, to watch a 79-year-old woman dressed in a yellow trouser suit and baseball cap suspend herself inside a bird cage 10 feet in the air, squawking at the top of her lungs. “I am the canary in the coal mine,’ shrieked Dame Vivienne Westwood, the flamboyant British fashion designer, couturier to everyone from supermodels to world leaders, punk icon, eco-warrior and political activist. She held a megaphone aloft and said to the cheering crowd: “If I die down the coal mine from poisonous gas, then that’s the signal.”Ms. Westwood had been lured out of 16 weeks in isolation by the plight of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is fighting extradition from Britain to the United States.

Source: New York Times July 21, 2020 11:53 UTC