Media Today

[Rick Plant]

Eric Clapton Tests Positive for COVID-19 and Postpones Shows After Vaccine Criticism

"We very much hope he will be sufficiently recovered by the end of the week to be able to perform the remainder of the planned performances," Clapton's Facebook post read.

Eric has tested positive for COVID-19 after repeatedly denouncing vaccine protocols.

On Monday, Clapton, 77, confirmed in a Facebook post he had tested positive for COVID-19 and would consequently postpone his upcoming tour dates in Zurich and Milan.

"Eric Clapton is unfortunately suffering from Covid having tested positive shortly after the second concert at the Royal Albert Hall. He has been told by his medical advisors that if he were to resume traveling and performing too soon, it could substantially delay his full recovery," the post began. "Eric is also anxious to avoid passing on any infection to any of his band, crew, promoters, their staff and of course the fans."

"So, after intensive internal discussion, it has been decided with great regret and apologies to all those concerned to postpone the performances in Zurich on 17th May and Milan on 18th May, the present hope being to be able to resume the tour starting with the concerts in Bologna on 20th and 21st May."

The post continued, "It is very frustrating that having avoided Covid throughout lockdown and throughout the period when travel restrictions have been in place Eric should have succumbed to Covid at this point in time, but we very much hope he will be sufficiently recovered by the end of the week to be able to perform the remainder of the planned performances."

The Facebook post concluded by saying that an announcement concerning rescheduled dates will soon be made, and purchases will remain valid.

The British singer and guitarist has expressed skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccine in the past. In December 2020, he appeared in a song Van Morrison wrote called "Stand and Deliver," which included lyrics that were critical of the lockdown.

Two months later, Clapton received his first of two AstraZeneca vaccines against the virus, and expressed contempt in a letter to Robin Monotti, who later shared it on his Telegram with the guitarist's permission, according to Rolling Stone.

"I took the first jab of AZ and straight away had severe reactions which lasted 10 days. I recovered eventually and was told it would be 12 weeks before the second one…" Clapton wrote.

"About six weeks later I was offered and took the second AZ shot, but with a little more knowledge of the dangers. Needless to say the reactions were disastrous, my hands and feet were either frozen, numb or burning, and pretty much useless for two weeks, I feared I would never play again, (I suffer with peripheral neuropathy and should never have gone near the needle.) But the propaganda said the vaccine was safe for everyone…"

(The CDC has recommended vaccines for adults and children ages five years and older; clinical trials have found the vaccines to be safe and effective in preventing even mild symptoms of COVID-19.)

Meanwhile, in January, during an interview on YouTube channel the Real Music Observer, he claimed he suffered severe nerve damage to his fingers from the vaccine and couldn't play his guitar for months.

"My career had almost gone anyway. At the point where I spoke up, it had been almost 18 months since I had kind of been forcibly retired," he told Real Music Observer. "And I joined forces with Van. I got the tip that Van was standing up to the measures. And I thought, 'Why isn't anybody else doing this?' And we go back; I've known him since we were kids. And I contacted him. I said, 'What do you think? What's going on?' And he said, 'I'm just objecting, really. But it seems like we're not even allowed to do that. And nobody else is doing it.' And I said, 'You're kidding. Nobody else?'"

https://people.com/country/eric-clapton-tests-positive-for-covid-postpones-shows/

[Rick Plant]

New York AG opens probe into social media platforms that Buffalo shooter was active on before massacre

New York Attorney General Letitia James has opened an investigation into social media companies in the wake the mass shooting in Buffalo carried out by a white supremacist Payton Gendron, Axios reports.

The investigation will look into online resources the shooter reportedly used to develop and plan his attack that killed 10 and wounded three. The platforms targeted by the investigation include Twitch, 4chan, 8chan and Discord.

“The terror attack in Buffalo has once again revealed the depths and danger of the online forums that spread and promote hate,” James said in a statement.

“The fact that an individual can post detailed plans to commit such an act of hate without consequence, and then stream it for the world to see is bone-chilling and unfathomable," she added.

In his writing, the 18-year-old suspect said he came by his views while surfing the often radical discussion site 4chan and other conspiracy-theory websites amid "extreme boredom" during Covid lockdowns.

Much of his manifesto is lifted directly from the "Great Replacement" text posted by the Christchurch killer, Brenton Tarrant, which claims that white Europeans were threatened by "ethnic replacement" and "genocide."

"Brenton started my real research into the problems with immigration and foreigners in our white lands, without his livestream I would likely have no idea about the real problems the West is facing," Gendron wrote.

Gendron spelled out in meticulous detail his plans for the attacks, choosing the target, selecting his arms, body armor, and other equipment, and how he would live-stream it with a helmet-mounted camera, just as Tarrant had done.

https://www.axios.com/2022/05/18/ny-attorney-general-investigation-social-media-buffalo-attack

[Rick Plant]

Coronavirus vaccine could have saved 319,000 people, if they had only taken the shot: study

About a third of the 1 million lives lost to COVID-19 could have been saved with vaccines, a new analysis shows.

Researchers at the Brown School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Microsoft AI for Health analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The New York Times and came up with not only 319,000 needless deaths but also a state-by-state breakdown of where they could have been prevented.

Between January 2021 and April 2022, about every second person who died from COVID-19 since vaccines became available might have lived if they had gotten the shots, the researchers found. Nationwide, about half of the 641,000 people who have died since vaccines became available could have lived if every single eligible adult had gotten jabbed.

"At a time when many in the U.S. have given up on vaccinations, these numbers are a stark reminder of the effectiveness of vaccines in fighting this pandemic,” said Stefanie Friedhoff, associate professor of the practice in Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health, and a co-author of the analysis, in a statement. “We must continue to invest in getting more Americans vaccinated and boosted to save more lives.”

They created a dashboard showing the number of vaccine-preventable deaths per 1 million residents in each state and in the U.S. as a whole. Then they created an “alternative scenario” positing what it would look like if the vaccination pace had been sustained at its highest point last spring and stayed aloft long enough for 85%, 90% or even 100% of the adult population to get jabbed.

What it looked like was 319,000 people still being alive, even when variants’ effectiveness on immunity was factored out.

The most lives could have been saved in West Virginia, Wyoming, Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma, the team found. Where vaccination rates were higher, such as Washington D.C., Massachusetts, Puerto Rico, Vermont and Hawaii, the number of deaths that could have been prevented with vaccines was lower.

For instance, if all adults in Tennessee had gotten vaccinated, there would be 11,047 fewer deaths being mourned, the study found. Likewise in Ohio, where the number stood at 15,875.

“This compelling data illustrates the trajectory of 50 states with 50 different fates during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing the important role of vaccines in protecting lives in each state,” said Thomas Tsai, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Assistant Professor in Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

© New York Daily News

[Rick Plant]

End of the line nears for NASA InSight Mars lander



After some four years probing Mars' interior, NASA's InSight lander will likely retire this summer as accumulated dust on its solar panels saps its power.

The lander will, however, leave behind a legacy of data that will be tapped by scientists around the world for years to come, helping to improve our understanding of planet formation, NASA said, while announcing on Tuesday the imminent end to InSight's science operations.

Equiped with an ultra-sensitive seismometer, InSight recorded more than 1,300 "marsquakes," including a magnitude 5 quake on May 4, the largest so far.

But around July, the seismometer will be turned off.

The lander's energy level will then be checked about once a day, and some pictures may still be taken. Then by the end of 2022, the mission will be completely stopped.

The cause: the accumulation over months of Martian dust on the lander's two solar panels, each measuring about seven feet (2.2 meters) wide.

InSight, which is already running on only a tenth of the energy it had at the beginning, will soon find its batteries drained.

The speed at which dust accumulated corresponded more or less to what had been estimated by NASA.

The lander got a new lease on life around a year ago, when its robotic arm was put to new and unplanned use to remove some dust from the solar panels, extending the mission.

The maneuver -- employed six times successfully -- saw the arm use dust itself to clear the panels, as it scooped up some martian soil and gently dropped onto the robot so the dirt was blown across the solar panels, clearing parts of their surface.

Adding something to the lander specifically to clean the panels was forgone due to costs, explained Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during a press conference Tuesday.

Such a mechanism would leave "less to put into the science instruments," he said.

'Treasure trove'

InSight, one of four missions currently on the Red Planet -- along with the US rovers Perseverance and Curiosity, and China's Zhurong -- arrived on Mars in November 2018.

Its seismometer, made in France, has since paved the way for great advances.

"The interior was kind of just a giant question mark," said Banerdt, who has worked on the InSight mission for more than a decade.

But thanks to InSight, "we've been able to map out the inside of Mars for the very first time in history."

Seismic waves, varying based on the materials they pass through, offer a picture of the interior of the planet.

For example, scientists were able to confirm that the core of Mars is liquid and to determine the thickness of the Martian crust -- less dense than previously thought and likely consisting of three layers.

The magnitude 5 quake in early May was much larger than all those previously recorded and close to what scientists thought would be the maximum on Mars, though it would not be considered a huge tremor on Earth.

"This quake is really going to be a treasure trove of scientific information when we get our teeth into it," Banerdt said.

Earthquakes are in particular caused by plate tectonics, he explained. But, they can also be triggered when the Earth's crust moves due to temperature anomalies caused by its mantle.

It is this type of vibration that scientists think they are dealing with on Mars.

Not all of InSight's scientific operations have gone smoothly, however, such as when its heat probe had trouble being successfully buried below the surface to take the planet's temperature because of the composition of the soil where the robot landed.

Regardless, in light of the seismometer's success, NASA is considering using the technique elsewhere in the future, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division.

"We'd really like to set up a complete network on the moon to really understand what's going on there."

© 2022 AFP

[Rick Plant]

Johnny Depp grabbed Amber Heard by hair, hit her repeatedly: sister
https://www.rawstory.com/johnny-depp-grabbed-amber-heard-by-hair-hit-her-repeatedly-sister-2657352992/

[Rick Plant]

Why Britain has the highest inflation in the G7

UK is grappling with soaring energy prices and a red-hot labour market — and the problems could persist

Official data released on Wednesday showed UK inflation surging to 9 per cent in April, and suggested Britain was enduring the worst of all worlds with its price rises compared with other countries.

Like many European economies exposed to higher gas and electricity prices that have been exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, UK energy costs were 69 per cent higher in April compared with a year ago. The full effects of the war will be felt by British households in October, when the energy price cap is expected to be raised, in a move that is likely to take inflation towards 10 per cent in the autumn.

https://www.ft.com/content/12ecd537-06bb-483c-8b1d-137ac63e106d

[Rick Plant]

'Blade Runner' composer Vangelis dead at 79



"Blade Runner" and "Chariots of Fire" composer Vangelis, the electronic music pioneer and sole Greek to win an Academy Award for best original score, died late Tuesday aged 79.

The reclusive, mostly self-taught keyboard wizard was a lifelong experimenter, switching from psychedelic rock and synth to ethnic music and jazz.

In a career spanning over five decades, Vangelis drew on space exploration, wildlife, futuristic architecture, the New Testament and the 1968 French student riots for inspiration.

His Oscar-winning main theme for "Chariots" beat John Williams' score for the first Indiana Jones film in 1982. It reached the top of the US billboard chart and was an enduring hit in Britain, where it was used during the London 2012 Olympics medal presentation ceremonies.

True to form, Vangelis was fast asleep in London when the result was announced on March 29, 1982 -- his 39th birthday.

"I'd been out late celebrating," he later told People magazine.

His work on over a dozen soundtracks included Costa-Gavras' "Missing", "Antarctica", "The Bounty", "1492: Conquest of Paradise", Roman Polanski's "Bitter Moon" and the Oliver Stone epic "Alexander".

Vangelis readily admitted to the Los Angeles Times in 1986 that "half of the films I see don't need music. It sounds like something stuffed in."

He also wrote music for theatre and ballet, as well as the anthem of the 2002 FIFA World Cup.

Child prodigy

Born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou in the central Greek coastal town of Agria, near Volos, Vangelis was a child prodigy, performing his first piano concert at the age of six, despite never having taken formal lessons.

"I've never studied music," he told Greek magazine Periodiko in 1988, in which he also bemoaned growing "exploitation" by studios and the media.

"At one time there was a craziness... now it's a job."

"You might sell a million records while feeling like a failure. Or you might not sell anything feeling very happy," he said.

After studying painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts, Vangelis joined popular Greek rock group The Forminx. But success was cut short in 1967 by the arrival of a military junta that clamped down on freedom of expression.

Trying to get to England, he found himself stuck in Paris during the 1968 student movement, and joined fellow Greek expatriates Demis Roussos and Lucas Sideras in forming progressive rock group Aphrodite's Child.

The group achieved cult status, selling millions of records with hits such as "Rain and Tears" before disbanding in 1972. Vangelis and Roussos both moved on to successful solo careers.

Relocating to London in 1974, Vangelis created Nemo Studios, the "sound laboratory" that produced most of his solo albums for over a decade.

But he valued his independence over record sales.

'Success is treacherous'

"Success is sweet and treacherous," the lion-maned composer told the Observer in 2012. "Instead of being able to move forward freely and do what you really wish, you find yourself stuck and obliged to repeat yourself."

In a 2019 interview with the Los Angeles Times, the composer said he saw parallels with the dystopian world depicted in "Blade Runner".

"When I saw some footage, I understood that this is the future. Not a nice future, of course. But this is where we’re going," he said.

Vangelis, who had a minor planet named after him in 1995, had a fascination with space from an early age.

"Each planet sings," he told the LA Times in 2019.

In 1980, he contributed music to Carl Sagan's award-winning science documentary Cosmos. He wrote music for NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey and 2011 Juno Jupiter missions, and a Grammy-nominated album inspired by the Rosetta space probe mission in 2016.

In 2018, he composed a piece for the funeral of Stephen Hawking that included the late professor's words, and was broadcast into space by the European Space Agency.

Vangelis has been a recipient of the Max Steiner film music award, France's Legion d'Honneur, NASA's Public Service Medal and Greece's top honour, the Order of the Phoenix.

In later years, Vangelis moved between homes in Paris, London and Athens, carefully guarding his privacy. Little is known of his personal life.

"I don't give interviews, because I have to try to say things that I don’t need to say," he told the LA Times in 2019.

"The only thing I need to do is just to make music."

AFP