Coronavirus
Bryan Adams Blames “Bat Eating”, “Virus Making Greedy Bastards” For COVID-19
Bryan Adams was supposed to kick off a residency at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Monday, but because of the coronavirus, those dates have been delayed indifferently. The “Summer of ’69” songwriter and devout vegan isn’t holding back on who he blames for the crisis. “Thanks to some fucking bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards, the whole world is now on hold,” Adams wrote in an Instagram post on Monday night. “My message to them other than ‘thanks a fucking lot’ is go vegan.” While other musicians such as Paul McCartney have expressed similar sentiments regarding China’s wet markets, Adams’ tone and word choice has led some to accuse him of racism and xenophobia. It is worth noting that there is no conclusive evidence that COVID-19 originated from a wet market...
Cannes Film Festival 2020 Officially Canceled Due to COVID-19
Tomorrow was supposed to mark the first day of the 2020 Cannes Film Festival. However, back in March, the event was postponed in light of the coronavirus, with plans to stage the cinematic celebration in July. Now, though, festival director Thierry Frémaux has told Screen Daily that the 73rd annual Cannes Film Festival has officially been canceled altogether. Frémaux and the Cannes team seem to have come to a conclusion that’s becoming increasingly evident around the entertainment industry: hosting major events in 2020 appears to be impracticable. “Under the circumstances, a physical edition of Cannes 2020 is hard to envisage, so we’ll have to do something different,” Frémaux said. “A ‘festival’ is a collective party, a spectacle that brings together an audience in a given location, in thi...
Bryan Adams Blames Coronavirus on People Not Going Vegan
A decidedly not-in-“Heaven” Bryan Adams took to Instagram tonight to condemn *puts on glasses* “fucking bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards” for the cancellation of his intended Royal Albert Hall shows in London this week so that “the whole world now is on hold.” That certainly cuts like… some kind of sharp object. But wait, there’s more: “My message to them other than ‘thanks a fucking lot’ is go vegan.” These are decidedly not the best days of Adams’ life. Read the entire post below and either give this man an “amen” or enjoy your dinner of bratwurst.
Harry Potter Actress Miriam Margolyes Admits She Wanted Boris Johnson to Die from Coronavirus
Miriam Margolyes, the veteran actress best known as Professor Sprout from the Harry Potter franchise, admits to wishing that Boris Johnson had died of the novel coronavirus. Margolyes, who also won a BAFTA Award for her work in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, said, “I had difficulty not wanting Boris Johnson to die. I wanted him to die,” in an interview with the British TV show The Last Leg. She nearly got her wish. The UK Prime Minister contracted COVID-19 in April, and as his symptoms worsened he was moved into intensive care. Less than a week later he had recovered enough to be released from the hospital. In the tug-of-war between public health and economic strength, Johnson has been more aggressive about bolstering the markets than other world leaders. On the same day...
Rammstein and Guns N’ Roses Both Call Off European Tours Due to COVID-19 Pandemic
Rammstein’s Till Lindemann (photo by Jens Koch), Guns N’ Roses’ Axl Rose (photo by Amy Harris) Two of rock’s biggest live acts will not be touring Europe this spring and summer, as planned, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Rammstein and Guns N’ Roses have each announced that they’ve called off their respective outings. Rammstein were scheduled to embark on a new leg of their “Stadium Tour” on May 25th in Klagenfurt, Austria, and remain on the European run until August 4th in Aarhus, Denmark. As of now, there has been no official announcement regarding the band’s late summer North American run, which is slated to kick off August 20th in Montreal. Rammstein, who’ve been touring in support of their 2019 untitled album, explained the European tour cancellation: “Due to local eve...
Event Safety Alliance Releases Reopening Safety Guide for Venues
A month into the pandemic, Steven Adelman and Jacob Worek of the Event Safety Alliance were on the phone, talking about how to reopen the concert business — eventually. “As I looked around the empty streets outside my condo, it became apparent that the small event spaces that were going to get to open first would not have the foggiest idea how to do that safely,” says Adelman, a Scottsdale, Ariz., lawyer who is the ESA’s vice president. So Adelman and Worek, the operations director, spent the past month crowd-sourcing more than 400 tour promoters, managers, Ticketmaster employees, caterers and Irish-fair organizers and released a 29-page guide on Monday. Given contradictory, confusing and evolving state stay-at-home restrictions — bars in Kansas are allowed to...
Minister: Plant extract in Madagascar’s coronavirus ‘remedy’ grows in Nigeria
The Federal Government has said the “Artemisia annua”, the plant extract in Madagascar’s announced ‘remedy’ for coronavirus also grows in Nigeria. The Minister of Health, Dr Osagie Ehanire, revealed this during a briefing by the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja on Monday. Ehanire said samples of the said plant would be got from Madagascar and compared with the ones which grow here in the country. He said, “The cure from Madagascar has been making the news and we have promised to get samples of the herb or the botanical products that is there for analysis and (also) use (that) as an opportunity to speak with the health authorities, particularly the scientific community, on how they use it. “We will give that to the research community with us here to examine and see what they can...
Primavera Sound 2020 Canceled Due to COVID-19
Primavera Sound 2020 has been officially canceled. The Barcelona, Spain music festival was originally scheduled for June 3rd-7th, but was postponed until August 26th-30th in light of the ongoing pandemic. Now, the 2020 event has been completely called off. “We are devastated and are terribly sorry for the inconvenience caused, but the health and well-being of our festivalgoers and all of the people involved in the festival has always been and is still our absolute priority,” Primavera Sound said in a statement addressing the “most difficult decision in it history.” Editors’ Picks The festival’s original 2020 lineup included Pavement, The Strokes, Massive Attack, and Lana Del Rey. Tyler, the Creator, The National, Beck, Bauhaus, and Bikini Kill were also slated to perform. While the c...
Shinedown Singer Says Band’s Summer Tour Is Still a Go: “You Can’t Stay Inside Forever”
While most bands are conceding that touring won’t happen for at least the next several months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Shinedown frontman Brent Smith says his band is planning as if they’re hitting the road this summer. As he puts it: “We are not afraid to play for you.” Shinedown were forced to postpone their spring North American “Deep Dive Tour” due to the pandemic, but quickly rescheduled the dates for the summer, before health experts and government officials started predicting that concerts wouldn’t resume until 2021. In a new interview with Jose Mangin for Zippo Live, Smith explained that the band is still hoping to honor the newly scheduled dates. “We are supposed to be on tour right now doing that tour, interspersed with headlining some festivals,” said Smith. “We rescheduled...
Kaduna university expands online lectures to cover undergraduates
The Kaduna State University (KASU) says it has expanded its current online lectures to cover all departments in postgraduate and the undergraduate programmes to keep the students learning while on Coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown. The university’s Director of Academic Planning, Dr Salisu Tahir, made this known in an interview with newsmen in Kaduna on Monday. Tahir said that the university’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) team had recommended the use of Zoom platform for postgraduate lectures and Google Class for the undergraduate lectures. He said that the university had begun a week-long training for the academic staff to effectively adopt the user-friendly platforms to teach the students. He added that the directorate of academic planning had developed a module to enable ...
Ekiti discharges five patients, expands isolation centre
Ekiti State Government on Monday disclosed that five patients of the deadly coronavirus pandemic have been discharged from the Isolation Centre in Ekiti on Monday. This is just as the government revealed it’s a plan to expand the Isolation Centre to 100-bed space capacity for more preparation on the Pandemic. Governor Kayode Fayemi had on Saturday evening broke the news on his Twitter handle that the state recorded new three cases. According to the tweet from the Governor, “We got information from NCDC tonight that three more persons tested positive to COVID-19 virus. Two are contacts of the medical doctor still in our care and another person who sneaked into the state before he was quarantined. This underscores the need for extra vigilance. ” With the development so far, Ekiti has 15 conf...
