L-Walter Yetnikoff, R- Billy Joel; Bobby Bank/WireImage
Legendary record executive Walter Yetnikoff, who died on Sunday, would have been 88 on Wednesday, August 11. As the head of CBS Records from 1975 to 1990, Yetnikoff guided the careers of Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand and Billy Joel, who posted a tribute to the late music-industry bigwig on his website Wednesday.
Billy recorded for Columbia Records, which at the time was owned by CBS. Billy writes, “Walter Yetnikoff was the man who changed everything at Columbia Records…Walter was a street fighter — a man who didn’t shy away from confrontation with other power players when it came to protecting his artist’s interests.”
Billy continues, “I will always be eternally grateful to him for ensuring that my song copyrights and publishing rights were returned to me — intact. I loved him as a dear friend and a mentor, in a business where real friendships don’t exist.”
The Piano Man adds, “I owe much of my good fortune to Walter’s stewardship at the Columbia label. I will miss him and the strong life force that he was.”
In other news, Billy returned to the stage for his first post-pandemic concert at Boston’s Fenway Park last week, and is currently set to perform at Buffalo’s Highmark Stadium this Saturday.
(NEW YORK) — The first signs are emerging that the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus is dampening demand for air travel: cancellations are rising, while passenger loads and air fare are on the decline.
On Tuesday, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screened 1.7 million people nationwide — the lowest number of passengers in nearly two months.
In its most recent financial filing, Southwest Airlines reported seeing a recent uptick in cancellations. The airline attributed them to the rise in COVID-19 cases as fears mount about the delta variant.
The airline projected the surge in cancelations to continue into September, a much more grim outlook than Southwest and most other major U.S. airlines had just three weeks ago.
Travel booking site Hopper has seen domestic demand flatline since July Fourth.
“What we saw was that mid-July was one of our best booking weeks ever,” Hopper economist Adit Damodarn said, “so the domestic bookings were really strong in mid July, but on the domestic front we have seen bookings be pretty flat since then.”
International bookings have been hit harder, Damodarn explained, hitting lower than projected rates.
“I think there’s a lot going on here that’s making people think twice about traveling,” Founder of crankyflier.com Brett Snyder told ABC News. “One of the big concerns for people going internationally is the chances of even if you’re vaccinated of getting an infection seem to be going up. It may not be severe, but it does mean that you might not be able to come back into the U.S. for some time just because of the testing requirement. So with that I think you’re scaring some people off. And then, of course, we have the just general concern about getting sick, going to places where there is more virus.”
Hopper noticed more fliers began to purchase cancel-for-any-reason flight insurance in July.
“It is up about 33% since early July,” Damodarn said. “So I think what we’re seeing here is a little bit of hesitancy, maybe, from users traveling.”
And the airlines’ prices are already starting to reflect the halt in demand recovery.
Average air travel booking prices, before fees, are currently down $76 from the end of June, according to travel itinerary app TripIt.
“We’re seeing a significant drop in domestic and international airfare,” Damodarn said. “It’s a little bit more than the seasonality that we have seen in prior years, and so that would suggest to us that there’s both the seasonal variation coming off the peak summer travel season, as well as the impact of the delta variant.”
Jamie Foxx is hitting the road for a book tour in support of his first memoir, Act Like You Got Some Sense.
The multi-city trek kicks off October 15 in Philadelphia and makes stops in New York, Los Angeles, and Irving, TX, before wrapping October 22 in El Cajon, CA. It’ll feature special guests and each ticket holder will receive a signed copy of the book.
In the memoir, out October 19, Foxx writes about being raised by his no-nonsense grandmother, his rise to fame in Hollywood, and how he’s taken the lessons he’s learned into being a father to his two daughters.
“When I am deep in the weeds, trying to figure out how to parent my daughters, it is the voice of my grandmother I hear in my head, encouraging me, and of course yelling at me when I’m messing up as a parent,” Foxx says in a statement. “Thanks to her, I knew that it wasn’t about always being your kids’ best friend but being a parent. Even when it means you gotta be tough with them. Sometimes you gotta be tough because you love them. Just like she always loved me.”
Tickets for the book tour are on sale now. Select stops will require attendees to provide either proof of COVID-19 vaccination or a negative test result within 48 hours.
(Hadley and Delaney Robertson) Hadley and Delaney Robertson, 15, created the BraceTrack app to help people who use scoliosis braces
(MIAMI) — Twin sisters Hadley and Delaney Robertson created the BraceTrack app to help people who use scoliosis braces.
The twins, 15, from Miami were both diagnosed with scoliosis at age 12 during their annual checkup in January 2018. According to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, scoliosis affects 2-3% of the population, or an estimated 6 to 9 million people, in the United States. It can develop as early as infancy but is typically onset between 10 and 15 years old.
While Delaney’s scoliosis didn’t require treatment, Hadley was diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis and the curve of her spine was greater than 20 degrees. Doctors prescribed her a back brace that needed to be worn for 18 hours a day to stop the progression, Hadley told Good Morning America.
“Getting used to wearing a brace can be a little daunting,” Hadley, who was able to stop bracing in June 2020, said. “It’s made of a hard plastic so it can be hot to walk around in on a daily basis and it makes it a little bit difficult to do activities like sports.”
Fortunately, if Hadley needed to take off her brace for any reason, she could wear it for extra hours another day to make up for lost time. The true difficulty was in keeping track of not just those banked hours, but also her daily use.
“One thing about that I found really difficult was figuring out how to track the time that I wore it,” Hadley said. “I tried using a lot of different things. I think we tried using a notepad, a whiteboard, and I even tried looking for an app on the app store to see if there was something that could help me track that but there really wasn’t one so we decided to develop one ourselves.”
That same year, the twins began to research more about scoliosis and app development to figure out what functions would best serve people with the condition. While the girls were previously interested in STEM, they had no prior experience with building an app.
“I think one common misconception around this sort of thing is that you have to know everything about an idea to get into it,” Delaney said. “We really didn’t know everything about app development, or scoliosis even. We just jumped in and started doing a lot of research.”
They then worked with an app developer to make sure they had everything they needed to get the app into app stores across all devices, and it officially launched in May 2019.
“Since BraceTrack is a medical app, it was really important that we were HIPAA compliant and that we had all of those things in order,” Delaney said. “So we found an app developer that would be able to help us actualize all of the vision, all of the designs that we had.”
BraceTrack has several functions to assist users. It can keep track of how long a person wears their brace each day as well as how many banked hours they have, which can be applied to other days where they’ve needed to take their brace off.
It even keeps a log of past history of brace use and creates average trend data based off that. Users also have the ability to create a report with all of the data the app collects, which they can save and send to a doctor, relative, or the like.
“These reports make it more easy to interpret and understand where you could be wearing your brace more or where you’re wearing it a lot,” Delaney said.
The app has been downloaded over 1,000 times, the sisters said, and had around 500 active users last week. Currently, BraceTrack has a 4.9 out of 5-star rating on Apple’s App Store with a myriad of positive reviews.
“We’ve been really amazed by the response we’ve gotten to the app,” Hadley said. “People have said that’s made their brace experience a lot easier and that they’re able to track their time and understand better where they are with that.”
Hadley and Delaney also founded Brace for Impact in January 2021, which is a nonprofit that aims to provide funding for scoliosis braces for children and families who are unable to afford them.
“Bracing journeys can be really expensive since braces cost anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000,” Delaney said, adding that braces are custom-fitted and kids may need multiple braces as they grow.
She continued, “It can be a real financial investment and we were sort of thinking about what we could do to support kids who aren’t able to afford these braces since insurance doesn’t always cover them and they’re really important to your spinal health.”
Brace for Impact has raised $120,000 to date to for four of its partner scoliosis centers: Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, Shriners Hospital for Children, Children’s Diagnostic and Treatment Center and Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital.
“We’ve just been really amazed by the places we’ve been working with,” Delaney said. “The doctors and hospital staff that we’ve been talking to about this have just been so amazing and so inspiring.”
“It’s been really amazing so far to watch how Brace for Impact has been able to help kids,” Hadley said.
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden White House is continuing to push back against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABC News reported earlier this week that the state of Florida had requested 300 ventilators from the federal government to help handle the recent increase in COVID-19 related hospitalizations in the state. DeSantis said Tuesday, though, that he was unaware of that request.
On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded to DeSantis, saying that “as a policy, we don’t send ventilators to states without their interest in receiving the ventilators.”
“I think the most important question here is why would you oppose receiving ventiltators when you clearly need those in your state, given the percentage of hospitalizations that are occuring in Florida,” she added. When asked whether it was possible that DeSantis could have been unaware of the request, she suggested the question was better posed to DeSantis and his office.
The pushback, Psaki said, wasn’t a personal attack on DeSantis.
“Our war is not on [him]. It’s on the virus, which we’re trying to kneecap, and he does not seem to want to participate in the effort to kneecap the virus.”
DeSantis has also instituted a statewide ban on mask requirements. Earlier this week, he suggested that the state Board of Education could withhold pay from school leaders who implement mask mandates for students.
(NEW YORK) — YouTube has suspended Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky from uploading content for one week after he posted a video claiming most masks are ineffective in combating COVID-19, making him the second GOP lawmaker this week to be disciplined by a social media platform for misinformation.
Public health experts have said masks, even cloth masks, which Paul took particular issue with, offer protection against COVID-19 transmission, which in turn prevents infection. But Paul claimed in the video, “cloth masks don’t work,” and that most over-the-counter masks “don’t prevent infection,” according to YouTube, which it said violated its policies against spreading COVID-19 medical misinformation.
“This resulted in a first strike on the channel, which means it can’t upload content for a week, per our longstanding three strikes policy,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement. “We apply our policies consistently across the platform, regardless of speaker or political views, and we make exceptions for videos that have additional context such as countervailing views from local health authorities.”
According to YouTube, it will remove content that includes claims that masks don’t work to prevent contracting or spreading COVID-19 in order to protect users from content that poses real-world harm.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest masking recommendation is that everyone in areas with substantial or high levels of transmission — vaccinated or not — wear a mask in public, indoor settings.
After the media giant sanctioned Paul on Monday, the Kentucky senator fired back against the decision in a tweet on Tuesday, calling the suspension a “badge of honor.”
He also blasted the ban in a press release, but conceded he believes that private companies should have “the right to ban me if they want to.”
“I think this kind of censorship is very dangerous, incredibly anti-free speech, and truly anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth,” the release began.
“As a libertarian leaning Senator, I think private companies have the right to ban me if they want to, so in this case I’ll just channel that frustration into ensuring the public knows YouTube is acting as an arm of government and censoring their users for contradicting the government,” he continued, without evidence.
Paul, who holds a medical degree, has feuded with public health experts from the start of the pandemic including the nation’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.
He’s also the second Republican lawmaker this week to get suspended from a major social media platform after spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
Twitter took action against Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account on Tuesday for COVID-19 misinformation via a one-week suspension, downgrading her account into “read only” mode.
While Greene tweeted on Monday the vaccines were “failing,” data shows that nearly all COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in recent weeks have been among the unvaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Public health experts continue to warn that vaccinations are the most effective ways to curb the spread of the coronavirus and the highly contagious delta variant.
Luke Combs lent a hand to a fellow North Carolinian recently, purchasing an Amazon wish list full of classroom supplies for kindergarten teacher Kelly Kirk as part of the #clearthelist social media initiative.
Kelly tagged Luke in a Twitter post, sharing the link to her wish list and asking him to support a fellow graduate of Appalachian State University.
“Cleared it for ya,” Luke responded. “Good luck to your students and GO APPS!”
The wish list included supplies such as building blocks, plastic animal figures, coloring and drawing supplies and storage containers. The #clearthelist movement is a push for educators to receive financial support for the school supplies that they need to teach, but which don’t fall within the school district’s budget.
Last month, Luke found another way to give back to his fan base: He paid for the funerals of three men who died of suspected carbon monoxide poisoning at Michigan’s Faster Horses Festival. Luke was one of the festival’s headliners.
Like many others, Cardi B doesn’t understand the outpouring of celebrities who have come clean about their not so frequent bathing habits.
Taking to Twitter Tuesday evening, the 28-year-old “WAP” rapper wrote, “Wassup with people saying they don’t shower? It’s giving itchy.”
Cardi’s tweet comes after celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis and Jake Gyllenhaal have expressed that they don’t bathe themselves daily. Last month, while a guest on Dax Shepard‘s Armchair Expert podcast, Kunis, 37, admitted, “I don’t wash my body with soap every day,” before clarifying that she does hit the hot spots like underarms, chest, and private parts.
Kutcher, 43, added, “I wash my armpits and my crotch daily, and nothing else ever. I got a bar of Lever 2000 that delivers every time.”
Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal, 40, told Vanity Fairearlier this month, “More and more I find bathing to be less necessary, at times.”
“I do believe, because Elvis Costello is wonderful, that good manners and bad breath get you nowhere. So I do that,” Gyllenhaal continued. “But I do also think that there’s a whole world of not bathing that is also really helpful for skin maintenance, and we naturally clean ourselves.”
While it may seem that Cardi’s outnumbered when it comes to her thoughts regarding daily hygiene, she does have Dwayne Johnson on her side.
After a fan questioned where the retired WWE wrestler, 49, stood on the topic, he responded, “I’m the opposite of a ‘not washing themselves’ celeb.” He then described his daily routine, which consists of bathing three times a day, with the last time consisting of “Face wash, body wash, exfoliate and I sing (off key) in the shower.”
While we wait for Billie Eilish‘s upcoming Disney+ special Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles, you can watch a very brief cinematic experience from the singer, courtesy of Apple.
Billie and Apple have collaborated on a short film designed to capture the “immersive experience” of listening to Apple Music’s new technology, Spatial Audio. Powered by Dolby Atmos, Spatial Audio can now be heard by all Apple Music subscribers.
To show off the technology, the film shows Billie sitting in front of a lighted vanity mirror, singing her song “Getting Older” a capella. Then, we see that Billie’s in a room filled with vanity mirrors, all reflecting off themselves, as she starts to sing another track from Happier Than Ever, “GOLDWING.” At that point, the music sounds like it’s coming from everywhere.
Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles, which will feature animated sequences combined with Billie and her brother FINNEAS performing at the Hollywood Bowl, hits Disney+ on September 3.
In the U.S., Norwegian pop group A-ha is best known for their groundbreaking 1985 video and hit song “Take On Me,” but apparently, there’s more to the story — so much more that an entire documentary on the group is on its way.
Variety reports thatA-ha: The Movie has just closed a deal for U.S. distribution, following its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. According to Variety, the documentary examines the “creative clashes, ambitions and stormy relationships” of A-Ha’s three founding members.
“The band really deserves it; they need to be discovered by everybody who thinks they only had one hit,” director Thomas Robsahm tells Variety.
In the U.S., “Take On Me” reached number two, and then A-ha had only one additional top 20 hit: “The Sun Always Shines on TV.” However, in the U.K., they continued to chart throughout the ’80s and ’90s, and even scored a top 10 in 2006, while in their home country of Norway, they’ve had nine number-one hits. Worldwide, they’ve sold more than 50 million records.
It’s also worth noting that A-ha were tapped to record the title song for the 1987 James Bond film The Living Daylights, which starred Timothy Dalton as 007. While the tune didn’t chart in the U.S., it was a top-five hit in the U.K.
