Roger Waters’ comments on Russia’s war against Ukraine have sparked outrage.
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has cancelled concerts planned in Poland amid outrage over his stance on Russia’s war against Ukraine, Polish media reported.
An official with the Tauron Arena in Krakow, where Waters was scheduled to perform two concerts in April, said they would no longer take place.
“Roger Waters’ manager decided to withdraw … without giving any reason,” Lukasz Pytko from Tauron Arena Krakow said Saturday in comments carried by Polish media outlets.
The website for Waters’ This Is Not a Drill concert tour did not list the Krakow concerts previously scheduled for April 21-22.
City councillors in Krakow were expected to vote next week on a proposal to name Waters as a persona non grata, expressing “indignation” over the musician’s stance on the war in Ukraine.
Waters wrote an open letter to Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska early this month in which he blamed “extreme nationalists” in Ukraine for having “set your country on the path to this disastrous war.”
He also criticised the West for supplying Ukraine with weapons, blaming Washington in particular.
Waters has also criticised NATO, accusing it of provoking Russia.
Members of Bailey Ukulele perform Saturday outside the Monmouth Museum in Monmouth during AppleFest. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal
MONMOUTH — On the fourth Saturday of September, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in Monmouth who couldn’t tell you that if you want apple pie, you have to head downtown.
You can get a slice, with ice cream, whipped cream or cheddar cheese, or you can get a whole pie to take home. But the important thing is that you get something because the Monmouth Museum’s AppleFest is the organization’s primary fundraiser, and pies are the cash crop.
“It’s a really good crowd,” Audrey Walker said, looking around Main Street from the back of the Apple Pie Cafe tent where she was fiddling with one of the crock pots filled with lunch offerings, noting that crock pots are all a little different.
Over the course of the day, volunteers were also dishing out baked beans, corn chowder, zuppa toscana, butternut squash soup and hot cider to the people who came to the town’s center to hear live music, tour the museum, watch the pie-eating contest and take in the offerings from crafters who have set up on Main Street.
Main Street was closed Saturday for AppleFest in Monmouth. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal
While AppleFest is the the main fundraising event for the Monmouth Museum, which tells the history of the town, it’s also a draw for others with the same goal of raising money.
Along with the 50-50 raffle or a chance to win a Major League Baseball bat, the Friends of Cumston Hall hosted the 8 a.m. AppleFest 5k Run/Jog/Walk, the Center Church hosted a pancake breakfast from 8 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., and the Lions Club held its yard sale on Beach Road to support its programs.
And after a brief time in the shade of Blossom House, Kris Sanborn shifted her display for the Monmouth Academy project to the sunny side of the walkway by the Stencil Shop.
Sanborn was one of the volunteers to share information about the town’s project to restore the original Monmouth Academy building that dates back to 1856, to make it into a building that can host events, meetings and voting.
While town voters approved spending $1.5 million to restore the building in 2021, Sanborn and other volunteers on the Former Academy Building Committee are fundraising to offset was town residents will have to pay.
“We’re getting the final budget with numbers,” Sanborn said. “Of course, with the scariness of the (price of) building materials right now, it’s not stretching as far as we’d like. Fundraising is of utmost importance right now to supplement that.”
Spread out on the table were packaged commemorative throws woven and donated by the Maine Heritage Weavers at the Bates Mill and information about the academy.
“We’re all cautiously optimistic that we’ll be able to complete the project,” she said. “We might not be able to have bells and whistles and do a bunch of extra.”
Apple pie slices wait for buying customers Saturday during AppleFest in Monmouth. Pies were for sale by the pie or the slice as part of the Monmouth Museum fundraiser. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal
For more than three decades, the last Saturday in September has been set aside in Monmouth for AppleFest, which capitalizes on the abundance of apples that are grown in nearby orchards. And each year is a little different.
This year, Bailey Ukulele commanded the attention of early festival-goers. For about 40 minutes on Saturday, the 10-member ukulele band played a range of songs that included Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel,” the hymn and spiritual “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and “Blackfly,” an ode to the pesky flying biter by Canadian folk singer Wade Hemsworth.
The band got its start about a decade ago in Wayne, later relocating to Winthrop, where its members meet weekly in the basement of the Bailey Library, from which it has taken its name.
“If you know a few chords, you can play a lot of songs,” member Lucinda Coombs said. “A friend mine tells me there are musicians and people who play instruments. We play instruments.”
Coombs said she thinks the attraction to the ukulele is that it’s easy to pick up — because it’s both a small, light instrument and has only four strings.
The band’s membership usually hovers around a dozen and is always looking for new members, who are welcome to come Thursdays at 6 p.m. in the library’s basement.
When the group wrapped up its set, it ceded its place on the stage at the museum’s Carriage House to Bill Stone and the Stone Quarry Band.
Two years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic meant that AppleFest was canceled, but the work-around for pie fans was a drive-thru pie sale.
This year, it meant no wagon rides. Walker said volunteers could find no one with a team of horses willing to give rides.
But all in all, Walker said she was pleased with how the day was shaping up.
“We couldn’t ask for better a better day,” Walker said. “Maybe we could ask for less wind, but it’s a typical fall day.”
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The top news executive at NPR announced Friday that she is leaving the organization, an unexpected departure that coincides with a shake-up in the nonprofit media giant’s management structure.
Nancy Barnes, who took over NPR’s newsroom in 2018 as senior vice president and editorial director of the broadcasting and digital news operation, said she will leave the organization later this fall. She did not announce new plans but said in a note to staff on Friday that she will “pursue other journalistic endeavors.”
Her decision came hours after NPR’s chief executive, John Lansing, announced the creation of a new position that will oversee all of NPR’s programming – trademark news programs such as “All Things Considered” as well as podcasts and non-news programming such as “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” The new chief content officer position would have effectively created another tier of management over Barnes, who previously reported directly to Lansing.
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Barnes and Lansing did not respond to requests for comment.
A highly regarded newspaper editor at the Houston Chronicle and Minneapolis Star Tribune, Barnes took over NPR’s newsgathering operations from an interim manager following the resignation of Michael Oreskes in 2017 amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment.
NPR said it would conduct a search for Barnes’s successor, who will become the fourth person to run NPR’s news operations in the past five years.
She leaves at a time of growing financial pressure on NPR, a nonprofit organization that is funded by primarily by fees from noncommercial radio stations and corporate sponsorships.
For fiscal 2021, NPR had revenue-after-expenses of $16.9 million – a swing from a deficit of $14.1 million the year before. Officials have indicated that the organization was hit hard by the pandemic, with daily listening and corporate support falling as fewer people listened to news reports while working from home. At one point in mid-2020, NPR imposed unpaid, week-long furloughs on most of its newsroom employees.
Lansing announced the new position of chief content officer in a staff memo Friday morning. Barnes announced her resignation Friday afternoon.
She wrote in an internal memo that there is “increasingly overlap between the news and [non-news] programming divisions” and that she supported Lansing’s decision to add a chief content officer. She called her departure “bittersweet.”
NPR’s news division employs 481 people. The programming division employs an additional 183.
Barnes supervised NPR’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election, the pandemic, social unrest following the murder of George Floyd and the Russian military invasion of Ukraine. She also created a climate desk, a disinformation team and a breaking-news investigations team. She said she would remain on the job through the 2022 midterm elections.
NPR won its first Pulitzer Prize under Barnes last year, in audio reporting, for an investigative podcast series called “No Compromise” about gun rights activists. A second NPR-produced series, “Throughline: Soleimani’s Iran,” about the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani of Iran, was a finalist for a Pulitzer last year.
Dead & Company, a popular offshoot of the Grateful Dead, announced on Friday that its 2023 summer concert tour will be the band’s final set of shows. In a short post shared on social media, band members told fans they “wanted to be the first to let you know” rather than have the news leak later.
Dead & Company includes longtime Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, along with Grammy Award-winning rocker John Mayer on guitar and lead vocals.
Reports had circulated earlier this year that Dead & Company’s 2022 tour could be its final. Instead, fans will get to see the band one more time with no ambiguity as to its future.
Led by mythic frontman Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead was formed in the Bay Area in the 1960s and became icons of the decade’s counterculture revolution, moving to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and openly experimenting with psychedelic drugs. The band’s die-hard fans — the Deadheads — are known to be some of the most passionate in the world. An entire culture and countless virtual moving cities have been created around following the Dead on tour.
Multiple Deadheads interviewed at Lesh’s Stern Grove show said they’d seen some iteration of the band at least 100 times.
The Grateful Dead officially disbanded in 1995 following Garcia’s death, but surviving members continued to play together.
Dead & Co. was formed in 2015 after Mayer and Weir played together on “The Late Late Show.” Mayer did not grow up a Deadhead but discovered the rock legends later in life when they came up randomly on his Pandora radio station.
The 2023 tour will likely be reminiscent of 2015’s Fare Thee Well tour, when many of the original band’s surviving members came together for the final time to play five shows in Santa Clara and Chicago.
Dead & Company has not yet announced dates or cities that will be included on the farewell tour.
While fans will mourn the end of Dead & Company, not all is lost, according to Weir. The straggly guitarist gave his rabid followers something to celebrate by tweeting, “Well it looks like that’s it for this outfit; but don’t worry we will all be out there in one form or another until we drop…”
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has cancelled concerts planned in Poland amid outrage over his stance on Russia’s war against Ukraine, Polish media reported on Saturday.
An official with the Tauron Arena in Krakow, where the musician was scheduled to perform two concerts in April 2023, said they would no longer take place.
“Roger Waters’ manager decided to withdraw – without giving any reason,” Lukasz Pytko, from Tauron Arena Krakow, said in comments reported by Polish media outlets.
The website for Waters’ This Is Not a Drill concert tour did not list the Krakow concerts previously scheduled for 21 and 22 April.
City councillors in Krakow were expected to vote next week on a proposal to name Waters as a persona non grata, expressing “indignation” over the musician’s stance on the war in Ukraine.
Waters wrote an open letter to the Ukrainian first lady, Olena Zelenska, early this month in which he blamed “extreme nationalists” in Ukraine for having “set your country on the path to this disastrous war”.
The 79-year-old also criticised the west for supplying Ukraine with weapons, blaming Washington, in particular. Waters has also condemned Nato, accusing it of provoking Russia.
It is not the first time that the British songwriter has expressed his views on international politics.
In 2019, he criticised a Live Aid-style concert to raise funds for humanitarian aid for Venezuela, claiming it is a US-backed effort to tarnish the socialist government.
The show in the Colombian border city of Cúcuta aimed to raise millions of dollars to provide food and medicine for Venezuelans suffering widespread shortages.
The row came as Venezuelan security forces were accused of executing dozens of people and arbitrarily detaining hundreds of others in a campaign to punish people who protested against president Nicolas Maduro.
In 2018 during a concert in Brazil ahead of presidential elections, Waters spoke out against the rightwing candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently president.
NPR’s top news executive, Nancy Barnes, announced Friday that she was exiting the public broadcaster after NPR CEO John Lansing decided to create a chief content officer above her, The network reported.
Barnes, who had overseen NPR’s news operations since 2018 after five years as executive editor of the Houston Chronicle, is expected to leave at the end of November.
“As many of you have noted to me and others, there is increasingly overlap between the News and Programming divisions,”Barnes wrote Friday afternoon in a memo to the staff. “Now is the right time for me to pursue some other opportunities.”
NPR rep did not immediately respond when we asked for comment.
According to NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, there had been brewing tension between Barnes as SVP for news and Anya Grundmann, the SVP for programming and audience development who oversees many of the network’s most popular podcasts — an area that has been a leading source of NPR’s recent growth in audience and revenues.
NPR reported that it had 24 million listeners on a weekly basis for its broadcasts last spring, along with 8 million for its podcasts. The website also has 16 million weekly unique visitors.
Barnes, a veteran news executive at regional papers like the Houston Chronicle and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, had replaced Michael Oreskes as NPR’s top news executive. After multiple allegations of sexual harassment, Oreskes was forced to resign in November 2017.
Actor Piolo Pascual may have everything, but he revealed that he wouldn’t mind being single for the rest of his life.
During the launch of his latest endorsement for Beautederm held at Luxent Hotel in Quezon City last Thursday, Piolo admitted that having a lifetime partner is not something that he’s excited to have. “Hindi naman natin hinahanap yun. Pag dumating, dun na natin nahanap yun,” said Piolo when asked about having a lifetime partner in life.
“Pero sa ngayon ok naman po ako eh. Nasanay na rin sigurong mag-isa. It’s not something that I’m excited to have or something that I would want to have. But for now, I just want to focus on myself and see what I can do. Sanay na po talaga akong mag-isa. Hindi ko na alam kung darating,” he said.
Papa P, as he is fondly called, said that he wouldn’t mind if his son actor-singer Inigo Pascual would get married soon.
“I guess my son and me are the same in terms of career-driven. I know this time he wants to focus on his career and have the opportunity to grow in this business. So kung sabihin niyang gusto na niyang magpakasal, I’d be happy for him. I’ll be there to support him through and through,” Piolo said.
Inigo co-stars in the latest Fox series, “Monarch,” a musical drama about America’s first family of country music.
When not busy, Piolo says that he enjoys being a plantito. “Kanina galing ako sa bahay, and my plants were growing. I am able to propagate my plants and transplant because sa sobrang dami nila, kailangan mo n i-distribute. Kanina yung mha bakod naman namin nilagyan ko ng cactus at ibang klaseng halaman para mapuno. Ang sarap ng pakiramdam. It’s a therapy for me. When you see them grow, nakakawala ng pagod.”
Piolo Pascual
Unfortunately, Piolo said that “The Flower of Evil” on ABS-CBN would be his last TV series for now. After that, he will focus on doing movies and a concert tour. He admitted that his upcoming projects would not allow him anymore to shoot another teleserye.
With a career that spans three prodigious decades, Piolo’s body of work includes a consistent string of top-rating primetime television series as well as blockbuster and critically acclaimed films that have defined several generations, making him one of the most respected and trusted actors in the history of Philippine entertainment.
The immense mainstream popularity and accomplishments of the iconic actor in both television and film paved the way for him to pay it forward as a producer of quality films that greatly contribute to the growth of the industry.
Piolo’s success as an actor is borne out of hard work and perseverance, which is very much parallel to the story of Beautéderm which has equally inspired countless Filipinos.
He is endorsing Koreisu Family Toothpaste and Koreisu Whitening Toothpaste, both conceived by Beautederm, as a set of top-tier oral hygiene essentials that are both fluoride-free and triclosan-free with very minimal ingredients that makes the products safe and effective for the entire family to use.
Koreisu Family Toothpaste is formulated with Sodium Bicarbonate (baking soda) which makes it a safe alternative to commercial toothpaste without sacrificing anti-plaque benefits while fighting tooth decay that causes bacteria. Koreisu Whitening Toothpaste on the other hand is a whitening toothpaste that contains activated charcoal that eliminates stains and unpleasant odor.
Both Piolo and Beautéderm are passionately committed to excellence and the highest standards of quality – making them a perfect match. And Piolo being a certified health buff makes him the ideal artist to promote Beautéderm’s oral care essentials, especially these days when the maintenance of good well-being is extremely important not just to survive but also to thrive in these very challenging times.
“Koreisu Family Toothpaste and Koreisu Whitening Toothpaste are daily essentials of mine in maintaining excellent oral health,” says Piolo. “These are all-natural products that are not only hygienic, but it adds an extra layer of protection against germs and viruses as well. I am so grateful to my Beautéderm family and to Ms. Rei for trusting me to represent these amazing products that I absolutely love.”
Beautéderm’s President and CEO Rhea Anicoche-Tan on the other hand is thrilled to have Piolo on board the fabulous Beautéderm family for the third straight year.
“Who doesn’t love Piolo? No one could ever argue that he is the ultimate hunk and one of the industry’s top leading men,” says Rhea. “But beyond all the pomp of his showbiz persona is a hard-working man who creates a positive difference in this world through his professionalism, humility, and the goodness of his heart. Plus it really doesn’t hurt that he has a dazzling megawatt smile right? It is truly our pleasure to have Piolo with us in our Beautéderm family.”
Pakistani Singh Ali Zafar has said something on Shehnaaz Gill that the fans of Shahnaz will be surprised to hear. Ali said that ‘If Shahnaz Gill is listening, then I would like to work with him in one of my songs’. However, there has been no reaction of …
According to reports, pop star Taylor Swift is the front-runner to take the NFL halftime show for next year’s Super Bowl 57.
The NFL announced Friday that the league was teaming up with Apple Music for the coming Super Bowl.
“We are proud to welcome Apple Music to the NFL family as our new partner for the iconic Super Bowl Halftime Show,” said Nana-Yaw Asamoah, SVP of Partner Strategy for the NFL. “We couldn’t think of a more appropriate partner for the world’s most-watched musical performance than Apple Music, a service that entertains, inspires, and motivates millions of people around the world through the intersection of music and technology.”
According to Variety, insiders say that a Taylor Swift NFL Halftime Show is pretty much a done deal. And with the halftime entertainment skewing heavily toward rap performers for the last several years, it might be time for a slight change in direction.
Dr. Dre performs with Snoop Dogg in the Pepsi Halftime Show during the NFL Super Bowl LVI football game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams at SoFi Stadium on February 13, 2022, in Inglewood, California. (Cooper Neill/Getty Images)
Swift has been a major proponent of Apple Music and has debuted many of her recent songs there. And while she did have a dust-up with the service over royalties, she also praised Apple for resolving the issue.
Then there is the Pepsi connection or lack thereof. With the end of the Pepsi partnership for the NFL’s big halftime show, that could easily open the door for Swift, who had joined Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi, a contract that made her a bad fit for a show sponsored by Pepsi.
Swift is also set for a major concert tour, and the halftime show has often been a precursor to an artist’s next tour.
Taylor Swift attends ‘In Conversation With… Taylor Swift’ during the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival at TIFF Bell Lightbox on September 09, 2022, in Toronto, Ontario. (Amy Sussman/Getty Images)
So, the stars seem to be aligning for Swift to join the NFL this coming year.
Swift has recently won another dubious plaudit after taking criticism for being one of the worst global warming offenders for constantly flitting about the world on private jets.
The “Shake It Off” singer has also advocated for a growing list of extreme, left-wing causes.
In June, for instance, Swift blasted the U.S. Supreme Court for its decision to overturn Rove v. Wade and claimed the court “stripped women of their rights.” Last year, she jumped in to endorse losing Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s race for governor. And during the 2020 campaign for president, she campaigned for Joe Biden and criticized Donald Trump and his voters. She was a loud and constant critic of the Trump administration.
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