Celine Dion cancels 2023–2024 shows over health

Canadian singer Celine Dion performs on the opening night of her new world tour ‘Courage’ at the Videotron Center in Quebec City, Quebec province, eastern Canada on Sept. 18, 2019. AFP FILE PHOTO

By Agence France-Presse

PARIS: Pop icon Celine Dion on Friday canceled all her remaining shows scheduled for 2023 and 2024, saying she was not strong enough to tour as she battles a rare neurological disorder.

The 55-year-old Canadian revealed last year that her condition, Stiff-Person Syndrome, was affecting her singing.

"I'm so sorry to disappoint all of you once again... and even though it breaks my heart, it's best that we cancel everything until I'm really ready to be back on stage," the "My Heart Will Go On" singer tweeted.

"I'm not giving up... and I can't wait to see you again!" she added.

A statement released by her tour said: "With a sense of tremendous disappointment, Celine Dion's Courage World Tour today announced the cancellation of all remaining dates currently on sale for 2023 and 2024."

"I'm working really hard to build back my strength, but touring can be very difficult even when you're 100 percent," Dion said in her statement, which was also posted on Instagram.

One of the world's top female singers with an octave-busting voice, Dion is the vocalist behind hits like "Because You Loved Me," "My Heart Will Go On" and "Think Twice."

Last December, she posted a tearful video on Instagram to say she had recently been diagnosed with Stiff-Person Syndrome and would not be ready to start her European tour in February as planned.

She said the disorder was causing muscle spasms and was "not allowing me to use my vocal cords to sing the way I'm used to."

Sufferers commonly experience stiff muscles in the torso, arms and legs, with noise or emotional distress known to trigger spasms.

The cancellations will affect her 16-country tour in Europe, which was due to start in the Netherlands' capital Amsterdam in August and conclude with two dates at the O2 arena in the United Kingdom's capital London in April next year.

Tickets purchased for the canceled dates will be refunded via their original point of sale, her website said.

Her "Courage World Tour" began in 2019, and Dion completed 52 shows before the coronavirus pandemic put the remainder on hold.

She later canceled the North American section of the tour due to her health problems.

The dates in Europe were to have been the Grammy-winning singer's first global concert tour in a decade and the first without her husband-manager Rene Angelil, who died of cancer in 2016.

Fans online reacted with disappointment, but wished Dion well.

"Not surprising, but no less sad. Courage to you Celine, we are with you," wrote fan information account @LesRedHeads.

"You don't have to apologize queen! Take care of yourself. Your health should take number one priority," wrote @notaerz.

Dion had sparked hopes of a recovery when she released a new album "Love Again" last month, the soundtrack for a film of the same name, which contained five new songs, as well as past hits.

The youngest of 14 children, Dion was born in Quebec province, eastern Canada, and got her start at 12, when her mother sent a recording of her to Angelil, who mortgaged his own home to finance her first album.

She began singing in French, but started bellowing out hits in English after taking English lessons in the 1980s.

She gained worldwide fame in 1997 with "My Heart Will Go On," the theme to James Cameron's epic film "Titanic".

She parlayed that success into a regular gig at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, playing for audiences night after night for 16 years, with only a few breaks.

Fans in frenzy as Beyonce kicks off concert tour

BY AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

May 11, 2023 10:53 AM

  

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AT A GLANCE

• Hours before the doors opened hundreds of people were thronging outside the stadium, including some who had travelled halfway around the world to catch the show, anxious to see the global music icon -- one of the world's best-selling artists.

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Beyonce (AFP)

SWEDEN (AFP) - Ecstatic Beyonce fans sang and danced in feverish excitement in Stockholm Wednesday as the superstar kicked off her first solo tour in seven years with a futuristic spectacle featuring a lunar rover, an airborne horse and wall-to-wall rhinestones.

Hours before the doors opened hundreds of people were thronging outside the stadium, including some who had travelled halfway around the world to catch the show, anxious to see the global music icon -- one of the world's best-selling artists.

Once the concert was about to begin, the tens of thousands of fans in the 60,000-capacity Friends Arena -- filled to the brim -- erupted in cheers as their "queen" emerged on stage. 

"Just want to say: Y'all make me so happy," Beyonce said as the concert began. 

"I see familiar faces, people that flew from very, very far to come see the first show tonight," she told the audience at the outset of the three-hour space and science fiction themed show.

The show features Beyonce performing atop a lunar vehicle, playing the role of a news anchor while dressed as a queen bee, and suspended above the crowd as she sits on a model horse completely covered in sparkling rhinestones.

"This was another level. Amazing, I can't wait for the rest of the tour," Abdul Ibraimoh, a 33-year-old artist manager from London, told AFP after the show.

"There was a lot of anticipation for what she was going to do, and yes I'm speechless, it was just incredible," Shane Barkey, a 31-year-old radio host from Ireland, said.

Beyonce, who has a record 32 Grammy awards; is in the top 10 biggest grossing female artists. She is also a fashion icon, with designers queueing up for her attention.

Many of the fans in Stockholm sported cowboy hats and rhinestones, mimicking the look of the performer's outfit in the ads announcing the 57-stop European and North American tour.

Julie Vargas, who flew in from Houston, Texas -- Beyonce's hometown -- confessed to having a "shrine" dedicated to the star at home.

"I don't want any spoilers, I wanted to be the first to see it and take the news back to H-town baby!" the 38-year-old surgical technologist told AFP as she waited in line in the early afternoon.

- 'The queen' -

The "Renaissance World Tour", announced in February after being teased last autumn, is the star's first solo tour since 2016.

Tickets sold out so quickly for the opening show that tour organisers added a second concert at the same venue for Thursday. From there, she goes to Brussels this weekend.

The tour, which continues until September, is expected to earn the international artist nearly $2.1 billion, according to business magazine Forbes. She is already a multi-millionaire.

"We love Beyonce, she's the queen, that's why we are here of course," 36-year-old artist Kasher Bloom from Riga told AFP.

"Beyonce is the queen! Our mother, everything! I would do anything for her," Jarra Jatta, a 21-year-old fan from Helsingborg in southern Sweden. 

In February, Beyonce made history by becoming the most successful artist in the history of the Grammys, surpassing the late classical conductor Georg Solti's long-standing record of 31 lifetime trophies.

But despite winning another four Grammys, fans were disappointed that she missed out on the award for album of the year for her seventh studio album, the house-tinged "Renaissance". The 16-song 2022 album was an instant hit and earned wide praise for its deep ambition.

- Decades at the top -

Born Beyonce Giselle Knowles, the now-41-year-old has been in the upper echelons of pop music since her teenage years.

She initially rose to fame as part of Destiny's Child -- whose smash hits included "Survivor" and "Say My Name" -- before embarking on a wildly successful solo career.

From setting the standard for the overnight album drop to delivering her earth-shattering "Homecoming" show at Coachella in 2018, Beyonce has long bucked the industry's conventional wisdom. She is simultaneously one of music's most private and most watched stars.

Her paradigm-shifting 2016 album "Lemonade," which emphasised Black womanhood against the backdrop of America's heritage of slavery and culture of oppression, remains one of the most venerated musical projects in recent memory.

Then she dropped the critically acclaimed song "Black Parade" in June 2020, amid nationwide protests ignited by the murder of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, at the hands of a white police officer.

UN to deliver prescription for climate crisis

PARIS: The United Nations was poised to release a capstone report Monday distilling nearly a decade of published science on the impacts and trajectory of global warming, and the tools available to prevent climate catastrophe.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 30-odd page "summary for policymakers" — compressing 10,500 pages authored by more than 1,000 scientists — is as dense as a black hole and will deliver a stark warning.

"We are nearing a point of no return," UN chief Antonio Guterres said last week as diplomats from 195 nations gathered in Interlaken, Switzerland, to hammer out the final wording, finalized on Sunday night by exhausted and sleep-deprived delegates two days behind schedule.

"For decades, the IPCC has put forward evidence on how people and planet are being rocked by climate destruction." Since the last IPCC synthesis report in 2014, science has determined that devastating impacts are happening more quickly and at lower levels of warming than previously understood.

With Earth's average surface temperature 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels so far, the planet has seen a steady crescendo extreme weather, including tropical storms made worse by rising seas.

On current trends, the world is on track to warm by an additional 1.6 degrees.

In 2022, climate change quantifiably amplified deadly heat waves in South America and South Asia, massive flooding in Nigeria and Pakistan, and record-breaking drought in Western Europe and the Unites States, according to the World Weather Attribution consortium, which includes many IPCC authors.

Science in the last decade has also elevated the danger posed by so-called tipping points in Earth's climate system that could — beyond certain temperature thresholds — see tropical forests in the Amazon morph into savannah, and ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica shed enough water to lift oceans by meters.

But most of the wrangling at the week-long IPCC meeting centered on potential solutions, especially on how to decarbonize the global economy quickly enough to avoid crippling impacts, according to participants.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations vowed to collectively cap warming at "well below" 2 C, and at 1.5 C if possible.

A 2018 IPCC special report made it alarmingly clear that the more ambitious aspirational goal — since adopted by governments and business as a hard target — was a better guarantee for a climate-safe world.

Some countries emphasize the need to rapidly phase out fossil fuel use and reduce consumer demand, and others the potential of technological solutions.

"Over time, IPCC meetings became more politicized as government representatives — mainly, but not exclusively, from oil-producing states — interfered in the scientists' discussions," the journal Nature said in a recent editorial.

In Interlaken, negotiators from Saudi Arabia, for example, fought hard to remove or dilute passages that emphasized the central role of fossil fuels in driving global warming.

They also insisted on balancing any mention of renewable solar and wind energy with technologies that reduce the carbon emissions from burning gas or coal, such as carbon capture and storage.

"Other countries were hiding behind them, but the Saudis were most vocal," said one participant at the closed-door deliberations.

The IPCC synthesis report will also feed into the next high-level round of UN climate talks this December in Dubai, which will see the first "global stocktake" of progress toward achieving the Paris treaty goals.

To be unveiled ahead of COP28 in Dubai, the stocktake will confront countries with the deep inadequacy of their Paris pledges to cut emissions.

Latest California storm turns deadly, breaks levee

WET WHEELS Cars are partially submerged in floodwaters in Watsonville, California on Saturday, March 11, 2023. AP PHOTO

March 13, 2023 

 By Agence France-Presse 

PAJARO, California: Another powerful storm pummeled California overnight into Saturday, forcing thousands to evacuate and killing at least two people, while causing a levee to give way in coastal Monterey County.

"We were hoping to avoid and prevent this situation, but the worst-case scenario has arrived with the Pajaro River overtopping and levee breaching at about midnight," Luis Alejo, a Monterey County supervisor, said on Twitter on Saturday.

Residents told Agence France-Presse (AFP) they were alerted by local fire officials in the middle of the night that they needed to evacuate.

"Just the noise of the fire department — their sirens and all — woke us up," said Moses, a resident of the area for about 20 years who preferred to give only his first name.

He said officials later came and knocked on his door multiple times, but that he decided to wait until 5 a.m. to make a decision.

After returning home from surveying the flooding, Moses said water was beginning to cover his street.

"That's when I told my wife: 'Hey, we got to get out of here,'" he added.

The area remained under a flood warning on Saturday afternoon, the National Weather Service said.

On Friday night, state emergency services director Nancy Ward announced that the storm had already claimed at least two lives.

Images posted on Twitter by the state's National Guard account showed guardsmen rescuing residents trapped in their cars by high water.

At least one road was washed away in Santa Cruz County, just north of Monterey.

Residents in several towns, mostly in the north, have been ordered to evacuate.

An unusually intense and seemingly endless series of storms has battered California for weeks.

The latest storm was expected to dump as much as 9 inches (23 centimeters) of rain on already saturated ground.

Part of a powerful atmospheric river, known as a "Pineapple Express" — for the warm, subtropical moisture it brings from Hawaii — this latest storm will speed the melting of the enormous snowpack that has built up in higher elevations.

The resulting runoff threatens to aggravate already serious flooding.

In Pajaro on Saturday, the fire department and national guard used drones to survey the flooded areas, checking for people stranded in their homes, AFP reporters saw.

Two cousins, Angel Martinez and Christian Garcia, waded through the water carrying a plastic bag of food salvaged from the kitchen.

They told AFP their neighborhood was a "wreck," with water 3-feet (1-meter) deep in their backyard.

They were only able to grab cellular phone chargers, some blankets and a first aid kit when they hastily evacuated.

US President Joe Biden on Friday approved an emergency declaration that clears the way to expedite federal aid to the western state.

Biden called Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday to reaffirm full federal support for the impact of flooding and landslides on the state, a White House pool report said.

Newsom said California was "deploying every tool we have to protect communities from the relentless and deadly storms battering our state."

Storms in January were blamed for the deaths of 20 people.

Manila faces worsening floods

By Agence France-Presse

BARAS, Rizal: From her house in a Manila suburb, Rowena Jimenez can't see the bare mountains around the built-up city. But she feels the impact of deforestation every time her living room floods.

Slash-and-burn farming, illegal logging, open-pit mining and development fueled by population growth have stripped the once-densely forested Philippines of much of its trees.

In Manila, where more than 13 million people live, low-lying areas are often inundated when storms lash the Sierra Madre mountain range, which lies east of the city and acts as a barrier to severe weather.

But without enough trees to help absorb the rain, huge volumes of water run off the slopes and into waterways that flow into the metropolis, turning neighborhoods into disease-infested swamps.

Jimenez, 49, has lost count of the number of times the Marikina River has broken its banks and flooded the ground floor of her family's two-bedroom concrete house, a few blocks from the water's edge.

"There is always fear that it will happen again," said Jimenez, who lives with her husband, youngest daughter, sister, nephew and mother.

"Your heart sinks because you realize the things you worked so hard to buy will be destroyed again."

Jimenez blames environmental "abuses" upstream in the nearby Upper Marikina River Basin — a catchment spanning roughly 26,000 hectares (64,500 acres) in the southern foothills of the Sierra Madre.

Only 2.1 percent of the watershed was covered by dense "closed forest" in 2015, according to a World Bank report.

Runoff from the mountains drains into the basin, which is critical for regulating water flow into Manila.

It was declared a "protected landscape" in 2011 by then-president Benigno Aquino, under a law aimed at ensuring "biological diversity and sustainable development."

That was two years after Typhoon "Ketsana," known in the Philippines as Tropical Storm "Ondoy," had submerged 80 percent of the city and killed hundreds of people.

But by then, many of the trees in the catchment had been cleared to make way for public roads, parking lots, private resorts and residential subdivisions.

Jimenez still shudders at the memory of the water reaching 23 feet (7 meters) high and forcing her family to huddle together on the roof of their house.

"We didn't salvage anything but ourselves," she said.

New Zealand declares national emergency

By Agence France-Presse

SAVE ME A helicopter locates a catamaran in distress, with a single sailor on board, near the city of Whangarei, Northland region, northern New Zealand on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023. NEW ZEALAND DEFENSE FORCE PHOTO VIA AFP

AUCKLAND, New Zealand: Cyclone "Gabrielle" swept away roads, inundated homes and left 225,000 people without power in New Zealand on Tuesday, prompting the government to declare a national state of emergency.

High winds and driving rain lashed the country's populous North Island, in what Prime Minister Chris Hipkins called the "most significant weather event New Zealand has seen in this century."

"The impact is significant and it is widespread," he said. "The severity and the damage that we are seeing has not been experienced in a generation."

Daylight on Tuesday revealed the severity of the disaster: roads eaten away by landslips and collapsed homes buried in mud, silt and a slew of storm detritus.

Falling trees smashed power lines and floodwaters blocked several major roads, leaving communities stranded.

Local media reported that some people were forced to swim from their homes to safety. Others waded through stormwaters on foot. Some were forced to shelter in place.

"During the night a huge tree came down in front of our house, just missing my Ute. It blocked the road and we couldn't get out," 53-year-old Whangamata resident Brendon Pugh told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"It's been scary. I am an ex-coast guard, but I have never seen anything like it in 20 years living here," he said.

"The water in our road was up to my shins, then waist-deep in places. We were without power from 10 p.m. last night until about 3 p.m. today and we had no internet," he added.

Cyberattacks target websites of German airports, admin

by Agence-France-Presse

BERLIN, Germany — The websites of German airports, public administration bodies and financial sector organisations have been hit by cyberattacks instigated by a Russian “hacker group”, authorities said Thursday.

The Federal Cyber Security Authority (BSI) had “knowledge of DDoS attacks against targets in Germany”, a spokesman told AFP.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is designed to overwhelm the target with a flood of internet traffic, preventing the system from functioning normally. 

The attacks were aimed “in particular at the websites of airports”, as well as some “targets in the financial sector” and “the websites of federal and state administrations”, the spokesman said.

The attack had been “announced by the Russian hacker group Killnet”, the BSI spokesman said.

The group’s call to arms was in response to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s announcement Wednesday that Germany would send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine to help repel the Russian invasion, according to financial daily Handelsblatt.

Attributing Thursday’s attacks directly to the hacker group, however, was “particularly hard”, the BSI spokesman said.

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“They call for action and then a lot of people take part,” he said.

The attacks made “some websites unavailable”, the BSI said, without there being “any indication of direct impacts on (the organisations’) services”.

Attacks on public administrations were “largely repelled with no serious impacts”, the BSI said.

The interior ministry for southwestern Baden-Wuerttemberg state acknowledged “nationwide” DDoS attacks since Wednesday evening against websites, including those of public administration and the regional police.

Germany is on high alert for cyberattacks in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The Federal Office for Information Security said in October that the threat level for hacking attacks and other cybercrime activities was higher “than ever”.

Super-resistant mosquitoes in Asia pose growing threat: study

 

This handout photo taken on July 14, 2018 and received on January 6, 2023 courtesy of Shinji Kasai, the director of the Department of Medical Entomology at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo, shows an Aedes aegypti mosquito at their laboratory. Mosquitoes that transmit dengue and other viruses have evolved growing resistance to insecticides in parts of Asia, and novel ways to control them are desperately needed, new research warns. By examining mosquitoes from several Asian countries, and Ghana, Japanese scientist Shinji Kasai found a series of mutations allows the Aedes aegypti mosquito to survive pyrethroid-based chemicals like the popular permethrin.

SHINJI KASAI / Courtesy of Shinji Kasai / AFP

Agence France-Presse

TOKYO, Japan — Mosquitoes that transmit dengue and other viruses have evolved growing resistance to insecticides in parts of Asia, and novel ways to control them are desperately needed, new research warns.

Health authorities commonly fog mosquito-infested areas with clouds of insecticide, and resistance has long been a concern, but the scale of the problem was not well understood.

Japanese scientist Shinji Kasai and his team examined mosquitos from several countries in Asia as well as Ghana and found a series of mutations had made some virtually impervious to popular pyrethroid-based chemicals like permethrin.

"In Cambodia, more than 90 percent of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have the combination of mutations that results in an extremely high level of resistance," Kasai told AFP.

He found some mosquito strains had 1,000-fold resistance, compared to the 100-fold seen previously.

That meant insecticide levels that would normally kill almost 100 percent of mosquitoes in a sample killed only around seven percent of the insects.

Even a dose 10 times stronger killed just 30 percent of the super-resistant mosquitoes.

"The resistance level that we found in mosquitos in Cambodia and Vietnam is totally different," said Kasai, director of the Department of Medical Entomology at Japan's National Institute of Infectious Diseases.

Dengue can cause hemorrhagic fever and infects an estimated 100 to 400 million people a year, although over 80 percent of cases are mild or asymptomatic, according to the World Health Organization.

Several dengue vaccines have been developed, and researchers have also used a bacteria that sterilises mosquitoes to tackle the virus.

But neither option is yet close to eradicating dengue, and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes carry other diseases, including zika and yellow fever.

New formulas needed 

Resistance was also detected in another type of mosquito, Aedes albopictus, though at lower levels -- possibly because it tends to feed outdoors, often on animals, and may be exposed to insecticides less than its human-loving Aedes aegypti counterparts.

The research found several genetic changes were linked with resistance, including two that occur close to the part of mosquitoes targeted by pyrethroid and several other insecticides.

Resistance levels differed, with mosquitos from Ghana as well as parts of Indonesia and Taiwan still relatively susceptible to existing chemicals, particularly at higher doses.

But the research shows "commonly employed strategies may no longer be effective," said Cameron Webb, an associate professor and mosquito researcher at NSW Health Pathology and the University of Sydney.

"There is growing evidence that there may not be a place for current insecticide formulations in controlling populations of key mosquito pests," Webb told AFP.

He said new chemicals are needed, but authorities and researchers also need to think of other ways to protect communities, including vaccines.

"We have to think about rotating insecticides... that have different target sites," added Kasai, whose research was published last month in the journal Science Advances.

"The problem is that we don't have so many different kinds that we can use."

Other options include more efforts to remove breeding sites.

When and where the mutations for resistance emerged is still a mystery, but Kasai is now expanding the research elsewhere in Asia and examining more recent samples from Cambodia and Vietnam to see if anything has changed from the 2016-2019 study period.

"We are worried that the mosquitoes with the mutations that we found in this study will spread to the rest of the world in the near future," he said.

"Before that, we have to think of a solution."