In Other News: New Orleans musician offers kids trumpets for guns; ‘Jeopardy!’ host Trebek searches for answers in book

Published 1:47 pm Wednesday, July 22, 2020

New Orleans musician offers kids trumpets for guns

A New Orleans trumpeter, vocalist and bandleader is offering kids trumpets in exchange for guns. Shamarr Allen started the project last week, after a 9-year-old boy was shot and killed and two teens wounded, news agencies reported. “I have a 9-year-old son and I grew up in that environment so I understand what those kids are going through. They aren’t bad kids, they just don’t have anything to do,” Allen told WVUE-TV. So — after checking with police to make sure that he wouldn’t get any kids in trouble and would be able to give police the guns for safe disposal — he posted a note on his Instagram account: “To all the youth in New Orleans, bring me a gun and I’ll give you a trumpet no questions asked.”

‘Jeopardy!’ host Trebek searches for answers in book

In “The Answer Is … Reflections on My Life,” Alex Trebek is the one providing the answers and questions in a new memoir that should reinforce his admirers’ expectations about the ever-steady “Jeopardy!” host. The concise chapters, with titles including “What is a Mentor?” and “The Answer is Family” and ranging from a few paragraphs to a few pages, make for a readable but not slapdash approach. The sum of the parts echoes the public figure, the genial and even courtly man that viewers have been watching on the “Jeopardy!” quiz show since 1984. The fan support and affection that greeted Trebek’s 2019 pancreatic cancer disclosure encouraged him to write about his life. But the illness and its toll, while honestly addressed, don’t dominate the book. Instead, the Canada-born Trebek focuses on his roots as the child of an immigrant father and French Canadian mother, the work ethic that earned him TV success, and the contented marriage he shares with Jean, now also his caregiver as he undergoes treatment.

Telescope snaps family portrait of 2 planets around baby sun

For the first time, a telescope has captured a family portrait of another solar system with not just one, but two planets posing directly for the cameras while orbiting a star like our sun. This baby sun and its two giant gas planets are fairly close by galactic standards at 300 light-years away. The snapshot — released Wednesday — was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert. What makes this group shot so appealing is it’s a “very young version of our own sun,” said Alexander Bohn of the Netherlands’ Leiden University, who led the study. Bohn said he was “extremely excited” about the discovery. “This is the first time astronomers were able to capture such a shot,” he said in an email. The observations can help scientists better understand the evolution of our own solar system.