Death took on great names in the United States and Great Britain on Friday. The super powers mourn both on corridors of royalty and entertainment.

Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband and the longest-serving consort of any British monarch, has died at age 99.

In the US, rapper Earl Simmons, aka DMX, who had been on life support since April 2 following cocaine overdose, lost his fight. He died at 50.

A statement posted on the royal family’s website Friday morning said: “It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen announces the death of her beloved husband, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

“His Royal Highness passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle. Further announcements will be made in due course. The Royal Family joins with people around the world in mourning his loss.”

Both DMX and Prince Philip are figures with a huge global influence, and the news of their death has stirred emotions.

“Earl was a warrior who fought till the very end,” the Simmons family said. “He loved his family with all of his heart, and we cherish the times we spent with him.”

Prince Philip spent 65 years supporting the queen, retiring from his public role in 2017 and staying largely out of the view since. In his active years, he helped set a new course for the monarchy, championing Britain itself, as well as environmental causes, science and technology.

AS for DMX, his music was often menacing and dark, with the occasional nod to Christian spirituality, New York Times noted. He committed crimes, served time in different correctional institutions and battled addiction long before he released an album, and his troubled past informed the gritty content and inimitable delivery of his rhymes.

Born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., on Dec. 18, 1970, Earl Simmons was the first and only child of Arnett Simmons and Joe Barker. He grew up in Yonkers, a city just north of the Bronx that became a hotbed of racial tension in the 1980s.

His father was an itinerant artist whom he rarely saw, and his mother struggled to raise him and his half sister Bonita in a violent neighborhood. In his memoir, “E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX” (2002, with Smokey D. Fontaine), he wrote that there was often little food at home while he was growing up and that as a precocious, hot-tempered and disobedient child, he was often beaten by his mother and her lovers.

He commandeered the stage with electrifying performances that ignited passion, selling millions of records. DMX was the first musician whose first five albums reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. He was the standout artist on the Ruff Ryders label, often rapping over tracks by the star D.J. and producer Swizz Beatz. Rappers like Eve, Drag-On and the Lox, a group made up of Jadakiss, Styles P and Sheek Louch, also recorded on the label.

In the late 1980s he started performing as a beatboxer, creating beats using only his mouth, with a local rapper named Ready Ron. (He took the name DMX from the Oberheim DMX drum machine, a model popular in the 1980s.)

He said he was 14 when Ready Ron introduced him to crack cocaine by passing him what Mr. Simmons thought was marijuana. It’s an unfortunate taste that eventually ended his life.

On the other hand, Prince Philip won a reputation for his early efforts to help modernize the royal family’s image during a time of great change for Britain and the world, especially at the outset of Elizabeth’s reign in 1952. NBC noted that he also developed a reputation for the occasional brusque comment and crass, if not racist, jokes.

Philip helped bring the royals to life on television rather than through radio reports. He was the first member of the royal family to do a televised interview and he presented a show on a royal tour of the Commonwealth. He is also said to have had a hand in televising the queen’s coronation in 1953 and in organizing a groundbreaking 1969 television documentary about the family.

He championed causes that caught his imagination, and helped found the Royal Academy of Engineering, which promotes engineering excellence and education, and served as the first president of the World Wildlife Fund.

He created the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, a series of challenges to encourage young people to take up adventures in the outdoors, and had a hand in restoring both Windsor Castle after a devastating fire, and Westminster Abbey. He also promoted the use of the English language outside Britain in the years after the breakup of the British empire.

What’s more, he made the operations of the royal estates more efficient, according to royal biographer Ingrid Seward, who wrote “Prince Philip Revealed.”

NBC’s tales of his early life denotes adventure, crisis and military service. Born June 10, 1921, on the Greek island of Corfu, he was the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, and Princess Alice of Battenberg. Greece’s king, Philip’s uncle, was forced to abdicate when Philip was a baby, and the family fled to Paris, with Philip famously carried to safety in a crib made from an orange box.

At age 7, he moved to England, where he lived at Kensington Palace, now home to Prince William. Philip lived there with his paternal grandmother, Victoria Mountbatten, and later attended Gordonstoun, a boarding school in Scotland.

At 18, Philip joined the Royal Navy and graduated from the Britannia Royal Naval College as a top cadet. He saw active duty from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, and in 1945 at the end of World War II, he was in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrendered.

Prince Philip renounced his Greek royal title and became a British citizen. Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, also gave him a new title: the Duke of Edinburgh.

However, as tributes pour in for the two, the distinction between them is seen beyond royalty and entertainment. Prince Philip was a life fully lived, while DMX was a life cut short. But they’ll both be missed.

Many employers demand their employees’ fitness test results before their recruitment processes are completed. This is found in both private and public sectors and it is usually requested from all candidates irrespective of who they are or where they come from. In most cases, candidates that go for medical tests are sure of receiving their appointment letters because it is the last stage in recruitment procedures (even though it is never publicised). But that is not always the case because a question mark on the candidate’s medical result can cost him the job. This explains why some people do not hear from recruiters again after undergoing medical examinations.

There is nothing wrong with an employer trying to make sure that he recruited employees that are fit to work. Employing a person, whose health condition can prevent from putting his best, does not only put a strain on the company but also on the other staff members. For instance, I have found myself in an organisation, where a colleague always visited the hospital every other week for medical check-ups. To date, the nature of her illness is unknown because the management did its best to conceal that from us. But we were unhappy because of the strain caused by this person’s periodic absence. At a stage, many of us began to feel cheated because we were not given the same “freehand” given to this colleague. This will be the same case with other organisations, where a staff member could not do his or her job because of ill-health. So, employers should not be blamed for seeking fit staff.

However, there are some recruitment practices, regarding medical examinations, which should be discouraged. The first one, as implied above, is that some hospitals send candidates’ medical reports directly to recruiters. This is made worse by the fact that these recruiters may not contact the candidates to discuss their medical reports. They just contact the candidates with ‘good’ medical results and ignore the others. This means that recruiters have access to applicants’ medical history even though they are not medical practitioners. To crown it all, they leave candidates in the dark, especially those whose results deemed unfit to work. I know that these recruiters may argue that they wanted to prevent mutilations and forgery by asking hospitals to send results directly to them, but they can still find a way around it if they want to. From what I understand, people’s medical conditions are private. But because there is job scarcity, recruiters have field days intruding into these privacies.

Another thing that should be addressed is the content of the medical report. Some employers demand details of medical results, which I believe should not be so. For instance, some of them request candidates’ HIV, hepatitis, and STI status. They may have reasons for this (especially if the candidates will have direct contact with minors and invalids if recruited) but demanding for all these, I believe, infringes on the candidates’ rights. These employers can demand these candidates to carry out these tests but they should not expect to see the results in detail. What should be given to them are summaries of the test results.

Employers should understand job seekers have the right to privacy. As recruiters search for the right employees, they should desist from infringing on applicants’ rights in the process. Requesting for applicants’ medical tests is necessary; however, care should be taken to avoid abusing it.