Stevie Wonder on Saturday knelt before a packed New York festival in a protest for peace as he led stars and politicians in pressing for sustained aid to eliminate the world’s worst poverty.
On a balmy late summer night, thousands converged on Central Park for the live-broadcast Global Citizen Festival, which hands out tickets for free to fans who take actions such as petitioning their governments to support development assistance.
With US President Donald Trump proposing sweeping aid cuts, the concert had set a goal of building political momentum in the world’s largest donor nation.
Wonder took the stage and knelt, emulating a gesture popularized by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick during the national anthem to denounce racial injustice. Trump on Friday angrily denounced such protests, using profanity to demand that teams fire the athletes.
“Tonight, I’m taking a knee for America,” the blind soul legend said as took to the ground, his son Kwame Morris clutching his arm.
Wonder also voiced worry over the increasingly personal venom between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“We could lose the ultimate video game — of life — losing sight that weapons are real, and rhetoric is dangerous, whether it be from a superpower in North America or a superpower in North Korea,” Wonder said.
Wonder jammed through more than an hour of his best-loved songs before turning his ever-powerful belting voice to the 1985 charity singalong We Are the World as well as Imagine, the peace anthem by John Lennon, who was assassinated a short stroll away.
The 67-year-old Wonder closed by bringing up a visibly star-struck Pharrell Williams, singing together a funk-heavy take of Get Lucky, which Williams co-wrote for Daft Punk, as well as the younger artist’s ode to optimism Happy.
The diverse but heavy-hitting lineup also featured chart-topping electronic duo The Chainsmokers, rising soul star Andra Day, folk rockers The Lumineers and young Canadian pop songwriter Alessia Cara — who, in a feat of organization, also performed on Saturday in Toronto at the Invictus Games for wounded soldiers and veterans.
Punk rock greats Green Day injected politics as well, with frontman Billie Joe Armstrong weaving Trump into the lyrics of American Idiot, the band’s high-octane 2004 indictment of US media culture.
Green Day turned down the volume for a second set of Wake Me Up When September Ends and Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life), set to a slideshow from UNICEF to show the still severe human impact of AIDS.
French President Emmanuel Macron addressed the festival by video, promising to help raise more than US$1 billion for the Global Partnership for Education before a Feb. 8 conference in Senegal.
The partnership has a goal of US$3.1 billion in funding for next year through 2020, of which US$2 billion has already been committed.
Danish Minister for Development Cooperation Ulla Tornaes told the festival that her government would next year double to US$110 million its international funding for women’s sexual and reproductive health.
“When some countries stop fighting for women’s rights, we intensify ours,” she said to applause.
US Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican, said that Global Citizen had triggered about 400,000 calls to the US Congress to preserve aid — and voiced hope the pressure would work.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
RSS