'Live 8' global concerts put focus on Africa, poverty....
USAfrica The Newspaper, Houston,
CLASS
magazine
USAfricaonline.com
and The
Black Business Journal
Singers from U2's Bono to billionaire Bill Gates called for the
leaders of the world's wealthiest nations to relieve African poverty
at "Live 8'' concerts in London and nine other cities. About 200,000
people jammed 
into
London's Hyde Park on July 2 at the start of a week of music and
demonstrations to pressure heads of G-8 nations meeting July 6-8 in
Gleneagles, Scotland, to increase aid and debt relief to Africa and
also rewrite trade rules.
"This is our moment to stand up for what's right,'' U2 lead singer Bono told the audience in London. ``We can't fix every problem, but those we can, we must,'' he said, mentioning malaria, AIDS and deaths caused by dirty water. U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, host of the G-8 summit, is making African poverty reduction a focus of the meeting. Performers at ``Live 8'' -- including Paul McCartney, Cold Play, Madonna and REM -- want to raise popular awareness of the continent's economic deprivation.
The concerts will reach a potential global audience of 5.5 billion people through television, Internet and other media, organizer Bob Geldof said. They occur 20 years after the Live Aid concerts that Geldof also arranged to combat African poverty. Africa is the only continent to have become poorer in the last 25 years, according to the United Nations. More than 300 million Africans live on less than $1 a day, and less than half of children on the continent complete primary school. In the last 50 years, there have been 186 coups and 26 wars in Africa, with more than 7 million people killed, the UN says.
Geldof introduced Gates, the world's wealthiest person, to the stage in Hyde Park calling him ``one of our biggest supporters'' and saying Gates and his wife have contributed more than $5 billion toward poverty and disease reduction. "I believe that if you show people the problems, and you show them the solutions, they will be motivated to act,'' Gates said. "We know what to do. The generosity we are working for will save millions of lives.''
The London concert, the centerpiece of the day's performances, began with Paul McCartney and U2 singing the Beatles' ``Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'' The nine other concerts are taking place in cities including Philadelphia, Tokyo, Rome and Johannesburg. In Edinburgh, about 40 miles (60 kilometers) from Gleneagles, more than 120,000 people marched to demand action against global poverty, organizers of that event said. In an interview with Geldof broadcast in Europe on Viacom Inc.'s MTV network last night, Blair said the Scotland G-8 meeting could be a pivotal moment in alleviating African poverty, adding that effective leadership in African countries is also a key part of the solution. "We have a chance of making real progress,'' he said. ``Concern about development is in part what brought me into politics,'' and ``thirty years later I'm in a position to do something about it, so I feel I should.''
Blair hopes to double aid to Africa, to $50 billion, by 2010, following a report earlier this year by the Commission for Africa. Last month, finance ministers from the world's richest nations agreed to write off debt worth about $40 billion by the world's most impoverished countries, mostly in Africa. "Too many people are dying on one continent, and there will be eight men around a table on the 8th of July in Scotland who can put an end to that,'' Geldof said in the MTV interview.
Given the size of the "Live 8'' audience, Geldof said Blair will be able to tell other G-8 chiefs, "I come with the largest democratic mandate ever collected in the history of this planet to do this.'' The Hyde Park concert is the biggest-ever ticketed event in U.K. history. About 150,000 tickets were awarded through a text-message lottery, while 55,000 additional tickets to watch the event on big screens were given away this week. The park is closed to people not holding tickets for the first time in memory. About 25 musical acts are scheduled for the London concert, with a revolving stage to whisk bands on and off stage for their 15-minute sets. The concert has attracted criticism from some musicians, including singer Damon Albarn of the groups Blur and Gorillaz, that there are too few African artists at an event focusing on Africa. Geldof said that global popularity, not national origin, was the criterion to be invited to perform.
The July 2 concerts will be followed by a July 6 rally in Edinburgh and a final "Live 8'' concert in the Scottish capital. The G-8 countries consist of Britain, the U.S., France, Germany, Canada, Japan, Italy and Russia. Since 1975, the heads of state or government of the major industrial democracies have been meeting annually to deal with economic and political issues such as economic relations, energy and terrorism. By Charles Goldsmith in London/Bloomberg

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