Word: geldof
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Twenty years ago, the notion of Bono as a political player was almost unimaginable. In 1985, U2 played Live Aid, the Bob Geldof-- organized concert for African famine relief. At the time, it was hailed as a massive success, and in the sense that it got people to briefly engage with another part of the world while watching Tina Turner dance with Mick Jagger, it was. After the concert, Bono and his wife Ali Hewson spent six weeks working at an orphanage in Wello, Ethiopia. The weight of famine, war and corruption--as well as the resentment many capable Africans...
...Lucy Matthew, another Brit from the nonprofit world, who would meet him wherever U2 was playing and open a policy desk at the local Kinko's. "He told us he was in this cause for life," says Matthew, "and it was time to become a real organization." Bob Geldof, one of Bono's closest friends, came up with the name DATA, a double acronym meant to position the group as a nexus between the nonprofit development world (debt, AIDS, trade, Africa) and the results-oriented political world (democracy, accountability, transparency in Africa.) The name was also directed inward: no wishful...
...would fall almost precisely on the 20th anniversary of Live Aid, and Bono wanted a concert to prove how far the movement had come. Bob Geldof "didn't want to repeat himself," says Bono, but six weeks before the summit he hit upon the idea of staging free concerts in each G-8 country. After a frenzy of persuasion, cities were lined up, sponsors found and bands, many of which already had concerts scheduled for the day, were persuaded to divert from their itineraries and play for free. "Charm, handsomeness and the fact that [Bono] wrote Where the Streets Have...
...July 8, the leaders agreed to cancel the debt of the 18 poorest African countries and to increase aid by $50 billion by 2010. But some activists say it's not nearly enough. Dr. Kumi Naidoo, the South African who chaired Make Poverty History's international umbrella, felt that Geldof--who called the debt deal a "10 out of 10"--was too exuberant and pointed out that all the deal meant was that 50,000, the number of people dying unnecessarily each day, would drop to 37,000. Naidoo's skepticism underlines the limits of Bono's approach: all that...
Jolie is just a woman of her time. 2005 will go down as the year of charitainment. The networks broadcast celebrity telethons for both tsunami and Hurricane Katrina aid. Bono and Bob Geldof organized the Live 8 concerts with the help of screenwriter Richard Curtis (Love Actually), who wrote HBO's The Girl in the Café, the world's first romantic comedy about African debt relief. (As propaganda goes, it was at least a better date flick than Triumph of the Will.) Even celebrity cartoons were pressed into service. UNICEF blew the Smurfs into little blue smithereens for a commercial...