Band Aid 30: Stars unite for recording session

LONDON: -- Stars including One Direction, Emeli Sande, Rita Ora and Ed Sheeran have recorded a new version of the Band Aid charity single in a studio in London.

Ellie Goulding, Sam Smith, Chris Martin and Bono also sang on the reworked Do They Know It's Christmas?

Sande said the participants "sounded like a really powerful choir" when they sang the chorus together.

The recording, which comes 30 years after the original Band Aid, will raise money for the fight against Ebola.

The UK government has agreed to waive VAT on the single.

Organiser Bob Geldof, who also masterminded the original in 1984, said he addressed the participants "like the headmaster" before they sang the chorus.

Read More: http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-30061576

-- BBC 2014-11-15

More people will die this winter in the UK from the cold that will die from Ebola, and yet these 'pop stars' don't go off to record a single for them.

Bob Geldolf calls and they all go running - plus, a bit of publicity won't do any harm.

The song was bad enough first time around, 30 years later and I still will not be buying it

Should be interesting to see if anyway close to the original vocal wise

More people will die this winter in the UK from the cold that will die from Ebola, and yet these 'pop stars' don't go off to record a single for them.

Bob Geldolf calls and they all go running - plus, a bit of publicity won't do any harm.

The song was bad enough first time around, 30 years later and I still will not be buying it

I won't be buying this lame piece of publicity crap either, Geldof can go stick his head up his own stupid ass! The man is mentally retarded, he needs to focus on his own retarded life / family first. Peaches, Fifi and Tinkerbell, not to mention that old slag Paula Yates. Get your own house in order Bob you senile old fool, you son of a banker who's own father probably caused a lot more misery than Ebola ever did!

Let us see just what "Help" the first piece of junk did for Africa...absolutely NOTHING, let us see where the money went from these self promoting creeps, in fact let us see if the money could nor be spent better in helping kids in their home country's before wasting it year after year, decade after decade on a society that is incapable of change, a society rife with corruption.

The UK is struggling with the NHS and looking after its own citizens, would their efforts not be better spent there? Cancer research? rather than just pouring it down the drain to these corrupt governments. Has anyone ever done a breakdown of where the original Band Aid cash went and if it actually benefitted anyone? I recall somewhere around the time of the original release the UK confiscated a shipment of Johnny Walker that was destined for the filth of a government somewhere over there while their own people were starving.

Obviously donating to the failing NHS does not get the same publicity as helping the great unwashed of Africa, the West has been sending Billions to these people for the past 40 years that I can remember (When I was a kid and wasted some food my mother would always say " Those kids in Africa would be glad of that" - She never posted the food though!) What benefits has it had for the locals? Nothin whatsoever, it just feeds the egos of like Geldof, Stink, and Bonio.

Maybe they could send a few thousand bucks to Boko Harem to stop killing kids and start recording another version of " A Whiter Shade Of Pale" - what turns a peace loving band into murdering 200 schoolgirls? Were they mad that Lynyrd Skynyrd caught the wrong flight?

LONDON: -- Stars including One Direction, Emeli Sande, Rita Ora and Ed Sheeran have recorded a new version of the Band Aid charity single in a studio in London.

Ellie Goulding, Sam Smith, Chris Martin and Bono also sang on the reworked Do They Know It's Christmas?

Who are they then?

A friend sent me this a couple of weeks ago.

It just about sums up how I feel.

Kevin Myers (born 30 March 1947) is an Irish journalist and writer. He writes for the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, having previously been a columnist for the Irish Independent and a former contributor to The Irish Times, where he wrote the "An Irishman's Diary" opinion column several times weekly. Until 2005, he wrote for the UK Sunday Telegraph. His articles criticise left-wing opinion and the "liberal consensus", sometimes incorporating hyperbole,sarcasm and parody. This essay recently appeared in The Irish Independent:

Somalia is not a humanitarian disaster; it is an evolutionary disaster. The current drought is not the worst in 50 years, as the BBC and all the aid organisations claim. It is nothing compared to the droughts in 1960/61 or 73/74. And there are continuing droughts every 5 years or so. It's just that there are now four times the population; having been kept alive by famine relief, supplied by aid organisations, over the past 50 years. So, of course, the effects of any drought now, is a famine. They cannot even feed themselves in a normal rainfall year.

Worst yet, the effects of these droughts, and poor nutrition in the first 3 years of the a child's life, have a lasting effect on the development of the infant brain, so that if they survive, they will never achieve a normal IQ … Consequently, they are selectively breeding a population, who cannot be educated , let alone one that is not being educated; a recipe for disaster

We are seeing this impact now, and it can only exacerbate, to the detriment of their neighbours, and their environment as well. This scenario can only end in an even worse disaster; with even worse suffering, for those benighted people, and their descendants. Eventually, some mechanism will intervene, be it war, disease or starvation.

So what do we do? Let them starve?

What a dilemma for our Judeo/ Christian/Islamic Ethos; as well as Hindu/Buddhist morality. And this is beginning to happen in Kenya, Ethiopia, and other countries in Asia, like Pakistan. Is this the beginning of the end of civilisation?

AFRICA is giving nothing to anyone outside Africa -- apart from AIDS and new diseases. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the Begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us out of Africa, yet again.

It is nearly 25 years since the famous Feed The World campaign began in Ethiopia, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78+ million today. So, why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none.

To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn't count. One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of children starving.

Sorry, my conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there.

The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a low IQ, AK 47-bearing moron, siring children whenever the whim takes him and blaming the world because he is uneducated, poor and left behind. There is no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system but I do not know what it is.

There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column like this. It will win no friends and will provoke the self-righteous wrath of, well, the self-righteous hand wringing, letter writing wrathful individuals; a species which never fails to contaminate almost every debate in Irish life with its sneers and its moral superiority. It will also probably enrage some of the finest men in Irish life, like John O'Shea, of Goal; and the Finucane brothers, men whom I admire enormously.

So be it.

But, please, please, you self-righteously wrathful, spare me mention of our own Irish Famine, with this or that lazy analogy. There is no comparison. Within 20 years of the Famine, the Irish population was down by 30%. Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules plane, Ethiopia's population has more than doubled.

Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness. Somewhere, over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent, AK 47-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts and housing pirates of the ocean. Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive, illiterate indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world or allowances by the semi-communist Governments they voted for, money supplied by borrowing it from the World Bank!

This dependency has not stimulated political prudence or commonsense. Indeed, voodoo idiocy seems to be in the ascendant, with the president of South Africa being a firm believer in the efficacy of a little tap water on the post-coital penis as a sure preventative against AIDS infection.

Needless to say, poverty, hunger and societal meltdown have not prevented idiotic wars involving Tigre, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea etcetera.

Broad brush-strokes, to be sure. But broad brush-strokes are often the way that history paints its gaudier, if more decisive, chapters. Japan, China, Russia, Korea, Poland, Germany, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 20th century have endured worse broad brush-strokes than almost any part of Africa. They are now -- one way or another -- virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

Meanwhile, Africa's peoples are outstripping their resources, and causing catastrophic ecological degradation. By 2050, the population of Ethiopia will be 177 million; the equivalent of France, Germany and Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly Protein-free wastelands of the Great Rift Valley.

So, how much sense does it make for us actively to increase the adult population of what is already a vastly over-populated, environmentally devastated and economically dependent country?

How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them?

Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity!

But that is not good enough. For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed. It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating. If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts.

Oh good: then what? I know, let them all come here (to Ireland) or America. not forgetting Australia!)

Yes, that's an idea.

As Geldof said: you don't have to like this record,just get out and buy it! you have got to admire this guy,spoken from a man who has had his fair share of lifes tradgedies!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-30074650

^^^^^^,

Maybe if Sir Bob and his tax dodging chums actually put their hands in their pockets and handed over some of their wealth, they might gain some credibility.

As it stands its nothing more than an exercise in self promotion and gratitude.

The hypocrisy stinks from here to E Bola land and back.

Maybe Sir Bob could post up some accounts of his first venture into Africa, how much dissapeared into the back pockets of corrupt gov'ts or was was wasted on the bloated salaries of these administrators.

Tell the Pikey tawat to get a hair cut, the man is nothing more than a gobshyte, a total pleb.

A course in English language wouldnt go amiss, Sir Bob, I have often found, if you lack the vocabulary to express yourself, please dont resort to expletives, you only confirm what a tozzer you are.

I'm donating 5 quid if Bob and Midge were not to release another painful version.

Another thing, I very much doubt the vast majority of funds actually arrive to where they are intended. In fact, I'll bet my life on it.

I'm donating 5 quid if Bob and Midge were not to release another painful version.

Another thing, I very much doubt the vast majority of funds actually arrive to where they are intended. In fact, I'll bet my life on it.

Corrupt African leaders are already setting up PayPal accounts to get rid of their ill gotten wealth.

The same leaders are already setting up humanitarian supply trucks that can only be sourced from them at a rent of $$$$$ per day, payable to their wifes account overseas.