Clooney’s $1M fights war crimes
George Clooney has donated $1 million to combat war crimes and corruption in Africa. The Clooney Foundation for Justice on Wednesday announced the gift to the Sentry, an investigative initiative Clooney co-founded to uncover the financial networks behind conflicts in Africa. Clooney said the group’s focus is “to make sure war crimes don’t pay.” Clooney’s grant was added to several others, including one from actor Don Cheadle, totalling $3.45 million. The Sentry said the money will help fund reports in the coming year on “state looting and illicit financial flows out of the war-torn countries of South Sudan, Sudan, Congo, Somalia and the Central African Republic.”
Walk of Fame adds members
Six more names will be added to Canada’s Walk of Fame next month. Two-time Olympic gold medallist and three-time world champion Donovan Bailey is among those who will be inducted at an annual awards gala in Toronto on Nov. 15. Actress Anna Paquin, the youngest Canadian to have won an Academy Award, will also receive a star, as will science broadcaster and environmental activist David Suzuki. Several people are receiving posthumous honours, including Viola Desmond, the civil rights pioneer whose face will grace the new $10 bill, and Ted Rogers, the late president and CEO of Rogers Communications Inc. Canadian folk icon Stompin’ Tom Connors, who died in 2013, will also be inducted.
Concert helping fire relief efforts
Metallica and Dave Matthews are set to headline a wildfire relief concert in San Francisco next month. Metallica, which calls the Bay Area home, has joined with Matthews and Oakland rapper G-Eazy to form the Band Together Bay Area coalition to raise relief money for victims of the wildfires, which have killed more than 40 people and caused at least $1 billion in damage. The concert will take place at AT&T Park on Nov. 9. The coalition says all of the money raised by ticket sales will go to a fund for “low-income, vulnerable populations displaced by the destruction.”
Sixth looted painting named
German officials say they have identified a sixth work from the art trove accumulated by the late collector Cornelius Gurlitt as having been looted by the Nazis. The German Lost Art Foundation said Wednesday researchers determined that the Portrait of a Seated Young Woman by Thomas Couture belonged to Georges Mandel, a Jewish French politician murdered in 1944.