Names and faces
British singer Marcus Mumford held a moment of silence before performing at the Manchester benefit concert Sunday. The leader of rock band Mumford & Sons then sang “Timshel” while strumming his guitar at the One Love Manchester concert, held at the city’s Old Trafford cricket ground. The song includes the lyrics: “But you are not alone in this, and you are not alone in this, as brothers we will stand and we’ll hold your hand.” Sunday’s concert raised money for the victims of a suicide bombing that struck at the end of singer Ariana Grande’s last show nearly two weeks ago. The May 22 attack at Grande’s Manchester concert killed 22 and wounded dozens more. The pop singer visited young fans injured in the attack at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital on Friday. Grande, who also was to perform Sunday, was to be joined by performers including Justin Bieber, Coldplay, Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, Usher and the Black Eyed Peas. The concert came the day after attackers targeted the heart of London, killing at least seven people. Authorities have said the attack started with a van plowing into pedestrians and then involved three men using large knives to attack people in bars and restaurants at a nearby market. Grande’s manager, Scooter Braun, said Sunday that the concert would go on as planned. He called the event a “statement that hatred and fear will never win.”
Alisyn Camerota, a CNN anchor, became the target of rebuke for assuming that the 2017 national spelling champion is “used to using” Sanskrit. Camerota and anchor Chris Cuomo were talking to Ananya Vinay, 12, who is of South Asian descent, on New Day after Ananya’s victory Thursday at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Toward the end of the interview — and after asking the sixth-grader to spell “covfefe” — Camerota joked about the origin of the gibberish that President Donald Trump posted on Twitter last week. “It’s a nonsense word. So, we’re not sure that its root is actually in Sanskrit, which is what you’re probably, uh, used to using, so, I don’t know. Anyway,” Camerota said. Vinay, an Indian American, is from Fresno. Criticism of Camerota’s comment has since been circulating on social media. Many said her comment was racist, while others were simply in disbelief that the CNN anchor had made such an assumption. CNN has not responded to a request for comment. Sanskrit, a language closely associated with Hinduism, greatly influenced Indian languages as well as languages in China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the Philippines. The origin of some English words also can be traced back to the ancient language. Sanskrit, rarely spoken today, is generally used by Hindu priests during religious ceremonies, but activists and Hindu nationalists in India still push for the language to be more widely taught in schools.