Names and faces
The music video for the No. 1 hit song “Despacito” has hit a record — it has become the most popular clip on YouTube of all time with more than 3 billion views. YouTube announced Friday that Luis Fonsi’s ubiquitous song with Daddy Yankee has surpassed previous record holder “See You Again,” the song by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth from the Furious 7 soundtrack. “Despacito” became an international smash hit this year, topping the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The record-breaking video does not include the popular remix with Justin Bieber; that version has been viewed more than 464 million times. The video is also the most “liked” video on YouTube. Former Vice President
Al Gore said he tried for months to persuade President Donald Trump to take climate change seriously — and thought there was a possibility that Trump would come around, until Trump announced that he would pull the United
States out of the Paris agreement in June. “I thought, actually, there was a chance he might come to his senses,” Gore told late-night television host and comedian Bill Maher. “But I was wrong.” Gore made an appearance Friday on HBO’s Real Time
with Bill Maher to promote his second documentary about the threat of climate change, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. His Power-Point-heavy first film,
An Inconvenient Truth, became a surprise hit when it came out in 2006 and is one of the highest-grossing documentaries in history. The two movies have bookended Gore’s efforts over the past decade to educate the public about climate change. Gore told Maher that, yes, he had visited Trump Tower in December at the invitation of Ivanka Trump to talk to the then-president-elect about climate change — and that the “conversation continued after he went into the White House.” Though his efforts would prove to be fruitless, Gore said he was heartened by at least one development that followed Trump withdrawing from the Paris agreement. “When he made his speech pulling out of Paris, I really was concerned that some other countries might use that as an excuse to pull out themselves,” Gore told Maher. “But the very next day, the entire rest of the world redoubled their commitment to the Paris agreement, as if to say, ‘We’ll show you, Mr. Trump.’”