Vigils were held around the world on Wednesday to mark the 30th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, as new extracts from his last interview show the former Beatle scoffed at fans who worshiped “dead heroes.”
From New York to Liverpool, Havana to Prague, fans gathered to lay flowers at memorials, sing classic Lennon songs like Imagine and light candles in memory of their idol.
In Tokyo, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono, who was with him when he was shot, marked the anniversary with a charity concert, saying the world still had so much to learn from his life and his songs.
PHOTO: AFP
“Today, on this painful anniversary, please join me in remembering John with deep love and respect,” she said in a Japanese-language tweet, as she prepared for the annual show.
Near the luxury Dakota apartment block in New York, where Lennon was shot four times in the back by a lone gunman in the evening of Dec. 8, 1980, hundreds of fans gathered at the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park.
“For me, he was the spirit of peace,” said Kaoru Shimizu, a Japanese woman who joined others who had arrived from around the world to mark the day here.
An Argentine couple at the vigil had arrived on their honeymoon in the city a day after Lennon was shot, and had returned on this cold, clear winter day with their family to pay respects.
“We’re so moved to be here, and lucky to be here with our three daughters, 30 years later,” Romulo Audenci said at the somber gathering, where fans sang classic Lennon tunes like Don’t Let Me Down and Eight Days a Week.
In the former Beatle’s hometown of Liverpool in northwest England, the focus of the memorials were the Peace and Harmony monument unveiled earlier this year in memory of Lennon, who died shortly after his 40th birthday.
Fans lit candles and sang songs to remember the life of one of the port city’s best-loved sons, whose songwriting relationship with Paul McCartney produced some classic songs.
“Despite his short, 40 years of life, he gave so much to the world. The world was blessed with fortune to have known John,” Ono said in a message on Twitter.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema