Jane Fonda brings climate-change fight to LA ahead of Oscars
Associated Press | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 6 years, 7 months AGO
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Two days ahead of the Academy Awards, two-time Oscar winner Jane Fonda brought her Fire Drill Friday campaign against global warming to Los Angeles on Friday, demanding a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions over the next 10 years.
The rally, which drew a crowd of a few hundred to the steps of City Hall, was the 15th that Fonda has held since last fall. The first 14 were in Washington, D.C., where she and others were arrested multiple times.
“We marched together and we protested together and chanted and sang together and we got arrested together," the 82-year-old actress, dressed in a bright red jacket and red hat, told the crowd. “The purpose was to raise awareness of the urgency of the climate crisis.”
Friday's rally took place just as pre-Oscar events were kicking off all over town, but Fonda, a best actress winner for the films “Klute” and “Coming Home,” never mentioned the ceremony.
Instead, she said she was excited to be home in Los Angeles because California, plagued by wildfires and drought in recent years, "is the front line of the crisis."
Her audience, largely quiet until she took the microphone, ranged in age from young to old, with many carrying signs supporting the cause.
Fonda, a prominent activist since her early 1970s opposition to the Vietnam War, asked the crowd to demand among other things a 50% reduction in fossil fuel emissions over the next 10 years. She wants that followed by a phaseout of the fossil fuel infrastructure over the rest of the century.
ARTICLES BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
Hong Kong police arrest 4 from university student union
HONG KONG (AP) — Four members of a Hong Kong university student union were arrested Wednesday for allegedly advocating terrorism by paying tribute to a person who stabbed a police officer and then killed himself, police said.
For South Sudan mothers, COVID-19 shook a fragile foundation
JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Paska Itwari Beda knows hunger all too well. The young mother of five children — all of them under age 10 — sometimes survives on one bowl of porridge a day, and her entire family is lucky to scrape together a single daily meal, even with much of the money Beda makes cleaning offices going toward food. She goes to bed hungry in hopes her children won’t have to work or beg like many others in South Sudan, a country only a decade old and already ripped apart by civil war.
For South Sudan mothers, COVID-19 shook a fragile foundation
JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Paska Itwari Beda knows hunger all too well. The young mother of five children — all of them under age 10 — sometimes survives on one bowl of porridge a day, and her entire family is lucky to scrape together a single daily meal, even with much of the money Beda makes cleaning offices going toward food. She goes to bed hungry in hopes her children won’t have to work or beg like many others in South Sudan, a country only a decade old and already ripped apart by civil war.