The 2018 BET Awards barely handed out any trophies with big stars like Cardi B, Drake and Kendrick Lamar absent, but the show included superior performances by rising singer H.E.R., rapper Meek Mill and gospel artist Yolanda Adams, who paid tribute to Anita Baker and nearly brought her to tears.

Baker, an eight-time Grammy winner who dominated the R&B charts from the early ’80s to mid-90s, earned the Lifetime Achievement Award on Sunday at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.

The 60-year-old used her speech to encourage the artists in the room to keep music alive.

“I would ask that the music be allowed to play, that singers are allowed to sing, and rappers are allowed to rap, and poets are allowed to rhyme,” said Baker, who also was honored by host Jamie Foxx, Ledisi and Marsha Ambrosius.

H.E.R., whose real name is Gabi Wilson, was impressive as she sang the R&B hit “Focus,” played the electric guitar like a rock star and sang softly during the sweet love song “Best Part,” where she was joined by Daniel Caesar.

Meek Mill, who was released from prison in April, rapped the song “Stay Woke” on a stage transformed into a street corner, featuring hustlers, children and police officers. A mother screams as her child is shot during the powerful performance, and an officer lays an American flag over the body.

Meek Mill also made a statement by wearing a hoodie featuring the face of XXXTentacion, the 20-year-old rapper-singer who died after being shot last week.

“We can’t get used to these types of things. We’re too used to young people getting killed,” Foxx said when speaking about XXXTentacion later in the show.

The Oscar winner told the audience to “try to sneak a message in” their music.

“We got to figure something out,” he said.

Snoop Dogg celebrated 25 years in music, performing the classic songs “What’s My Name” and “Next Episode.” The rapper also performed songs from his recently released gospel album, wearing a choir robe on a stage that looked like a church.

Childish Gambino, whose song and music video “This Is America” tackles racism and gun violence and became a viral hit last month, gave a short, impromptu performance of the song when Foxx brought him onstage.

“Everybody begged me to do a joke about that song. I said that song should not be joked about,” Foxx said.

Foxx kicked off the show rejoicing in the uber success of “Black Panther,” namedropping the records the film has broken and even pulled Michael B. Jordan onstage to recite a line from the film.

“We don’t need a president right now because we got our king,” Foxx said of T’Challa. “(Director) Ryan Coogler gave us our king.”

Foxx entered the arena with a stuffed black panther toy – with a gold chain around its neck – which he handed to Jordan. The film won best movie.

“The film is about our experiences being African-Americans and also captures the experiences of being African,” Coogler said. “It was about tapping into the voice that tells us to be proud of who we are.”

At the end of his speech he told the audience to travel to Africa and learn more about the continent’s history.

SZA, who was the most nominated woman at this year’s Grammys, won best new artist and said she’s “never won anything in front of other people.”

She dedicated the award to those “lost in the world,” saying: “Follow your passion … believe in yourself.”

After the show, BET announced that Kendrick Lamar had won best album for “DAMN.” and best male hip-hop artist. Beyonce won best female pop/R&B artist, while Bruno Mars was named the best male pop/R&B artist.

“Girls Trip” star and comedian Tiffany Haddish, who won best actress and gave her speech in a taped video, also said encouraging words.

“You can achieve anything you want in life,” she said.

DJ Khaled was the leading nominee with six and picked up the first award of the night – best collaboration – for “Wild Thoughts” with Rihanna and Bryson Tiller. He was holding his son on his hip onstage and also used his speech to highlight young people.

“All of y’all are leaders and all of y’all are kings and queens – the future,” he said.

Migos won best group and gave a fun performance that even had Adams reciting the lyrics. J. Cole, Nicki Minaj, Janelle Monae, Miguel, YG, 2 Chainz and Big Sean also performed.

The BET Awards normally hands its Humanitarian Award to one person, but six individuals received the honor Sunday. Dubbed “Humanitarian Heroes,” the network gave awards to James Shaw Jr., who wrestled an assault-style rifle away from a gunman in a Tennessee Waffle House in April; Anthony Borges, the 15-year-old student who was shot five times and is credited with saving the lives of at least 20 other students during February massacre in Florida; Mamoudou Gassama, who scaled an apartment building to save a child dangling from a balcony last month in Paris; Naomi Wadler, an 11-year-old who gave a memorable and influential speech at March for Our Lives; Justin Blackman, the only student to walk out of his high school in North Carolina during the nationwide student walkout to protest gun violence in March; and journalist and activist Shaun King.

Debra Lee, who stepped down as chairman and CEO of BET last month after 32 years at the network, earned the Ultimate Icon Award.

“The power of black culture is unmatched. It’s beautiful. It’s amazing. It’s everything. It’s us,” she said.

She ended her speech quoting former U.S. President Barack Obama, calling him “our commander in chief,” which drew loud applause.

“And, it’s Debra Lee, out,” she said as she dropped her imaginary microphone.
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Latin American countries have sprung a World Cup surprise by filling Russia’s 11 host cities with tens of thousands of fans from Mexico and Colombia to Peru and Argentina.

And some of the Europeans who did show up said their friends back home told them they were crazy to go.

The contrasting cast of supporters at the biggest event in sport reflects Russia’s progressive creep away from Europe in the 18 years of President Vladimir Putin’s rule.

Moscow is now embracing new allies that happen to worship football and where damning — and often exaggerated — media stories about Russian hooligans and poisoning cases are rare.

This mix and the added ingredient of a more evenly spread-out global middle-class with the means to travel the world has the streets of Russia dancing to a decidedly Latin beat.

“We didn’t expect it to be this beautiful and the people are amazing,” Mauricio Miranda said as she waved a Colombian flag on the edge of Red Square in Moscow.

“We will definitely come back,” said the 30-year-old.

Belgian public relations consultant Jo De Munter does not necessarily disagree. It is his friends who do.

“I think Europeans are a bit afraid,” the 46-year-old said while staring in the direction of Lenin’s Mausoleum.

“In Belgium, everybody told me I was crazy to go to the football.”

By the numbers

World Cups come in all shapes and sizes and comparing ticket sales rarely tells the whole tale.

Europeans and Latin Americans are naturally more inclined to attend World Cups held in their regions because of the easier travel arrangements and familiarity.

South Africa in 2010 may provide a better example because it was a frontier football country with specific security and logistical risks.

Yet FIFA figures showed almost 50 percent more Britons bought tickets for the African continent’s first World Cup than this maiden one in eastern Europe.

Australians were in third place then but are just ninth in Russia.

Germany and England bought the fourth- and fifth-most number of tickets. France was ninth.

But France dropped out of the top 10 in Russia while Britain slipped down to last place. Germany remained fourth.

The United States has long led purchases among non-hosting countries because of its massive economy and large communities from football-mad Mexico and other Central American communities.

Taking the US out of the equation leaves Latin Americans accounting for two-thirds of the top 10 countries that have bought tickets for Russia.

Safety net

Fans banging Mexican drums and sporting the red-and-white bodypaint of the Peruvian flag encountered on a Moscow summer’s day were almost all big city office workers.

Colombia’s Miranda is an urban planner with a new job in Canada.

Alexandro Grado is a former financial consultant with Mexico’s Citibanamex who now owns a plastics recycling firm.

“Going to Russia is not expensive if you buy everything ahead of time,” Grado said.

Yet not all fans can afford to go bar hopping near the Kremlin and sociologists who study the sport say this is where Latin American football federations come in.

“There are national teams which have very strong organizational support behind them. Argentina in 2010 was one example,” said Ludovic Lestrelin of France’s Universite de Caen in Normandy.

Lestrelin said less well-off fans in Europe get far less travel and accommodation assistance from state agencies and are increasingly more likely to stay home and watch on TV.

This means Europeans attending World Cups tend to be richer than the average football fan. The traveling Latin Americans are more likely to come from all types of backgrounds.

“Those who travel to Russia and other places do not reflect the social makeup of French stadiums,” said Lestrelin.

“Those (in France) are more diverse, with a central core of lower and middle class workers.”

Zbigniew Iwanowski of the Institute of Latin American Studies in Moscow said Russia is further reaping the rewards of a “pink tide” that brought anti-US leaders power across the continent.

“The pendulum has swung back to the right but they still have (Russian state media) like Sputnik and RT,” Iwanowski said.

“Russia’s image is better in Latin America than it is in Europe and US.”

‘Not properly European’

Few would argue that Russia generates a lot of negative headlines in Europe in general and Britain in particular.

But the media’s role in shaping public opinion — and the reverse — is all but impossible to gauge.

What is clear is that at least some of the Europeans who ventured to Moscow and beyond did so with a degree of trepidation the voyagers from Latin America lacked.

De Munter said he often travels to watch Belgium play abroad. Rarely has he seen the national team’s support so small.

“We are expecting 4,000 Belgian people, which is not that much. Especially now because the Red Devils are doing very well.”

Gherardo Drardanelli flew in from Italy to take part in one of the fan tournaments organised alongside the World Cup.

“I think our concept of Russia — we feel that Russia is far away, that it’s not a properly European country,” the 28-year-old said. 
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Donald Hall, a prolific, award-winning poet and man of letters widely admired for his sharp humor and painful candor about nature, mortality, baseball and the distant past, has died at age 89.

Hall’s daughter, Philippa Smith, confirmed Sunday that her father died Saturday at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, after being in hospice care for some time. 

“He’s really quite amazingly versatile,” said Hall’s long-time friend Mike Pride, the editor emeritus of the Concord Monitor newspaper and a retired administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. He said Hall would occasionally speak to reporters at the Monitor about the importance of words. 

Hall was the nation’s 2006-2007 poet laureate.

Starting in the 1950s, Hall published more than 50 books, from poetry and drama to biography and memoirs, and edited a pair of influential anthologies. He was an avid baseball fan who wrote odes to his beloved Boston Red Sox, completed a book on pitcher Dock Ellis and contributed to Sports Illustrated. He wrote a prize-winning children’s book, “Ox-Cart Man,” and even attempted a biography of Charles Laughton, only to have his actor’s widow, Elsa Lanchester, kill the project. 

But the greatest acclaim came for his poetry, for which his honors included a National Book Critics Circle prize, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a National Medal of Arts. Although his style varied from haikus to blank verse, he returned repeatedly to a handful of themes: his childhood, the death of his parents and grandparents and the loss of his second wife and fellow poet, Jane Kenyon. 

“Much of my poetry has been elegiac, even morbid, beginning with laments over New Hampshire farms and extending to the death of my wife,” he wrote in the memoir “Packing the Boxes,” published in 2008. 

In person, he at times resembled a 19th century rustic with his untrimmed beard and ragged hair. And his work reached back to timeless images of his beloved, ancestral New Hampshire home, Eagle Pond Farm, built in 1803 and belonging to his family since the 1860s. He kept country hours for much of his working life, rising at 6 and writing for two hours. 

For Hall, the industrialized, commercialized world often seemed an intrusion, like a neon sign along a dirt road. In the tradition of T.S. Eliot and other modernists, he juxtaposed classical and historical references with contemporary slang and brand names. In “Building a House,” he begins with the drafters of the U.S. Constitution leaving Philadelphia, then shifts the setting to the 20th century. 

___ 

Some delegates hitched rides chatting with teamsters 

some flew standby and wandered stoned in O’Hare 

or borrowed from King Alexander’s National Bank. 

____ 

An opponent of the Vietnam War whose taxes were audited year after year, he was also ruthlessly self-critical. Nakedly, even abjectly, he recorded his failures and shortcomings and disappointments, whether his infidelities or his struggles with alcoholism. 

The joy and tragedy of his life were his years with Kenyon, his second wife. They met in 1969, when she was his student at the University of Michigan. By the mid-70s, they were married and living together at Eagle Creek, fellow poets enjoying a fantasy of mind and body – of sex, work and homemaking. 

“We sleep, we make love, we plant a tree, we walk up and down/eating lunch,” he wrote. 

But Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia and died 18 months later, in 1995, when she was only 47. Even as he found new lovers – and sought them compulsively – Hall never stopped mourning her and arranged to be buried next to her, beneath a headstone inscribed with lines from one of her poems: “I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART, BUT WHAT PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU BESIDE ME?” 

In the 1998 collection “Without,” and in many poems after, he reflected on her dying days, on the shock of outliving a woman so many years younger, and the lasting bewilderment of their dog Gus, who years later was still looking for her. In “Rain,” he bitterly summarized his efforts to help her. 

___ 

I never belittled her sorrows or joshed at her dreads and miseries 

How admirable I found myself. 

____ 

Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928, but soon favored Eagle Pond to the “blocks of six-room houses” back home. By age 14, he had decided to become a poet, inspired after a conversation with a fellow teen versifier who declared, “It is my profession.” 

“I had never heard anyone speak so thrilling a sentence,” Hall remembered. 

He published poetry while a struggling student at Phillips Exeter Academy and formed many lasting literary friendships at Harvard University, including with fellow poets Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich and with George Plimpton, for whom he later served as the first poetry editor at The Paris Review. He also met Daniel Ellsberg and would suspect well before others that the anonymous leaker of the Vietnam War documents known as the Pentagon Papers was his old college friend. 

After graduating from Harvard, Hall studied at the University of Oxford and became one of the few Americans to win the Newdigate Prize, a poetry honor founded at Oxford and previously given to Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin and other British writers. He returned to the states in the mid-1950s and taught at several schools, including Stanford University at Bennington College. He was married to Kirby Thompson from 1952-69, and they had two children. 

Hall’s first literary hero was Edgar Allan Poe and death was an early subject. He completed his debut collection, “Exiles and Marriages,” between visits to his ailing father, who died at the end of 1955. In the poem “Snow,” Hall confesses, “Like an old man/whatever I touch I turn/to the story of death.” 

In recent years, as Hall entered the “planet of antiquity,” many of his elegies were for himself. He worried that “anthologies dropped him out/Poetry festivals never invited him.” He pictured himself awaking “mournful,” dressed in black pajamas. He warned that a story with a happy ending had not really ended, but advised that we leave behind a story to tell. 

“Work, love, build a house, and die,” he wrote. “But build a house.”
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