"I’ve always been against the ideas of rock stars lecturing people as if they know something the rest of us don’t - it looks arrogant.

"It’s not as if they have a private source of information. To state the obvious as if you are the only person that knows it is intellectually weak. Like Bono - he uses his celebrity, but in doing so he increases his celebrity. I’m never totally convinced that the rest of U2 feel comfortable with that."

Bono’s fireplace flap - May 17 2007
It’s a good job that Bono has a few homes to choose from, because his swanky Manhattan apartment has apparently been filling up with smoke.

The U2 front-man mustered his very best diplomacy skills when he was forced to let other occupants of his apartment building know that smoke from their fireplaces was wafting into his two-floor penthouse on the Upper West Side.

"Bono was so nice," Leni May, a fellow occupant of the luxury pre-war building told the New York Times.

"He said, ’Listen, whatever I can do to get these things working, but it’s emptying into my apartment and I can’t have smoke like that’," said Leni, adding that Bono told the building’s board members that one of his four children suffers from asthma.

According to the newspaper, the building’s residents, which include Dustin Hoffman and Diane Keaton, have been told not to use their fireplaces while the issue is looked in to.

A spokesperson for U2’s management company, Principle Management, confirmed the grievance, but said that the singer was simply raising a health and safety issue, not a personal complaint against his famous neighbours.

"This is not a Bono issue," said the spokesperson, "It’s a building issue. It’s about health and safety regulations."

Bono attacks world’s rich on Africa - May 16 2007
The world’s biggest industrial countries are failing to keep up with financial promises they made to Africa, rock star Bono has said, calling a new progress report "a cold shower" for the Group of Eight.

G8 members in 2004/06 contributed less than half the amount needed to make good their promises to double Africa aid to 50 billion dollars (£25 billion) by 2010.

That is according to a report released by Data - Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa - the Africa advocacy group founded by the 47-year-old lead singer of U2.

"The G8 are sleepwalking into a crisis of credibility. I know the Data report will feel like a cold shower, but I hope it will wake us all up," Bono said in Berlin.

Bono is urging German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who chairs a G8 summit in Germany next month, to ensure that members contribute what they said they would.

The report shows that the G8 increased aid by 2.3 billion dollars (£1.15 billion), but says they need to increase aid by an additional 3.1 billion dollars (£1.55 billion) to substantially help the people of Africa.

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