Nelly Furtado does the right thing, belatedly

While it's noble of Nelly Furtado to give to charity the million dollars she got for playing a 2007 concert for the Gadaffi family, perhaps the more pressing question is why she thought that playing the gig was the right thing to do in the first place.

Perhaps Furtado's defence might be that it feels wrong to keep the money now that Gadaffi's people are, say, calling for the slaughter of people who want political change.

But that was happening in 2007, says Amnesty:

Later that month, however, Mu'ammar al-Gaddafi urged his supporters to "kill enemies" if they asked for political change.

Perhaps it was the thought of unarmed protesters being gunned down in Benghazi that made Furtado feel the cash was tainted.

But in 2007 police opened fire on crowds outside the Italian consulate in the city, killing at least 12.

In February 2007, Amnesty warned that:

"Libyan authorities may have beaten and raped or sexually abused some [Eritrean] detainees, and some detainees may even have died in custody as a result of such torture or other ill-treatment."

Nelly's jolly little gig came around the same time that Gaddafi's state sentenced those Bulgarian nurses to death for "deliberately" infecting children with HIV.

It's strange that all of that didn't taint the money, but four years on Furtado has suddenly noticed a stench coming from all those dollars.