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Tens of thousands of people braved heavy rain and thunder Saturday night to see Paul McCartney perform a charity concert on Kiev’s central Independence Square.

The outdoor show, the first in Ukraine for the former Beatle, was billed as the biggest concert ever in the former Soviet republic. It was broadcast live on national television and on giant screens in five cities.

After a half-hour delay because of the weather, McCartney, who turns 66 next week, came out on the stage and greeted the crowd in Ukrainian, before diving into the Beatles hit “Drive My Car.”

Before the concert, fans in five major cities sang Beatles songs in a live TV linkup with the capital.

The square where McCartney played was the site of the Orange Revolution in 2004, when peaceful mass protests overturned a fraudulent election and brought a pro-Western opposition leader to power.

Organizers said the money raised will be spent on diagnostic equipment for Ukraine’s National Cancer Institute’s children’s department. Many children now seek treatment abroad because Ukraine lacks the necessary equipment.

The concert was free but the organizers were asking for donations from Ukrainian businessmen and others.

More than 500 people have contributed a total of about $600,000 and donations were continuing to come in, said Tatyana Overina, spokeswoman for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, which organized the concert.

Pinchuk, a billionaire businessman and Ukraine’s richest man, established the foundation in 2006 to contribute to the modernization of Ukraine and bring forward a new generation of Ukrainian leaders.

R. Kelly’s attorney guided his electric scooter down a hallway outside the courtroom where his client is on trial for child pornography, exclaiming as he sped past several reporters, “In the morning, we attack!”

That battle cry last week from Ed Genson, who suffers from a neurological disorder that makes it difficult for him to walk, was apt: After two weeks of prosecution testimony, the R&B star’s lawyers have a lot of ground to regain.

After launching their defense days ago, Kelly’s lawyers are endeavoring to breathe life back into several key claims when the case continues this week, including that a mole on Kelly’s back proves his innocence and that a sex tape at the heart of the case could have been doctored, possibly as part of an extortion plot.

Kelly, who won a Grammy Award in 1997 for “I Believe I Can Fly,” has pleaded not guilty to child pornography for allegedly videotaping himself having sex with a female prosecutors say was at young as 13. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison.

Defense attorneys say neither Kelly nor the alleged victim are on the videotape, pointing to what they said in opening arguments was the absence of a fingernail-sized mole on the man’s back in sex tape. Kelly, they noted, has such a mole.

But the mole defense took a hit when a prosecution witness froze frames on the tape that showed a spot on a man’s lower back — located in the same place as a mole on Kelly’s back as it appears in 2002 police photos.

On Thursday, however, the defense played their own frame-by-frame footage of the man’s back for jurors.

“Do you see a mole?” Kelly attorney Marc Martin asked defense witness Charles Palm.

“I see a black mark but it doesn’t appear to be a mole,” the video expert replied.

Palm also told jurors the spot appeared only intermittently — proof, he said, that it was likely a mere glitch on the tape.

Kelly, who at times appeared dejected as prosecutors presented their case, seemed more at ease as the defense got into the thick of their case, even occasionally nodding his head in agreement as witnesses spoke.

He seemed particularly buoyed by three relatives of the alleged victim who took the stand for the defense to say they didn’t recognize her as the female on the graphic tape. Four relatives testified earlier for the prosecution to say it was her.

“It definitely wasn’t her,” one relative, Shonna Edwards, told jurors emphatically on Wednesday. Edwards said she saw the tape for the first time a few days before, saying the female’s body in it was too developed to be her relative at the time.

Among the most surreal testimony of the trail to date came when Palm, the defense video expert, sought to counter testimony that doctoring the nearly half-hour video — 100,000 frames on the entire footage — would be practically impossible.

To demonstrate it was doable, he played an excerpt he digitally altered where just the heads of the man and woman disappeared as they had sex. At other points, their bodies fade in and out completely, as if they were ghosts.

“I created most of that over a couple of spare hours,” he said. Asked in cross-examination if anything indicated the tape had actually been fabricated, Palm conceded, “Nothing jumps out at me at being obviously faked.”

When they continue their case this week, Kelly’s lawyers were expected to call a witness who came forward after the trial began to claim he could discredit Lisa Van Allen, the last witness for prosecutors before they rested their case Monday.

In her potentially damaging testimony, the 27-year-old told jurors she engaged in three-way sexual encounters with Kelly and the alleged victim on several occasions, including once on a basketball court.

She also described how Kelly allegedly carried a duffel bag stuffed full of homemade sex tapes. “Wherever he was at, the bag would follow him,” she said.

The defense has already begun trying to impinge her potentially devastating testimony.

A law clerk for the defense, Jason Wallace, told jurors Wednesday that Van Allen’s fiance sought $300,000 from Kelly in exchange for her silence. Van Allen also has admitted she once stole Kelly’s $20,000 diamond-studded watch from a hotel.

Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” took television by storm in the 1960s, making stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as “Sock it to me!” has died. He was 86.

Martin, who went on to become one of television’s busiest directors after splitting with Dan Rowan in the late 1970s, died Saturday night of respiratory complications at a hospital in Santa Monica, family spokesman Barry Greenberg said.

“He had had some pretty severe respiratory problems for many years, and he had pretty much stopped breathing a week ago,” Greenberg said.

Martin had lost the use of one of his lungs as a teenager, and needed supplemental oxygen for most of the day in his later years.

He was surrounded by family and friends when he died just after 6 p.m., Greenberg said.

“Laugh-in,” which debuted in January 1968, was unlike any comedy-variety show before it. Rather than relying on a series of tightly scripted song-and-dance segments, it offered up a steady, almost stream-of-consciousness run of non-sequitur jokes, political satire and madhouse antics from a cast of talented young actors and comedians that also included Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson, Jo Anne Worley and announcer Gary Owens.

Presiding over it all were Rowan and Martin, the veteran nightclub comics whose standup banter put their own distinct spin on the show.

Like all straight men, Rowan provided the voice of reason, striving to correct his partner’s absurdities. Martin, meanwhile, was full of bogus, often risque theories about life, which he appeared to hold with unwavering certainty.

Against this backdrop, audiences were taken from scene to scene by quick, sometimes psychedelic-looking visual cuts, where they might see Hawn, Worley and other women dancing in bathing suits with political slogans, or sometimes just nonsense, painted on their bodies. Other times, Gibson, clutching a flower, would recite nonsensical poetry or Johnson would impersonate a comical Nazi spy.

“Laugh-In” astounded audiences and critics alike. For two years the show topped the Nielsen ratings, and its catchphrases_ “Sock it to me,” “You bet your sweet bippy” and “Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall’s” — were recited across the country.

Stars such as John Wayne and Kirk Douglas were delighted to make brief appearances, and even Richard Nixon, running for president in 1968, dropped in to shout a befuddled sounding, “Sock it to me!” His opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, was offered equal time but declined because his handlers thought it would appear undignified.

Rowan and Martin landed the show just as their comedy partnership was approaching its zenith and the nation’s counterculture was expanding into the mainstream.

The two were both struggling actors when they met in 1952. Rowan had sold his interest in a used car dealership to take acting lessons, and Martin, who had written gags for TV shows and comedians, was tending bar in Los Angeles to pay the rent.

Rowan, hearing Martin was looking for a comedy partner, visited him at the bar, where he found him eating a banana.

“Why are you eating a banana?” he asked.

“If you’ve ever eaten here, you’d know what’s with the banana,” he replied, and a comedy team was born.

Although their early gigs in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley were often performed gratis, they donned tuxedos for them and put on an air of success.

“We were raw,” Martin recalled years later, “but we looked good together and we were funny.”

They gradually worked up to the top night spots in New York, Miami and Las Vegas and began to appear regularly on television.

In 1966, they provided the summer replacement for “The Dean Martin Show.” Within two years, they were headlining their own show.

The novelty of “Laugh-In” diminished with each season, however, and as major players such as Hawn and Tomlin moved on to bigger careers, interest in the series faded.

After the show folded in 1973, Rowan and Martin capitalized on their fame with a series of high-paid engagements around the country. They parted amicably in 1977.

“Dan has diabetes, and his doctor advised him to cool it,” Martin told The Associated Press at the time.

Rowan, a sailing enthusiast, spent his last years touring the canals of Europe on a houseboat. He died in 1987.

Martin moved onto the game-show circuit, but quickly tired of it. After he complained about the lack of challenges in his career, fellow comic Bob Newhart’s agent suggested he take up directing.

He was reluctant at first, but after observing on “The Bob Newhart Show,” he decided to try. He would recall later that it was “like being thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool and being told to sink or swim.”

Soon he was one of the industry’s busiest TV directors, working on numerous episodes of “Newhart” as well as such shows as “In the Heat of the Night,” “Archie Bunker’s Place” and “Family Ties.”

Born into a middle-class family in Battle Creek, Mich., Martin had worked in a Ford auto assembly plant after high school.

After an early failed marriage, he was for years a confirmed bachelor. He finally settled down in middle age, marrying Dolly Read, a former bunny at the Playboy Club in London. Survivors include his wife and two sons, actor Richard Martin and Cary Martin.

At Martin’s request there will be no funeral, Greenberg said.

Martin lost the use of his right lung when he was 17, something that never bothered him until his final years, when he required oxygen 18 hours a day.

Arriving for a party celebrating his 80th birthday, he fainted and was treated by doctors and paramedics. The party continued, however, and he cracked, “Boy, did I make an entrance!”