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Even Ukraine’s own diplomat blasts Yanukovych government
By Mick Krever, CNN
With surprisingly undiplomatic frankness, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.N. Yuriy Sergeyev criticized the man who just days ago was President of his country, Viktor Yanukovych.
“The main direction is to be associated with European Union,” Sergeyev told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour from New York. “This is what the previous government and the president tried to [persuade] the population, and they betrayed [them].”
He was referring to the sudden decision by Yanukovych last November to call off a trade deal with the European Union. That move set off months of protests and ultimately the removal of the president.
Ukraine issues arrest warrant for ousted President Viktor Yanukovych
During the protests, Sergeyev said, Yanukovych was presented as a “pure Christian,” visiting churches and “praying for the people.”
Ukraine's U.N. envoy on the way forward
Yuriy Sergeyev, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.N., speaks with CNN's Christiane Amanpour.
“But as we know now,” Sergeyev said, “he prayed for them but did absolutely different.”
Some gay Ugandans would rather die than live under new law
By Mick Krever, CNN
Some gay people in Uganda would rather kill themselves than live under that country’s new anti-homosexuality law, signed today by President Yoweri Museveni.
“People are afraid of losing their lives,” Ugandan gay rights activist Pepe Julian Onziema told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on the phone from the capital, Kampala.
“Prior to the bill becoming law today, people attempted suicide because they are like, ‘I’m not going to live to see this country kill me – so I would rather take my life.’”
Homosexual acts had already been illegal in Uganda, but the new law signed by Museveni toughens penalties against gay people and makes some homosexual acts crimes punishable by life in prison.
Many who fear violence have already fled the country for the “nearest border,” Onziema told Amanpour.
Actor Steve Coogan on faith, film and 'Philomena'
Steve McQueen: The man behind '12 Years a Slave'
For Steve McQueen, “12 Years a Slave” was a film that had to be made.
The Oscar-nominated film portrays the true story of a free black man from the north who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the American South.
“For me, being of African descent, I thought there was a hole in the canon of cinema regarding this subject,” McQueen, the director of the film, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday. “It was very natural that I wanted to put it on film.”
“My ancestors were slaves,” he said. “My parents are from the West Indies, from Grenada.”
“There are so many things which people often question, but we don’t we don’t seem to want to answer. And I wanted this film to try to answer some of those questions.”
Click above to watch their full interview.
Amanpour remembers Shirley Temple
Syrians forced to eat grass; aid worker says deprivation worst he’s ever seen
By Mick Krever, CNN
A World Food Programme aid director on the ground in Syria described to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday the desperate situation of civilians in war-ravaged Homs – something he said he had “never seen” before in his career.
“Nobody is able to actually feed themselves, feed their children, feed their families, with anything but the weed, the grass that they can pick on the side of the curb and what little that they can eke out from what they’ve saved over time,” Matthew Hollingworth, Syria director for the World Food Programme, said on the phone from Homs.
“They’re living in tunnels, they’re living in basements of apartment buildings which are otherwise destroyed, basements of shopping centers.”
“They are barely, and they have been barely, existing,” he said. “I’ve never seen levels of deprivation such as this.”
Decoding two sets of surprising Asia peace talks
By Mick Krever, CNN
Is there something in the water?
Suddenly peace, or at least peace talks, are breaking out in the most unlikely places. In Asia, entrenched enemies – China and Taiwan, North and South Korea – have agreed to sit down at the table.
In an effort to decode the surprising developments, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour spoke on Tuesday with Kurt Campbell, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, who is widely credited with being the key architect of America’s “Pivot to Asia.”
China and Taiwan are holding their first-ever official face-to-face talks since Mao Zedong’s communists won their civil war in 1949 – a “quite significant” turn of events, Campbell said.
“Over the course of the last 30 years, people thought that the most tense situation in Asia was between China and Taiwan, but in recent years the relationship has improved substantially – commercially, economically, and now politically.”
Has America lost its ability to dream big?
By Mick Krever, CNN
Peter Thiel has made more than a billion dollars investing in Silicon Valley’s innovations, but now he says American society has become “somehow very hostile to big ideas.”
“If Einstein wrote a letter to the White House, it would get lost in the mail room,” Thiel told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday, referring to the letter Einstein wrote to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the promise and danger of nuclear technology.
“Something like the Manhattan project or the Apollo program are quite unthinkable today,” he said.
Many say that those very big ideas are lacking in the area that may matter most in the coming century – climate change.
England has experienced its wettest January in 250 years, and much of the southern part of that country has been literally underwater, flooded, for weeks.
President Obama's administration, in an effort to act without a difficult Congress, last week announced the creation of so-called "climate hubs" to help farmers adapt to climate change – a humble step.
“The technology story in the last 20 or 30 years has been a story of tremendous innovation in the world of bits, and computers, but much less innovation in the world of atoms and stuff,” Thiel said. “And the energy problem is certainly a problem that’s more a problem involving atoms, and how we build new kinds of power sources.”
Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook.
Epic story of human existence in Britain
Imagine that the epic story of human existence in Britain just got half a million years older!
Yes, footprints recently found along the East Coast now dates it back 900,000 years, instead of 450,000 years as previously thought.
Hippos roamed in Trafalgar Square, lions and rhinos stalked the countryside, often when humans were driven out by dramatic climate change in the 10 ice ages that have swept this land.
A timely and eye-opening new exhibition opens later this week at London's Natural History Museum, and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour got a special preview with leading paleontologist Chris Stringer, who curated the exhibit.
Climate change: cost and opportunity
By Mick Krever, CNN
The British are famous for obsessing about the weather – but with the wettest January in 250 years, and parts of Southern England literally submerged in water, they have lots to obsess about.
For Rachel Kyte, World Bank Special Envoy for Climate Change, extreme weather events are just another example for why climate change should be discussed not just as an environmental problem, but an economic one.
“The extreme weather events that we thought were going to happen to somebody else, over there, in the future, and now are actually happening right now, here, to us,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.
“What we’re trying to do is bring the science of climate, which nobody’s arguing about now, into the economic policy-making rooms,” she said. “We want to try to bring the science and the economic planning together so we have a difference set of decisions being made.”
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