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Israel boycotters making a ‘mistake,’ sending bad message to Palestinians, says Israel ambassador
By Mick Krever, CNN
Proponents of a boycott on Israeli goods are making a “mistake” and sending a “problematic” message to Palestinian negotiators, Israeli Ambassador to the UK Daniel Taub told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday.
“If they genuinely want to advance peace, what they're really doing is they're sending a double message, which is very problematic,” Taub said. “They're sending a message to the Palestinians … that you don't need to be sitting at the negotiating table.”
The “suggestion that they can go off to other places to try and get political gains, I think, would be very, very damaging,” he said.
The campaign to divest from Israel and boycott its goods – not unlike the campaign to pull out of Apartheid South Africa more than two decades ago – has been gaining increasingly mainstream traction.
Pussy Riot tells Amanpour: ‘We are free people, and free people feel no fear’
By Mick Krever, CNN
Despite spending almost two years in a Russian penal colony, two members of the dissident Russian punk group “Pussy Riot” were confident and defiant as ever in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
“We were never afraid from the beginning – neither before our imprisonment, nor during it, nor right now,” Masha Alyokhina said. “We have no reasons to be afraid. We are free people, and free people feel no fear.”
Pussy Riot: 'no reasons to be afraid'
Masha Alyokhina of Pussy Riot tells CNN's Christiane Amanpour that they are "free people, and free people feel no fear."
As the Winter Olympics get underway in Sochi, Russia, Alyokhina and her fellow activist Nadya Tolokonnikova are two of the sharpest thorns in President Vladimir Putin’s side.
Like so many host countries before it, Russia has faced a barrage of criticism leading up to the Games – but with Russia it seems personal, and much of the venom is directed as Putin himself.
The West and many Russians are angry about his wholesale assault on human rights – the crackdown on political opponents and dissent, and the harsh treatment of gays.
Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were thrown in prison after they were convicted of “hooliganism” and inciting religious hatred for performing a riotous punk song in a Moscow Cathedral – and posting a video of the action online.
“It is a system of slavery,” Tolokonnikova said of the penal colony. “People turn into cogs, into a factory.”
“You have no choice where you will work. You are forced to sow. You have no choice in this matter.”
Tongue in cheek, ambassadors spar over Pussy Riot
By Lucky Gold, CNN
Imagine a world where the Cold War may be over, but the Twitter War between the U.S. and Russia is heating up.
As if the two don't have enough to disagree about – such as Syria, Edward Snowden, human rights and political dissent – Pussy Riot has now become a bone of diplomatic contention.
On Wednesday in New York Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, met with Pussy Riot members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina at the U.S. Mission to the UN.
She then tweeted this simple message.
When asked about it, Russia's UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin responded to reporters with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek:
"Hasn't she joined the band yet?" he asked, and then tartly added: "I would expect her to invite them to perform in the National Cathedral in Washington. This is my expectation. Maybe they arrange a world tour for them – St. Peter's cathedral in Rome, then maybe in Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and end up with a gala concert at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem."
Top chef Tom Colicchio sets out to end American hunger
By Mick Krever, CNN
Tom Colicchio – renowned chef, restaurateur, and head judge on TV reality series “Top Chef” – wants to “rebrand” hunger.
“You know, the idea that people are hungry because they're lazy and they don't want to work just is not true,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview that aired Wednesday.
In the richest country in the world, 50 million people are hungry, and don’t know where their next meal will come from. Colicchio is setting out to change that.
“The average person is on food stamps for only nine months. The average person who is on food stamps was working the year before and the year after.”
“This is not a handout,” he said. “It's an investment in people. It's an investment in our country.”
Angelique Kidjo on a mission
Grammy-winning singer Angelique Kidjo is on a mission.
“African women have to be seen through the true lenses of it,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday. “The false lens is always showing the women being abused, being in refugee camp, and walking around with their breasts naked looking like zombies that have no brain.”
“I’m not a cliché. I’m a human being. I have a brain; I can use it. I have a mouth; I can speak for myself. And that’s what I want people to hear – the beauty, that resilience through the voice.”
Kidjo, from the West African nation of Benin, has just released a bold new album, Eve, and has written a revealing autobiography.
On the eve of a new tour around the United States and the world, Kidjo sat down with Amanpour in New York.
Click above to watch their interview.
U.S. has ‘failed’ narcotics fight in Afghanistan, says inspector general
By Mick Krever, CNN
Despite spending $10 billion in reconstruction money fighting narcotics in Afghanistan, the U.S. has “failed,” the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, John Sopko, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.
“If you look at production, if you look at cultivation, if you look at breaking the tie between the drug culture, the drug production, and the insurgency – if you look at all three of those indicators, we failed.”
Sopko is behind a damning new report alleging that corruption and incompetence in Afghanistan is putting a billion dollars in government assistance at risk.
Of the 16 Afghan ministries that the Inspector General examined, not a single one could be counted on to properly secure funds, the report says.
He alleged that of the litany of fixes to the aid program that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) proposed, 90% were ignored.
Indeed, he said, in Afghanistan’s case USAID waved most of its normal good governance requirements for aid.
“Our fear is that this money is at risk because of the waiver of their requirements.”
Abdullah Abdullah, leading contender to replace Karzai in Afghanistan, vows to sign troop agreement with U.S. if elected
By Mick Krever, CNN
Leading Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday that he would sign an agreement to keep international forces in Afghanistan, and aid dollars flowing, if he were elected to succeed President Hamid Karzai.
Karzai has thus far demurred signing such a deal – a so-called Status of Forces Agreement – to the frustration of the United States and its allies.
U.S. forces are currently scheduled to pull out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
“When we are asking President Karzai to sign it, and when we say that it is in the interest of Afghanistan that that agreement is signed sooner rather than later, that means that we will be ready to sign it when time comes,” he said.
Playing for time with human lives
By Christiane Amanpour and Lucky Gold, CNN
In his state of the union address on Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke of diplomatic pressure that has forced Syria to surrender its stockpile of chemical weapons.
Now imagine a world where dictatorship, terror and fear – and 95% of those chemical weapons – remain in place.
The United Nations-backed Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize and charged with locating and destroying those caches of sarin and mustard gas – now says "only a small portion" of the stockpile has been shipped out; perhaps only 5%
As cargo ships wait to transport these weapons to their eventual destruction, the Assad regime is dragging its feet and failing to deliver. It is now eight weeks behind schedule.
Viktor Yushchenko: Ukraine opposition does not control streets
By Mick Krever, CNN
The Ukrainian opposition does not control the street protests that have raged for months in the country’s capital, Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday.
“I don’t think that the political opposition of Ukraine has the control of the entire situation on Maidan,” or Independence Square, Yushchenko said through a translator.
The opposition, he said, has not provided a “comprehensive pact” that would satisfy the demands of the protestors.
The opposition is concerned with “the fight for power,” but less with “the strategic course of the country.”
Thought you had a big vocabulary? Think again
By Mick Krever, CNN
If you thought you had a big vocabulary, think again.
The average English-speaker knows between 25,000 and 40,000 words, Oxford English Dictionary Chief Editor Michael Proffitt told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday.
His organization – which bills itself as the “definitive record of the English language” – has recorded 800,000 words and counting, he said.
“Even people who are doing 40,000, at the highest end, it’s about five percent of what we’ve got in the OED,” he said. “And that’s not all the words in the language.”
Proffitt has just taken over the helm of the OED, the first succession in 20 years, and he faces a unique challenge.
How will the revered dictionary stay relevant in a 21st century world of Tweets and text messages?
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