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Imagination under threat
By Mick Krever, CNN
Neil Gaiman is many things: A writer, a screenwriter, a storyteller. But before all that, he is first and foremost and defender of imagination.
And imagination, he says, is under threat.
“The imagination – it's a muscle,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday. “It's a really important thing. If you want to build the future, if you want to create a literate generation, if you want to create a generation that is not criminal.”
Gaiman says that libraries – those endangered stockpiles of, yes, physical books – are a critical wellspring for imagination.
“I was a booky kid,” he said. “I will never forget the joy of getting my parents to drop me off at the local library on their way to work, and just going in and reading my way through the children's library, going and exploring in the card catalog back when they had card catalogs.”
“Pulling books off the shelf and then nervously edging out into the adult world” – and “discovering the joy” of the inter-library loan system!
It was – and is – “absolute magic.”
Will NSA revelations chill intelligence gathering?
By Mick Krever, CNN
Revelations over American spying methods may have a chilling effect on the West’s ability to gather intelligence from terrorists Richard Barrett, the former director of global counter terrorism for British intelligence, suggested in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.
On the one hand he said, terrorists – like ordinary people who send emails – know that their exchanges could probably be monitored but continue nonetheless to communicate.
“Obviously they’re much more careful than the average person,” he said. “But they will use communication methods, they’ll get careless occasionally – they’ll make slip-ups, they’ll reveal telephone numbers and things like that.”
It is something that Glenn Greenwald, the columnist who broke the NSA spying story, suggested to Amanpour on Monday.
NSA spying has nothing to do with terrorism, Greenwald tells Amanpour
By Mick Krever, CNN
Spying by America’s National Security Agency does not have “anything to do with terrorism,” Glenn Greenwald, the activist journalist who broke the story, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.
“Is Angela Merkel a terrorist? Are sixty or seventy million Spanish or French citizens terrorists? Are there terrorists at Petrobras?” he asked rhetorically. “This is clearly about political power and economic espionage, and the claim that this is all about terrorism is seen around the world as what it is, which is pure deceit.”
The latest revelations of American spying involve the alleged taping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal mobile phone and that the U.S. gathered data about 60 million Spanish phone calls in a single month, which comes after similar reports from France.
Greenwald, formerly of The Guardian, has been systematically publishing reports of secret American intelligence gathering since he was given a treasure trove of leaks by former intelligence officer Edward Snowden.
“It is not true that every country intercepts the personal communications of their democratically elected allies,” Greenwald told Amanpour, referring to the oft-repeated criticism put forward by true believers that “everyone does it.”
Remembering Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland’s moral compass
By Lucky Gold, CNN
Imagine a world where a shy, devout intellectual took on an all-seeing, all-powerful leader - and helped create Eastern Europe’s first modern democracy.
Tadeusz Mazowiecki was a journalist and activist when his native Poland was in the iron grip of soviet communism.
When Polish workers struck at the Gdansk shipyard in 1980 launching the solidarity movement, Mazowiecki joined the protests.
Veteran editor Harold Evans calls for British First Amendment protecting press
By Mick Krever, CNN
The United Kingdom needs its own version of the First Amendment protecting press freedom, former editor of The Times and The Sunday Times Harold Evans told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.
Evans spoke with Amanpour as one of the great journalistic trials of our time got underway in London: that of two former newspaper editors from the Rupert Murdoch empire, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson.
They face charges that include conspiring to hack mobile phones at the now-defunct tabloid newspaper The News of the World.
Among the victims of phone hacking by newspapers was Milly Dowler, a schoolgirl who was later found murdered.
The scandal sparked the creation of the Leveson Inquiry, which after hearing from 180 witnesses recommended a number of reforms to the British press. Ministers and journalists are still at odds over underpinning regulation with legislation.
“I’ve always thought the First Amendment was a pretty good idea, actually,” Evans told Amanpour. “And what Leveson proposed in effect was to create a kind of British First Amendment.”
The ‘inattentive generation’ raises the ‘restless generation’
By Mick Krever, CNN
What are your children doing on the internet?
For many modern parents, it’s one of the scariest – and most mysterious – questions they can be asked.
It’s something British filmmaker Beeban Kidron – director of the second “Bridget Jones” film – realized she too was anxious to answer.
(On the release of a new Bridget Jones book, Kidron called Helen Fielding “a genius” for killing off the character of Darcy, but when asked if she would direct a film without Darcy, she deflected “Of course not!”)
Her newest project is called “InRealLife,” a documentary about children’s addiction to the internet.
The question she wanted to answer was not the fraught one of whether online activity was good or bad – a complicated question that is moot anyway – but how the internet was changing young people.
“I felt that the world around me was just sort of closing in, and I suddenly realized it’d been over a year since I’d seen a young person without some sort of device in their hands,” Kidron told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview that aired Monday.
‘Absolutely’ a link between climate change and wildfires, U.N. climate chief Figueres tells Amanpour
By Mick Krever, CNN
There is “absolutely” a link between climate change and wildfires, U.N. Climate Chief Christiana Figueres told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.
Wildfires are raging in a ring around Sydney, Australia, as that country experiences its hottest year on record.
“The World Meteorological Organization has not established a direct link between this wildfire and climate change – yet,” Figueres said. “But what is absolutely clear is the science is telling us that there are increasing heat waves in Asia, Europe, and Australia; that there these will continue; that they will continue in their intensity and in their frequency.”
Australia’s new prime minister, Tony Abbott, has expressed deep scepticism about climate change, once even calling it “absolute c**p” (he has since walked those remarks back).
Abbott is trying to get rid of Australia’s carbon tax and has dissolved its climate change commission.
“What the new government in Australia has not done is it has not walked away from its international commitment on climate change,” Figueres told Amanpour. “So what they’re struggling with now is not what are they going to do, but how are they going to get there.”
Will politics exacerbate Australia’s raging wildfires?
By Mick Krever and Ken Olshansky, CNN
Will politics exacerbate Australia’s raging wildfires?
It’s not supposed to be fire season yet in Australia, where summer hasn’t even begun. But more than sixty devastating bush fires are already raging in a ring around Sydney.
Just a month ago, Australians elected a new prime minister, Tony Abbott, who once called climate change “absolute c**p.” (He has since walked those remarks back, calling them a bit of “rhetorical hyperbole.”)
Though it is unclear that climate change directly caused these wild fires – police arrested two teenagers for starting two of the Sydney fires –local officials do fear those hot, dry, and windy conditions this week could exacerbate the situation.
In the past 12 months, Australia has lived through the hottest summer, in the hottest year, on record.
“There is a real political debate about how to deal with this issue of climate change,” Stan Grant, international editor of Sky News Australia, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.
“Tony Abbot in the past has been citizen for being a climate skeptic, if not a climate change denier,” Grant said. “Now he stepped back a lot from that hard line that he’s taken, but he’s been very ideological when it comes to how to deal with this.”
FULL interview – Malala Yousafzai
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CNN's Christiane Amanpour profiles Malala Yousafzai.
In bizarre diplomatic spat, Putin ‘acting like a cornered animal,’ Russian journalist tells Amanpour
By Mick Krever, CNN
A decidedly undiplomatic spat between Russia and the Netherlands is bringing to the forefront once again what Russian journalist Masha Gessen calls President Vladimir Putin’s “bully” syndrome.
Late Tuesday night, a senior Dutch diplomat in Russia, Onno Elderenbosch, was beaten in his apartment by two men posing as electricians.
Just days ago before that, Dutch police arrested a Russian diplomat in The Hague after neighbors reported suspected child abuse – police released him hours later and apologized to Moscow.
And all this comes on top of Russia’s arrest of 30 Greenpeace activists who, using a Dutch-flagged ship, were protesting oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. Earlier this month, Russia charged the 28 activists and two journalists on board with piracy, which carries a potential sentence of 15 years.
“This was a high-level diplomatic message of sorts,” Gessen told Amanpour from Moscow. “It’s not specific to the Dutch-Russian relationship, but it is specific to the way Russia is treating the rest of the world.”
President Vladimir Putin has run the country “like a thug” for 14 years, Gessen said, and is only now showing the world who he really is.
Putin began his third presidential term last year, after a brief interlude as prime minister.
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