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Did Iran’s Berlin Wall fall, just to go right back up?
By Lucky Gold, CNN
Imagine a world where the Berlin Wall came down – and went right back up again.
On Monday, an extraordinary tweet was sent by Thomas Erdbrink, Tehran bureau chief for The New York Times.
“Is Iran's Berlin Wall of internet censorship crumbling down? I am tweeting from Tehran from my cell [phone] without restrictions.”
And he wasn't alone. Suddenly, Iranians were able to access Twitter and Facebook without side-stepping government firewalls – a freedom of expression almost unknown since the 2009 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the crackdown against his political opponents, both inside and outside the country.
America’s CEO of the Environment
By Mick Krever, CNN
Is Sally Jewell a contradiction in terms?
She is a CEO turned government regulator. She is a petroleum engineer turned conservationist. Indeed, the contradiction is built right into her job: As U.S. secretary of the interior, she is responsible for both the conservation and exploitation of about twenty percent of America’s land – that owned by the federal government.
“I feel privileged to be in a unique position of understanding how we must balance both” conservation and exploitation, or extraction of natural resources like oil and gas, she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday.
“You can't make a choice between having jobs and having resources and having a great environment,” she said from Washington. “It's a false choice.”
Israel Cabinet Minister Lapid on Syria, Iran: Words not enough
By Mick Krever, CNN
It may not be Yair Lapid’s job, but he certainly has a lot to say about foreign policy.
“If you want to negotiate you better have a big stick in your hand – or in this case a big Tomahawk,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour of negotiations with Syria on Tuesday. “It’s the Middle East; you have to have sticks with the carrots.”
Lapid, a former journalist and TV presenter, threw a wrench into Israeli politics when his upstart moderate party, Yesh Atid, took second place in the last election.
He is clearly a man with ambitions. He was widely rumored to have wanted the post of foreign minister; he was given finance. Most observers assume he covets the prime minister’s office.
So it’s no surprise that he has plenty to say about some of the top international issues on Israel’s agenda: Syria and Iran.
His views come down to this: Words are great, but we care about deeds.
“Unless there is a credible threat, all the negotiations [on Syria] are just empty words,” he said. “This is not over. It won’t be over until all weapons of mass destruction will be out of Syria. Then we will know this whole move has succeeded.”
Saving an archaeological treasure with a Picasso
Imagine a world where you can own a Picasso for the price of an opera ticket, and save an archaeological treasure at the same time.
CNN's Christiane Amanpour has the story.
Former bank regulator Sheila Bair warns against debt ceiling ‘nuclear bomb’ – Amanpour
By Mick Krever, CNN
The former head of a top U.S. financial oversight agency issued a stark warning over the upcoming, déjà vu battle over America’s debt ceiling.
“As sympathetic as I am to some of the Republican concerns about our fiscal situation,” Sheila Bair, former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday, “those are nuclear bombs that you can never actually use.”
Bair served under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as head of the FDIC, which guarantees the deposits of Americans’ bank accounts.
Assad moving chemical weapons to Iraq and Lebanon, Syria opposition General Salim Idriss claims to CNN’s Amanpour
By Mick Krever, CNN
(CNN) - The head of the opposition Free Syrian Army told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Thursday he has intelligence showing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government is moving its chemical weapons out of the country.
"Today, we have information that the regime began to move chemical materials and chemical weapons to Lebanon and to Iraq," Gen. Salim Idriss said from inside Syria.
CNN could not independently verify Idriss' claim.
Several senior Israeli officials told CNN's Elise Labott that they have not seen movements into Lebanon or Iraq, and that they did not believe it made sense for the Syrians to be moving weapons so soon.
And Iraq categorically denied that chemical weapons had crossed into its territory, with an adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki speculating "there is a political agency behind this claim."
"We were the victims of chemical weapons under Saddam's regime," said the adviser, Ali al-Moussawi. "And we will never allow to let any country to transfer chemical materials to our lands at all."
Still, if the allegation were true, it could fundamentally shift the assessments of U.S. intelligence officials, CNN's Barbara Starr reports.
Syria solution not possible without Iran, top UN political official Feltman tells CNN's Amanpour
Russia's plan to have Syria destroy its chemical weapons has put diplomacy, and the United Nations, front and center.
So is a diplomatic solution possible?
Not without Iran's cooperation, Jeffrey Feltman, the top UN political official, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour.
Click above to see Amanpour's full interview with Feltman.
Madeleine Albright explains diplomacy on Syria
“In my mind," Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Thursday, "there is no question that the threat of the use of force is what brought this diplomatic venue into place, and what made President Putin understand that this was something that should concern them in terms of getting his client, President Assad, to in fact give up his weapons, his chemical weapons.”
Click above to watch Amanpour's interview with Albright, and find out what insight she has into Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's negotiating strategies.
CNN’s eyewitness to Halabja chemical attack
By Mick Krever
The world may hardly have known of the chemical attack that occurred in Syria on August 21 were it not for the startling images that emerged in the immediate aftermath.
“The images from this massacre are sickening,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in his address on Syria this week. “Men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas; others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath; a father clutching his dead children.”
But in 1988, when Saddam Hussein gassed the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja, the only way for news organizations to get images of the massacre was to send their own cameramen to the scene.
Rich Brooks, one of CNN’s longest-serving photojournalists, travelled to the scene, and told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday what it was like.
“We weren't sure what we were going to see exactly,” he said. “But what I remember vividly was entering the village and just how still and silent it was. Initially, we saw birds on the ground and then we saw cattle and sheep. And then we turned a corner into a street that was just full of bodies. And you've seen it before and the smell was overwhelming.”
Syria can only be contained, not extinguished, top former U.S. diplomat Ryan Crocker tells CNN’s Amanpour
By Mick Krever, CNN
The United States has fundamentally misread the uprising and subsequent civil war in Syria, the former American ambassador to that country and one of American’s most experienced Foreign Service officers told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday.
“I think we made a mistake right at the beginning in somehow thinking that Syria was like Egypt, like Tunisia, like Libya,” Ryan Crocker told Amanpour. “You and I know it's not.”
That misreading has lead Crocker to a stark conclusion.
“Assad isn't going anywhere outside of Syria anytime soon, if ever,” he said. “And maybe we're beginning to understand that.”
Crocker is a career diplomat who has served as ambassador to Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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