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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.”
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.”
Ex-Syrian government insider Jihad Makdissi speaks out about the country’s future
Today marks yet another key deadline that Syria has missed to get rid of its chemical stockpiles.
The chemical weapons deal, brokered by the United States and Russia in September last year seemingly has little to show for itself. Even after recent peace talks in Geneva the Syrian regime continues to rain its military might on cities and civilians across the country.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour spoke to Syria’s former government spokesman in his first television interview since announcing his resignation in February 2013.
Jihad Makdissi served as spokesman through the first year of the civil war, but is no longer a supporter of the Assad government or the opposition. He left his position defending the government after realising Syria was not “heading towards a political solution” even though he had hopes that President Bashar al-Assad would take “reformist actions”.
When asked if President Assad thinks he can win on the ground, Makdissi told Amanpour his view is the Syrian government “still believes in a security solution" for the conflict, and that “any political concession is not in their dictionary yet”.
But he says the international community needs to acknowledge this conflict is “no longer about Assad”. “What most Syrians want the international community to concentrate on”, he says, is, “on Syria achieving change”.
Click above to watch the full interview.
Lord Lamont: I believe Rouhani is sincere
It seems Iran is quite the place to be right now judging by the procession of western diplomats and business leaders making their way to Tehran.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt is there meeting with his counterpart Javad Zarif, discussing Iran’s nuclear programme. And more than 100 French business executives are also having meetings inside the country this week, with other European countries planning similar trips.
In the United States though, Congress continues to battle over new sanctions for Iran; and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has even joined the fray, arguing against that move.
Lord Lamont, the Chairman of the British-Iranian Chamber of Commerce, has recently returned from Tehran as well. He was part of a UK parliamentary delegation that came back with strong recommendations for engagement with Iran. The former British finance minister told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that members of the government he met with were “positive” about dealing with the west and felt it was “in the interest of both parties”. But despite there being “a lot of goodwill” from the Iranian side, he says they felt negotiations could be “very difficult", that there is "quite a wide gap between the two sides”.
Asked whether President Hassan Rouhani is a man Britain “can do business with”, Lord Lamont told Amanpour he believes Rouhani is “sincere” and that he does want to make changes in Iran, but that he will not be able to make all the changes he wants unless he gets a nuclear deal.
That said, Lord Lamont says everyone he met in Tehran emphasised that any deal has to be approved “not just by the government, not just by ministers, but by other ‘centers of power’”.
Click above to watch the interview.
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.
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