By Mick Krever, CNN

To look at news headlines, it’s easy to get an impression that there’s nothing good in the world – it’s all protests, and car bombs, and civil wars.

To Bill Gates, the world’s foremost philanthropist, the headlines are hiding the truth.

“By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been.” he writes in his annual Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation letter.

“The good things are kind of quiet,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview that aired Tuesday.

“For example, poor countries getting richer – when I was born, most of the world was poor, and the rich countries were the exception. Now most people live in countries that are middle income.”

FULL POST

By Mick Krever, CNN

Is Glenn Greenwald endangering America?

To listen to U.S. security officials, the columnist who revealed secret surveillance by the U.S. National Security Administration has exposed to terrorists the methods that the American government uses to prevent attacks.

Greenwald rejected and took issue with that argument in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.

“I think that suggestion is so ludicrous that it’s actually an insult to the intelligence of the people at whom it’s directed,” he told Amanpour from Hong Kong, where the man who leaked intelligence on the NSA program is in self-imposed exile.

“Any terrorist that’s unaware that the government wants to [spy on them],” Greenwald said, “is a terrorist incapable of writing his own name, let alone detonating a bomb successfully on American soil.”  FULL POST