Asma Jahangir is the Chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and a special 'rapporteur' for the UN on Freedom of Religion and Beliefs. She has denounced a Supreme Court Ruling in Pakistan with regard to the 'National Reconciliation Ordinance' there on the grounds that it threatens both the rule of law and the country's survival as a democracy.

For context, Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president, has also accused those demanding his resignation of threatening the country's democratic system.

In a speech on Sunday 27th December marking the second anniversary of the assassination of his wife, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Zardari said opponents working to bring down his government were "colluding" with anti-government fighters. Benazir Bhutto's killers are said to be still at large.

The speech was Zaidari's first public appearance since the supreme court struck down the amnesty which to that point had protected him and several other senior ruling PPP  party officials from corruption charges.

In the meantime, there are daily bombings around the country killing hundreds of Pakistani citizens. 

From The Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2009

"Democracy Is the Greatest Revenge:
Benazir Bhutto's assassination didn't derail Pakistan's development."

By Asif Ali Zardari

"Two years ago the world stopped for me and for my children. Pakistan was shaken to its core and all but came apart. Women everywhere lost one of their greatest symbols of equality. And Islam, our great religion, lost its modern face.

On Dec. 27, 2007, my wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated. She was the bravest person I have ever known, and the second anniversary of her death is an appropriate occasion to reflect upon what she achieved for our country,and how her legacy must be preserved against those who would return Pakistan to darkness".

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Cyril Christo, a poet whose film 'A Stitch in Time' (an anti-nuclear documentary) was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988. His collections of poetry include 'The Twilight Language' (Canio's Editions) and 'Hiroshima, my love' (Edwin Mellen Press 1997). His wife, Marie Wilkinson, who is also featureds as a guest in the piece, is an architect, planner, photographer. The two live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Their new book is 'Walking Thunder' which follows on from their previous work 'Lost Africa'.

As Cyril Christo puts it, "Africa stands as the shadow of our beginnings, cradle to humanity, and great mirror to what we are in the process of becoming, a thirsting purgatory caught between origin and our common fate. Marie and I continue to document the disappearance of the essence of Africa". In the future survival or demise of the elephant, they believe, lies the future of mankind itself.

Indian state authorities have announced that, 25 years after the Union Carbide Bhopal tragedy that killed thousands, the (till now) sealed pesticide plant is to be opened for tours. In this interview, Dr Suroopa Mukherjee explains that the Bhopal victims' problems are still a very long way from being over.

The Bhopal disaster - or 'Bhopal gas tragedy' - took place at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal in the state of Madya Pradesh. At midnight on 3 December 1984, the plant accidentally released methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas, exposing more than 500,000 people to MIC and other chemicals. The first official immediate death toll was 2,259. Others estimate 8,000-10,000 died within 72 hours and 25,000 have since died from gas-related diseases. The deaths go on.

Some 25 years after the gas leak, 390 tonnes of toxic chemicals abandoned at the Union Carbide plant continue to pollute the ground water in the region and affects thousands residents of Bhopal who depend on it.

There are currently civil and criminal cases related to the disaster ongoing in the United States District Court, Manhattan and the District Court of Bhopal, India against Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemical Company, with arrest warrants pending against Warren Anderson who was CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the disaster.

Dr Suroopa Mukherjee PhD is an academic and activist at The Hindu College of Delhi University who has worked closely with victims and has spearheaded the 'We for Bhopal' movement.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg talks for KGNU with T.R. Reid who was a bureau chief in Tokyo and London for The Washington Post. His new book, “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care,” is a systematic study of the health systems in seven countries that was inspired in part by his family’s experiences living overseas and receiving health care abroad. Mr. Reid also produced a 2008 documentary on the same topic for PBS called “Sick Around the World.”

I have been working on a New Media memoir about my late mother, an actress. Diane Hart lived an extraordinary life and so an extraordinary memoir is required.

You can find her Wikipedia entry HERE.

And then two different presentations (for New Media academic research) of the memoir HERE and HERE.

To my regular listeners, I apologize for using this space (not for my regular feature interviews) but for hosting the audio for the project. Frankly, there is nowhere else they can go.

Fresh from the success of the 'Viva Palestina: Lifeline from Britain to Gaza' aid convoy - which took over 100 vehicles to Gaza from the UK, Member of Parliament, George Galloway has linked up on his US tour with the Vietnam veteran and peace campaigner, Ron Kovic, to launch a similar, but even larger venture from the States which will set off on its journey on the 4th July. And, as he explains in this interview to KGNU's Claudia Cragg, Galloway announced the initiative at a 1000-strong meeting in Anaheim, California, rounding off a packed-out, coast to coast speaking tour highlighting the Palestinian cause.

George Galloway is a Scottish politician and Member of Parliament for the Bethnal and Bow constituency. He started his political life in the Labour Party, but was expelled from it during the administration of then Prime Minster Tony Blair in October 2003 following controversial statements voicing his opposition to the war in Iraq. He is now a leading member of the Respect coalition (a group which he founded). He is an advocate of redistribution of wealth, greater spending on welfare benefits, and extensive nationalisation of large industries. He supports the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As a practising Roman Catholic he is personally opposed to abortion, although he supports Respect's policy of promoting a woman's right to choose. He supported the equalisation of the age of consent for homosexuality. As a Labour MP he was a member of the Socialist Campaign Group.

Travel is, for a foreign correspondent as essential a tool as pen and paper, as well as these days a recording device and laptop. In order to work, we have to travel to a story and that involves a journey but that journey is rarely a pleasure. More often than not, we are spliced between holidaymakers also surviving economy on the way out, collapsing on the way home, and in between darting in and out of a cheap hotel to meet specific people only to find they may stubbornly refuse to talk.

For many years, the unorthodoxy of work of the writer, Sophie Calle, (b. 1953) has intrigued me especially on the issue of creativity and identity. In formal journalism, however, I have always been unequivocal that the artificial constructs she uses have no place. That is, unless like Calle you work for a open-minded, voyeuristic newspaper with a very progressive readership like 'Liberation' and I probably never will. The hallmark of her work, however, has been to impose an entirely arbitrary set of constraints to produce a work of creative non-fiction, the most famous being her Suite Venitienne (1979), The Hotel (1981, now in The Tate Collection) and Address Book (1983).

In the last of these works, she found a lost address book and constructed a narrative adopting the techniques more usually applied by a private investigator than by a journalist. The work caused enormous controversy for Liberation, and was saved only from a thorough damning because it is considered 'conceptual'. The consensus eventually concluded that the creative emphasis of this piece lies in the artistic idea itself, as opposed to just the finished artefact and its content. Calle is associated with the  Oulipo School (Mathews & Brotchie, 1998), the 'Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle'. British poet, writer and academic Ian Monk is both an adherent and authority on the school. Classic Oulipo traits are clear in the work produced when Calle persuaded her mother to hire someone who would be invisible to her, yet photograph and note her every movement, she says, just 'to provide photographic evidence of (her) own existence'. .

In my personal opinion, Calle without fail always went too far for me but Intellectually and creatively, there was something worth emulating. The factor that has most influenced me here came from reading the 1988 essay of the late Jean Baudrillard (Leach, 2002, p 52). In this, he describes 'Suite Venitienne' in terms of a reciprocal loss of will on the part of both the pursued and the pursuer. This ruse would perhaps allow me to tease my non-fiction work into greater creativity and so I decided to apply this to a journey I was to take in October of last year. I would interview people entirely at random to produce a piece of creative non-fiction from a 10-day thousand-mile car trip that my husband and I took through the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. (Should you wish to read the full Critical Commentary, it is available at this link)

Alberto Fujimori, the former Peruvian president who is now 70 years old, has finally been convicted of kidnapping and murder. He has been sentenced to 25 years in jail in what was described as a landmark ruling for human rights cases in Latin America.

A three-judge panel found the 70-year-old guilty of authorizing a military death squad during the state's "dirty war" against Maoist rebels in the 1990s.

Maria McFarland, a Human Rights Watch researcher who attended the trial said. "After years of evading justice, Fujimori is finally being held to account for some of his crimes,"

"With this ruling, and its exemplary performance during the trial, the Peruvian court has shown the world that even former heads of state cannot expect to get away with serious crimes."

Argentina, Chile and Colombia may also be watching this day as they come to terms with their own dark deeds of past history.

Fujimori during the trial repeatedly protested his innocence and said he deserved credit for saving Peru from anarchy.

He told the court, "I governed from hell, not the palace," and blamed his former spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, for any counter-insurgency excesses.

Fujimori's daughter, Keiko, is a congresswoman and a leading contender for the 2011 presidential race and says that she plans to pardon her father just as soon as she can.

In this interview held at the beginning of Fujimori's trial more than 15 months ago, one of his victims - Gisela Ortiz who lost her brother, a student, as Fujimori waged the La Cantuta massacre - explained why she thought Fujimori should be brought to justice.

(N.B. this interview is with Gisela Ortiz, speaking in Spanish, with translation of her words by peace and human rights activist, Hayden Gore).

My younger son has just finished reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and commented that it was not only an extraordinary literary work but also, of course, a source for rare insight into the complications of mental illness. This reminded me  of a conversation (not so much a formal interview, you understand) I had a few years ago with the fabulous and extraordinary author, Joanne Greenberg, who as Hannah Green wrote I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

This work is a fictionalized depiction of Joanne Greenberg’s own treatment experience decades ago at Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland, during which she was in psychoanalytic treatment with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. The book takes place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at a time when Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Clara Thompson were establishing the basis for the interpersonal school of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, focusing specifically, though by no means exclusively, on the treatment of schizophrenia.

Greenberg has written that :-

"I wrote [I Never Promised You a Rose Garden] as a way of describing mental illness without the romanticisation that it underwent in the sixties and seventies when people were taking LSD to simulate what they thought was a liberating experience. During those days, people often confused creativity with insanity. There is no creativity in madness; madness is the opposite of creativity, although people may be creative in spite of being mentally ill."

(From the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy website)

At the time of recording, Joanne Greenberg's just published novel was 'Appearances'. In this conversation, she also discussed not just mental illness, but also creativity, the role of 'Underwood', how she creates her stories, how she writes 'sex', personal memories of a vicarious brush with Sylvia Plath, and a great deal more.

Claudia Cragg speaks here with 'Six-Word Memoirs' editors Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser who have once again brought readers a memorable collection that’s a diverse grab bag of writers—famous, obscure, gay, straight, single, married, divorced, and polyandrous, hailing from Mississippi to New York to California, Australia to Vietnam. This time, though, the subject is 'Love and Heartbreak'. One entry from sex-columnist Dan Savage sits alongside one by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Hass. Supermodel Janice Dickinson dishes out six words in the brazen spirits she’s known for, while Chip Rowe—aka The Playboy Advisor—makes a surprising revelation to his millions of readers. The world's most famous divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, tells us, in six words, "Love almost always leads to heartbreak."

Since hitting the mainstream, the six-word form has been re-imagined countless times. From kindergarten through graduate school, teachers have brought the six-word storytelling exercise into their classrooms. A young girl in California ended her eulogy for her poker-loving grandma with a six-word summation of her life: “Look, I have a royal flush!” 

Six-word memoirs continue to pour into SMITH Magazine’s website every day and themes have emerged, from faith to hair to sex to food. By far the most common thread, however, is love. Passionate love, parental love, platonic love—it seems to be the most universally life-changing factor for storytellers of every age, background and worldview.

Josh Rushing is a former U.S. Marine captain and current Al-Jazeera English correspondent. He is familiar to many as the point man who helped sell the Iraq war to the American public as spokesman for United States Central Command (CENTCOM) during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He became famous for his appearance in the documentary Control Room, which documented his conversation with Al Jazeera correspondent Hassan Ibrahim.

In 2007, Palgrave Macmillan published Mission: Al-Jazeera, Rushing's memoir of his journey from a small town in Texas to the Marines to Al Jazeera English.

Nowadays, Rushing works as a correspondent and military analyst out of Al-Jazeera English's Washington, D.C., bureau. He covers a wide variety of international issues for Al-Jazeera English, but focuses primarily on U.S.-Middle Eastern relations about which he spoke with Claudia Cragg.

'Philanthrocapitalism', by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green is an examination of how today's leading philanthropists are revolutionizing the field, using, they believe,  new methods to have a vastly greater impact on the world.
In this book, you read that to philanthropists of the past, charity was often a matter of simply giving money away. For the philanthrocapitalists - the new generation of billionaires who are reshaping the way they give - it's like business. These "social investors", who are largely trained in the corporate world, are using big-business-style strategies and expecting results and accountability to match.

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, is leading the way: he has promised his entire fortune to finding a cure for the diseases that kill millions of children in the poorest countries in the world.

In this book, the authors examine this new movement and its implications. Proceeding from interviews with some of the most powerful people on the planet - including Gates, Bill Clinton, George Soros, Angelina Jolie, and Bono, among others - they show how a web of wealthy, motivated donors has set out to change the world. Their results will have huge implications: In a climate resistant to government spending on social causes, their focused donations may be the greatest force for societal change in our world, and a source of political controversy.

Combining on-the-ground anecdotes, expert analysis, and up-close profiles of the wealthy and powerful, this is a fascinating look at a small group of people who will change an enormous number of lives.

I recently spoke with Matthew Bishop who, before joining 'The Economist', was on the faculty of London Business School, where he co-authored three books for Oxford University Press. He has served as a member of the Sykes Commission on the investment system in the 21st Century. He was also on the Advisors Group of the United Nations International Year of Microcredit 2005. He has been honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and is a graduate of Oxford University.

More By Matthew
 
"I Want to Lose a Fortune"
 
"Fighting Global Poverty: Who'll be Relevant in 2020?"
 
"View from Davos: Bono Marketing His Red Badge of Virtue"