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The Current Transcript for November 20, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: Two police officers from the Spanish national police came to my hotel room in Madrid and they said we have a warrant for your arrest from Interpol, based on a Russian request.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Business man and investor, Bill Browder, has been celebrated as a champion of human rights in Canada, the U.S., in Europe, for his work exposing corruption in Russia. But the Russians have reacted with an Interpol red notice to force his arrest. Just one example critics say of how Russia abuses the power of Interpol. Now Russia appears poised to take control of the international policing body and that has critics wondering if Interpol should be scrapped. We're on that story in just a moment. Also today, she was a tough reporter with a patch over one eye and a stubborn streak that refused to take no for an answer. And when Marie Colvin met someone in crisis, she would do anything to tell their story.

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VOICE: There was a tiny baby, well one-year-old naked, hit in the left chest, the doctors just said we can't do anything and we had to watch the baby's little tummy, desperate for breath, die.

AMT: What you just heard was the last story she ever told. Marie Colvin was killed in Syria in 2012. In half an hour, her friend and fellow war correspondent, Lindsey Hilsum, takes an unflinching look at the dedication and the demons of this generation's best journalist and.

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[Sound of beetle flying]

AMT: Nah, that's not your neighbor mowing the lawn. That is a rather large, ugly and imposing Hercules beetle and though it and so many of its cousins, may not delight you, the beetles of the world are busy tending to the ecosystem, which is why some scientists worry about their ability to birth more little beetles. Climate change on six legs, in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Expel Russia from Interpol, former U.S. ambassador suggests ahead of election

Guests: Michael McFaul, Michelle Estlund

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AMT: Interpol is supposed to help police forces around the world work together to fight crime. To catch human traffickers, foil cyber criminals and bust international art thieves to name a few things. But lately, the international policing agency has become the subject of intrigue and the target of criticism. Interpol is set to elect a new president tomorrow in Dubai. It has to. Its last president, Meng Hongwei, disappeared in September. Chinese authorities say they are detaining him in a corruption investigation. The leading candidate to replace Mr. Meng is Russia's representative Alexander Prokopchuk and that has prompted outrage from critics who say that Russia has been abusing Interpol for years, targeting those it considers its enemies abroad. Among those raising the alarm is my next guest. Michael McFaul served as U.S. ambassador to Russia under U.S. President Barack Obama. He is now a professor of political science at Stanford University. Hello.

MICHAEL MCFAUL: Thanks for having me.

AMT: When you heard Alexander Prokopchuk was in the running to lead Interpol, what did you think?

MM: I was appalled and disappointed in my government for not trying to do something about this. So I was appalled because Russia has a long track record of abusing Interpol red notices and diffusions against political opponents. They abuse the system. The system is supposed to be about trying to arrest criminals and they use it from time to time to try to arrest human rights activists. And second, let's just be clear, the Russian government, the Ministry of Interior, you know that this gentleman comes from back at Russia, they have a poor track record of enforcing the rule of law by any international measurements, you know, the various groups that measure rule of law. There's a strong sentiment amongst those experts that they rule by law, not rule of law. So of all people, I think just symbolically, even if he doesn't have a lot of power, sends the wrong signal and I think will damage the reputation of Interpol.

AMT: Can you just briefly explain what a red notice is?

MM: Yes. There's actually two things that your listeners need to be aware of. One is the red notice, which is more famous. That's a notice that goes out of Interpol, the international organization that is Interpol, based in Leon, and it goes out to member countries and If there's a red notice by somebody's name, you're obligated to arrest that person. And then if you have an extradition treaty with the country putting in the red notice, you're supposed to send that criminal, alleged criminal, to the host country. There's another thing that most people never heard of called a diffusion, which is actually the thing that's most abused by countries like Russia. And that is a similar thing, it's kind of like a red card, green card in a football. So a diffusion, it's a lesser standard to get one and it's asking, it's a request to the host government where a person might be residing or entering, to stop them and to arrest them and to ship them back to the country. And that can be done on a bilateral basis, it doesn't have to go through the headquarters of Interpol. At least that's the way I understood it. The reason I became so expert on these things, was last summer at the Helsinki summit, Mr. Putin, President Putin when he met with President Trump, floated the idea that American diplomats, including me, should be handed over to the Russian government for interrogation. So now I've had to worry about red notices and diffusions when I travel abroad.

AMT: And so these things, well what they carry on into perpetuity?

MM: Well I'm not an expert. In my own case, they get in to the system and then they can be adjudicated. You know most famously, Mr. Browder, Bill Browder, a British businessman has been chased around the world by the Russians, using red notices and every time that the diffusers, I actually don't know which of the two are used against Mr. Browder, but every time so far when Bill has been stopped, he's managed to convince the authorities that whatever country he's in that this is done for political purposes. But you know, I think he has to worry about maybe going to the wrong country where they might be more sympathetic to the Russian government.

AMT: And I'll just interject. Bill Browder of course, the man who was a venture capitalist, ran into trouble with Russia. His lawyer, Mr. Magnitsky killed in prison and the Magnitsky Act that a number of Western countries have now adopted, including Canada and the U.S. Russia is not happy with him.

MM: Exactly. In fact they just had a big hearing at the general prosecutor's office yesterday, claiming that they have all kinds of new information about a criminal scheme that Mr. Browder has been running and most incredibly, they are now accusing Mr. Browder of killing Sergei Magnitsky.

AMT: So you're telling me that Russia has been misusing Interpol through these processes for a while, not just once or twice.

MM: Yeah, I mean, I think they have a long history, they're not the only country by the way, there are other countries that have abused the system for political purposes. And some countries of course reject these political uses of red notices and diffusers, that's good, but I just think naming a Russian as the head of Interpol I think really will taint the reputation of the organization. And the second piece by the way, I'm upset about with my administration, the Trump administration. This again shows what happens when you abdicate leadership, when you don't stand up for democracy and human rights. When you don't voice you know on behalf of all democracies in the world and exercise your authority and organizations. And I just hope that the administration before this vote goes forward might understand that there are consequences from being absent.

AMT: Alexander Prokopchuk has been the vice chair at Interpol for the last two years. Has he been too close to the top already in your view?

MM: Well to be honest, I didnt know he was the vice chair until you know I was being threatened with arrest by Vladimir Putin. This July I wasn't paying attention to who's where in Interpol, but now that I have, yes I think you know democracies need to exercise or voice in Interpol and to pushback of these kinds of appointments. Maybe it's too late with this one, but maybe you know moving forward we'll try to you know, you only have rule of law when you have democratic rule of law, when accusers have the right to defend themselves and it's not what happens in Russia. So why would we want somebody heading up the international police organization, when the government and the ministry from which he comes has a very poor track record of adhering and implementing the rule of law back at home.

AMT: The year he became vice chair, 2016, Interpol actually introduced changes to try to help prevent the misuse of its system. Do you know if that's made any change?

MM: I don't know. I know Mr. Browder is still harrassed and you know detained all over the world. I know there's a Russian citizen sitting in a you know in a jail right now in San Franscisco, who claims that this was all for political purposes. I can't adjudicate those. I'm not an expert, I'm not a legal expert, but people that watch these things closely list Russia as one of the top offenders of using Interpol for political purposes.

AMT: And we know the representative from South Korea is apparently in the running for this position, but should Mr. Prokopchuk be elected, how should Western countries respond?

MM: I think they need to be very, very suspicious of any red notice or diffusion put into the Interpol system from countries like Russia. And I think, at a minimum, hopefully this appointment will just raise the red flag, to mix metaphors, of any time you get one of these things, don't just treat it as business as usual, but look very hard to understand if there's a political purpose behind you know the case in question, the person in question.

AMT: Doesn't that defeat the purpose of Interpol, if you have to question everything that Interpol does, how effective can it possibly be?

MM: I agree. You know,, if it were up to me, I would kick Russia out of Interpol. I think their record of abuse suggests that they don't deserve a place in that organization. But you know there are 200 members there, not just the United States. And as far as I can tell, the United States is not exercising its voice. I don't know if your government is either. You know you have one of the most articulate spokespeople on the planet for the Liberal International Order in your Foregin Minister, Chrystia Freeland. I hope the Canadian voice will be heard on this too because we need more voices pushing back on this abuse because if we don't, these systems, these international rules, these international organizations are going to fall apart, and in the long run this is just one more blow to that. But in the long run, that's what I really fear, that the entire liberal international order will fall apart because of these abuses of it including from countries like Russia.

AMT: Mr. McFaul, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your time.

MM: Yeah. Yeah thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

AMT: Michael McFaul served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia under U.S. President, Barack Obama. We asked Interpol for an interview. No one was available. We requested a comment from Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister, Chrystia Freeland. We have not heard back. Four U.S. senators are urging President Donald Trump to oppose the candidacy of Russia's Alexander Prokopchuk. The Kremlin says that is election medalling. Well as you heard from Ambassador McFaul, Interpol's critics say the abuse of the so-called red notices is not limited to Russia. The UK-based global criminal justice watchdog, Fair Trials International, has been tracking the use of red notices since 2013. It issued a report last month and it says that while Interpol has enacted substantial reforms in the past five years, people are still being unfairly targeted. Michelle Estlund has represented some of those people who say they are unfairly targeted. She is a lawyer who specializes in Interpol red notice cases and we've reached her in Miami, Florida. Hello.

MICHELLE ESTLUND: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

AMT: Michael McFaul says Russia should get kicked out of Interpol. What do you think?

ME: Well I certainly understand the reason that he would feel that way. We have witnessed repeated abuses of red notices by Russian authorities and diffusions as he mentioned. My take on it is a little bit different because I feel that if we kick them out completely, then we run the risk that Russia is going to become kind of a safe haven for criminals. My thought on how we manage them includes maybe adjusting the levels or the amount of credibility we give to each of Interpol's member countries because they don't really all deserve the same level of credibility and right now they are all afforded the same level of credibility when they're submitting requests for red notices and Russia is like some of the other member countries, continually demonstrating that they don't merit that level of trust.

AMT: How much control does the president of Interpol actually have on day-to-day operations?

ME: Not much, you know the president of Interpol is I don't want to say ceremonial, but his duties are fairly limited and obviously the secretary general who is Jergen Stock right now is in charge of the day-to-day activities of Interpol. He's essentially the CEO, but the president does head the executive committee and part of the executive committee's job is to supervise the work of the secretary general and also to set policy and begin new programs. The same questions that are being asked now about the probable new president were asked about the outgoing president, when he took office and the concerns were similar because China also has a record of violating human rights and not following due process. One of the things that happened when the past president was in the office was that a very new asylum policy that had been part of the reforms that Interpol introduced in order to protect refugees, that policy was refined and the refinement was supposed to be because we didnt want to have terrorists being overly protected. The concern there that I had when we saw that policy refinement was that there was really, as far as I know, no danger or no instance of terrorists getting asylum and then escaping their red notices. What we did see though was out of many countries including China, prosecution for political dissidents and activists that led to red notices.

AMT: Well let's talk about these notices because Interpol's own record show the number has climbed substantially in recent years. I think what does it say, 1300 in 2003 to 13,000 last year. How much of these are legitimate notices for legitimate crimes in your estimation?

ME: We can't know specifically because most of them are not published and we don't know the backgrounds of all of them, but my guess, my educated guess is that the majority of them are legitimate. The people who come to me for help are not the people who are hiding because they have drug trafficking charges that were legitimately investigated or convictions for a murder that were legitimately obtained. The people who come looking for help to remove red notices are few and far between, relatively speaking, but when it's your life, the effects of an improperly issued red notice can be devastating.

AMT: In fact there was a case in Canada where a potato farmer in New Brunswick was the subject of a red notice from Algeria because they didn't like the potato crop.

ME: Right and Mr. Tepper ended up being detained I believe in Beirut for a long period of time and many people felt that this was a dispute that was about a business matter and Interpol's not supposed to be involved in that. So there are definitely issues that arise that aren't just political. They can be business disputes, they can be corruptly obtained convictions or arrests and in those cases people look for relief from Interpol, from the Commission for the Control of Interpol's Files, it's kind of a quasi appellate body, to remove that red notice.

AMT: And that's where you come in, right?

ME: That's where I come in.

AMT: And how difficult is that to get that shifted?

ME: Every red notice is afforded a presumption of validity and that has to be overcome by the red notice subject. As you can imagine, most people do not have the resources that Bill Browder has and the person you were talking about previously who's been able to continually really battle against Russia and its efforts to keep a red notice or obtain a red notice against him. Most people who come looking for help are business people, government officials, somebody who's run afoul maybe of either the wrong government official or the wrong crony of a certain administration and in order for them to succeed, they have to provide proof of the violations that happened to them during the context of their investigation or their prosecution. They have to convince Interpol that what was done to them was wrong and it takes time, it takes effort, it takes money. Not everybody has that. It can definitely be done, but it's very difficult for people to do on their own because Interpol is kind of an unknown entity for most people.

AMT: And we heard Mr. McFaul say, he has to think about where he travels. I would imagine your clients go through this?

ME: They do and the unfortunate thing is with Interpol, you don't always know that you have a red notice until you're detained. So Mr. McFaul I suppose you could say is fortunate in the sense that he knows this might be an issue, most people don't. A lot of times they're stopped at a border and if they're lucky the customs or immigration officials will inform them that there's an issue and send them back. Other times, they're not so lucky and they get detained. So it's hard for them to even know that this thing exists.

AMT: I want to play a clip for you from Canada's Public Safety, Minister Ralph Goodale. He has commented on the Interpol red notice system on several occasions and mostly in the context of Mr. Browder's case. Listen to what he said in May of this year in the House of Commons.

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VOICE: Canada vehemently disagrees with the Russian government's abuse and misuse of the Interpol listing system. Bill Browder has a strong record of human rights advocacy. In 2015, Parliament unanimously supported Irwin Cotler's motion recommending the legislation Mr. Browder has been calling for and we all unanimously adopted that legislation earlier this month.

AMT: So what role can countries like Canada play in pushing for reforms to Interpol, specifically on these on this issue?

ME: Well they can do what he just did. They can speak out on it and also remember, you've got some countries that supply more funding than other countries do. The United States obviously gives a good amount of funding to Interpol. Smaller countries with less capability don't provide as much funding and if they use their voices, if the countries all use their voices to first of all to vote, that's a big part of it, obviously voting in who's going to be the new president. But secondly, to ask the organization to look at certain issues and to demand answers. You know Interpol has made significant reforms in the last few years. They've worked with organizations like the one you mentioned earlier, Fair Trials International, they've really sat down with a working group to look at what needed to be done. Granted, it's been done slowly, but it has been done consistently. What concerns me though is if we've got somebody coming in, who we think is going to come in as the new president, we don't know what efforts he's going to make, if any, to undo those reforms. This person is going to be in charge of an executive committee, which agreed is not as hands on, it's certainly not as involved as the secretary general, but he does have influence over the policy and direction of the organization. And that's a concern.

AMT: Well the vote is tomorrow. We'll have to watch and see what happens. Thank you for your time.

ME: Thank you so much for having me.

AMT: Michelle Estlund is a lawyer who works with clients who have been named in Interpol red notices. She joined us from Miami, Florida.

ME: Let us know what you think. You can find us on Twitter @TheCurrentCBC or on Facebook or go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. The news is next and then Marie Colvin risked her life to tell stories from some of the most dangerous places in the world. Six years ago, the risk became a reality when she was killed in Syria. I'll speak to a fellow war correspondent and friends of hers about Marie Colvin's legacy. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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How famed war correspondent Marie Colvin lost her eye in an ambush in Sri Lanka

Guests: Lindsey Hilsum

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come, as world temperatures rise, climate change has been linked to more intense forest fires and more powerful hurricanes. From crippling ice storms to destructive floods, add another potential calamity to that list, male insect infertility. New research suggests heat waves could create plummeting insect populations. And while fewer bugs may be good for the garden, it may not be good for the gardener. We'll find out more in about 30 minutes. But first, a life lived on the edge.

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VOICE: I'm at ground zero and I'm seeing what is being hit. Civilian buildings are being hit. In the clinic today, if you can even call it that, it's an apartment, it has two operating tables and a dentist and a doctor. There was a tiny baby, well 1-year-old, naked, hit left chest. The doctors said we can't do anything and we had to watch the baby's little tummy desperate for breath, die. And there's been absolutely ferocious shelling this morning, starting at about 6:30 n the morning, tank shells and mortar rounds, very heavy shells. Several buildings have collapsed.

AMT: That is Marie Colvin, a war correspondent with The Sunday Times, The British Sunday Times, reporting in February of 2012, from the besieged neighborhood of Baba Amr in Homs, Syria. Marie Colvin's work that day stopped the world in its tracks. So powerful that she spent hours on a satellite phone telling journalists from rival news organizations of the toll Syrian government shelling was having on its own citizens. Her work that day would also cost her life. Within hours of that report, she and a French photojournalist, Remi Ochlik, were killed in a Syrian government rocket attack. You might remember Marie Colvin, if you ever saw her picture, she wore an eye patch after losing the use of an eye while covering the plight of Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka. Marie Colvin was 56-years-old. She had reported from a roster of the world's worst conflict zones, Chechnya, Iraq, East Timor, Afghanistan and when she was out of those places, she drank and partied with the best of them. Marie Colvin was a bit of an enigma. When she died, fellow war correspondent Lindsey Hilsum set out to learn more about her friend. Lindsey Hilsum is the international editor for Britain's Channel 4 News. Her book, In Extremis, is both a tribute to Marie Colvin and a raw view of what it really means to spend a career on the edge. Lindsey Hilsum is in London. Hi.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Great to be with you, Anna Maria.

AMT: In that clip you just heard, she was actually talking to one of your colleagues. What were you thinking as you listened to that just now?

LH: Well it was extraordinary. Marie and I had dinner in Beirut the week before and I had said to her, no, no. Being smuggled into Baba Amr was just beyond my danger threshold. It was just at the moment when the revolution in Syria was turning into civil war. Baba Amr was the most dangerous place on earth. I thought it was crazy, but she went in. She filed an amazing story about the widow's basement, which proves that the Syrian government was lying when it said that only terrorists were in the enclave. But then you know she came out to file that story and she went back in again. And so when she called to say she wanted to go live on Channel 4 News, I just couldn't believe that she had gone back in and I was angry with her. I said Marie, you know what are you doing? Why did you go back? She said Lindsey, it's the worst thing we've ever seen. I said I know, but what is your exit strategy? And she said that's just it, we don't have one. I'm working on it now. She gave us that broadcast and also the BBC and CNN and then a few hours later, she was killed.

AMT: There was no exit.

LH: There was no exit and you know, part of her knew that.

AMT: How tough was it for her to even get in there? What did she have to do to get to that place?

LH: Oh my goodness, it was amazing. I mean it took her several days to get in and she was with a photographer called Paul Condroy, he used to be in the paras, you know he was a former soldier. Not only were you in and out of vehicles and being shot at, but they had a kilometer and a half where they had to sort of crawl through this storm drain, like a sewage pipe. At one point they went in that way then they went out and then they went back in again. It was unbelievably dangerous and arduous.

AMT: And when she went back, there was actually an explosion right by the place where they entered. She might not have even been able to get out, if she could have gone down that pipe again. No?

LH: Well that was it. That was the extraordinary thing, which Paul only told me about six months ago. So when she said she wanted to go back in, he said no I have a bad feeling and she said well you know I'm going anyway. You know and I'm angry with Marie about that because as if Paul who is you know, he's a soldier and it would go against all his principles to let her go in on her own. Of course he went in with her, but he found later that just as they went back in, unbeknownst to them, the house where they had been resting and having tea there had been TNT, you know explosives, which the rebels had stored there and it exploded. So if they had not gone back, if they had done what he wanted and just stayed there and then returned to Lebanon, they would all have been eviscerated.

AMT: It's quite incredible. Either way, Marie Colvin was in her last hours.

LH: That's right. It's a very painful thing to think about still.

AMT: The death of that baby she's describing, was she there?

LH: No she wasn't. The first time they'd been in, they'd gone out to the widows basement and to the clinic. And so she had seen that with her own eyes and that is what she'd reported. But that second time, they couldn't get out because there were mortars coming in every few minutes and that baby, it was one of the local videographers had recorded that. And you know one of them was killed as well on that same day. And so it was brought in and she saw it on video. Now I would say as you know, if she was being a purist as a journalist, she should had made that clear, which she didn't. But I think at that moment, Marie had decided that getting the news out about what was happening in Baba Amr and the death of that child, she thought that that was the most important thing. And you can argue journalistic principles, but I understand why she did that.

AMT: It's likely the only time she wasn't actually face to face with the people whose stories she told.

LH: Oh yeah, she was a person who always. She was the person who always had to be there and she went back in without telling her editor. And then she sent him an e-mail from inside on the satellite phone saying, well we wouldn't have reported from the suburbs.

AMT: Syria was her last war, it certainly wasn't her first. I want to hear the story of Sri Lanka. How did she get the injury that resulted in that eye patch?

LH: Well this was in 2001 and she decided she would go into Tamil Tiger territory and no journalists, outside journalists had been in for six years. And it really was a forgotten conflict. Through contacts in London, she got access and she went in and she crossed the front lines to get in and she didn't get much of a story actually because the Tamil Tigers rather failed to produce the leader they said would talk to her. And then she thought okay well I've done my best and it was coming out. I had access to her diaries and they're extraordinary because she describes how beautiful it was. She describes this jungle and these butterflies, but then there's this impossibility of crossing this front line and then suddenly they're ambushed. And she drops to the floor and everybody disappears and then she knows she has to do something. So she gets up and she shouts, American journalist, American journalist and they shoot her and then she feels this terrible pain in her eye and chest and it's a rocket propelled grenade. And she survived that, but she had nightmares about that moment for years and years.

AMT: And she had a lot of shrapnel in her body from that as well.

LH: Oh she did. Yes and I mean the chest wound was initially the one that might have killed her. The press officer at the American embassy, when the Sri Lankan army who took her to the hospital eventually. I mean first of all they shot her then they saved her. When they called him, he could hear her yelling and I'm not going to use the words that she used, swearing down the phone in the background. So he thought okay, I know she's going to survive if she's swearing like a trooper.

AMT: I remember reading the news reports when that happened and at the time the government was accusing her of being with terrorists and it wasn't clear that they were actually going to be very helpful to her.

LH: Oh absolutely and this was, she said that this was one occasion when she was glad to be an American because the American embassy intervened and they basically said well you know, you can accuse her of that if you want and you can put her on trial and you can have a brave female American journalist who is well-known around the world and can tell her story on trial, or maybe you could just let her go and that is in the end what they did.

AMT: Her editor told her to write about her lucky red bra. He saw some pictures of her.

LH: One of the wonderful things about Marie and which made writing this book a joy, was on the one hand she's this tough war reporter, you know wading through the swamp and so on. But when she was at home, you know she loved clothes and she loved La Perla underwear, but on this occasion, the lucky red bra she said rather acerbically, it was cream, the red was my blood.

AMT: We're seeing a pattern here. She will not only go right up to the front line, she'll cross it to get close to people under siege and that was really underlined earlier in her career in Lebanon in the 80s, when she literally sprinted into a refugee camp. Tell us the story of what happened there.

LH: I think that this is the critical moment in Marie's career, that she and a photographer Tom Stoddart were in Beirut, you know during the war in Lebanon. There was a militia called Amal, which was sponsored by Hafez al-Assad, that's the father of the current Syrian leader and it was besieging this camp of Palestinian refugees and people couldn't get in and out. Marie and Tom bribed one of the Amal commanders to cease fire for one minute and in that one minute, they ran across No Man's Land into the camp and while they were in the camp, they witnessed the shooting of a young woman. Women were leaving the camp to go and get food and these snipers from the militia would just pick them off and they picked off this young woman. There was a British surgeon Dr. Pauline Cutting and a Scottish nurse, Susie White, who were working in the hospital under extraordinarily difficult conditions. And Marie watched them trying to save the life of this young woman and failing. I mean I think that her writing on this, I'm just going to read you a little bit. Though her hair was clotted with blood, Haji Achmed Ali seemed younger now that she had been cleaned. Her body was soft and shapely. She wore two tiny gold earrings. Someone opened her fist and cleaned out the handful of blood soaked dirt that she'd clenched in her pain. I think that that is such a beautiful piece of writing. It really brings it home for you. And one of the reasons that Mary noticed those little gold earrings was that they reminded her of a pair she'd given to her younger sister, Cat, many years earlier. And what happened with that story was that it was a different era. It was on the front page of The Sunday Times, which was a hugely influential newspaper. Gorbachev, a supporter of Hafez al-Assad in Syria, he was put under pressure by the Americans and the British. He put the pressure on Hafez al-Assad, within three days the siege of the camp was over. And so she really felt that she had achieved something. People who were in the camp I've spoken to have no doubt that her reporting had made a difference. You know that I think set her up for life. She wasn't going to write about herself, but her journalism was going to be distinguished by the intensity of her personal experiences. She would get up close.

AMT: And she also made everyone realize that those people were just like them. They had the things that we have, only they're stuck in a terrible place and they're dying.

LH: I think that that was one of her extraordinary talents as a writer was to do that. And you know we're talking about the 1980s, now American journalism was really quite formal at that time. And you know you would never say I, you would always say this reporter. Marie would say, I saw. I saw this. Which became her trademark, just as later on, the eyepatch became her trademark. Marie's work and commitment was extraordinary, but she was also the best fun on the road and she had the best parties and she did have eye patches studded with rhinestones for parties.

AMT: When did you two meet?

LH: We met in 1998 and the war had broken out between Ethiopia and Eritrea on the horn of Africa. It was a normal situation where all sane people were trying to leave and what the American journalist, H.L. Mencken, called a little bunch of madmen, were trying to get in and that was the journalists. And we were in Djibouti, which is the hottest place on earth and there was a Ukrainian plane which was flying people in. So Marie and I ended up walking together across the plane and we go on and as we taxied down this rather lumpy runway, we saw two things whizzing past the window. And we looked at each other and we looked at them and we realized it was our pilots t-shirts, which they had taken off and hung on the wings to dry because they were so sweaty. And then we looked in to the cockpit because the door was open and sure enough two enormous Ukrainian pilots flying bare chested. And as the plane took off, all the TV gear, which they had put at the front unsecured started to slide down the aisle and Marie and I got the giggles like we were little girls in class and we just couldn't stop laughing. And that was when we became friends. We thought we were going to die. We thought this plane was going to fall out of the sky and I don't know, we just thought it was hysterical.

AMT: And over the years you would meet both in London I guess and in war zones.

LH: Yeah we would meet and on the road you know, if Marie turned up I'd think I must be in the right place because she had such a good nose for a story. And also I thought oh good, now I'm going to have fun. And she was you know she was naughty. I remember one occasion we were giving a presentation in front of a group from Amnesty here in London, rather earnest young people and an earnest young woman got up and said you know how do you cope with the trauma of covering all these wars zones? And Marie looks at me and she looks at the young woman and she says Lindsey and I, we go to bars and we drink.

AMT: So interesting and of course she would end up having problems with alcoholism. I want to ask you a few more questions about the people she covered. She had two ongoing seeming friendships, different kind of journalistic relationship, maybe is the way to put it, with two notorious leaders and did a lot of delicate maneuvering with both Muammar Gadhafi and Yasser Arafat.

LH: Yeah she had an incredible ability to make people want to talk to her. She used that charm on Gadhafi. Now he was rather predatory and rather menacing. There was one time when he put out these little green shoes and a little white dress for her to wear, before the interview which she refused to wear. She said no, it's all too small and she kind of brushed him off. And there was another really weird occasion when he, she was back in her hotel after interviewing him, and there was a knock on the door of her room and she went out and there was this huge nurse. And the nurse said I'm Bulgarian nurse, I take your blood. She's like what? And this nurse was sent by Gadhafi to take blood, which was you know incredibly weird and so she sort of made an excuse and said, no I'm feeling a bit tired, let's do it tomorrow. And then the next morning she goes down to the reception, she thinks I'm going to get out of here. This is too crazy now. And the reception won't give her her passport back. But luckily, Arafat was in town and 417, who were his security detail, knew Marie and they saw her in distress and so they came over and they just snatched the passport back and ensured that she could leave the country. Arafat, she had quite a combative relationship with Arafat, but he trusted her and that, but that didn't mean that she didn't ask him the difficult questions. She often asked him you know whether he was supporting terrorism and questioning his policy.

AMT: And she at one point was dating one of Arafat's top people and she would sit around with Arafat and they'd drink and talk.

LH: Marie was a great smoker and she was a great believer that to get your story, you had to drink whiskey and smoke. Sometimes I wonder whether that's why I failed all my life. I'm no good at either of those.

AMT: What did you make of how close she got to Gadhafi and Arafat? Do you worry that it ever clouded her judgment when it came to her reporting in the regions?

LH: It certainly influenced it, but I think that what was so interesting about it was that she portrayed them as real people. That these were men who were largely portrayed in the Western media as monsters and she managed to show another side of them.

AMT: And they were very elusive. You know it was when she was living in Jerusalem that I met her. I mean you describe the woman that I remember, you know in terms of her journalism and in terms of her partying.

LH: Did you enjoy some of that?

AMT: Oh yeah. Well it was just interesting. She was very you know when she was in Jerusalem, she was married to Juan Carlos Gumucio, another legendary reporter.

LH: She had an extraordinary ability. You know there are some men who have a neon sign over their head, which says, have fun with, but do not marry. Readers, Marie always married them.

AMT: Well he was her second husband and her first was the British correspondent, Patrick Bishop. She had a confrontation with his lover on a bus.

LH: Oh yes, this was 91. She was really heartbroken because Patrick had been unfaithful. I'm not saying that she always behaved well, but she did love him. She's coming out of Iraq on this bus full of correspondence and she starts to listen to the conversation in the row ahead, which is in French. And she knows that he's having an affair with a French journalist and suddenly this woman is talking about you know how wonderful her lover is and what a shame he's married. Marie just leans forward and taps her on the shoulder and says, that's my husband you're talking about. Ooh, I don't know what it would have been like to be that woman.

AMT: What a legendary story. I remember the story.

LH: Do you?

AMT: Oh I do. I heard it. Oh yeah, but if we're going to talk about Baghdad and she was on that bus coming out of Baghdad. We need to talk about the extraordinary reporting she did at the time of the US invasion of Baghdad in the early 2000s, when she hired a mechanical digger and went looking for proof of a massacre.

LH: There's this extraordinary moment after a government has been overthrown and order has not been restored, when journalists can do anything. And Marie was determined to find out about the massacre that she had heard about when she was, had covered the earlier war in 1991. So she hired a mechanical digger and took it to a place where someone who said he was an eyewitness, claimed that there was a mass grave. And sure enough, there was a mass grave. And she describes in her article, how this blue sneaker that comes out and then all these women come up and start weeping and weeping and you know it's the most extraordinarily, emotional scene.

AMT: So many stories of the grisly scenes and the close calls and the raw emotion of the people who have witnessed or who have survived atrocities. It all took a toll on her.

LH: It certainly did. You know she had these nightmares. Sometimes you know she drank just to try and get herself to sleep because going to sleep was such a painful thing. And also she was in emotional turmoil because her love life never worked out and one of the reasons I called the book, In Extremis, is she wrote it has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis pushed to the unendurable. And you know that's how she lived. She pushed herself to the unendurable and lived in extremis. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and it was a relief to her you know in the end to admit it. She was treated and she did recover, but she was always vulnerable. And you know this side, this image, you know this brave, bold woman with the eye patch who'll go into all these places and do all these brave things, that wasn't how she always felt inside. And I think that that was a real problem for her trying to marry up the image of herself, which she wanted to create and she believed it.

AMT: And there was this mythology that her editors liked about her too, right, the glamorous war correspondent.

LH: There's no question, her editors talked it up, you know the risks that she took, it was a huge selling point, but I think that in the end she paid the price for it.

AMT: Well and when she died there were questions about the culpability of her bosses at the Sunday Times, were there not?

LH: Definitely and certainly some people within the Sunday Times feel that she was too vulnerable and too volatile and should no longer have been allowed to go into war zones. You know on the other hand, hard to imagine Marie doing anything else.

AMT: What do you think she would be doing today?

LH: She'd be in Yemen trying to find out what was really going on.

AMT: She'd refuse to leave there too, wouldn't she?

LH: She would.

AMT: The Syrian government had informants looking for the media center where she and other journalists were working in Baba Amr. When they found it that's when the shelling began and that's when she died. You write that the top Syrian officials actually celebrated.

LH: That comes from testimony given in a court case. Her sister, Cat, with the aid of the Centre for Justice and Accountability have taken out this civil case against people in the Syrian government, including Bashar al-Assad for the extrajudicial killing of Marie and in the witness testimony for that is the testimony of a defector, who says that she was targeted and that they triangulated the signals from the broadcasts that she made.

AMT: And so where is that case now in the courts?

LH: That case is with a judge in Washington. But you know, Bashar Assad isn't going to go to Washington to you know await sentencing, but I think that what Marie's family hope is that this will draw attention yet again to atrocities being committed in Syria and that one day, the perpetrators of those atrocities will face international justice.

AMT: You and your colleagues now work with young journalists coming up in Marie's name. What are you doing?

LH: When Marie was killed, I mean I think we were all grief stricken, certainly for about a year afterwards, I couldn't go anywhere dangerous. You know, I just couldn't face it. And then we started to think about Marie's legacy and her best friend, Jane Wellesley and Lyse Doucet you started this small project in Marie's name, called the Marie Colvin Journalists' Network. We're providing support to young women journalists in the Arab world because just as young western women were often told, oh no you can't be a journalist, often in the Arab world, young women are told oh no you can't do that, that's a job for men. I'd like to think that Marie would think that that was good and she would like it, the women coming up in her wake come from the countries, which she loved and which she reported on.

AMT: I think that's a wonderful tribute. Do you miss her?

LH: Oh all the time.

AMT: Well I didn't know her as well as you did, but I remember her well and I always admired her. It's a really important thing to remember the kind of work she did and what it means for journalists today. Lindsey, thank you for your work.

LH: Thank you very much, Anna Maria. It's a delight to talk to you about it.

AMT: Lindsey Hilsum is the international editor for Britain's Channel 4 News. She's the author of, In Extremis: The Life of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin. And if you like to get into the journalistic weeds, you'll know what I mean when I say Marie Colvin's career was Gellhorn-esque. Stay with us, in our next half hour, insect numbers around the globe have been dropping for years. Now scientists think they pinpointed at least one connection and that is male insect infertility caused by rising temperatures. Can hot and not so bothered bugs tell us anything about human infertility? We are asking. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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Heat waves are damaging beetle sperm, and that could be bad news for the entire planet

Guests: Matt Gage, Allan Pacey

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE: I don't know if you can hear it, but that's the sound of millions of Japanese beetles eating my plants. It is super gross.

AMT: Well she's not happy about the beetles in her garden.

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VOICE: And they've really done a ton of damage this year. This is the worst I've seen.

AMT: Beetles are ubiquitous. They come in all shapes, sizes, colours, sounds, such as the Click beetle.

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Sound of a Click beetle

AMT: That snaps the top and bottom of its body to make the sound you're hearing. Or the Hercules beetle.

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Sound of Hercules beetle flying

AMT: Sounds more like a buzz saw or maybe a lawn mower, but those are the wings of the Hercules beetle. And while some people think beetles are pests and that their sounds are annoying, scientists would remind us that beetles play an important role in nature. They feed on other insects and plants that could be considered weeds. They're part of the ecosystem. And so some new research is troubling. A new study has found that heat waves damage beetle sperm, which is not good news for the beetles and as the planet warms, it may not bode well for the rest of us. Matt Gage is a professor of evolutionary ecology and a leader at the University of East Anglia research group that published the new study. He's in Norwich, England. Hello.

MATT GAGE: Hello there.

AMT: How might one measure a beetles' sperm count?

MG: You have to have a good microscope and some steady hands. So what we did to measure it was we simply we got male beetles to mate with female beetles and then we extracted the sperm packet that the male transfers to the female, out of the female tract, disperse the sperm and counted the number of sperm that were in there. And what we found was that if males had experienced a heat wave before they did this, their sperm count went down by more than three quarters.

AMT: What does beetle sperm look like?

MG: It's actually hugely variable. So the species that we work with, which is a tiny beetle, it's about three millimeters long, a little flower beetle, its sperm looked pretty much like just like a thread really. So they don't have the sort of tadpole shape sperm like human sperm, looks just more like a thread and they're about three times as long as a typical human sperm, but some beetle species produce sperm that are millimetres or even near centimetres in length. So there's huge variability and we've actually got some genetically modified beetles that into which we've put a fluorescent sperm tag, so these ones fluoresce green when we put a fluorescent light source on them. So we can see the sperm moving through the female reproductive tract.

AMT: OK so you found some results with the heat. What were you setting out to study?

MG: So the background to the study is that we expect more heatwaves to happen with climate change. And we know that climate change is causing biodiversity declines, but we actually don't know a great deal about what the specific sensitivities or mechanisms are that are causing those. We've known for a long time that male fertility is sensitive to heat. Sperm don't like heat. Sperm are best produced at a cooler temperature, but hardly anybody's looked at the impacts of heat and sperm production of male fertility in so-called cold-blooded animals, ectotherms, like insects and we thought that was a bit of a gap because most biodiversity on planet earth, most species are cold blooded and we wanted to know whether they were also more vulnerable to heat wave conditions as warm blooded animals are as well. So what we did was we basically just exposed these male beetles to conditions that are define the heat wave in the natural environment, basically where the temperature gets to five degrees centigrade above the normal for the time of year, for five days or more. We found that males were really sensitive to heat wave conditions. So if you give males one heat wave their reproductive performance drops by about half and if you give them two heat waves, they become basically sterile. But by contrast, females are just fine, they can handle heat waves okay. Their reproductive output wasn't affected at all, but they were affected indirectly because if they'd mated with a male and they had inseminated sperm inside them in their female reproductive tract and then they experienced the heat wave, their reproductive output and fertility dropped by about a third. So females were indirectly affected because of the sperm that they were carrying inside them.

AMT: Does heat play any role in the beetles' motivation to mate?

MG: We had a bit of an effect on male motivation to mate if they'd been in a heat wave, but they still mated at a frequency that would easily provide a female with plenty of fertility. So they still mated three or four times in an hour, as opposed to six or seven times an hour, when they haven't experienced the heat wave. So they can mate a lot these beetles. So we don't think any impact on mating behaviour led to this decline in fertility. We think it was a very much a sperm-specific impact that we found. What we also found, which was kind of unexpected and a bit more worrying was a transgenerational impact. So if you're an offspring that is born from a dad or indeed a sperm that experienced a heat wave before fertilization, then your lifespan was down by about 20 percent. And if you're a male produced by a dad or indeed a sperm that experienced a heat wave, then your own reproductive performance went down by about a third. So if you're a son that was fertilized by a dad or a sperm that experienced a heat wave, there was this transgenerational impact into the next generation.

AMT: And now you're are the scientist, I'm lay person, but does that mean there's a genetic change that happens that quickly, like is that almost like a modification genetically that's happening in real time?

MG: Yes well probably. Exactly, but we don’t know exactly how this happens, but the most likely contender is that the DNA inside the fertilizing sperm has been somehow damaged by its exposure to a heatwave condition and that's producing an offspring that's got an elevated mutation rate. Sperm are pretty inactive in terms of DNA repair once they've been made. So once they're inside the female reproductive tract and they're exposed to a heat wave, they don't really have the capacity to fix damage to the DNA. The egg can mend DNA and the embryo can mend DNA, but possibly the sperm was so damaged by heat wave exposure and so we see these declines in reproductive performance and lifespan associated with that.

AMT: So why would heatwaves affect beetle sperm that way?

MG: Well we'd expect it to affect any sperm and we're using these beetles simply as a model for other species. We'd speculate that extreme thermal stress could damage DNA in any sexually reproducing system.

AMT: Remind us how important beetles are.

MG: Beetles are very important. Of the 1.5 million species on our planet, so far identified, a million of those are insects. And within the insects, beetles dominate, so at least a quarter of insect species are beetles and beetles do all sorts of different things in all sorts of ecological niches. They turn over nutrients and important things like soil fertility. They pollinate plants. So 80 percent of our flowering plants around the world are pollinated by insects and beetles play a big role in that as well. So beetles are important. Insects are even more important. They hold food webs together, so they're kind of core to biodiversity and biodiversity of course is core to earth's life support system.

AMT: And if there are fewer of them, what impact could that have on other species in the ecosystem?

MG: Well we don't know how close we are to some very important tipping points in terms of insect abundance and diversity. Now of course we've knocked back a lot of insect populations so that we can grow things like food for ourselves and not compete with insect pests for that, but insects are core to biodiversity and if we're losing large numbers of them, we don't know at what point we might see some really dramatic effects that people really care about.

AMT: Are you looking at other species and their reaction to heat as well?

MG: We are looking at other species. So we're studying moths and butterflies species and cricket species. In fact, tomorrow I fly out to Norway, where we're working with salmon, looking at temperature impacts on salmon sperm and eggs and the resulting impacts, if any, on embryos.

AMT: So this is again, ecosystem, our own food chain.

MG: Exactly. And I think people can relate to sort of big animals that play large parts in our lives like salmon or fish. Now they're less interested in small, often pestilential animals like beetles, but beetles can be really excellent models of how other species might react to things like climate change.

AMT: So you're finding that warmer temperatures damage sperm in other species. What can you draw any connections to what that could mean for male fertility, human fertility as climate change progresses?

MG: Well we've known for many years that human male fertility is sensitive to heat, but there are plenty of studies drawing relationships between lifestyles, too many saunas, too many hot baths. And there are also studies drawing parallels between heat wave conditions and resulting drops in birth rate, nine months later on. Those studies are tricky to draw conclusions from because it's hard to know exactly when the heat wave occurs and when the impact of that on the resulting birth rate nine months down the line. So I mean humans, obviously they're warm blooded, so they can protect their body temperature to a degree from environmental variation and we've also got things like air conditioning to escape to. But there are potentially some impacts of these kind of phenomena on human fertility.

AMT: And you're saying even beyond what might be going on with humans, we should be very concerned about what's going on in the insect world and with other species.

MG: As a biologist, I would definitely, as an evolutionary ecologist, I would definitely subscribe to that view of the world. We need to preserve our biodiversity and keep it healthy. We depend on it. So anything that impacts on that, we should be concerned about.

AMT: Well thank you for explaining your work and thank you for what you do.

MG: You're welcome. Thanks for the interest.

AMT: Matt Gage, professor of evolutionary ecology and leader of the University of East Anglia research group. He joined us from Norwich, England. Well the findings about beetle fertility and heat waves, raises questions about potential tolls of climate change on human fertility. So a leap from beetle sperm to human sperm, I'm joined by Allan Pacey. He's a professor of Andrology at the University of Sheffield. He studies male reproduction and fertility and he joins us from Sheffield, England. Hello.

ALLAN PACEY: Hello.

AMT: Well as you listened in, what were you thinking about the beetle sperm study?

AP: I've known Matt for a while and he does some very good experimental studies. And I think the issue with any study like that is how much and to what extent do you want to translate that to the human because humans are very different in their physiology and their lifestyle and may cope with some of this stuff in a different way.

AMT: So we need to be careful about drawing conclusions or connecting, thinking we can connect too many dots.

AP: Indeed. But having said that, there is quite a lot of evidence that heat is a risk factor in male reproduction. So about 10 years ago now, I was involved in a multi census study in the United Kingdom. We recruited about two and a half thousand men across 13 or 14 hospital sites in big cities in the UK and we really did investigate their lifestyles and their habits and their medical history and so on and so forth to a great detail. And when we churned the numbers, I was surprised and I was very surprised to see that the single biggest risk factor for poor sperm quality in these men was whether or not they wore tight underwear. If you wore tight underwear, you were two and a half times more likely to have poor sperm than a man who wore loose underwear or a man who wore no underwear.

AMT: And is that because of the heat generated by that constriction?

AP: Yeah that was our leading theory. I can't prove that because we didn't make heat measurements, but the testicles hang outside the body in order to be two and a half degrees cooler than core body temperature and we know from lots of studies over many years that is the best and the most optimum temperature for human sperm production. So if a man is wearing tight underwear then essentially, he's pulling his testicles up towards his body and they will begin to get warmer. But that is an assumption on our part, but I think there's a lot of circumstantial evidence to support that as a reasonable conclusion. So for example, we know that men who drive a vehicle for more than two hours a day and therefore sit down to drive that vehicle, that constricts the airflow around their testicles and there are measurements actually of those men driving vehicles, showing that their testicular temperature rises. So I think it's a similar kind of effect. It's heating the testicles up and that in some way inhibits the efficiency of sperm production.

AMT: Okay so you do know that temperature has an effect on the production of human sperm.

AP: Yeah we know that sitting down increases testicular temperature and we know that men who sit down a lot are less fertile so putting two and two together, we make that conclusion. It's actually very difficult to do the experiment to prove that it directly affects sperm production. It takes three months to produce a human sperm from start to finish. So that would be a very elaborate experiment to do if we were to heat my testicles up today and we'd have to be looking at the sperm produced after Christmas in order to work out whether or not it had an effect. And there's an awful lot that can happen to me between now and Christmas. So that's the difficulty of conducting that kind of an experiment, but I think we've got enough circumstantial data to suggest that that's probably likely.

AMT: Well I want to get your thoughts on something else then related. We spoke to Hagai Levine, who's an epidemiologist from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He's the lead author of a 2017 study into male fertility and he explains what they found. Listen to him.

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VOICE: So we wanted to know what are the trends of the sperm count of men around the world, over the last 40 years. We found a very clear and actually dramatic trend of decline in both total sperm count and sperm concentration among Western men. We found over 50 percent decline over 40 years in both sperm concentration and total sperm count.

AMT: Allan Pacey, what do you make of that?

AP: Yeah I am aware of that study, I read the paper. This all feeds into this concern that modern men may be less fertile than their fathers and grandfathers. But I think we have to be cautious about how we interpret that data. There are two stages in a man's life when his sperm count might be affected. The first and the one that we're most used to thinking about is what he does as an adult: the lifestyle he leads, the food he eats, the sexual behaviour that he has, how often he ejaculates, his medications, his general health, so on and so forth and all of those things together will influence his adult sperm production. But there's a second stage where this is important too and that's before he was even born. So there's data to suggest that when he was a male fetus inside his mother, things that she may be exposed to combined with genetic factors and the general quality of that pregnancy, may pre-program the output of his testicles when he becomes an adult man. Now that's a really complex thing to get your head around. You know your maximum sperm production as a man may have been set before you were even born, but it's an even more difficult thing to try and research because it means if we have to fully understand the quality and quantity of sperm that an adult man today may be producing, we'd have to think about what may have happened over the last 30, 40, 50 years, depending on how old he was. And that makes it very difficult to fully understand what's going on.

AMT: And just the numbers that Professor Levine talks about, does that mean there is a trend toward lower male fertility?

AP: Yes in some people's minds true. If that data is real and it's still controversial in some people's minds, then one might predict that today's men may be less fertile, but I think the important thing for me is how that data might be combining with our lifestyle choices. So in developed nations, such as Canada or the United Kingdom for example, people are now in their 30s before they start trying for a family, whereas only a generation ago, they were generally in their 20s. And that has quite a dramatic effect because the female partner is older, but also the male is slightly older and that in combination with a lower sperm count or sperm quality in the first place, is almost leading to the perfect storm. It's leading to more and more couples experiencing infertility.

AMT: Well it's interesting because women are made well aware of that, the age factor in conceiving, but we talk less about the role of older men and their sperm getting older. What about things like cancer, how does that affect?

AP: Yeah cancer treatments are generally bad for fertility in both men and women. I spent 25 years working in our national health service helping people with cancer and their fertility needs, so I was able to bank sperm for men before cancer treatment because the risk is that after the cancer treatment, they're less fertile or indeed in some cases may be sterile.

AMT: Now I want to go back to Professor Levine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He told us that we don't fully understand the impact of climate change on human fertility, but he has concerns about that. Listen to him again.

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VOICE: We know from specific studies that heat could harm sperm. And one may ask, what are the impact of climate change? We are very concerned that this alarm of problem in male reproductive will not be met as needed by governments and the scientific community around the world because clearly there is a problem, but much more than that the causes that cause the sperm count decline could also become later even a larger problem for mankind. So if we do nothing, yes I am worried that eventually we could become extinct because of causes we don't know.

AMT: Allan Pacey, are you as concerned about extinction because of this?

AP: No I don't think I would go that far, I think that's a little too dramatic for me and I think part of the reason that I say that is that we know that the human race is able to be fertile successfully at equatorial regions for example. So you know it's pretty hot at the equator. So heat by itself, I don't think is the major concern for me. Where I do get concerned however, is in our general lack of understanding of all this. And I think there's a general recognition now that we know that there are potential threats out there for male fertility, but actually it's very difficult to galvanise support from governments or funders or even the general public about this being something that we should be worried about and that we need to invest some research funds in. And I fear that that's where we are now, we're kind of bystanders in this, rather than actually asking the questions that are really going to matter.

AMT: And do we need to ask questions about how climate change will affect human male fertility?

AP: Yeah, I mean it's not a bad question at all to ask. I think it would be incredibly complex to disentangle, but if climate change is going the way that people say it is, then we don't have a lot of time to think about this and it would be useful to know the answer before it is too late.

AMT: Might affect policy changes by governments, predominantly male governments, then haven't paid enough attention yet.

AP: You would hope so, wouldn't you?

AMT: Now I might just speak to them. Allan Pacey, thank you for your time today.

AP: Oh it's a pleasure. Thank you.

AMT: Allan Pacey is a professor of Andrology at the University of Sheffield. He studies male reproduction. He is in Sheffield, England. Let us know what you think. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Guest host Saroja Coelho speaks to this year's winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Esi Edugyan, the author of Washington Black.

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VOICE: Sorry, I wasn't expecting to win, so I didn't prepare a speech. I just have to say that in a climate in which so many forms of truth telling are under siege, this feels like a really wonderful and important celebration of words. So thank you so much.

[Audience applause]

VOICE: It's about a character who is born a slave. And so he's known nothing, but hardship and savagery his whole life and then he's plucked out of this situation, you know very suddenly and surprisingly and taken out into the world and he's just, he's a character that's full of resilience. And you know he's really seeking his place in the world and understanding the limits of what that can look like, but also really striving to change things for people like himself. And so it's a I guess it's a tale about sort of how you can continue to go on.

Esi Edugyan, the 2018 winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, for her novel, Washington Black. That's coming up on Q. Tomorrow on The Current, hear the dramatic story of Jackie Speier. In November of 1978, Jackie Speier accompanied California Congressman Leo Ryan on a fact finding mission to Guyana. They were following up on rumors that members of Jim Jones' cult were being held against their will at the compound of The People's Temple. It became notoriously known as Jonestown. They discovered that several members wanted help to leave, to escape and they were terrified and rightly so. As the Congressman was leading one group to leave, Jim Jones orchestrated the Jonestown massacre. More than 900 of his followers were forced to swallow poison and they died. And on the tarmac in the jungle, Congressman Ryan and Jackie Speier were about to board planes with a couple of journalists to return to the United States with the escaping People's Temple members. Armed men working for Jim Jones drove up and started shooting. Many people were killed. Jackie Speier was shot five times. Remarkably, she survived. She's gone on to be a member of the U.S. Congress. Forty years later, she's written, Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage and Fighting Back. She will be my guest tomorrow. We're going to leave you with her speaking to ABC News reflecting on what happened that day. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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VOICE: I was actually placing people on the two planes and a little Guyanese boy had scampered on to the plane and I had to coax him out because we didn't have enough seats and as I was trying to coax him out, the tractor trailer had arrived and started shooting, but my back was to it. So I didn't see it. I didn't even know what the sounds were and then everyone started to scurry. And then Ryan started to run. And so then I ran under the plane and as I was running, he was hit once and then he was hit again and fell. And I just ran to one of the wheels and tried to hide there, pretending I was dead. It seemed like it went on forever, it must have been you know a couple of minutes, but they had identified who they wanted to kill, the Congressman, Don Harris, the NBC reporter, the cameraman, the sound man, Greg Robinson, The Examiner photographer and me. Now every time I go back to that moment, I thank God that I'm still alive because there's no reason why I am alive. My whole right side of my body was blown up. My right thigh was totally destroyed, but the femoral artery was still intact. If that had been severed, I would have bled to death in 90 seconds. So you know there's so many thoughts that run through your head when you're dying. And I was 28-years-old and you know I had resigned myself to the fact that I was dying and because I'm a good Catholic girl, I said the act of contrition and waited for the lights to go out.

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Nov. 20, 2018 episode transcript

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