Global Atlanta
Ted Turner Pushes to Reconcile Conflicts, Restore Environment
March 26, 2014
By Trevor Williams
Ted Turner might be too down-to-earth to be a diplomat, but a speech today in Atlanta showed that the 75-year-old billionaire is still an active ambassador for political reconciliation and environmental restoration.
Addressing a record crowd of 1,300-plus at the Technology Association of Georgia’s annual summit, the founder of Turner Broadcasting System and CNN eschewed the high-brow language of international negotiators in favor of a plainer prescription for fixing the world’s problems: Less talk, more action.
Stil, Mr. Turner, who has given $1 billion to the United Nations, said he’d like to see more dialogue at the multilateral body, which he said is the only place where world leaders of all stripes can come together to hash out their differences peacefully.
He “hated to see us come to loggerheads with Russia over Ukraine” and lamented the loss of the Goodwill Games, an international competition similar to the Olympics that aimed to put political bickering aside for the sake of friendly competition.
Mr. Turner conceived of the games, which were first held in 1986 in Moscow, six years after the U.S. and other countries boycotted the Summer Olympic Games there. They were held every four years until 2001, when they were cancelled by AOL/Time Warner, which had bought Turner Broadcasting in 1996. Mr. Turner said he never would’ve nixed the games.
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