Welcome to The Newsfeed.

I'm Paris Jackson.

We're recapping the highlights from the recent Cascade PBS Ideas Festival in Seattle.

Where innovators, journalists and industry leaders gathered to discuss the most pressing topics of today on the Amazon campus.

The festival tackled conversations from the harmful effects of Big Tech, First Amendment rights in the wake of a second Trump presidency, to America's growing fears of other nations.

Here's a look at three prominent voices that made waves.

For years, the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival has been a destination for critical and thought provoking, newsworthy conversations.

This year's guests were a good reflection of today's Zeitgeist.

Here's travel expert Rick Steves on why traveling can help people broaden their perspective.

My secret juice, I think, is the fact that I'm a historian.

I got my degree in in European history, and I'm a traveler.

So being a traveler, I'm less ethnocentric.

And being a historian, I'm less chronocentric.

I really believe in the value of history, and I really believe in the value of getting to know people you're afraid of.

In another session, Amanda Knox recounts her eight year ordeal from being convicted, then acquitted, convicted again, then learning the Supreme Court of Italy overturned that conviction and permanently acquitted her and her codefendant, her former boyfriend.

Knox says it was a very intense period.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So it was the middle of the night.

First of all, we got a very, very late in the middle of the night verdict.

And I spent almost the entire day in the office of the prison chaplain, Don Saulo, who had become my dearest friend in prison.

And we we talked together.

He held my hand.

We cried, and he was 100% convinced that I was going home.

And that was that was a big thing for me, because at that point in my journey, I didn't have faith in the criminal justice system anymore and had already failed me once.

And so I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen when I walked back into that courtroom.

And so it was handed down.

I was going home.

I came, I was driven back to the prison, not in a prison van, like a caged animal, but in a, you know, in a police car.

And I the entire prison, which I've been watching on TV, erupted in cheers.

Everyone screaming.

Liberta!

Liberta!

In another talk, CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios national political correspondent Alex Thompson dig into anecdotes from their book ‘Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again We just could not believe the story.

And one of the most shocking ones, was in the New Yorker excerpt, which was that, President Biden, didn't seem to recognize George Clooney when he saw him backstage at the, at that big fundraiser that George Clooney was a co-host for.

That raised a record $30 million for his campaign.

And George Clooney had known President Biden since he met him after 9/11.

And he dealt with him as an activist, against the genocide in Darfur, when he was vice president and on and on.

And, that was I mean, that's just a shocking thing.

And it it also just explains why Clooney wrote the op-ed he did because he saw what every one of us saw debate night.

He saw it backstage at that fundraiser.

And we just have lots of anecdotes like that.

I'm Paris Jackson.

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