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Ugandan President Museveni says his party is ‘having very intensive internal discussions’ about anti-gay bill
By Madalena Araujo, CNN
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday that his party is discussing the anti-gay law that was scrapped in August.
“We are discussing that issue among ourselves in our party, and when we decide how to move we shall inform the public. We are discussing it internally within our party.”
Uganda’s anti-gay bill was signed by Museveni into law in February but has since been annulled. It defined homosexual acts as crimes punishable by life in prison and drew a huge amount of condemnation within the country and worldwide.
Musevini said he “did not sign the bill” when it was initially passed by Parliament, but “later on,” he explained, “I signed it because of some provocations from outside, because we didn't like lectures which were emanating from certain quarters.”
At the time, a defiant Musevini told CNN that "if the West doesn't want to work with us because of homosexuals, then we have enough space here to live by ourselves and do business with other people."
Will Nobel end Malala's sibling rivalry?
Malala Yousafzai says she still fights with her brothers. So Christiane Amanpour asks, will a Nobel Prize bring peace?
CIA torture methods ‘are war crimes,’ says former Guantanamo chief prosecutor
By Madalena Araujo, CNN
The abuses committed in the CIA’s "enhanced interrogation" program during the George W. Bush Administration were war crimes in the eyes of international law, Former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay Colonel Morris Davis told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.
“These are also crimes in the international community, and we can’t, and we have no authority outside our borders to excuse this conduct so these are war crimes, are violations of the Convention against Torture.”
The U.S. Senate has for the first time laid bare the shocking wrongdoings carried out in the CIA’s network of black site detention centers between 2002 and 2008, following the September 11th attacks.
Colonel Davis said he “wasn’t shocked by the particulars and the techniques that were employed.”
“We’ve all heard about waterboarding and some of the other things that were done to the detainees as part of the program. I think what was breathtaking to the public looking at this is the quantity, the scope and the extent and the pervasiveness of this program that we’ve used for a period of time on a number of individuals.”
PR guru Lord Tim Bell on advising dictators and Margaret Thatcher
By Madalena Araujo, CNN
Public relations can be a tricky industry when you’re dealing with notorious clients.
Lord Tim Bell knows that better than most people, having advised some of the world’s most controversial personalities, including Chilean general Augusto Pinochet, dictatorial Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s wife Asma al-Assad.
“I've discovered,” Bell told CNN’s Amanpour on Monday, “you may not believe this, but I've discovered that in my life in advertising, and my life in public relations, that telling the truth is a damn sight more effective than not telling the truth.”
“So I tend to opt for the truth – if I’m told it. Now the problem I have is that I'm a conduit. So somebody tells me what happened, I don't know whether that's right or wrong.”
The king of spin said that what drove him to write his new memoir, “Right or Wrong”, was the thought that what he’d “experienced was worth telling people, not because I thought it would be fascinating and change the world, but because it just seemed to me to be necessary for somebody to speak up for the right-of-center thinking, which very few people talk about now.”
Bell, Chairman of Bell Pottinger public relations, is best known for advising friend and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s, with a Conservative campaign under the slogan "Labour Isn't Working."
Release organizers unaware South Africa hostage Pierre Korkie was held with Luke Somers
By Madalena Araujo, CNN
The director of the aid group that led the effort to get South African teacher Pierre Korkie released by al Qaeda captors in Yemen told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday that his organization was unaware Korkie was being held with U.S. hostage Luke Somers.
“We also have the same problem as the Americans, we also didn’t know where Pierre was being held, we didn’t know he was with Luke Somers,” Imtiaz Sooliman, founder, director, and chairman of Gift of the Givers, told Amanpour.
Korkie and Somers, an American photojournalist, were both killed on Saturday in a failed U.S. rescue mission after the team on the ground “lost the element of surprise,” a senior State Department official told CNN.
The official also said the Obama administration was aware there were two individuals at the site but did not know one was South African or that negotiations were ongoing for his release.
On Friday, a team of tribal leaders was finalizing arrangements to release Korkie, Sooliman’s relief group said in a statement.
A cry for justice in America
Imagine a world where the cry for justice rises coast to coast, perhaps echoing the last words of Eric Garner as he pleaded to the police who were harassing him "this stops today."
Christiane Amanpour has the story.
From witnessing World War II code-breaking to causing uproars at the House of Lords
By Madalena Araujo, CNN
Jean Campbell-Harris could never guess that she’d end up at Britain’s top secret code-breaking headquarters during the Second World War at the age of 18.
“The man who interviewed me to go to Bletchley, asked, first of all - do you speak French? Yes. Do you speak German? Yes. Speak Italian? Well you don’t have to learn Italian, all you do is add 'io' to the end of every word. And, you know, I was in,” the now 92-year-old Baroness Trumpington told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday.
Trumpington worked as a cypher clerk at Bletchley Park’s naval intelligence department. She transcribed messages from German submarines for the code-breakers, the most important one being the British mathematician Alan Turing, who helped crack the Nazis Enigma code but committed suicide after being put on trial for his homosexuality.
His life is now being celebrated in The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which the Baroness thought “was absolutely excellent.”
She does, however, “have one absolutely minor criticism that the girl who played the part of the girlfriend,” played by British actress Keira Knightley, “was far too pretty.”
NY Congressman Hakeem Jeffries: I ‘worry every day’ about what a ‘bad apple’ police officer could do to my son
Click here to watch the full interview.
By Mick Krever, CNN
U.S. House Member Hakeem Jeffries, a black congressman from Brooklyn, New York, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday that he views some “bad apple” police officers as a threat to his son.
“I’ve got to worry every day about what could happen to him – not just from the robbers, but from a bad apple on the police department.”
His remarks came a day after a grand jury in the New York City borough of Staten Island decided not to indict a police officer who used a banned choke hold on an unarmed black man, which resulted in his death.
“I was really struggling as a father as to what to say to my older son in particular about what this verdict, or failure to indict, means in terms of his everyday actions on the streets of New York. I was actually comforted by the fact that I called and he got home safely.”
Jeffries called the decision a “stunning miscarriage of justice.”
“In many ways it’s a stain on the credibility of American democracy.”
“The overwhelming majority of New York City police officers are to be commended for the great work that they’ve done in partnership with the community in reducing crime.”
“But there are bad apples on the police force, and when you unleash them without consequence you see the type of tragedy that results.”
Israeli government in a state of ‘collapse,’ says former U.S. Middle East peace envoy
By Madalena Araujo, CNN
Former U.S. Middle East peace envoy Martin Indyk told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday that the Israeli government has entered a state of “collapse.”
On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired two key ministers of his coalition cabinet and announced that he would call for parliament to be dissolved, paving the way for new elections.
“They [the government] started to come apart over the peace negotiations last year. But since then, with the war in Gaza and then the increased conflict in Jerusalem, there's been divergent responses to all of this, which has just created this, I think collapse is the best word for it, in the ability of the government to function,” Indyk, who is now Vice President and Director of the Foreign Policy program at Brookings Institution, said.
“There is also a sense that this government wasn't able to function effectively, combined with right-wing parties and the center parties in this coalition were coming apart.”
Also at the heart of the rift is a divisive nationhood bill backed by right-wing members of the cabinet as well as Netanyahu, which was designed to give Arab Israelis individual rights, but not the “national” rights Jewish Israelis would have.
Beginning of a ‘tough period’ for Pope Francis
By Madalena Araujo, CNN
Pope Francis faces a tough road ahead, a veteran Vatican watcher told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview that aired Wednesday.
“It’s a very tough period that is beginning for him, because of course people [are] enthusiastic about him. I mean the believers but also non-believers are very interested in what he’s saying. But within the Church, there is a tough group of conservative of bishops and priests and cardinals, and also very traditionalist bishops and cardinals who are practically against the Pope, who are working against the Pope,” Marco Politi said.
The growing opposition the Pope is encountering within his own Church is mainly down to his attempts to reform it since he took office in March 2013.
“They don’t like what he wanted to do with the synod about family, to give new possibilities to remarried and divorced people to get the communion, or to have a new look on the homosexual union.”
Politi’s latest book "Francis Among the Wolves” looks into this resistance.
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