coders spilling in notjust across northern ireland but other parts of the uk. rather thin clouds, some clearer skies for a while across the south. tending to increase the cloud amounts to the cause of the night, but the best of it is likely to be in north—east england and scotland. we will be around 7 degrees or so. high pressure dominating on thursday, light winds are many, the cloud will be thin, sunshine at times. the best of the sunshine used in scotland and pubs north—east england, western scotland seeing more lower cloud and drizzle. otherwise it should be mainly dry, temperatures 11 to 13, get some sunshine and it could be a couple of degrees higher. very quiet, tried that fairly cloudy weather over the next couple of days. more sunshine over the weekend, particularly in england and wales, and the temperatures will rocket. hello. this is bbc news. the headlines. president trump says the syrian gas attack on children had a big impact on him — describing it as an affront to humanity.

i will tell you, it's already happened, that my attitude toward syria and assad has changed very much. one of the us president's closest advisers — his chief strategist, steve bannon — has been removed from his position on the national security council. labour's ruling body is to review ken livingstone‘s status in the party — following his comments about hitler and zionism — and his suspension for another year. the duke and duchess of cambridge and prince harry have attended a special service at westminster abbey for the victims of the westminster terror attack. to celebrate 20 years since hardtalk hit the screens, this special programme talks to current and former presenters about what hardtalk has meant to them, looking back at the highs and lows, how guests react to being on the show and asking what interviews stand the test of time. some very significant people have lined up,

condemning what you have done, or questioning it. i'm not sure... the european commissioner, peter mandelson, has questioned the wisdom of publishing the cartoons, he says, "publishing them again and again pours petrol on the flames." you talk about frustration with governments, now, but your whole career, basically, sounds as if it's been banging your head against a brick wall. great to see you, how are you? how do you feel, as president, that you are going to go down in history as a president who presided over a loss of a large part of your territory? oh, gosh, yes. we understood that you wished to do this interview, and you wished to reply to questions that we, in the name of the bbc, are putting towards you, am i not right?

cheers! yeah! to the next 20 years! how come you all have water, and i have got wine? that's terrible! so go on, you've got to take us back to the first run. we want to hear, tim, your thoughts on how it all started, and what it was all like. you know, the strangest thing about starting it was that people didn't talk about the content, they were obsessed with what i might wear on set. and the ideas were so bizarre, ranging from a normal suit, to a smoking jacket and fez, at one particular point. but luckily, we got off that, we got onto the interviews. and we got away from the idea that if you are going to do a 25—minute interview, it wasn'tjust more of the same questions, it was going to have to have a different character, and it was going to start drilling down and become more of a cross—examination in an interview. really putting facts to people. i mean, there is an obsession with what are facts, now. fake facts, what are real facts, now? but actually, 20 years ago, we were pretty keen on facts,

and pretty keen on putting facts to the interviewees. and very quickly, the programme developed this human rights agenda. because i think everybody on the team cared about this. you will almost like a kind of chief prosecutor at the now international criminal court. that was the fun of it. you could have applied to thatjob, i think. i could have, i could have. but i knew nothing about anything, except — except that we got guests that did know things, and had cases to answer. but a lot of it was also about what drove them. what drove them, but you had to come away after 25 minutes with something new. you couldn'tjust regurgitate — yes, you couldn'tjust regurgitate the same thing. no, but i think that holding people to account, i still think that they are the best hardtalks. i don't know what you think. and i've only got one that i really remember very vividly — i mean there are others, there is jean—pierre bemba, who was vice president of the democratic party republic of congo at the time, and he now, you know, went to the international criminal court, and was duly found, you know, guilty of terrible human rights abuses. so i think that, for me, is the best kind of hardtalk, where you've got somebody

who can really say... and he speaks french, because he was educated in belgium, and he didn't like the questions i asked him so — "i don't understand what you were saying". "sorry, could you say it again?" so it gave him time to think, you know. to me, what — one of the best signals that what we do still matters is the feedback that we get from our audience, particularly as you — you talked about the human rights agenda. and we do those interviews with powerful people who are not, frankly, held to account in their own countries, we just get such a wave of positive feedback from our audience, thinking of meles zenawi, the prime minister of ethiopia, when i talked to him — and he was a very strong leader. and he ruled his country was something of an iron fist, but when i challenged him on the specific human rights records, some of the abuses that we can put at his government's door, he found it difficult. and it was a very contentious interview. who presents the names of members of the election board to the house of the people's representatives for approval? the president submitted

the names to the parliament. now, if we were to appoint new election board members, it would be the prime minister which would put the names to the parliament. and what were — where were you at that particular time? i was the president of the transitional government. you were the president? yes. so you still put forward the names? yes, idid. well, i think that's the point i'm trying to get to. afterwards, the reaction we got, not just from ethiopians inside the country, but from ethiopians all around the world, whojust said "thank you". "thank you for putting the questions to our prime minister that, had we been in the room, with you, we would have wanted to put." conversely, i think that the leaders who submit themselves to the hardtalk interrogation are sometimes, in a way, almost respected for doing that. it's those who just refuse... who want to take you on. yeah, they want to take you on, and they want to submit themselves to 24 minutes of sustained questioning. and that's often, i think, a selling point, when i say to people "would you like to do hardtalk?"

do you ever... okay, go on, tim, who was your favourite? is there a favourite from hardtalk that you remember, that you think... there — there — there was one person who brought me up short, actually, and it was very interesting. i think sometimes the interviews are very surprising — the ones that you don't think are going to be good stay in your memory. this was a man called dennis mcnamara, the un official in charge of displaced people. and i was doing the usual thing you do with un officials, saying "the un's failed here, here, and here," and at one point in the interview, he just put up his hands and said "wait a minute, wait. just — just hold on a minute." and i got this feeling down back of my spine, thinking "something's coming, and i may not like what's coming". he said, "i can't save millions of people," he said, "but i have a small plane." "and when i can, ifly it into a war zone, and i pick up as many women and children as i can, i put them in the plane, ifly them out, and i land them somewhere safe." he looked at me across the table and said, "so, how many lives have you saved?" and ijust went, "good question"... shut you up? well, a little bit of humility is not a bad thing.

i know, probably, the four of us are not necessarily known for that quality, but a little bit of humility from journalists, who simply sit on the fence and criticise everybody else, is a good thing, sometimes. we don't do the difficult things in life, do we? but the people who surprise you in those interviews, it's not — and the ones you remember — aren't necessarily the ones that you'd expect. that's right. that's what i've always found. you can go into something thinking... which — which ones do you remember? which was your most unexpected? well there — i think it's a belgian doctor who i hadn't heard of before. and this was ages ago. and — and he was talking about how he was in central africa, and started noticing something. this was now—professor peter piot, who identified that aids was not just a gay disease, it was heterosexuals, it was throughout africa. but i can remember the moment, listening to him, and the hairs standing up on the back of my neck, and thinking, "oh my goodness, the difference you've made to the world"... yeah. and you've just had

that moment ofjust... absolute chill. we've talked about the ones, you know, the people you hold to account, people in positions of power, but we do a lot of interviews where we speak to opinion—formers, you know, and — and people who influence people through their work. and i'm thinking of a writer, lovely ghanaian woman, ama ata aidoo, and she came up with one of my favourite quotes from a hardtalk i've done, when she said, "you know, zeinab, the african woman, she's not a downtrodden wretch, as she's often depicted"... i remember seeing that. ..and you know, and ijust thought it was great. so when we interview people like that, we're actually, you know, challenging perceptions, and, you know, stereotypes and prejudices, and so in that sense, it's also dealing with, you know, material that — that's quite, you know, a hard topic to — that some people may not grasp. and i think those hardtalks are also quite important. go on stephen, what about you? it is a huge adrenaline rush to get an interview that you've worked on for months and months and months, that's extraordinarily difficult to organise, that's

frankly, you know... the person involved doesn't want to do it, but you eventually persuade them to do it, and that apply to going to caracas to interview hugo chavez. oh, wow. which took a lot of persuasion, notjust from me, but bizarrely from oliver stone, the filmmaker, whom i'd interviewed for hardtalk, and he became, you know, sort of a... your producer? well, friendly. and he knew hugo chavez quite well. and i said i'd really, really love to interview hugo chavez. and he said "stephen, i think i can help you". and one day, i got this phone call, i was having dinner with the family, and oliver stone was on the phone, and he said "stephen, it's on!" hugo chavez was fronting the south american film festival, and it was a red carpet thing, and i was invited onto the red carpet to meet him, and i said "mr chavez, we do need to get this interview". and he said "come to the palace later". so, very late at night, we ended up at the palace — with oliver stone, who came along, too — and the hardtalk crew, and the venezuelan tv crew...

there were about 25 people, all filming each other in this room. and we recorded an hour with chavez — because he wouldn't stop talking. you know, it was fascinating. very combative. he wagged his finger in my face, and said, "i'm surprised the bbc has sent such an idiot". laughter so that was an adrenaline buzz of the highest order. i bet. but the other one that sticks in mind, very different, was the corrections boss of the prison system in georgia, the man who had to sign off on every execution. a man called allen ault, who for years did this job, and actually, in essence — not literally, but in essence, pushed the button to electrocute a series of prisoners on death row in georgia.

and he, overyears, came to find thisjob was destroying him. i still have nightmares, not every night, but on occasion, i still have nightmares about it. it's still a — it's a very ha rd pill to swallow. and it's — stays in your psyche for — i guess forever. it's the most premeditated murder possible. but the — the manual is about that thick, and the progression that you go through to execute someone... everytime i think it's behind me, then something happens, and it all comes back with a rush, and i was out at the lexington airport the morning — i had a 6:05am flight. and the 6am flight left. by all rights, i'd always been on delta airlines. this morning, i was going someplace else, and was on another airline, and i checked in with

all these people. and the plane crashed, and killed everyone. and i had to go again. all that — all those feelings came back, all those faces came back. all those nightmares came back. and — just had to keep re—dealing with it, re—dealing with it. i remember a man called hugh thomson, who was a us helicopter pilot during the vietnam war. and in 1968, he was trying to divert vietcong fire away from some of the american troops. he flew low over a clearing, and he saw something that stayed in his mind until he died. he saw the picture of american troops massacring villagers, unarmed villagers, in a little place called my lai, which became known, notoriously,

as — as the my lai massacre. and he stopped — he brought the helicopter down, and told his men to train their guns on their fellow american soldiers, who were garrotting, raping, shooting, and stabbing unarmed villagers, vietnamese villagers. and he said, "unless you stop, i'm going to open fire and we will kill you all". and he stopped it. it took 30 years before anybody said "thank you". but you were ostracised for a while, weren't you? yep. for a while, yep. you would go to the officers‘ mess and everybody would disappear. yeah. actually, when it first broke, and people didn't know the facts, and they — they forgot all about it very soon after it happened. but personally, you paid a heavy price in terms of depression, didn't you, over the years? a lot of nightmares... yeah. ..that you went through. four marriages. i don't — well, there's

been multiple marriages. it's been hard for you to carry around, hasn't it? no, it's life, you know? you gotta do it, you know, life goes on. can you ever forgive the people who did that? no. nope, i can't. i don't think i'm man enough to. i know the pain and suffering that they inflicted for no reason, no reason whatsoever. there was no threat. there was no enemy. they might have all grown up to be enemy, but that's not what a soldier does in any country. it's just not. and when you think of those who walked away from it, got on with their lives, had children, set up businesses.

they've gotta live with themselves. i imagine some of them don't have an easy time. i'm ok with what i did. ijust, you know, i know their unnecessary pain and suffering, i know how fragile a human life is. we probably all had that experience of leaving an interviewee and feeling incredibly emotional, possibly crying. the only time i've ever cried in front of an interviewee was on hardtalk, thankfully it wasn't on camera, but i suspect most of the audience were in tears too, it was nadia murad, the yazidi girl. it was translated so it was extraordinary sitting opposite someone who was speaking an opposite language to you but we had simultaneous translation, very broken, and hearing this extraordinary story where actually the most affecting thing, so often with these stories, it's not necessarily the really grusesome stuff, what sticks

in my head was her describing how in order to secure a minute phone call with her brother she had to lick honey off the toe of her husband, supposed husband. i had one interviewee who... the topic was so difficult for him, naguib sawiris, egyptian, very wealthy egyptian industrialist, and the topic was so hard, it was when president mohamed morsi was there and a lot of the cops in egypt were concerned about the mood turning against them. he stopped the interview after 12 minutes because the topic was so difficult. it was life or death for him, he received threats and he was worried about his family's safety. we continued the interview but it shows you, it's indicative of how difficult the subject matter is. one thing i've done, and i really appreciate the opportunity to do it, is take the show on the road, because to reach some of these stories, some of these

places as well. not everyone can come to the hardtalk studio in london. i can actually go on the road and do it myself so the reportage becomes me gathering some of the information, some of the case which we can then put, for example in honduras, to the president of the country after we'd been to the city that has the highest homicide rate in the world, which is being crippled by gang, drug cartel warfare. we could actually talk to people suffering from that reality before going into the corridors of power. to get an eyewitness account, i paid a visit to the home of hilda lezama. she was on the boat which came under heavy fire. she took a bullet through her thigh and remains seriously ill. her son—in—law and two pregnant women were killed. hilda insists all were innocent victims, not drugs traffickers, simply villagers coming back from a trip downriver.

i think you put your finger on something that's really important and has become more important over the years, which is we've seen democracy rolled back considerably over the last 10/15 years and it becomes i think that much more important that we hold people to account. when you think about the rollback of democracy even in europe. we're getting the growth of the free—market dictatorships and people are accepting this. social media, which is obviously something... again, a huge change. opinion has been elevated beyond facts. but human rights has been downgraded consistently and it shouldn't be. we still need to mention the names of the disappeared, the dates when they disappeared, the dates their bullet—ridden bodies were found on the streets, the powerful people who were responsible. that's the strength of hardtalk. the producers, the researchers that work on the team, we are so rigourous with our facts. i don't know if you feel this as well, but a lot of the people we interviewed over the years should

either be in front of criminal trials or war crimes tribunals and they weren't. so the only thing you can do in a free society is put the questions to them and have them answer them in public. put the weight of evidence... and that was the strength i think of hardtalk. my experience with mrs milosevic, milosevic‘s wife, who was a serial denier about the ethnic cleansing that had taken place in the former yugoslavia. do you think he will come home from the hague monday? why not? thank you very much indeed for being with us on the programme. no, i'm asking questions that are of interest to the public. you reminded me of one another rather wonderful moment

in my hardtalk career when i did an interview with former nigerian president obasanjo and it was again quite a contentious interview and of course human rights and corruption were two topics that came up in the interview, and i'm sure that was no surprise to him, but we gathered a lot of evidence, spoken to a lot of people and it was seen as quite a forensic test of his record when he was in power. at the end of the interview, we did the usual handshake, because as we all know the handshake happens on hardtalk, and as the credits rolled and the lights dimmed in the studio, he looked at me and through gritted teeth said, "stephen, tomorrow you'll be hearing from my lawyers." a wonderful way a man, clearly not in power any more, felt there was some sort of aura around him and some sort of intimidation tactic he could apply.

i met him former president obasanjo, a charming man in his own way, at an event not so long afterwards and he could not have been nicer to me. ihada... i won't name him, a leading businessmen... go on, zeiney. we do on hardtalk this is hardtalk! come on! in the world of finance... no, he might sue me. he said at the end of it, "i have to think of a way of getting my own back on you!" and i was, like, "really? bodyguards, where are you? he didn't needless to say, but that instant reaction when they haven't enjoyed it. they know when they come on, they often have a sense of what's in store, they're perhaps more prepared to go... i think the extra time we have really matters. from the word go... yes. and they hadn't even given me a chance! i was kicked under the table by one british politician... you're kidding!? mo mowlam, mo mowlam, former northern ireland secretary. what, literally?

after this interview, she was wearing these sharp heels and pointed toes and she kicked me under the table and she got me right in the shin. you might have deserved it! i said, "what did you do that for?" she said, "because you're a bustard." were you? had you been? i think it's important that you give the same treatment to everybody and this is how the programme has lasted so long, you're as tough with everybody and you have to be. i want to say, here we are all talking about hardtalk and it's funny, people might think there's competition between us, but actually what's nice is we are also committed to the programme that anybody, any one of us who has done a great hardtalk, i think great, it's wonderful for the programme. its a bond between us. it is. we share something really, really important. we've bonded over this meal but i think i'm the only one who's done any eating. no! dig in! i'm going for the salami! the old bbc sausage roll. times have really moved on, haven't they? times have really moved on.

some very warm weather on the way for some of us during this weekend before things remain fairly quiet. we had sunshine today, a pleasant spring day, this was south—west wales, the highest temperature across in cardiff, 16.6 degrees. the next few days remain dry with sunshine and warm in the sunshine but getting warmerfor sunshine and warm in the sunshine but getting warmer for the weekend, especially for england and wales. this even and overnight with breaks

on the cloud, more likely across the south west and east of scotland and north east england, a fair amount of cloud elsewhere but rather thin as temperatures around 7 degrees. high—pressure on thursday, light winds everywhere and a fair amount of cloud also. around the top of this area we have strong wind meaning differences across scotland, west of scotland with more cloud and drizzle and eastern scotland getting sunshine and it will be warmer also. northern ireland is sitting under cloudy skies for most of the day, sunshine in the north—east of england for a time but cloud through the midlands and perhaps across east anglia and the south—east but that will be thin with sunshine at times. brighter across south wales in the south—western england with sunshine and temperatures not far off where they be. perhaps brighterfor many on friday, a fair bit of cloud around but a lot of dry weather also. the high pressure over the uk

will not hang around, it gets squeezed into the near continent, bringing changes for the weekend, his weather fronts for the north—west. as the high pressure continues to pull away we will have one of the southerly breeze over the weekend, particularly sunday, bringing warm airand weekend, particularly sunday, bringing warm air and sunshine for england and wales. things look good for many of us on saturday, more cloud for the north—west of scotland but otherwise brighter skies and sunshine, warming up a little bit, 17 degrees or so. for the horse racing, the grand national looks super on saturday and the next few days should be fine and dry with sunshine and no significant rain. we might see more cloud in western parts of scotland and northern ireland, this rain arriving later but for england and wales, more sunshine on sunday but the differences in the temperatures... it will not warm up everywhere, scotla nd it will not warm up everywhere, scotland and northern ireland will be cooler and cloudy but sunshine poor south—east scotland, england

and wales could mean temperatures at 23 degrees in the south—east on sunday but make the most of that. it will cool down significantly on monday but only for a short time. hello, i'm ros atkins, this is outside source. russia and the west are at loggerheads over who was responsible for the syria chemical attack that left 70 people dead. the turning point of the use of chemical weapons in syria was the establishment by the previous us administration of the so—called red lines. if russia had been fulfilling its responsibility, there would not even be any chemical weapons left for the syrian regime to use. we've also heard from president trump. i will tell you, it's already happened, that my attitude toward syria and assad has changed very much. mr trump's controversial chief strategist steve bannon has been removed from the us national security council. we'll be live in washington to find out why. the european parliament has set out its priorities for brexit.