airbase from which government planes staged a chemical weapons attack on a rebel—held town. more than 50 tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from american navy ships in the mediterranean, hitting the airbase in the city of homs. speaking in florida, donald trump said president assad had used a deadly nerve agent to kill civilians, including what he called "beautiful children and babies." he called on civilised nations to end the slaughter in syria, as well as terrorism. mr trump said the action was in america's national security interest. syrian military sources say us strikes on an air base have caused losses. describing the strike as an act of "aggression," a government spokesman said "one of our air bases in the centre of the country was targeted at dawn by a missile fired by the united states." now it's time for hardtalk. 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. i 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 2a 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 of just. .. 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 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... every time 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 a different 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 believe he will come home from the hague one day? 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 slightly 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 all so 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. it's 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. hello there, good morning.

lots of pleasant weather on offer over the next few days for large swathes of the united kingdom. and in fact, on thursday, it was a pretty decent day for many, although there was always a bit more cloud in the north and west, a little bit of rain with that, and that is where we keep most of the cloud overnight. it helps to give the temperatures up in the north and west, but generally it is a chilly night. major towns and cities, eight, nine degrees. but it is in the rural spots, away from the north and west, that we are going to see temperatures getting down to two or three degrees, so a chilly start for many, but a bright start as well, with lots of sunshine. the cloud that we see into north wales and the north—west of england, that looks like it will be breaking up through the morning. so by the afternoon we will see lengthy spells of sunshine for much of england, wales, eastern scotland, too. western scotland, ireland, always seeing more cloud. the odd spot of rain, most places dry.

ten or 11 degrees in the north and west, but with some sunshine in cardiff and in london, it is 15 and 16 degrees in a few places. but, across england and wales, we do have quite high levels of tree pollen through the day on friday, and that is causing hayfever sufferers a bit of a problem. other side of the atlantic, it is the wind which has been a bit of a problem for the golfers at augusta. that wind still in evidence on friday, but easing down. continues to ease down into the weekend, as temperatures are on the up. and temperatures will be rising back on our shores into the weekend. it's going to be a lovely day for much of england, wales, most of scotland, most of northern ireland too. it is just the far north—west which will have a little bit of rain. 16,17 or 18 degrees across england and wales, very pleasant indeed. with light winds, looks like a lovely day at aintree for the grand national. 16,17 degrees, some sunshine and light winds. it should be a fantastic day out. the second part of the weekend has this area of light high pressure drifting away towards the near continent. the winds started to drift in from a more southerly direction. the air will be coming up

from spain, from france, and it will be quite warm air heading ourway. and the effects of that will be most felt across england and wales on sunday, because towards the north and west we will see a weather front drifting its way in. that is going to bring some cloud, some patchy rain, slightly lower temperatures here. patchy cloud for the western side of england and wales. further east, there is going to be light winds, plenty of sunshine, and quite a warm day. the west of england will be easily into the low 20s. i think around 22, 23 degrees will be the top temperatures, maybe about ten or 11 in the far north and west. but we do have a weather front drifting its way south sunday night into monday, and as that happens it is going to shut the warm air out of the way. colder air will follow along behind, so monday a very different look and a very different feel to things. there is going to be a lot more cloud in the sky. it is going to be quite breezy. there will be a few more showers dotted around, as well, and temperatures will be taking a bit of a tumble.

hello, you're watching bbc world news. i'm james menendez. our top story this hour — the us has attacked an airbase in syria with more than 50 cruise missiles. this is the moment the tomahawks were fired from a us navy ship in the mediterranean. president trump said it was in response to the suspected chemical attack in syria. news of previous attempts and changing asaad's behaviour have all failed, and failed very dramatically. state tv in damascus said syria had been a victim of american aggression and the governor of homs said

the missile strikes served the goals of so—called islamic state. earlier, russia warned of negative consequences of any us military action in syria but the pentagon did warn moscow of the air strikes.