Brunei: Death Penalty Won't Apply to Anti-Gay Law; Saudi Executions
CYRIL VANIER, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Welcome back to the CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Cyril Vanier.</s>NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Natalie Allen. Here are our headlines this hour. At least 41 people have died after a plane made a hard emergency landing at a Russian airport near Moscow. Video showing the Aeroflot passenger plane bursting into flames as it slammed on to the runway. Russian news agency Interfax reports that perhaps a lightning strike caused a communication failure and that forced the plane to make this landing.</s>VANIER: A militant group in Gaza says a ceasefire with Israel has been restored and Israel has lifted restrictions on civilians in the Gaza periphery indicating an acceptance of the ceasefire. It ends a weekend of escalating violence with hundreds of rocket launches and airstrikes and more than two dozen killed on both sides of the border.</s>ALLEN: The United States is deploying warships to the Middle East because of what it says are troubling warnings from Iran. The U.S. is sending the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and a bomber task force. The announcement came from National Security Adviser John Bolton, who adds the U.S. doesn't want war but is prepared to respond to any attacks.</s>VANIER: Asian markets and U.S. stock futures tumbled sharply after President Trump threatened to raise tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods by Friday. He added trade talks between Washington and Beijing are moving too slowly. Those remarks apparently took Beijing by surprise. And the "Wall Street Journal" is now quoting a source who says that China is considering canceling the talks it had scheduled with U.S. on Wednesday China as a result.</s>ALLEN: Well, after facing a widespread international backlash, the country of Brunei says it will no longer apply the death penalty to a heinous law that punishes homosexuality and adultery.</s>VANIER: Brunei's Sultan said in a message that it was important for the country to uphold international commitments on human rights. The law and its penalty went into effect in April. Celebrities and businesses worldwide condemned it and called for a boycott of Brunei- owned hotels.</s>ALLEN: CNN's Will Ripley is following this story for us. He is in Bangkok. And perhaps international outrage and boycotts certainly, hopefully in this instance had an impact. What more can you tell us about this announcement -- Will?</s>WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi -- Natalie. Well this announcement is being criticized by a number of human rights groups as the Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, essentially changing up the window-dressing on a draconian law, saying that the country will not enforce the death penalty provisions of a law that have said that people who are gay could be stoned to death, creating an international uproar on behalf of the LGBTI people around the world. But certainly those living in Brunei, a small country of fewer than half a million, that with this strict new law that was announced very quietly at the end of 2018 and implemented in April, created an absolute fury. And you have everyone from politicians, like the U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, the former vice president. You had the U.S. State Department. You had celebrities such as George Clooney and Elton John are, you know, expressing condemnation and in fact, you know, Clooney and Elton John were also saying that people should boycott hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei. What this law essentially does, human rights activists say is that it creates a climate of fear inside the country for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex, even though the country itself and the Sultan had said that this law is more about education and adhering to family values inside the country. It's a claim that human rights activists simply don't buy. Not to mention the fact that even though government says it won't enforce the death penalty there is still imprisonment of up to ten years, amputation and other punishment that much of the world, certainly developed world believe are not consistent with Brunei's obligations to enforce internationally-defended and protected human rights -- Natalie.</s>ALLEN: All right. We will see what happens next in this story. Will Ripley for us. Will -- thank you.</s>VANIER: And it looks like North Korea carried out the new ballistic missile launch and CNN has exclusive images to prove it. This satellite image was provided by Planet Labs in the Middlebury Institute. Analysts say it likely shows smoke from a short-range ballistic missile in eastern North Korea.</s>ALLEN: And this comes after the country's state media reported a strike drill on Saturday. They say leader Kim Jong-un oversaw long- range rocket launchers and tactical guided weapons. The top U.S. diplomat spoke about this test on Sunday.</s>MIKE POMPEO, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: So we know a couple of things. One, at no point was there ever any international boundary crossed, that is they landed in the water east of North Korea and didn't present a threat to the United States or to South Korea or Japan. And we know that they were relatively short range and beyond that we know they were intercontinental ballistic missiles either. And beyond that, I leave to the Department of Defense to characterize this when further information arrives. We still believe that there is an opportunity to get a negotiated outcome where we get fully verified denuclearization. Chairman Kim has repeated that -- he's repeated that quite recently, in fact. So we hope that this act that he took over the weekend won't get in the way. We want to get back to the table. We want to continue to have these conversations.</s>VANIER: CNN's Paula Hancocks is live in Seoul, South Korea. she has been covering this from the moment those weapons were fired. Paula -- now that the dust is settling on all of this a little bit. It does seem that the international reaction is fairly muted?</s>PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right -- Cyril. I mean certainly from the U.S. point of view it is a fairly positive response to what many analysts are saying was at least one short range ballistic missile test. It is something that the U.S. President Donald Trump had been pinning as one of the successes of his engagement with North Korea and with Kim Jong-un. The fact that there haven't been any missile or nuclear tests but that now clearly is not the case. Now, we heard from the South Korea Defense secretary of defense on Sunday giving us a little more information about what they believed was fired saying that the tactical guided weapons system that North Korea said that they had tested was in fact a new model. So it is not just the fact that North Korea is making a statement. According to many experts they are also moving forward in their program, testing something previously that has been untested. So they're trying to develop that particular weapon system. But as you say the international condemnation really hasn't been there at this point. In fact, the strongest words we've heard have been from the South Korean which is unusual. We heard the Blue House, the presidential office saying that they believed that North Korea's actions went against the agreement, the military agreement that they've signed back in September of last year when the President Moon Jae-in was in Pyongyang with Kim Jong-un where they both agree that they wouldn't do anything to raise tensions on the Korean peninsula, the Blue House says that's against that agreement it is calling on North Korea to come back to the negotiation table, as soon as possible - Cyril.</s>VANIER: So where then does this leave denuclearization talks between the U.S. and North Korea?</s>HANCOCKS: Well I think the overwhelming feeling at this point is that this was a warning shot from Kim Jong-un. He has publicly said at the Supreme People's assembly in North Korea that the U.S. has to change its attitude and he is giving them until the end of the year to change their attitude, otherwise the talks are rough and he's going to choose another path. we also heard him when he was with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, just last month. The Russian president saying that Kim Jong-un believed the U.S. had acted in bad faith at the Hanoi summit back in February where both leaders, President Trump and Kim Jong-un, walked away without any agreement. So there is a perception that this is a warning shot from the North Koreans, that this is putting pressure on the U.S. president to change the way that they're dealing with Pyongyang because clearly Pyongyang does not like the way they're being dealt with at this point. They want to see some sanctions relief and more. But it is not too provocative that it could backfire on North Korea. So it did give the U.S. administration some breathing space, and wiggle room to not react too strongly to what North Korea did and as you can see that is exactly what the Trump administration did -- Cyril.</s>VANIER: Paula Hancocks reporting live from Seoul. Thank you very much.</s>ALLEN: Men condemned to die plead for their lives in Saudi court documents exclusively obtained by CNN. The kingdom claims they confessed before they were put to death in one of the largest executions in Saudi history.</s>VANIER: But the documents lay bare forced confessions obtained through torture. Accusations that the Saudi government has long denied.</s>ALLEN: One lawyer who briefly represented some of the executed men says the judge simply ignored the allegations of torture.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): The court documents are proof of torture and injustice. And they still have the audacity to say they are merciful and humane.</s>ARWA DAMON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The defendant say that they confessed because they were being tortured. That should have been investigated under Saudi law.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The judge is supposed to take this seriously to ask the interrogators for an answer to these allegations. But what happened in most of these cases is that the judge ignored it.</s>ALLEN: Watch Arwa Damon's exclusive report featured on our program "AMANPOUR". That's starting at 1 pm Monday in New York. Six p.m. in London, only on CNN. Full military honors for a hero. Friends and family say good bye to a young man who sacrificed his own life to save others, that story is coming next.