TV News LIES

Germany's parliament this week approved an annulment of thousands of criminal convictions under the nation's former anti-gay law and issued compensation to convicted men.

The law criminalizing sex between men existed in Germany under various forms from 1871 to 1994. Parliament members voted Thursday to throw out convictions affecting about 50,000 men since World War II.

Yemen's internationally-recognized government on Saturday ordered the creation of a committee to investigate allegations of human rights violations, following reports that U.S. military interrogators worked with forces from the United Arab Emirates who are accused of torturing detainees in Yemen.

A copy of the order issued by Prime Minister Ahmed Obaid bin Daghr was obtained by The Associated Press. It said the investigation would focus on areas liberated by government forces from Shiite rebels known as the Houthis and their allies.

Fifteen years after he helped devise the brutal interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects in secret C.I.A. prisons, John Bruce Jessen, a former military psychologist, expressed ambivalence about the program.

He described himself and a fellow military psychologist, James Mitchell, as reluctant participants in using the techniques, some of which are widely viewed as torture, but also justified the practices as effective in getting resistant detainees to cooperate.

“I think any normal, conscionable man would have to consider carefully doing something like this,” Dr. Jessen said in a newly disclosed deposition. “I deliberated with great, soulful torment about this, and obviously I concluded that it could be done safely or I wouldn’t have done it.”

The cutting of diplomatic ties, closure of air, land and sea and the restrictions placed on Qatar are "worse than the Berlin Wall", according to the chairman of Qatar's National Human Rights Committee (NHRC).

Speaking in Geneva on Friday, Ali Bin Smaikh al-Marri called on the UN Human Rights Council to condemn the blockade of Qatar as it infringes upon the rights of more than 13,000 citizens of the Arab countries involved.

The Department of Commerce has removed its mention of gender identity and sexual orientation from its equal opportunity employment statement, BuzzFeed News reports.

According to Buzzfeed, the new statement was uploaded to the website sometime within the last ten days, as the 2016 statement including statements gender and sexual identity was found on the Department’s website on June 6.

An Israeli human rights group working on issues in the occupied West Bank has welcomed the donation of prize money from one of the Man Booker International Prize winners.

Amit Gilutz, the spokesperson of B'Tselem, said on Thursday the NGO was thankful to the donor, adding that the group was determined to continue "to resist the occupation until it ends".