>> welcome to al jazeera america, i'm john seigenthaler in new york. here are the top stories. tonight most of the u.s. is experiencing record low temperatures. the bitter cold weather called the most dangerous in decades frostbite could set in on unprotected skin. windchills are 50 below zero >> jetblue halted all flights out of boston and new york. flights are expected to return tomorrow. cold and snowy weather blamed for 4,000 flight cancellations today. >> senators are back at work expected to vote on jobless

benefits, whether to continue to restore benefits for the unemployed. not clear if there'll be support from the republicans to push the measure forward. >> the supreme court put same-sex marriage on hold in utah. a federal judge ruled the ban was unconstitutional. but utah asked the supreme court to overturn the ruling in favour of state's rights. marriages will not be allowed during the appeal process. those are the headlines. "consider this" with antonio mora is next, and for the latest news aljazeera.com. . >> parts of iraq are falling

prey to extremists again. the iraqi government wants america to help. "consider this" with the u.s. promising military aid and troops, can iraq solve the problem on its own, and what is the reality story. >> 50 years after lbj launched the war on poverty, where are we and why is there disagreement over the government's role to solve the problem? anxiety disorders, can they help some succeed. >> "downtown abbey" is a hit, but does it accurately portray the relationship between the masters and their many servants. >> we begin with the fall of fallujah, the battle for the city in 2004 was the biggest urban operation for u.s. troops since the vietnam war. fighters were defeated in a fight that killed thousands of them, but left 100 americans da. was the battle in vein. since american troops left the

security situation deteriorated rapidly. according to the u.n., 7,870 were killed last year, the highest number in many years. al qaeda returned to fallujah and ramadi with a vengeance. >> joining us from watertown massachusetts, is a former marine private who fought in the battle of fallujah, and is the director of justice for fallujah, an advocacy group dedicated to raising awareness about the problems with fallujah weem. >> and douglas ollivant, a retired army officer who served in fallujah, and on the security council during the bush and clinton administrations. great to have you with us. ross you fought in the battle for fallujah as a marine. what did you think when you heard it fell to militants?

>> it's not clear too me that the city fell to militants. honestly, i felt like history was repeating itself. we are hearing the same rhetoric used to justify another assault on the city. in both cases claims were made that al qaeda took control of the city and heavy-handed military response was needed to liberate the city. in 2004 that turned out not to be true. there was al qaeda in the city. they were very minimal, playing a marginal role in the resistance taking place then. today a lot of the reports that i'm getting from my contacts in fallujah is that al-qaeda and al qaeda-linked groups are minimal, playing a marginal role in the fighting. today it's mostly tribal militias fighting against government forces.

unfortunately i think the same situation is playi out - the city is being destroyed and citizens harmed. >> douglas, do you agree with ross, that the role of al-qaeda is overstated? >> i agree we don't really know what is going on. i suspect a convoy of 60, 70, 80 al qaeda drove in, maybe met by tribal forces. it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few days. some republicans are putting some of the blame for what is happening now on the obama administration. senators john mccain and lindsey graham released this statement saying:

>> doug, does the u.s.s deserve some blame. should the administration have fought harder to lee troops in iraq. >> i'm critical of the administration when they deserve it. in this proposition, they don't the the united states doesn't put forces where we can't get legal guarantees that they won't be prosecuted. full stop. the only way to do that is for their council of representatives, their parliament, to pass a bill saying u.s. forces will not be prosecuted under their law. that was not going to happen. you weren't going to get the fallujah, and others to agree to let the combat forces stay.

the administration, i think, did the right thing and got us out of iraq in 2011. it did settle down. we have an al qaeda problem in iraq. those shooting at us have been quiet. they wanted us to leave. >> the shi'a, but the sunni side is the issue. the senators said this in their statement. they said: >> ross, when you hear that, talking about engagement, do you start worrying that this could mean troops on the ground? >> i certainly wouldn't agree with it if that were the case. you know, my perspective as an american citizen, concerned with

what my government is doing, and wanting to feel my government is doing the right thing, i feel we have to withdraw support for the maliki government. they are oppressive. they are using violence to crush political opposition. undemocratic. they are selling weapons to the regime, and that's what they are killing civilians with in fallujah. all support needs to be withdrawn from them. >> i'll let you weigh in on that. no support at all? >> prime minister nouri al-maliki is the elected prime minister of that country. it may not be perfect, but it was good. government formation was messy, but he emerged as the prime minister and that's more legitimacy than most governments in the region have. it's incumbent on us to support him. if he has no longer the prime minister in april, he has no longer the prime minister. we want a democracy in iraq,

let's see what it gives us. >> wouldn't it be worse if it falls apart? >> worse for who? >> if you have a civil war between the sunnis and the shia. >> they are having a war between the government and the population in anbar province. >> secretary of state john kerry and the white house made clear they planned to support iraq militarily but there'll be no troops. this is what was said on monday. >> we have, as secretary of state john kerry said, made a significant commitment to helping the iraqi government in dealing with that situation. and what secretary of state john kerry's point was, and this is a broader point about conflict in the season, this is something for the iraqis to take a lead on and handle themselves. >> now, doug, you spent time in iraq dealing with security

issues. you worked on a security council, can the nouri al-maliki government solve the problem by themselves. what nouri al-maliki asked for when he came to the united states in november was for us to sell him, give him, sell him the wep jons that he needs to defend his country against all threats, not only al qaeda, but to stand up to iran, so iran can't influence as much as it does. coming back to anbar, what maliki is saying is you have to step up. if you truly want to be part of iraq, you have to demonstrate you are not going to tolerate al qaeda in the midst. you are right about that. throw them out, kill them, do what you need to do. demonstrate that you don't turn to violence when you don't like the way the province is going.

>> anbar being the province where this is all going on. ross caputi, douglas ollivant, thank you both for your time. >> for more, i'm joined by jacob shapro, from princeton university, assistant professor of politics and international affairs, he's researched insurge sis in iraq, afghanistan and elsewhere and served as an officer in the navy, enforcing u.n. resolutions in the for the united states in persian gulf. >> why are we back in this position? 2004 was the bloodiest battle for our troops. how did this unravel? >> fundamentally it's a failure of the iraqi political progress. in 2006, 2007 and 2008 there was basically a bargain between the political forces and others which got them to turn against foreign fighters and others who had come into their territory to

fight against the iraqi government, against the u.s. forces. that deal was between the political organizations and the coalition, not between them and the iraqi government. in fact, one of the untold stories of that time and of the surge was the role that u.s. forces played in intermediating and stopping the conflict between the iraqi army and local militias. you have to situation in 2006, 2006 and 2008. as the war wound down, what didn't happen was a political settlement or deal that was sustainable between the sunni population. so you had... >> once the u.s. pulls out and then the shia government led by nouri al-maliki today, it had not really brought the sunnis into the democratic process.

>> exactly, it didn't make a deal that was better for them. at the start of 2013 you had a process movement in anbar, to protest and you had people coming out in the street, demonstrating in peaceful ways given the military capacity to get a better deal. that failed. what - this population doesn't have tools, other than inviting foreigners with which to pressure the government. you have the war going on in syria, and a population that wants to do more violence and use it as a base against the rest of the iraq. you can invite them in, allow it to happen to pressurise the government. >> it's a bargaining process. >> could it be more than that, could it be a serious regional issue beyond iraq, because the

city is taken by the islamic state of iraq and syria, as we said in anbar, and that borders on syria, the group is a powerful player, how big a problem can it be? >> i don't think it's much of one. you have to ask what does it mean for the cities to be taken and overrun. these are places where the iraqi government had little presence, little enduring capacity and was thin on the ground. for the cities to be taken and overrun, what does that mean. in most cases it means relatively small central government gary sons were over run or left. they can go on the web issuing press releases. as soon as the local political organizations that are deep and enduring and survive the war, as

soon as leaders of those organizations make a decision that these people are not useful, they'll be evicted as quickly as 2006/2007. >> if it's bloody and you have a serious battle, a journalist said there was one cemetery, there were four after. if this gets uglier than it is, civilians were killed and injured by the hundreds, they could have eight cemeteries. >> it's undoubtedly a tragic situation for the people of fallujah and iraq, and other parts of iraq, where they suffer from the terrors enabled by the organizations operating in the area. that is different to saying this is a threat to the fundament at stability in iraq. i don't see how it makes the situation worse than it is. >> civilians are fleeing the

area. thank you for your time jacob shapro. >> coming up, america's war on poverty turns 50 on wednesday. so, are we winning. >> and news on what is called hillary clinton's shadow campaign. why do some of her advisors not want her to run. gianna tobani is tracking top stories. >> china destroyed $12 million of a valuable material. the u.s. did too. we tell you why, and what is it. what do you think? join the conversation.

>> wednesday marks the 50th anniversary of president lyndon johnson, declaring war on poverty in america, and the argument over whether we won or lost the war rages on.

>> 50 years ago president lyndon johnson declared a big government war on poverty. sips then. the american tax payer spent trillions to lift people out of poverty. today, tens of millions of americans live beneath the poverty line. >> liberals say the programs have been a success, keeping tens of millions of americans out of poverty. >> derek kitchen from cato institute joins me, and melissa boteach, from the half in ten, which seeks to cut poverty in 10 years, and is a director at the center for american progress. thank you for being with us. melissa, senator marco rubio's argument is straight forward. trillions later there's still poverty, therefore the war on poverty fail.

>> if you use the poverty measure taking the programs into act, a study shows it's untrue. if you count the programs, 26% in 1967, and today it's down to 16% much those programs made a difference in lifting millions out of poverty, that's not to say we should pat ourselves on the back and declare the war is over, but we have to build on what is working and make investments to lift more families into the middle class. >> dan, you can take the other side. tens of millions feared to live in poverty before the great society, so the war has been a success. >> i don't think so. you can take a trillion dollars and redistribute it and give people wealth in the short run, but all you do is trap them in poverty if you create entitlement, turning americans into greeks, italians, spaniards

and french. what we are doing spiritual ain terms of self-reliance, achievement, self-esteem, that's the real damage, and that's not counting the fiscal burden of the government spending, taxes to support it and the fact that there's a lot of evidence that we had a rapidly falling poverty rate before the war on poverty began, and it flat lined if you look at the statistics, maybe with melissa's numbers, there has been a bit of improvement. i'm worried about trapping people. >> i want to getto melissa on that, but as she mentioned the numbers and lyndon johnson declared the war on poverty, it dropped by 43%, a faster rate than before johnson did that. the 26 to 16% number, others say it was 19 to 15% today. it

seems to show this helped a lot of people. >> i can't comment on the numbers that melissa pulled out. they sound encouraging the government statistics show more are in poverty today than before. the poverty rate was coming down. then in the mid '60s, it stopped coming down. the improvement stop exactly at the time the government, the federal government and washington got massively involved which suggests that maybe we should learn a lesson from bill clinton, and the successful welfare reform. the program was kicked back to the states and we got better results than a one size fits all. >> as dan is saying you could argue that the economy would have improved a lot of poor americans. if it's that four percentage

point drop, the number used when talking about the war on poverty, that that is virtually no improvement over five decades. >> the official poverty rates don't take into account poverty achievements put in place. the enactment of nutrition assistance. spreading that - it severely improved the levels of malnutrition. we had third-world style hunger. because we enacted medicaid we saw a drop in infant mortality. i think when we talk about measuring progress we have to take a comprehensive look over the past 50 years. it's important that we acknowledge that we have more to do. it's not the war on poverty that failed. we have seen an explosion of income, commonwealthy and low-wage work. the safety net is working

overtime to overcomment for an economy not working for many people. moving forward, we have to not cut the programs. we have to fixture economy so it's producing living wage jobs. >> the numbers also show that americans who work are only - fewer than 3% are below the poverty line. doesn't the issue seem the issue is job creation? >> it's a big part of it. it's also low wages. the 3% number may be americans that work full tv time, year around. if you look at americans working not full time or all around because they can't get the hours or the time they need across the i can't remember. you see closer to 10% of americans. poverty levels are low. we talk about 23,000 a year for a family of four.

there are millions of working americans scraping to get by. oftentimes they are worse off as they are not able to access some of the programs. >> marco rubio, the senators, had this to say in his message. >> instead of continuing to borrow and spend trillions on government programs that don't work. we need a real agenda helping people to acquire the skills they need to lift them out of poverty. is he right. doesn't social security, as one example, prove some social programs work. 39% of seniors lived in poverty a few years before lyndon johnson expanded benefits. today 9% do. >> if you redistribute hundreds of billions, trillions, you can lift people, the income level up. the question is what is the cost to the economy, peep's

self-reliance and independence. there are three things that will keep anyone out of poverty, finish high school, get a job. if you do those three things, the poverty rate will be small. a lot of anti-poverty programs encourage the wrong kinds of behaviours. this is what i talking about, the risks that the programs are trapping people in intergenerational poverty and dependence, we have better numbers. >> a lot to talk about. but we are running out of time. thank you both for joining us. >> turning to the run-up to the 2016 elections, the hillary clinton camp looks to be preparing the ground work for a presidential campaign. not only did the 2008 campaign organization release its email

list to prohill larry, a claim has to be settled between that group and another. some of the aidese melt over the summer to auto -- met over the summer to outline a campaign. is the former secretary of state gearing up for a campaign. >> we bring in gloouk , offering poll sticks for politico.com. >> i'll start with the meeting over the summer that politico.com broke the news about, meeting with dewey square group, she had aids with her to discuss filing dates and primary strategy. a lot has been made. is this the sort of thing that any candidate might have to have even if it is four years before the election. >> it was an interesting meeting to learn about. it's the case that the campaign

season seems to begin earlier and earlier with every cycle. she's indicated that this is a year she's starting seriously, about the possibility of exploring a presidential run. that meeting encapsulated what the ground work might look like or the numbers, should she choose to take the next steps. >> at this point, and the article talks about this, it seems like democrats are united behind her. well, it's clear that there is a lot of enthusiasm on the democratic side about the prospect of, you know, the first female president, hillary clinton was certainly popular as she left her position as

secretary of state. there's a lot of excitement about her and groups like ready for hillary, and others are seeking to capitalize on the energy and channel it in a way that would be productive, should she rup. there's talk about the possibility of other democratic challenges looking into a possible presidential bid as well. >> most of those have said, "no way, and the speculation is that, you know, if they get in, that hillary, at this point. she's a strong candidate that most democrats are united behind her candidacy, but the article brings up that while democrats in general may be behind her, there's a division in the inner circle as to whether she will run or not and whether she should run or not. >> sure. there's a number of influential

voices. who seem is to be weighing in on the debate. all sides. chelsea clinton, her doubter will be an important voice and she does not want her mum rushed into making a decision of this magnitude. at the same time there's a lot of people who have been with the secretary for decades and want to make they are there with her for whatever decisions she makes. some are enthusiastic, others cautious about embarking on a campaign because in this day and anal it's crueling, dna changing, as the phrase goes, and you want to make all that is in place before taking that job. >> there's an exhaustive political argument arguing that chelsea will be the main voice this her decision.

do you think that's the case. >> chelsea has been an important influence since her time running for senate. over the last several years, she's increased her role in the clinton foundation, a key player there. israeli thought to be one of the most influential voices. she made clear it's a big decision, and no one is ex-othering undue pressure. it will be interesting to keep an eye op what chelsea's public statements are of course as what hillary clinton decides to do and say publicly. there's a lot of scrutiny about her public appearances, in 2013 she gave speeches with a lot of media tapes. we can expect that to kick off. >> and the health scare she had

a year ago. a lot between now and 2016. appreciate you joining us to talk about this argument. >> time so see what is trending. >> china took a stand against elephant protests by destroying tuskses. john scanlon from convention on international trade in endangered species, explains why it is critical. >> this provide an opportunity for china to show solidarity to bring to an end elephant ivory and is having a negative effect on local people and their lively headlines. >> not everyone praised the view, including some of you: a

lot of heated opinions. read more on the website. >> china's move followed that of the u.s. >> let's hope they figure out some way of saving the beautiful animal. >> ahead - does anxiety help you succeed. we talk to someone who suffered from it and succeeded with it. why monday, january the 6th is called the most depressive day of the year. later on, servants like those on "downtown abbey" are making a comeback in real life.

>> imagine having all your every day activities crippled by fear and anxiety, more than 40 million adults suffer anxiety disorder in the u.s. in severe anxiety it can affect

everything you do. scott stossel fought anxiety his whole life and his book tells the story of his journey battling fobias. >> scott is the editor of "the atlantic," and the subject of the cover story, an essay, adapted by his book "my age of anxiety: frea, hope, dread and the search for peace of mind". >> great to have you with us. you went to harvard, the editor of a magazine, and you are a suk setsful guy, not -- successful guy, not someone that you would think struggles with anxiety. >> that's not the case. there's often a gap between the personae and the turmoil within. when a lot of colleagues read earlier copies of the book i had people coming into the office

saying, "i had no idea. can i give you a hug", it was disconcerting. >> anxiety paralyzed you from your social life to work. >> that's common for people suffering anxiety disorders. it can be debilitating, constraining your ability to travel, socialise, do public speaking and take risks of various kinds. it can be a handicap. there's evidence about having the right amount of anxiety. it can be a motivating force and the pump of adrenaline can spur you to perform more effectively than if you weren't anxious. >> you wrote about how basketball great bill russell would throw up. for a period when he didn't do that, he didn't perform well. anxiety can contribute to

success. >> for me this was fascinating. bill russel. multiple world championships. in college he won. he vomited before his basketball games, and there was a period of time when he stopped. until he started, he was not playing up to the optimum level. for me, one of my fobias is the pathological fear of vomiting. here is a guy not debill tated. he was - it was part and parcel of his high-level performance, and he - his body - he had the physiological experience, but was not allowing it to consume him psychologically. if i could embrace bill russell i would have been better off >> i sense you have.

a reviewer of your book said that your agony with anxiety led to our reading pleasure. do you think it helped or hurt you. >> it's an interesting question. it has helped me. part of the issue was i wrestled about how to write the bark. i kept the anxiety hidden from friends and colleagues. most people did not know about it. by admitting it i came out as anxious and having a mental illness, there's a stigma. my therapist said, "get it out there", he said he would be liberating. that's the case. on the other hand there's an irony, i was prompted to right

this 10 years ago, i was anxious about the public speaking and book tour when my last book came out, and i'm rewarded with another book tour >> and here you are with me, and thousands are watching. how do you control the anxiety? >> partly with medications, and i take ben zo diasa peen. it brings things down to a level where i can not have thoughts racing or focus on anxiety. it's partly practice and helps that i'm in an empty room staring at a camera, i can pretent no one is watching me. >> you have phobias, bombing the biggest. you tried the drugs, alcohol. your pre publish speaking

routine is extreme. therapy and you write nothing has fully helped the underlying anxiety, what helped the most. drugs at certain times definitely have beens effective both at reducing anxiety and general lef of anxiety. they have complicated view, and those that say the pharmaceutical companies. i believe some products help. for me medication helped. there are other things like cognitive therapy, where you are confronted again and again with things that provoke the anxiety, until they provoke less anxiety. what i'm trying to do with the

book is help myself and others like me, come to terms that anxiety is part of them, it per cent woven into who they are. my wife said, "i hate your anxiety why and that it makes you miserable. what if it was cured and you became a jerk." there may be aspects making you socially attuned to how people think about you. coming to terms with it has been an adoptive thing. >> talk about how it's woven into you. you write how your great grandfather, mother and sister are plagued by anxiety. how much of a genetic component is there? >> it's impossible to separate completely the role of genetics, environment, culture and luck

and circumstances. my own view after living with in is there's a strong genetic component to temperamental susceptibility when presented with stressful situations. my family line on both sides of the family has a strong genetic geno type of anxiety and my whole family lines are stipeled with it. that said, genes are not determinative. there's fascinating studies, has found, when studying monkeys, when you take monkeys from their parents. transmitting it through their geeps, they tend to grow up to be less anxious than the genetic peers, and leaders of the troop.

which meanings genetic predisposition to anxiety, combined with nurter can be productive. >> you writ about techniques for anxiety, and the book is "my age of anxiety: frea, hope, dread and the search for peace of mind." thank y thank you scott stossel for joining us. >> data dive is next. "downtown abbey" is a run away hit here in abroad. is it closer to fact or tiction? -- or fiction?

>> today's data dive is a little blue. monday january 6th is the most depressing day of the year for brits. according to a study of 2 million tweets over the past three januarys. this dates back to a controversial 2005 theory called blue monday. a psychologist looked at weather conditions, debt, post-christmas let down, failed new year's resolutions and everyone's dislike of mondays. it found the third monday of jan is depressing, two weeks later than the new research. >> there's no proof to support the theory. season defective disorder is real. >> there is no question allot of americans are blue right now because their toes are. the mid west coast are freezing, suffering through record low

temperatures. chicago hit 16 below. that is colder than the siberia. if you are not freezing you may be fatter. many people gain wait and that never helps your mood. neither does legal separation. the start of the week is divorce monday. it's the most popular day to file for a split from your spouse. that's according to a group of lawyers. if you are feeling down about blue monday or divorce monday, after all, tomorrow is another day. >> coming up, "downtown abbey" is a smash hit. how close is it to the servants from the early 1900s. we'll take a look.

>> millions of fans watched the fourth season premiere of "downtown abbey" as it kicked off in the u.s. with its rab ied fan base. >> my husband is dead.

after all he's suffered in the war, he's killed in a car crash. isn't that enough for me to deal with? >> you're letting yourself be defeated my lady. someone has to say it. >> when your only child dies, you are not a mother any more. you're not anything really. >> she is broken and bruised. it is our job to wrap her up and keep her safe from the world. >> no, robert, it is our job to bring her back to the world. >> the emmy-award-winning british season shows of upstairs, downstairs dynamic between the upper classes and servants. how close is it it to reality. lucy lethbridge is the author of "servants - downstairs britain", how close is "downtown abbey" to real life. let's start with the servants. in a state like "downtown abbey," there would have been a lot more servants.

>> i think for the purposes of drama it's necessary to cut the cast otherwise we'd be confused. there would be eight how's maids, and there would be far more younger servants learning on the job. i think it's necessary to keep the narrative, that you keep the number down a bit. >> is the relationship between the masters and the servants accurate. i am sure it varied from household to household. there's friendship, and at other times big distance. >> it's characteristic of the mysterious relationship. when the home is the workplace, then all sorts of rather set rules that apply in the contracts if you work in a factory or institution don't apply when you work in someone's home or if you have someone working in your home, and in the case of those old servanted

edwardian households, you have them living with you. that makes everything different. and, of course, that intimacy can be abused or wonderful. at every turn the relationship is dependent on the types of people involved in that particular family. >> in "downtown abbey," you see the real clear hierarchy among the servants. you see the butler, when he stands up everyone else must rise for. there would be many servants in a big household. some of the servants had servants themselves. >> that's right, the upper servants, something we don't have, which would have been the case in a large household is that much younger servants learnt their skills by waiting on the older servants. mrs. mousse and carson the

butler would have had young bells or boys -- young girls or boys learning on the job. the young girl would have taken mrs. hughes her breakfast, rather as daisy the kitchen maid is learning to cook from mrs. patmore. >> "downtown abbey" is a massive hit. why are people fascinated by? >> this is a question i asked myself many times, i don't know the answer. it's not knew to find fascinating this setup. upstairs, downstairs is a big hit. it came out in the early '70s. it makes fabulous drama, the relationship between upstairs and downstairs is one fraught with lots of interesting tensions. and i think it tells us something of our history, a world that seems familiar to us

and completely alien. it's a world in way you can take sides. one feels a great sense of allegiance, i think, particularly for the servants downstairs, and because in many ways, i think especially in "downtown abbey" they exemplify a changing world. you can see the old deferences that they took for granted that they chaff against. that is typical. servants were a major part of the workforce. more than a third of british women employed worked in domestic service. at that point you were either a servant or had servants. >> the famous round tree report on poverty drew the line between the poor and the very poor as being a line at which - which

was marked by people who didn't have servants. the people who didn't have servants were the poor. that wouldn't have been serve aned in the uniformed maid sense, paid domestic help. it may be a child coming in to look after your child while you go off to work. but it was considered - it's the outsourcing of labour, the big divider between poverty and extreme pov erty. >> you have incredible examples of how it takes eight people to serve a class of milk and a biscuit and bring up an example of a british lord who, you know, some of them didn't know how to do the basic things. >> that was an interesting story, the finest brain in britain, his brilliance and

intellectual brilliance were renowned offer the empire. he was a famous - famous for intellect and snobry. he was staying in a country house, waking up, wanting to open the window, but the servants being asleep, he didn't know how to do it. he picked up a log and smashed it. that was one of the things about my research - how lacking in practical skills and inept were some members of the upper classes. it was highlighted by the american heiresses that came over and married in, leaving accounts of how amazed they were by the uselessness of their husbands. how they would ring for a footman to walk down long cold

corridors and nudge the log in the fire, rather than pick up the fire tongs three inches away and do it themselves. it's not that they distained to do it, but it never occurred that they might be able to. >> how much of this exists today? there's a different numbers out there. some say that domestics in britain dropped dramatically after world war ii. others say there's a resurgence. the kind of thing we see, is that something you only see in a buckingham palace now. >> i don't think the world of "downtown abbey" has died. anyone lucky enough to stay in a grand hotel will see something like the oiled wheels of extraordinarily efficient edwardian country house. that will be the last place you find it now.

there's a demand for that kind of old-fashioned servant, the car sons, the o'brien, the ladies maid. they may be called household manager, wardrobe manager. it will be a very, very tiny percentage of the super rich who will employ. if they were minded to do that sort of work, there's money and travel in it. jobs available in russia and china, wherever the rich are. it's jobs that require a great deal of management skill. >> the book is servants, a downstairs history of britain from the 19th century to modern times", lucy lethbridge, thank you for joining us. the show may be over but the conversation substance on our

google+ pages and twitter. you can see us next type of. >> good evening. welcome to al jazeera america. i'm john seigenthaler in new york. crippling cold. the brutal below zero temperature blanketing the country putting lives in danger and grounding thousands of flights. >> fighting for fallujah. a resurging al qaeda, and the control of the key iraqi city. the u.s. response - and what it says about the mission. >> on hold - utah's same-sex marriage. u.s. supreme court steps in and we talk to a couple at the center of the battle >> lost and found, the photographer that took this photograph shares with