u.n. is clinging to previous statements by members of the u.s. administration on crimea i think that. that will come from several times by but by many many other u.s. official thrum. and mr bolton to the the the spokesman for the white house and many other. officials who come from the principal ballers who yes wolf they've assumed that the illegally facial crimea but actual should never be recognized remarkably for part of this summit in finland's presidential palace trump is likely to meet putin alone just as he did in singapore with kim jong un in june the u.s. is closest allies are worried what this most unpredictable president might agree to behind these walls james bays al-jazeera helsinki one of the biggest events in world sport is now less than ten hours away the world cup semifinal of course between france and croatia kicks off in moscow on sunday nights it's the balkan

nation's first appearance in the final but at home the game has been mired in controversy and had very little investment robin for a street walker reports now from zagreb they have always been plenty of talented young croatian footballers rising up through clubs like dinamo zagreb coach robert poole tonights remembers training luka more the rich long before he became an international football star more than it's a key player in the final robert can hardly contain his excitement. it's hard to describe my emotions just like everyone in great shock i can't wait for the final to start it's going to be one of the great this moment seen our modern history look at motivate his talent shown despite him being made a refugee during the eucharist of war in the one nine hundred ninety s. and despite the fact that investment has never been

a priority in preparation for. you would think that for a country with so many world class players croatia would have world class facilities but it doesn't even have a national stadium in fact this one built during the communist era and home to dinner. is the next best thing and it hasn't had an upgrade in nearly twenty years riding a wave of public euphoria croatia's government has decided it will now build a national stadium. but within demick corruption in croatian football including a scandal over transfer fees involving luka moderates and other players diehard fans believe a new stadium won't solve the problem the rulers of creation for the federation and the politicians. have made it extremely hard for creation to compete.

and the creation didn't make the world cup final because of them but in spite of them croatians may be willing to put those worries aside hoping that whatever the outcome on sunday the result will inspire the next generation and change croatian football for the better robin firstly walker al-jazeera zagreb. still ahead here on al-jazeera who'll take charge of the chaos the haitian prime minister suddenly resigns after a week of anger on the streets plus. i'd like to thank all the navy seals who came in to help us thank everyone for their moral support till today. within days will hear for the first time from the young thai footballers rescued from that cave. hello that will begin in the levant and western parts of asia this time it's

a largely fine picture not much to be said about it tempers in baghdad forty four but some parts of iraq probably still pushing fifty degrees the main weather feature remains this area of share right to vittie in eastern parts of turkey and carry through the caucuses with much of the showers this focus to on georgia there will be some really heavy downpours in the could be some flash flooding to come further south it's looking fine on the eastern side of the mediterranean beirut should see plenty of sunshine highs of thirty one is looking fine here in the arabian peninsula and i will fight on the western side temperatures and all the high a mere forty to forty two degrees celsius but sell our side of the clinchers a different story with a bit more breeze coming loose in the humidity and that allows the temperatures a climate of a bit higher so forty six is on the cards here in doha on sunday out through into monday heading down into southern parts of africa it's looking a bit windy in places at the moment to kind of strong wind a least in cape durban just sixteen degrees wanted to shatter the coast of

mozambique and also some showers in parts in the movie a stunning towards the skeleton coast as we head through to monday those will move a little bit further south into more western parts of south africa much welcome rain highs of eighty in capetown. i had a briefing today from a man named steele who has been out there working with the security forces a veteran of al salvador as daddy war sent to iraq you seem to me with our portfolios doing whatever it is that he wanted to take interest and acts about encountering sajan see while this interview was going on with jim steele there were these terrible screams about pain and terror but what was his mission and what legacy did he leave sad changes around his iraq.

welcome back this is al-jazeera these are the headlines so far the israeli military says it's bombed another site in gaza after a rocket attack from the palestinian territory this comes after hamas said a ceasefire had been agreed earlier on saturday israel carried out thousands of strikes in gaza in a major escalation of action. the latest flare up between students the nicaraguan security forces has ended catholic bishops if you mediating during the three months crisis secured the release of dozens of students two died after they were fired by pro-government forces while trapped inside a church oh i'm. donald trump will soon be flying to finland for his talks with the russian president after spending the weekend playing golf at his scotland resort he's told u.k.

newspaper he'll stand again for the presidency in twenty twenty. days of violent protests in haiti have now given way to political uncertainty the prime minister jacques bila phone talk surprised many by stepping down in the middle of a parliamentary session crowds to turned against him even after he abandoned the plan to raise fuel prices. from port au prince says gabriel is on. he arrived to parliament is a prime minister facing his political fate and calls to resign jacques de la phone tones unpopular fuel price hike which she abruptly suspended after riots a week ago that his government in deep crisis the chamber of deputies had planned to force the prime minister out with a no confidence vote on saturday but abruptly resigned instead of. before even coming here i sent my letter of resignation to the president. the resignation it a week of political tension in haiti most people from the middle class to the poor

say the prime minister who had only been in office seventeen months needed to go and the calls for him to do so grew louder by the day that the gas price hike and reversal were just seen as another sign of an ineffective government his eventual downfall came on a day of tension in the capital. the streets there were protests not nearly as large as the ones last week that turned violent but still anger at the government and coals for more resignations delay oh you know you have. this is also a message to the lawmakers a warning to everyone we're telling them to be very careful our problem is not only with the ex prime minister but to everyone in this corrupt system including the president. was going on in parliament that day of confusion members of the chamber of deputies yelling at each other as they debated the prime minister's future before they knew he was going to step down but after combe was restored in

the prime minister resigned they focused on what it all meant. now we need a new government one that inspires confidence with all sectors we need someone who understands the political dynamic that works across the board we need big changes that can have systemic. haiti currently now has no functioning government right now now that law on top has stepped down all of his ministers go with him so what happens next it will be the president as well as the two heads of the parliament there will decide who the next prime minister will be blown time left parliament quickly after stepping down without taking questions a country now hoping the political chaos of the last week also goes with him gabriel's sandow. port au prince police in chile have raided the offices of the catholic archbishop in two cities as part of investigations into sexual abuse by the clergy officers questioned staff and seized documents into mco and will reach

five priests in those areas are accused of crimes dating back to eighteen years and another priest has appeared in court charged with raping seven children. who held senior roles in the capital santiago is accused of taking part in a network of abuse. security forces are on high alert across cities in iraq's southern provinces as angus spreads of unemployment and corruption on saturday protesters stormed the provincial government building in his barbara and gopal. broken bent. this is the damage after protesters stormed the airport and the ruling party's headquarters at natura just a day before there were scenes of chaos security forces have been put on alert across the country to prevent further disruption and there has a lot of damage was what happened yesterday is that a group of vandals into the airport or a group of infiltrators with the protesters in to pay

a port and they smashed the computers and the x. ray scanners that are used for security inspections and they smashed the counters and a lot of the important technical equipment and. protesters say that's no reason why they should be living in poverty in an oil rich region. this is not a protest it's a revolution by the youth of not just the iraqi people have had enough nobody should tell you that this protest is linked to any political party or anyone controlling or giving instructions these are the people of not just youth and tribal men. critics of iraq's government say economic problems have accumulated over many years and the government has done little to make life of its people easier and to add to growing grievances regional proxy wars may be playing a role in the deteriorating living conditions of many ordinary iraqis. iran is playing a major role in that because since it has been sanctions by by the united states

put a corner economically they are cutting all the races supplies and water supplies to iraq which were normally going going smoothly and this is also creating a problem for iraq i think the iranians want to tell the americans that if you create the problems somewhere else we've got combat you everywhere in southern iraq including natura protesters are increasingly fed up with waiting for things to get better. that's frustration that two months have to relax sions there's still no new government that can bring about change barbara and al jazeera. a new era of friendship looks to have started between two troubled african neighbors eritrea's president. has made his first visit to ethiopia in more than two decades after the country's agreed to end long running hostility. is in.

a few weeks ago ethiopian that a chair will be tied and it is as they have been for the past two decades now they're behaving as if they're the best of friends and a tramp president decide to suffer work and i've been a disciple bones said today to dancing on loud jesus. sawzall stand out in a disciple tight security to welcome his visit the latest the in and being alone militaristic. i thank the people of addie saba for this wonderful reception for the eritrean president and we made this him a good listener the one i'm very happy to be here these two people are now one people. ethiopia's new prime minister ahmed made a similar visit to the tryst capital last weekend where he was welcomed by a forty with hugs some laughter the forty two year old a b broke the ice last month playfully embracing

a peace deal not ended in one thousand nine hundred to two thousand board a war that killed tens of thousands on left from is separated. add a field to this whole thing for you and things. that will get off and fly through the. telephone lines. the sudden change in relations is surprising many but it's just the beginning of what could be a long peace process both sides will also need to follow through on their commitments this week if you appear submitted requests to the united nations to lift sanctions on a trade in a sure good faith mohamed and. the palestinian farmers have grown tobacco for generations but as jobs have dried up more have turned to working in the unregulated industrial sector and the palestinian authority says it's missing out on millions of dollars of tax revenue stratford

reports now from the about in the israeli occupied west bank. down there helped his nephews pick the family's tobacco crop in the north of the occupied west bank he worked in israel for more than two decades but israeli government restrictions on freedom of movement for palestinians forced him to quit his job five years ago part a single source he says the local tobacco industry has to be regulated because farmers aren't paying taxes but it's easy money when there are so few jobs around and. the palestinian authority finds other work then most people would stop growing tobacco they should make jobs for the young generation the university graduates who helped to back up the twenty to thirty dollars a day they studied science and finance and they have to do this to back oh needs very little water to thrive palestinians have grown in this area for generations but not on this scale they say israel's control of water inland resources means

they have little choice but to grow it wherever they can. the palestinian authority says unemployment in the occupied west bank has almost doubled to around nine hundred percent in the last twenty years feels like this one used to be used to grow crops like wheat and barley but not anymore before israel started building the separation wall in two thousand and two many people in this area used to work in israel but now there are villages in this area where virtually every family is in some way involved in the business. this is one of many small tobacco processing plants in the area pharma sell their dried leaves to traders for just over ten dollars a kilo. we were afraid the p.a. could confiscate his tobacco says this worker but others say the p.a. usually ignores them because it knows so many people depend only on regulated

industry for their livelihood demand for tobacco is high on cigarettes of five times more expensive than those locally produced but it's estimated the p.a. is missing out on tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue a year from the local tobacco industry has some not i mean if we're to calculate how much of the deficit the tobacco industry would cover i'd say somewhere between twenty to thirty percent if we control the smuggled and locally produced tobacco. says he and thousands of other people have no choice but to keep growing tobacco a plant that kills those who use it but one which many palestinians depend upon to survive but al-jazeera joubert in the occupied west bank. boys rescued from a flooded cave in thailand are expected to be out of hospital on thursday the health minister says the footballers and their coach are recovering well divers extracted them earlier this week after they'd been trapped for more than seventeen

days in a video released on saturday they expressed their gratitude. i wouldn't even want thank you for worrying about me and thank you for going into the cave to help me out don't worry about me now i'm saying how. i'd like to thank all the navy seals who came in to help us and thank everyone for their moral support until today. a melting ice berg of greenland is causing fears of a tsunami residents near the danger zone in the village of in a suit have been moved to higher ground the government and the police have been put on high alert as is thought the melting iceberg could swamp the entire settlement on the western coast of greenland it's home to about one hundred seventy people. this is al jazeera these are the top stories so far the israeli military says has bombed another site in gaza after a rocket attack from the palestinian territory this comes after a must set a cease fire had been agreed earlier on saturday israel carried out dozens of air

strikes in gaza in a major escalation of action it says it was in response to border violence and rocket fire the latest flare up between students and nicaraguan security forces has ended catholic bishops have been mediating during the three month crisis secured the release of dozens of students two died in the violence after they were fired by pro-government forces while trapped inside the church. donald trump flies to finland later on sunday for talks with the russian president after spending the weekend playing golf at a scottish resort he's told the british newspaper the daily mail he plans to stand for the white house again in twenty twenty. haiti's prime minister. has resigned after days of violent protests they were triggered by plans to raise fuel prices by fifty percent which the government abandoned at least seven people have been killed in three days of unrest. eritrea's president is c.s.f.

work he is on a landmark visit to neighboring ethiopia it's the latest step towards reconciliation and peace between the long warring rivals last weekend the leaders signed a pact ending a twenty year military standoff. five people including four attackers have been killed in two car bombings close to the somali presidential palace the police say one last happened just after a gunfight between security forces and men at a checkpoint in the capital mogadishu the second bomb detonated nearby just moments later the group al-shabaab says it carried out the attack and a melting iceberg in greenland is causing fears about a possible tsunami several residents near the danger zone in the village of in a suit have been moved to higher ground it's thought the melting ice could swamp the entire settlement which is home to about one hundred seventy people twelve boys rescued from a cave in thailand will be discharged from hospital on thursday the health minister says the football is on the coach are recovering well divers got them out earlier

this week after they've been trapped for more than seventeen days those are your headlines the news continues after people in power all season but like a bit of a strange day to start these interviews we just heard today to city of aleppo has fallen. or should we say liberated. one. food astonishing stories tode in their own lives how did you know who to trust and not to trust. a stranger came to town witness on al-jazeera. recent elections most notably facts of donald trump as u.s. president apply logic the role played by social media in spreading malicious propaganda and fake news and this old sense of cyber reality fiction becomes fact

lies become truths and political consensus becomes almost impossible to achieve in the second of two special reports. investigates allegations that russia and the far right have been using the technology to undermine democracy. america's two thousand and sixteen presidential campaign highlighted new threats to democracy posed by social media platforms in the internet. the u.s. congress is investigating how the russians used facebook twitter and google to wage

information warfare and a special counsel is looking into whether the russians in the trump campaign actually colluded in their digital strategies. there's also growing concern that the business models and algorithms that drive social media companies are fueling extreme partisanship and opening up the floodgates to phony news but america isn't alone challenges to democracy posed by social media also surfaced last year in european elections we begin there in the second part of our investigation into why social media platforms are such powerful tools for those who want to spread propaganda and to simper mation we look into the ways automated accounts are known as bots are deployed by russians in the far right to manipulate the public the use of social media to wage information warfare was perfected by the kremlin in the baltic states in ukraine according to the nato strata com center of excellence in latvia genocide says its director saraf excellence is researching the information confrontation comment to wolf i would have done

a lot of look at what russia has been doing over the is and we see that a lot of our knowledge is actually were relevant to what is happening in the us because obviously for anybody who's been watching the methodology s. have been more or less there for some time according to the nato strike come center use of social media as a military tactic as part of the so-called draw some of doctrine named after the current chief of russia's general staff the goal is permanent and rest in chaos within an enemy state achieving that with information warfare rather than military engagement is a preferred way to win it gives you a plausible deniability and. it was quite a significant change i think in the end i mixed because typically russian theoretical thought was more about traditional military conflict rather than this what does it mean to have information campaigns at the center of military strategy this was the first sold troll factories running the shifts of people whose thomas

is using social media to micro target the people and spreading fake news and then in different countries they tend to look at what their vulnerabilities is that minorities and migration is a corruption is a socially quality and then you go on exploited and increasingly the shift is towards the robot is ation of the trolling. the use of automated social media accounts to interfere in elections and we can democracy has become more advanced in recent years we found that out when we stopped by the two thousand and seventeen riga conference last september thank you for coming to this very special three sixty zero s breakaway and we'll be focusing on elections and how bots and this information being utilized to create tensions in our society the workshop was sponsored by the atlantic council's digital forensic research lab the top journalists and researchers how to recognize social media manipulation techniques

at the very basic level of books is a social media account preprogrammed to do certain things that people pressing about and there are plenty of good bots out there like made robots with sham poetry what we focus on particularly is malicious thoughts which are used to distort conversations online then neemo the information defense fellow for the council specializes in tracking malicious bots on twitter is a lot of the bot activity today coming out of russia yes i've seen a lot of bot nets from the us for example that there are but nets which exclusively post for example far right content in the us but now it's a groups of fake accounts that can be automated to. like in post together you can tell a boat by looking at the three a's which are activity and an image see an amplification on that is if there's an example here whose handle is dreamed of dust which appears to be a u.s. based account that's fifteen months old in those fifteen months it's posted three

hundred nineteen thousand tweets per day you have the activity that's a ridiculously high figure in terms of anonymity the avatar picture is a cartoon image not a real person and the biography is just a collection of program phrases and then if you look at the amplification all you see is it's sharing stories to its two thousand six hundred followers neemo also showed us what appeared to be a commercial bot for a higher screen name is something like you did you did you it's a it's a random scramble of lettuce which is often a sign that you found a bot the account was part of a larger commercial but no under the law just bought and i've seen one hundred eight thousand accounts in it and you quite often find that what these are doing is drowning out the middle ground and they are trying to normalize a situation in which hatred and abuse. ah just the standard way of going the danger is that real users will get sucked into that emotional swirl and they'll join in. or also used to try to silence political opponents and journalists so this is i

mean with me being that i wasn't too upset by this because i happen to know that i was alive at this point but it's clearly an attempt to intimidate and it's another way of saying look we can get right into your face we can tell people your dad but using bots to get hashtags to trend on twitter is one of the most effective uses for russians in far right operators in recent elections this tactic was used to support donald trump. marine le pen in france and the alternative for germany party you can think of it like herding sheep you have a group of shepherds and these are real human beings they're real users who plan an online campaign they all agree what's that hash tag going to be they'll prepare means they'll coordinate what time they're actually going to launch their campaign then you get what you might think of as the sheep dogs these are also human uses they will read tweet them they'll amplify them they'll copy the meetings and then around that you'll have the bots they will then we tweet all shepherds and all the sheep dogs and then they'll start we tweet each other and so a group of may be

a dozen people can create the impression all anything between twenty and forty thousand tweets in iowa they can then push that hashtag into the trending list and so it throws a smokescreen over the whole idea of one man one vote somebody who controls ten thousand votes or one hundred thousand votes controlling one hundred thousand voices and they distort the debate. to disturbing use of twitter to mislead the public was demonstrated after a mass shooting in las vegas last year and another at a texas church. google searches prioritised false stories spread on twitter and facebook that the shooters were progressive democrats. muslim converts and members of anti from her radical anti fascist group all of the social media portals that we're speaking about are intimately connected in terms of how information flows. occur across all of the platforms and bought siri a bill to sort of manipulate this flow of information sam will use head of the digital intelligence lab at the institute for the future and was research director

for oxford computational propaganda projects his work with colleague douglas demonstrates that particularly those tweeting trump related hashtags played an influential role in the two thousand and sixteen election what we found was that they were successful in spreading their messages to people at the highest levels of power in the united states so people from major news networks journalists politicians other pundits all kinds of people like this were tweeting and messaging bot content and we showed that absolutely people like hillary clinton and like donald trump were actually spreading the content that bots were sharing online you think a lot of donald trump's followers on twitter are bots yeah that's right and the thing about the boss that followed donald trump is that they're typically active he's an incredibly active twitter user bots are used to spread those tweets and they're used to amplify those tweets like throughout the campaign we saw that and continuously we see that. during the campaign bots were also used to spread

damaging information the russians hacked from the democratic national committee in one study showed they generated twenty percent of all the political traffic on twitter during the first second and their debates were overwhelmingly sort of rate of five to one in support of donald trump compared to hillary clinton when it came to swing states we saw that bought usage was at an all time high bots are being used to spread fake news stories in ways that we've never really seen before are bots to use on facebook as well as twitter facebook has to come clean for instance during the election there was actually a real protest that happened because of fake profile pages that were automated on facebook and so bots are absolutely a problem on facebook. turin the founder of you bought studio is well versed in the ways bots are used on facebook his software is one of many turn key systems to pop up in recent years that make it easy to build a new xbox on social media platforms and they're cheap you can buy one for three

hundred dollars or less we call this the you about playground and we make it really user friendly in the way that anybody can just jump right in what we do here is we have a bunch of clones of common types of sites so that people can play around and get to know you by turn says you bought has hundreds of applications from advertising jobs to pumping up celebrity popularity it can also be used to spread in amplify a political message real or fake you have twitter on there yeah i mean there's a lot of different things you can do while he warns users against it turn is well aware his software can be used for so-called black cat purposes tasks that violate a platform's terms of service are illegal clo wiki about you can actually create random usernames and passwords and you can use those to create accounts but if you need a bot to make that many accounts for you then there's a good chance that you're doing something twitter doesn't want to do once you have

accounts you can use a bot to do it likes to do follow those shares to do read to you all of the above. yeah absolutely and if you'd like i can show you a more black cat example using entirely fictional account and the programs practice and he showed us how you bought might be used to spread this information on facebook through friend requests so this is a fake account that we have and let's say that we want to. get some idea out there let's say that we want people to believe the. origin is. another modified. so corgis are dogs right yes so this. it's some fake news fake news. so i going to post that on my wall and now i can run this and clicking this add friend button. and that it is just going out there and it's clicking add friends at random exactly endlessly and looks like and what's going to

happen is these people when they get that friend message they're going to act.