in yemen but that process stalled in the house of representatives why because it was controlled by republicans that are supportive of the president but today is a pivotal day as you point out now democrats in control of the house of representatives we already know that the now incoming chair of the house intelligence committee a man by the name of adam shift has promised that he will do what he calls a quote deep dive into this issue so expect that we could if not see public hearings on the house side certainly see a hearing is being held behind closed doors at the committee level where they will really examine the intelligence of the assessment by the cia and essentially the conclusions of the president what will this do this could put pressure on the president and could lead to the legislation that was passed in the senate also being passed in the house of representatives what happens then then it would go to the white house where the president would have a very difficult decision he would have to decide whether or not to sign it into

law if he signs it into law this would ultimately change a u.s. saudi relationship that has been in place for decades but what many suspect is the president will decide to veto that legislation if it gets that far as sensually siding with the saudis and against the will of the american people so this is where things stand right now don't expect that this could happen in the short term given the fact that there is a government shutdown taking place in the united states right now an argument over reopening it funding the government and also the issue of border security but this is certainly something that could be revived in the coming weeks and months indeed very young but on the east coast a would expect reaction as everyone wakes up to the news coming out of riyadh for the moment complete thank you. now the rest of the day's news is still had included a slowdown in china takes a bite out of apple's profits we'll look at whether it's just trade tensions but it's a plain. color

the weather is some a quieter across japan at the moment but some places of cloud and rain rolling through the save the planet into was almost you heading towards a hot. mike to see one or two showers want to see wintry fries but essentially it is looking somewhat dry than a has been a recently so we're getting up into double figures for tokyo and also for stock up in the sunshine just starting to poke its way through ready for celsius for so one celsius for peeling agel so for beijing olympics hostile cold enough at minus nineteen celsius not to seventy this week i wanted to sass they represent something of an improvement in sunny improving on the temperature by sas they base in places of snow possibly just making as winds in northern parts of honshu maybe it will soften areas of cotton not too much to speak up to space the snow into central china today it's

a cloud of rain close to shanghai down towards the south of the country quite bitchy really hong kong should stay dry temperatures around twenty one twenty two south just over the next couple of days but that rain further north will intensify become a little more widespread season widespread right making its way towards southern parts of tada this is a tropical side light that's going to continue making its way further north woods for the next couple of days. cultural history it's inscribed layer upon layer at times you race others you've been made to reinvent. through the transformative power of public are unlikely collision of hip hop culture and indigenous tradition forms a community building project led by the godfather of graffiti.

on a. hill watching i was there on the run the run of our top stories eleven suspects in the murder of journalist jamal khashoggi have faced a saudi court for the first time prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for five of them was killed and dismembered after entering the saudi consulate in istanbul but the second. president trump has also described syria's war as sand and death while defending his decision to withdraw u.s. troops from the country speaking at a cabinet meeting on wednesday trump didn't provide a timetable for the military exit he announced last month against the advice of his defense chiefs but he did say he wants to protect kurdish people in the north of

the country has been accused of abandoning the kurdish one p.g. you've been in the fight against eisel. whether it was your time if you want it or somebody said four months but i didn't i didn't say that either i'm getting out we're getting out of syria look. we don't want syria. obama gave up syria years ago when he didn't violate the red line i did when i shot fifty nine missiles at but that was a long time later so syria was lost long ago it was lost long ago and besides that i don't want we're talking about sand and death that's what we're talking about what we want to protect the kurds never the less we want to protect the kurds but i don't want to be in syria forever it's sand and it's death with limited has been following developments from guns into the syrian border. the

u.s. is not only putty in the. fight against the he's an international coalition the bell in the some of them nato allies late. and from friends troops already in the north and syria and they need to when the united states forces want to get the troops will withdraw from cities in the past two weeks we have heard from a quick withdrawal which would happen within weeks just forty eight hours ago it was four months i'm out. i didn't say that. days no clear timetable for with the withdrawal of the troops of course he's commented that syria is nothing but death also costs dolls and the commitment of the united states to finish. what is left off other so-called terrorist organizations

like al qaeda allied to syrian rebels so. we are seeing us question also where the kurdish fighters who have been. the most reliable of the u.s. officials have to call them in the fight against i still have not been thrown under the bus and out seeking new alliances going to with the syrian government and by extension it on russia. and inside syria at least thirty one people have died after days of intense fighting between two armed groups in the north the clashes are happening in parts of aleppo in a glimpse of a kind of link fighters and turkish banks rebel forces are blaming each other for starting the violence is the worst fighting in this part of the country in three months and jump also seem to just missed the war in afghanistan which began with the u.s. invasion in two thousand and one as a problem for neighbors like russia india and pakistan to deal with. but why is it russia there why is it india there what is it pakistan there why are we there

were six thousand miles away but i don't mind we want to help our people we want to help other nations so does president bashir is under immense pressure to implement reforms as he tries to overcome sometimes violent protests against his rule the unrest has prompted two of the nineteen parties in his governing coalition to defect since the protests against him of being whipped up by forward other means of the economic problems are due to international sanctions. we are under siege we face war we have lost our main revenue but we still stand firm we are suffering but we still stand firm and we are working hard to sort out all the problems despite the siege we have put an end to the villains we have brought security we've started a precedent in dialogue because these are the people of sudan. which is there is have a balkan joins me now from khartoum it seems the president is quite happy to blame

everybody at everybody else but of course there's a lot of pressure on him and people want to know how he's going to solve this current crisis regardless of who he blames. well so him one thing he said he's going to do is that sorry one thing he said he's going to do is he's going to try to increase wages for civil servants he said that the lower civil servant who began it will be getting an extra ten dollars per month starting next month and that the highest earning civil servant will be getting an extra fifty dollars so he says he's going to try to improve the economy something has said from the beginning when the protests started to not be around a nineteenth of december last year now people were saying that the issue is not the economy the issue is how he's been running the country for the past twenty nine years but as you've heard him saying he seems to be blaming everyone but himself and his policies he keeps saying that he will try to introduce new policies he says that to the budget for twenty nineteen is aimed at trying to reduce the inflation which that seventy percent at the moment one of the highest in the world so he says that he's going to try to improve the living with the living situations for civil

servants and civil workers but it's not clear if this will have an impact on the people who are protesting with more protests being planned for today and tomorrow and the coming days indeed he seems to be having to put out fires of two fronts war lose the sort of social fires in the public that you know we've been seeing for the past few weeks but now his coalition partners are abandoning him what sort of effect does not having sort of in the political discourse is it having any effect on the public in the way they think government is running. well when it went to some of the coalition withdrew from the from the national government the people who are protesting and organized and most of the ports as being organized by the students professional association apparel association to the workers union they welcomed the fact that the government seem to be collapsing they said that they will come any opposition or any political party that that is lending support to their to their protests and marches on the streets they're saying that they feel like with more backing from opposition groups they would be able to have more legitimacy and they would have more standing around and they would be able to force the government to step down so people have been welcoming the fact that two to two

opposition parties have withdrawn from the government and the fact that the government is apparently weakening but president bashir seems to think that it doesn't have an impact yesterday some of the political parties were also part of the government held a press conference and said that they're going to back this government they're going to try to overcome the crisis that the government's going through and they also seem to be blaming anything anyone any side but the government and the and the president so it's not clear if the fact that two government to two opposition have withdrawn from the government will have a deep impact on the protests of course we'll know in the coming days with more protests that had been planned but for now people seem to believe that the more opposition stand with them the more likely they will be having more legitimacy and they would be able to eventually convince president bashir to step down or see what happens for the moment about morgan votes joining us though the number of people killed in a building collapse in russia has risen to thirty six children or one of those killed play slows and turn goes outside the apartment block in need to go east of moscow rescuers are still trying to find three people missing since

a suspected gas leak cause explosion in the building on monday a baby boy who spent thirty five hours in freezing temperatures with sons alive in the rubble on tuesday. protesters have forced shops and businesses to shut down in the indian state of carola they've been holding marches against the entry of two women in one of the country's holiest hindu shrines least one person was killed schools across the state closed on public transport two has been suspended the two women were the first to enter the temple in decades since the supreme court overturned a centuries old ban on women aged between ten to fifty. washington's new era of divided government begins later on thursday as doubletons political rivals the democrats officially take control of the house of representatives has republicans still hold congress's other chain but the senate also in jordan tells us what it all means for trans presidency new year new session of congress the public's

expectations of success are high the american public is so much more engaged than they normally are they are paying attention to politics they're not just letting things happen after the november elections the republicans retain control of the senate but it's the democrats who now run the house their ranks are younger more liberal more ethnically diverse and filled with many more women. they want to check president don't trump policies and to pass legislation of their own immigration reform investigating saudi arabia's ties to the us and expanding health care coverage. but first ending the federal government shutdown how dangerous is this and why we need a wall the president wants up to five billion dollars for a border wall between the u.s. and mexico and he says he won't reopen the government unless he gets that money democrats say they won't give the president money for anyone that means eight

hundred thousand federal workers aren't being paid and a variety of federal services are not available until further notice the president seems to be stuck on a wall or barrier or whatever it is that he's calling it today but i think that they've given him plenty of options plenty of ways to open the government president trump owns the shutdown he is the person who said that he was going to shut down the government he needs to go away from an impractical wall and we're going to reopen the government break up a kind of gridlock reading the members of the one hundred sixteenth congress their first chance to show the public that they can solve the most difficult of political problems rosalyn jordan al-jazeera washington. ball says doldrums trade standoff with china is at least partly to blame for the tech giant losing billions of dollars with the business tim cook warned of lower than expected earnings for the first quarter of the year will society we can demand from china trump

administration fired the shots in the trade war which has seen both countries impose tariffs on each other's goods a truce agreed last month would expire in nichols's a reporter at the register a technology news and opinion website is that the trade tensions on time it's a blame. i think what apple would like to do is really kind of as much as possible cite china cite the trade were cited issues as the cause of this but as you noted the over the last couple of years apple has significantly increased the price of the i phone we've tim cook special explanation of this is you're seeing kind of a combination of the trade wars kind of causing problems in china kind of worries over the economy and that's making people less likely to go in and purchase apple products so it's so you're seeing both apple saying this is the train where the economic policies but it's also you know our products are more expensive and fewer people want to go to the store and pay that much for

a phone for hours trading it was something like seven point five percent drop in apple's share price i mean this isn't a huge hit for for apple as far as the shortfall i believe it's only about four or five billion out of an eighty four billion dollar revenue. for the quarter but if this is something that investors are paying attention to and they did punish apple pretty significantly after hours trading. but china has made history by landing a spacecraft on the false side of the moon victoria tells us what insights the probe could offer about earth's nearest neighbor. the dark side of the moon which can be seen from has long been a surface a fascination an unexplored frontier celebrated in popular culture this need to be kept by pink floyd record breaking song. but now thanks to

a pioneering chinese space mission it is being explored for the very first time the chunky four spacecraft was launched last month and successfully landed on the far side of the moon at two twenty six g.m.t. on thursday. by ground zero used the whole process was as expected the result was a decisive fit on the landing was very stable the current one wing location is our most valued deal landing place in other words we were right on target the chunky four carries a rose which will study the means to rain and send back samples to scientists say the far side of the moon is geologically different to the near side one of the goals of this mission is to find out more about what lies beneath the surface but china's space dreams don't end there it wants to catch up with the united states and russia one day even lead the world space race china is treating the moon as the first big outpost in deep space for its long term plans it's already sent several

missions to the moon it plans to send even more in the future including a sample return mission at some point but china is also setting its sights for mas and the asteroids and probably beyond it's been almost fifty years since neil armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon now the space race has a new contender china but as much as all world has changed the moons mysteries continue to capture people's imagination victoria gate and be al jazeera. thank you. your children there i'm so whole robyn these are all top news stories a love and suspects involved in the murder of journalist joel shastri have faced calls in saudi arabia for the first time prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for five of the accused she was killed in dismembered after entering the saudi consulate in istanbul or tobar the second some consumer has been following the

story from turkey's capital first contact with the foreign ministry was as such they would be reassessing the statement so that was a diplomatic resp or response of course by the foreign ministry sorry but i have to say that the saudi prosecutors are asking for a death penalty will probably not be welcomed by the turkish overshoes because first that penalty even was abolished in two thousand and four in turkey and when these the death penalty possibilities were being discussed before turkish officials how i have always received it as the silencing off the witnesses the only witnesses who actually saw the murder by the way another thing is that we don't know the names identities of those eleven people who have been arrested by the saudi prosecutor's office he was present all trump has describe syria's war as nothing but. his first cabinet meeting of the troubles or said washington has been carrying

the burden of stabilizing afghanistan. trampers asked political leaders from both major parties to return to the white house on friday after they failed to end the political partial sorry government shutdown trump said he's prepared to let it go indefinitely until he gets five billion dollars for his mexico border wall. sudan's president omar bashir is under immense pressure to implement reforms as he tries to overcome sometimes violent protests against his rule going to rest has prompted two of the nineteen parties in his governing coalition to defect bashir insists the protests against him are being whipped up by foreign enemies and the economic problems are due to international sanctions. we are under siege we face war we have lost our main revenue but we still stand firm we are suffering but we still stand firm and we are working hard to sort out all the problems despite the siege we have put an end to the villains we have brought

security we've started precedented dialogue because these are the people of sudan. those were the headlines to be more news in half an hour with marty but next on al-jazeera and inside story so to stay with us. taxing the internet tech giants like google and facebook generate huge revenues now they're being made to pay big taxes but also called digital taxation work and what will it mean for online business this is inside story.

hello there and welcome to the program i'm laura carlisle technology giants faced paying big tax bills in your billions of dollars is the latest country to announce plans to impose levies on internet companies and follows the french government so-called gaffa tax named after google apple facebook and. this digital tax targets many revenues collected from advertising and market related fees france and germany want to european union wide law introduced to ensure companies making huge profits online pay their fair share of taxes but so far the european commission has failed to get unanimous support. let's take you through some figures top digital firms estimated to pay an average tax rate of nine point five percent in the european

union whilst more traditional companies pay twenty three point two percent amazon's corporate tax bill in the u.k. for example is believed to be eleven times smaller than that of british bookstores now france hopes to raise around five hundred seventy million dollars a year with its new digital tax facebook alone that in four days thank you so plenty to discuss the and joining us here in doha to do so is nino cata c.e.o. of spock digital and additional marketing lecturer at georgetown university in london have glenn goodman financial trader and former business journalist and joining us via skype from cork in ireland balkan kota and cyborg rights activists very well welcome all of you to the program glenn when you hear those figures this new french tax but it really is a drop in the ocean isn't it for these tech giants how big

a deal is the gaffa tax. on its own it's not a big deal obviously if other countries start following suit and several other european countries have already started making steps in that direction then it could become a significant headache for some of the big tech companies i think what worries me the most i'm sure we'll get into it in more detail is just the piecemeal nature of this it's just a dog's dinner it's a big old mess we've got france doing its own little thing which may or may not work britain has at least laid out some more detailed plans but they have got some significant problems involving those as well spain austria everybody doing their own thing it's very very complicated very difficult what we really need to see is a big effort by either the you or preferably the whole world including the u.s. to come together and decide how they want to tax these companies that's it will certainly get into in the e.u. or even global wide tax a little later first of all in

a set it's complicated and i know for myself it's complicated i'm trying to read about it today how will this digital tax work by these individual companies just in layman terms give us an idea of how these taxes are raised. well the main thing that they're trying to do is to tax and revenue that relates to users themselves in those particular countries so for example you know france is annoyed that certain tech companies like to put most of their business in places like our island and luxemburg places where they're taxed at a very low rate and so then what those companies can do is sell the ads from those cheap countries to french consumers and french businesses inside france and yet france sees no kind of slice of that ad revenue because it's all booked in ireland in fact there was a big case recently where france took google to court and said you are us

a billion euros in taxes for all this ad revenue and google said no we don't because it was all done in oil and ok it may have involved french people to some degree but the actual ad selling went on in oil and and the court agreed with them so the french government is apparently appealing that one so from that kind of perspective you can see how governments could get very frustrated they've been trying for absolutely ages to try and work out a solution either you minister just can't come to a solution so the french have said well we've had enough of this we're going to do our own tax ok i want to get the reaction from errol of the tech companies disappointment first nino when we talk about advertisers that's your speciality does this tax simply pass the cost on to them the me how is this going to affect all the businesses that like to advertise on these platforms or details right now but from what i can tell it looks like they're going to charge a three percent tax to companies that are going to be using these platforms for

advertising so there's one hundred million businesses that use google and facebook to do ads to promote their products and services and so it looks like in their settings that's for example if they're going to target users in france then there might be an additional three percent added to the. per click currently it's set up in a way where it's an auction based system so the cost per each click for each advertiser depends on how many other advertisers are also advertising and what the competition is based on on an auction base so it won't actually be the tech companies themselves that this bill doesn't look like it from what i can tell so they won't be worried about it but they might like an ideal stacks are starting advertising you might just see bigger companies advertising rather than smaller companies will be more expensive for everybody but by three percent so i don't know if that means people cut back on their ad budgets but if they're getting a return on their investment anyway then if i don't think it will have an impact are we haven't heard much from these big tech companies they haven't responded.

much to tool what do you think their reaction is going to be if anything and it doesn't really sound like there's going to be much impact on them. i don't know i mean and and to be perfectly honest i'm not too concerned about what their reaction as i think we give too much importance to what they think to begin with they are corporations and it is the role of governments to regulate corporations democratically elected governments what's interesting to me is two things one that we're using this acronym gaffa google amazon apple and facebook and we're lumping apple in with these other companies but apple's business model is fundamentally different they sell products they don't sell people that's one thing and the other thing is how we're approaching this tax so it's an ad it's a tax on advertising but not all types of advertising what we're talking about

specifically is ad tech which is surveillance based advertising the way google and facebook make money is they track everyone and they profile them and then they manipulate their behavior and they rent out the information that's intimate insight they have about them to other companies so this is a quite a talk sic a business model and we're seeing the talks to get facts through cambridge outlets akai except trendy effects that the ramifications that it has on our democracy so i think we should start viewing taxes like this in the same vein that we would view taxes on tobacco and if we start doing that then three percent is nothing in france they tax tobacco at eighty percent now that's the kind of thing i want to start talking about if these companies are not good for our human rights if they're not good for the health of our democracies then we should be taxing them like we tax tobacco about our little it's very easy to say this is what we should do but how difficult is it to actually do that in practice when you have had courts as an

island have gone to the nuts about these low tax havens and very well paid lawyers to exploit loopholes that allow them to get away with paying that because it's been nominally difficult because our are institutions. corrupt the european commission is corrupt and i'm not talking about illegal corruption i'm talking about legal corruption i'm talking about lobbying so these corporations spend millions and millions and they have head could they have offices and in brussels and based you know the and all they do is they talk to these policy makers and try to influence them the same policymakers that are taking these decisions in a few years' time might be working at facebook and google i was recently speaking at the nordic tribe a see a reader and this is a conference of data protection officers people should be protecting us from these companies and facebook had a keynote there i had a keynote facebook had a keynote and the facebook keynote speaker his last job was as

a data protection officer working for the french data protection office he was a lawyer working for the data protection office so we have revolving doors and as long as we can tackle this influence of corporate finance and public policy making then we have a very difficult road ahead so we need to start talking about this in tackling the traditional corruption that is stopping us granted and what is incisional corruption that our is talking about is that the reason that we it's been so hard for the european commission to implement this wide three percent tax. well it's certainly one of the reasons i mean as our all quite rightly pointed out you have this revolving door i mean just here where i am in the u.k. we have nick clegg the former deputy prime minister who's headed over to work for facebook. and he was reported in the past to have not always been entirely complimentary about them and and about well about the tech industry in

general so it's very interesting that that kind of thing happens an interesting in a very bad way and as i wrote quite rightly said but it is not the only reason why it's been so difficult i think the main reason why it's been so difficult is because you're trying to turks a slippery snake that keeps slipping out of your hands all the time as you quite rightly said not only are they able to move tax jurisdiction sort of a pretty much whenever they want but also we have the problem that when they do move tax jurisdiction you have to try and work out how you can tax these particular types of of ads and ad spending that is going on and at the moment what of course many countries are starting to do in europe including the u.k. is to look at revenues rather than the profits traditionally of course corporation tax and so when you look at profits because it's just fairer to tax profits than revenues that might be done at a loss but also it's kind of more straightforward now we're looking at taxing

revenues and different types of revenues are going reading the u.k.'s incredibly complicated consultation document about the new digital proposed digital tax for these big tech companies and they're saying right first of all we're not going to tax small companies it's only going to be the very beginning on pennies so they look at a kind of minimum revenue but then they start going into definitions about where we only want to tax for example social media platforms but not actually just normal e-commerce online you know buying things on amazon we don't want to tax that revenue so how do we. define what is a social media platform and what is just a pure kind of marketplace because obviously there are often big crossovers now between the two types and so they're kind of trying to get their head around all this really this is just going to be a bonanza for tax lawyers they're going to make a lot of money arguing these things in court for the next few years until the world can get its act together and.