ted divvying has been in politics for forty years for him it would be a mistake to think that fake news has no impact on american alec toro behavior here's what's happening in our politics people are consuming information entirely different ways that we used to you know when i started doing presidential campaigns when jimmy carter you know his in office i mean we turn on the news at six thirty at night and we'd watch three networks at once and that was the way america essentially consume news now there is a constant flood of information both on television in the cable environment and particularly online you know that that online consumption of information is having a real effect on things because what's happening is the legitimate media is being supplanted by you know this fake news where people get information which sounds like it's real and true but has no basis in fact and in fact much of it is just made up and delivered you know by people who are attempting to you know affect the

outcome in elections by introducing false narrative and information into the flow of information so you know so yeah i think it does have a real impact. like of regard for the truth became more apparent than in any other us presidential campaign. according to politico fact an independent fact checking websites only four percent of donald trump statements during the campaign were true false information was constantly circulating in fact it became self-propagating you have to look at our media landscape and how americans get their news nowadays conservatives get their news only from fox news or alternative sites like breitbart so that's the only news they see and they view the manged what they call the liberal media the mainstream media with distrust and they don't believe the kind of c.n.n. new york times. washington post so they are only getting their news or law most of

their news from very slanted sources and so what trump will say trump picks up his information from the same news sources these voters hear something conspiracy theory and breitbart news or something on fox trump here is a two says it and the viruses are i've heard the word on the news and i heard that from president trump so he must be telling the truth if they're in a silo and it's really hard to break out silos so it's a self reinforcing cycle of mystery. it became more difficult to discern fact from fiction and the traditional press was brushed aside sort of a way that these campaigns have you know traditionally been covered and. and that model of campaign coverage was not sort of created with donald trump in my hands trumps disregard for making true statements is something that a lot of reporters have had trouble dealing with as we're not used to it we're not

used to politicians or press people just sort of straight out lying the mainstream media is disrupted and because the mainstream media is disrupted truth is disrupted and if the truth is disrupted you can just spread your advantage that. i didn't know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country. eighty three eighty three will serve boulevard and address among the most prestigious offices in los angeles behind these windows at number one thousand or a few companies that would seem to have no connection. the first is brit regarded as a platform for the so-called right. the second is going to ring steel it's a small audio visual production company and these companies are linked to a billionaire who's rarely in the public eye. his name robert mercer.

he is co c.e.o. of a hedge fund firm renaissance technologies whose ranks he's been climbing since one nine hundred ninety three. carol cadwallader has been investigating this computer engineer turned billionaire robot is he is an absolutely brilliant scientist. really pioneering work. in the sixty's and in the field of natural language processing which is the base of. basically and he was that royce at the start of it and working out how to do my machine translation between languages so that google translates which we use all the time. descendant of the work that he did you know he is without doubt one of the brilliant computer engineers of his generation

and he was just an ordinary middle class guy doing a professional job and he got an offer from renascence technologies this hedge fund . and he did. it was in the early ninety's that robert mercer left i.b.m. to work for run a song technologies. there he applied his methods of calculation on the stock exchange in order to predict its fluctuations. at technologies he pioneered. algorithmic trading which now is you know. written. something which still remains a bit secret about hard to make profit in markets but the origin of it is in applying a. computer techniques to the data without worrying about fear of where the economy

is going or what are the actual meaning of instruments or trading if you're buying wheat. or if you're buying a car company. you don't really care that it's a car company or that it's wheat you just look at the performance of these futures or these stocks and the key thing was to view this just as a set of numbers by applying his mathematical tools robert mercer revolutionized renaissance technologies investment methods making it the world's most profitable fund into this. mess it became very rich source because the performance of the fund which he had his own money and. was extraordinary i mean if it goes up thirty percent thirty five percent every year then pretty quickly you become very rich.

robert mercer is known to be very private he almost never speaks publicly. even google has a difficult time producing photos of the few that exist are always the same. there is also a poor quality video a public speech in twenty fourteen during a ceremony in his honor. found out after ike this i'm sure i'll accept this award but i would have to make an all ration on some topic or other for an hour now which by the way is more than i typically talk and in a month. robert mercer might have quietly enjoyed his new fortune but he decided to invest in politics. he's been recognized as one of the most generous republican donors since twenty ten.

merce's donations appear to be motivated by his own special interests. the political system in america is so broken right now because of the special interest money which floods campaigns i mean what happens is when the special interests have an agenda if you're annoyed company for example and you'd like to continue you know drilling for fossil fuel you know or your polluter and you want to make sure you can continue to pollute you go in you support politicians who believe in your agenda politicians who will say for example that you know climate change is not happening because of manmade activities you know they will they will promote that publicly because that protects the special interests who fund their campaigns. robert mercer set up his own foundation. the mercer family foundation. headed by his daughter rebecca. but what exactly are these special interests

he's protecting. it's hard to say since robert mercer never expresses his opinions publicly in a way you'll never know what's going on in robert nurse's brain so just look that's what is funding a little money that way and i think back on a bill for the page. to understand the ideas that robert mercer wants to promote we can look at where he's been spending we can do so with tax documents declarations of the foundations fiscal allocations for the years twenty twelve to twenty fifteen mercer financed a number of institutes and lobbies among them the heritage foundation which fights taxes and economic regulation one point five million dollars the media research center which fights leftist media bias twelve million dollars the government accountability institute which tracks government corruption and publishes books

against hillary clinton three point seven million dollars the heartland institute which defends climate change skeptics two point eight million dollars. in new york he even paid for an ad denouncing the construction of a mosque near ground zero in just two years robert mercer became one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics according to the washington post's. in twenty eleven breitbart news the right wing online newspaper was in financial difficulty. mercer saw an opportunity and he invested ten million dollars in the web site. the executive chairman of breitbart was a prominent figure closely linked to trump's campaign stephen bannon. a former goldman sachs trader he became a hollywood producer in the late one nine hundred ninety s.

he wanted to make films and t.v. series to. motes his ultra conservative political views. mercer in bandon are very closely associated and by mercer associating himself with somebody like steve better that maybe that may be a clue to his interpret vs personal views. in a few months abandon made breitbart an outlet dedicated to reactionary ideas. you see that with the breitbart publications over the course of many years it was someone like bannon who just proclaims this publicly that they're going to take on these a situations and they're going to try to deconstruct the government of the united states to pursue the agenda that they have which is to you know fundamentally change this nation and turn it into you know a place where people experience a level of division that i don't think we've seen since you know going back to the

civil war. robert mercer had built a political media network. to promote his ideas he was only missing one thing i can did it. in twenty fifteen he began by supporting texas senator ted cruz a figurehead of the american far right. but after donald trump's surprise victory in the republican primaries he placed his bet on trump. robert mercer created a pro trump political action committee called make america number one endowed with fifteen million dollars his role in trump's campaign quickly expanded. in july twenty sixth seen a dinner was held in a hotel in new york. it brings together among others rebecca robert mercer his daughter and donald trump the dinner resulted in key campaign changes.

trump's campaign manager was replaced. the chair of making america number one rebecca mercer whose family also fund the super pac. was able to influence the trump campaign to hire stephen bannon as campaign c.e.o. . steve benen became donald trump's campaign director. kellyanne conway who headed the mercer political action committee for ted cruz became number two. david bossie a mercer family stalwart became number three. robert mercer has assembled team was in place. bannon basi and conway would from this point forward steer the republican candidate strategy. when the merc versus decide to support a candidate they expect the candidate to be responsive to their needs both in terms of how the candidate runs their campaign it also also after if the kid is

successful and there are and they are elected as an office holder it's reasonable to presume that the mercers expect that the office holder will be responsive to the mercer's needs needs as well and their policy preferences. robert mercer his plan was proving to be successful. but a mistake was made that made steve bannon's role controversial. here is what was discovered by looking at donald trump's official campaign books each of these lines corresponds to an expense during his five month tenure there was no trace of payments for steve benen. but when we look at the payments made by robert mercer as political action committee one name appears several times. glittering steel a video production company. in total the company received three hundred two

thousand five hundred dollars from the committee in five months the company is run by steve benen. that would mean that his work for trump's official campaign might have been paid via glittering steel which would be illegal campaign financing . the campaign legal center decided to file a complaint. and . steve bannon faced a fine and an investigation by the justice department. we believe or we think it's possible that the super pac make america number one was subsidizing stephen bannon's work for the trump campaign by making payments abandon through glittering steel at all see this consulting firms last movie production

company located in california at the same address as and its own consulting firm. glittering steel and breitbart are not the only companies tied to the trump campaign eighty three eighty three will serve boulevard in los angeles also hosts cambridge analytics a company that came under the spotlight for its influence in politics around the globe. cambridge analytic claim to have revolutionary data modeling techniques that can change political campaigning. it was a subsidiary of an english firm and its role in donald trump's campaign is regarded as manipulation of public opinion. if you were looking at this from the outside you would really wonder what was going

on what what is this gross is that a religion that they have an in-depth exploration of global capitalism and our obsession with economic drugs this is still the center of capitalism there is no limits i view myself as a capital artist we are trying to pay for the world smaller and smaller we don't want to be set realistic in the world we would rather have a fantasy growing pain is coming soon in search of a safer neighborhood it was a huge middle name came in our house and took all our stuff in a man who can't put my family in the hole that they discerned that's a problem for me struggling to secure a home through really quite a bubble to the long run though we don't we could potentially lose our house and living paycheck to paycheck there's nobody to blame and live with the consequences every day of the choices that have been hard. on al-jazeera. russian filmmaker under a neck or a soft continues his journey across his homeland to discover what life was like

under putin during his travels he meets christians and muslims patriots and separatists i told little locals in the southeast we're on our side when i arrive and offer something completely different someone to leave russia but for others a russian passport means hope and the challenge of happens in search of putin's russia on al-jazeera. hello i'm barbara sarah in london these are the top stories on al-jazeera the u.s. president has unveiled the revamped missile defense strategy that is called the north korean ongoing and extraordinary threat that's the spy donald trump declaring seven months ago that the threat posed by pyongyang had been eliminated other

countries of concern highlighted in the pentagon review are iran china and russia and then a throwback to ronald reagan's one nine hundred eighty s. star wars initiative and as recommended studying experimental technologies including space based weaponry that could shoot down missiles the partial u.s. government shutdown which is now in its twenty seventh day is affecting donald trump's approval ratings with research suggesting growing discontent among his own supporter base a new poll indicates that fifty seven percent of people would vote against the president in twenty twenty. at least nine people have been killed in a car bomb attack on a police academy in the colombian capital bogota it's the biggest attack against the police or military facility in the city in over a decade the vehicle rammed into the academy grounds and then blew up shattering the windows of apartments in the area around the building. this is an attack on a sense of learning where there were unarmed young people and students it's an

attack not just against used oregon state forces against our police alone it is an attack against the whole of society this terrorist act will not go unpunished doctors in zimbabwe say sixty eight people have been treated for gunshot wounds after days of violent protests scores of others have been seriously injured demonstrators angered over a steep rise in fuel prices have been confronted by armed police and the un is criticised the reports of sudan's security forces using what it has this cried as excessive force against protesters riot police have used tear gas to stop people marching to the presidential palace in the capital have to a doctor and a child were reportedly killed during the demonstrations and more than three hundred refugees and migrants have arrived in the southern spanish port of malaga after they were rescued from the mediterranean sea on monday the red cross says

seventy eight women and fourteen children are among those pulled from sixteen's those are the top stories i'll have the news hour for you in half an hour and fair game continues next. thank.

you. the election of the forty fifth president of the united states raised ethical and potentially legal questions. the possibility to undermine basic democratic principles has significantly increased. there will be no lies we will honor the american people with it truth and nothing else. the headquarters of a firm little known to the general public called s.c.l. group strategic communication laboratories is located in the heart of london.

in these offices of data scientists compiled and analyzed terabytes of personal information. their objective was to determine what motivates human behavior in order to influence a. they specialize in psyops. which is. a military term psychological operations it's a whole discipline it's an academic subject it can be used in different ways. the firm is very clear about its services on its. clients include nato the british ministry of defense the n.s.a. and the u.s. state department. as c.l. has helped identify key leaders in afghanistan facilitating u.s.

intervention. it's also organized communications for vaccination campaign in ghana. but the company's practices remain questionable. it's a way of not change people that's the work. towards better outcomes for them but it also can be used to manipulate people without being aware and it can and has been used by authoritarian regimes. the company organized protests in nigeria in two thousand and seven to win fluence the elections. s e l also intervene during an election on the island of st vincent in the caribbean. as. he did for example it is not just on his own what he meant to have he just really moved it

clear program of a collision a stance pretty for school of candidate the survey can have a problem okies over four hundred to four for a player that has. ensured. c.l. sets up ultra targeted influenced strategies. the advent of the web and the vast amount of data circulating created an entirely new dimension of business. in order to extend their market as c.l. group created a new subsidiary in the us cambridge analytical tech seven i wanted to suggest that a structure just doesn't take them but it is it does it was it has a new you can bridge and into the cue ball fit on the ball and i'm so just. to create cambridge analytics as c.l. partnered with the american billionaire robert mercer a mathematician specialized in data. steve

bannon served as vice president of the firm. from the outset the objective was clear nothing less than a revolution in the election campaign process despite multiple interview requests cambridge analytical has refused to speak with us. but it's possible to understand the work they did by simply watching their advertisements political campaigns have changed they're no longer about running the most t.v. spots sending out the most direct mail or spending the most money they're about who spends the smartest money in today's political world what campaigns are getting more expensive in elections are won by small but crucial numbers of votes putting the right message in front of the right person at the right moment is more important than ever this is where cambridge analytical in our revolutionary data modeling techniques can help. it sounds like

a more logical approach to campaign strategizing however the reality is more complex and above all much murkier than cambridge and in that it was willing to admit it. since coming to the. united states the firm embarked on an unprecedented operation to compile data on the american population without its knowledge here's how it works. imagine that inside this car is mr x. like anyone he leaves thousands of pieces of personal information on the internet his address age income hobbies purchases religion and whether or not he owns a gun. cambridge and a little legally bought this data from credit companies banks social security and web giants like facebook google and twitter. in total the

firm claim to possess about four to five thousand pieces of data for over two hundred thirty million adults living in the united states. this is how they plan to use its traditional political campaigns use geography and demographics like age and gender to break down voters into target groups this can work up to a point but it misses the important personal details that really drive voter behavior we combine geographic and demographic information with up to five thousand data points of national political consumer and lifestyle behavior for every voter in the united states then we add a unique extra layer of data about personality decisionmaking and motivation. this creates an unparalleled rich and detailed view of voters in the issues they care about so you know exactly who to target with exactly what type of message we call this behavior micro-targeting our team of data scientists psychologists and

campaign experts can show you which individual voters you need to win over in order to secure victory. the idea is to give people psychological tests and then compare the results with the in from. nation they already have on them to know what motivates them and thus influence their vote it's a technique that existed before cambridge analytical one of its inventors teaches psychometrics at stanford university california his name is michelle kosinski metrics is basically a science of psychological measurement so basically have not is that instead of using question to ask you about your thoughts feelings experiences and past behavior such as are you a well organized person you can basically look at your digital footprints and see what are you in facts i well organized person in real life. tests to

determine a person's psychological traits are cold ocean tests they measure personality based on five criteria. openness conscientiousness extroversion agreeableness and neuroticism. it's done with seemingly innocuous questionnaires that can be completed online like these. in two thousand and eight michelle kosinski created the most famous of these tasks on facebook called my personality a questionnaire to learn more about yourself. became really popular we had over six million people to take the question there and a large fraction of these people also donated their facebook profile information to us and from this information you can use. algorithms to transform this

information into very detailed and very i curate intimate profiles so as a result michelle kosinski hospital largest psychometric database in the world. a database he can cross-reference with the facebook profiles of the six million people who respond it's. so basic you can turn your facebook likes into an accurate prediction of your political views religious views your personality intelligence happiness sexual in taishan or even what are your parents were divorced or not people often ask me how accurate those algorithms are at predicting our intimate traits and i think that a great example comes from our recent study where we have compared the curacy of algorithms with a curiosity of other people so what we did we took friends and family members of our participants and we asked this friends and family members to feel in the

personality question as in the name of our participants now we would provide algorithm with a set of facebook likes and have it do the same thing so based on your facebook likes tried to predict your personality the results of this experiment are staggering by studying ten of your likes on facebook be algorithm knows you better than you're called. with one hundred likes it knows you better than your family. and with two hundred thirty likes it knows you better than your spouse now given how much food friends how many footprints we're living every day while using internet and splaying of our phones. it basically means that computers can clearly know us better in many ways. even our close family members. prediction of human behavior through the combination of personal data and

psychological tests is shockingly accurate. david kero is a media professor at parsons university in new york. modeled for months to retrieve the data that cambridge analytical had on him. he was amazed by what he discovered . this is the excel spreadsheet that they provided it is broken into three tabs core data election returns and models the model on the one hand personal data that the firm has gathered from the web and then my registered now this is all the voter data here and this is what would normally be public in voter records but it it's all accurate it has the day i registered to vote and it has figured out my birthday my address the zip code down

to you know all of my address it's connected it to census information and it's connected to all the different kinds of elections so u.s. congressional state senate state house state legislative then you have some consumer information here like the designated mark information and f i p s it is another kind of consumer voter code and when you're on the other hand the psychometric interpretation of his personality together that's how you can really zero in and target the model is my profile so you can see the different topics were ranked in order of importance my registered partisanship my unreligious or partisanship you clearly see who their client was it didn't measure me as a democrat or republican just a very unlikely republican and you can also see sort of the model itself is in the interest of sort of finding. conservative voters especially conservative voters who might be registered as a democrat but are actually going to vote republican so being able to go down to

the zip code level and then reus o.c. that to all other election districts allows you to geo target. so precisely and that's how you're going to move the needle in u.s. elections i think if americans knew this was happening and happening internationally they would be outraged. funded by robert mercer and headed by steve benen naturally cambridge on a little would offer it services to candid donald trump. by late june twenty sixth seen the partnership with a done deal. on july the twenty ninth the first payment was sent to the company you can find it's in the campaign account. with four payments between july and october twenty sixth in cambridge an emoticon would receive nearly six million dollars. at the same time the political action committee for donald trump

funded by robert mercer paid cambridge analytic top five million dollars between november twenty fifth and november twenty sixth in. ultimately the firm would receive eleven million dollars to work with the trump campaign. a digital targeting strategy was made possible and set to run for donald trump. all that was needed was a way to put it to use in the american elections certainly beat some camp which include cambridge analytical saw something in the american electorate that the clinton campaign and the media certainly did not see. it's been reported that thanks to cambridge analytic cuz knowledge of the electorate trumps advisors devise the highly targeted strategy based on the particularities. of the u.s. voting system. in the united states the president is not elected directly by the

people but by the electoral college appointed in each of the fifty states. not all states have the same number of electors making some states more important to win than others. the trump camp suspected that they would not win the national vote so with strategists decided to concentrate on the state. knowing that they would lose the national popular vote. how do you win well you win by capturing the electoral college how do you do that you try and figure out a way of where you can go to appeal to relatively small numbers of people he was going to places that a lot of people thought why is he doing that he shouldn't be doing that he should be going someplace someplace else we didn't there was a strategy of looking at places that had been thought of as consistently democratic states states like michigan wisconsin and pennsylvania all three of which mr trump

carried on in november. this was the strategy reportedly recommended by cambridge analytical not to try to convince millions of voters across the entire nation to vote for trump but rather to target only the tens of thousands but the firm knew through its analyses were hesitating. if you are somebody who's. clever. and you're just you're looking i mean what he does algorithmic trading it's all about finding the tiniest edge is that tiny tiny tiny edge that you have of your competitors that you can leverage and make a massive difference and that's the money and i think this idea of using data and the potential manipulation through a platform. is that you just enough to give you that edge that then you can exploit

through things like faith and all these other techniques and tactics. here are the techniques that motion by the data scientists i cambridge and i'm. using the information they had on the other words they defined thirty two types of personalities throughout the country. it's believed that individualized messages were sent targeting those considered to be the most concerned about issues. was discussed by trump during his campaign. the firm identified many such voters in three states wisconsin michigan and pennsylvania three states bay believed could swing in favor of trump. in a press release cambridge analytical openly explained its strategy.

there remains one question that the firm does not address just how did they reach these targeted voters. they did it using a little known facebook feature dark posts. they do sit in on top is when bashed his book on massage. and popular strong determined that it christmas search for certain movies you said populace wanna listen about but it's all of. those i cannot expect out of it if the decline of depth of data live under yourself is a book i make them as such but also when they get if look on you that make critical mistakes are not so i thought as for this christmas as the above but i had the

money to pick. it's so dark posts are very personalized messages visible only to the person for whom they are intended how does that work exactly let's go back to mr x. analysis of his online data can determine whether or not he's in favor of carrying firearms a message can then be created targeting him did you know that hillary clinton wants to take your gun away. he'll receive this message in his facebook news feed at a specific time courting to has happened and digital fingerprints. no one but him will see the targeted ads and it will disappear a few hours later. as no record of them you've got no way of investigating that you have no idea who saw what and this is democracy taking place in darkness it's

not democracy if you're going to have a political debate have you out in the open you know who is arguing what and here is being told what and the idea of just sort of like sneakily targeting people with who know what's on their phones and on their computer and with anything they could have been saying anything we'll never know because that's gone well it's on facebook seven it's is interesting thanks but they're not giving up. this digital strategy for the trump campaign was focused on the last few weeks. on november the eighth twenty sixteen against all odds trump took wisconsin by twenty three thousand votes michigan by eleven thousand and pennsylvania by forty three thousand. in total seventy seven thousand votes in these three key states kerry trying to victory when he was three million votes behind over the entire country.

the digital targeting strategy had proved effective we can see that approximately seventy thousand voters made the decision for everyone else because they were the ones in the districts that ended up deciding where they think this highlights as well our electoral college system is a vulnerability that if software and data allows the most important voters to be easily. found it and diminishing the vote of everyone else effectively. politics and democracy was the next industry to fall we knew that technology interrupted newspapers. and music and it was like actually harry is we've been talking all this time about how great you know technology is it . the next disruptive technology and i was like this is technology disrupting

politics and and it's not just politics it's democracy and donald trump is the great disrupt. after trump's election when two former employees at cambridge analytical claim that the front collected the data of tens of millions of facebook users. collection was done in violation of privacy policies. christopher wiley was the first whistleblower he's the former director of research at cambridge analytics. britney kaiser the former business development director was the second on march the twentieth twenty eighteen c.e.o. of cambridge alexander nix was suspended after secret recordings were broadcast off next boasting if using fake news campaigns and honey traps to affect election campaigns globally. on may the second twenty eighteen s e l group announced that it

was filing for insolvency and closing all of its operations including its subsidiary cambridge analytical. cambridge analytical stated that it has been vilified for activities that are legal and widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arena as. however the acceptance of this digital strategy continues to be challenged as the manipulation of public opinion becomes clearer. donald trump's campaign strategy exposed democracy to new threats however it also drew more attention to data technologies role in politics around the globe. unless there were a significant change in privacy policies personal online data continued to be used

to destruct politics all over the world. hello there is certainly is rather hot for some of us in australia temperature records are it's humbling and it's all ahead of the system here so this is bringing something of a welcome relief is it drags in some fresh air for adelaide them would already see the temperatures drop as we head through friday twenty nine a maximum twenty edged in melbourne but to sydney it's still hot for us thirty four

degrees is a maximum that will as we head through into saturday and as this system makes its way towards us further west there is still going to be very hope for is in perth all temperatures all the way up thirty seven degrees over towards new zealand and we've got a weather system making its way towards us that's the same one that is affecting us in australia making its way across the southern parts of the south island but as it runs its way northward it is breaking up so still would force in oakland all maximum temperature at twenty three degrees on friday but will be topping even higher up to twenty four for saturday for the south island though that system pulls it sounds together once more for saturday so some today is certainly looking like the west today for the northern parts of asia don't quite quiet for many of us here well latest system is pulling away towards the east but behind it there will be some cloud a few outbreaks of rain and snow as well plenty of wintery weather here but the southeast looking dry fine in tokyo.

generally financial operations are propping up north korea's economy hampering the elite and fueling the nation's missile additions. one east investigates north korea's secret money on al-jazeera. al jazeera. every. hello there i'm barbara sarah this is the al-jazeera news hour live from london thank you for joining us coming up in the next sixty minutes. a child

and doctor are reported dead in the latest protests demanding that sudan's president step down a car bomb explodes at a heavily guarded police academy in the colombian capital killing at least nine people donald trump cancels a trip to afghanistan by u.s. house speaker nancy pelosi in a spat over the shutdown as polls show that his approval ratings are forming and less meta and more grains nuts fruit and vege scientists work out the ideal diet for the health of the planet and its people. and i'm leah harding and doha with all the day's sport as twenty three time grand slam winner serina williams dominated the third round of the australian open in melbourne we have that story and more later in the hour.

a child and doctor have been reported after the latest protests across the than the man being the president omar al bashir stands down police used tear gas and live ammunition to the spurs crowds trying to march to the presidential palace but he remains the find denouncing the protesters us traitors and announcing a pay rise for civil servants to try to quell the anger here but morgan reports now from the capital hard to. freedom peace and justice these have been the demands of protesters for nearly a month along with a demand for sudan's president omar bashir to end his nearly three decades in office and step down. many here still mourn i don't know what's going to help our demands are the demands of everyone and god willing we will continue running group be successful our protest today is large and we are going in the right direction we will go to the presidential palace we just want peace freedom and justice like the rest of the world the protests began last month in the city of azerbaijan when the

government announced it would hike bread prices in a country where inflation is a nearly seventy percent one of the highest in the world hundreds protested to voice their anger the demonstrations have since spread across many cities in sudan including the capital how to officials have shut schools and universities and cut off access to many social media platforms police have used tear gas and live ammunition as the e.u. and the un called on the government to not use excessive force against those protesting the high commissioner for human rights michel bashfully called on the sudanese government to protect exercise by all people regardless of the political affiliation of their rights freedom of expression and peaceful assembly she also urged all sides to refrain from the use of violence activists say at least fifty have been killed since the protests began the government says that number is twenty four and it's not only hard to that came out today several other cities at least ten other cities also came out to protest against president bashir they say they

want him to leave and had a part in the interim independent council something he said is not going to do but president bashir has been defiant in the face of the demonstrations he has accused those protesting as being influenced by external forces. we reaffirm that we care about the young and their concerns we call on the young to be positive and preserve their country and not listen to cause that destabilize sudan and its security with the demonstrators making it clear that they want change now the protests are becoming the longest since a gang gained independence and the biggest challenge to president obama to bashir since he came to power twenty nine years ago people more going on today are caught on. protests also in zimbabwe where doctors say they've treated sixty eight people for gunshot wounds after days of clashes there over the sudden rise of fuel prices state t.v. says six hundred people have been arrested since monday including the labor leaders and prominent rights activists human rights watch has accused supporters of the ruling zanu p.f.

party of beating activists and handing them over to police alexey o'brien reports. with broken limbs and bruised faces this group waits for treatment outside a clinic in harare. soldiers broke into a house in the middle of the night destroying property in the process they took turns to beat us in our room was full of blood. it happens during demonstrations against president innocent men and god was moved to double fuel prices to counter a deepening economic crisis the security forces responded with what rights groups say was an unprecedented use of excessive force live ammunition rubber bullets and tear gas. they had no mercy they wanted to kill us but i managed to escape the protesters had set fire to a police station barricaded roads and looted shops hundreds of people were arrested

and are now making their way through the courts including prominent activist pasta event. he's facing charges of subverting the government and twenty years in prison if convicted we thought we had a. new country and a new way of. none of what them. now whatever they had been urging people to stay hard as part of a three day strike over the fuel prices the protest pose the biggest challenge yet to president who came to power offering a new start and valuing to revive the shattered economy by attracting far. investment he announced the increase then headed off overseas tweeting from russia that resolving the economic challenges was a monumental task he also called for calm a message that may not have got through with zimbabwe's internet only partially working after being shut down for several days we are calling on the authorities in

the baba to fully store access to internet it is a human right to do the right the strikes now but schools and some shops remain closed in the capital harare. they've been years of food and fuel shortages sometimes people are forced to queue for hours even days as it is another way things are not yet normal we can't get fuel all fuel stations are closed many say the change that was promised following the ousting of robert mugabe hasn't happened brian al jazeera well earlier we spoke to zimbabwe human rights lawyer doug cold hard he's met a number of those who have been arrested. just last night i was at a police station which. when it was literally a military takeover of the police station about twenty soldiers came in and took control of the police station which is something that i have certainly never seen

and this is really very concerning in terms of who exactly is running this thing and who has deployed the military and why are the military operating seemingly in it in plain clothes often using ballot clubs and and meeting out such extreme brutality on on on ordinary citizens after my clients were lived in custody with at this police station in gorham ones soldiers came back to the police station to try and seemingly to try and abducted. my clients from that police station which was thwarted but the same soldiers or other soldiers went into a nearby township. at a church mine where one of my clients stays and brutally assaulted many of the people who are the who are now. seeking medical attention but this crackdown it's

really something that we haven't seen in zimbabwe in a very long time and has and really makes it quite clear that it's good the so-called new dispensation or second republic is no different from the garbage era if anything it may even be progress. that they stole in a car bomb attack at a police academy in the colombian capital has now risen to ten it's the biggest attack against the police or military facility in the city in over a decade the vehicle rammed into the academy grounds then blew up shattering the windows of apartments in the area around the building president. rushed to the scene for west of the country where he actually been attending a meeting on security. this is an attack on a center of learning where there were unarmed young people and students it's an attack not just against oregon state forces against our police alone it is an attack

against the whole of society this terrorist act will not go unpunished. and joins us now another death toll has gone up since the last time that we spoke just give us the latest on what is coming out of this. yes barbara the ministry of defense the columbia ministry of defense just minutes ago confirmed that to so as written to ten and that there are more than sixty people injured many of them have been taken to a number of hospitals here in the colombian capital bogota in the meantime our investigations continue inside the police academy behind me both to investigators that the attorney general's office and the police are still analyzing the area of the explosion so we have more details more on the car now

that was used in this attack that's something that the attorney general talked about in a press conference a couple of hours ago there were needing people grams of explosives inside of the car and that the explosion was so strong that was heart hurt kilometers that way and we've seen the windows shattered in the apartments the two a kilometer from here so you can imagine that just the strength of this car bomb actually speaking here to the two policemen they said they were surprised that even more people didn't die given how powerful this explosion was when it happened then nine thirty am the attorney general's office is also saying that they are hoping to have more information later in the evening and they are

also focusing on the car they said it was registered and that the last mechanical rescission was done in that alka region far away from here on the border with business well i wear miniskirts criminal groups operates among them still standing great rebel group of the year lehner national. liberation army. obviously the strength of the bomb was remarkable actually the worst attack of this kind that colombia seen for more than ten years what does this mean for the country that. the cloak the people of all the time called long against it in general have been quite eager to turn the page on the long history of violence in colombia and this attack is a reminder of darker times through the eighty's and the ninety's and also the early two titles in when car bombs that were almost the norm that were explode.