to him but of course this is all happening at a time when the you know the atmosphere the environment towards anyone remotely connected to human rights organizations is changing quite profoundly and given the crackdown against their major and which you've just highlighted why would anyone want to be a human rights lawyer in today's china. well that's right and i think that may well be the point and remember the chinese government is not just going after human rights lawyers and activists it's also been targeting foreigners that it thinks pose a threat to canadians have been detained during the past few weeks one of them a former diplomat and i think the message actually that's going out from china's leaders is this we're not overly concerned about what international sentiment is about china's human rights agent thank you now the french president says egypt's human rights record is perceived as worse now than under hosni mubarak's

leadership emanuel markram made the comments during a three day trip to the arab nation micro was criticized for not taking a stronger stance on egypt's human rights record when he met president abdel fattah el-sisi in paris two years ago is expected to raise the issue with egyptian president when they meet in cairo later on monday. time for a short break here not just iraq when we come back with the latest on some bandspread protests which are threatening the president's longtime rule. and the man known as a legend of the afrojack is given a hero's for well in zimbabwe more in the stay with us. from long flowing on in the winds to an enchanting desert breeze leaving. we have got some slightly quater weather pushing into parts of central europe still a fair bit of cloud and rain easing across the ajmi i think and that'll make its

way into the balkans all tied in with this area of low pressure not sea but over towards the black sea no great shakes on the weather here but i would towards the west still quite a cold northerly wind coming down across a good part of the british isles into france digging down into spain and portugal still some snow there just around the peyronie's fabulous no that is spinning out of the low countries and they will ease its way down to ward c. balkans and some heavy rain across the balkans for a time quite a stiff wind into central possible makes its way eastwards to the increasingly wet and windy across a good parts of greece and athens at around fifteen celsius for what that's worth on shoes days a very wet weather also making its way into western parts of france by this stage just developing an area of low pressure has been named a storm cable that'll bring some very nasty conditions across western france as we go through chews day and into awareness day further south in circuit pos of north africa as nazi babbie you can see in there is

a class still affect in the far north of algeria the chance of some sherry rain coming through here fifteen such as the high in algeria. the weather sponsored by cats on a race. and the next episode of techno the team travels to the heart of the amazon . where we are now should be grateful to investigate illegal gold mining mercury had a very unique characteristic of finding the goal for a minor it's almost like magic and the technology being used to expose its devastating impact and so what we end up doing is imaging a forest in very high fidelity stream. techno on all just zero.

welcome back a quick reminder the top stories here at al-jazeera the u.n. human rights investigator looking into the murder of jamal khashoggi is meeting turkey's foreign minister and. says week long talks in turkey are crucial step towards formal accountability for the killing of a critic of the saudi crown prince. as well as proclaimed president won by voters calling for two days of protest demand because what you wrote calls for you in fair elections do accuses the opposition leader of being part of a u.s. led to. an arsenal is claiming responsibility for sunday's bomb attack on a roman catholic church in the southern philippines philippines army commandos think that abu sayyaf fighters wanting to eisele down the two explosions which killed twenty seven people. now searches in southeast brazil say there's little hope of finding survivors from friday's down collapse a torrent of sludge from an iron ore mine killed fifty eight people around three

hundred still missing adonal sharma reports now from the disaster zone the search was called off briefly because of fears a second down was about to burst and. this is the result of the dam burst which spewed out millions of liters of waste from an iron ore mine in minutes it destroyed everything in its path education and infrastructure roads and lives. don't move this so three. but if you venture i'm just looking for a survivor or any sign of life in the wreckage of this house maybe a leg or a hand of the person i don't know the way the house was built and fell it's hard to see anything there. you'll thorough to say there's little chance of finding survivors but families of the estimated two hundred fifty people unaccounted for continue to. move. we found for the nunda looking for his brother better than a subcontractor at the mine obviously want to have come to the river to see if i can find some information someone who could tell me something maybe they'll find

a body and it might be my brother the mine owners valet have been fined sixty six million dollars the company said the recent inspection past the safe this is just one tiny part of the huge devastation in this region a swathe of destruction that swept through this area destroying homes killing possibly hundreds of people many questions being asked about why lessons were not learned from the last such disaster in the nearby town of marianna in november two thousand and fifteen. the town of berman dean your remains tense these precautions taken with news of a possible second dam about to rupture the ortho it is evacuated families in vulnerable areas and continue to distribute food water medicine and to. be dodgy has got view this are still a possibility it will find survivors until we find every single body the fire

department works with the understanding that there are still people alive i mean. some say they will not cannot give up this well there is still some hope. my mom cannot. she's on medications i'm the only one who can go out and look for information. on their al-jazeera roman genial brazil. a neighboring peru an avalanche of modern rockers crashed into a hotel killing at least fifteen people on the southern city of the bank a mudslide broke the walls of the hotel thirty four people were injured. a bit more anti-government protests in sudan's capital khartoum that coincided with a visit by president omar bashir to egypt where he accused the media of exaggerating the extent of the unrest even more when reports from cancer. it's his second visit outside his country in less than

a week as to dance president armorel bashir faces continuing calls back home to end his thirty year rule and step down calls that started six weeks ago and to which he has remained defiant to heed. the there is a problem in sudan we cannot claim that we don't have a problem but some media take it out of size and dimension it is an attempt to clone what is being called the arab spring in sudan it has the same slogans programmes and requests it also has the same use of social media however the sudanese people have learned the lesson that they have seen what happened in some of the states that went through the so-called arab spring and its negative implications god willing the sudanese people are very alert and will not fall into anyone's trap to destabilize sudan. the demonstrations started in mid december and the city of odds over rising bread prices it quickly spread to other parts of the country with thousands taking to the streets demanding that and bashir who's been in power since one thousand eight hundred nine and his rule security forces are accused of using excessive force with bullets and tear gas used to disperse

peaceful unarmed protesters. the government says twenty nine have been killed since protests began rights groups say that number is at least fifty with dozens more injured. opposition to bush years rule is not only in the streets some political parties have lend support to those protesting and on sunday the federal party one of the parties in the national government announced that it's withdrawing its participation in the government becoming the third party to do so since the demonstrations began in the for the. their regime has lost legitimacy and the ability to deal with the political crisis and trust in the regime has been lost we hope that the president steps down and paves the way for an interim government that is agreed upon by all sides the protests are seem to be the biggest challenge to be here since he came to power and some analysts say the ruling party is running out of time to find ways to overcome and. the withdrawal of the federal

party today is a sign that the ruling party is weakening so it has to take a step back and find a solution to the wave of protest of was more political parties will withdraw from the government and join the opposition movements. a movement triggered by an economic crisis which has become a nationwide call for change and to which there seems to be no end in the horizon going to al-jazeera. but dozens of mothers have been protesting in yemen's port city of aden demanding the government provide information about their missing son women have been demonstrating daily and rallied outside the interior minister's home believe most of the men are in detention and were captured during the ongoing civil war and even some of the control of the saudi backed government. now the number of illegal drugs factories being discovered in iraq is growing and so are the number of objects particularly in poverty stricken parts of yourself what matheson reports. this is one of the front lines in iraq's latest battle the

fight against illegal drugs such as heroin and crystal meth. it's a makeshift treatment center run by police in the southern city of basra trying to help addicts such as has sound. i have been an addict for more than seventeen months then i got arrested by police while i was buying large quantities of drugs to use every day my entire family has disowned me. drug smugglers have been crossing parts of the border with iran which were left with little protection during the four year war against isis importing mainly cannabis and methamphetamines drugs factories have also been discovered on the iraqi side of the border in plantations and orchards in bass or province. we're tightening security to prevent the smuggling of drugs and narcotics we're doing as much as we can to stop it but there are ways smugglers are getting past

this the treatment center in basra run by the police is one of two unofficial facilities that the city has but they can handle only a few patients at a time so some of them come here this is the even the last hospital in baghdad and it's a rags only official addiction treatment center it can deal with about seventy four patients at a time and some of these beds are empty at the moment but there are more patients coming from all over iraq every day buzzer province has some of iraq's biggest oil fields but its electricity and water supplies barely work i don't widespread unemployment problem means people here have very little money. irag zante drug force says it sees one hundred sixty loaves of drugs produced in basra province since november that's ten kilos more than was confiscated during the whole of twenty seventeen. if you were out of the bus and truck sometimes you have reached a seriously as a way the number of people something or using them is rising more than thirteen

hundred people have either been charged with drugs offenses been found guilty. but the police also admit it's hard to stop people making and selling drugs when the only alternative is poverty rob matheson al-jazeera baghdad u.s. senator coming harris is known to twenty twenty white house campaign with attacks on president donald trump's policies she's criticize the administration's separation of thousands of immigrant children from their parents of the southern border are as is presenting a self as the leader who can unite a divided country a longtime ally of donald trump says he'll consider cooperating with the russian investigation by special counsel robert muller roger stone was arrested on friday and denies charges of lying to congress and witness tampering if there is wrongdoing by other people in the campaign that i don't know about which i know of no one but if there is i would certainly testify honestly i'd also testify honestly

about any other matter including any communications with the president it's true that we spoke on the phone but those communications are political in nature there but now i and there is there is certainly no conspiracy with russia done estabrook has more from washington. well roger stone does seem to be hedging a bit on friday when he was indicted he said that he would not bear witness against president trump now today as he made the rounds on the sunday talk show he said that he may consult with his attorneys and he may have a conversation with the special prosecutor what we don't know is what else robert muller may have up his sleeve he may have additional charges that he could bring against roger stone that what might compel him to turn evidence against the president we just don't know at this point we've kind of seen this thing play out over and over again where people close to the president like his attorney michael cohen and his former campaign manager paul man a fourth say that they would not talk and then ended up flipping against the

president and we could see that again play out with roger stone a wildfire such a cross cape town's famous lions had mounted in south africa firefighters have been battling through the night trying to bring the blaze under control as the fire moved towards residential areas a number of people evacuated their homes helicopters with water buckets were used to douse the flames cape town south of drought conditions for almost all of last year then throw jazz legend known as the son of africa has been laid to rest of the state funeral in zimbabwe which you could see he died on wednesday at the age of sixty six our reports from his hometown. saying goodbye to zimbabwe's and one of africa's iconic musicians the base way they know how to solve and dance. all of them with who could see officially known as to who died on wednesday after

a four decades long korea doing what he loved one of my favorite things that he said was that he wants to tell stories and he's a poet he's telling those stories and the music is just an accompaniment to telling those stories was. to get he started performing in one thousand nine hundred ninety seven singing protest music joining the war to end white minority rule more than forty years and sixty seven albums later his knees it inspired generations around the world. in as much as it's a sad time that he's gone what he leaves us is the legacy of his music so in wellington than in the message of the music there's a lot of process there's a lot of in. looking at african cultural beats here really new in many many

different beats within zimbabwe and further afield and those he tapped into so his music is authentic and substantive. was. was was. there. were too busy songs largely stayed clear of politics he chose to mainly sing about people's struggles and hopes in zimbabwe with its huge economic and political challenges he was seen as an entertainer teacher and unifying issued certainly rest in peace and that is about winston with last live really unifying spirit but i think that we should. we took as he was given a state funeral by zimbabwe's government which has declared him a national hero as a u.n. goodwill ambassador he said he wanted to spread hope through his music his fans say

they'll remember him for his inspirational songs that try to make some africa and beyond a better place. zimbabwe. now a mural by the british artist banksy on the door of the battleplan theater in paris has been stolen ninety people were killed at the concert hall and orchestrated by iceland. the paintings show a young girl mourning the loss of life the battle plans expressed deep indignation at the first. talk of the check of the headlines on al-jazeera the un human rights investigator looking into the murder of. his meeting turkey's foreign minister in ankara. plans to have long talks in turkey especially. a crucial step towards formal accountability for the killing of the saudi journalist and critic of the crown

prince stephanie because more from istanbul the un special rapporteur is in ankara meeting the turkish foreign minister she is also expected to come to. where she will be meeting prosecutors the main authorities that have been handling the investigation into the murder of. expected to meet friends of the journalists and the people that were involved on that day almost four months to the day that she entered that building the saudi consulate we can't see it because the employees of obscured the door with some of these vans many questions remain where is the body. and who ordered his killing. venezuela's president is calling for two days of protests to demand that nicolas maduro called free and fair election. president with your accusers the opposition leader being part of a u.s. led cruise. is claiming responsibility for sunday's bomb attacks on a roman catholic church in the southern philippines but army commanders think that

abu sayyaf fighters who are linked to iceland planned the explosions which killed twenty seven people president to tears visiting some of the wounded in the muslim majority island of hollow in china a prominent human rights lawyer has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison for subversion one kong shown was tried in a closed hearing last month he defended political activists victims of land seizures and members of the band religious group falun gong one was detained during a widespread crackdown on rights activists four years ago the french president says egypt's human rights record is perceived as worse now than under hosni mubarak's leadership nine year old marco made the comments during a three day trip to the arab nation well macro was criticized for not taking a stronger stance on egypt's human rights record when he met president abdel fattah el-sisi in paris two years ago he's expected to raise the issue with sisi later on monday well those were the headlines continues here on al-jazeera of the

technique that's option by for each year childhood ends for an estimated fifteen million girls globally married before the age of eighteen. young girls compelled to marry after fleeing the war in syria share their stories on talk to em just zero. am i. am. i made the fish every week

a new cycle going to see any simple breaking stories and then of course there's donald trump town through the eyes of the welts jan an ace that's right out of a hamas script that calls for the and aisle asian of israel that is not what that phrase means. as we tend the cameras on the media focus on how they recruit on the stories that matter the most in bad news a free palestine. this is techno innovations that can change lives the science of fight fire we're going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity and we're doing. this is a show about science. by scientists. techno investigates gold at any cost. we travel deep into the rain force of these illegal mining operations except for miles and miles away from the

main highway to uncover a gold rush that's turning the lush jungle into utter devastation high pressure water hoses and blasted out and it's not just the layers people are stepping. on filled torahs just i've conducted extensive research in this rain forest so this story is personal really pains me to see this to davis and is a biologist specializing in ecology and evolution now she shows us the high tech tools that are exposing what even the i can't see so where it's blood red that's where the mercury pollution is most intense we will share our findings with lindsay she's an ex cia analyst that's our team everything we've been saying it's for this now let's do some science.

hey guys welcome to techno i'm photo was joined by lindsay moran and marie to davison this upcoming episode is an important one to me takes place in true have done a lot of my research and it is a tale of contrasts we will see rain forest full of new species and then we will see the devastation that humans have done to extract gold and as we know with devastating stories like this where there's a lot of damage science can play are all here not just in monitoring and discovering what's going on but in trying to help process i think this is a story having looked at some of the images that one image of the devastation pretty much says it all absolutely this is an important story it's one that's very near and dear to my heart and it starts in the proving rain forest. and. amazon rain forest for more than fifty million years it's been

a cradle of life. this is what pristine rain forest looks like. rush. untamed. bursting with wildlife but maybe not for long because the soil underneath is laced with gold and the human desire for it can turn all of this. into a toxic waste land like this. this is love pomponne in the buffer zone of the pot to national reserve it's part of more than one hundred thousand acres of rainforest improved that have been decimated by an illegal gold rush. to investigate techno travel deep into prove to a region called by the us the mother of god it's one of the most biodiverse. areas on the planet and the source of seventy percent of the illicit gold produced each

year in peru brought a flight into the area with gold mines strong look out the window at all but. then. we arrive to. the region's capital in a gold mining. is what. an estimated thirty thousand illegal miners work in modern day that the us chances are you might find some of them here to so much gold were by equipment i stopped into one of the shops to look around at a place called amazon gold and right we walk in and there's a sign this is going to order meaning i buy gold and as i exchange my money there was a little scale right in front of me still had some gold dust on it from the past exchanges but the sign was removed as soon as our camera was spotted. for two moema who

is also placed in transition while many of its roads are still dirt paths the new intrusion of highway his opened up the area to the wider world people come from all over the country to work the goal feel secure. luis fernando this directs the carnegie amazon murray creek ecosystem project he's been studying gold mining toxic legacy in the amazon since two thousand. so now miners have better access to the remote force they can get their equipment there everything's easier because of that our everything's easier it's essentially part of the perfect storm that is mother. so not only do you have a brand new highway that makes transport easier if you have record high gold prices and the preexisting condition of extreme poverty. tell me about this illegal gold mining what is a process where really on the edge between the amazon in the andes and erosion over

millions of years has worn down the rocks of the andes which are gold rich. and all that sediment has washed down the river. next stop a mining area near love pump but that can be dangerous for an outsider. the only way into this spot is on the back of a motorbike. the going is tough. and wet. and makeshift bridges don't always hold up. as we get closer to trees give way to something that's hard to grasp. impossible to put into words.

and so where we are now should be rain for the rain but the forest is missing having done so much work in the areas that have prestigious rainforest it really pains me to see it as the only way to get a handle on the devastation is to understand how illegal miners get to the gold. they start by clearing the trees so the process is one that's very very primitive. you use high pressure water hoses and blasted out. the water dissolves the soil removing anything in it that's organic you concentrate it using sluices which kind of looks like a slide where you run a slurry of the sediments over carpets which captures the tiny flecks of gold that you find in the sediments the process can turn primary rain forest into this in a matter of days. something in the bud this is

president of a small community of miners who work them on one river. nearby even she was disturbed by the level of destruction other miners had done to this land yet i fadi if enough of it they better take one if it or not but mining does more than strip of forest bare miners bring in mercury to extract those tiny flecks of gold. mercury has a very unique characteristic of binding with gold forming an amalgam for a minor it's almost like magic if there's any question as to whether or not this area was contaminated with mercury the answer is right here. the film amazon gold documented miners working with mercury at a mine deep in the rainforest people are stepping into mercury people are stepping into that mix of sediment mercury and water in stomping on it like you would

grapes. because you need all those little pieces of gold to touch the mercury to be able to capture it manu any miner john valdez works with mercury almost every day the is north korea get into that is. it going to. stick it to you for that i don't know. i don't have the money. and it's a look at it whatever it is for you that don't know yet that the. miners can also be exposed to mercury vapors that's because once they extract their malcolm they have to burn off the mercury to get to the gold so these miners are touching mercury they're breathing mercury one of the health effects so the top american way that these miners are exposed to is extremely toxic especially when you breathe it . in starts to a fact that liver kidneys the digestive system and starts to affect the central

nervous system. today the money miners aren't working because of the rain but john bubba's showed the equipment he used just two days ago to burn off a piece of gold. everything we've been saying it's for this is about three grams of gold which translates into one hundred dollars which the average worker here could make in about three days. that's a lot of money immoderately that the average farm worker makes less than two hundred dollars a month that lure of gold is changing the face of the amazon as jungle is replaced by mining camps like this magnets for crime underage prostitution and poverty. symbols of gold at any cost. in two thousand and thirteen hunting images of the toll illegal mining had taken on

the proving amazon went viral. the video was taken by the carnegie airborn observatory a high tech plane developed by gregg as nerve from the carnegie institution's department of global ecology. what is it about these mining activities that are so destructive from let's say from an environmental perspective first gold miners not only remove the forest to go down below the soil surface down into what would be called the mineral soil below the biologically active part of the soil so deep in the soil that there isn't a science to tell us that there is forest could ever recover. the devastation exposed from above was dramatic but it was also only part of the story the aircraft but south fitted with all sorts of cool technology but how did you use some of that technology to zero in on what was happening in terms of gold mining yeah one of the

key technologies on board the plane is a laser imaging system what it does is we fire laser beams out of the plane the lasers can penetrate all the way down to the forest floor and so what we end up doing is we end up imaging the forest in very high fidelity three d. most of the work that have been done on this gold mining problem was using satellites that see some of the larger mines we started finding that there was a much larger contribution from thousands of small mining operations that weren't known and suddenly we had a problem to report the rate of gold mining expansion tripled after the two thousand and eight global recession if you are on a typical amazon river before seems like it's intact all around you but this is that same river that we just were on in the boat. when we peel the forest back we reveal the ground which is shown on the right here and what we see here.