who the media say the attack in the early hours of weapons day targeted hangars containing warplanes were going to still not acknowledge weapons days attack but did issue a statement after an incident on tuesday saying a civilian side to the airport was targeted. the u.s. says it seen indications the syrian government may have renewed its use of chemical weapons and state department say chlorine may have been used in an attack on sunday in the northwest of the country the u.s. government is warning the regime of bashar al assad that it will respond quickly and appropriately if it finds evidence of a chemical attack. the united nations says most of the people who fled venezuela are in need of refugee protection and it's urging governments not to deport them 3000000 people of the country in all since 2015. those are your headlines the news continues here on al-jazeera after the listening post i'll have a summary in about 25 minutes by. millions of dollars of being stolen in

a scam that starts in the philippines in stretches across the globe one i want to exclusive access to this cutthroat underworld through a criminal turned whistleblower on al-jazeera. are just released by the way it's probably why you. are coming. from. around the world. i'm. below i'm richard burton you're at the listening post here are some of the stories we're covering this week dateline everywhere are the news media finally giving the climate change story the coverage it deserves when television goes too far a guest on a british program takes his own life the show is now off the air for good china goes to the movies in a patriotic way and blockbusters are where the action. and algeria online.

where the revolution continues it's one of those news stories maybe the only one that seems almost too big to cover climate change and the scientific consensus that the planet is almost at the point of no return the evidence is overwhelming the latest came just last week in that un report warning that roughly 1000000 plant and animal species now face extinction news outlets could cover climate change stories every day and still sell this story short but they struggled to find the right way to cover the relentless onslaught of data that is newsworthy still there are signs that things are changing corporate media which have fed off natural disasters covered floods and famines while shying away from the larger causal issues are now beginning to examine and link the global economic system to an issue that has brought us to the brink movements like the extinction rebellion and terms like the

green new deal are trending and for far longer than the standard 24 hour news cycle are these changes in coverage real will they last our starting point this week is the planet earth. here i've got an experiment for you safety glasses satire is that it's most effective when it contains an element of truth in this case and inconvenient truth what i'm saying is the planet is on fire and american television personality scientist bill nye uses showmanship props and profanity to make his case on climate change and a topic that when covered conventionally can struggle to attract clicks quickly gets 4000000 of them safety glasses off. the night it is absolutely fantastic on one level it was comedy but on the other hand it was perhaps the searingly. concise in terms of the situation that we face the planet is on

the scale unimagined 20 years ago metaphorically in every conceivable sense we are destroying the oceans the soil the other species the whole of life which supports our lives is exponentially destroyed climate science is very difficult to talk about. and you know you talk of the 6 generation of climate science models coming up now with method data and so on and so on but i think this particular mean globe and. the act of basically putting it on fire. and and basically saying we. captured all of that in a very nice to see. you know the climate crisis is a complex story to cover but there's been a shift since the data has now grown so compelling you don't have to be a scientist to understand there was the un study from earlier this month warning

that up to a 1000000 species flora and fauna could soon be extinct a 2nd u.n. body warned governments late last year they had 12 years to limit temperature rises to avoid a climate catastrophe. when the state of our planet both studies drew significant coverage as did a recent wave of climate activists hundreds of climate change activists marched want to. act now there were the school strikes in march the brainchild of a 16 year old swede grettir. who became the face of the strikes and the focal point for the news media. joins me now from stockholm. young lady thank you very much for joining us this strikes went global with more than a 1000000 students involved. and then there was the extinction rebellion. street

movement born in london that was tired of playing by the rules and being ignored by the media last month it disrupted traffic for days all kinds of news cameras showed up but rather than focus on the cause of the protests many of them could not resist while being on the affects the seemingly mostly middle class eco activist temper tantrum known as extinction rebellion came to london and shocked much of the city it's absolute madness and that's a bunch of protests as brings london a huge capital city to a standstill still mirror protests took place in $27.00 other countries and for a while climate change news was everywhere but it was interesting to watch the framing of a sanction rebellion. in the u.k. a lot of the response was you know these are just privileged protests. going out into the streets don't they have jobs to do you know a lot of incompetent middle class self-indulgent people who want to tell us

how to live our lives which i don't think is the most honest or you know good thing from the part of the media and i won't stand for anything else so we get a lot of folks who are coming into the streets are doing so because they recognise that climate change and you know extinction crises pose a massive disruption to life as we know it or extinction of valiant has done alongside always think retta to my going to school strikes i think it has changed the narrative around climate change even in the mainstream you hear a lot of people now talking about the climate and i don't see the climate crisis but certainly i think the narrative has moved on since extension of value still has now faded off the agenda again to a significant extent the challenge now for extinction a 1000000000 in the next phase i mean they've had a quite effectively destroyed i think the challenge going forward is that we're all going to get tired of you know good natured food he might post is about climate change and about diversity loss but that isn't going to. remain on the screens

forever so what happens next. if it was up to climate activists the answer would be new emission laws around the world no country produces more carbon per capita than the united states and the climate change debate there is now centered on what's called the green new deal proposed by progressive democrats in congress the green new deal aims to achieve net 0 greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2030 it's ambitious and with cost estimates in the range of 10 trillion dollars expensive that's partly because it proposes sweeping structural changes to the american economy that go well beyond the energy sector the green new deal has generated extensive coverage much of it serious and thoughtful but when the debate makes it onto fox the most widely watched news channel in the country the focus is less about science and economics and more about competing political ideologies we have

to be brutally honest and say that these ideas are really dangerous yeah what you get from the most of the media the right wing the foxes and all the rest of it an impression that is just totally on their list economic feasible green new deal will save the planet in exchange we just give up cars and airplanes and rebuild every structure in the united states and the problem in the media is that they're complicit with the way politicians frame any change as a change that is going to happen to the average taxpayer when it comes to climate change for this is not about the average person you know getting hit in the pocket it's about those that have the most just once ability and the most you know luxury and space to be able to make the changes without affecting you know is too much it's really about turning the lens back on them and the problem is the fact that we live in an economic system which is very deeply to say no and that we sort of premise our notions of economic success indefinite girth. and growing the economy

exponentially the call of an economy has to grow its g.d.p. is basically a place that every year that still presents a tremendous stress on the earth's ecosystems and that i think is a conversation that is very hard to have a mainstream media but that absolutely needs to be a central part of the conversation why not call into question sort of our fixation on economic growth as the only metric of well being which it's not a terribly good thing is a globalized media model it's very financial life it's about media ratings it's about what sells it's highly sensationalized but you also beginning to see more concerted effort to mainstream climate focus is the issue of funding and resourcing etc but at least in that context that shift is happening. the climate change story is also being told on platforms in ways it hasn't been told before greenpeace has never been shy about getting its environmental message last year it added an

investigative unit to examine the measurable effects of climate change and to dig into the corporate p.r. side of the story journalistically documenting the money fossil fuel companies spend to lobby governments. and netflix which makes most of its money through fictional content films and t.v. series recently added a climate change series fronted by david attenborough. it was best known for making picture rich wildlife documentaries by britain's b.b.c. 6 months ago he was criticised in the guardian for missing the bigger picture as one of the british papers columnist put it. and his team were telling a false story creating a fairy tale world that persuades us all is well in the midst of an existential crisis and that i think a lot of having been publicly called out in the media event and i think in that.

it's this incredibly powerful serious got our planet to face very significantly from his previous wife for the 1st time in human history the stupidity of nature. placing the wonders of nature the numbers are so. i think that combination is obscene if i could. were discussing other media stories that are on our radar this week with one of our producers joanna whose job the former u.s. army intelligence analyst and wiki leaks whistleblower chelsea manning is back in jail just 7 days after being released what are the details here well richard manning was sent back to prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury over her contact with wiki leaks and its founder julian assange back in 2010 now the judge seems to be tightening the screws not only is manning back in jail after having already served $62.00 days for similar charges earlier this year

if she continues to refuse to give evidence she will be fined $500.00 us dollars a day after the 1st 30 days rising to a 1000 a day after 60 days now these grand jury investigations are completely closed to the public and that includes the media but what we do know is that this is an investigation into wiki leaks and it's in the lead up to what prosecutors hope will be a criminal trial of a son to has been charged with conspiring with manning to break into pentagon computers to get access to a trove of secret military documents and state department cables manning says she refuses to answer questions i will not cooperate with this or any other grand jury that's because she has already given her testimony during her trial in 2013 after which she was convicted and jailed for 7 years before her sentence was commuted in 2017 by president barack obama ok turning to the u.k. now where a suicide has led to the cancellation of a long running tell of. program the jeremy kyle show as well as some uncomfortable

questions on the ethics that lie behind certain television formats 1st of all what kind of program are we talking about here well richard it was very much a tabloid t.v. program modeled on the jerry springer show in the us it featured members of the public fighting very personal battles in front of a live audience facing confrontational questions from the host often to solve or perhaps exploit these family disputes for 14 years on i.t.v. in the u.k. but the channel pulled the plug following the death of steve diamond a participant who reportedly took his own life a week after a studio taping diamond was asked to take a lie detector test to convince his fiance that he had not been unfaithful he failed the test but this story has raised questions about the impact these kind of programs can have on the mental state of their participants ok thanks joe. to china now a country that's been flexing its media muscle and not just in the news realm for

all of the attention that hollywood and bollywood attract the past 2 years have produced the 3 highest grossing movies in china's cinematic history will for a year to operation red sea and the wandering earth have different settings and themes but they're all action films and look beyond the good true of this violence implausible plot lines and special effects and you'll detect some jingoistic themes that are very much in line with president siege in ping's brand of national assertiveness throw in some government backing either tacit or financial and these films take on a very different feel cinema has always played a central role in the media strategy of the communist party are we simply seeing more sell you lloyd based propaganda revamped for the 21st century or just a market based response to the demands of chinese movie going audience listening posts i mean actually ravi now on the new blockbusters of chinese cinema.

thank you. there are blockbuster action films made in china with the chinese cuts but almost none of them are actually set in china 140 or 2 was released in july 2017 in an unnamed african country workers in a chinese factory are taken hostage by mercenaries from europe. when they don't know what you do join. right good member of the un security guard the action hero is actor and director who plays an ex-military man my problem is people like me get used to. $875000000.00 in box office only means $140.00 or 2 is not just the highest grossing film ever made or distributed in china it's the highest grossing non english language film of all time. to make the question read see which came out in february 2018 and is based in

a fictional country modeled on venom called the aware. and the wandering earth released in february this year takes chinese cinema even further afield it's a science fiction film set in space together these are the 3 most commercially successful chinese films ever released and they all tell stories of china's growing international power at the end of a while for it to there's a chinese passport scoring slogan wherever you are in the word as a government as a country is always behind you that convert a very strong nationalist message to the audience and something probably avoidable being a master a film released in china these are different from previous propaganda nationalist movies which came out of a state sector they have budgets for. large enough to accommodate top actors good

locations and quality special effects in other words these are chinese movies being made on the hollywood scale about subjects that might have been in the past considered as states made propagandist subjects. chinese cinema has come a long way since its days as a new message in the vehicle for the communist party films of the fifty's and sixty's such as the white haired girl the battle chung mountain. and the red detachment of women who are only spreading a unifying message a communist vision to knit a vast divided country together which i give you my. by the 1990 s. beijing had shifted from communism to a more market driven system chinese cinema found a new impetus the possibility of commercial success led by the example of movie

makers in hong kong filmmakers on the mainland started experimenting with new john ritter's action movies t.v. dramas chick flicks rum commerce even satire. the producer it was clear to mainland chinese producers just how much potential their domestic market had was having come of age watching hong kong cinema in the eighty's and ninety's they began to invite filmmakers from there to come over for industry or for the model for china it was diverse it had stars and it played with different genres and what's interesting about some of these films is precisely because of the popularity of the people involved they can push the.