hong kong. christopher plummer the actor best known for playing captain von trapp in the sound of music has died at the age of 91 the canadian star became famous the world over after his iconic role opposite julie andrews he died peacefully at his home in the us state of connecticut christopher plummer was in more than 100 films and acted well into his later years becoming the oldest actor to win an oscar in 2012. a look at the main stories now a united libya might be a step closer with an agreement for an interim government a prime minister from the west of the country in the head of the presidency council from the east have been chosen in talks brokered by the un but it's not clear if they'll be able to overcome military divisions on the ground country's been split by 2 opposing of ministrations which emerged following the end of one look at duffy's role

a decade ago james base is at the united nations well this is obviously an important development we now have a new interim government for libya we have an ambitious timeline to elections this year to take place on the 24th of december but and there are many parts one we've been here before there was a u.n. backed government announced 5 years ago that came to absolutely nothing no unity government as you say we have the foreign fighters and foreign involvement in libya certainly a deadline has passed for all foreign forces to leave libya and they have not left the country. the u.s. house of representatives has approved a budget package which should help the president's recovery plan president biden had appealed to republicans who were holding up progress of his nearly 2 trillion dollars stimulus package it came as new figures showed there were a few a new jobs in the month of january that had been hopes key sectors like manufacturing and retail laid off workers last month because of the pandemic the

international criminal court says it has territorial jurisdiction over palestine that strengthens the prosecutor's earliest admission to the court to investigate alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied palestinian territories well that includes the gaza strip the occupied west bank and east jerusalem and russian opposition leader alexina valley's appeared in court again as his case dominated diplomatic discussions he was accused of slandering a war veteran a charge he denies meanwhile the e.u.'s foreign policy chief called for his release at a joint news conference with the russian foreign minister in moscow instead the kremlin expelled diplomats from 3 nations. over the top stories this hour counting the cost is coming up next they'll be more news from doha after that that's it for myself in the team here in london we'll see you tomorrow a by. as the global pandemic continues to spread will african nations manage to

secure qubit 19 vaccines african union leaders will also try to find a peaceful resolution to heighten regional tensions in ethiopia example and somalia the annual african union summit on al-jazeera. hello i am sam is a than this is counting the cost of al-jazeera look at the world of business and economics this week not content with watching it citizens with cameras china opens a new front tracking spending with its currency but is it also a way of reigning in the tech giants economy tanks for the house prices soared the pandemic widens the divide between generations and cause money into $1.00 of the

most unproductive parts of the economy. and fishermen in the philippines struggling with a volcanic eruption and pandemic face another threat the government plans to import thousands of tons of fish. tried and tested in the biggest open digital prison in the world china's surveillance of legal muslims inching jang has been rolled out across the country cameras artificial intelligence facial recognition of been deployed to monitor and reward citizens with social credits but china is about to take another step to exert its control over its $1400000000.00 population it's currently testing a digital currency that could replace the one this year it's also a shot across the bows of the powerful tech companies like we chat pay and alley pay you may remember fin tech company and was preparing the world's biggest stock

market listing when its founder challenge the central bank's powers president she told the flotation and jack went missing raising concerns about his well being when he made an appearance just a week or so ago via video. but hasn't been seen since ma was also dropped from a list of china's entrepreneurial leaders in state media beijing and started a 2nd trial of electronic cash with over $3000000.00 worth of e.u. on distributed among 100000 residents of the tech hub of shenzhen or that's the picture in china another country preparing to go digital is venezuela its currency has been decimated by hyper inflation making the ball of are pretty much worthless the economy was long in trouble before trump's administration hit it with crippling sanctions the u.s. measures of course made it difficult for venezuela to find buyers for its oil

president nicolas maduro says the physical currency will eventually disappear and we can't discuss digital currencies without mentioning bitcoin of course it's seen a resurgence of late smashing through the $40000.00 barrier for the 1st time last month lifting the total value of the entire crypto currency market above one trillion dollars of course it's still very volatile but there are predictions it could hit $200000.00. well joining me now from london is name as is the chief market analyst at avatar a good to have you with us so is the investment community coming around to the idea that coin is a real asset or is it way too volatile thanks for having me i think when we are referring to wall at 75 everyone can agree on one particular our fattah and that is that while it has it can be anywhere in any particular sector and in any interest here because we have seen it clear evidence of that in

a game stop stock you know obviously that there was a massive rally in the frenzy around retail investors now are we seeing bitcoin as a as a as a value asset as a valuable asset there is a clear evidence of that because institutions are starting to piling in in this particular asset and that was one of the primary reason that we've seen this massive rally and the rapid that i'm really referring to is the break of $20000.00 the previous all time high and then we've all possible proximately touching a $42000.00 mark so now we are going to machinery trace mint and that sort of through trace when it's not not when you want to really say that it is something to worry about because when you see such a massive rally a small bit which is very much fueled because of the massive volatility so this sort of retracement is really going to ease off that one little itty so if you compare bitcoins volatility now with respect to other stock market driven

tips you can clearly see that the bitcoin isn't that wall of talent all now so in the event of that massive support from institutional investors and there isn't enough what has he i still hold my view of it point is the investment is that why we're seeing countries like china introducing a digital currency or other factors at play here and in china entity using its. on the c.d.c. is a very different and image altogether that is because they're one they don't want the dollar to become more dominant force because of the over the libro coming of the dollar could become a lot more stronger so bank of china the bank of china really wanted to make sure that they have their own product and secondly they also wanted to verify and then really address the issues in relation to money laundering and some other source here to things with that so the aim for central bank over here is really not to not

to let the game go away from them so they want to be a part of this particular digital asset game are they also worried though when you say the game going away there is going away to other big tech players that are becoming simply too powerful and you're absolutely correct and i concur with you because if you look out a position of town center. in china you can see that everyone is pretty much accepting and they are very deeply integrated into the society into the system and me and now this is exactly what our people about what china wants to do if they wanted to address those issues they want to have a digital currency presence through their own violence for sure daken control now another country that wants to go digital of course is venezuela does this mean given up on the idea of the petro currency. you see patter was

a really good contact and very ambitious project where if you especially if you compare the performance and what the view was for that particular coin on the harness white paper by things one really executed according to a white paper and that has led to a massive failure otherwise if you wanted to find her way where you can just buy a pastor sanctions which are imposed fairly or unfairly by one country when they do sell the assets of the dismissal coin it is that way forward and even now in europe you are seeing because of traffic and destruction of the last 4 years what we see tat has been very volatile in terms of their international relations so now we seeing a shift of a shift which is away from the dollar and that now europeans are very much forcing their own currency the euro in order to bypass the sanctions and digital currency allows to a much larger extent for those sort of problems and why but venezuela is obviously

looking now to a digital currency after one failure under its belt with the currency the petro which you mentioned there how credible is this one how much trust do you think people are going to be looking at this digital currency of venezuela with now i think at the end of the aid all it depends is the dots ability and how many users you have our way you can really utilize a currency and that is that the u.s. failure so far with respect to patra i.b.m. going back to big question the reason that we've seen the massive run it was primarily because pitfall and bigger institutions and the utility providers have started to hear. the facility where they can use their currency and that's what exactly what we want to do so if a man's mother wants to go that route and it wants to provide more infrastructure where patrick out of use and certainly there is an enormous money to it they also need to back it up with oil as it says in the you know white paper and i'm glad you mentioned a moment ago the issue of sanctions does introducing

a digital currency allow you to bypass sanctions i mean how useful is it. i mean it is certainly can address enormous amount of challenges yes because back when when we moved away from the concept of holding gold and going to dollar remember the dollar weakness was very much happening because your peons under the i shall say also presidency they were very much going after gold and that was very that was eradicating the presence of the dollar on the global platform and now we are facing a situation especially as a mention because of tran and everyone is very much on the edge there want to find a solution because up again fair or unfair sentient and digital currency it does why those solutions because you are sort of a bypassing dollar who are all of the dollar denominated in the banking system and

then you are using your own channels to lend the supply chain wire and then report that with the top guns of the coins interesting now given everything you've said we've got to ask look if the investment community a coming on board if even some governments are coming on board what does this mean for central banks are we going to see them starting to accept and allow the digital currencies they've been opposed to. and now our look how thing that there's a huge divide but the simple answer to that is central banks will never allow that and it is only a matter of time before they will start tightening the screws can they do the how to tighten the screws screws over all i mean clearly you know the track record shows now because it is a decentralized world this is something which is controlled by a retail of our i wouldn't say necessarily who's that by and by the by the community who are ready to support that so by governments can always find

a way to control such a phenomenon and i think central banks will not allow that and that pretty much is the stance from a from a government perspective as well but deval be a use of these currencies these digital assets as long as we see platforms like people animate many of that still integrating and then letting people use their digital assets to pay for the assets that they want to about of a struggle will go on thanks so much name for your thoughts on this thank you. south africa's tourism sector has been hit hard by the cove of 19 lock down it's a vital industry for the economy particularly in cape town businesses across the city and now struggling just to stay open robert adams has been finding out more.

the term has always been a dream destination for travelers around the world the blue flag beaches table mountain which is one of the 7 wonders of nature the list of must see interactions is endless. december and january a peak periods with tourism in the cape but visitor numbers are down by as much as 90 percent strict lockdown regulations include nighttime curfews beaches all off limits to all of a snaps posted to social media nowadays include some interesting visit the police law enforcement and the national army who put all the sure life i economy down prices have gone up and people are suffering at the moment they are having difficulty surviving lots of business is. closed down if they're not already closed down the dominion of family originally from bulgaria has been struggling to make ends meet i mean survived lockdown despite the reduced client numbers husband

daniels to a company which he started in 2007 as not it's also very hard i used to hear from 19 now i have only one i don't have income from march of last year. just before actually it's more than 20000 here just in cape town guides who start getting at the moment because it's not it's not visitors off of the all western cape but i'm a beginner flagged down i close for. their. shore on the left quadrant i move to smaller planes. higher than the bigger one than mine in long street the heartbeat of good turns into payments seem they are for sale and too late signs everywhere this barber tells me his daily tally of customers has fallen from 100 to 5. he's not the only one

complaining about the bleak economic situation as our last it is drive people to get out to the streets no one can no one can find jobs like we take 3 of us to get paid for whole day you can get maybe one customer can make maybe a 100 on an ordinary day it would be difficult to find a parking spot here a chemist by beachfront but then cut down hasn't had one of those an ordinary day in the alley a year business is on the faint step of suffering ordinarily on that side of the main doubt it would be lined with informal traders selling their way is mainly african arts and crafts but only a handful of them remain notorious even the base they close to visit some days. just maybe you can get different going to run for survival it's very difficult because of lockdown so what's the way forward how we'll get on the cover these are questions we put to the local government who look at the industry as all it's really an important sector for cape town a contributes round about one comma $2000000000.00 us dollars to the city's economy

and it creates around about $300000.00 direct and indirect jobs so for us a priority is to make sure that we stabilize the tourism landscape by making as much relief available to our to resume and hospitality industry and that could be for example the reclassification of your property if you've got a tourism business property back to a presidential category and that could really reduce rights bills we've also implemented these other missions for people renting land or building from the municipality so that we can just you know give people that financial relief at this point in time while many of cut their losses and closed up shop people like daniel amy dillon jack and the estimated 75000 of his was jobs like the risk in the base to have no choice but to live out the storm. robin adams al jazeera. well there's little doubt that many developed economies are experiencing

what economists refer to as a case shapes recovery that's where better paid workers are doing well and low paid workers mostly women and minorities are losing out and this is reflected in the housing market the housing market like the stock markets of been pretty much unaffected by the pandemic induced recession as many employees work from home the possibility of it becoming a long term trend has seen many move out of cities to more remote locations that pushing up prices home buyers poured into the south fork area of long island known as the hamptons that's pushing up median prices to a record 1400000 dollars the average house prices in london rose above $685000.00 for the 1st time piling the misery on the young who can't afford those mortgage deposits that success abated the generational divide between the old and

young for rental prices of headed in the opposite direction as many rent is of moved out due to the pandemic in bragg's it now according to the office for national statistics almost 900000 new k. residents left the country but our property boom is good for the economy we're not just talking about the destructive financial crises that come with booms and busts but more money being spent on ever more expensive property takes money out of the economy especially from productive areas like manufacturing and research and development. joining me from oxford in the u.k. is andrew barber andrew is a professor at the same business school which is part of the university of oxford his latest book is called real estate investment and finance strategies structures and decisions good to have you with us so just like the stock market it now seems property prices are rising detached from reality are they well there's a bit of evidence that that something curious has been going on not just in the

face of the college and didn't it but also since 2007 when. the cost of easing program seems to have found its way into the house prices so it looks like governments of boring molly the money is being given to people in varying a belt in furlough schemes for example the money is accumulating in bank accounts because people aren't spending like they used to because they're not going out and that money is finding its way into stock shares and into her into real estate prices interesting but it's also opening up the generational gap or so the accusation goes been baby boomers and millennial. you know this is a real problem i mean we do have a clear clear clearly there's an impact on those that have and those that are not you know those that out of benefiting from help from rising house prices those that have not are seeing house prices getting more and more affordable so it seems that the inevitable result is that we'll end up with more and more renting more and more

rich more poor which is not a great thing to the world a wealth tax one of the suggestions to fix this do you think it's the solution. i think all sorts of taxes are probably the solution i don't think a wealth tax is particularly easy to apply but i can see inheritance taxes capital gains taxes income taxes and even property taxes you know it seems to me perfectly reasonable that people should pay a tax based on the value of their homes which i suppose is the same as a wealth tax but a specific property tax would be would be quite efficient and there's also the the growing concern that the rising price of houses is taking money away from other vital parts of the economy like research and development to manufacturing how do you see that issue i'm not sure there's much evidence for that frankly. there are positive impacts of rising house prices mean the it's is is pretty well proven

economically that rising house prices give people more confidence it gives people the ability to borrow more than they would otherwise have done so rising house prices generally increases consumption so spending and it also increases the opportunities for people to borrow and therefore to invest in business so i think that's a difficult one i think there is some evidence that rising gas prices are pretty good for the economy subject to this inequality issue that we've got and we often see the headlines about people moving out of cities is there a demographic pattern to that in other words are we seeing more the white middle class moving out of the cities and it's minorities who are left to do or have the jobs that require them to be physically present in the cities who are staying put. i think this is this is fascinating. i'm not a great believer in this max mass exodus from the city if you look at modern for example of them as out waves of immigrants going back to the 16th century you know

the 1st of all a wave with jewish immigrants then a wave of hugo knows from france then bangladeshis indians people who've been moving into london and they generally go into the inner city live in overcrowded housing because it's close to their place of work where they can get employment and there's been a constant wave that when these people if they succeed in becoming wealthy or are more comfortable they move out and it's nothing new about the idea that middle class middle aged people with families move out of the city into the suburbs and only thing in your belt and they're being replaced all the time by young people who are desperate to be in the city and increasingly by older people also a lot i don't have the headlines and the stats got it wrong now the facts the facts are there people are moving out but they're also moving in as well you know we've got massive migration coming into cities it is a tremendous demographic bulge of people going into the sub whenever i guess the question what is the overall picture at the end of the day we've got more people

moving in or out well in the short term moving out in the long term moving it. interesting if people are leaving the city someone is buying the homes why as you've been saying we've got waves of immigration coming in why is that not being reported in covered as much then. and stated so this idea that we're all in the city all of this nonsense or i guess time will tell thanks so much for your thoughts on that thanks for having me fishermen in the philippines are angry over government plans to import thousands of tons of fish many lost their jobs when the volcano erupted last year and the coronavirus pandemic added to their problems they say their recovery efforts are being threatened general allen duggan reports from ban tigers province northern philippines thank you xing has long been even main source of income for many

families in towns surrounding the talbot keno on the island of luzon at least 50 kilometers south of the capital manila but most of the fish tents were destroyed by falling ash when the volcano erupted in january thousands of fishermen lost their jobs including says circling neeson was spent most of his life working in fish pens owned by is called. the lockdown imposed by the philippine government to prevent the spread of coronaviruses means recovery has been much slower than it might otherwise have been but fishermen say the situation is getting better and that's why the government's plans to import fish is upsetting many here. are getting more fish know and they're earning again we don't need more imports what we need is government support fisherman here tell us they're still struggling financially but months after that our volcano eruption they say their harvest are now back to

normal industry are again ization scarlet and are to. officials shortage and say there are enough local stocks even joining to 3 months closed a fishing season it's estimated more than $30000.00 metric tons will be imported and there are fears that prices of local fish may drop significantly but the government says those who earn a living from fishing shouldn't worry. said we're going day shore and. that the unborn i mean we will give those that increase the will of the. country species. that are in danger will be no need for importation what we're doing right now to take care of our pollution award because a lot of the sheeple work but more important now that. all the fish that we need fishing has long been seen as the solution to the country's problems the

government says it wants filipino fisherman to be able to compete fairly with those from other countries but those who work you see the government dissolve and we sorted imports in the past and these remain our stop gap. and that's our show for this week there's more for you online about 0 dot com slash c.d.c. that'll take you straight to our page which has individual reports links and entire episodes for you to catch up on that's it for this edition of counting the cost i'm sammy's a than from the whole team here thanks for joining us the news amount to see it on its merits. as information on governments responses to covert 19 across the world emerges so too as a deeply disturbing question. people in power investigates allegations of systemic

discrimination against the pandemics disabled victims and asks has there been a shameful failure to protect some of the world's most vulnerable citizens. coverts disabled victims talk one on and just 0. the health of humanity is at stake a global pandemic requires a global response. w.h.o. is the guardian of global health delivering lifesaving to school supplies and training to help the world's most found mobile people uniting across borders to speed up the development of test treatments and of that. working with scientists and health workers to learn all we can about the virus keeping you up to date with what's happening on the ground in the ward and in the land advocating for everyone to have access to essential health services now more than ever the world needs

w.h.o. making a healthy a world. for everyone. a way forward for libya after nearly a decade of conflict an interim government is chosen ahead of the next and later this year. daryn jordan this is out of their own lives and also coming up a landmark ruling from the i.c.c. which could pave the way for investigations into war crimes in the occupied palestinian territories. really for the last president joe biden gets the go ahead from congress to push forward with his one point.