unique identity. people and shop owners here hope that with the recent political settlement in libya stability can be achieved and with that more attention given by libya's authorities to its historic sites malik traina al-jazeera tripoli. and how fast they are these are the headlines nigerian security sources say dozens of students kidnapped from a secondary school last week are being released an official says they're on their way to mina in central nigeria more from i did just now he's in a picture they release followed tense negotiations between the government of niger state and the government of course and triggered forces regarding the safety of the students they spent a month at least 9 or 10 days in captivity and at some point

a lot of people gave up that anything good will come out of this negotiation although the government is not saying where they paid rent some initially said it's not going to pay ransom for the release of the students but he also understood that i understand that the bandits also demanded the release of at least 6 of their members held in police custody the other headlines u.s. president joe biden says there will be significant changes to the relationship with saudi arabia this is after the release of a declassified intelligence report accusing the saudi crown prince mohammed bin solomon of approving a plan to capture or kill journalist jamal khashoggi police in maine maher used tear gas and stun grenades as they try to prevent protesters from gathering the country's u.n. ambassador has appealed to the body to use all means necessary to oppose the military coup. joe biden's $1.00 trillion dollar coronavirus aid package is passed in the house of representatives it will have to go through the senate before coming into force it includes direct payments of $1400.00 to most americans but will not

include an increase in the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour the u.s. is a step closer to a 3rd vaccine meanwhile after experts recommended the approval of the johnson and johnson jab the u.s. food and drug administration has been holding a virtual public meeting to decide whether to sign off on the one dose vaccine for emergency use use even the biggest city or can is going into lockdown for 7 days starting sunday being imposed after a new coronavirus case was discovered. iraqi foreign minister for his sayings arrived in tehran on his 2nd trip this month he will meet the iranian counterpart is java zarif a day after u.s. airstrikes hit iranian backed militias in eastern syria near iraq's border as you headlines and the cost is next what should americans be thinking and doing right now it should be a bad idea they don't care about their work is all they care about is making money by it's not going to be left out of the calling for the bloated defense budget to

be high the bottom line on u.s. politics and policies america act on the world 0. back to grow this is counting the cost on al-jazeera look at the world of business and economics this week one of the world's biggest exporters of emissions is preparing to mine the seabed for walmart cereals no way means sell the image of green but it's got very rich off exploiting the worst economic tsunami been 300 years the biggest budget deficit since world war 2 its biggest tax generated diminished by breck's it how lonely you case finance minister where the books and export of cherries to china hit by social media rumors we talked to the vice minister of trade. thank you for joining us no way became

the 1st country in the world where the sale of electric cars over took those powered by combustion engines a remarkable achievement for a country that in another world 1st plants and the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025 but like most headlines is a huge contradiction in no ways comment change credentials while the country is western europe's biggest exporter of oil and gas and has managed to save one trillion dollars and its sovereign wealth. from exports last month there auction off $61.00 offshore production licenses yes it plans to drill for more oil and gas that includes some 125 licenses to drill in the arctic barren see a relatively unspoiled corner of the planet while it continues to reduce emissions at home it's x. 14 emissions over seas mostly to china in facts noways the 7th biggest exporter of emissions after cotta the top 3 being russia saudi arabia and australia not

satisfied with exploiting national resources of its coast the demand for green technology could see no way start seabed mining it could license companies as early as 2023 to start mining for copper zinc cobalt gold and silver metals that are needed for wind turbines solar farms and electric vehicle batteries off the coast the norwegian university of science and technology says they could be up to 21700000 tonnes of copper more than the world's copper output in 2019 deep sea mining could generate up to $20000000000.00 in annual revenue for no way towards 2050 combat to around $61000000000.00 from oil and gas in 29000 and create about 20000 jobs consultancy by stat energy has estimated but it's not the only country that plans to mine the sea beds for minerals trying to and japan have similar plans joining us now via skype from bergen in norway is peter hogan he's the program

director at the institute of marine research and professor at the geophysical institute of the university of beg and very good to have you with us peter thank you for your time so why is there a rush to mind seabeds. maybe several reasons it's been coming back the last couple of years but actually 3040 years ago there was also were people realize that there were minerals on the sea but i think no there may be so reasons there is. electrification of the economy batteries and the various suppliers but industry association in general i learned i would also that some of the suppliers from from learn based mineral exploration there is some geopolitical aspects not all minerals are available on every market and people then look for other places to find these minerals yet as speaking of these other places many advocates of seabed mining say china has a monopoly on rare earth minerals so we must all find other reserves you agree with

that well i understand their concern that when resource is located only one place and you need it for a long term whether it's china or somewhere else that doesn't really matter you'd like to have more and more supplies and more eternity of so it's an understandable reason i believe there are of course a lot of concerns when it comes to seabed mining t.v. natural as david asmer award this year that deep sea mining risk creating quote terrible impacts that cannot be reversed what are your thoughts on that how bad is your damage me on the environment yes it could be bad and i think the jury is still out remember the deep sea bird is the least known and well meant on earth and we don't understand how it works we don't even know what organisms are there how the eco systems are put together. you can save some and some some of them the advocates would would say that now we have

a scientific study that says that if we do it this way it will not disturb very big area on the other hand i think we know so little about the deep sea environment that we need to know a lot more before you can approve activity so on with mining and speaking about right now off the coast of namibia for example the government of namibia and of beers the diamond company are scooping up the sea bed to find diamonds which you know hardly is hardly essential many people would say and scientists believe that this could. take up to a decade to restore the seabed there you know that's a that's a special case i know that case and. you know it shows that i mean not only the interests that are expressed or not also applies i think to some extent to the to the green transition and the need for minerals for electric vehicle batteries and so on and there may be other all the reasons why people are mine or want to mine and i think also in some places the oil and gas industry is looking for other

things to do to use their technology and their base and would like to see new markets like activity for deep sea mining to watch so so we should always be critical to the to the rationale for these various actors in that in this case various actors including the united nations which is quite surprising the u.n. issuing licenses for seabed mining in international waters which you know a lot of people find surprising and they're collecting the royalties to pay for u.n. work away not all compromised by commercialization i think yeah i mean that with the u.n. has it international sea better authority which was created as a follow up of the convention on the law of the sea almost 40 years ago and that came about because of the interest and the awareness of the world minerals on the seabed and people were putting this mechanism in place maybe not with the same environmental consciousness that we have today and the awareness of the of the complexities of the deep sea eco system so so that is an issue. that we have to

deal with here i have to ask from a norwegian perspective norway has done well from oil and gas but the rhetoric of advocating climate change policy sits on easy when it's one of the top 10 exporters of emissions here this this is a complicated issue and it's a political area which has many aspects to it. and the you can also talk about the . who is to blame for the 02 emissions is it the producer or is it the user of these products. and that's a political question what is the best way to solve it by putting you know putting the responsibility on the producer or the you so. but of course for norway the oil and gas has been a very very important in come to the country alone is politically difficult to turn down but particularly peter hogan thank you very much for talking to us about the

sink you for your time thank you. now that break said it's done its biggest tax revenue generator the city of london has lost its status as europe's biggest share trading capital to amsterdam a shocking transfer of wealth as the finances of the country rapidly deteriorate and march 3rd finance minister receives so not an advocate of bracks it will need to find money to pay for the pandemic when he delivers his budget a $2.00 trillion dollar economy some to its worst economic performance in 300 years the country is on course to report a budget deficit of $400000000000.00 pounds britain spain a $1.00 trillion dollars in tax a year but the big question is what taxes to increase to pay off the deficit after a decade of austerity are the people of u.k. ready and willing to pay and according to the resolution foundation $2600000.00 people expected lose their jobs this year as about 8 percent of the working

population. so what will the finance minister do joining me now from london via skype is not a fan blade the ad is an economist and chief executive at the new economics foundation very good to have you with us mater on counting the cost so should rising debt be a consent ensure no it shouldn't be a concern and it should be concerned for 2 reasons the 1st thing is that the key issue is not really the size of the debt it's the how sustainable that debt is and you ability to pay it down and we have this strange thing where the debt burden in this country looks big but actually the cost of financing that there is because of 0 to 60 negative interest rates is a historic kolo so actually if ever there was a time to borrow this is the time to borrow and the key thing is that 2 thirds of the long term cost of that debt is not into these really low interest rates the other reason why we shouldn't worry about it is because we've had

a big change in policy from the bank of england and what we're seeing is that the bank of england is essentially underwriting government debt by borrowing bottoms so you know the barrington is essentially purchased about half of government bottoms and so those 2 reasons means that actually the dynamics around debt to completely change and so this is absolutely trouble policymakers to be in that for a nation that simples austerity unnecessarily sometimes what is the fascination with containing debt that is a very good question i mean look it's born out of a long orthodoxy and i did a good the rational argument is if our debt becomes too big if that's unsustainable if the money markets think that we're not a safe bet because we can't pay back that debt and credit agencies decide to downgrade us that's bad for us economically that's bad for us i'm actually and it happens our capacity to borrow in the long term the but the truth is that i think

his argument has always been. the state because underlying them is a more or stronger ideological drive that essentially is trying to constrain public spending because it's trying to constrain the scope of the space in the size of the state so i think when people have used debt as an argument for constraining the contraction of the public sector it's often been driven and underpinned by the political and ideological piece rather than the economic piece and speaking of the political you have joe biden the u.s. president the i.m.f. the u.s. federal reserve all saying that now is a time to spend to spend money do you think the u.k. is willing conservative party is listening that's a very good question i mean they are in so far as they have spent so you know our our our our deficit has gone up in the region of 400000000000 so they have been spent i think the piece that they maybe not listening to was the fact that you know what all of those organizations us and indeed organizations here is don't stop

spending the economy is still really precarious as we come out of the pandemic as we start easing it businesses are in these people are struggling do not stop supporting and invest in the economy and this is where i think the government hasn't quite grasped this not least because if we look back at the all term budget statement that the chance he gave what he did it was choose to cut day to day spending by about 10 to 12000000000 every year so the drive to cut the drive to go back to consolidation is pretty strong and it's whether those of us there are going that the long term cost of that far far greater the little short term impact of increasing the deficit we're not interesting you say people are struggling and that's a reality where expecting what 2600000 people to lose their jobs how can the chancellor help me there are 3 things that he's going to do the 1st is protect jobs so you

know if the government. did well to introduce the furnace they would have done better if they just introduced it for one or 2 year period rather that's a good thing that they've done but the philistines been a massive lifeline and has saved many jobs that would have been lost and so as we now look at easing out of looked and it's really important that the chancellor keep the furnace place for a period of time so i would say for a year but critically gradually move this team into a part work part subsidize nonworking scheme and what that would do is allow businesses to keep people on board and the states the government to subsidize the time that people are working and in that time of the not working off or training so that you can get people sectors that might have to reduce the number of people employed like hospitality like the aviation industry you can train those people up and then try and get them into other jobs the 2nd is it's going to create jobs this is the time for the stimulus we're arguing they need

a big green fiscal 16 years 23000000000 would i'm not 400000 jobs if they were to invest another 20000000000 in public services and social sector 700000 jobs and then finally they're going to support people it's really really hard for so many people out there and our social security system is completely inadequate they need to be thinking about how the bills that up you talked about of course the u.k. is slowly easing out of coronavirus restrictions are the lockdown what do you think is going to have the biggest impact on the economy will it be the pandemic or bracks it. that's a very good question i mean i think in the end in the short term it is without a doubt the pandemic i mean you know the economy shrank by 11 percent because the government essentially had to freeze economy that is unprecedented you know the scale of the impact you know the worst contraction i will contraction for 300 years so in the near term the condiment is all consuming and it's definitely

a big driver of any economic worries that we have i think as we move into the medium term where we like the so short term shock of the pandemic is there will be impact and we know there's going to be a break the impact of all that would actually suggest for a longer 202530 years and i think that's where it gets a player so it's definitely if you look at the numbers the u.k. is no worse than other countries and in part to do with the still pretty dynamic but that's been kind of marked by the bigger coated shock but as we sort of mill out and we thought the economy regains its rebounds the impacts of brands that were locked out so a long road to recovery thank you very much me at ever speaking to us me at a fund from the new economic sound ation on counting the cost thank you for your time thank you for having me now exports cherries from chile to china have taken a hit and it appears to be all because of a rumor unsubstantiated reports began circulating on chinese social media that

traces of coal that 19 were found in some boxes a latin america at its embassy in yemen has a story from santiago. all year long producers wait for this moment when their cherries go to the final stage of selection. and packing before being shipped off to china for the chinese this color red britain's good fortune so the import carries millie from chile to celebrate the chinese new year. but when an unsubstantiated story went viral on chinese social networks it brought misfortune to chile's multi-billion dollar cherry industry if the money from us are not the same this was the result of non-official information in china a rumor that's provoked a steep drop in demand that our government is working round the clock with the private sector to see what we can do. when claims began circulating that some

important cherries had been found to be tainted with coded 19 overnight exports plummeted from 500 to 0 containers a day australian cherry producers have also been impacted but not nearly as much as in chile which exports much larger quantities noice all know what we've never been formally accused of anything by chinese symmetry or customs with already stressed a story in the media that was never attracted by the ones who suffer most of the small and medium sized produces who've invested everything they have and we've had to be singing beijing on a good year. the president of the exporters association says exports are picking up but that the cherries are being sold at a loss and time is running out it's summertime in the southern hemisphere truck lease carries the click of a lead valuable because they are happy and ships have a specific time for the chinese market but others like these great these cherries

will spoil it in just a matter of weeks. chile has launched an intense counter offensive in china using influencers and scientists on social networks to try to convince consumers that their cherries are safe to eat all this is more than just bad luck it underscores just how vulnerable food exporters are to a negative tweet or story substantiated or not. asean human eye latin america editor in santiago there let's get more now on those cherry exports where the road rager yang as well as chile is vital minister of trade and he joins us via zome here in doha thank you very much mr young us for being with us so terry's a 1600000000 dollar export industry for chile let me ask ask you 1st if you were surprised that the chinese government did very little to face down these almost why do you think that is well actually the governments at the local level made

statements to clarify the situation and the public officials from the health sector in china gave interviews explaining to the people there that consumption of cherries and fruit were generally and food was safe so we have been in contact permanently with the chinese authorities we've got their support in terms of disseminating the proper information the proper news they issue is that this is a huge market and this year we're expecting to sell over $2000000000.00 us dollars in cherry's so the report will said we were working round the clock to change the wave against these the fake news around consumption and i think we have an impact in price that it's absolutely correct but we were able at the end of the day to be covered is let's talk about the relationship with china a bit more chile is a very open economy of course and there are concerns across political parties there that beijing is slowly taking huge stakes in the polygraph and their efforts to

legislate against this right now why well this is something that is said i would say a hot topic in addressing today about it but it's where do and when. any country like china is which is our top trading partner it's natural that they also start becoming more important in in its investment in france and we do not have any city . in terms of investment that distinguishes or discriminates region or admits any country and that we remain as such but there is a discussion which for us it's something that should be consuming for instance o.e.c.d. standards when thinking on doing some sort of rescreening which all countries including china if you do so that's an ongoing discussion we're not close to it but regardless of the mechanism what we want to convey to all foreign investors is that you get is and will remain an open country which will not discriminate any origin

or any country as you say china is a big trading partner they invest $1000000000.00 in the food sector alone again politicians in your country fear that china is taking advantage of the pandemic right now do you share those concerns well not really because the operations it's not that we have seen a jump or or booming of chinese investment given depending if this was started to happen before and what we see is that there are lots of opportunities to be grasped by a very different countries in china and some in legislators certainly have more concerns about it but we have faced it at the congress also trying to display the tools that they are the tools that also recognize better practices and that's the role that we want to keep and mending our let's move on and talk about the pandemic any threat is had on your economy vaccines of course are now being rolled out

around the world and chile has the most advanced rollout of vaccines anywhere in latin america tell us how much damage the pandemic has caused on the economy well the big impact we will perhaps. own we finished last year with a 6 percent decrease in our in our economy nevertheless we are among the least affected countries along with pursuit given we've been them in weeks. ect bounced back this year and out because of it should expand by 5.5 to 6 percent you know that there is a big commodity prices boom right now and half of our exports relate to mining so we expect to recover and also one of the pillars of the thick of it is our vaccination campaign which is 16 lee ambitious we hope to get 80 percent of our population you know related by june and we are doing well so far more than 3000000 people in juneau today are back snape and we expect to close march with 5 so the

government in that sense has made it the top priority at the betting you know on different platforms back scenes and again like i said in the beginning our principle is it not discriminating any potential solution so we can't face or we get astra zeneca we got so you know back from china we're talking with sputnik 5 as well and that i think that pragmatic approach i think has let us have the position that we have no terms of the rollout of the vaccination and so mr young has you're here in the middle east talking sovereign wealth funds looking into investing in infrastructure and green hydrogen which is produced from renewables what progress have you made and what do you hope to get out of this visit well we talked about trade and the whole china for instance is our top trading partner but we are saying nope and small distant country need to again look for new frontiers for trade and

that's what we're doing here at the d c c countries also given the momentum that their need germany is going through in particular the g.c.c. after the blockade. of a cutter and that and what we did in riyadh was to signed an historical 1st agreement with the d.c.c. which we hope will lead to start an f.d.a. negotiation with with the d.c.c. countries in the future and whether. also start just more trade but also more investment so that's why we are meeting with all soaring funds of g.c.c. countries in this visit because the additions that we have seen that we have seen in this country are going to bury world with the opportunities that we can offer you mentioned green hydrogen according to macand see gillette is where well positioned for that race in the future but we also talked about infrastructure we also talked about digital economy we are in by that we have invited these countries to join did their pact limited digital economy partnership agreement that we have

with singapore and you've seen and and food security which. is very important for these countries and where chile has a lot a lot to offer as a very strong food exporter country thank you for your time or degree angle is the vice minister for trade for chile thank you i'm going day and that is our show for this week get in touch with asked by tweeting me at for labatt a g.e. or drop us an e-mail counting the cost at al-jazeera dot net is our address there's more for you on line at al-jazeera dot com slash c t c that will take you straight to our page which has entire episodes for you to catch up on and that is it for this edition of counting the cost i'm fully back to vote for the whole team here in doha thank you for watching news on al-jazeera is next. a tamil journalist in search of a missing colleague stops at nothing to bring her story to the public. in sri lanka

press freedoms are under threat. and some stories can only be told by those who will not compromise on the truth. news from just one part of the viewfinder asia series on al-jazeera. when match day arrives the green army comes to life. but football is not all they shout about. a club where society's disenfranchised have the loudest voice. and political dissent takes center stage. they are on the locals resistance the ultras of roger cossack blank up the fans who make football on al-jazeera. played an important role in protecting human. face.

wore. this is al-jazeera. either given al this is the news hour live from doha coming up in the next 60 minutes we are going to hold them accountable for human rights abuses u.s. president sends a strong message to saudi arabia after an intelligence report implicates the saudi crown prince in the murder of journalist jamal khashoggi. dozens of students are freed in nigeria after big.