and facing leaders in china that their responses were very different. now the w t a and the simon are coming out with, with essentially a very strong challenge to the chinese government. and you see it also from other tennis players who tweeted about it today. so i think it is really quite remarkable . it's something that we haven't seen a whole lot of major sporting organizations at least to this extent. back to europe, croatia market 30 years since the fall of book of a town that was relentlessly sheldon besieged during the 199195 war thousands joined a march through the time walking mostly in silence. the serve, lead you this love army practically sleep. practically reduced to about to rubble and hundreds of people were killed. it became a symbol of resistance in the conflict were ruptured after croatia declared independence from the yugoslav federation. ah,

exactly how passed the out update your help stories, hundreds of iraqis who gave up trying to enter the e. you have now arrived back home that repatriation flight 1st stopping in bill the migrants and refugees have been stranded on the bellows pulled on board in cold and wet conditions. the us president joe biden is holding his 1st in person meeting with the leaders of canada and mexico. and the white house is the 1st such meeting of the 3 north american nations for 5 years with the both and said the summit was crucial to tackle the major challenges facing north americans or north american vision for the future. draws on our shared strengths as well as 3 vibrant democracy, dynamic population, and economy. wishing to work together where that we can be. we can meet today and we can meet all the challenges. we just take the time to speak on or by working together. and we have to end pandemic, and to take decisive action the curb,

the climate crisis. canadian military has joined rescue efforts in the flood, devastated province of british columbia. one person has confirmed that and at least 3 are missing. 800000 people have been forced to leave their homes in the countries western most province, flooding and land slides cut. major roads, making transportation of good difficult. several governments in europe are cracking down on people who haven't been vaccinated against cupboard 19. the virus is spreading again in a number of countries including germany where death, so also on the rise. protest is in sudan have again classed with security forces a day after at least 15 people were killed by gunfire. there is widespread anger at the military's refusal to hand back power after last month take over the acid prime minister of della hum. dock is still in custody. 2 days after the military said he would be released. those are your top stories up next. here on al jazeera, we have our program full lines. i'll have more news on this channel in 30 minutes.

i'll see you then. beyond the comfort zones were assumptions are challenged, traveled to the ends of the earth, and further experience, the unimaginable of the people who live it. witness award winning documentaries on a just the euro. everybody was standing and now everybody's day it that i grew up with their families. their parents are day. it is hot breaking because i know the live that was in these walls. you know, and now there's no live in the wall. andre west grew up in this house, in the 5th ward, historically black neighborhood, and east houston. for years residence here suspected that the number of cancer cases was unusually high, is say, this is definitely to me now,

where it used to be. we were so happy running around the yard, playing ball kickball, riding in the little red wagon. we was happy you, you've got to find you all way. you know, because everybody's got home. in december 2019, the worst fears were confirmed. the cancer cluster was discovered in their community. the state concluded that the 5th ward, the nearby neighbourhood called cashmere gardens, had higher than expected roots of certain cancers. but they didn't explain what it is meant for dante. what are you? we have been suffering. we have lost loved ones. we have lost parents. we have when i was free and we have wealth allowed. some residents here blame the cancers on decades of possible exposure to korea, so a likely human carcinogen. a nearby real yard use the chemical mixture to preserve

wood for was 75 years. i want to know, is it a neighborhood i want to know? do i come back to them? welcome back. the good thing i have name, we need to know what is they prior to when to what a thing for loan struggles to houston, texas to follow community search for answers and justice. oriel barbara was diagnosed with the suffered your cancer in may of 2018 benita check from you he said 9 chemotherapy treatments and reconstructive surgery on his esophagus. how would you describe the kind of payment

as it is for sharing? that's all i can say, and where you sit there and you hear a person say come quick. i feel like i'll, i'm gonna die. i need you here with me. that pretty big lump in your throat. and you're gonna change it to give you that power. now, along with what you have, he's lived in cashmere garden since he was a child legacy. he was police officer, so he still has that spunk in him. he just wants to be able to get back to his normal life. is hard to see him like bare he just don't look like himself and yet i just start trying to make sure i see the man that i marry the person that i know he wouldn't have been man. he had some weight on him that was before the diagnosis. last a lot of what you were thinking the same new years all along a pitcher. but he's no longer with the fall. you can see his rios, in other words,

right? you know, his dad has lung cancer, his cousin died from lung cancer. his uncle's head, throat cancer in all of them, lived right beer. always at his mom's house right there on lavender street for years residence pressured the state to look into why so many people in the community had cancer in 2019 the texas public health department found elevated rates of a soft reduced broncos larynx and lun transfers in cashmere gardens and the 5th ward, a couple of nights ago when i got in from the hospital and i started counting the houses that the people just on my block that have cancer. i have had cancer, you know, 8 people in one block. and you know, including those that have died from cancer, you know, so yeah, something is definitely wrong. how many were you in this house?

8 of us. what 9 would my mom? it was an i andre west grew up with 7 brothers and sisters on lavender street in the 5th ward in the same street were shronda and oriel iv wonderful memories. here . lot of good memories here. lot of good people in the community. lot of love and community. lot of families, you know, family. everybody was family. bunch of kids, you could have kids laugh and ron, and plan on the bicycles in the wagons. just fog. get bad out. they everybody start getting sick. this is my sister, cynthia george. the one that's the safe with the lawn cancer. this is carolyn horn, cynthia, a year part 2 years and boy, and she passed away, long cancel, also in 2015 andres, eldest sister, cynthia,

died from lung cancer at 63 years old. 2 years later, her sister carol and also passed away from lung cancer. my sister's wasn't smokers and for them to get lung cancer. there wasn't my sister, cynthia she retired from her job to find out the following year. she had like, it's hard to work it mother it give us at the my mother my sister carolyn, which was next. the next oldest to cynthia. very hard work. very loving mother and grandmother

under his family. moved to the 5th ward in 1963. her child at home is a few 100 feet from a real yard by railroad giant union pacific from 1911 until 1984 railroad ties and telephone poles were preserved as increase. soon prism is a mixture of hundreds of chemicals. many of them, toxic fumes, can irritate the skin and eyes make breathing difficult. the smell is real strong, irritated, throw burned your eyes, smell like talk. and you definitely had to go inside, but going is i didn't hip it. we eliminate poverty stricken neighborhood. you know,

we don't have ac conditions. we have the little ceiling, fans them up in the attic, that blue to cool air down into the house. me gas, mental air could hardly breathe. like i said, i had balls to come up and my body rashes at the marks from scratch. and why do you think your family has been so affected by cancer? because of the christoph, because of the chris. so yes, because of it, there's nothing else. there's nothing else if the chris so is the rail york the really hard stop treating wood with creosote in 1984. but now the ground water under more than $100.00 properties near the site is contaminated with chemicals found in korea. so this is the actual site,

but these are the 110 properties that have grown contamination underneath dr. lauren hopkins that a community survey in january 2020, to learn more about the people within the cancer cluster. of the 30 households or team surveyed 43 percent reported the cancer diagnosis. the city average 6 percent were able to turn in precisely where the chancellors in the cluster looking. we know which census tracks are elevated and the census tracks that are elevated out of the 10 are surrounding the union pacific railroad site. do you think research contamination has anything to do with this cancer cluster? i don't know what is causing the cancer's. we do know that those, those are the kinds of cancers you would expect with exposure to those chemicals on, you know, i think because of all the chemicals that he's been living around, being a little boy growing up, living around railroad tracks, the air pollutants,

the water and stuff all that had a lot to do with this cancer. how does it feel now knowing that you spend a lot of your life growing up in the area where you're more likely to get cancer? terrified, terrified because no one what i know now. and if my mother would have known, she probably wouldn't never bought a c or to live. sandra edwards grew up on lavender street next door to andre. she's part of a group called impact, which formed in 2016 to pressure the state to study the cancer rates in the community. i feel good to hear man is colla dunham high. impact is also demanding that union pacific, which owns the real yard address. the pollution in the neighborhoods in pacific you just, you're really in a band that you can come out of. i'm not going to, well, we stated lose alarm in fact that people don't lose what is then up to you. i am

ready to fight and i am going to fight you to go underground to i'm game and yeah, better hope i don't. bad. no time. union pacific made nearly $6000000000.00 in profits 2019. it's one of the biggest railroad companies in the world. the crease, old thing, they cooked any of the straight down my street across that track. straight a he was where the paper thing was, where they cookie. so we know when a ryan is out in our neighborhood, is, is, is, is everywhere. in january 2020 sandra spoke at the 1st public meeting about the cancer cluster. since the study was released it was organized by congress woman sheila jackson, lee grass, the state to study the cancer routes in cashmere gardens of the 5th ward in the early 20. 19, i don't want to be full of badness, but i do want to say that this is serious. some way i know that we now have in a big baggy in some way, lough, someone, someone got, think of something,

but we have all been affected in some way on other bodies. and every now stick together. we are going, i gotta make why everybody is here. well intentioned, to help find out the answer, we've been waiting a long time nationally renowned environmental activist erin brockovich was also there to support the community. so tonight, where everyone is here, could i hear from you? are you frustrated? how are you getting answer? oh, who in this room has cancer or knows of someone that lives here that have cancer? is it normal? i don't know what else we have to do here and we do. and they need to know that the community wants union pacific to clean the contaminated groundwater clue and compensate people for the pollution in the neighborhood. and

my name is barbara. i was diagnosed with lung lung cancer and 2017. i've been treated, i'm in remission. i want to know if there's some kind of funding to help me move. i'm on the phone 2 feet away from you. something to help us help us. we are sitting on a client. i work for you. i got to know. i got a guy with the union. pacific representative was at the town hall with left before we could ask or any questions? hey, award its jason mccloud with paula. so we got on the phone and we have just been to some of the streets near the site. most of the houses are vacant, just a handful of people still there. you know, if they were talking to, would you tell them it's still safe to live in these homes like a

oil and water? experts say that once creosote sink steep into the earth, it's extremely difficult to take out you civic is removing only what's closer to the surface, but leaving the rest behind. one of the things that union pacific had proposed for the korea. so basically just wait and see, let mother nature do her thing. rodrigo can to the environmental lawyer who's advising impact the chemicals and it can actually see up through the soil and they can come into the atmosphere. and if there's someone living above or recreating above or simply walking on their property, they may be breathing in those vapors. we know this is how the chemicals in korea, so behave, and they haven't done the testing. so to see whether or not that mechanism is taking place. according to state records, regulators have known about the contaminated groundwater since at least the 1900

eighty's residents we spoke with said they didn't hear about the contamination until decades later. the state environmental agency in charge of overseeing the site in the state health department both declined or interview requests me even though you were on a railroad track. yeah, it was so paste. it was faulty, is just so much as much as my father get seek at 80, something. what count from counseling and 2 months later he was taken to this. it made me so angry that everybody on latin street is i know, 5 or 6 families watch. just goal is no way you don't know these. you can that made

me believe you don't know that you were kill. they looked at it is what public community didn't care. they just safely get, they'll never bow across the united states. communities of color are more likely to breathe polluted air than white woods. and black residents in particular are the most likely to live near polluting industries and toxic sites. why is it the continued sites are disproportionately founder, communities of color, the historical institutional racism that has come on in this country that has led to sort of the limiting of where black and brown people can buy homes and live. stephen lester, is a toxicologist with nearly 40 years of experience helping people in contaminated communities find answers. it's probably no coincidence that many of these communities, many of these cancer clusters that we see, many of the industrial clusters that exist in this country today happened to be

around. and in the midst of communities of color, we track down some of the men who used to work in the crease of facility at that real yard during the 1960 seventy's and eighty's. how many of you have health problems that you think were caused by crew? so i had a 2 forgotten tumor. yeah. long lung cancer. i'll find out on the 17 of this month. well, i have a prostrate cancer. my. so what was it like working there? terrible smell, smell that when you get a nice man we go bag along with chris. oh, they're strong. they would burn your skin, you know, in the summertime, you know. yeah, real burn on. if it hit your skin, it would mix it, it would make, with the water dripping warm, it would make some widow. i've got to go, but a water fountain entering the water. if in the water it was real tone on the ground

. when it would rain, you know, the ground knew it would bubble, you know, just like it was, i don't know what, we never didn't know what it was. it was like gas. you know, it just, bob ball over to you or, you know, we're chris was running down side of the yard for one in order to the other, into the railroad tracks and into the neighborhood sector where the, where the houses were. did anyone ever complain and what happened if you did? no, i did not know all we didn't do that. we was on the breed in this in it. no, no, nothing. no. we never hear no protective gear. no so no, no, no because we use it. i guess we just had to work, you know, to support our family. and so they didn't say not. and then i guess we didn't, i didn't even actually we didn't know we didn't actually know question, but you know, how many people here think the cancer cluster in this community was caused by chris

of contamination? a, how did you react when you learned about the cancer close to you? it lives, are you what were you thinking after there was enough error that got out there? they added up. yeah. say the government answers, they can't prove what caused the hire marina cancer. what do you do next? it's no way this whole neighbourhood went to jesus and what? nothing else, nothing but the carissa, me i have they come back to say it is not there. you are lying and you're not gonna tell my people there and they got con, i believe you the state of texas decided not to do an epidemiological study, but could explain what's causing the higher cancer. it's saying it wasn't feasible . will the people in the 5th ward of cashmere gardens ever find the

answers they're looking for? there is no clear way to distinguish what's causing without investing a great deal of money and government stop to it. and then of course, you have the corporate side of this who's, who's putting pressure on government to say, well, especially less you're certain that these chemicals are these outcomes related to this chemical, the new chant ticket. so it sounds like people are on their own. yes. unfortunately, people are on there and until there's a change in this country until people stand up and say enough till people get involved and force government to address these questions. people are going to stay on hulu . i

don't know who i am with with we want them to put account that we want them to make them me. my object in my goal is to get a cancel community put in the field more. these people were affected by them. they brought the council to them, they didn't go out and kitch these, they didn't expertise is only right for you to bring a signal to them for them to get hill. yeah, that is right. yeah, yeah. cuz i'm proud of it. i yeah, yeah. you know,

i didn't gone on so long gone on to low. so what we're gonna do is, so your empathy lives with how we are marilyn i live in this mid. i don't live in this area anymore. when i came back to fight, because this is a border my hobbled beginning, and you never should forget, jehovah, beginning and nestled mom. he's always say when you can go nowhere, you can always go home. but that's not home over there. any more, just like it's like a dead zone over there is a dead zone over there. and it's just, it breaks my heart. but it makes me angry. it's time for them to make it right. make it right what. what the people in phil warden cast go on yoga harbor and all these different places. it's time for them to shut up and put up. is the company doing enough to address your concerns? they're not doing anything, sir. they got a hot blood. they have a hotline,

they don't you much have a nerve compassion to talk one on one with the people they give us a hotline union pacific didn't agree to our requests for non tumor interview. instead they sent a written statement saying important quote, decades of testing. sure. there was no creosote pathway to reach property owners and recent health studies lack scientific testing needed to make any firm conclusions about the cause of their medical conditions. once everything comes out in korea, so is the reason behind is been they can see the toll that it's taken on me if in war. so especially my husband and how, you know, loss of income, increased medical bills, all the pain and suffering, you know, ah, plans that we had to do, things are just on hold right now. are

you optimistic that you ever get answers about what's causing the kids? maybe once we start getting the ball rolling, then yes, our eventually i'll get some answers in our push until i get answers. 2 weeks after we met shronda and her husband oriel died from complications related to cancer. he was 55 years old. after royal died, shronda became one of more than a 1000 other residents from kashmir gardens in the 5th ward filed lawsuit against you to pacific. when we got together, this is something in a year and it was a lot of general gonna let me get. i'm gonna get what do you feel when you look out across this really are a lot of her pain, a lot of deaf to the community is just since on calls. you

know, we matter. we matter. ah . ah . ah, graves of the unmade evidence that school is designed to strip indigenous people in the u. s. of their culture also claimed the lives of their children abuse. corporal

punishment forced to child labor loss of identity, loss of langley, fin, loneliness. the discipline was horrific. kids were killed. there isn't any native personal life today that hasn't had someone that went to boarding school in their family. very truth on a job, 0 a and less than a year. how will host the middle east as well in preparation? the country is staging. a major settlement with 16 nations going head to head in thanks, porpoise built stadiums put 2022 will keep you across the action as council prepares for the regions. biggest ever sporting events that be for our cup on algebra ah. meet the minimum, a tough is helpful and the daughter decided to quit the rock race hoping to live

better with less. let's just throw everything away out there will expose the simple living movement aimed at reducing personal consumption projects and clubs, and i hope to be happier. as a result, a simple life on al jazeera, ah hundreds of iraqis are flown home from bella. ruth's giving up hope of starting a new life in europe. ah, hello, and welcome on peace adobe your watching l. 0. live from our headquarters here, and also coming up the u. s. president joe biden host his northern and southern neighbors at the white house. the 1st summits between north american leaders in

years assessing the damage, severe flooding and landslides lays waste to homes road.