the u. s. is always of infected people. all right, well people pay attention to what with on here now does either very good. they're bringing the news to the world from here. ah, hello, i'm emily, angling joe. hi, these are the top stories on al jazeera incident, more protests against military rule and taking place in the capital cartoon. internet services are reported to have been suspended there. the rain stated, prime minister, has been trying to appoint a new cabinet for more than a month without success. mohammed val has more from cuts of people are gathering in the outskirts of got to him in several places because they were not allowed to reach the central cartoon area. so they started gathering in the outskirts and we

know now that at least in $3.00 to $4.00 places, they have already started l. demonstrations that's in the east in the south. and in the western academy is made up of 3 cities. people are finding the translations off the most places are finding it easier to gather in on doorman last one of the 3 cities and also in battery. but they're not being able to reach cut to the capitol, the central, the central component of the, of the, of the ser piper to city at the security forces are visible almost everywhere. all the bridges are almost all the bridge is leading for central cartoon are closed at and the expectation is that there will be some very powerful confrontation between the 2 sides. because last time, the same situation happened, the bridges were close as if it was high of police and security forces. but at the end of the day, the demonstration is the more status we're able to break into the lines of those

security forces and reach the gates of the presidential police. they would like to repeat that experience today, but we noticed that the amount of security in the streets and on bridges has been doubled almost 3 times, almost 300 percent. and that's what people say, that's what we have seen driving to the says here. more than 4000 flights have been cancelled worldwide throwing christmas travel plans into chaos. the highly transmissible on the con variant has effected flight crews of major airlines. gabriel alexander has moved from newark airport in new jersey. delta, one of the major carriers here in the us announced over a 125 cancellations on friday, united airlines to another major airline here in the u. s. over a $160.00 cancellations. they say this is all due to pilot flight attendant and

other staff shortages staff that have been hit by the new army cranberry. and that is hitting the northeast of the united states in jersey. washington dc new york particularly hard new york city. in fact, is the us epicenter of the army con variance. at least 13 people have drowned after a board carrying migraines, capsized off of grace in the agent. say, it's such disaster. and greg washes as many days, bringing the combined death told to 27 smugglers have been increasingly using the dangerous route from turkey to italy to enter europe. for people in zimbabwe had been killed after bus collided with fuel tanka, the crash happened. the eastern city of newtown began b is truth and reconciliation commission has recommended. former president g, i germain stand trial for murder, torture and rape. ga, fled to exile in 2017 after refusing to accept the faith in presidential election.

in his christmas blessing, the head of the roman catholic church has urged the world to turn to dialog. speaking from some paid his way in the vatican, francis said, or any dialogue could sell conflict. he drew attention to violence and syria, yemen, ukraine, and elsewhere. frances warned immense tragedies at being passed in silence. the largest and most powerful telescope ever built is due to go into space shortly. scientists hope the james web telescope will help us better understand stuff, and galaxy center over 13000000000 years old. once in space, the telescope will be used to look back in time to light from the, from the early universe to examine the creation of stars and galaxies. incredible stuff, those of a had, i'm seen. these continues here on al jazeera after the bottom line. ah

. i am steve clements and i have a question. how does the united states become the world's biggest black market for stolen artifacts from ancient civilizations? let's get to the bottom line. ah, well, if you're in the market for a coffin from the time of the pharaoh's in egypt or gold from the empire, you've come to the right place. the united states is one of the world's main places for cultural racketeering, which is the illicit trade in ancient art and artifacts. the antiquities trade is a multi $1000000000.00 industry and it takes place around the world. in all fairness, the united states is alone. the problem runs from germany to england, to china, the middle east and beyond. jeff last month, france return $26.00 works of art to beneath which had been demanding their return since $1892.00. that's about a 130 years ago when french colonial soldiers basically stole them and brought them

home. that sort of thing is taking place now all over the world, especially in the arab world. buyers and sellers are taking advantage of lax regulations, making deals on statues from yemen or clay from the babylonians all the time. so how does the trade happen and what's being done to stop it? today we're talking to deborah layer, the founder of the antiquities coalition, which focuses on protecting cultural heritage around the world and are awesome professor of middle east history and anthropology and shiny state university in ohio, and currently a visiting professor at katara university. professor awesome is the co director of the antiquities trafficking inherited anthropology research project. it's really great to have you both here. i've always been interested in this subject as we saw, essentially the looting happen in the instability from the air of spring and after the wars that have happened in the middle east, you begin seeing things on facebook and ebay that you clearly knew were looted from places and we saw this going on,

so i'm are kind of tell us about the smuggling route. how do artifacts get out of these places, which this is our cultural past? our history. how do they find themselves into the homes of billionaires or into museum collections from, from the area of the world where you are in right now? right, well the 1st thing to say here is that looting of artifacts from, you know, tombs in and places, archaeological side cetera, is as old as humanity itself. as long as people have been burying the dead with goodies, someone's been coming up behind them, digging them up, and then taking them and trying to make a profit from them. so this is not a new phenomenon. this is not specific to a certain time or place or space that said often and as we see in times of conflict in times of instability. and, you know, obviously the region since 2011 has been going through a multiple,

a, you know, difficulties was conflicts, et cetera. we see an increase in this kind of looting and trafficking in antiquities and cultural heritage. and places like syria, libya and yemen, eval and eval suffered extremely of course iraq. we all know what happened to the museum baghdad. all of these places get looted and these are manifestations of basically the inability, a loss of control by law enforcement agencies and the institutions that are intended to protect a cultural heritage, sites and monuments. and usually the looting is done either by organized trafficking, gangs, et cetera. which is one way this is done, but also we mustn't forget that in many cases it's just average people everyday people who just want to make ends meet and we refer to these as subsistence looters . and between the 2 of them, you end up with a lot of stuff flooding the market will armor. we also saw this from isis. we saw

this from terror groups. we saw isis, which was out either destroying. ah, you know, big a cultural relics, you know, buildings and sites of worship. but taking these antiquities to also help fuel itself. tell us about back. this will certainly em, we'd appreciate that groups like isis and isis is not exclusive in this. basically see cultural heritage as a resource and they exploit this resource in number of different ways effectively in the case of isis and they looted what they can sell and what they could not sell because he was too big or immovable. they then destroyed in this, in these very public set of manner displays i referred to these as cultural heritage atrocities. and these was specifically designed to demonstrate the able devices to act with impunity. and the impotence of the international community unlocked communities to prevent them from doing that. so essentially,

isis exploited cultural heritage as a resource in missing with a but exploit and mineral wealth or a cotton harvest or, or any other if you know, and material or something they can use to enrich themselves and to fund their activities. and, and of course, the other big game changer in all of this was the expansion of the internet and social media platforms. which kind of really acted as a game changer from around 20132014 onwards opening up the market in ways that we could not imagine before. well, thank you. deborah layer, you felt found the antiquities coalition because you were disturbed by what you saw in the practice, the racketeering. the looting of these are incredibly priceless artifacts from arc really it's our collective pass. it's all of our collect a pass from ancient civilization and whatnot. and i'm just interested in what the ecosystem is and, and, and how, when you sort of look at it today and,

and what are the parts of this ecosystem that you feel we can, you know, make an impact on? well, one of the things that we're very appreciative is that the political will, is growing in recognition that this is a serious crime. and it's a global crime. an, as honor rightly pointed out, some of it, you know, looting has been going on as long as there have been very treasure. but with the advent of sophisticated technologies like the internet, with express mail, with these online auction houses. now you make this looting essentially in the market for a global and so you can tap into that and the conventions that we have the international laws that we have pre date in many times. this new technology, the, the main one from you. now sco dates from 1970. so we need to create a new updated legal structure that reflects the modern so what's the limit of that unesco framework? what's wrong with it that it's not capturing this did these digital platforms, so it doesn't give the ability to even address e commerce, for example,

it doesn't give you now the ability in many ways to be proactive in its nature, in times of conflict, to go in and create, for example, a blue helmets for culture. the italians took the lead and tried to do that through the united nations and recognition at this crisis with support from jordan and iraq . but we still have a ways to go for the international community in particular unesco to be proactive. what we do have, which i think is very encouraging, is the g 20 under italy's leadership actually took up the issue this year. and they are looking at how we can address through the major markets which tend to be the demand countries creating the infrastructure, whether it's through our crime squads in the police, through being creative and how we would use for example, anti money laundering laws and other capabilities raising awareness amongst dealers, collectors auction houses to offer the sellers of these items to raise awareness,

to make sure that it's being seen as a serious crime. what you know, what fasting things. i've been reading about awesome group and i'm fascinated because it sounds like you have league of facebook watchers. you've got a great report out on, on facebook, and i myself, have seen the artifacts on facebook and on a um, e bay. and. and so when you look at the digital platforms, the visuals of these things help broaden the market, but they also help you know, those that are watching kind of see what you're doing. tell us about this golden sarcophagus at the met. well, that's what to you rightly point out. i mean it's now become this global platform, right? it used to be, in the old days, you'd walk into a manhattan show room, they would only be able to have an inventory of a few items. you would see what you were getting, you would make the purchase. now you can take a look at it online. and in the case of the mat, they actually, it is a very famous photo. if this is our mass horn to museum, a better policy big man, the big mat, an a simple google search would have identified that on of the stamp that was on

his full size golden sarcophagus from egypt. that it was actually a fake provenance. just a simple google search is what was needed. and it was bought from europe and had been looted from egypt after 2011 beautiful piece that has since been repatriated back to egypt. and it was a photo with kim carr dash and standing in front of it. absolutely. and the met ball zillions of people saw it. right. of course. yeah, i find that fasting. and in just another one, you know, i find this fascinating that some of the worst culprits in this are in the united states. michael steinhart, a 1000000000 are very famous in the hedge fund industry. i had a 180 or more looted items. what's the story there and donated to that to the met, also a piece that had to be returned and to many other major museums. and steinhart is just one example of many, and this is part of

a global network that we need to start to address. starting from the supply countries, and we know in some cases with the breakdown and civil society, people are looking for how they can survive. we understand. but it's these international gangs that start to get involved in the mid level people, the distributors and some days in cases and with syria and iraq. for example, when the worst of alluding was going on in the time of the crisis, much of the antiquities were coming across the turkish border. and as police were looking to stop them, one day they would be seizing antiquities and humans. another day it was antiquities and nuclear materials. so the distribution networks tend to be the same with just a variety of products. it then gets to a middleman where it's specialized in these specialists, then start to work with experts. whether it's in the case recently of southeast asian art, somebody out of thailand was acting as a middle man for the career ruse when they needed some money for the civil war.

they would sell a few of the looted antiquities from cambodia. he worked with a professor here in the u. s. and a very well known and well respected dealer and manhattan who's just pleaded guilty to 3 felony crimes for her complicit work in sallied the southeast asian antiquity . wow, so this corruption, even in the finest salons, amr, i'm, i'm really interested in how for our audience we process. what is, what are the kinds of appropriate artifacts that are in museums? you know, i've been to the museum of art and philadelphia, or the museums of natural history, and we see mummies and sarcophagus. we see the elgin marbles in london. we see, you know, lot of elements of our collective history in these great museums in the world. howard those different than what you're trying to stop today, or is it all part of the, you know, the same, you know, the same process of,

you know, looting? well, i mean, technically and then, and i say technically, any item in a museum today, or whether it's the metropolitan museum, whether it's the loop in paris, whether it's the british museum, philadelphia, or any of these other museums that you mentioned. technically any. i think that doesn't orange made in that country or from that ah, we're breaking into our scheduled telecast for the much anticipated launch. should the james web web space telescope that's to to happen any moment now in covering this event for us is our correspondent manuel rap holler. who's life for us at the launch size? encourage hello. are they many? what is happening and how far off away from this actual launch what's happening is just a general sense of excitement here at the re on space emission control room. we are

about just a little over 2 minutes from the schedule that launch with a lovely view of the control room itself. this is the point where all of the different sequences of the are and 5 rocket that heavy duty rocket that's going to going to be transporting the james webb telescope to its orbit. all of those different sequences from the point of lift off up until the point where the faring that houses the telescope itself will open up and allow the spacecraft to at that point be a independent spacecraft on its way to its final orbit some 1500000 kilometers away from earth. all of those sequences that we just that i just described happened within a period of about 27 minutes after take off at this point. again, we're just moments away a little over a minute, minute and a half until lift off of the james web space telescope. this again is

in many ways the combination of years of work. we're talking about 25 years that this program, this mission has faced setbacks has face delays, has faced funding cuts. and so for many people, this is a combination of, of a life's work. but it's also in many ways just the beginning of this mission. it's still going to be 30 days before the rocket reaches it's orbit that lagrano point or l to 1500000 kilometers from earth. and then another 6 months before the, all of the different sequences more than 300 possible points of failure. 300 different sequences that have to go right for this mission to be a success begin to unfold. we're talking about a unfolding of a massive solar array, a massive heat shield, the size of a tennis court. and then of course, the now i conic gold plated mirrors that are going to collect light and allow this telescope to peer back some 13 and

a half 1000000000 years to the early stages of our universe of the birth of, of galaxies. so were moments away from a launch, a historic launch that promises to rewrite everything we know about astronomy. manuel reply, thank you very much. weigh a less than 30 seconds away from that launch. so we're going to listening. standing by for terminal county at today. oh, i thought somebody to confirm that it these yes, fed cease. thank, get, pull it up and start it decker lodge lift off from a tropical rain forest to the edge of time itself. james, where begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe. mm. punching

a hole through the clouds. 20 seconds into the flight. good pity program reported. i know that vehicle performance is nominal. the ari on 5 rocket continues to fly up hill and nominal fashion, the rumble of a powerful hour. i felt here on the control center 3 d animation like a cancer. no sense of i by chance. yeah. you're right. throw up. yeah. oppressive. 13 kilometers an altitude 7 kilometers down range, traveling about a point 6 kilometers per 2nd about so normally

the trajectory reported to be nominal by john, look, voyer the range operations manager you can see at the bottom of your screen. the yellow line is the trajectory plot perfectly overlayed over the green line, which was the pre launch trajectory. one minute 41 seconds end of the flight. about 40 seconds away fraud as it comes down to the solid rocket boosters. coming up on the 2 minute mark, end of the flight went in the text, the threshold next generations of this, not this direction, but a let's say we're looking at an animation there of the james where the face tell us which looks to have been launched without a hitch, it has a 27 minute ascent,

which is incredibly difficult and complex. let's bring in our correspondent now. meanwhile, rapid load was actually at the french piano. manuel, what are you hearing about that lower it seems to have gone off without a hitch. the around 5 in dreams were traveling almost 5000 miles an hour. seems like all systems or nominal here, the excitement is palpable behind us in that control room. just moments ago we could hear the sounds from those powerful rocket boosters. more than 480 metric tons of solid rocket fuel propelling just enough to blast off and send the spacecraft more than more more than one and a half 1000000 kilometers away from earth. you can just really feel the vibrations here in the building and really here here, those sounds. but as far as we can tell everything, as you said, went off without a hitch in terms of that initial lift off. but again, this is really just the beginning. it's 27 minutes after lift off is the part that the rocket itself is doing its job, that powerful,

heavy duty area and 5 rocket that's carrying the james web space telescope in that ferry, at the 27 minute mark that faring is going to open up and release the telescope itself. at that point, the telescope becomes independent on its way to the lagrano 2 point or l to 1500000 kilometers away from earth. this is an optimal point where the telescope it's going to have. it's back toward the sun and b and point. it's powerful light collecting sol like collecting gold plated mirrors toward the cost most collecting light observing the infrared spectrum being able to peer back into the early stages of our universe further back than any other space telescope before it. again, this is the lar, just and most powerful space telescope ever build ever sent in the outer space. and many people are seeing this as a promise to rewrite the history books to rewrite astronomy books. and this is

again, something that's 25 years in the making 25 years of setbacks and delays. this is a launch that was supposed to happen in 2020, but was canceled due to the cobra. 1900 pandemic, just this month. the launch was delayed 3 times in part due to inclement weather. so for many people, for thousands of scientists, for engineers, this is a combination of a careers of a life's work. an entire career spent 25 years in developing the technology. and speaking of the, of the technology itself, we're talking about more than a dozen new technologies that were developed just to get this thing off the ground . so i'm blacking the words, but today is without a doubt historic day, a historic moment. and a big moment for everyone involved, certainly not lacking the word that is a very complex situation. i mean, this is regarded is one of the gram signed to begin. dev is the 21st century many. and it's just incredible to think that it actually takes images of the very 1st

stars and galaxies to shine in the universe. obviously, it's very technical, but how just, how significant is this in terms of science? when you compare it to previous missions like hubble in the ninety's, i myself, i would consider myself a child of hubble seeing those 1st images and in color in the textbooks where we were 1st learning about astronomy as children or comparing it to other space missions like like galileo or, or, or the kepler telescope. that was specifically specifically looking at x. so planets that's to say, planets that orbit stars, other than our son. what, what the web telescope is going to be able to do is observe the light through the infrared spectrum. so in doing so, it's going to allow scientists to peer not only back in time to the early stages of our universe, to early galaxies, far back before anyone has ever done before. but scientists are also going to be

able to examine the atmospheres of planets and determine whether or not planets could not only be habitable and suitable for, for humans to possibly one day colonize, but to determine whether or not those conditions are optimal for life. so it wouldn't be a stretch to say that if there is an instrument in outer space right now capable of determining whether and how we are or are not alone in the universe, it is the web space telescope. so it is, it does promise to revolutionize astronomy, but before we can get too excited, i think a lot of people are still quite nervous. there's a general sense of nervousness because it is still going to be a month before the telescope reaches its orbit at the l 2 point and another 6 months before all of the different instruments on board and all the different sequences come finish unfolding like an interstellar butterfly, all these different components sort of opening up. we're talking about the solar

array itself, where it's going to where the telescope is going to get its energy from, as well as, as the heat shield that's going to protect it from the heat from the sun. about the size of a tell of a tenant score, talking about the largest space telescope ever sent in the outer space. it's going to be 6 another 6 months before all of those sequences are completed before all the calibrations are done. so we're expecting the telescope to actually come on line no sooner than june of 2020 to a little bit of a white still to go. thank you for breaking down for the memo rappel or live for us . we appreciate your time to other world news now and to sudan where thousands are on the streets again to protest against the military takeover. internet services are reported have been suspended there. the rain, cited prime minister, has been trying to appoint any cabinet for more than a month without success. and protest is want the military to stay from a transitional to

a democracy. mom about has been covering this story from cartoon mohammed, one of the numbers like so far, how many people have started together? well, there is no precise estimation, but it's very clear that the there are huge numbers that have been gathering in the city 3 parts of the of the 70s cops on that sir, come to battery and how to me, some of the capital and on doorman we said before that or the bridges have been blocked by the security forces that the presence of the security forces this time around these has increased almost 300 percent compelled to last week or the the previous to demonstrations. right now, access is still blocked for those who want to access, come to him from on demand or from come to him behind. but while we have not the student the last half hour or so is not a huge numbers have been able to push from the south of the capitol, come to him,

his self, the central cup to him, to was the presidential polish. and we'd be told that they are there, they are now about $100.00, a few 100 meters away from the, from the presidential poly start study. they just, we have seen that happening last time. and suddenly bridges were opened. everybody is to ask questions about what happened and how it happened last time. but now we have this huge push from within the cup of the central capital calling itself. apparently, some of the protesters were able to move probably yesterday, or overnight to this area because they know the bridges will be closed. so they moved into the central area of cartoon to the south and they are pushing. there was a presidential parties about one kilometer away from it. as i speak. we only have about 10 minutes left of this bulletin mohammed just quickly tell us about the mood of the protest is there seems to be relatively peaceful st from one.