as telling hong kong to take all necessary steps to contain the virus from yacoma chief executive carry lamb thanks g for his support and vow to unite hong kong to fight the virus. the hong kong government is facing criticism for seen, for like this old people waiting out in the cold for a hospital bed. 2 years into the pandemic. many asking why more wasn't done to prepare for this day. brick clearness, al jazeera, hong kong, ah discreet look at main stories now into america's top. diplomatic says, millions of people are facing a moment of peril as they wait for russia to invade ukraine. you are secretary of state anthony blanket, made the comments at the un security council and repeated his government's assertion that moscow is now looking to manufacture a pretext for war. joe biden, us present to saying that he expects rashid military action to happen in the next

couple of days. but russia rejects accusations of any planned offensive despite massing more than a $150000.00 troops along the border. i have no doubt the response to my remarks here today will be more dismissal from the russian government about the united states, stroking hysteria, or that it has no plans to invade ukraine. so let me make the symbol the russian government can announce to day, with no qualification equivocation or deflection that russia will not invade ukraine. stated clearly stated plainly to the world and then demonstrate it by sending your troops, your tanks, your planes, rat to their merits can hangers and sending your diplomats to the negotiating table . in the coming days, the world will remember that commitment or the refusal to make it

ukraine and russian back separatism accused each other of shedding positions in the east and don bass region the violations of a sci fi there are common, he's incidents appear to be an escalation at this point in time, nato's echoed warnings. the reports could form part of a russian so called false flag effort. while moscow is accusing the west of hysteria, we are following other headlines as well, and particularly in brazil. well over a 100 people have been swept to that death in the latest landslide dissolves. to their a months worth of rain fell in one day in metropolis known as brazil's imperial city, resulting mudslides of buried homes, flooded streets and washed away cause. those the headlines this how the stream is coming out next, looking at couple to mining in the democratic republic of congo. ah

ah, welcome to the stream um josh rushing, sitting for for me. okay. today, or smartphones rely on a range of rare minerals to give them their magic. but what is the continue global demand for the latest gadgets mean for people digging up precious materials in places such as do your congo? a new mobile app called 7 grams ames to answer that. it was recently featured at sundance film festival. here, let's take a look. 7 gram is entering that istic project that tells the story of your smartphone through your smartphone. using augmented reality, your phone contains around 7, grubs of array of precious minerals,

such as tungsten cassie to write cobalt gold. one country has these minerals in abundance, the democratic republic of congo, and those essentials is in making devised apart from today. we have come to embrace and that have completely changed the way we communicate. 7 grim exposes to heat and consequences that manufacturing or by electronics has an offer solutions to prevent more abuse and injustice from reaching our electronics. to discuss the app and the impact of mining on to our congo were joined by corinne. ben khalifa, the director of 7 grams, he's in berlin. sarah hicks and having me as an associate professor globalization at the university of antwerp, embassy sci nicu. but as a professor at the catholic university of chicago in eastern, dear congo, he focuses on natural resources in the environment. oh, and i should mention one more guest at the table is you,

if you're watching this on youtube, see that box over there? we have a live stream producer waiting to get your comments to me so i can get them in the show. we can all be a part of this discussion. speaking or discussion cream. tell us about 7 grams. like where did you get the idea for this? well, in 2015 i was in eastern congo and it was photographing outside of miners in the golden crescent, right mines in cuba, north cable, i realized, photographing it was my smartphones to where you know, extracting the romito hands g n product. and i mean, i thought there was something to do about that. ah, i must have struck in a sense of irony that, that the very thing they were digging out of the rock there you are actually using in that moment to capture that moment. yeah, i mean it was just like a moment where you, you realize something is so extreme. and also you see the heart around this condition in which they are working. i know to magically i had a d i. d took a few years to baghdad into place, but here we are dis, up 7 grams is,

is available now everywhere in the world. what are the things in it that, that movie the most was chance a story? here we went, we have a clip of that. the animation that this is, is really beautiful. check it up and was always enemies to find time to ways to conquer resources, to take down on the b b, b. so word ends i weeks become a month to become years. the

story chances that he's kidnapped. he's turned into a child's older and then into a minor so he captures a lot of these stories. i think kind of one character. how did you meet him? what's his story beyond just us? he was so many people like charles in eastern congo and this is i think might have to trauma. so shelf was someone that we had to chance to discuss with and completely understand what he went through happens to live in the area where he was abducted to know and decided to give it story, but to remain anonymous because it was very important for him that life will never be put in danger or one of his family, but she said, i'd like to bring you in at this point. what i'm thinking about chance here. how common is this? what's the, the scope of, of this situation?

yeah, there are so many additional minor in here go. they have different stories. there are nearly a quarter 1000000 people and you have any person just in integral sector and you have so many out of me being dog. so be a big percentage of their comedies population. just surviving on the minor. it's actually the 2nd biggest employer right after i grew culture. i want to bring in a video comment from someone in our communities that associate professor at the university of noddy said arthur checked us out roughly 70 percent of the world's supply of cobalt is mind in the democratic republic of the congo. and this cobalt is mind an appalling conditions. i've spent months on the ground in the congo and seen hundreds of thousands of peasants, including tens of thousands of children, kate and toxic filth and grime,

and pets and tunnels. eking out a sub human existence on a dollar or 2 a day to dig cobalt out of the ground and feed it up to the supply chains of mega cap tech and e v. companies around the world. much more needs to be done to a raise awareness of this human rights catastrophe. and much more needs to be done to alleviate the sub human colonial conditions under which cobalt is mind to power our lives every day. yeah, and from there actually want to take us right into a bit of video we have we're it's it's couple of gold miners describing what it's like working there requisite c. good for him. of lemon. was the anthro cool. it is really serious, but we enter here like animals. we have to walk on all fours and if we get tired, we screwed along in our bucks in order to get to where we need to reach sadie. we're lucky moseto classy. when a parent unique, we don't get sustenance,

we don't even have the means to find soap to wash ourselves. and if we have no motivation now, if we don't find gold, it's difficult to eat or nay on our bank or to rely on my chair. and to custody facility and uniform of us is a you were saying there's a quarter 1000000 artists nor miners just in the gold sector alone that are basically living this existence. do we have that kind of numbers on what the impact is on their lives and what the impact is on the environment from this kind of mining? oh, yeah, so there is a one that is a necessary to understand. so mcclockey illustrated this very clearly for every ring of call that is produced, you need 20 tons of material that is extracted from the ground. so

all these things are the ground being, are these underground being taken out is either briefed by the minor. so this is a very dusty environment they work in are both into the rivers and in the reverse, you have fission from any organisms which suffer from it. and this is just like the, the tailings that come along the material. but in addition to that, you have more toxic elements like mercury acids that are in the processing of these materials. so they are so much so much adamant that are not either neither healthy for humans. ready or for other organ is in the environment that come along in this process. so yeah, that's a great environment sir. this is a slow moving disaster. i mean, we've heard about this for years. why are we still here talking about it?

yeah, that's a very good question. i mean, in terms of the working conditions, i'm very little has changed on this by the fact that there has been quite some attention at the international level for this issue i'm, since i would say since about 15 years. ah, but not much is changing. and, and there's while on the one hand, and we can maybe talk about a global supply chain initiatives later. but also a lot is changing insights that the, our congo in the art is no less small scale mining sector. and 1st of all, there's a number of formalization initiatives that require minors to group into miners, corporate tips, and to work in legal zones that have been established ida comedies, government, so they're working on that. but in reality, we see that especially for gold, which is more easy to smuggle less easy to control that at least 95 percent of the

gold is still produced um, illegally and then so it's not registered. i'm another development that we see in the sector is an in than sophistication of extraction, in the sense that there is now use of new technology such as cyanide nation. there is mechanization through the use of ball mills. so the sector that was previously purely art isn't the, let's say, using hands hel, tamares and chisels. it's now more and more mechanized, which in turn it has positive effects on the productivity, but it also has additional negative effects on health. and so we see a number of changes, but when we look at the working conditions at issues of health and safety, um we see barely any so cream. when you look at the really deplorable conditions on the ground, you connect the dots from,

from those people to the companies there that are profiting who re looking at who's making the money here. yes, i'm a sorry. no, maria list and yeah, i'm just billed on what you said, sarah, because look, this is an incredible piece of technology engineering that when to create, this is amazing and it changed to what was said earlier. so no, we can do days, but we can't follow minerals from eastern congo to china with all these intermediaries. i think we can do it. and i think those companies can do it, just not doing it because there is no pressure from the consumers. and there was no interest for them to change the supply chains, but i think and i do believe they can do it and we need just to, to put more pressure. i mean, i'm just not saying it's simple obviously. but those, those, those up and talking about it is exactly what is needed awareness. and i think one of the ways to put pressure on this has been through the courts. perhaps it was a lawsuit filed here in the us. unfortunately,

the judge tossed it out last november, but we have a comment from the lawyers who help present that lawsuit. were the group that filed a lawsuit against apple tesla, google, microsoft in dell for using cobalt mind in the d. r. c. by children, we represent 16 families that had a child, either maimed or killed while mining cobalt for one of these companies. all of the companies, even though they claim they have policies, prohibiting child labor and their supply chains. they deny any responsibility, even though they have the resources and the power to fix it. a conservative judge through the case out, but we've appealed already and we're going to keep fighting until we get justice for these children and the others. okay, there's a couple of things he mentioned there that i want to touch on. one is the stream reached out to apple tesla, microsoft, google, and dell for comments on this we received a comic back only from dell and it says,

dell technologies is committed to the responsible sourcing of all materials which includes upholding the human rights of workers at any tier of our supply chain and treating them with dignity and respect. we're working together with our peers, suppliers, and their stakeholders to address the risk associated with mining operations and conflict afflicted in high risk areas and helping ensure the human rights of all who worked in those communities are upheld. so that's what dell says, but i want to point, now we can go to my computer here again, i want to point out what the judge said and the lawsuit, cuz cream, you mentioned all the intermediaries in between. and my question here is, are those are they being used in a way to obfuscate the source? and if so is that a winning strategy? here's what the judge said in this particular case, and i'm quoting from him, it might be true that if apple, for example, stop making products that use cobalt, it would have purchased less of the metal from mccorr, which might have purchased less from glen corps,

which might have purchased less from c m k k, which might thus have instructed ismael to stop purchasing coal bought from child art sesno miners, which might have led to some of the plaintiffs to have not been mining when their injuries occurred. the judge said, but this long chain of contingencies in all its rippling, glory, creates mere speculation. not a traceable harm. so if the system is designed for all the middle men to create office cation, is this judge not saying, yep, that's a winning strategy. well, i think we need to do something about it. there is people on the grounds that are suffering and must be better ways to, for those companies that us some of the richest in the world. the most wealthy use company in this world. i'm sure they can find a way to do to source and nut instead about biking. doug, the results of eastern congo actually kinda, it's walking with our to the miners on to go on to find

a solutions. and under completely believe this is possible. and yes sir, and what they all said is, is our, our, the big companies doing enough here? yeah, maybe i, i want to point out that there has been a shift in recent year in those so supply chain initiatives for us. i think it's in a positive direction, and previously you had a very strict focus on conflict minerals. and so, for instance, in the u. s. dot frank act, the conflict minerals from the congo were singled out, which had as an effect that buyer stopped sourcing minerals from the region which in turn had a direct effect on livelihood. so this has been well documented in academic research at that it had the devastating effects on minors on their families, on the whole population. so the solution is definitely not stop sourcing from the region. now, there has been a, an acknowledgment of this issue, and nowadays companies are shifting more to words responsible sourcing.

so it's the idea of due diligence that companies are monitoring the risks in their supply chain and acting upon these risks. now i do have a couple of problems with that, and the 1st is that the framing in which these risks are dog is very much done by the downstream companies. so it does not rest necessarily corresponds to the priority concerns of the people on the ground. ah, and secondly, i mean there is, you frame something as a risk in your supply chain. so the framing is very much direct to words, to lead companies for an art as well, minor it's, he cannot identified as, as a supply chain risk, right? if he is faced with extortion, it's a problem that has economic, political, social, gender, cultural dimensions, and that is affecting his, his body, his family, his life on a daily basis. so, so i think this, this links a bit to the idea that a, that there is

a quick fix to this issue and the supply chain can be fixed and that we, if we identify risk at particular notes in the supply chain that we can like replace these dirty conflict notes, whits colleen notes and it's just not as simple as that. so of a bassy so you can ask you were saying that we don't want a boy caught these things. what should we do? where from, from your pre a position? do you see pressure should be applied to change what's happening? yeah, i think it's very important to understand how life is for these miners before they got into mine, or most of them were. some of them were living in conditions that were so poor that the only way to survive was to go in them. and so like this conditions in which

they are, are horrible. it's really a nightmare. but they had much worse before. so saying that you towards these minerals or you don't pick from there, that's won't help at all. so the 1st thing is, at what price are you trying to get on with companies like a pause this line. so they, they have the ability to take at least minerals, these very precious mineral coming from a tennis channel at a fair price. and theo make profits because it is a transmission. they represent a very small percentage of the actual cost of this product. just a few grams that are used to produce this, the phones and the electric cars. the 2nd thing is something i have seen so much energy being spent on developing technologies and like a cobalt free batteries. just to be able to stay away from this

by the price of his no minus bring. but the problem is how poor do they become when you stop taking they are cobalt. how poor do you to read? miners become when you can no longer gets what they can produce. they have to go back growth, the foods they can eat, be isolated in a portion of the forest and probably die from hunger when they have about season. so on a human perspective, i think there is need more pressure to the sky. but me in the president of we are congo recently. address most of the speak to religious get. he said this now, we know that we have noticed for some years that people come into our country with empty hands and pretend to be on printers and then leave with billions in their

pockets while we remain poor. that's why i came here to speak with our partners, so we can understand each other on a number of things from now on. this needs to be a win win partnership. we won't accept any other partnership, only a win win part. that will be late for you. you know, you will see how much accountability falls on the government of d r. c m president. just got it. i'm. i don't think unfortunately it's, it's quite easy to make a very good for the school speech to the mom says. but like when you have to look at the concrete the men is doing things off the miners. there is not much as fara said earlier, you can see there are no changes usually you have for this is,

but i'm not adopted. and that so much energy is put into really making a change into the i think the 2nd thing is you have to take into account congo is one of the countries with the worst projects. you have companies like this last april which have like it's something times the budget perform well. so in terms of power, print that you for kids, he may be the leader, he's p pro, but he, he has very little to say to him, cook or mosque when it comes to decisions that are made on quote. so i don't see much change from the government, and i also don't have the highest expectation because i know how difficult it is when you don't have enough money to make concrete change. you don't even have enough money to do research and understand the situation on the field. you don't have enough money to put up right policies, so i really wouldn't be about blaming the government from what is happening. i

think their responsibility. but i want to bring in a couple of voices from youtube before we in the show here. 1 am is sergio romano. if the world really wants the success of africa, it should protect and help africans to progress and not exploitation. here's a common off a twitter from kwame, i guess say, what does the director do personally to ensure congress people are protected from harmful conflicts. as a result of getting this mineral that might make huge profits up to selling smartphones and cream? i'm not gonna put that all on you. going to put me in that group too. what can i do here as the consumer? what can we all do as the consumers in this situation? i think it was our nurse. we're going to start repair our phones. we're going to start recycling our phone, only 24, some of the clinics i actually recycle. so there was an ecological problem in this, but there was also a lot of resources that could get back to the supply chain and definitely ask those

companies. and so then that you value the fact that those devices are produce without violence, without injustice. and there was ways to do it. we understand it's not that easy. but again, if you can do something, us engineered as a smartphone, i'm sure you can find a way to buy from are to the miners in instant congo, the resources you needs at a fair price. and that is a win win for everyone. it is a win win for those companies because then stop supporting business and injustice. and sarah fairly quickly here. what international structures need to be put in place? what international authorities are there to affect change in this? well, i think we now see an evolution to wertz, more public regulation because these supply chain initiatives, these private arms by chin initiatives are, were voluntary. and we have seen the limits of dis,

off like the willingness of companies to invest in this to invest resources in this . and so the, the court case that was mentioned already here is one example of like a shift back to give her giving more responsibilities to governments and, and legislation that this actually, that, that, that's is mandatory i, we also see mandatory due diligence requirement style. so i think that's very important and also for the government, which i know, sir, but in your hope, in the court case of the judge all re, throughout bills are less than hopeful. it's less than what i wanted here. but as we know, the lawyer said earlier that they are gonna pill back, listen reviewers get your phone out right now. we're going to show you a q r code where you can take a picture of this and you'll be able to get 7 grams on your phone, i phone or android, and you'll be able to see this incredible a, our experience. thank you so much to my guess for joining on the stream today. and for all of you out there watching, we'll see you tomorrow. ah

ah, i americans are increasingly say authoritarianism might not be so bad. there were several steps along the way where the chain of command, if you'd like to covered up what's your take on why they've got so raw? that to me is political malpractice, the bottom line on us politics and policies and the impact on the world. on al jazeera new zealand, he's a bird watches paradigm. but this south pacific nation has one of the worst

extinction records on earth, writes an other interview practices have decimated the nike bird population. the decline is still ongoing. if we let it roll for another 50 years, they will be much left to restore. now you zealand is leading the world with an extraordinary goal to wipe out the countries with peers. by 2050. there is nowhere else on the planet like this. and we now have the technology, the well and the know how to do it and take those bases. finally, after 2 days of 36 that we made our 1st, hey we both birds will join 14 other key we released here in the last few mom. it's a vital step in saving while kiwi, which we're almost walked out across the region 2 decades ago and talked to al jazeera. we also do you believe that the threat of an invasion of ukraine is

currently the biggest threat international peace and security? we listen, we are focusing so much on the humanitarian crisis that we forget the long term development we meet with global news makers. i'm talk about the store restock matter on al jazeera. ah, hello, i'm r m new machine on the now main story, the sour america's top diplomats is saying, millions of people are facing a moment of peril as they wait for russia to invade ukraine. us actually a state antony blinking made these comments that un security council and repeated his government assertion that moscow is now looking to manufacture a pretext for war. u. s. president joe biden says he expects russian min attraction within the next several days. but russia has continued to reject these accusations . spite massing more than a $150000.00 troops along its border.