a russian soyuz spacecraft successfully undocked from the international space station and there's on its way back with two russian cosmonauts and an american astronauts on board after an attempted day was halted for some long. revelations of sounds of cia trained assassin is operating in pakistan raise concerns about what's to happen after the u.s. military pulls out of the region and will control the length holes left behind by. the war words between the american and iranian president's up to the dish on tells the yuan general assembly but most people in the world believe the united states was behind the nine eleven the time it's. coming up next if you want to show

looking at just why it's a done became center stage at the u.n. trying to assemble a new york when president obama devoted a chunk of his speech on the future of africa's largest country and over to our washington d.c. studios next here on elsie. we've got to. just issues good voice ceased to face with the news makers. welcome the ilona show we'll get the real headlines with the mercy we're going to live out of washington d.c. now today the un shifted gears and spoke about sudan president obama gave a fourteen minute speech to the breakout session which dominated the conversation but is the u.s. suddenly injecting itself into that issue just a little bit too strongly are to correspondent lauren lister is going to have the

details on the reactions next we'll examine the boundaries of free speech six people in the u.k. have been arrested for burning the koran something that definitely would never happen here in america but are there examples where free speech seems to go a little too far we'll speak with georgetown university professor christopher chambers and hilarity and confusion ensued as stephen colbert came to the hill in character today to testify so in this changing media political landscape who is more influential politicians or media figures and is there even a difference anymore our chief correspondent christine for his hour will join us to talk about this emerging hybrid then we'll tell you a story about a sobering new documentary called the other city brings us a new perspective to the shocking hiv aids rates right here in the district of columbia the first some reason nobody wants to talk about so we'll speak with the producer of the film sheila johnson and it's friday so we're going to bring you a mash up of these strangest stories making headlines like katy perry being deemed

too busty for sesame street and a new barbie doll that's making a mockery out of broadcast journalism we're going to get comedian seaton smith's two cents on all of that at the end of the show but now let's move on to our top story. the un general assembly continued today with a wide range of world leaders with the podium names like benjamin netanyahu hamid karzai and cesar chavez as well as the disarmament conference which at which iranian president mahmoud ahmadinejad was in attendance after yesterday's speech which has been slammed by now by both the u.s. and the e.u. but barack obama the american president focused his sights on another issue today that of sudan a country with an upcoming referendum that could lead to the breakup of africa's largest nation it's a situation that hillary clinton has called a ticking time bomb but were there any real solutions to stop the clock with joining me from our studio in new york to give us all the details is our chief

correspondent lauren lyster lauren now obama spoke for a fourteen minutes today in this closed door speech and there's been a lot of hype surrounding the fact that he was present there that he was speaking and you know also about this coming week that they're going to issue what are the reactions been so far. well we've seen a draft of the communique gotten our hands on it and the criticism of it is that it's very weak it doesn't do very much it's fourteen paragraphs log ok obama's motorcade was long with twenty four cars that were stopping up traffic and it mentioned star for very little a region which the president of sudan has been indicted in the international court on charges of war crimes and genocide yet there is very little attention paid to it in the communique and in addition in this draft the people that signed on to it basically are saying they celebrate the new strategy in darfur wall many of the parties that are involved in the actual conflict on the ground have rejected this new strategy human rights advocate groups have come out saying that this is weak that this is not meet the mark does not make the mark and it's really not doing

much at all alona well so what's the role that the u.s. is suddenly seems to be playing in this issue. well you know that's a really fair question because all of a sudden the administration has really been hyping up president obama's involvement in this issue his participation in this meeting painting the administration is really spearheading this issue in regards to diplomacy but critics say it really amounts to just a big p r gesture that human rights advocates and groups are obama supporters and he's been seen as not being tough enough on this issue not doing enough for this issue so now he's stepping up to the plate and show because he's basically in campaign mode but people say is that really he's not doing anything for example in his speeches fourteen minute speech he didn't even mention the sudanese president well they're saying that they're spearheading this effort we know that the u.s. do radial the security council's plans to take a trip to sudan because they were concerned about needing to be photographed with

this president of the country so basically you know president obama is appearing to walk the walk and talk the talk but he's not walking the walk by any accounts now do you think of this is just adding perhaps fuel to the fire when it comes to anger of smaller nations that feel like the u.s. whenever it feels like it gets to just step in and say that they you know they can do what they want and they now own a certain issue in the way that they're going to handle it. right well one u.n. official was quoted as saying i would hate to be a small member country because many did want to get more involved on this issue you had austria offering up legal help mexico wanted to take this trip wanted to do more in regards to diplomacy and visiting the region and you see the united states really did rail it well then taking a stage and spearheading what looks like efforts to do something in the region and to advance efforts of the international community when really in reality that hasn't been the case now let's talk about also some of the funnier things you

mentioned the obama's motorcade seem to be incredibly long i heard that he that he shut down bathrooms mean what else happens when the u.s. wants to get involved in an issue at the u.n. and obama decides to a grace everyone with his presence. well yeah as you said you know it stops traffic his motorcade was ridiculously long you know nobody could get in and out around already traffic has been horrible all for him to deliver in essence a fourteen minute speech behind closed doors that advocates of human rights what this is supposed to be addressing say really amounted to nothing and was all for show people that were in the u.n. couldn't use the bathroom all of the restrooms were closed down during that time because obama was in the building because he was there so you know when obama shows up at there it's met with a lot of hype but also a lot of inconvenience to everybody around i mean we have to deal with it right here in washington d.c. all the time not only with obama's motorcade with joe biden's motorcade that somehow can't seem to help themselves but i don't know how we get into car

accidents and hit people but i can imagine in new york it's definitely been causing quite the rock as to is there anything else that we should be looking forward to you know keeping our eye on in terms of the u.n. and the general assembly there. one thing that's really interesting alone is that the general assembly continues this weekend next week yet what we're finding out is that press are no longer interested in you know obama has spoken on the dinner job his spoken and now in essence everybody's breaking down tonight pretty much as we speak the press in the main island is breaking down and basically closing up shop in the media is pretty much not caring anymore that this is continuing to go on you know you have critics saying in essence these are just a lot of speeches made to empty halls so while this is you know toad it is being such a major pillar for people to take the world stage and address their grievances and their goals i mean you have to ask if it's falling on deaf ears now seems like after this saw after all the high business is just going to go back to normal and

no one's going to pay attention to the u.n. lauren thanks so much for filling us in there. well we're taking a break but there's still much more to come in tonight's show the media is buzzing about the execution of a woman with a low i.q. . yet for some reason there is no media attention when a black male is executed with the exact same mental capacity so we'll look into that double standard and can freedom of speech so far people in the u.k. were arrested on suspicion of burning the koran yet people burning the book here in the us haven't seen any kind of that punishment so will discuss the case when we come back.

sure however. we've got an update tonight on a story we've been following here on the show last night the state of virginia executed forty one year old teresa lewis now this was the first execution of a female in the u.s. in almost five years and the first execution of a woman in virginia and nearly a century lewis was convicted in two thousand and two of the contract killing of her husband and stepson i was put to death by lethal injection now there was a lot of debate surrounding lewis's mental status doctors have testified that lewis had an i.q. of about seventy which is considered mentally ill anything under seventy two is but a judge ruled that she was competent to stand trial and to face the death penalty now lose the death sentence was only the twelfth time that a woman isn't executed in the u.s.

since capital punishment was restored as a sentencing option thirty four years ago now in that same period one thousand two hundred and fourteen men have been put to death and in fact many of these executions barely even draw headlines anymore but because lewis was a woman and because she was white then of course her story gained national attention even international headlines her i.q. also played a huge role in the attention of the media gave or you know it something that no one covered is that twelve days before her execution a fifty year old alabama man was executed for shooting his former girlfriend to death in one thousand nine hundred three hollywood died by lethal injection on september first of this year and during his appeals the lawyer claimed that would only had an i.q. of seventy or less and that his trial lawyers wrongly failed to tell the jury about his mental limitations of prosecutors also said he was not as mentally disabled as claimed and the u.s. supreme court rejected that appeal but you know what the story of hollywood. was

never even a national story and never made headlines because he was a black male but it should have yet again a man with a questionable mental status was executed in this country no matter what your beliefs are in capital punishment when the country starts killing people that are not fully there mentally we are starting a very dangerous precedent it's time to take a long hard look at capital punishment in the us and the double standards that apply to executing a woman we as a country should be equally outraged by the state killing someone who is potentially unfit to stand trial or garbus of their sex. now just when you thought that the qur'an burning stories were over here comes another the gang of six men have been arrested in the u.k. on suspicion of burning copies of the koran on you tube on september eleventh now if convicted the charge will be that of stirring racial hatred notice this didn't

happen in america it didn't happen because the freedom of speech included in the first member of the constitution is praised above all here but some are wondering if sometimes that freedom of speech can go too far in an era where the qur'an burning in one of the living room can be spread virally across the entire world and incite violence or earlier i caught up with christopher chambers georgetown university professor and author of the blog nat turner as revenge i first brought of the fact that there are exceptions to the freedom of speech in this country those include defamation child pornography fighting words and speech that expresses a genuine threat to the safety of others you know like the example of yelling fire in a crowded theater but i asked chris how often those exceptions really are applied these days you can probably hear defamation of character on t.v. in the media every single day it's things like libel defamation i mean it's really hard to prove because nowadays everybody is a public figure in the the the you know the standard is so high that you know

a lot of newspapers are web sites specially really don't really don't think about it but you know if the exceptions are so broad made everybody from the local cops to the congress or the f.c.c. wants to shut down a talk show host it's getting too crazy you really have to show that what you're seeing is either a certain to do with child pornography obscenity or it's about has the tendency to incite somebody to action what does that mean people just don't want to get near those kinds of tests so basically everything goes well you would have thought you know i mean it with this case of pastor terry jones wanting to burn the koran you had. general david petraeus who's in charge of our troops in afghanistan saying directly that this will affect american right this could put troops in danger in this area i mean if you're sitting here that's expressing. some tendency to incite but it is so high and we don't want to go in and say to tell

somebody ahead of time it's called prior restraint not to do something that all we can really do is put kind of moral pressure but when you're dealing with lunatics and on it and these days we're dealing with people with very high threshold of lunacy and very big emotions so it normal people like you and i would if the president says you know maybe you shouldn't do that first of all protect us but maybe we might think twice lunatics and very emotional people with the stakes so high that just makes them multiplies their eagerness because now they're they've got free p.r. and that's the problem these days that i mean that definitely is part of it because in this day and age when you have a twenty four hour news cycle you have the internet it's no longer like you you say something and you know maybe that the talent to be speaking about it and no one alive are here because it had anything to hold my own the slightest way you know controversial or exciting then the media is going to pick up on it's going to be all over america all of the world and so you know how do you how does that really i

mean here's here's the thing i mean the first amendment only goes after government you conduct me preventing you from doing something like this and everybody from the congress and the president to the local cops private action of any kind you going to get at it from other ways like you know people attacking muslims work those are employment discrimination kinds of issues not really first amendment to get at that kind of conduct you people start thinking that that's ok because you say you know you can say whatever you want to one of your coworkers because you say hey it's a free country i can say whatever you might not you might not be have the government go after you particularly. what you said but the environment that you create that triggers a whole bunch of other protections under like title seven civil rights stuff like that but i mean yeah it balloons because you get it in your head i can say anything and in this day and age where anybody can be their own newspaper online you can say anything. defamatory inciting i mean it's there it's really

hard because some people are anonymous some people might say well i'm just republishing what somebody else said i'm not trying to incite anything i want to bring up really quick images behind. the k.k.k. writing across what isn't fact something that is not protected right there free speech thanks. to a number of court ruling that decided that so i mean why why is it because you put this into historical context and yet burning a koran is still safe yeah i think that's what it is and it's perhaps it would probably take a lawsuit but i mean you know there's historical context there and it's such an unbridled symbol of of incitement and violence that you know. the history is there and the peer recall evidence that this incites people to do bad things burning the koran is hasn't gotten to that stage yet burning the

american flag hasn't gotten to that stage that should tell you something but but again i mean the scary thing is was this conduct moved online it's gotten harder and harder to take care of and the scarier thing is that the mainstream media which operates behind this this protection of the first amendment doesn't seem to want to do the investigative and digging to kind of get at this conduct to figure out where it's coming from and and study it so you know we're getting it from both ends of mainstream media doesn't want to do its job even though it's protected and then you've got lunatics and people who probably kind of side with the lunatics but kind of hide behind i mean we're talking about the internet this is how this story came to be. these six gentlemen in the u.k. that put their video on you tube but there they got arrested and i mean i think that's the great thing about inventor is that we have for exactly what some people will look at us and say that you know you need to adapt to a changing world do you agree with that at all i don't think so i think the first amendment i think it's working fine right now it was never meant to go after

jackass conduct i mean that's up to us to kind of police and the mainstream media to study that's what i think should be done is like the remedy to bad speech is more speech not cutting it off is to try to have a christian or a wave of intelligent people forums like the show and r.t. and it's a shame that it has to be a russian station that's that's looking at these these these issues and not an american station looking at these issues but it doesn't matter from where it comes from more speech is always going to drown out bad so i'm with you there people into say more and set of just focusing on the is that you know the the nut jobs that were all there in chris thanks i think you. well just ahead on the show we have the results of a new poll that shows that americans have no clue how well disparities in this country really are find out who they think has money compared to who really holds all that you know and political news characters even call their took to capitol

hill today so as the a politician a media figure a policy expert i'm getting confused our chief correspondent christine will join me with the story after the break. he's going to the future are covered. the past few weeks we've had a lot of discussions on the staggering poverty rate here in the u.s. the revelation that one in seven americans is living in poverty over forty three million people and while those millions of americans languish in

a destitute financial state forbes magazine confirmed this week that the very rich are just getting richer their top four hundred earners net worth rose by eight percent from two thousand and nine two thousand and ten but the sad part is that while income inequality continues to rise it turns out the most americans don't even know that it's happening there's a new study on wealth disparities that's been conducted by harvard and duke university's to determine how americans view their social and economic status and these findings might surprise you. the study determine that americans dramatically underestimate the wealth disparities in the u.s. when asked the participants thought that the top twenty percent own about sixty percent of the nation's wealth in actuality the top twenty percent over eighty percent of the country's wealth and here's the real shocker when asked what the people thought the ideal distribution should be they responded that those top twenty should only hold thirty percent turns out we're

a little delusional now another part of the survey showed participants the well to spirit is in two different countries between the u.s. and sweden and they compare them to a completely equal wealth layout now without knowing which country was which most people preferred sweden's wealth difference compared to that right here in america which if you'll notice is much more equal theirs is than the u.s. but i thought americans hated europe and they're stupid socialist economic policies guess not now i have to admit i'm a little disgusted by this survey because you don't have to know every detail about the economic structure of our society but to be so in the dark about the way that capitalism is giving a huge majority of the wealth to such a small itty bitty little portion of the people well that makes me a little worried and i makes me realize why people are more concerned with income disparities in the us they just don't know because before you know it there isn't going to be any middle class to include in these surveys. now there is

a strange sight on capitol hill today comedian steven call there testifying before congress his appearance comes just a few weeks after glenn beck summon the masses for a rally in washington signaling a new trend in politics next month called bear and jon stewart are planning their own rallies in the capital artie's christine reports on this new trend of media attention in d.c. . the line is getting finer between news reader household net worth has fallen over ten trillion dollars and newsmaker for tonight i announce the rally to restore sanity. and on capitol hill an unclear sign of which is which i think they're way too many undocumented mexican workers here in the united states doing jobs and i think that we've ignored this issue for too long and it's time to roll up our sleeves and face this issue mano whatever the spanish word

for mano is stephen colbert who's late night talk show the colbert report is a parody of fox news conservative talk show host bill o'reilly and took part in the united farm workers take our jobs campaign which offers legal residents and us citizens jobs as field laborers working alongside the other farm workers most of whom are undocumented the point is we have to do something because i am not going back out there at this point i break into a cold sweat at the side of a salad bar the program is designed in part to show how few americans would actually do the jobs they say illegal immigrants are taking from them since june the twenty fourth we received eight thousand six hundred inquiries through our website take our jobs dot org but only seven people have accepted those jobs on a full time basis there testified in character the obvious answer is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables. and if you look at the recent obesity system

sticks you'll see that many americans have already started members of congress on the committee say they were shocked at the star power of stephen colbert this very moment see this much media attention not even close since the impeachment hearing for president bill clinton. it's a trend that seems to be here to stay media stars drawing media attention for religious and political purposes at glenn beck's restoring honor rally tens of thousands came out in support in response jon stewart of the daily show and yes stephen colbert. with their dueling rallies in washington scheduled for late next month a sign that perhaps for real change to be accomplished it is them and not them who americans will turn to christine for south us. for one. washington welker's team here in the studio with me to tell us more now you said that the of

the lawmakers were absolutely just shocked that they haven't seen that kind of star power since bill clinton everyone's favorite president was. is about to get impeached with a media circus out there i mean what did you see i'll give you a couple reasons why i know that this was absolutely stunning for the lawmakers and i think sunny even for the security guards there the officers you know the police officers that work there on an oral basis first of all my camera man ylia who i worked with today he said that he and he's been working in this business for years covers all kinds of things pretty mellow guy he's that i have never seen anything like this there were at least one hundred of us journalists covering this a lot of cameras in the hallway that were constantly being pushed back against the wall that the police officer saying if you don't go against the wall we're going to kick you out i think everyone was overwhelmed no more when the law than the lawmakers i'll give you an example of kind of an awkward moment at the beginning of the hearing the house judiciary chairman john conyers at the very big. ending of the hearings that you know what you're here you made your statement now leave and

everyone had a look around a little bit awkwardly that's what it we all came out here for that yeah i mean he was so stunned he said it will be on the show tonight we know. you do your show and we'll do the will do this and this is a democrat somebody who you think would like to take his side but the house subcommittee woman zoe lofgren who invited him said you know what let's give a couple of the rich people a chance to speak i invited him here as an expert witness because he did spend a day working in the field so let's keep him here and then the hearing went on what there is really interesting to see you know what who gets attention on the hill i mean i've worked with you know with eliot to we've been at hearings together where hillary clinton is testifying general david petraeus is testifying the big names that you see on t.v. that we talk about having a single day huge issues absolutely absolutely talking about the war in afghanistan and then stephen called there the media just just goes crazy you know it's interesting because you were talking about how these media figures the glenn becks

jon stewart. stephen colbert is now are almost becoming activists and they're almost doing more than the politicians are these days do you think that there's any negative to that because he is in fact a comedian that he takes away from the issue i mean i think that there could be i think that you have these t.v. personalities and they're not journalists and they don't say their journals but their t.v. . says you the journalist but. they have mass influence alone and they have if you look at the numbers especially for glenn beck daily show and colbert report these three shows alone i mean we're talking many many many more people than watch for example the nightly news or subscribe to newspapers a lot for a lot of people this is how they know what's going on in the world by these three men i think that they could use that in a very negative way i think they all personally believe that they're using it in a way that's positive certainly stephen colbert has an interesting character because he is a. parody of the character of course he's trying to sort of be

a parody of bill o'reilly so that's why he has his march to keep fear alive on the same day i assume right next to jon stewart march to restore is ready i think it'll be interesting to see how many people actually come out for that christine thanks. are still to come on tonight's show he got fired today and he's also arch will time later find out why in just a moment and india's economy is booming while america's is struggling so a look at how indian immigrants who have called the u.s. home are now starting to return to their home country to find work will be back in a moment.