as december and it's been in the gay stations ever since but will now seriously be on the table in next month's allow mug russia nato meeting to take place in lisbon and possibly even before that when they take secretary-general anders fogh rasmussen visits moscow well one the particular area in which both russia and they say you can cooperate is in the own going issue of afghanistan and maintaining peace in that area and also in the ongoing fines against drug trafficking that comes out of afghanistan earlier this week several leading u.k. newspapers i made the statement that russia would be is sending a troops back into the country to help in training afghan forces now russia's envoy they say to be a ruggles that has flatly denied that another area of potential cooperation is in the future discussion on the europe walled missile defense shield in the spiritual

improved to russia needs so of friendship nato has said that it very much wants nature be a russia role the to be a policy all of that discussion on how best to implement that missile defense shield of course in europe. that's what reporting there and if your daughter of the editor in chief of the russia or in global affairs magazine says the memories of the experience of two fresh from moscow to send troops back into the country. russia has been. before and experience was such a terrible that i can't imagine in the circumstances under which russia will return to afghanistan. rumors are based i guess. in terms of a discussion of world future or going to stand which is also in the framework of need to a russian need and saw but it's not a russian troops but this would be a dignified good subodh how russia can support future of course the. regime of the

situation by other means spying on me. and dr adrian pabst electrum politics of the university of kent told me earlier that if russia is to provide helicopters and training to nato in afghanistan there is a legitimate reason for that i think their. security interest that moscow is quite legitimately defending does two things one is terrorism moscow is worried that extremism from afghanistan pakistan will spread across central asia and also perhaps fuel conflict in in russia and secondly the flow of drugs which is a major security and health issue because it of course is part of organized crime and causes such towel social and physical damage among drug users in russia so russia's got a legitimate interest it's defending them and it's just right it does so well nato has admitted it needs help in afghanistan there are already fears that the end of

operations in iraq will plunge the country into crisis if it is revelations from wiki leaks which claimed torture is already widespread the whistle blowing web site also raised concerns that could have controlled northern iraq will erupt into bloodshed when u.s. troops withdraw sebastian meyer has more. a dawn raid a race against time to catch militants off guard in the iraqi province of kirkuk where in the summer of duck cook and the police have just a few minutes to get into position before sunrise. daybreak's in the raid begins police under the supervision of the u.s. army go door to door searching rooms and checking residents against lists of unknown terrorists. police dominated heavily by kurds have been remarkably successful recently they've cut terror attacks by over fifty percent in the past few months these guys are very good they are very good and they're very good at intelligence and develop they are gathering intelligence and developing

intelligence and the other sort of verge growth he's not worried about but others mainly the cities non kurds are here in downtown they're going to deny the urgent care of the turks but due to their own historic claim of the kirkuk is a unique city in iraq the two melting pot of all the different ethnicities in the country but this mixture continues to lead to extremely volatile ethnic tensions the two thousand and nine field report that was recently leaked by the whistleblower wiki leaks states that without strong and fair influence likely from a third party these tensions may quickly turn to violence after the u.s. forces withdraw all of this will in terms of security when the u.s. leaves there will be no independent security force right now the security is from the kurdish side of the city this is the truth when the u.s. leaves things will get worse it will be conflicts arabs will stand up and created and we should say with and this will. go for

a bit but wars will begin with. an example of this violence wasn't long in coming no more than five minutes after we finished the interview a roadside bomb targeting the police detonated in the center of the city. luckily for the police the terrorist nest it appears that despite the gangs that the police are making. the american troop withdrawal could easily lead to a return to sectarianism in kirkuk for kurds arabs and turkmen alike the consequences of the u.s. led war have left the future of kirkuk very much uncertain sebastian meyer care cook for r.t. . well still ahead this hour for you u.s. senators enjoy the perks of insider trading and how americans seem to be looking at using legal loopholes to fatten their one it's plus. since global warming is just a lot of all their. activities to says that mother nature gave them a sign that they're right by sending snow two years ago all the details in a few minutes we hear on t.v.

. recently discovered all reserves in the eastern mediterranean looks set to become the latest point of tension in the troubled middle east at least four major competitors a staking their claim israel lebanon turkey and cyprus all want to peace but with no clearly defined maritime borders the fight could be lengthy and bitter and despite unclear border demarcation israel has already gained the upper hand and started developing two sites. takes a closer look now at the divisive deposits. prayer is a long time in coming more than we have been begging for a year a year please lord don't let me down don't let me down and finally jackie malaysia's praise have been answered the oil company he's invested in reportedly hitting bingo underground we're still talking about the largest amount of oil average to be discovered in the state of israel there's a joke in israel that when moses led the jews out of egypt he took

a wrong turn on his way to the promised land bringing them to the one spot in the middle east that has no oil but that punchline might need to change because it seems that moses might not have been so wrong after all in two thousand and nine israel announced the discovery of a first major natural gas field off its coast but the most recent reports from the giant natural gas site off the coast of haifa point to a potential for billion barrels of black gold we will be able to future. energy. it will be less expensive which is how important. from a political. appointee we will surely we will be less dependent on the. import of foreign oil but it's not only is rolling claim to the reserves greek cyprus and lebanon also say the oil fears and wild international law allows a country to drill in the so-called continental shelf of its coast the fact that

israel and lebanon have never agreed on maritime boundaries makes it clear where israel in and lebanon begins i know the club about how its version of think the border alone will pass if and when they will have a negotiation i don't know that there's a how it's all version or the above what they're not the agreement on whether and because the two countries are enemy states there's unlikely to be any agreement anytime soon both have threatened to go to war over the issue obviously this. an israeli company. has an israeli company and. will not be. allowed to enter into lebanese territory or will have any further connection with exploration of a lebanese aghast lebanon filed a complaint with the united nations after israel placed floating markers extending two miles into the sea and weighing in on the conflict hizbollah is the major

political actor in lebanon. and strongly supported from the syrian iran. and it would seem if we take statements and public position seriously which we are they really interest in form and to really creating turned. israel has the upper hand for now it's already struck a deal with cyprus and is preparing to start extraction while lebanon still needs to sort out the boundaries of its economic zone with cyprus and syria and it will be years before it has the evidence it needs to show that israel's fields extend into lebanese territory policy r.t. television. but forget there's much more for you on our website it's not a dot com online all the time just log on and explore at your will probably then i have a quick look and see what i might catch you right the moment on our on the subject i was bored with it's twenty forty winter and the preparations a massive construction work reveal secrets of russia's. web site discover why

audiologists not our fleet are racing to the site. and going against tradition find out why young couples in india have faced family for ads for taking money to put off parenthood one available online. capitol hill insiders in the us are thought to be abusing their position to make some extra pocket money the wall street journal has reported that many in congress are taking unfair advantage of the knowledge of markets and as it is going to reports it's not even illegal. the annual salary of members of the united states congress one hundred seventy four thousand dollars the profit they can make by trading on inside information priceless. a number of

u.s. lawmakers and dozens of congress staffers have reportedly traded thousands of dollars worth of stocks of companies they or their boss is wrote last for under the u.s. law there is no conflict of interest here they're just plain cheating and it's not fair what they're doing currently all u.s. lawmakers and their highest paid staffers have to do is to disclose information once a year on their finances by the analysis of the wall street journal u.s. public servants have been phenomenally successful trading stock at the peak of the wall street crisis senator spencer backus made tens of thousands of dollars betting against the market that he's comedian helps oversee and he's the ranking member on the house committee on financial services. chris miller a top energy policy adviser to the senate majority leader harry reid nearly doubled

his bat when his boss helped pass legislation that wander up benefiting the fur after his staff or his name was mentioned in a list of capitol hill stock traders mr reid reprimanded his aide. because of course. my attempts to talk to some of those involved were time consuming and unsuccessful. we talk a lot about exporting democracy one of the bedrocks of a successful democracy i believe is freedom from corruption the sense that elected officials are elected to serve the public not to and hence their own wallets or that of their friends or cronies or family congressman brian baird offered a bill that would ban insider trading on capitol hill years ago but the act received the support of phone the nine out of four hundred thirty five members in the house of representatives and none in the senate and in this case you've got.

the possibility of making great amounts of money in ways that aren't illegal and ways that are hard to detect congressman baird says annual disclosure reports are not enough to my knowledge there is no human being employed by the congress of the united states who has looked at our finance reports with a with an eye towards possible conflict of interest now there is no initiative to change the rules what for the rest of america is cheating it's perfectly legal for the country's lawmakers why would they want to change it as it is now a public servants stock market activities are hard to track there are no investigators here on the hill doing that and some believe those senators and staffers who have recently been caught in the spotlight are just the tip of the iceberg vanished on r.t.e. washington d.c. . and bruce being from michigan state university's college of law says the u.s.

has made corruption elite legal i should say twenty minutes from now there's more on this topic in cross talk where peter viles guest aside there's only one way to be corruption democratically and that's through elections. congress has had its hands completely into this financial crisis in the late ninety's. there is no doubt they're not going to or the only thing you can do to a congressman or a senator is not elect them i mean. we're marveling at the fact that there's almost one hundred seats available that contested well i recall that there are four hundred thirty five seats up every year what what is it what do we call it when three hundred thirty five of the guys are in serious contests we don't call it corruption but in this country there is no doubt that we have legalized what in other countries we call corruption. the institutions are set up to accommodate the

congressmen and the congress and make the rules. crosstalk coming your way soon here in r.t. global warming skeptics in the u.k. have gathered to mark what they've dubbed climate fools day two years ago snow fell in london as the british parliament was debating a bill to tackle global warming it was the first such early snowfall for over eighty years activists claimed the ironic coincidence was just more proof the police have wasted billions of taxpayers pounds one of those belting thomas is reverend phillip foster who sees no reason to play man made c o two there's not a particularly dramatic rise in c o two. and anywhere carbon dioxide does not affect the climate. i think that's a fundamental statement that is the mis connection that the climate warmest or

alarmists made if there is climate change of course but that is a natural thing but no it isn't due to man's actions anyway man's amount of carbon dioxide represents a tiny proportion of the shift anyway about four percent whether extreme events always take place always have and always will blame them on human emissions is simply. pointless because there is no real connection now let's have a quick look at some other stories making headlines around the world today the former president of argentina. has died of a heart attack age sixty news and shocked the country has been tipped to win the next presidential elections to succeed his wife cristina fernandez will be remembered for successfully battling a crippling economic crisis after taking office in two thousand and three before his wife's term began four years later he also boosted relations with neighboring states. the death toll in indian easier from two natural disasters has topped three

hundred a tsunami hit several islands killing over two hundred seventy well over thirty have died after a volcanic eruption bad weather meant it took rescue workers two days to reach the victims of the massive wave the earthquake that caused a huge wall of water is along the same fault line that caused the two thousand and four tsunami which killed over two hundred thousand in a dozen countries. what the government says survived a low confidence vote in the parliament over planned austerity measures thirty thousand protesters hit the streets in the capital because rest on wednesday demonstrate against proposed budget cuts because it was forced to slash public sector wages and government spending to comply with. that helped keep afloat last year. british taxpayers expect their money to be spent for their benefit rather than on upgrading the infrastructure of poor countries. and the other views of dr levy is an expert in. nations. coming your way shortly.

thank you very much for talking now first of all tell me how much it costs the u.k. to be a member of the well that's of both a very important question and a very tricky question to ask in the first instance the treasury writes a check to the european union every fortnight to move a two hundred million pounds now that's not the whole picture because that is

basically that's the contribution money comes back as part the overall net deal over which the treasury has appeared limited say that's not necessarily well spent however if you factor in the direct and indirect costs associated with the you membership the overall bill for business and for the country. could be as high as two hundred million pounds a year the problem is that nobody knows this because there has not been a cost benefit analysis if you are you membership so it is a huge question mark there which taxpayers alliance and other organizations are campaigning to get the answer to where does that money go well a lot of it doesn't come back into the into the u.k. because the u.k. is after germany the second largest contributor to the the budget certainly in net terms and along with a small number of northern european countries it's one of the one of the few which are overall net contributors so you could say that a lot of it goes in terms of subsidizing and upgrading the superstructure an

infrastructure of eastern and southern europe which from a british taxpayers viewpoint one has to question is a british taxpayer contributing billions of pounds a year effectively to another country is that it's not proper use of taxpayers' money so you're talking about one hundred ten billion euros which is an impossible figure for most people to understand what does it mean what would it buy in real terms well let's let's narrow this down a little bit more i mean a hundred hundred ten billion euros is the overall cost including all the regulations and the red tape the cost of the regulations and red tape in this is based on the commission's own osa to sticks the cost of the regulations is put in terms of the u.k. is greater than the actual value of the trade that it's meant to regulate the second thing is if you just look at the simple physical cost and the membership fee that is the equivalent of forming a chain along appear and dumping

a block of gold off the end of it every one hundred seconds. it's a gold ingots every hundred seconds just cast into the watery depths and in terms of schools and hospitals which is something that desperately needs to upgrade what about that now it's about a new hospital every three days i think it pays for the world family in two days i think it's something like every five days is the equipment to repairing every single cathedral in england and when we were doing the research for a book ten years on which is it looks hypothetically where the u.k. would be indeed any country would it would be were we to leave the european union which is stop breaking down the that the benefits that we could be spending the money on other than into what's basically a financial sinkhole from the u.k. taxpayers if you point it's just a waste of money is it a bit less in this sort of global economy to talk about british money for british people well not really because the british taxpayer of course is funding taxes and

we would naturally expect that the money to be spent on things which are of benefit to themselves i mean it's fundamentally old you know that their money and you talk about a global economy but of course the money isn't going to. say. north america it's a european system it's not a global system so we're short of having a global. economy with the european union if that's what you really like a lot of politicians say that it's just not realistic to me the e.u. wholesale but you think differently we already have with respect to the european union about ten different levels of association with the european union you have countries which are full members such as france you have countries which have got certain dr such as the u.k. which is opted out of the single currency you have countries which are part of the you can economic area such as norway you have countries which have got bilateral trading agreements such as canada and mexico there's even

a special form of association for. countries like north korea now i'm not saying we should have a form of association with the year that pyongyang has but we're simply saying if you have ten different ways of of trading and allying in a series cheating with with the source and the opinion there's a mechanism in there somewhere which is appropriate for any country and it doesn't have to be full membership we live in a world they don't we which is essentially dominated by superpowers the united states russia china and india don't the smaller countries of the european union need each other well absolutely not it's good that we're caught cooperating where we want to cooperate it's good that we're trading we're going to where we want to trade let's not kid ourselves i mean the european union is in the big picture it's big it's it's in danger of becoming a school or tech part of the world the voicing economies in the world of obviously in the far east india china and also you know brazil indonesia and other places now

rather than linking ourselves too closely with one part of the of the world trading system which is decreasing in importance the u.k. or any european country should be more about being involved in a more proactive free trade across the whole world rather than becoming part of a regional association which is risks becoming a professional protectionist book what we're seeing in europe at the moment is the degree of social unrest in response to the austerity measures because of the debt crisis do you see that impacting not just on the same but on the european union as a political entity yeah and the sad thing is it was something that you were skeptics who warning about even while the eurozone was being created we were saying that if you're going to be creating a currency union then you have to have a full economic union in order to whether these the shocks and you have to have a model so that where there is an asymmetric shock in one part of the the either basically you can have the larger most on unemployed. we have to move

from one part of the country to the other or you have large amounts of financial reserves which are able to support the idea. a couple of examples which your viewers might be familiar with in the u.k. you have for instance you have a single currency it's called a pound. and if liverpool is in recession what happens is because there is social mobility in the u.k. people from liverpool go and find a job in manchester or down in london or whatever and also you have a central government which pays part of the tax revenue into their pool in order to we generated now people accept that because there is this sense all of the democrats the sense of common citizenship and so sharing together we don't get in the here thank you very much thank you.

wealthy british style sun it's time to. market why not. get under. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's cancer or a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report. shows that so much of it which of course you write on it until you corruption in one form or another is a cancer that eats away at countries and societies around the world that corruption is very much part of.

the. motion to be soo much brighter than if you only bounce from phones to christians. please friends don't talk don't come. from. more news today volumes says once again flared up if these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. the giant corporations are all today.

research joined us a very warm welcome this is from the russian capital we're here twenty four hours a day top stories now. russia is seeking to prevent nato from placing major forces close to it for the close will that would limit the military presence in its newest member states nato. operation with moscow particularly on european missile defense and afghanistan. tensions in northern iraq over fears that. u.s. troops leave the kurdish controlled region. website wiki leaks released documents highlighting cases of hostility between kurds and arabs. to

a showdown looms between israel and lebanon over a recently discovered oil reserves in the eastern mediterranean to turkey in cyprus staking a claim so. clearly defined maritime borders experts predict the countries are likely to reach agreements anytime soon. be here in less than half an hour from now as the news continues on t.v. in the meantime we discuss the legal loopholes in the u.s. and corruption there the main issues on cross talk next.