president touches down in the islands to become the first russian leader to visit the far eastern territory. the u.s. and russia join forces for the first time to drug more than two hundred million dollars worth of afghanistan. a spy scandal is brewing after reports georgia has detained twenty members of the alleged russian. soldier to the sales first female president pledging to continue going to leaders.

recapping the top news stories and headlines of the week. president medvedev has become the first russian leader to visit one of the country's most far flung outposts the current it's a remote far eastern archipelago lies thousands of kilometers from moscow but is just a short hop from tokyo and for decades it's been a bone of contention between them the trip has already drawn criticism from japan with the country's premier saying it is an affront to its people while russia says it has no need to ask for permission to visit its own territory boyko reports. it's a leftover from the second world war old soviet tanks rusting on the shore with their

barrels pointed towards your pan the cornish your island together with three other pacific islands was thinking over it by the soviet union sixty five years ago but the tussle to define its national identity still goes on. this cross appeared here a few years ago soon after the russian orthodox church opened its parish on the island of sheikh a ton of to decades of thing its population the window on it is now in the midst of a baby it will. have the highest birth rates in the interests of holding region we have lots of young people votes of servicemen. the living standards are quite decent nowadays there are many jews here and parents bring them to be baptized it's wonderful to have children on the island building the church is part of the russian government's effort to raise the living standards of the korean island beach here means reinforcing national identity. all but the band and in the nine hundred

ninety s. they are and saw a large influx of japanese charities and officials trying to persuade the locals that they might be much better off if the audience were under japanese administration because you know if we get the owners bark we won't move the russians who live there we know how painful it is then you look for them citizenship. the dispute over the korean islands known as northern territories in japan always had a third party to it it was the united states that encouraged the soviet union to take them over in nineteen forty five and it was also washington that later still japan's territorial claims but now many japanese see both russia and america as occupying forces you knew of the japan has two issues one is a territorial claim to russia and the other is to get rid of american military bases on japanese turn tree under international law the grill island unequivocally belongs to russia but due to geographic and economic reasons its residents of palm

of get to japan than to the mainland. and while russia may be in their hearts japan is still vying for their minds and it could you mortar is teaching japanese at a she could tun school his salary speed by the japanese government i was is a very popular when you come to the school the children are already waiting for me demand those people who i see there are many people who came here last year i'm happy here sometimes it seems to me that i was my family again and here class seventh graders study alongside their parents who hope to get a job in japan life at the career law lands may have a proved in recent years but not quite so to stop eyeing the horizon according to a two thousand and nine nationwide poll about ninety percent of russians would strongly object to handing the korea lorenzo over to japan but the overwhelming majority of the respondents have never visited this territory and are very unlikely

to do so in the future the audience may be an integral part of russia on the map but they cannot make clear and logistical way there is still very much a foreign land some of the r.c. in russia's far east. the trip to the islands comes on the heels of madrid a visit to vietnam and a summit of southeast asian countries and her noisy multibillion dollar deals were signed and russia agreed to build the country's first nuclear power plant dmitri medvedev also stressed the need to help vietnam develop as a powerful and modern state the two sides signed additional agreements on construction of a hydro power station and cooperation in the oil sector moscow seeks to strengthen the already well established ties with the former soviet our. the first ever joint us russian anti drugs operation in war torn afghanistan has

been hailed a success special forces knocked out for drug labs on the afghan border with pakistan and confiscated a ton of heroin worth hundreds of millions of dollars afghan president hamid karzai condemned the operation claiming it violated the country's sovereignty but russian officials say karzai statement is confusing as the raid was led by the afghan interior ministry r t z company reports that for some moscow's part of the u.s. led mission came as a complete shock. poured this one died of so did this one group and this one group or this one died too while this one lost his leg and he got a mush is showing his cormorants killed in the soviet war in afghanistan two decades ago only four out of the fourteen in this picture made it out alive andrey was a commander over mine disposal unit in kandahar in two years he scored thirty five

people dozens of others lost limbs a third of all mines used against soviet soldiers were american made mostly of the us were enemy which supplied the mujahideen with the quitman weapons medicine it was american strain in asylums which helped shoot down our planes for. two decades after the soviet army acts it and dream it was taken aback to find out that russia was back in afghanistan again this time with its former anime. these are the pictures he saw on the news reports for drug producing lapse on the border between afghanistan and pakistan were destroyed in a special rate and a ton of heroin worth over two hundred million dollars. after we gave information to our u.s. and afghan partners the three sides planned the operation for three months we used about seventy special forces units three landing helicopters and six supporting

ones the whole operation lasted less than four hours. but many experts say washington needed a push before it started to act it's unbelievable to me that it took russia to tell the united states where the drug labs were when we have a hundred thousand troops we've spent eighty billion dollars on intelligence we have one hundred thousand additional contractors so we had to know were crawling all over every inch of that country but it took a year or two in fact to out the united states to force us and to embarrass us to cooperate with you to stop the drug trade which is in the interest of the entire world including the united states with more of the drug passing through its food has than any other country russia is convinced that the skin which must be confronted at its source however those who know first hand what fighting in afghanistan is like learning against being drawn into

a full scale war because. of course there should be special operations carried out against drug cartels but again special units should be in charge of this nineteen year old boys should not be recruited for the job every single operation should be planned in detail starting from the intelligence sections of the operation itself and the wrapping up of the operation so it's easy to get trapped in this war and hard to get out of it as long as islamist militancy and drunks emanating from of ghana's stand are seen as a threat to its national security rush is likely to remain a force in the region even as the u.s. works out an x. it strategy. faced with a bigger war is and less reliable neighbors said the region the united states and nato appear willing to accept growing russian influence at this point they need all the help they can get at the gathering florrie opportunity in afghanistan is a sign russia is back and this time around not as the us cold war anomie but as

a modern day ally it's in the trouble r.t. mosque. coming up a scouting for bombs. soldiers awaits him saying for using a palestinian child as a human shield and forcing him to check for explosives while his family looked on. in brazil the incoming leader takes up the baton to close the gap between rich and poor that's coming up in a few minutes right here on our team. russia and georgia could it be entangled in a spy scandal with reports tbilisi detained twenty people on friday for espionage an anonymous source quoted by reuters said that those detained are all georgian and are suspected of being part of a spy network gathering information from moscow the georgian interior ministry has so far refused to comment and says it will do so until next week russia's foreign minister sergei lavrov said moscow is not aware of any details as there are no

diplomatic relations between the two countries experts say tbilisi evasion shows how authoritarian the country actually is. when someone is arrested they are entitled to due process that means they can call a lawyer that family members can be contacted therefore arrests are announced and it never happens i can't tell you how bizarre it is to hear a police spokesman say. i can neither confirm nor deny that arrests have taken place secret arrests are the hallmark of a police state there is a new law before the georgian parliament which is called the freedom charter and it's something akin to the patriot act in the united states it will drastically increase the powers of the security service. past its first reading of the in the georgian part parliament recently and it is possible that someone is trying to create. a social mood to support that. one of the country's opposition

leaders says tbilisi uses the slightest link to russia as an excuse to prosecute this kind of charges russian links russian ties russian is spirit is always used in georgia's political propaganda i don't know anything about these people but i know that in georgia it's quite enough to be some holding three zero. no any spinach may be there but if you will fail business in russia or you are family in russia and you were raised in georgia it's quite enough for georgia law enforcement off shows to make criminal discussion about. iraqi lawmakers are demanding their government investigate allegations of war crimes the police comes a week after the online whistleblower wiki leaks released four hundred thousand secret u.s. documents on the war in iraq the files detail american forces handing prisoners

over to iraqi interrogators despite overwhelming evidence of torture the data also shed light on fifteen thousand killings over the past six years which had been previously unaccounted for iraq's prime minister nouri al maliki says the revelations are aimed at undermining the country's political stability but that's an overreaction and an unlikely motivation for the leak according to one leading expert on the country. i think that would be very doubtful to imagine that the wiki leaks and the soldiers responsible for giving these documents to them had the undermining of the iraqi government in mind when they chose this date and let's bear in mind that there hasn't been an iraqi government for seven months so it's not likely as if there's many dates to choose from when it comes to releasing this in this sense this is u.s. military documents really unlike any previous media story or report from iraq this is words from their own mouth which makes it very difficult for them to deny it and they're not really doing that if you actually listen to what the pentagon and state

department spokesman is saying what they talk about is the critical nature of the nature of the leaks and whether u.s. soldiers are informers or people working with the u.s. will be put in danger by them talking about the method of the message rather than the message itself now the message itself paints a very different picture of the iraq the americans have been telling us about the last seven years some fifteen thousand iraqi deaths have not been accounted for so the history of iraq is being written by these documents which are as i say from the americans miles themselves this week a top aide to saddam hussein was given the death sentence on charges of murder and crimes against humanity but the verdict has drawn international condemnation british m.p. jeremy corbyn says referring to the old regime was a ruse to deflect attention from the revelations by wiki leaks. the reason they're doing it now that you are correct on this is to divert attention away from the wiki leaks issue because wiki leaks have exposed the torture that is going on

systematically and i think the death sentence pronounced for the territories is to divert attention absolutely no point in this form of victor's justice being carried out will be nothing to reconcile people in iraq i think what we need is a real investigation into the behavior of the occupying forces and the iraqi army and its forces ever since the invasion of two thousand and three cancel the death penalty abandon the whole idea of the death penalty and instead look at the issues of human rights and justice and look at the behavior of forces ever since the invasion took place i do not see the value in executing terek izzy's any more than executing anybody else it will not bring the dead back it will further brutalise what is already a very brutal situation the death penalty does not work the seventy four year old to regas these was sentenced to death by hanging on tuesday he served as deputy prime minister and foreign minister to iraq's former president saddam hussein he

was convicted of killing members of political parties opposed to saddam's regime although he denied any personal involvement in coming up later this hour the streets of moscow are flooded with vampires devils and pumpkins as it celebrates halloween find out more right here on r.t. . brazil chooses dilma rousseff to be the country's first female president she will succeed the highly popular outgoing president lula da silva rousseff from the ruling party has campaigned on the success of lula da silva who's credited with lifting millions of people out of poverty but he's moralise to reports from sao paulo right now where the gap between rich and poor continues to shrink. in brazil there are those who live tucked away behind barbed wire walls. and those who live behind shanty cinderblock ones but in this developing nation and one of the fastest growing major

economies in the world where they are pioneering deep water oil research and ethanol production for example signs of human development to marked by a before and after before outgoing president lula da silva took office he woke up going to the people didn't recognise the poor today the rich are en route because the poor as poor as they were before people have the opportunity. he's increased the job market civil construction for me and for others he's giving jobs to people who didn't have it after lula's eight years in office is a brazil where jobs but really social policies are bringing inequality down were income from the poorest in the country has grown eight percent a year while the richest has grown only one and a half brazil is part of a trend in latin america of countries that are electing leftist governments that are essentially redistributing wealth to the poor in neighborhoods like this in brazil you see that most evidently and their program called both

a familiar. janina and her two daughters live together in one shared room about one hundred square feet in this favela or slum she gets by on a few odd jobs and she gets the equivalent of twenty four u.s. dollars a month from the government through both the familia and helps with food or sometimes i use it to pay a bill in return for both a familiar cash to naina has to show the government that her daughter samantha gets her vaccinations and is in school and intends at least eighty five percent of the time samantha's life is one of learning an opportunity where once in a slum like this reaching her age meant dropping out of school to work and help the family this is what i want them to said he a lot so in the future they'll have a profession and they're not going to suffer like their parents suffered so i want them to study. at the same time the parents are suffering less both the familia is responsible for a sixth of the reduction in poverty in brazil while it costs just

a half percent of g.d.p. basically it's considered very cheap and efficient it's a model being transferred globally from mexico to new york city and we're here for the first time arguably in its history the walls separating rich from poor don't look so set in stone. lauren lyster r t so paulo brazil now to some other world news of this hour more than thirty people have been killed in a police operation to release hostages from a catholic church in baghdad militants took over the church after attacking the country's stock exchange where they killed two guards they were reportedly demanding al qaeda members held in iraq and egypt to be set free. an explosion in istanbul's main square has left at least thirty two people injured authorities say a suicide bomber was targeting police officers the blast occurred close to an area where riot police are stationed in case of protests after the blast more explosive

devices were found and the few. authorities in yemen have released a female student suspected of sending explosives to u.s. synagogues earlier qatar airways said one of the two parcels posted from yemen last week had been transported onto planes before being seized in dubai bombs were found on u.s. bound planes in the u.k. and dubai u.s. officials are now going to yemen to check security practices and holes in the system. indonesia's mount merapi volcano is once again spewing ash down its slopes the disturbance caught many people that had returned home to collect possessions following a low in activity no casualties have been reported thirty eight people died last week when the volcano began to erupt and at least fifty three thousand have been moved to safety. two israeli soldiers are awaiting sentencing for forcing a nine year old palestinian boy to check for bombs during the invasion of gaza

almost two years ago activists however claim that the conviction bypasses those who allow the rampant practice to continue policy are met the boy who was thrust into the line of fire measured rubber was just nine years old when soldiers grabbed him and made him check for bombs. i was just sitting here is really soldiers took me over there there were two bags and he told me to open them but i didn't know how to do it. he was terrified of the abandoned briefcases which the soldiers thought could be booby trapped and his frightened family forced to watch one of us one of them put his hand on my son shoulder and made him go into the toilet cubicle i heard a few shots fired soon afterwards i felt like i was dying my little daughter he was with me kept saying they killed him. and yet it was five years ago that israel's supreme court made the law crystal clear human shielding is an absolute absolute no

no endangered civilians deliberately is absolutely prohibited but the reality on the ground is still very different you had to show his army years in the palestinian territories he knew the supreme court's ruling but watched his sergeant ignore it so did he and the soldiers serving under him so what we did is we just bumped into a house nearby house we grabbed one of the kids we took him with us put him in the front of the patrol you just walk your patrol in the village with your kid and then no interest out one hundred sixty complaints were filed about the way soldiers behaved in the gaza war two years ago but only forty seven criminal investigations were ever carried out most of them have since been closed i think that the ask a combat soldier and serve in the occupied territories or use palestinians as human shield is like to ask you to drink coffee in the morning but israeli lawyers say convicting the two soldiers is to the i.d.f. scribus there are always soldiers who step out of line but that's that's part and

parcel unfortunately of bringing a military operation to say that as a general phenomenon as i.d.f. soldiers you use human shields that's absurd for much of the family they take comfort they finally be getting justice even if it's only against low ranking soldiers and not the commanders they accuse of allowing human shields behind the laws back here r.t. jerusalem. this week global warming skeptics in the u.k. marked the second anniversary of what they've dubbed climate fool's day two years ago as the british parliament was debating a bill to tackle climate change the earliest snow in almost a century fell in london activists claimed the chilly quince events was just more proof that the bill is a waste of taxpayers' money writer and a legal analyst john o'sullivan says climate change is a natural process but it's become a source of profit for governments nobody disagrees that climate change is climate change for four point five billion years we're not arguing about something trivial

like the issue of climate change the real issue here is corruption now what we're trying to do is ask the governments around the world to show us the evidence it's not good enough to tell us that they have the records we found time after time here in england with the c.r.u. last year and recently in new zealand when challenge to the government agencies cannot produce the records. that was writer and a legal analyst john o'sullivan now which is and a zombie took center stage in moscow this weekend with the silly city celebrating the freakiest holiday of the year halloween clubbers swapped their glad rags for real rags and wigs. barton was there and joined in the fun and he has all the details for us. it's how we got time for trick and treating and dressing up but here in moscow it's really an occasion for jessica. one of the clubs that we see

not just scary costumes but a whole variety of weird and wonderful to see some to see system policeman to see whole souls of professionals i don't say it's a time. when he's out of the sky he's a d.j. . england's big. coal holloway's father must mean you impression the same. maybe. even make a little. bit of the end of the city it was not. an easy thing is becoming. seems to become the rule over the world to me i spent a lot of time in venice made. a really big we will say to him in every way every since addressing me. wants to listen to different types of. things out of time. well no disrespect but you look like scary to.

me. thank you down in the sky my i don't know i don't say scary. scary funny. and it's good to see that tom was having a good time for us there now for more on how moscow sell. it's the scariest day of the year you can head to our tea dot com you can also check out the latest news and analysis here's some of what's online for you right now. americans put their trust in comedians above politicians as satirist jon stewart is named of the most influential men in the u.s. . and in moscow authorities sound the alarm as estimates suggest the city is crawling with rats some figures even claim the rodents out number of people in the russian capital or about. just

a couple of minutes why america is throwing good money after bad by miscalculating the real threat of terror i mean back with a recap of our top stories coming up just.

dying to. look forward to be held don't see. the pain and suffering will never be. forgotten. as well as the joy of nomination. here a spring of nineteen forty five on our. wealthy british style i'm told some time to. find. our.

markets why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy in the kinds of reports on our. minds. would be soo much brighter than if you knew about someone from financed impressions. please for instance on t.v. dot com. discover the treasures of russia.