against the tide of history be reburied. sixty six years of retreat on r.g.p. . friends is military spending on board operations spirals out of control as the governments are accused of not stepping up for people's needs back home. yet is that right not justify the means us methods in the war on terror including charges of torture in overseas prisons again face criticism following the killing of osama bin laden. a court sentences two russian nationalists to life in eighteen years for the murder of a human rights lawyer and a reporter in moscow two years ago. and more gas for europe but is it enough

as the north stream pipeline is one step closer to completion we hear from the head of the company who doesn't think it is stay with business we'll be here for you and twenty minutes tops. one pm in moscow i mattress so good to have you with us here on r t our top story the billions spent on france's military for easer broad have already accounted for the years defense budget with paris only stepping up its foreign adventures the political price could also be costly for the sarkozy administration daniel bushell reports. heat or eat that's the choice faced by modern kids so instead of supporting the elderly france's government is accused of using that money for war. france says it doesn't have enough funds for it time and pensioners must

tighten their belts big now spends over thirty billion euro a year on the france france has more than twenty thousand soldiers currently on foreign soil in lebanon kosovo a new military base in the united arab emirates is fighting wars in libya every coast and afghanistan each french have a missile costs hundreds of thousands of euros so just five months into twenty eleven the forces are broke even with madame pension cuts pretty much up the defense operational quota for the year military excess snaps france's reputation as a careful spender investors now plan to scrap the country's troy's aaa credit rating which lets it go on the cheap course if you have a country which is very rich. it can afford it but france has been named as possibly losing its aaa status sir so everyone you shouldn't is

one closer to losing aaa status france should have stuck to the un peacekeeping remit in the ivory coast and libya wants x. premier dominique de villepin in now pays the price of gunning for regime change and for each. for integration support and to follow strict principles the one of the international community the treatment of the united nations costs are reportedly hidden from the public this military advisors back from libya he says for months france has set soldiers on the ground there contrary to its claims we have gone troops and i think by the way. that we had good cause for to find the drug in someone but it was not every kid so says she worked all her life for a decent retirement no politician or her if she wanted the money spent on campaigns

abroad cost of war pensioners forced to cover up because they called so for the heating they ask all the military campaigns worth it if the government called take care of people for a time then your bush or party paris the international contact has agreed to give the rebels more money with a temporary fund in place within weeks russia says this is simply showing support for one side and what's effectively a civil war for more on his word with our correspondent catherine mcgrath rather good to have you with us so you were at a news conference with russia's foreign minister sergey lavrov what was exactly moscow's metro message. i asked the russian foreign minister at a press call president what it was about the idea of including russia in this international contact group on the bia toward sergei lavrov said that in russia's view the only international which is intrusted with the adoption resolutions and one is hearing the implementation of such as the u.n. security council and that any country member to the u.n.

which signed under its charter is supposed to follow all of the resolutions and the foundational haunted will believe you know or any other world is simply not needed is a veil of robes. that's going to leave the contact group has established itself and now is trying to take responsibility for the international community's policy tools libya should be not only libya we're hearing voices calling for this group to decide what to do in other states in the region we believe that all sides should be focusing on peaceful resolution of the situation and not supporting one side in an internal conflict which is essentially a civil war. those comments were made at a joint press conference by the russian foreign minister and the chinese deputy foreign minister very often we see that russia and china are coordinating their voices in major international events and the most recent example of that was in march when they both abstained in the no fly zone both on leave and what the two

countries feared might happen as a result of an international intervention is happening now we see thousands of casualties i was started as an arrest is now has now appears to be a bitter war between got out of his forces and rebels but russia and china and again they stressed it today believe that medo is going far beyond its un mandate by even considering an on ground operation in libya and that it breaks the main principle of the u.n. the principle of noninterference in other countries the mastic with theirs and even china which had so far been very muted on the western intervention and becoming more and more vocal immediate cease fire and peace agreements are the only two options according to the deputy foreign minister of china which should be considered rather than an on ground or in the air ration and minding the rising number of casualties and leave it's likely that both russia and china would veto

any u.n. resolution which would to place ground troops in libya. catherine mcgrath reporting live for us thanks for that. several major spanish banks have been financing controversial arms producing companies which make cluster bombs and he reports address one company's supply bombs in two thousand and seven which have been used by colonel qadhafi against his own people campaign or any international community to take urgent measures to prevent banks from giving loans for weapons. stereotypical it's on one hand for events to say yes this is general purpose finance clearly if they ask and it will be useful to their production i ams and many other activities need company work so it's very like. what a plant is financed and the company's finances they know very well let's open up to be a company does the financing and there are many states that have that surprised convention

. means that states cannot it's assists in the production in question incentives for example and the country senses and subsidize new zealand that had impacts and that could be sliced that he did. see invest in these countries. for around the clock updates on what's going on in libya and around the world you can always check out our column including the gold coin behind the intervention find out why some believe the coalition may be fighting to keep me from burying the american dog with a shiny new local currency. what else we've got lined up for. immigrants who go to the u.s. with big ideas of a better life have made that apply themselves leaving the country to emerging about to go to emerging economies as their begins to find prosperity there. osama bin laden was planning to attack several u.s. cities according to information found in his compound in pakistan and recovered by

u.s. special forces the american special forces mission to kill the title leader was hailed as a success by washington but there is widespread criticism over why he wasn't taken alive as our he's got a chicky on reports it's not the first time u.s. methods in this war on terror have come under scrutiny. it's putting a pretty face on years of torture and a lot u.s. officials talk about the efficiency of enhanced interrogation techniques as they call them in locating bin ladin we have taken that information through waterboarding and so for those who say that waterboarding doesn't work we say that it should be stopped and never use again we got vital information would show directly where as to why are you denying that waterboarding was in part the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to the successful mission no i think some of the detainees clearly were you know they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees no tangible proof has been presented as

to how torture helped of taint valuable intelligence on bin laden although a detainee named kelly cheik muhammad was reported to have provided information on a courier that led to bin laden's capture intelligence sources say he repeatedly misled interrogators about the couriers identity and stalled the quest for years he was water boarded one hundred eighty three times what we're seeing is that waterboarding enhanced interrogation techniques just like professional interrogators have been saying for years always result in either limited information false information or no information the laying of the groundwork if you will of these techniques basically i believe wholeheartedly slowed us down on the road towards some of bin laden and numerous other members of al qaeda not not just bin laden and i'm convinced we would have found them a lot earlier had we not resorted to torture and abuse attempts to justify torture

seem outrageous to those who have been unjustly subjected to inhumane treatment at u.s. prisons overseas morata colonels was captured in pakistan in two thousand and one he was working for an ngo that helped the youth there to quit drugs and adopt a healthier lifestyle he was. sent to guantanamo and tortured for five years it will be a great sign. for agree that crime remember. you started. your courts of. ours i refuse. to. post very old. overwater every prime. minister were. never charged with any crimes for us now back home in germany the vast majority of the hundreds of individuals who have been held at guantanamo since two thousand and two like moron are said to

be of no intelligence value whatsoever some of them were children when they were captured by canadian citizen omar carter who was just fifteen when he was taken into u.s. custody he said because he was tortured he was ready to say anything that will cheer is nonet truth here to stop the pain the international community has widely condemned the unlawful practices of the us prison amnesty international called the gulag of our times and matthew alexander has carried out more than three hundred in kerry geishas in iraq and helped track down a number of terrorists he says torture that was used by the u.s. authorities in one town a mole and other prisons overseas like the infamous abu ghraib in iraq contributed to more terror when i was in iraq i oversaw the interrogations of foreign fighters and those foreign fighters the majority of them said time and time again the reason

they come to iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse of detainees and both are great and when time of day and this is not my opinion the department offense tracks the statistics and they were briefed every interrogator right there that said that torture abuse was arcade is number one recruiting tool and so this policy of torture and. these did not make america safer what it did was it caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of american soldiers recently in the wake of all the cheering about bin laden's death when asked about torture the cia director said. we would have gotten the same information through other approaches so i think there's always going to be an open question just a few years ago when barack obama was running for president on promises to shut down guantanamo and stop the torture it was presented as a done deal but now with bin laden's death it would seem the ends justify the means the means which has many experts say not only have not made americans safer but

have motivated more terrorists i'm going to check our reporting from washington r.t. pakistan says it's going to investigate its failures in the mission to track down bin laden but the country also warned it may rethink its alliance with the u.s. if washington carries out any more secret operations on its soil such as the raid that saw bin laden killed the kind of colonel anthony shaffer says the u.s. should stop funding a pakistani regime that can't be trusted. but we knew this in zero three that the pakistanis were playing both sides of the fence so our own policy leaders have been naive or worse were guarding the fact that they're not playing ball this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt you know they're incompetent relates back with that said one of the things we've recognized and we won't talk about is that a lot of the money we're giving them is going right back into their nuclear weapons program so the problem is any time we give them money we cannot use it for the purposes which we give it to him for and it's probably lost in these other kind of programs of their own making and the problem is you cannot continue to fund. a

regime which will not play ball and frankly we're in danger in our own our or indian allies in the process of what we're doing commentary from lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer speaking about pakistan's alleged links to terror groups. the russian court has handed a life sentence to a nationalist convicted of killing a human rights lawyer and a journalist in central moscow two years ago his associate in the crime was handed an eighteen year sentence in jail or he's our son a boy who is live outside of the core with more sana so this sentence is being seen as a new landmark for this type of crime in russia tell us more about that. absolutely mad this is a very unusual trial not only because of this sentence but also because of the crime that was committed should just in the lead at least in the process most of the hate crimes perpetrators in russia they were trying to hooliganism charges and this is probably one of the first times in the russian history did the perpetrators of this crime or not only try but also fountain's to lengthy prison terms on these

exact charges now. in this particular case the main defendant. can still live in prison and he was found guilty of murder and according to the jury he deserves no leniency he's calm old wives the twenty five year old muscovite gave a high. was found to be acting as an accessory to one of the murders and she was sentenced to eighteen years in prison now this crime was striking not only because of the sentence but also because of the way he was can feed and carried out both he can defend passes the along to an ultra nationalist group and. warding to the core of the few morgellons because of the ideological differences of course was a prominent human rights reporter he made

a name for himself representing victims of various hate crimes and what he was very much just live. in a community of russian ultra nationalist neo nazi sympathizers now they made a plan to kill him and never bamber in late november of two thousand and nine the. weapon of murder murder weapon reach was very unusual for this kind of case they actually used an antiquated nine thousand time gun he still to kill a bolt of the victims and they did that they committed the crime in broad daylight they followed mark after one of the news conferences that he'd given in the center of moscow he was walking down the street at kompany by an especially about who it was was once journalist she joined him to ask some additional questions and they were girls killed in broad daylight and the. mosco now the cop with the

criminals are highly arm usual copple they come from very different badger on hospice comes from an underprivileged family her boyfriend comes from a very well off family but nonetheless they found something in each other and. russian journalist nicknamed them the russian bully and. why. cos some displeasure within the families of the victims who ask them not. to know is not to remand to size these people because the crime that they committed was both grave and grievous and a number of organisations also aside its bid them in welcoming this verdict and saying that it indeed represented i'm our departure from the culture of impunity that is normally and usually associated with the killings of journalists and human rights activists here in russia all right our son

a boy called live outside the court room for us thanks very much for that we're going to get updates from you throughout the day. there was next to no progress on the european joint missile defense system and a meeting of the russian nato council the idea initially put forth by moscow has been met with little enthusiasm from nato or the u.s. so far russia is on going to the alliance says the politicians and not the military who might be holding thanks brooke. under the impression that the military dialogue is running to his of a political dialogue the american policy clearly refuses to consider russia's interests but they're also refusing to provide us with guarantees that the posed he was a missile defense system is not targeted at russia the americans want to deploy interceptor missiles capable of shooting down our nuclear weapons near our launch the office of continuous the time when they will be able to shoot down a large part of our nuclear arsenal if it's launched a month at the seam time which you keep telling us that it's not aimed against

russia they see reporters and we want them to give us written guarantees but most of the time the u.s. diplomats and politicians simply smile back at us. washington says the missile defense project will help protect europe from countries like iran and north korea has repeatedly voiced concerns it could also threaten its national security at a russian nato summit in lisbon last year both sides have a compromise agreeing to work together on the project. turning out to some other stories making headlines across the globe protesters in syria are preparing for what they call a day of defiance against the regime this comes as tanks have been withdrawn from a clampdown in daraa and deployed elsewhere the town was affectively under siege for ten days with electricity and phone services cut off snipers shooting people from the rooftops violence claimed more than five hundred fifty lives since the unrest started seven weeks ago. counting underway after polls

close in a series of national and local elections in the u.k. early results suggest the third largest party liberal democrats are set to lose control in several areas elections also appear to be a referendum other countries voting system which could see a switch from the first past the post to what's known as the alternative vote results won't be fully known until late friday. extreme weather continues hampering parts of the u.s. as communities struggle to rebuild from the devastation that's left more than three hundred dead people in a number of easter and station bracing for a record breaking floods in route the latest reports from texas and publicly the southwest warned of a threat of severe drought many people preparing for the worst as forecasts offer a little hope of an early respite. for twenty years one a russian aerobatics team has been wowing the crowds around the world pilots of those three g. are famous for their displays with less than a meter between each of the plane's wings or chinese catarina as are about is lucky

enough to be watching them right now she joins us live with more on tell us more about it. matt i'm sure you can hear the credible noise behind me that of course is that beginning just the beginning of the anniversary show given to the people by the so-called russians with a team of aerobatic pilots who out loud to the world with their techniques and their performances are going to hear more of crowds have gathered all over the world people. seek eight countries on the line in the course of their career performing stunning aerobatics studs that have allowed their colleagues renowned aerobatic teams all over the world they of course doing things that you know on their back has ever attempted to do course as well as the usual stunt. such as barrel rolls loop de loops and leak loops they do things such as applying

information with another famous russian aerobatic team which also had its twentieth anniversary this year the russian knights they do i fly over with nine of them all information for types of planes flying all very closely together something that will all their aerobatic team in the world has ever attempted or achieved of course this is their anniversary so it's their gift to the people and their gift to themselves they're taking to the skies once again laing the crowds with their stunning techniques and of course this is just the beginning of a thirty minute show we'll be bringing you pictures from this fantastic display as soon as we get them very cool and sure to keep your drum safe out there sounds louder thanks very much archy's caterina's are all wired with that report and he's in our way is up next with the business news stay with us.

below and welcome to business here in r t there's a bloodbath taking place in the commodities market it's the biggest sell off in the sector for two years and virtually all wrong materials are sharply down the weakening trend has suddenly accelerated as investors worry about the strength of the global recovery and the possibility of higher interest rates in china recent economic data in the u.s. has done little to inspire confidence and there's considerable nervousness about keep payroll figures later on friday some investors are suggesting the commodities boom is now over let's take a look at those numbers. but while prices are leading the commodities pack downwards on friday after seeing losses of around eight percent over night light sweet is currently trading around ninety seven dollars per barrel while brant is around one zero eight dollars per barrel. gold is one of the rare elements of

calm it's holding firm after making big losses in previous sessions meanwhile silver is continuing to slide partly down over three and a half percent. however that's still trying to percent below recent. and the equity markets are also down the footsie is almost half percent in the red and in germany of the jacks is up slightly this hour recovering from earlier losses on the way but heavily selling just before the close on thursday. here in russia the markets are particularly volatile both the r.t.s. and the my sets opened sharply lower but have since been rebounding the r.t.s. is almost back to neutral while the my sex is up nearly one percent that's just spite of markets being heavily dominated by resource stocks. but the current correction on the russian market has seen equities sell off fifty percent since the beginning of april but it says that they grab their. capital explains it's been

concentrated in a couple of sectors. in such a period of time when one market is correcting this is all looking to take profit in a stock so that in the most that is of is the view and here sector now we see this suffering the most which is the exactly the trend of the last three days gazprom has been one of the biggest losers and to remind you still up almost twenty percent year to date so it's quite obvious when there's a century where the financial sector is actually it is correcting but financial stocks are a bit more resilient we're not seen as much momentum in selling the consumer names because they're down heavy year to date i always the utilities or i think the downside is also a big cap because they had very bad year and actually there is a lot of upside in those names on a one year once a year horizon so i think of the names probably we are not better to sell. north stream has finished like the world's longest subsidy pipeline across the baltic going to start pumping gas from russia to germany in the autumn ahead of north

stream mathias varden expose the eleven billion dollar project will not add enough capacity to meet future demand and more pipelines will be. formed from institutions. shoring to. become something from supply and consumption you will move in the next two years ago and. mostly the protocol for fifty five. this is a quarter because there's. also supply. to cover the new. york. that's all days from now from the business to ask more for you in less than an hour same party.

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