it's seven pm here in moscow this is r t coming to you live from new snow with our top story this evening oil prices have jumped in response to the latest heated exchange between iran and the u.s. over the persian gulf and the critical trade route in the strait of hormuz washington says it's airships will continue their missions in the region despite tehran's warnings that they should stay away iran threatened to block oil shipments through the strait of hormuz if new western sanctions hit its exports the threat came at the same time as a ten day long naval exercises that showcase new aircraft and medium range missiles the u.s. who ships are stationed in the area maintains that it won't tolerate any passage of time correspondent pepe escobar says you sanctions against iran will hurt the global economic outlook. i can imagine if it was the other way around if these

sanctions were against american exports of oil or if this sinks us or against china for instance assuming china you know main source of of of foreign exchange for china will be to export energy it is an act of war this thing is how you're going to implemented and who's going to respect me with europeans like you know the french foreign ministry pathetically is saying oh look we have to curb our imports of iranian oil what's going to happen to the european economy if that happens now it's one hundred eighth a barrel so it's going to be one hundred twenty any one months could be one hundred forty one hundred fifty and you want to recover the economies of the u.s. and europe as well with oil at one hundred fifty is not going to happen and it's totally counterproductive. law and amendments and the way it's going to be interpreted by the obama administration i'm not sure they're going to try to provoke a confrontation against south korea for instance an ally with russia which china or

which countries in south america are essential for that matter. and the editor of the corbett report current affairs website says that by trying to slap more sanctions on iran the u.s. and e.u. are only stirring up the dangerous tension in the region. i think it's quite remarkable to think that france and the us and other countries would be willing to step up sanctions that have already had such a profound effect on the iranian people on the basis of their hunch that era to run is developing nuclear weapons as as france has basically put it is quite remarkable because that really does is tantamount to an act of war the idea that iran would really close off the straits of hormuz or attempt to do so would only be an absolute last measure resort for a country that relies on the importation of refined gasoline and other things through the very straits that they would be a sensibly sabotaging and planting mines and so it's it's quite remarkable to think that that iran would do that in any other situation other than they felt that the

entire existence of their country was under threat so adding more sanctions to to the mix is is really just a recipe for military disaster i think. we're going to share your take on this developing story go to our web site to tell us what you think of new sanctions on iran so far this is what the numbers are looking like over half of those who responded say iraq will be pushed to desperation saying new sanctions have now more seventeen percent think the world economy will suffer a sanctions drive boil prices sky word almost as many as fifteen percent believe u.s. measures simply won't work and thirteen percent say iranian people not the government will be most heard on the sanctions cast your vote at r t v dot com. the process of finding a republican candidate to contest the twenty twelve american presidential election officially got underway in state of iowa off the results however were anything but

decisive with career politician mitt romney beating his conservative counterpart rick santorum by just eight votes just a few points behind the two was libertarian ron paul the only anti-war candidate in this year's lineup even hours before the vote though many people were still undecided after a republican election run up marred by sex scandals mudslinging and take for tat p.r. by despite all of that former congressional aide and diplomat told ruben relieved it's wrong paul who stands out from the rest of. its foreign policy is very distinct from the other candidates in that he has a more isolationist viewpoint he wants the united states to retreat from international conflicts and she will fares in some areas that can be good as opposed to military action with a growing who's opposed to the rock war but the other candidates are all extremely hawkish on foreign policy very conservative ron paul does stand out amongst

them makes voters what it's worth spars leading the party and getting other boards it really. hasn't done that someone who says i am. a free american and i can make it on my own and that's what ron paul really embodies but republicans also understand that that kind of positioning will not win the general election against president obama. well as the republican campaign develops democrats are beginning to wonder just how much appeal president obama still has having come to power on a wave of hope four years ago his chances are beginning to a dimmer with complaints from voters of broken promises and corporate favors driving them away archies weren't important has more. three years ago one historic campaign turned u.s. politics into a pop culture phenomenon in. the world the democratic candidate achieved unprecedented support international fame and

a record breaking six hundred fifty million dollars in donations. thousands of new yorkers celebrated the victory clutching an enormous american flag hand sewn by obama supporters but the winds have changed and the very same democratic symbol waved in honor of the president elect in a way huge strength from a strike has been donated to a movement that became a phenomenon in two thousand and eleven they're about twenty people holding up david move food out organize the flag project after being inspired by obama rhetoric a dream shattered by the subsequent years of politics as usual curly what's inspiring me as a as a lot of us like that that's the thing that's inspiring you know like that's why i brought the fight so ws and the thing that inspired me about it is the fact that it's a grassroots movement. that had a like a very clear and transparent process artist shepard fairey seems similarly just an

chanted releasing an updated version of his iconic hope poster replacing obama with his now clear support for occupy wall street with an economy still in crisis wall street largely unregulated social programs slashed and over forty five million citizens on food stamps it all starts with making a decision to get involved obama's familiar prose may not be enough to win back his familiar fan base he didn't produce what people wanted him to produce in two thousand and eight professor and author dr cornel west was one of obama's biggest supporters i think he's got the vision has got the newness he's. at the freshness taking part in more than one hundred campaign events but last april the prominent intellectual told r.t. that obama has failed he's the friendly face of the american empire abroad he's in the process actually of becoming very sadly

a pawn of big finance and a puppet of big business and any politician here knows they're in trouble when the hollywood a listers start turning their backs are you happy with the way that obama has been running the country. you. know now and i think i really think he misinterpreted his. his mandate yet the approval ratings show voters are even more turned off with the alternatives leaving obama seemingly the lesser of two evils america's president clearly enters the twenty twelve race amid a growing band of disillusioned democrats most will still back barack obama over his republican rivals arguably with heavy hearts in two thousand and eighty was the unassailable candidate of choice this time mr obama is likely to stay if i default. new york. will still have through this hour here in our two year

earning their daily bread we tell the story of two entrepreneurs who bank their way to the top and russia's top and pastry sector. and the euro won't flare up again with athens now threatening to pull out of the eurozone unless the e.u. and i.m.f. funnel more valid cash into its collapsing economy. the first egyptians are heading to polling stations once again as the country's first democratic election in more than half a century enters its final phase results are to be announced next week with the muslim brotherhood being the favorites after clinching the lead in the first two stages of the vote last year earlier were overshadowed by clashes between protesters and the army egypt's ruling military generals have been accused of clinging to power and now face anger over their handling of protests that have left fifty nine dead since november reason army raise on western sponsored n.g.o.s have

also added to concerns over the country's stability the mideast expert to rico lee says that in order to ease tension the military has to give its people what they want and step down. you don't you if egypt shows the military to be a defense. to say you know the concrete against out so. well intervention and mostly ability. rather tall because for the last thirty to forty years egypt has essentially when they run don't look barak or i'm just being a mocked each and pay to ship run by the military and people want an end to that so when the miller creek books serve more barak on trial again it's an attempt to divert attention from its own rule in the country that is what is really worrying people and that is all to be discussed and checking we insert geos the jim carrey is is i think to show that form bars are manipulating of concrete and so for

which is again nonsense i think washington has a great deal of influence within the military oh after all it billions of dollars i mean big in a billion dollars a year that's a huge amount of money. for the rise of is the most parties in egypt has prompted western concern for the policies the country may adopt if the likes of the muslim brotherhood do step in to power because up with regional politics expert jeremy salt his outlook on developments in the arab world is coming up next hour in artie's interview. during the for what's been happening in the middle east and the policies that western governments have followed since been this year they have always had a noble motive we're doing this for this very very good reason but we don't have to be terribly skeptical or cynical to understand that actually behind the noble motive is self-interest if we look at what happened in egypt the west backed

mubarak right to the very last and then was no longer possible to back him when it was indefensible the gump. greece has announced that it could ditch the euro and exit the euro zone as little as three months unless the e.u. and i.m.f. fund it with a second one hundred thirty billion euro bailout all talks over the cash lifeline have stalled for months over the poor performance of austerity measures and fears for the future belgian business journalist your hands and overvotes believes the numbers say it all and that greece's exit is unavoidable. the greek economy is going down like a stone. g.d.p. contracted by four percent in two thousand and ten by six percent in two thousand and eleven and there is probably worse to come in two thousand and twelve and i think we are now at the point where everybody has research realizes that we cannot go on like list and unrest and even the country is becoming so much of

a threat that some drastic things needs to be done and my reading of what the greek government is doing is that they are trying to they are looking for an alibi to offer to their public by which they could say well it's not our fault it's the international community that pushes us towards the exit of the euro zone and i think also here in europe at the brussels that quarters of the european commission people start to realize they really are at the end of the road there is no other option left for them they're in a deadlock they cannot rewind the greek economy and so they are facing in a big black hole. well it's seen as one of the biggest blystone in modern britain but tackling gang violence there is proving difficulty with the government seeing it seeing a firm response rather as the only means of dealing with it is growing criticism though that attempts to improve the situation are addressing the roots of the

problem archies morris smith explains. you know. the dark underbelly of life in britain is in a city's gang culture dramatized here for a television series for gavin it was real life he got into a gang to escape a feeling of powerlessness an abusive home life where money was a constant struggle. so. angry over the top. name for the crazy. people. at his lowest ebb gavin admits to having stabbed

a girl and his story isn't unusual in deprived areas nowhere is the question of how to solve the gang problem in london more relevant than here in new it lies in the shadow of london's two thousand and twelve olympic park but it's also got more gangs than almost anywhere else in london around here young people say you start just by hanging out with your friends on the streets and you end up in a spiral of gang violence and fear. in you are more than half of the kids are living below the poverty line and they don't feel the government's doing anything to help them how can you hold me. you have to have a. neighbor . and the neighbor. to government really knew and understood would be happenin. when gavin met sheldon

thomas an x gangster himself he turned a corner and they're now working in a team to get young people out of gangs the government claims it wants the same thing and having laid the blame for august's riots firmly at the door of gangs their solution the carrot and stick method are as you found some excellent police work to identify and manage the highest risk members through a combination of targeted surveillance enforcement and arrest for any offense however minor and positive offers of training employment and drugs treatment for those who want a different life but for those not prepared to break away from violence they will face harsher and tougher punishments but this isn't going to work according to sheldon thomas who feels the government is forcing him at every turn what they do. the manifestation of god's gone for i don't get this gang rape drug detector that's just

a manifestation of the causes of it and stemming from from the breakdown moles on the window from society as a whole while the government rhetoric sounds encouraging other policies will undermine both carrot and stick economical sterett he cuts will mean sixteen thousand fewer police officers on the streets and services that deal directly with gangs now will have their funding cut by between twenty and ninety percent in some areas that means young people like gavin in the future will have nowhere to go but the st lawrence smith altie london. well more on the stories we're covering can always be found on our website our two dot com here's a look at what's online for you right now we focus on ten events that shape twenty eleven and bring you our correspondents firsthand account on reporting from the world's hot spots that's in our testimony series. and the night the

planet partied our picture galleries capture the high spirits from around the world as we heard in twenty twelve and much more for you r.t. dot com. up next expert entrepreneurs based in russia tell us their success stories and describe their path to prosperity in the latest from our pathfinder series. well today we bring you the story of him and go hard to call an area gurus who baking their way to fortune in russia's premier premium pastry sector for more than four years now they've been running the most successful business of its kind having started from scratch they now give us a taste of what it takes. i am twice a week in the production center and the rest of the time i'm in the restaurant genya. genya beer that puzzles just to make sure everything is ok

definitely in the west when you're starting something new everything is more subtle the industry has existed here we had to do everything from scratch. when we started the business we realized. we had to. really difficult objectives one was that we had to create our own brand and we decided to license at least initially in the nation's national brand for us and the whole point of our project the whole point the business was that these products i called the bakery hardly exist in russia today you don't get many customers here you can't help being there or later this and that customer should be greeted every time every time you are developing a company culture you know one of the most difficult things in russia a few years ago was to make sure your line staff smile is just smile if it's not interesting culture it at the beginning i would say if i come to the restaurant

and if you're smiling i will give you a hundred. if you're not. really ever my desire your resume so we've made it again we still but it's still a chat the first quarter we spent in two thousand and six we spent about nine months developing a very small factory we basically had a thirty square meter room where we were trying to make something like fifty products fresh every day and the biggest challenge was the local ingredients it would be insane to import let's say flour to russia when russia is one of the biggest low exporters in the world we were very very lucky that we did this because by the end of two thousand and eight when the recession started the first thing that happened in the recession in russia was a collapse of the ruble exchange rate compared to the euro so suddenly overnight imported prices were up thirty forty percent and that is deadly for any kind of business like ours but for us at least the cost of our products was relatively stable because for the main ingredients like sugar like flour we were using locally

made products. it's still a lot of things happens in russia mechanically in the service industry the have a hard time getting the idea or they followed the rules or did they have a problem so this is the difficulty in russia united states or in europe it's a little bit easier because they have a use to it. you need to empty the garbage cans you need to clean up that place what is that card from there higher on the other hands if we see that your heart they take it to heart. in other cultures that may be a little bit more difficult the idea to build a bakery business in russia was exactly right the idea that the competition wasn't so high in this sector i would do it again but i think i would make sure that we'd raise a bit more capital up front than we did i would also make sure i think that we invest at the beginning far more in training of production people than we did we should

have outsourced much less than we did four years ago we should have made much many more products ourselves and then we would be even more successful than we are today i think but yes i would absolutely do it. but we'll have more features on foreign entrepreneurs doing big business in russia in our pathfinder series throughout the week. let's take a look now at some other stories from around the world this hour a series of three explosions in the second largest city in afghanistan have killed at least thirteen people including a child the first blast occurred as a suicide bomber attacked a police checkpoint with two other bombs went off later the violence comes a day after the afghan taliban announced plans to open an internationally is own office in qatar something that could be a step towards formal peace negotiations. thousands of people have

taken to the streets in northern peru against protesting against the development of gold mine demonstrators say waste from the works will taint their water supplies the protests come in one of the country's most heavily mined regions it also has a history of troubled relations neighboring farmers and ranchers. now to the incredible story of two girls who were born just minutes apart in the same ward in the russian urals but were accidently swapped by a fateful mistake it meant they ended up with the wrong parents are these current reports on how the blunder was only discovered more than a decade later. meet anya she's thirteen years old muslim and lives with her father nine month in the town of kut based on the other side of town also thirteen lives with her russian orthodox mother despite their differences in religion and culture they are recent friends sharing the same birthdays and ties that bind them deeper

than what lies on the surface but long and simple in that moment i was in such a state of shock that i thought it was all a joke of in one nine hundred ninety eight anya an arena born only fifteen minutes apart in the same hospital were accidentally switched at birth the discovery happened with us ex-husband who claimed arena his daughter looked nothing like him he refused to pay alimony but yulia insisted upon her innocence had the family take not one but two d.n.a. tests the results show that in fact the ex was not the father and both results showed that yulia was not arena's mother but that a good one was my first thought was that irina doesn't find out and the second was where is my biological child born with her lawyer and investigators by her side yulia discovered her biological child anya was living on the other side of town with ny much. they told me they switch my child with another at the hospital they said your biological child is with another family they gave me

a picture of her and i was in shock for about forty minutes my hands and legs were shaking. two days later nine reluctantly phoned yuliya they met and decided to first introduce the girls to each other after they became friends the truth would be revealed to each of them separately but as we moved into the first time we introduced the girls to each other we came to this we took pictures walked around and ate ice cream romano later she told me that my mind was my biological father in the beginning i didn't believe it but my mother said it's true i'm not lying. irina ananya now close friends decided to remain with the parents who raised them but the inconvenience of living in different suburbs makes it much harder for the families to meet often it breaks your heart one day back and forth i don't think that's the way to live it just adds to the suffering it's the teenage girls that now face social hardships their separate cultures beliefs and habits make understanding each other difficult very different they pray they don't speak when they speak i don't

understand what they say more of the saying something about me. regardless of their differences irina and anya are happy to have each other's friends no matter the reasons that brought them together karen tara r.t. moscow. in just a few minutes here in our chief crosstalk looks back at the one nine hundred ninety one august coup attempt in moscow an event that many believe contributed to the historic lapse of the soviet union that's after a quick look at the top stories after this short break. we'll.

more news today violence is once again flared up. in these are the images the world

has been seeing from the streets of canada. trying to corporations are on the day. you're watching our show you live from moscow worth seven thirty pm the headlines the u.s. says it's warships will stick to their missions near a crucial oil laying out of the persian gulf despite warnings from iran to stay away from the standoff continues to drive up oil prices and tensions. republican presidential candidate race gets underway in earnest voters remain in the final civil were just trying to put forward to capitalize on disillusionment with the iraq obama. the eurozone.