several damaged envelopes a month this part of the balloon is subjected to wear and tear more often than others after the envelope is repaired and the new one is ready the tests start. mikheil nigel is the main balloon tester of the to line ups factory none of the balloons made by the company will be launched unless he gives the go ahead. our best gets match european standards they were not as good in the old days but now they're russia's best. true i can't afford to pay the price but. i would buy one if they were not so expensive that. michelle knight golf is a veteran russian air and all that he's been involved with aviation for fifty four years mikhail is a boon designer by training he's built seven of them with his own hands. first took

up ballooning when he was fifty three years old he looks forward to celebrating his seventy fifth birthday in flight the contest balloons at any time under any conditions one hundred flights a year is a minimum. if you could see today flying is always a blissful whatever the conditions. were for moving out of mir walvis and normal position. in the balloon is in working order as it should be . that hopefully we'll get no complaints from the guys in about us. to look at the ils this is not what i call flying. in general i don't see being tethered is the definition of florida only with the out there who while we truly

flying. a hot air balloon can only be in preflight during the daytime it's a common role for all balloonists in the world the basket has to touch down before sunset. unlike balloons in free flight tethered balloons are allowed to be launched even in the dark in that case the burner illuminates the balloon from the inside. pilot's refer to this phenomenon as the good organizers of the past to go ask festival of balloonists came up with the idea for the spectacle to attract tourists . air currents simpatico are such that early morning is the best time for taking to the skies the convoy of balloonists normally starts out at five o'clock in the

morning to head towards the starting line. the success of the flight primarily depends on the wind no matter how skillful the pilot might be balloonists get weather forecasts and reports about the force and direction of the wind from ground control safety services but then there is a simpler way of determining the winds direction the whole crew takes part in preparations for a flight normally it includes four people a technician carries out checks to satisfy himself that the balloon is in working order. have a good flight. balloons are raised into the sky by the pilot and the navigator but whether the crew will get home depends on those who stay on the ground.

so once a balloon lands the crew has to be retrieved from the spot. sometimes inexperienced teams responsible for retrieval can't find crews landing at dusk therefore those unfortunate balloonists have to spend a night out in the open. is another ex air force pilot. during competitions he is often charged with the task of ensuring the crew safe return to earth his job is retrieving crews of balloonists from wherever they might land. rainbow rainbow pickup is calling do you read pickup i can hear you. wonderful. night has had special training to learn how to get his

bearings in different conditions whether in the woods or mountains but tracking a balloon through the streets of a town is a skill in its own right the. problem with tracking a balloon flying over a city or another population center is that there is a mass of people. you need to have a good knowledge of the city's top dog are free and the floods. i don't want it invariably ends up happening. is you get stuck in traffic. which is just great. you know and i mean. this is a very convenient place. from here we can see where balloons are going where they are likely to touch down for a gram of the prophet. can you see our balloon rising over this town it's over by the hill. how far

a balloon can fly depends on the wind what's most important is to make sure that it lands in such ways to make it easy for the retrieval truck to get it. bring the rainbow pick up calling are you coming in times working for you for. that pickup head down right away ok we're coming. to. pick up can you see us we can see you very well. but one of the. night he loses three or four kilograms of weight in a week of intense retrievals the crew puts the billing together and takes it apart

several times the envelope weighs one hundred twenty to one hundred fifty kilograms . i think about what we entrust our very lives to this envelope for them when we make sure that no stones get in the way back up which might damage it may three or four days during. each gas tank weighs fifty kilograms if you add that to the burner in the basket the retrieval people will be hard put to collect it all. pylon could see my lawn through. them now we're all. on face

value ballooning is a simple affair behind the scenes it is a vigorous combination of efforts by a crew an escort truck and those who help build to believe these people define rain snow bitter cold and scorching heat truly they're afraid of only one thing the ability to take to the skies. the sky does not misunderstand the sky does not judge the sky very simply is. what i. strive for for the australia i do know that there's no

way around to see that to among. if you want to have sex go and have sex.

resistance is not of politics but a culture. is couldn't. its own.

cultures of resistance on our team. keep your eyes on the sky it's because a man aerial vehicles could be coming to an airspace near you so does this mean saying goodbye to american civil liberties. undermine the highball i told. the civil unrest is taking its toll on syria and the body count is rising by the day but just how many people are dying is still a mystery we'll show you why some numbers aren't adding up. like swedes and the like all the other groups that are headed to sas foods and sodas and snug and

dining our way toward disaster if the saying you are what you eat is true that americans are genetically modified salt covered french fries coated in high fructose corn syrup and dipped in a vat of chocolate milk it's the obesity industrial complex and. it's giving health activists heart palpitations. it's thursday february ninth four pm in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl and you're watching r t well get ready to look up at the sky and see drones on hovering up above as of now on man aircraft can only be seen be used in military airspace and by certain law enforcement agencies but this week congress passed a bill that would allow for commercial and private use of drones so what this would do is let any person or company that gets a permit to fly drones wherever and however they please and these aircraft

typically carry surveillance equipment even weapons in some cases so what does this mean for your privacy and safety joining me now to talk about the implications of this bill host of the alex jones show alex jones. hi alex so this bill just passed by congress would open up our skies for almost anyone to fly drones what does this mean for the average citizens privacy. well as thanks for having me this is a nightmare it's it's it's the military industrial complex not just trampling on our privacy with ground penetrating radar and infrared looking through our walls from going on for decades and now it's going to be unmanned so if the pilots you know say no to a mission that's the legal it won't matter because many of these drones are now as reported by the l a times are autonomy they're artificially intelligent they're given their mission they've got tiny drones that fly in formation that are

weaponized and have surveillance and they also have reapers that are weaponized and of course they have other predators just a month ago i was on r.t. in north dakota the air force was involved a local police surveilling purported cattle thieves who actually just kept cows that had come on their property under common law under common law and you can actually keep cows that come on your property i have a ranch my family does i know the law but they didn't care they acted like oh the military's involved surveilling said us and so this is the military industrial complex basically a taxing the public and then using that money to build up a military infrastructure against the population exactly what president dwight d. eisenhower warned about his farewell speech back in ninety six he won't be where the military industrial complex and the quote technocratic elite that controls us that's the full quote in rome it was the military used by caesar internally that

took over in nazi germany in napoleon's france this is always the danger in third world countries today and in ancient nations this is classic and these politicians in a revolving door are invested in these drone companies the body scanning companies all of it and they're getting incredibly rich off of setting up surveillance and weapons systems against the people and the. it is really frightening now as you mentioned it's the military as of now that has been using these drones but this new bill would allow companies to use the aircraft of how do you expect companies especially big companies think google and companies like that to use this technology. well that's the problem because of technology getting so inexpensive and robotics and factories would cost ten million dollars a decade ago cost one hundred thousand dollars and things are going to get cheaper

and cheaper and these big mega companies like google that's already operating in fourteen states just a couple years ago it was one state with with robot eighteen wheeler trucks robot cars and when they wreck it's all swept under the rug because the system wants to go to this and they're openly arguing that they're going to prove that robot cars and aircraft are more. safe on average and force people to have robot cars force people out of the eighteen wheeler so this is about humans having our rights taken and these big mega corporations in the military operating these drones they're also not just having air drones the pentagon said in two thousand that by two thousand and twelve they wanted half the air force to be drone and half of the army's. air assets to be drone as well as the navy and now they're saying by two thousand and twenty ninety plus percent will be drone and half the ground force will be combat robot and again this is where an eighteen wheeler pulls up i've seen

the company show it pulls up and running your house a bunch of robots get out the back on we on treads come up to your home and basically attack you this is what taxpayers in america are paying for is a literal terminator type scenario but skynet doesn't work for artificially intelligent you know master computer it works for the corrupt global elite who again are making money out of building weapons systems and using them against us it is incredible look i've had family who's in the military for years who told me about how they fly around on anti drug missions using the us army and now that's all admitted here domestically so this is just the robots knocking down the door and it's completely unconstitutional it's dangerous and we're going to rue the day that. it happens all over the world under the n.b.a. they are saying we will just arrest and kill citizens in the u.s. with no trial and have disappear drones will kill people in any country in the

world so it's a global decoration of war against the entire planet and again it's not america doing it it's the big mega banks that openly are conquering europe through fraud and ponzi schemes that are ready to us that have conquered the united states and own the military industrial complex no one is standing in their way no one they're trying to start wars in syria they've already given al qaida control of libya they're getting ready for war with iran they've got drones all over the planet seventy thousand of them i mean this is literally like attack of the clones or something out of a star wars movie wow i mean this is out of control the certainly sounds of a very scary what you're suggesting here also want to talk about the safety concerns of this bill drones they can carry weapons as we mentioned earlier earlier and also the safety of having these things fly around in our airspace i mean technology is not fail proof the possibility of drones crashing into houses and other planes i mean this seems to pose several safety concerns. well and they've

already done perspectives on this the big insurance companies have done actuaries and have broken all this down and they've said well the answer is have all the aircraft and all the cars into a central computer that basically warns the other drones so the answer is going to be when there's disasters is good humans out of the cockpits get humans out of the driver's seats of the cars and make everybody go to robots and then a centralized elite in their own words will control this tech not prosy i've been calling them technocrats in a scientific dictatorship for seventeen years now suddenly the elite are saying we want to check not proceed for the world no more elected governments experts will run things i wasn't guessing that they were technocrats i read white papers written fifty years ago where the big think tank experts in britain and the united states said we'll use the wealth of these countries in europe to build this tech not prosy to dominate the globe but we've got to stay on the cutting edge of technology so

it's not america and england dominating the world it's these criminal interest the scientific dictators who are very intelligent who have now used us as the launching pad for basically the robot wars that are coming so get ready folks because before military could say no to crimes there won't be military soon will be robots working on robots that deploy the combat robots alex of very scary interesting point that you raise there but this could be just the beginning that this is beyond drones and what this could potentially lead to that was alex jones hosts one last boilers out international own shares of that they've announced thirty thousand drones associated press to be in the sky thirty thousand a sixty three billion dollars funding system half of it in the new f.a.a. bill to fund this god bless you alex and alex thank you we'll talk more about this another time thank you. well as the conflict in syria intensifies various numbers

are being reported on the death toll and casualties but amid the chaos it's difficult to get a clear picture of what's really going on there which begs the question just how accurate are these numbers the british based syrian observatory of human rights is one of the most widely quoted sources of the figures but the group is now experiencing an ownership row which has left media outlets wondering how reliable this source is are to use either bennett reports. the syrian observatory for human rights it's one of the most widely quoted sources of syrian casualty figures but it's not always telling the truth and ownership the syrian observatory for human rights is left several media outlets quoting false information as to rivals fight for the same name the original group was hijacked by opposition activists who are posting military deaths alongside civilian ones both sites claim there the official observatory this though is the original site in arabic with an english version on

facebook and this is the fake site launched in the center and mostly in english several foreign news outlets have assume they are one and the same thing quoting the fake sites casualty figures the consequence a very different perspective of the crisis the original sites latest figures showed just over five thousand one hundred civilian deaths against almost two thousand military casualties the rival site claims well over six and a half thousand civilians have been killed and barely six hundred troops a difference many claim suggests this is a lot more than just a numbers game i don't think even the people using these figures are have any objectivity really they have an agenda a clear agenda is there just the fire by any means possible that assad regime is a brutal massacring regime and it needs to fall a soon as possible and we can see the united nations security council when that

human rights strategy for regime change doesn't work how annoyed western governments are how have got syrian observatory original observatory strictly opposes military intervention the man who hijacked it's name disagrees. used to translate at the real observatory he was fired after falsely claiming to be an official spokesman and using a live interview to call for a no fly zones since then he's launched a smear campaign against the original group claim. the impostors as are we and these figures have been quoted by the b.b.c. c.n.n. and a.b.c. australia the other groups say they tried to pass some political views so like calling for no fly zone for international intervention and we made it clear i sit on the server tree for human rights the original. is that we are i guess an intervention we are against a no fly zone all we need is to stop the but that is going on in syria as always

and is group refused to speak on camera stating i cannot waste my time talking about this is the moment whilst people are dying in homes they're my priority right now he did refer us to another opposition group based in london and they too refused to comment on the ownership of the observatory but they did confirm that reporting military deaths was not in their interest it's not our position to report the casualties of. government troops the b.b.c. and the guardian had to withdraw material after falsely quoting as always the human rights observatory the un stopped counting the death toll claiming it's too difficult to keep track of but its human rights chief also said five thousand civilian deaths should be enough to provoke international action the real observatory still documents the deaths civilian or otherwise but it may be too late for the numbers to matter i've given it r t london. joining me now for

more is christopher chambers journalism professor at georgetown university nice to see you christopher so a very unstable situation over there in syria hard to know exactly what is going on so what is the likelihood that some misinformation is being reported to the public oh. very high i mean when you have an unstable or combat situation a lot of the conventions that you think you know especially about journalism and about sources. a lot of that goes out the window and i think you're seeing an example there i mean you have to also mix that with the realities specially in the west of declining newsroom personnel you know either on the ground dealing directly with stringers or at headquarters doing the research and the homework to really back this stuff up because that doesn't pay the sensationalism pays but the ground work the homework part of it that doesn't pay so

that corporately gets cut out so when you have unstable combat bloodshed in the genders mixed with a corporate agenda then the truth tends to go out the window set out all these layers of facts can get mixed up oh exactly exactly i mean you have to you know when you have an unstable situation the other talking about syria where you're talking about to hear a square i mean these news organizations particularly in the west are going to have to rely on either stringers which is terribly unreliable when you don't have the the back office back up and research back home and then social media and then with social media you have people with agendas or you just have plain the stakes i mean i'm not going to say this is a more benign example because it's not but look at what happened with joe paternal his death the long time coach at penn state university with regard to the child abuse scandal was reported and you know he was in the hospital but this was a social media event that basically snowballed and major outlets cable outlets from

cable cable giants down to blogs picked that up off of twitter and then you had people basically magnifying that in on facebook and then it turned out to be wrong so you know so you take that situation and put it in a just just a flammable situation on the ground in syria whether you're talking about the opposition or the assad government that you know there are going to be problems with fair. i also want to ask you how numbers can be used to kind of skew the picture and. push an agenda well clearly i mean the next most important thing to pictures in the media pushing any agenda or and. and if you've got the pictures the pictures you know that can be doctored to but when you have the pictures you have to mix them with the numbers to tell the story so if you show children lying dead in the street in damascus you need to back that up

with numbers as well now where do you get them i mean if there are no in geos on the ground or n.g.o.s that you trust or a government has kicked them out and you don't have social media that can back up the figures with anecdotal evidence i mean you don't have those those mechanisms on the ground a lot of times what happens is is that you take the government's numbers and you take the opposition's numbers and you take some hopefully objective third party that's there and their numbers their you know whatever counts they're making whatever and it don't all the evidence that they're that they're using and then you basically make a best guess now is that is that journalism one o one is that what we teach georgetown no but what what else are you going to do. very interesting a challenge post today and how it can affect public perception of what's going on there want to switch topics a little that speaking of media.