these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china operations to rule the day. syria's first steps to democratic reform are ridiculed by the u.s. as washington stops just shy of labeling president assad a war criminal one allegedly pumping weapons into the. state. from spain greece the czech republic and belgium and dirty protests. as governments hack and slash policies leave economies and public patience at the point of collapse. a man charged over the murder of prominent russian journalist anna politkovskaya says the killing may have been orchestrated in london by a fugitive russian businessman and a suspected. terrorist our top story.

international news and comment live from moscow this is r.t. with twenty four hours a day a source in the syrian military says the army has now reestablish control over the battle torn city of homs it's also reported various rebel groups that fled the city have been surrounded near the border with lebanon it follows a claim by a senior rebel general that his militia group had been supplied with french and american weapons and even anti-aircraft missiles on the diplomatic front earlier u.s. secretary of state hillary clinton compared the syrian leader bashar al assad to a war criminal but stopped short of directly making the accusation the latest games to downplay the reform adopted by syria to make the political process more democratic and give the opposition a voice and reports from syria there are fears that outside interference is fueling further bloodshed. but the borders doors and tate despite

international isolation syria's borders have remained opened and easy to pass through and that may have played a crucial role in limited of the country's conflict almost in needed. after the crisis began here last margarine you were reports of weapons been smuggled through to arm president al assad's opponents one thousand dollars for a truck full of weapons capable of delivering household destruction and that's how marshall kind of will pay to smugglers usually iraqi or lebanese drivers according to ziad ismail chief of the customs service on the border with lebanon. these people bring weapons here to destroy our nation to try to kill syrian people in the syrian territory to arm our enemies tribe syria has more than two thousand kilometers of front here with five states a stroll iraq jordan turkey and lebanon the syrian cities where the most violent

clashes have taken place homes and there are all over the in an hour of the border is a fact that some believe has determined their fate or destiny is this is one of three checkpoints on the three hundred fifty kilometer syrian lebanese border in the last year as we've been told here there were only three attempts to smuggle weapons across the offices confiscated thousands of bullets dozens of guns and hundreds of kilograms i have little metal pieces like this one used to make a world but the azores is main concern and make little points like this one but parts of the border where there isn't any security at all but here look at this in the middle of nowhere there is nothing only one road across the road right now and at the same time are crossing the border and i'm already in lebanon. and further south you see remains extremely vulnerable the city of daraa the cradle of the syrian uprising it all started here and it continues to play

a role in the country's crisis where the water was jordan just several kilometers away from here and numerous reports suggesting that foreign weapons and troops going is only flow through it has become one of the. points in the country's security. the city has become the scene of fierce and bloody clashes at least twice in the conflicts twelve month history the authorities have claimed that many of the so-called free syrian army have in fact come from across the border. they appear shoot and kill and then they disappear immediately they arrive from abroad but they are not from jordan they use this country's border many of them are from africa. we are showing their weapons allegedly seized in military operations now. in the army we don't have weapons from israel and america sniper guns and night vision binoculars advanced developed weapons we don't have it in syria this what we

confiscated is killing innocent people and kill even more. while the international community condemns the el assad regime and supports its opponents many believe all sides in the conflict should be held responsible for violence across syria and with so many foreign russians involved it's clear that the crisis thresh is far beyond these borders refn ocean r.t. reporting from syria. and coming up later in the program comparing conflicts. they now call the capital of the revolution just as they once called for lewis and the capital tear. as fighting continues in the syrian city of homs we take a look at the u.s. media's approach to iraq's crisis in fallujah ten years ago which saw american soldiers fighting with the government and against militant forces. still to come people first is a day of mass protests across the e.u.

with tens of thousands rallying against austerity and economic hardship in paris five major unions organized a massive march to pressure brussels to tone down its austerity stance and instead focus on pro growth policies in the capital prague thousands of students are protesting against long planned but controversial university reforms even in the bureaucratic heartland of the e.u. thousands gathered to demonstrate against brussels insistence that cuts are the only way to financial. correspondent tom bowman is in athens with more on what's expected there. this iconic building behind me it's not become an icon for particularly good reasons but in the fretful parliament behind me and in the streets around that had been so full of ferment a day of protests today not a surprise a lot of people across the country in public sector unions there are doctors out on the street at the moment and there's also a lot of words

a lot of alarmist words for a financial words that didn't used to mean a lot that is suddenly taking on very serious meanings indeed one of them the d. word default and today a later on today a meeting of the international swaps and derivatives association which sounds boring could turn out to be very important indeed it may just side that the greek government is not capable of paying out and that essentially means that technically greece will have defaulted which is exactly the kind of financial disaster. the government has been trying to avoid all this time yesterday the greek government force through very painful cuts i spoke to a federation police chief who was at protesting yesterday normally the people trying to stop protesters and he said this could force our entire service out of business this is this is meaning that my colleagues are struggling to put food on the table really really serious messages here and

a feeling of exhaustion after two years of austerity after all of these painful cuts it seems that life is only going to get worse here whether inside the euro zone or not the message here is please this is enough. in spain people are angry at their government's deep cuts and the effect they're having on their own bleak future prospects today's students and teachers are out in force running against the strong impact a sturdy has had on education sara firth is in the dritte where crowds have gathered to voice their frustration. well the students have gathered at this hearing that in the protests are expected to continue for a while you can see groups of the students sitting around here we've been speaking to them they said the focus is to keep this demonstration peaceful but they want to get the point across that they're not going to be spending cuts affecting public services such as their education they feel it is unfair that at a point when the country is on the brink of another recession that they're being

asked to pay for the debts and they say the price that they're being asked to pay is simply too high that it's their futures that rest speaking to the people here they will tell you exactly what it's like to be a student in a country that right now has more than forty nine percent of the u.s. unemployed that sixteen to twenty four age bracket really struggling i mean it's a very bleak picture this being painted for them as the government continues to introduce these spending cuts they'll tell you that really they feel that they're being punished for years and years of government waste and that the debt now is being dumped on them and they're being a fools to pay for this with their future is really very very concerned about what the future holds for them and indeed around the country you can see evidence of years of this government waste as we've been finding out lifeless an empty welcome to one of spain so-called ghost towns these are supposed to be live in your apartment blocks in the town a sustained year when the crisis started. the real estate bubble

fell down and of course companies started going back dropped and the whole of the whole economy blew up these apartments are now in by the banks that have resulted to selling them off a cup prices to try to entice in the buy is big billboards announce the bargains and you won't have any trouble with noisy neighbors because well there won't be many. low prices these are going to fill up quickly and with very young people looking to buy one for our son. we are going to. yes i think so. and what made you want to buy one because it's. elsewhere in the country and there's no hiding the empty airports the flamboyant but unnecessary building projects all that have cost the taxpayer billions but given little return it's a legacy of government waste. the government's recently changed with the country my

is an economic crisis asking people to pay back through a stereotype money that was wasted by the government has caused widespread anger and brought people on to the streets in their hundreds of thousands. it's crazy the cost one hundred eighty billion euros and it's empty no one is working there is no float back in the cheap prices might be able to breathe much needed life into the area not everything can be fixed with clever marketing many people in the country now feel that the banks and the government selling off not just the nice houses but their futures as well towns like the sun here aren't unique all across spain right now you see these large areas of new build homes now that hopelessly abandoned it's a sign some say that the country often described as too big to fail already has. the time to send us. later this hour to talk to

a spanish economist about how close the euro zone's fourth largest economy is to collapse and whether its future lies with the block. when just a few minutes from now on our anonymous revenge wave of arrests in europe and south america sees a quick response from online activists and a tourist group struck back at interpol. and its presidential hopeful vladimir putin says the opposition in the country is rocking the boat head of the election and called on every political power to be cautious. a fugitive russian tycoon and a suspected chechen terrorists both living in the u.k. may be linked to the murder of the celebrated russian journalist anna politkovskaya the revelation comes from a former russian police official currently on trial and charged with masterminding the killing artie's laura smith reports on the latest twist in the case. the man who is making these allegations is a man called colonel dmitri. who is charged with organizing the killing of an

appellate court he is a former senior police official he is supposed to have planned that killing the people who he say ordered it now are bodies but is of skee the oligarch who is living in london akhmed zakayev who is a suspected terrorist who is also living in london now russia has requested the extradition of these two people on numerous occasions. on charges of terrorism on charges of fraud now that extradition has never been granted by britain and what public of this former senior police official is saying is that politkovskaya who of course was a prominent journalist and it's believed that it was just journalism that in fact in particular revelations of human rights offenses in chechnya what have you saying

is that politkovskaya quarreled with. that is of ski in london and that that is what led to that essentially ordering. now lots of people have been arrested for having organized the killing but nobody has so far had the finger pointed at them for ordering it so this could be a key development but certainly particularly for betty's obviously this is not the first time that his name has come up in connection with the murder of public it's come up lots of times before. and you can track the entire course of the trial by logging on to our web site dot com so what are the stories of just a click away europe's political exodus the e.u. recalls twenty seven ambassadors from from the east as a diplomatic pull out of the country and the union grows. and bringing destruction from above such as warn the earth from a need to protect itself against a giant comet that could smash into the planet in the year twenty forty discover

the chances of that party dot com. the hacker group known simply as anonymous claims to have brought down the international criminal police organizations website crashed shortly after interpol announced the arrest of twenty five hackers in spain and latin america as part of the agency's operation on mosques. as morally battle in an ongoing cyber war. interpol had said the twenty five alleges members of the anonymous saw online how king activists group or hacktivist group were taken into their custody right after their own website was attacked now right after the announcement was made their own website again failed to load an act of us a wrote on their twitter feed not the message interpol down so there are speculations that this is their response to these are reports of arrests and this police action is just the latest in a more in a bigger operation that intergovernmental and police operations hoping to crack

down on the activities of a non of us in recent months we've seen certain bills so-called people in the act are all arguing in favor of protecting intellectual property rights however this event made a lot of people angry and polarize opinion saying that passing such bills will actually infringe on their feet in my speech as well as the openness of the internet these are precise precisely the issues that anonymous claims to be fighting for but at the end of the day such arrests again will not stop their activities they repeated several times in the past that no arrests can be made on ideas. to get firsthand information on the ongoing anonymous raids on u.s. government websites head straight to our website dot com they can point out that one of the group's members has been speaking to us shortly after they shut down the cia and f.b.i. these sites find out we have to say available right now on artie's web site r.t. dot com.

presidential candidate putin has warned russians of likely provocation by the opposition and called on the country's political forces to stay calm ahead of the weekend's poll. has the details on what the prime minister had to say. just days remaining before all of russia goes to the polling stations something certainly concerned the prime minister especially given the fact that some forces some political forces in russia have already started preparing for the protest action after the election night even given the fact that the election itself has not happened yet by that i mean the words of one of the key opposition figures that exceed the very popular blog in russia who said openly in an interview to a russian channel that he supported the ass collation of the conflict that he

supported the growth of the protest force and that i quote one day people will take to the streets and would not believe the end of the quote also we know that the opposition has been giving out tends to the population that is certainly in some way replicate the scenario of two thousand and four in ukraine the so-called orange revolution and definitely these things warry the prime minister who reflected on that rather a rather stern warning saying that the people these people the opposition would go to any deaths to provoke serious violence to provoke some serious provocations to happen after the election that is probably they would even regular votes and try to pin that on the authorities they would even go as far as killing somebody as the prime minister said and then try to pin it on the authorities on the ruling on the wrong party and those that power so definitely we're in for some turbulent days before and after the election and certainly our extensive coverage will be

everywhere in moscow in all of russia to bring the latest story of us. so world news in brief this hour in our world update it's a murder i should say james murdoch the son of media baron rupert murdoch has stepped down as executive chairman of news international he says he's leaving his position to focus on the company's global t.v. business the organization has been under scrutiny since it was real that one of its newspapers the news of the world have been hacking phones to get stories the paper was forced to shut in july. dozens of protesters from the far right serbian radical party of gathered in belgrade to rally against membership of the european union demonstrators marched to the office of the country's president. and were stopped there by police it comes a day after e.u. foreign ministers recommended serbia should become a candidate to join up but the party says it's gathered more than two hundred thousand signatures of those opposed to entry.

north korea says it's suspending all nuclear and long range ballistic missile tests to build confidence with the u.s. it will also stop the rain in richmond and let u.n. monitors into its plants it comes after talks with american officials last week the first since longtime north korean leader kim jung il died the decision has been welcomed has been welcomed by south korea the u.s. japan and russia all members of the six party talks on pyongyang's nuclear disarmament. we're returning to our top story now the crisis in syria the world's media is flooded with stories and images allegedly depicting the bloody results of the syrian army is a sort of the city of homs but few have compared the clashes to that massacre in fallujah in iraq which happened nearly ten years ago and saw u.s. troops fighting alongside the government against the rebels you may find some of the images in reports disturbing. well they now call homes the capital of the

revolution just as they once called the capital of terror different conflicts that share more in common than actually meets the eye now each is the third largest city and its country in each the site of a bloody urban war one of them now in history books the other still raging as we speak now in homes as in fallujah poorly armed insurgents faced off against a superior military well equipped soldiers armed with mortar snipers tanks and airpower and in both cases officials claims that only heavy handed force could bring peace blaming the violence on criminals and terrorists here's a chief military spokesman for the u.s. forces in iraq we will down the criminals we will kill them we will capture them and we will pacify flu. and here is syrian president bashar al assad. our priority now is to regain security which our country has enjoyed for decades this can only be achieved by using the terrorists with an iron hand. for those who are

using weapons to kill well civilians now in both countries that iron hands targeted a sunni muslim opposition in wars that took on increasingly sectarian tolan's into lucia the u.s. forces and the shia iraqi troops were seen as infidels in syria their religious wrath is aimed at assad's alawite forces according to some disparaging comments salah white monkeys satanic troops those are just some of the many slurs now amid the violent clashes gut wrenching images like these showing the human toll of war streets littered with bodies of the wounded not to mention those of the dead but this is where the similarities end civilians did suffer most in both wars and yet the stories of pollution innocents remain largely untold most reporters in two thousand. for were embedded with the u.s. troops today the few who do sneak into syria often stick with the rebels and the

difference in the coverage is well self-evident. americans hit the militant. groups . form more of them by. the main hospital and locked in a key group they need help from the outside world medicine the most basic supplies . of uncommon valor from the u.s. soldiers are always with protesters fearless protesters really. now those who dared show images of the civilian casualties in fallujah were often dismissed as propaganda their viewers even got the following advice from the pentagon. change the channel to a legitimate authoritative cornish news station the accusations from the syrian government are eerily similar. to today lies in the media have gone beyond common sense television channels have lost all shame and profession. now it

is often said that perception forms reality and nowhere does this ring more true than in syria and iraq in one battle the press told the story of the besiegers in the other that of the besieged and in both cases it would seem it's the truth that suffered most. of. washington. has been lost in his cross told guests just how the international community can go interfering into syria's domestic affairs and here's a taste of what's coming in full at seven thirty pm g.m.t. . the power of the security council is precisely the problem in these situations we've always had great power interventions with or without security council approval for the idea of sovereignty is being involved ability is totally out of date and has been for at least twenty years the notion that states consider themselves to be beyond any external interference i mean we had the genocide. in one thousand forty five myriad international treaties since then recognizing some

role for the international community in intrastate affair is a nonstarter all i welcome the problem is that this is a. disagree with what i've been saying this idea of. sovereign impunity is purely there to protect governments so that they can slaughter their own people and have no international accountability the idea of noninterference isn't about protecting genocide or governments. want to. talk coming our way a little later when it's time to check the stock market oil prices and currency rates katie has all of that of the business what's happening in the financial world at the moment well what's happening right now the top story is that the european central bank has a lot is almost five hundred thirty billion a year i was in low interest loans into the box banking system this is the second

three year long term refinance operation by the e.c.b. the first round took place in late december when banks brought almost four hundred and ninety billion the extra funds our hope to make banks stronger in cars and to loan money to businesses and consume it but from. the move it will give only a short term support. you don't solve a problem by increasing levels of debt and all those. short constraints in the money markets and short of funding constraints it doesn't address the longer term problem if the economic situation within the eurozone worse especially for the stronger countries then it is likely that we could see another round of. funding coming back into the market. on to the market. head over to europe firstly and they are indeed mixed this hour german stocks are advancing for

a second day after the e.c.b. decision that over in the us they opened up in the well they opened up while the positive it now is a negative view despite data showing the us economy grew three percent in the final quarter of twenty eleven they can see a sea of rise. for the russian markets closed up in the black with the presidential election drawing near experts say we're seeing a sort of presidential rally drawing foreign investors to the markets on to the movers now to be gained a little bit. income jumped fifty five percent to a record nine billion dollars last year it was positive news from europe and i will holding a. news bank in terms of what is significant stage in the company moving on to the currency is now exchange rates we can see that your is low against the dollar the offer from the e.c.b. now the ruble is losing value against the greenback and the urge despite stronger

crude prices on to those crude prices now as you can see is indeed a mixed. although still heading for the best month since. on to other news then china has signed a contract to buy electricity from russia for another quarter of a century soldier from this year the amount of letters do you do deliveries to the asian neighbor well a double. thanks to newly built power transmission line between the countries. a copy back in about an hour's time to me then for more market updates.

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