latest news the week's top stories here on r.t. rebels converge and syria's two largest cities which were previously spared from clashes as heavy street battles for people to flee their homes while at the u.n. security council russia and china again veto a western bags syria resolution and a further tightening the screws on the regime along. also riots rallies and rage in spain as the public takes a stand against cuts for thursday's million strong demo sitting in wee while still the fight against austerity. but israel rounds are ran over the ball gary a suicide bombing which killed seven including five israeli tourists but some analysts accuse tel of even using it to gain international support.

hello there they're going use round the clock from moscow this is r.t. my name is kevin owen and first in our roundup of the top stories of the last seven days syria's two largest cities have become a focal point of intense street clashes between army forces and the rebels the regime hub of aleppo is now into its fourth day of fierce fighting with the main battle reportedly taking place there intelligence headquarters that rebels engulf the city from rural areas engaged in clashes with government troops forcing residents to flee to safety reports of sporadic fighting also continue to pour in from damascus to put tensions there these slightly hafter security forces cleared rebels from key districts artie's rif and is in the syrian capital. this week for the first time in seventeen months the syrian conflict has finally hit home in damascus billowing smoke clouds the skyline of one of the oldest inhabited capitals in the war old city which used to proceed. a reputation for its loveliness and

vibrant nightlife clashes between government troops and rebels have broken out in at least five damascus neighborhoods in mid on where the fighting has been the fiercest tanks are rolling on the roads rather than cars with soldiers the only people left in the streets the reason why it's so hard to capture all these terrorists is because they can easily disguised themselves as civilians when we conduct our operations we have two hundred civilians and terrorists use that to move around the army has launched a major offensive following a deadly attack on the country's security leadership last wednesday national security building in the central damascus this is exactly where the suicide bombing happened here earlier on wednesday killing the country's defense minister and his deputy we were earlier been hearing reports that it's been a very intense bombing but as you can see the building is not very much damage some windows broken and actually this is all the damage as we can see from here also

from what we can see from here we can understand that the explosion happened inside the building at a time when there has been a mitten between cabinet ministers and high ranking security officials free syrian army has already claimed responsibility for what happened and for the blast and for the killings many countries have closed their embassies here in syria had half withdrawn all personnel in this neighborhood alone turkish embassy over the saudi embassy this is the building of american embassy tallon embassy these embassies have also suspended their work overseas companies have also have it created their staff foreigners no longer feel safe here in the syrian capital and they have lad but ordinary syrians don't have the same choice the world has come to their door and they have nowhere to run and they're trying to organize their everyday life waiting for this nightmare to end one of the most important rule these days in the syrian capital is not to go to the cities troubled areas where the clashes between the rebels and the army still continue and the names of these. neighborhoods are

very well known for everybody here might have began. no i won't take you to my down it's too dangerous but damascus is a very big city with a population of around two million people maybe these days even more with all displaced families from homes and other epicenters of the uprising from all across the country shelter now here in the capital and in some neighborhoods you can see pictures that you don't at all expect to see in the capital of a country and gulf war i like this family alone picnics really very peaceful pictures so one can flick has been raging for seventeen months already people say they are tired they are exhausted but they also say that life must go on may finish our tea from damascus in syria well that's one picture of events the rebels fighting government troops in the city of aleppo meantime have described their assault as an operation to liberate the city he returned chief of the independent

syria tribune explain to us what he thinks really means. to liberate the city from its own people that's what they mean actually so far for the past fifteen months and has shown nothing but great support to the syrian government up to the president. this was many fisted by huge rallies several times. the issue the idea of the opposition shields repeatedly to demonstrate in the city to show their their size in peaceful demonstrations or on battles and they diverted to recruiting others from other areas and have them circulate the area in the countryside but not inside the city so far the mandate of the three hundred strong international observer force in syria was extended for another month on friday the unanimous un security council decision followed another vote which saw russia and china veto a resolution threatening sanctions against assad's regime moscow described the western led plan which could potentially have resulted in foreign military action in syria as biased because it can only put pressure on the government middle east

academic professor lawrence davidson says if the world community really wants to stop violence in syria it also has to put pressure on those sponsoring the rebels to keep this un resolution was something of a red herring. because it wouldn't have made much difference on the ground the british ambassador to the u.n. made a statement that. the resolution would have helped save lives i think this is just fantasy i think from the american standpoint why into being openly when it's possible that the regime might fall just through clandestine i intervention in direct intervention and if the british and the americans and the french want to save lives or they have to do is put pressure on the saudis and qataris and others to stop running guns into this area and tell you how

a rebel. as the u.s. continues to back the syrian opposition a series of online training videos show desire to influence the conflict from afar many of these videos well aimed at the syrian opposition aren't actually made in theory itself is that many of them originating from other countries including a lot of them coming from the u.s. and of course that again raises questions about the u.s. is involvement in this type of cyber warfare. but watch the footage and to join our discussion on the western impact of syria online without comment for you to take part and there is a reason as well as for the rest of middle east bahrain's crackdown on anti regime activists intensifies with want to go all out to a nationwide protest make this out. but next the real marathoner protests in spain this last week has deepened with the government's austerity drive grows the rage reached fever pitch on thursday with over a million protesters thought to have rallied across the country artist alexi your

jet ski reports from madrid on what's driving the disillusionment. now this is yet another one in a string of anti or fairytale anti governmental protests in spying which have been hitting the country in the course of the past several weeks now several thousand have gathered in the central square in madrid here to protest against the austerity measures by the government the situation is very bad it's terrible unemployment is growing the government's job reforms are aimed at increasing mass layoffs and cutting benefits every person who's come out to demonstrate is exercising their right to protect what he's entitled to by the norms of democracy one vote every four years doesn't mean anything. gunman is not representing the interests of the people of the measures and it's helping a few not the holy shit this comes just days after thousands of people across spain in madrid in particular closs with the police several dozen were wounded the police actually used tear gas and rubber bullets to pacify the crowd this is all because

on the july the eleventh the spanish prime minister announced that additional sixty five billion euros will be cut from things like pensions on unemployment benefits to rescue the country's financial banking sector a hundred billion rescue plan was then first approved by the german parliament on thursday and by brussels on friday understands that the spanish government has been defending their policy just defending the cuts saying that this is basically the only way to rescue the country's ailing economy and the ailing banking sector will certainly have to wait and see whether more protests will happen and whether the people who are getting more and more aggressive with every step in the austerity measures that the country's government is implementing will be willing to take more the and into the streets once again. close believes the worst is yet to come and the people have pushed beyond insurance. it's a very small patch over a massive massive gaping hole and that gaping hole is private sector debt the

people when you take their food you take all that they have you take their homes they respond quite viscerally what we saw in madrid for instance wasn't violent an artists and a group that decided to burn a bunch of dumpsters you saw were you know police charging against other police protesting police we saw them charging against firemen and women we saw them charging against public sector workers and chasing them through the streets of madrid and neighborhoods in madrid the actual people that live there were actually throwing flower pots from the balconies at the police now that's a qualitative change from what we've seen over the last year and spain certainly you see people living in a.t.m. buildings right in little a.t.m. services and you see them living out in the streets looking in the in the trash you know for food i mean these are people that two years ago were working and they were working and maintaining families and now they're very livelihoods are threatened and of course tensions are going to boil over the walls all true rich funneled over twenty one trillion dollars into offshore havens around the world to avoid paying

taxes that the studding figure equals the combined size of america japan's annual output and it comes from a report commissioned by the tax justice network that's off the james henry explains to us how they reach these huge. we use three different methods one is to look at the bottom of a record capital it flows out in developing countries looking at some of those we've developed to analyze their balance of payments sources and uses of funds and a sort of those come out with some very large numbers for the developing countries we did models of honored thirty nine and different countries secondly we looked at a lot of data that's published by the bank for international settlements on the bottom of cross border deposits by corporations and individuals and that allowed us to make an estimate of how large their core folios were the offshore

investors have. really we were able to get quite a bit of data on individual financial institutions even though they are secret need to disclose a lot of information collectively that you could put together if you work at and come up with some you know not perfect but some idea of how much they have and what we're looking for here was not. a perfect number but really to try it estimate the way an astrophysicist estimate size of a black hole you triangulate using different methodologies and just kind of try to . achieve a sort of a minimal size and i think the twenty one trillion is very conservative actually a reason to believe it could be a lot more. still to come a grim anniversary for norway but a year since rather cool nationalists and this deadly terror attacks we look at the extremist ideologies with a blooming and supposedly multicultural view of what. we're reporting or why

a baracuda view is a desert network news shows in droves and turning instead to d.i.y. journalism. when you down to monitor the protests in bahrain this last week with thousands of demonstrators up against police firing rubber bullets into rallies was sparked by a government decree to all forms of public protest the monikers response to swift with other groups of raids on the homes of suspected protestors and dozens of arrests the media is also being targeted with police apparently order to prevent coverage of the rest but we spoke to someone who witnessed the brutality on the streets filmmaker and veteran human rights activist jen marlow before being kicked out of bahrain herself she was one of the few western journalists left there she told us the situation is more desperate than many would believe. what i witnessed is an increasing increasing repression against the pro-democracy and human rights activists in the short time that i was in bahrain i felt like the situation was

actually deteriorating it is across the country it is extremely widespread and in villages and towns all over bahrain there is violent repression of attempts to demonstrate and attempts to protest even more alarming much more increase of house raids at night in middle of the night in villages all over riot police coming in surrounding houses brutally arresting people and imprisoning them taking people from restaurants swimming pools their private homes this this practice of targeting activists and demonstrators fortunately seems to be on the rise and very widespread right now and the bahraini regime is very determined not to let what's happening be exposed and so. anyone who's going to bahrain with the purpose and the agenda of trying to show what's happening and trying to really expose the reality on the ground there is deemed wants to keep them out and keep them silent as much as

possible. norway's market year says anders breivik massacred seventy seven people in those twin attacks breivik still on trial he insists the killings he carried out will part of his war of multiculturalism and desire to stir sort of similar reports next europe's clash of cultures is growing ever more radical. well. i swear to god we will not let it pass peacefully therefore we say stay in your homes you may not see. just in our streets girls are raped molested and insulted by gangs of immigrants the battle cries of grown louder. of hatred to religion. in extreme cases ideology turned to tragedy more than seventy people were killed by far right militant anders breivik in norway over his rejection of the government's policies

towards muslim immigrants in france seven people including children were killed by islamist hammad mira in a deliberate attack against jews he was then killed in a police raid both men adding fuel to flames of hatred and prejudice dismissed from . the caliphate the benefit to misstate the far right to build the racist. it's a primitive state and not his style and the far left. to build communities on the level of his property than it was ten years ago we tried to talk to proponents of each extreme edia me is a leader of a group in belgium that's labeled the far right and he's been convicted on charges of racism which he denies up immediately with the influx of foreigners because really can't cope anymore you don't have to be an extremist it's needed the same

anti immigration argument put forward by the golden dawn party in greece dubbed neo nazi and fascist by critics it won a seven percent of votes in recent elections at attacks on foreigners and greece is reportedly on the rise. again. we also met with the leader of the islamist group sharia for belgium there is judgment day if you if you're a muslim you will go to paradise if you are this believer you will go to hell that's what we believe he's now in custody and is being investigated for terrorism suspected of sending young muslims to fight in holy wars in yemen and chechnya but such arrests have not stopped other groups from sprouting we tried to talk to another hardline salafi group in belgium reportedly with saudi links and are under surveillance by authorities several young men tried to stop us from filming and in

the end called the police we were told that for our own safety we should just leave the does it boil down to an economic solution is there a fundamental clash of cultures of religion are these extremists or just some minority of the attacks was by this isolated cases the answers you get depends on whom you ask and in the end all you get is a hodgepodge of opinions and no real solution on how to curb this growing the still is what some experts call a cycle of hatred feeding off of each other a gargantuan challenge for europe to address before hatred turns to more of this. tesser cilia r.t. brussels. just couldn't throw website well that report was on the bring it up to date some stories you might be interested in this one talk about rising poverty levels in the united states is on one of our team don't come from us it's forecast to spread a record levels over the next year hitting its highest since the one nine hundred sixty s. and straight in the report you can't see why there's little to stop it but lama busts a mother who's married and she's

a model as well maybe russian woman to be the only known american to reach the last sixteen of a pageant that celebrates why it's called. israel's prime minister is blaming the deadly suicide bombing in boulder area this week on hezbollah group supported by seven people including five israelis were killed in the attack on a tourist bus but independent research is a separate paul rich things around wouldn't risk international condemnation by supporting terrorism next time yahoo and israel in fact need to play the victim card in order to be more aggressive and in the past few months few years israel has lost a lot of support even here in the united states it's very easy to put the blame i

mean iran and iran is not a very attractive country to the world and the masses are very happy to accept whatever they're told told by mr netanyahu to me it doesn't make sense that iran would want to carry out this operation and it's very hard to accept that iran would willingly have the world condemn it and cater to the wishes that these really is by providing them with an excuse to attack. a wheelchair using army veteran and social justice protester set himself on fire in israel it is the second such incident and fifth attempt in just a week but the previous coinciding with mass rallies against government policies i support a year of public housing activist and a regular at the demonstrations she told me these latest acts of desperation are unfortunately nothing new. i think what people are feeling is despair and this is what people are trying to say to our government. people are dying here

every week people are committing suicide they do it in their homes they're doing it far away from our but this happens here all the time people are not dying here of hunger but they are dying of despair binyamin netanyahu. throughout his political career has always had a new liberal economic view which is pro privatization which is the whole idea is that poor people have to handle themselves. and this is what we have c.n.n. throughout his career so i am not surprised that binyamin attorney now is not answering us very quickly i am surprised that our minister of housing does not understand that either he gives real solutions to people or he should resign from this government. for more americans have lost faith in the network news shows the survey says that enough for reporting errors and too much time give the showbiz

result is more important explains that the response that is a rise in citizen journalists there was such as from the public of a real reliable news. venning goodness statics round the clock operations a product always being exported america's mainstream news industry generates power and profits but it seems partisan reporting and frequent gaffes may have made many americans turn away from the big broadcasters when their big uprising the revolution going are across. and have going. home to getting the work that program where are a recent gallup poll shows an all time low of only twenty percent of the public trusting the news many say this means citizen journalism is becoming a big game changer and the amazing thing about training citizens to be really good

pundits is that they they have a wealth of information that journalists just don't have when you help them connect what they know are exposed to their experience with a big picture political event it's very powerful what's that journalist and best selling author and i only wolf not only supports citizen journalism she and business partner lisa thomas have built a nonpartisan training ground for it it's called daily klout dot com we're not just teaching people to vent we're training people to write rigorous shapely opinion pieces which are eight hundred words long and also to source their assertions and we also teach them how to link what they're exposing are calling for with action steps. daily klout also features a legislative search engine that monitors and explains bills making their way to capitol hill

a tool allowing everyday people to hold federal state and corporate leaders accountable when america's fourth estate fails to i think the mainstream media has become about entertainment. and. so concerned who who holds the purse strings if the mainstream media is controlled by large corporate interests they're going they're beholden to them but this website is independently financed giving tens of thousands of citizens the freedom to report on topics many news networks are accused of suppressing i think one of the best ways you can judge the state of democracy is in how it's needed. and i think if you have a situation where the citizens of the country are actually bypassing the mainstream media i think that says a lot about the stage of democracy critics however argue that only properly educated and experienced journalists should be intrusted with understanding their rigors and ethics involved in news reporting but even then. there is

no guarantee the public will receive facts the supreme court justices have struck down the individual mandate in order unconstitutional the direct blow to the president united states a direct blow to his democratic party the individual mandate has been struck down it has been struck down no it has no. sock i knew i was mass media still means i stronger and wider reach that citizen journalism but it no longer holds the power to determine what the public is good baby doing or even reporting about very important artsy new york. well the news in brief now for you to top stories at least barack obama is on his way to meet three families in colorado in the wake of friday's deadly shooting rampage at a screening of that new batman movie twelve people were killed fifty eight others injured when i must gunman through gas canisters into that crowded cinema and

opened fire place explosives from the home of the suspect twenty four year old james holmes who's under arrest it's still the shooting had been planned for several months. the heaviest rainfall in sixty years has triggered flooding that's left at least thirty seven dead in the chinese capital beijing electrocutions roof collapses and landslides caused many of the deaths the deluge hit on saturday and continued overnight forcing nearly fifteen thousand evacuees to safety mostly in district outside the city. it's coming up to one twenty six and a half am moscow time thanks for being with us my name's cavanagh and i'll recap the main stories here on r.t. in just a couple of minutes let me find out about what the sheik in the former soviet union our report fashion behind the iron curtain is coming up here on r.t. .

one industry in the soviet union. cannot display our labor school. for the attempt to get a job with them past the web. one can easily be putting. pressure on the old girls for those who would authorities but this is it for the silvia to be.

instilled starting here. or going global and. my. blog. choose your please take your stand. to lose me. make your statement. split the words. like street money. if they shoot something inappropriate for public they can easily be shot by accident and casualties of war ok. i wish she would have never happened but it has. been a war a t.v. camera becomes an unnecessary what destroys their own safety all foreign nationals

including journalists and inspectors should leave iran. and it's clear for thousands with such witnesses i got it on my site. one. text to. merciless shooting on r t. russia would be soon which brightened if you knew about someone from funniest impressions.