greek coalition government leaders failed to agree on a package of spending cuts dealing a blow to the country's prime minister who says the measures are crucial to restoring the country's credibility. the euro will always take their toll on the french with president francois hollande watching his ratings take a dive. russia turning eastward at the asia pacific summit economic and political ties with china growing stronger which could unnerve the u.s. and its moves for influence in the region. and nearly a dead heat between republicans and democrats in the white house race with both candidates looking to set apart their remarkably similar plot for.

three and. bring you today's top stories and a look back at the week's news here on r t leaders of greece's three party coalition government have failed to agree on a package of spending cuts that prime min that the prime minister says more crucial to restoring financial credibility they are seeking international creditors to give them more time to implement austerity measures with more talks set for wednesday the latest cuts are especially painful to the country's most vulnerable living pensioners low income workers independents saturday greece's second biggest city thessalonica he was rocked by a protest with some fifteen thousand demonstrators taking a stand against the measures party's peter all over has been. minister antonis samaras has said that he will do everything within his power to make sure the greece remains within the euro zone but every did acknowledge that the cuts that is governing to making will both on thing and. painful for the greek people but as

unfair and painful as they are he says that the necessary as without being in the eurozone greece would die as a nation he also says the important is in terms of the country meant taining any credibility that it has left on the global financial stage and not credibility is set to be tested quite soon is all that is from the so-called troika arrive in greece to see whether they fulfilled their part of the bargain when it comes to making the cuts that they were asked to do on whether they receive the next round of bailout money a massive thirty one billion euros worth of assistance whether those cuts are necessary they're certainly not popular here in thessaloniki we've seen thousands of people out on the streets of greece's second city demonstrating against the way that the current governments are handling the financial crisis in greece and anger and the way the government is dealing with the crisis is upon and they're doing is

wrong it's not just in terms of protest the greek people are airing their their grievances with the current government if you look at the latest political polls we're seeing that some are ases government lies in second place behind a a opposition party that's anti bailout money was perhaps more worrying though is if you see that in place is the ultra rightist party golden dawn party that has a far right agenda some of called neo nazi and fire they certainly have a seemingly growing popularity here in greece which is concerning many people many people i've seen out in the streets here infest alone ikey protesting what they call the fascist organization i have to say that this demonstration thessaloniki far more peaceful and some we've seen in the past in greece that people are upset they're airing their views but they're certainly not of the violence a that we've seen in in cities like athens as people demonstrate. against the

handling of the financial crisis it's not only ingres workouts are being met with a wall of public protest in portugal government slashes to social safety nets have been dubbed an act of war against the working class next door in spain german chancellor angela merkel's visit sparked protests with demonstrators demanding an end to berlin's interfering in madrid's affairs thanks to the daunting financial storm clouds over the euro zone with a bloc central bank forced to roll out the artillery the c.b. says it will now begin buying up your own nation's debts to stabilize their borrowing costs but a financial advisor marco peter pollie thinks it's not the right solution. they refuse to deal with the issues it's very simple and that you want to foot fiscal integration which means that the germans have to sign for everybody else's debts and you get your. shed blood for the debts in front of his colleagues should you have a split of the year. in the meantime what you can do is keep printing money

which is what everybody is hoping for is to drug to keep going to. help the situation until the politics can catch up with the politics. and they've had lots and lots of meetings but we're still not close to. full solution through the eurozone that's anything but smooth sailing for the bigger more stable european economies too in france the president's ratings are in a freefall as waste war and economic weakness are taking their toll on the public as our. traditional means of dealing with the stress just don't seem to be cutting it anymore. bronze medals lost its title as a country with the highest per capita consumption of antidepressants but the french certainly have at last a peasant as it now would be even more reasons to be unhappy because the new record unemployment levels of economy that's just not growing and prospects all around and when they look to their new president they don't expect much of

a future either so much so that sixty eight percent of french people are fearful for their future close with a record high of seventy percent in two thousand and five shortly after jacques chirac was reelected for a second term but did manage to beat all other presidents in unpopularity after just one hundred days on the job. came after nine years in government and the bad ratings come after only four months. so it's catastrophic situation for when you vote for change and you relate as the president doesn't have even had a plan to deliver. the reforms you vaguely promised i mean of course you are. adding salt to injury the state just threw a life like to a struggling mortgage lender by guaranteeing its debts after launch explicitly

declared the world of finance as his enemy during the election campaign. this craziness has to stop i think this financial sector is spending on the other side billions for things which are not a priority for us. francis began sending direct aid to anti assad regions in syria a former french colony a move that shortly followed along as promised to recognize a provisional government formed by the opposition an all too familiar style in french foreign policy that irks the citizens like mathilde despite having voted for a law and what she calls france's intrusive behavior that she says is all about securing for the. interest. you can change president but the foreign policy doesn't change and move main political parties decided to go to war in my need to country to send the french army to go and kill people in ivory coast to do it is syrian money rule example trying to get you just like what happened with libya that the

french have a superiority complex to a point where the imagine that they are the one seeding something easy but they don't know this is that we see the other people from their money. to a teacher at a local school at a brother of three this is what she tells the kids. some to do music tell the kids to study hard improve their language skills and then they must think of the future outside of france are you. and that this point the french have clearly lost patience to us or sylvia r.t. paris you can follow this and many other stories online here is what else is a click away right now all the country is tinkers and tailors and soldiers are now germany's working more on the spy part is berlin is taking a brand new or creating a brand new intelligence network. russian prosecutors target more exotic forms of corruption sex bribes specifically sparking debate over just where to draw the line on illicit payments.

the world shifted to the east this week as heavyweight asia pacific nations gathered to decide how to prop up global financial health the cool and damp weather in russia's far east didn't show the war brewing here russia and china whose friendship is seen as a strong asset to economic recovery or to be tree medvedev has more from a lot of us took. one logical person was rounding up the results of the two thousand and twelve form which russia posted for the first time he basically again praise the fact that apec is extremely important as a region and as an organization it accounts for around fifty percent of the global economic output and global trade and therefore the shift is happening globally towards this region and russia is no exception and that in effect and has said that

china plays an extremely important role as a driver of global economic growth actually in an exclusive interview that the president gave prior to this forum that it was and also stuart stated the importance of russian chinese relations china is indeed becoming a global economic and political hub china has taken up this new leading role you know tony in russia's eyes but also in the always of the whole world what makes this rather special however is that russia and china are neighbors and our special relations took thousands of years to evolve to where they are. over the coming years we are bound to achieve a one hundred billion dollar turnover rate well that exclusive interview is of course available on our t.v. you tube channel you can catch it there but also i think more important was the q. and a session which followed that round up of the forum and letting the person had a chance to comment on this state of russian and european relations of course the

euro zone is now in a crisis and therefore that in a question was asked as to what is happening between russia and europe is there a trade war he answered that there's the situation is far from a cold trade war and the fact that your commission is now right now looking into gas problems a so-called monopoly position on the eastern european markets is based on the economic problems in the region and that basically europe now wants to transfer some of this economic burden onto russia and a rather peculiar and one thing i would say question that let. and was asked to comment on his recent stop that he made prior to the apec summit and that was your model in russia siberia to teach a flock of cranes to fly south he was using a hang glider and the journalist said that basically it's created a whole wave of internet jokes a comparison also was made to russia's electoral race that only sixty three percent of the krays the site had to pull the curtain and the other decided to go somewhere

else and this is what he had to say not all the. only the weak ones don't mean i must admit it's also the leaders phone the pilot's phone the not all the koreans fallujah. if you fly is too fast and too high he can't keep up there are also birds who don't fly in a flock even if they aren't part of the flock they're part of our population and they should be taken care of as much as possible. and i was listening to that q. and a at the international press center here and the answer was followed by a standing ovation. it's not just economic interest russia and china have in common there's also been agreements international disputes to the chagrin of the u.s. according to financial consultant. the toews between putin and hu jintao have been extremely strong and this has frankly been at the expense of relations with the us

and not overtly obviously but when it comes to issues like syria and iran there is a great deal of coordination between the two sides on those political issues then you know these things spill over into the economic side as well of course you know and we're starting to talk about how both countries handle the oil embargo that the u.s. has been sort of pushing on iran you know russia as a producer and china as a consumer they both you know the fact that they're harmonizing this really sort of helps to. counteract the u.s. u.s. influence and the ability to which the u.s. can exert its influence on its european allies in asia and japan specifically so we're seeing a lot of that. turning now to syria where a powerful explosion has rocked the country's largest city aleppo a car bomb near two hospitals and a sports stadium has killed at least seventeen civilians and injured forty others

this city has been plagued by violence a massive battle between rebels and government troops has been going on for days now saturday troops loyal to president assad turned back an attack on a major military base this comes while the u.n. syria peace envoy lakhdar brahimi is in egypt trying to make the warring more parties sit down to a cease fire a more well cough a member of the syrian social club ex-pat group things there's been a pattern of rising violence ahead of any diplomatic meetings that are aimed at fighting peaceful solutions to whatever the security council middle in syria there was an atrocity before that i think the most infamous one was supposed massacre on the fourth of february when we had been to russia and china used a double veto against the resolution in the security council condemning syria and this trend has continued in a sense we've seen an issue now in massacre taking place when kofi annan was about to. the presence of the next the and so on and so of course the western powers have for a long time seen this conflict as the same model with the same you know if you point

it just like this did with three decades ago the western powers have given these you have these these extremists here's the opportunity to win a certain war they've helped them then they funded them they gave them weapons and they won a war and they didn't think that this was because of the cia and m i six funding and backup but actually because the old god actually gave them this victory and this has ruled a lot of trouble to an alienated large segments of the societies of the muslim societies in the western countries. a friend a surgeon just back from syria where he attended rebels at a hospital in the besieged city of aleppo says at least half the opposition forces he treated were foreign jihadists the shock bearer co-founder of a medical charity doctors without borders says foreign nationals are actively involved in the conflict and he had mid-summer of french origin and were inspired by mohamed merah self-styled militant who was killed who killed seven in the french

city of toulouse back in march lora smith reports there could be fighters with u.k. passports also on the rebel side. to most britons going about their everyday lives the war in syria seems worlds away but for a few it's a struggle they feel personally involved in as the u.k. government portrays president assad as an evil dictator there's evidence that britain's all going to syria to fight for the opposition birmingham area m.p. khalid mahmood says some in his community have already gone there is a particular individual who's actually gone back to baghdad at the moment and has came back in a few weeks time who's been engaged in fundraising supporting people and putting people together to go back to get people who signed the support and made work and other. broad saying that they're going to support the resistance some says mahmud of british syrian extraction others of british muslims who feel their faith makes

this their struggle but whatever their reasons for going the fear is what they'll be when they return they're trained in the art of warfare but also radicalized as well and then they want to then continues on credit causation they want to bring more people on board and then perhaps their looks to try to. resolve some of the gripes they have here that's blowback the u.k. has already seen from another conflict here in london on the seventh of july two thousand and five the official report into the seven seventh's bombings reveals the existence of rivers back to house of the four bombers had been to afghanistan for so-called violent jihad back in the u.k. mohammed sidique khan and says that town with together killed fourteen people in combined suicide attack specific and seven bombers were only vaguely known to the authorities and that could be the case for fighters returning from syria too it's

all very well to notify the u.k. borders agency but in reality there's very. little they can do people that may leave here to fight in syria will go directly to syria they may stop in turkey or levon on iraq so the government will not be able to really know the. nation there's no real way of telling whether they're actually going to end up in syria there is no way to know. who won them to syria who they'll be liaising with. ideology is necessarily how the ologies and viewpoints point change in syria these are the scenes that could greet them on their return and islamist organization the english defense league is unlikely to take further radicalization of british muslims lying down creating more bad feeling and deeper fissures in an already divided society full weston whose british freedom party is allied to the e.t.l.

says militant groups are preparing for a confrontation we're going to get further and further into this horrible situation of them and us and them and us and then you have small scale violence that starts and then. you know i think we literally entering into a religious civil war scenario so far the government's given the syrian opposition eight million dollars for non-lethal equipment including communications but ordinary britons could find themselves paying the far higher price of unrest and insecurity at home for they support for the syrian opposition doris meth. coming up in the program kosovo closers its doors to western overseers hailing it as a storage move despite thousands of nato forces have still on its territory. and demonstrations continue in bahrain despite the government's bad are authorized rallies for story still to come. but first barack obama's captivating showing at

the democratic national convention this week appears to be paying off new poll numbers give him an edge over republican rival mitt romney only by a slim margin though but with just two months to go till the presidential vote both candidates working overtime to outshine each other. part and i reports that that could be a challenge. in two thousand and eight frock obama turned us politics into something of a pop culture phenomenon we made at one of those defining moments. a moment when our nation is at war our economy is in turmoil the democratic presidential candidate accepted his party's nomination valiant to rebuild america's moral standing and break from the policies of his predecessor the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in washington and the failed policies of george w. bush four years after change occupied the white house america is still at war

twenty three million citizens are unemployed and most of the national security policies cemented by george w. bush continue unabated or have been expanded in the code of your station of what were illicit abuses under bush imprisonment without trial spying without warrants we've now replaced imprisonment and torture largely with assassination which is actually not a moral improvement under obama's leadership guantanamo bay remains open the patriot act has been renewed warrantless wiretapping extended but cia black sites have closed targeted killings have been justified drone strikes publicly acknowledged military commissions codified however enhanced interrogation like waterboarding has been banned critics say obama has not only double down on bush's policies he's also raised the stakes signing the national defense authorization act made him the first us president to assert the right to assassinate anyone anywhere

without any legal sanction if there is a war cries out there we can the war crimes iraq. tops the list this made many of those who voted for him hoping for change left disillusioned in fact what they appear to have voted for was more of the same obama's ratings are now the lowest of any incumbent per. didn't since the one nine hundred eighty s. the two major parties are very very much the same on all the important issues when it comes to spending more money than we have engaged in in foreign conflicts that we can't afford the cost of america's overseas military campaigns have contributed to a u.s. national debt that topped sixteen trillion dollars this week while obama's america is running on empty critics say wall street continues to play largely by the same rules that led to the global financial crisis there hasn't been regulation of the banks in a sufficient way and that the main crisis affecting the united states which is to

say the financial clutch on the global economy and the corporate stranglehold on the political system hasn't changed at all because president obama comes from the coalition that led to that in the first place since obama has stepped into the white house america has seen an unprecedented rise in grassroots movements like the tea party and occupy wall street they'll both very different one thing uniting them is the claim that the people of america are being ignored by their own government the two major us political parties have historically gone to great lengths and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to highlight their differences yet following obama's first term in office the biggest change may be that more voters are likely to see a democrat and a republican as two sides of the same court in a fortnight i r.t. new york turning now to some other stories making headlines across the globe. a

spate of attacks ahead of a live in a rocky cities killing at least a hundred car bomb targeted police recruits lining up for a job at an oil company's office in the northern city of kirkuk outside baghdad ten soldiers were killed in a dog ambush and car bombings in other cities hit the southern port of basra to the north and to the northwest syrian border no one has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks. you are rocks vice president has been sentenced to death after a court ruled he was guilty of masterminding the killings of the country's security forces and shias terry was not in court though if he had fled to turkey when the charges against him emerged in december the case sparked a political crisis in iraq with other sunni politicians branding the prime minister who issued the warrant for hashemi a dictator. eighty police have been injured during clashes that occurred at the kurdish cultural festival in southwestern germany the unrest started after a teenager tried to get into the event with a band flag and police used pepper sprays they were pelted with stones and bottles

of water the clashes laugh lasted for about two hours and detained thirty one people. at least sixteen people have been killed by government soldiers after failing to stop at a checkpoint in mali the victims believed to be molly and maria tanian members of the dow a sect on their way to a religious conference in the capital sources report the army had likely confuse the preachers for islamic fighters one of the islamic militant groups in the country has called the slaughter a declaration of war. the breakaway serbian region of kosovo has a method to its constitution to eliminate western lead overseers who previously had the power to fire government officials and reject laws he did not civilly in office was set up in two thousand and eight to ensure the protection of the serb minority in the region kosovo's prime minister calls the move historic but what journalist says the change is more cosmetic. the i think tensions are been constantly in a state of escalation since last since last year since the attempt of the forty's

to a certain troll of the northern part of the province and the foreign supervision as i said it's not so much decreasing as it's changing venues now all of the context is going to be directly between nato and the sponsors of this so-called independent state of course and the so-called government there the i.c.a.o. is simply an office whose. which was supposed to give a pretense of legitimacy to the whole process. bahrain is witnessing daily protests and violence though this time incited by the police security officers resorted to tear gas and stun grenades to deal with scores of peaceful demonstrators who defied a government ban on authorized rallies activists packed the streets demanding democratic change and the release of political prisoners saying the ruling family is ignoring their calls tuesday bahrain's court decided to uphold a guilty verdict for opposition activists accused of plotting to overthrow the government times correspondent pepe escobar thinks the protesters are only just

gaining momentum. now the protests in bahrain which are absolutely legitimate it's the case of a shiite majority seventy percent of the country protesting because they are treated as second or third rate citizens even their own country you don't hear anything in a wash it down in paris about it they are talking about regime change in syria they are talking about the bombs that iran does not have from the beginning this this the saudis especially they could. they sold to washington the idea that this was an iranian plot in war ever happens. it's always few by the saudis and by washington as a minor disturbance and of course the u.s. does not want to compromise its position as being the aircraft. angel of the persian gulf recap of our top stories coming up in

a few moments stay with us here on r.t. . they were young and high flying. their careers were on takeoff. that flight for them was one of many. and the last one.

leaving the ice one archie. obviously boy. did that definitional kept showing up to question going to try to know if he had a good source or it's something off capitalism without bankruptcy is like christianity without fail. more news today violence is once again flared up. again these are the images.