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 greece's credibility. hero woes take their toll on the french with president francois hollande reaching his watching his ratings plummet. russia turns east at the apec summit economic and political ties with china growing stronger that some say could an herb the u.s. and its moves influence in the region. nearly a dead heat between republicans and democrats in the race for the white house with both candidates looking to set apart what some say all remarkably similar platform .

for am in moscow i met treasure bring you today's top stories and a look back at the week's news here on r t our top story the leaders of greece's three party coalition government have failed to agree to a package of spending cuts that the prime minister says are crucial to restoring financial credibility they're asking international creditors to give them more time to implement austerity measures with further talks set for wednesday the latest cuts especially painful to the country's most vulnerable including retiree's low income workers independents saturday greece's second largest city thessalonica he was rocked by protests with some fifteen thousand demonstrators taking a stand against the measures peter all of it reports. minister antonis the most is 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 given to him make a. we're both unfair 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 men taining any credibility that it has left on the global financial stage and not credibility is set to be tested quite soon is old it is from the so-called troika arrives in greece to see whether they've 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 and anger and the

way the government is dealing with the crisis is one of their 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 anti bailout money was perhaps more worrying though is if you see that in fifth place is the ultra rightist party golden dawn party that has a far right agenda some of called neo nazi and in fact 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 in testimony 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 city. it's like nothing as people demonstrate against the handling of the financial crisis and it's not only in greece where cuts are being met with a wall of public protest in portugal government slashes to social to safety nets have been dubbed an act of war against the working class and next door in spain german chancellor angela merkel's visit sparked street protest 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 our borrowing costs but financial advisor marco peter pollie thinks this isn't the answer. they refused to deal with the issues it's it's very simple that you want to put fiscal integration which means that the germans have to sign for everybody else's debts and you get your. share blood for the debts in front of his

colleagues you should 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 no closer to. the eurozone it's also anything but smooth sailing for the bigger more stable european economies as well in france the president's ratings were in a freefall as waste war and economic weakness have taken their toll on the public as our reports from paris traditional means of dealing with stress just don't seem to be cutting it anymore rounds may have lost its title as the country with the highest per capita consumption of antidepressants but the french certainly haven't lost their pessimism now with more reasons to be unhappy because the new record

unemployment levels an economy that's just me. growing and weak prospects all around and when they look at 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 to the 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 sure i can lower ratings came after nine years in government and the bad ratings come after only four months. so it's catastrophic situation for you when you vote for change and you relate as the president doesn't have even a plan to deliver. the reforms you vaguely promised i mean of course you are unhappy 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 a last promise to recognize a provisional government formed by the opposition an all too familiar style in french foreign policy that irks 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 national interest. we can change president but the foreign policy doesn't change and move main political parties decided to go to war in my native

country to send the french army to go and kill people and i rico stooge. today it is syrian money abroad that we're trying to get just like what happened with libya that the french have a superiority complex to a point where the imagine that they are the one saving others but they don't know is that we see other people for their money for peace as a teacher at a local school and a mother of three this is what she tells the kids they see the film something they do tell their kids to study hard to improve their language skills and they must think of the future outside of france. and at 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's what else is a click away right now but it's got tankers and tailors and soldiers and now germany is working on the spot i part is where lin is creating a brand new intelligence network. that russian prosecutors targeting more exotic

forms of corruption in this time sex pride sparking debate just over where to draw the line at a list of payments. the world shifted a little to the east this week as heavyweight asia pacific nations gathered to decide how to prop up global growth the cool and damp weather in russia's far east didn't chill the warmth between russia and china whose friendship is seen as a strong asset to economic recovery parties dmitry medvedev and co has more from a lot of us talk. 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 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 all that exclusive interview is of course available on our t.v. you tube channel you can capture that but also i think more important was the q. and a session which followed that round up of the four of them 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 person was asked as to what is happening between russia and europe is there a trade war he answered that 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 lead. 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 and

a comparison also was made to russia's electoral race that only sixty three percent of the krays decided to pull the curtain and the others decided to go somewhere else and this is what he had to say not all that. only the week. of of it i must admit it's also the leaders phone the pilots phone the not all the koreans follow. if you fly is too fast and too high. 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 also there have been agreements on international disputes to the chagrin of the u.s. according to financial consultants money. the ta is between putin and hu jintao extremely

strong and this is frankly been at the expense of relations with the u.s. and not overtly obviously but it 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 to syria powerful explosion has rocked the country's largest

city aleppo a car bomb near two hospitals in a sports stadium killed at least seventeen civilians and injured forty others the city's been plagued by violence a massive battle between rebels and government forces has been going on for days now saturday troops loyal to president assad turned back an attack on a major military base this while the u.n. syria peace envoy lakhdar brahimi is in egypt trying to make warring parties sit down to a ceasefire marwar cough a member of the syrian social club ex-pat group thinks there's been a pattern of rising violence and ahead of diplomatic meetings that are aimed at finding 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 in the massacre taking place when kofi annan. it was about to

meet president of the next day 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 jihad these these extreme muslims the opportunity to win a certain war they've held them to them they funded them they gave them weapons and they won would they didn't think that this was because of the cia and m i six funding and backup but actually because they pulled god actually gave them this victory and this has ruled a lot of trouble to tell united large segments of the societies of the muslim societies in the western countries the french surgeon who's just returned from syria where he attended to 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 the medical charity doctors without borders says foreign nationals are actively involved in the

conflict there admits some are of french origin who were inspired by mohamed merah a self-styled militant who killed seven of the french city of toulouse in march as artie's or a smith reports there also could be fighters with u.k. passports on the rebel side as well. 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 britons 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 is going back in a few weeks time who's been engaged in fundraising supporting people and putting people together to go back to get people to sign that. for the maid work and other

. bride 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 they're also radicalized as well and then they want to then continues up credit causation they want to bring more people on board and then perhaps that 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 libya official reports into the seven seventh's bombings reveals the existence of rivers that to house of the for all those had been to afghanistan for so-called violent jihad back in the u.k. mohammed sidique khan and says that the town with together kills fourteen people in

combined suicide attacks specific 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 not go directly to syria they may stop in turkey or lebanon or rock 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 when they enter syria who they'll be liaising with what ideologies 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 western 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 it's the tit for tat and that's why. you know i think we truly 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 you are smith. will stay with us here on araa he still to come kosovo closing its doors to western overseers helling it as a historic move just by thousands of nato forces are still on its territory bus.

demonstrations continue in bahrain despite the government's ban on authorizing rallies the full story still to come. but first barack obama's captivating showing at the democratic national convention this week appears. the paying off new poll figures give him an edge over republican rival mitt romney but only by a slim margin with only two months to go to the presidential vote both candidates will be old working overtime to outshine the other party's marina porter narrow ports that could be a challenge. in two thousand and eight for aco bomb i 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 value 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 had been expanding their 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 cries. 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 president 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 a 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 you know 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 merino court my r.t.

new york. turned out of some other stories making headlines across the globe a spate of attacks has hit thirteen iraqi cities killing at least one hundred a car bomb targeted police recruits lining up for a job at an oil companies are office in the northern city cure koch. outside of baghdad ten soldiers were killed at dawn ambush the other car bombings hit cities ranging from the southern part of basra to the northwest syrian border no one has yet claimed responsibility for any of the attacks. meanwhile in iraq the 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 she is terry go hashmi was not in court though as he had fled to turkey once the charges against him a merge back in december the case sparked a political crisis in iraq with other sunni politicians branding the prime minister who issued the warrant for me a dictator. eighty police officers have been injured during clashes at a kurdish cultural festival in southwestern germany the unrest started after

a teenager tried to get into the event with a band of flag police used pepper spray and were pelted with stones and bottles of water clashes lasted for about two hours and thirty one people were detained. at least sixteen people have been killed by government soldiers after failing to stop at a checkpoint in mali victims are believed to be molly and maria taney and members of the dawa sect on their way to a religious conference in the capital sources report the army had likely confused the preachers with islamic fighters one of the muslim one of the islamic militant groups in the country has called the slaughter a declaration of war for the breakaway serbian region of kosovo as amended its constitution to eliminate western lead overseers who previously had the ability to fire government officials and reject laws the international civilian office was set up in two thousand and eight to ensure the protection of the serb minority in the region kosovo's prime minister called it a historic move but journalist. thinks that change is more cosmetic. he and think

tensions are have been constantly in a state of escalation since last since last year since the attempt of the forty's to assert control of the northern part of the province and foreign supervision as i said is that is not so much the decreasing as it's changing venues now all of the contact is going to be directly between nato and the sponsors of this so-called independent state of kosovo 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 so this time incited by police security officers wanted to tear gas and stun grenades to deal with scores of peaceful demonstrators who defied the government baton authorized rallies activists packed the streets demanding democratic change and the release of political prisoners saying the ruling family is ignoring their calls on tuesday bahrain's court decided to uphold

the guilty party for opposition activists accused of plotting to overthrow the government patrick headings in a geo political analyst for the u.k. column website things protesters are just gaining momentum now but the problem in bahrain is this is an actual democratic reform movement this is a real arab spring movement this isn't like the kind of fake arab spring that you saw in egypt this has been brewing and boiling over for over one year now but yet it's been more or less not commented on at all in the global mainstream corporate media and some of the state run media organizations like the b.b.c. they're in a very difficult position the opposition movement because as a result of this ruling some of the potential sentences for protesting against the government could be as much life in prison so what's happening in bahrain there's sort of constructing a sort of program. to quell any just that whatsoever. coming up in

a few moments president vladimir putin tells r.t. where he sees russia's future but first a recap of our headlines stay with us. 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 arche. wealthy british style. that's not on. markets why not come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's concert for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report on our.