talk turns to action of the brics summit in south africa with the world's top emerging economies staking out a challenge to the green lighting a new massive bailout fund. begun to talk about a hunger strike reaches its fiftieth day the inmates fight against prisoners treatment could turn deadly and leave a bad taste in the mouths of us government officials who keep silent on the issue. the chief says biggest bank gets the boot to predicting doom and gloom european banks get. concerned about brussels potentially reaching into their accounts. and u.k. immigrants face a new controversial citizenship test that includes wide ranging questions. that even some members of the british parliament. the top stories this hour.

international news and comment live from a studio in moscow this is with the twenty four hours a day. a new global bank is being born in south africa where the world's top emerging economies are meeting the new financial powerhouse will be a direct challenge to the world bank and the i.m.f. the international monetary fund both dominated by the u.s. brazil russia india china and south africa also the new crisis fund and hinted they would ditch the dollar. at the summit. the five member states of the organization have agreed to establish our joint anti crisis fund possibly reaching one hundred billion dollars although the details are still being worked out only

it's planned that the how much each country will have to chip in to this fund will directly. directly connected to each of g.d.p. but talks on this project will continue to the next g twenty summit in washington when an ambitious project for an ambitious organisation for the past twenty years the five member states of this organization have been the most a rapidly developing economies in the world it's thought that they're growing faster around seven times faster than those of the g seven nations and it's estimated that by the year twenty twenty combined to brics nations will make up over twenty percent of global creed among other of a long term plans which have already been decided to here in south africa is the creation of a joint development bank possibly with a starting capital of around fifty billion u.s. dollars and it's planned that it will it will be independent from the international

monetary fund and the world bank which are controlled by the united states and europe and now also china and brazil have decided to use their national currencies when conducting the newly half of the payments between each other as a direct challenge to the dollar russia and china are already using a similar scheme and the idea is that other members of ricks will soon follow because they see the dollar is increasingly becoming more vulnerable to shocks caused by crises in general it's clear that brics nations who do want to protect their economies the they do want to be more independent from western financial institutions especially in the times of some heavy problems with the western finite . model in general and what we're witnessing here in south africa is definitely words turning into action and truly a transformation of this organization from a forum for dialogue to

a real working mechanism. the world bank has already promised to cooperate with the brics development fund as and when the financial institution materializes asia times correspondent pepe escobar thinks the new bank initiative could turn the global financial system in a completely new direction this alternatives to the world bank and the i.m.f. some still say essentially this is the big deal and of the bretton woods system and to be supported by their next rick's list mexico indonesia south korea turkey and the next guests as well this is you know that stick don't take place of geopolitics a geoid comics are changing it's not atlanticist anymore it seemed merchants of reemergence finally of the south miss being spread by western guard media that china is the new colonialists power in after school gleefully ridiculous the

breakdown of bricks new plans and what impact they may have on the global economy is still ahead for you in the business update later with the capital. it's now fifty days since the biggest hunger strike began in america's war on terror detention facility with no progress being made to stop the protests which could be close to turning deadly the appetite for justice and acceptable treatment to sing three of the protesting inmates hospitalized one authorities say at least ten being force fed has made a point not brings us the latest. this hunger strike at the guantanamo bay detention center grows more dangerous by the day the international committee of the red cross has announced that they have sent a doctor and another delegate to the island prison a week earlier than planned because of concerns surrounding the health of those

hunger strikers participating in this protest now the i.c.r.c. representatives are scheduled to make a regular two week visit to the detention camp on april first but as we already just reported the organization says that they sent two representatives early due to the issues in the concerns relating to the hunger strike now in the meantime navy captain robert duran to spokesman for the detention operation who we've been communicating with more than two weeks now confirms that thirty one of the one hundred sixty six give no prisoners are on hunger strike eleven of the men are being force fed three of those men were hospitalized for rehydration an observation now two weeks ago when r.t. reached out to captain and he dismissed any reports or allegations of a mass hunger strike taking place at the detention facility then the numbers

started escalating and now this hunger strike began according to attorneys on or around february sixth attorneys say that the prisoners went on the strike to protest the a legit confiscation of their personal items and they allege it sacrilege is handling of their korans this is not just about treatment this is about the fact that these inmates of these detainee detainees have lost hope. that closing guantanamo bay is still a realistic priority for us president barack obama he promised to close down this prison by the beginning of twenty ten there's one hundred sixty six six prisoners languishing still. more than half of them have been cleared for either transfer or release attorneys say that by holding these men without charge without trial the united states is violating international laws of human rights. well to talk more on

the attempts to resolve the crisis at the guantanamo prison camp i'm joined live by simon shore he's a spokesman and head of media relations for the international committee of the red cross in north america and understand that two of your delegates have now reached the camp what have they seen. well you know we don't really comment publicly on what we see during our visits but our two delegates arrived on monday and as your reporter said the idea was to get there a little in advance of our regularly planned visit that starts next monday and to get a better sense of the current tensions and their anger strike to speak with the detainees directly of course we're involved and also with your torah teams to get their perspective on what's going on and that's what we're doing right now and we'll be doing for the next two weeks what you decide to send these two weeks earlier than planned where we've been following of course the current tensions and then the anger strikes since our last visit which ended at the end of february and we've been you know in in very close communication with the authorities at the camp sense

and being up to date on what's going on is very important for us to be present there and to speak with the detainees in person again to get their perspective is something that's very important it's how we work and you know for us it's really essential to be in the facility to really get a sense of what's going on and that's that that's the reason we've been reporting on how desperate the conditions have been getting in the last two weeks why didn't you send delegates there before from the red cross. well you know we visit the facility very regularly six weeks we have a two week visit there we were there last february last week of february we've been visiting the facility since two thousand and two so for us you know visiting want to animal is something we do very very regularly we have a food program dedicated to those visits to this interaction on those issues with the u.s. government and something we do daily here in washington and down in guantanamo so it's for us it's it's part of our job and you know again sending detainees this week is our response we've done it in the past in issues on the facility and we

continue to do that you say you can tell us what you're seeing there at the moment but you can tell us what you've seen in the past what are the conditions like are you happy with the way that the detainees are treated and with that general condition in health. when in fact we don't comment publicly on conditions of detention or treatment of detainees those are issues that we raised directly with the authorities concerned american authorities in this case what i can tell you is that from our observations you read those tensions and and this anguish that detainees are experiencing is clearly related to the lack of a clear legal framework in guantanamo and this is now adding a real impact and as an impactful it is for some time on their mental health on their emotional elf and this is what we're seeing played out today and so for us really the issue beyond just what you know we are seeing right now in guantanamo is this issues that you reported touched on that lawyers are talking about the issue of the legal framework that that regiments the detention of guantanamo and this is

the issue that the administration must address so clearly you are concerned about the the mental health of these detainees is this something you can challenge the authorities with the red cross have much influence over this. well you know the discussions the reporting the observations we share with the authorities we really have an impact it's a continuing thing as as i said we've been visiting the facility since two thousand and two so you know it's a very solid relationship in terms of having our opinions and observations taken into account there are bigger questions that are on the political sphere legal sphere and their you know the administration with the congress must act and this is beyond really what the i.c.r.c. can do what we can do is to ensure that certain international standards held and that the perspective the humanitarian perspective of the detainees is taken into account it's interesting over the last couple of weeks we've noticed that many

organizations really haven't said much about what's going on and we've been reporting what's happening we've been talking to lawyers who are representing detainees the fact now that you and i are talking that the red cross is clearly concerned how significant is it now that this story becomes more and more public and and well known as it were. what i think you know the fact that president obama announced that guantanamo would be closed back in two thousand and ten that there hasn't been really any action. movies slowly disappearing from the landscape here the political landscape and and certainly until a few days ago the media landscape all this is playing into what's going on now and you know bottom line and for us you know seeing it from our perspective what we see is increasing levels of the spear ration i mean just briefly would read what street the red cross want to see this detention center closed down just briefly do you want to close down. no we don't have an opinion on the closure of guantanamo what we want to see is a clear legal framework that which amounts to detention and one to animal so i really appreciate time thank you very much indeed for joining us there from the

international committee of the red cross in north america well for the seven weeks the hunger strike has been taking place l.t. has been gathering statements from lawyers activists prison officials and international organizations and of course you can head to our special time line on our t.v. dot com to get more insight into the situation in guantanamo and see what the reaction the protest has invoked so far and of course give us your opinion on the story on our web site we're asking you what you think about the ongoing hunger strike at guantanamo will actually reach what it will conclude well so far the majority of those who've already taken part in our vote but leave that and we can look at the results on the screen in just a moment where i see what you think about this hunger strike the impact it's having well to sixty percent we'll see here on the screen right now are suggesting that the prisoners could in fact risk their lives end up dying some of them and that would result in very little impact very few but maybe token policy changes may be

made we see the eighteen percent conditions for the impression that the prisoners could improve so the hunger strike could have a positive effect on their plight and we can see that seventy percent think that the prison detention could be closed but indefinite detention could continue elsewhere and a minority think that this bad press over the detention camp could lead to definite detention actually ending those are the results of what you're thinking so far in a web site r.t. dot com because to hear from you. well still to come here on r.t. . a pipe dream for one russian businessman after he spent three years digging a tunnel to siphon crude oil from a pipe the only thing he's likely to earn from it is a stint behind bars. and also major country what's available to plant in the u.s. it's a stumbling block because local governments say no to the drone initiative but stories

and plenty more for you after the break stay with us. when their own country can't offer them a living even loving mothers sometimes have to leave their children behind. i don't like to wonder just a bit longer. if the dream of millions of migrants that their children might choose their motherland. is. i want my children to win over moscow. russia has become this step motherland. migrants working hard to find a way home. wealthy british style.

market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger or a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines kaiser report. news continues here on r.t. credit rating agencies are ringing alarm bells over cyprus saying the e.u. is bungled rescue has sent investors packing across europe that is thousands of cypriots descend on the presidential palace demonstrating against the troika a new minister risky brussels bailout for the tax haven came strong with some of the harshest conditions yet including a deposit tax banks are now reporting mass calls from fearful savers looking to get their money out of the block the firm founder and c.e.o. blacksmith energy consulting group says the approach to solving the separate crisis

has been less than ideal. i think the debate here is obviously much water than the particular case of cyprus and the political message that's being conveyed at the high end the the high end of the base and been going on for last week or so are clearly underlining. the lack of a lack of vision behind europe's bailout the particular case of cyprus shows a a political move where we're we're we're we're trying to. to heal a deep pool and with a band-aid obviously cyprus is again a particular case but the overall discussion and the overall worry and fear that is that is underlying here is is for for every european citizen. the stone age the jury service and the london olympics are just three subjects you can now be quizzed on if you want to become a british citizen the new version of the controversial u.k.

citizenship test has just been put into place and has been harshly criticized for its difficulty and focus on history as r.t. sarah first reports many brits themselves struggle to find answers to some of the questions. also in scotland the famous british landmark in london's trafalgar square built commemorate admiral nelson he died in the bus or to follow in eighteen a boy but it's also now we are first to one of the questions britain has since that time the way he is being criticized focusing too much on historical information and not enough on practical knowledge it's become a standard joke and i mean that you know for something which is supposed to be taken seriously and you know when it was first announced we were involved in a few little quiz sessions where even you know prominent members of the people who in the past had been prominent members of the government were being asked questions like who was the the british king who expel the danes for i'm guessing completely

and hopelessly wrong and yet he's disappeared so these. they must first say that by putting british culture and history at the heart of the system that they're ensuring that those who want to settle in britain permanently fully understand british life those criticisms about the test being overly complex and focusing too much on historical information do the questions really represent what it means to be british was a find out we did some of these questions to members of the british public to find out how they fare which led looks of prehistoric monument which stands in the english country of well. the name of the admiral he's got a monument here in trafalgar square below the notion yes that's right ok we've got another one for you because this is an assistant ship ties what you call the second largest party in the house of commons conservatives it is the opposition.

hugo one of the to the name of the admiral he died in battle in eight hundred eighty five and has a monument here in trafalgar square. give you. all sorts of questions i've gone through them it's not as if these questions are. people going to be done online and they get to have plenty of opportunity to look through a very thin book frankly for it if they can do that and i think that. he wants. the twenty four questions correctly and the need to learn details historical backgrounds if they want to become. and many people more than a hundred and fifty thousand people took the city. almost eighty thousand of which were here in london. a new reason to pick your words carefully when tweeting about

your job recently cation for the. negative posts you make about your work or your boss to our website. and your list of new words for the first time removing. succumbing to pressure from the american giant more. it's fast becoming one of the most precious commodities no surprise then that the black gold rush might land one russian entrepreneur in prison that's after he personally dug a sixty meter tunnel to siphon crude oil from a pipeline today i spoke to sean thomas he told me all the details. well you have

to give the guy credit for some entrepreneurial spirit if you will but a bizarre story indeed let me get down to exactly what happened ok so this fifty two year old man from the oil rich region of novosibirsk spent three years digging a sixty meter tunnel from his country home to the. trans nafta subsidiary pipeline and what he did was he then tied into that pipeline and then he spent three months siphoning oil for himself off of that pipeline and then selling it course he got caught up being not very lucrative for the man but here's what he got the basically three months thirty tons of crude oil estimated about fifty five hundred thousand rubles that's about sixteen thousand u.s. dollars. if you ask him we had the opportunity to actually hear what he had to say about it if you ask him why he didn't he said well he just wanted to see if he could get away with it and listen what he had to say. but i wanted to see whether i

could manage to accomplish something like that or not one so i read a thesis paper advantage and it served as a starting point i came to the site every day off to work and kept digging at night and all day if it was the weekend so when i wasn't at work i worked here it was no easy task there were a lot of difficulties with the soil then all i needed was a hose of the car i had one hose and i connected it to a container the cart was the difficult part the oil kept spilling my efforts didn't even pay off everything happened so fast i think it was just bad luck. bad luck indeed it was not profitable for him in fact he said that he spent more money digging the tunnel and getting it all set up than he did from selling the oil off he also said that there were problems with the system that it overflowed it spilled it ruined his clothes and that he's now repenting for the whole thing but one thing that is certain now that he's facing some prison time he's facing charges of large scale theft he might be going behind bars maybe all of these digging skills. prove

to be useful to people are we. going to be interesting enough it is a massive network throughout the whole of russia certainly just imagine if you hadn't got caught he could have made a lot of money out indeed indeed andy and you could have gone undetected in fact there are countries who have done the exact same thing from russia as well as. u.s. government hopes to increase the number of its surveillance drones to ten files and in the next seven years the plans would be easy to realize that it was local authorities aren't happy at all about the idea of being watched twenty four seven he's got a count reports on the resistance one point this documentary on u.s. public television touts the technological capabilities of drones and their new super sensors this image was taken seventeen thousand five hundred feet above quantico virginia and covers fifteen square miles the state of virginia was the first to stand up against this kind of surveillance in early february the state

legislature passed a two year moratorium on the use of drones but the bill is yet to be signed by the state's governor who is known to be very supportive of the spy aircraft sees this technology is already being heavily marketed to local law enforcement agencies and other groups and there's even one county in virginia that already purchased two drones for surveillance and so we know it's coming and we just we want to get out ahead of it at least twenty seven states are now considering legislation to outline how drones can be used by law enforcement or to ground them all together but there are those who. believe the lawmakers at first. the rise of the spy planes so they're taking the matter into their own hands a company in oregon says it has developed and will soon start selling to acknowledge that could shoot people from surveillance drones or not this able in their cameras or anything like that we are not doing anything physically to the drones we are simply not allowing their cameras to look at areas. also in the

battle for privacy a designer in new york came up with an anti sebelius clothing line this is a garment of designed to be firmly reflective which means that he bounces off and he does what suits for thermal imaging and particular this technology is used a lot on drones and you refuse but it's doubtful that this designers gear however creative could compete with the cutting edge spite acknowledging now being developed for government use a million terabytes of video a day which is the equivalent of five thousand hours of high definition footage so you can go back and say i would like to see what happened at this particular location three days two hours four minutes ago and it would actually show you exactly what happened if you're watching it there's actually enough resolution to be able to see people waving their arms or walking around with because they where

as a number of states try to restrict the use of drones at a federal level there is a great push to expand their use the federal aviation administration projects that in seven years there will be thirty thousand flying over the u.s. there's absolutely no way of knowing if we are being filmed at the moment so we might as well wave to big brother up there in washington i'm going to check out. some international news in brief in italy the five star movement has said it will not enter into negotiations to form a government with the center left aligned. luigi bersani. party had previously said it would not support the big policies it blames for the current crisis you know it's what leaves the parliament deadlocked and he's allowing one last month's election but did not get enough senate seats to govern on its. in bangladesh protesters thought to be supporters of the opposition have detonated

handful of crude explosives in the capital dhaka nobody was hurt in the blasts the demonstrators are demanding the release of one hundred fifty activists taken into custody earlier this month charged with inciting violence is coming only second nationwide strike by. the hague tribunal has sentenced to high ranking bosnian serbs to twenty two years jail each with their role in the yugoslavia war then bosnian serb interior minister and a top security official were both committed to a campaign of murder torture and you should more than double the amount of serbs have been sentenced by the tribunal compared to other ethnicities. france and germany have demanded an explanation from russia concerning a series of ongoing checks into normal governmental organizations operating in the country or do you mean the commission has more on the story france and germany are basically concerned with the recent text which has been conducted by the members of

the prosecutor's office as well as by some tax officials who have been coming into offices of various n.g.o.s in order to check their financial paperwork now some of these n.g.o.s are from france and germany and this is why berlin and paris demanded an explanation at the same time the officials russian officials are saying that all of this everything that's happening is very strictly within the legal framework of these so-called foreign agents lot which is essentially keeping track of what is it what exactly is happening to the non-governmental organizations or where is their money coming from and where it is being distributed. those weights are being operated by foreign companies or who is funding is based on overseas presented very to present a very detailed paperwork regarding their finances and also put themselves in special register at least now there are reports that a lot of n.g.o.s have actually are fused to do that and decided to boycott the law altogether but this is a lot there are some to duration officials and therefore you can't really boycott.