israel and gaza are seeing their heaviest exchange of rocket attacks following the ongoing palestinian prison riots and street clashes over the death of a former hamas member in israeli custody. the war of words on the korean peninsula with many south koreans fearing conflict as pyongyang suspends access to a crucial industrial zone jointly run with. with the presidential race now underway in venezuela we take a look at whether any of the main candidates could fill the shoes of the late top stories. from our new center here in moscow this is r.t.

with the twenty four hours a day first to news we are receiving from russia's chechen republic a massive has engulfed almost all the floors of the highest skyscraper in the region's capital grozny we have bring you live pictures of that inferno which you can see just in the right of the screen there. it was once a recently completed forty story a lavish hotel which also boasted luxury apartments almost completely immersed by smoke and flames dozens of fire brigades are fighting the blaze or people said to have been evacuated from it before the became out of control the sky scraper is part of the city complex of high rise office and apartment buildings worth around two hundred fifty million dollars these are the latest pictures of that fire there in the chechen capital a movie star who was recently handed the keys to an elite five room residence in the complex that's after he wired russian citizenship later in the program we'll

have a report from our correspondent on this developing story there in grozny the capital of church. tensions once again flaring up on the border between israel and gaza palestinian militants launched rocket attacks on tuesday and early this morning with israel retaliating the ongoing hostilities and street clashes were partly sparked by the death of a former hamas member in israeli custody sees. the details. for the past forty eight hours there has been increasing auscultation in the mood over the all over the western big concern of course in gaza of course we should start with that that's where fire exchange took place between the palestinians and israeli armed forces. reportedly shot several mortars into these early territory israel retaliated with an air raid the first the first such raid since

november since the member says cease fire and then and then palestinians from the gaza strip. have sent several more rockets into israel we don't know about any we haven't heard about any damages or injuries or deaths because of the fire teams but . remain so that the tension is running stream lehi the clashes continue they were specially raging today in hebron which is the hometown of the. palestinian prisoner who died in an israeli jail wasn't appropriately treated according to his family he wasn't treated by medical by medical professionals until february of this year when he was finally told that he has terminal cancer and that he literally has days to live not leave a lot of people happy obviously they're going to continue with their struggle and we will see more protests in the nearest future just february as thirty year old prisoner died from a heart attack that caused

a flurry of protest among palestinians palestinian prisoners themselves went on strike they went on a hunger strike in fact they have done so in this case two you have to understand there are almost five thousand palestinians in israeli jails right now and palestinians during their protests continuously ask israeli officials to either release those prisoners or at least treat them appropriately however it doesn't seem to be the case at least according to the palestinian authorities because as you as you see the palestinian prisoners keep dying in this pretty. case it looks like there was no like no medical aid was given an appropriate moment and this of course things palestinians incredibly frustrating and then of course there is the issue of these israeli occupation of several palestinian lands as well as the issue of settled settlements so obviously all of these issues just piled on top of one another and the mood obviously tense are with every day. palestinian journalist

khaled america who's in hebron which is seeing some of the worst clashes over the past two days explains why the people on the streets are refusing to calm down. a state of widespread anger and diggnation or got of. what many people here. a primitive murder of israelis palestinians think that the death of most of the humvee was a direct result of israeli criminal negligence moral callousness this is the second person. to die in israeli jails in less than sixty days so the israelis cannot be given the benefit of the doubt at all the potential for. all out confrontation with israel. it's always there but i don't think that hamas in particular is eager to escalate the situation to.

the time at least everyone expects both sides to maintain a semblance of self-restraint and we hope that the situation will not. deteriorate into an all out confrontation in gaza. north korea has barred workers from the self from entering a joint the operated factory zone it's pyongyang's latest move in the conflict between the neighboring states which has been simmering in recent weeks the key song industrial park has been one of the few successful efforts of reconciliation between the two koreas from which the economies of both countries benefit south korea based journalist joseph kim as mine. the south korean president is newly elected north korea doesn't want to test her limits and perhaps she's willing to change her policies towards north korea and the game's main objective is actually

to start a dialogue with the u.s. with north korea's recent what the u.s. calls provocations it's actually been easier for the united states to pivot its military back into the studio something that the pentagon has said that it was wanting to do to rebalance back into east asia so because of this we've seen a larger increased presence of military expansion by the u.s. into east asia during these annual drills something that we haven't seen before we're seeing a lot of money spent despite the eighty five billion dollars budget cut that the u.s. is currently going through these threats from north korea or what people say are perceived threats have actually become common and to many people in south korea but this time around the rhetoric has actually gotten a lot harsher so many south koreans are actually getting more of an eerie feeling on what this might turn out to be i don't feel a direct threat but i'm getting a little anxious sense can't even the south korean government is taking echo worse

this time so it feels like it's getting closer when the u.s. is more forceful it has a less positive effect from the perspective of a south korean citizen i feel anxious and it doesn't feel like protection. first of all it's not the first time north korea has issued threats so to us we don't feel the threats we don't perceive them to be dangerous but it seems there are a lot of things happening inside kim. it seems that the u.s. is doing those things to make correct evaluation on king john so that the nuclear problem doesn't see it and i'm putting stress with south korea with the joint military drills but i don't think it is really helping in terms of into korean peace ted. well let's just recap the events that have been developing on the korean peninsula of late tell me i know its plans to revive a nuclear reactor that's been shut down for six years it previously said all of its

missile systems would be moved mobilized and all in high alert the north pole said it had itself to be in a state of war with its southern neighbor washington me mom has been taking more solid steps by upping its military presence in the area its navy sent a second guided missile destroyer to the korean peninsula on monday night south to u.s. stealth will planes arrived in the region following the deployment of nuclear capable b. fifty two long range bowman's gregory in it she's on the advisory board of the korea policy institute he believes there are hidden motives behind washington's moves the united states have hundreds bases throughout the military throughout the world. if north korea collapses united states stablished military bases right on the border with china and then circumvent of that nation. also there are third consider mineral resource deposits and north korea which would be used for exploitation by u.s. corporations and the united states. has never tolerated

a country that won't criticize economy of the service of a foreign corporation they want to know that about north korea knows that if their approach diplomatically is going to go it's yours but if it's right or only respond in a firm so you were kind of a feedback loop where your bottom restraints come and cut off on or go or stations were never at north korea and nothing since since the last several years obama is following a policy of what he called strategic patience which is enough to act a slow strangulation of north korea through sanctions and economic measures in the hope that it will collapse at some point in time. life here in moscow with the twenty four hours a day coming up on the program with open all means the u.n. adopts a treaty a controlling exports of conventional weapons hoping to advance humanitarian concerns but critics say it's phrasing leaves too much room for interpretation. plus a bearing taliban attack claims dozens of lives in afghanistan just

a day after president karzai offered the militants a chance to enter politics anymore after the break stay with us.

for international in the very heart of moscow. continues here in the race for the top job is kicked. off in venezuela as the country's acting president nicolas maduro prepares to take on his main opposition rival in the week a pretty lives both are eyeing to replace the country's late charismatic president hugo chavez who died last month following along with cancer who's the former confident there's a needed heir to chavez is looking to continue in the footsteps of his predecessor

meanwhile centra state government has vowed to deliver a free market economy and strengthen ties with the west including washington in my colleague kevin and spoke to dr francisco domingo head of latin american studies at middlesex university he says despite the good intentions the chances of securing the top job a slim. nicolas maduro has demonstrated to be a formidable communicate so easy person the several to use in volume land which he is the masses very he conveys very good messages he's very good very astute politically and i think he's doing very well that's why he's leading in the polls. gaining if you like from the spontaneous outpouring of grief or for chavez is he capitalizing for one of a better word on the grief. oh i'm sure there is a lot of sentiment about it i mean now chavis was a figure of haters in the international media now the population of venezuela

realize how much he was loved was two million actually that came out in the streets to be a bit him fair world as him possibly was the biggest demonstration in the history of the country and any candidate whoever they are would be foolish not to use it however the key point is that i think is the message people are saying you know mother is saying to them do you want the continuation of what you had with him for forty years improving it perfect a need or do you want to go back to the bottle days of the republic which the british represent and the message in that sense is very clear last mother oh i see this is really in between ten to forty percent in the polls. when police are unfit to protect women from abuse in india technology comes to the rescue. website engineers have come up with their answer to sex crimes and that is a rapist zapping police alerting brar. also a lot of moments almost seven decades after the end of world war two its legacy

still taunts berlin is not about the latest alert the german capital central role way station at r.t. dot com. the united nations has adopted its first ever treaty designed to control the global trade in conventional weapons the act was already historic with the document has no inforce mint mechanism let's take a closer look now at what it's aiming to achieve well the treaty bans countries from exporting arms to embargoed states of weapons to those who could use them to carry out war crimes or indeed acts of terrorism the document also requires states to prevent conventional arms reaching the black market the un chief said the document will become a powerful new tool to help prevent human rights abuses but some states point out that the deal is ambiguous and lacking clarity is going to come reports know what it means for the world's major arms. the us accounts for thirty percent of global

arms sales russia twenty six percent germany friends china seven six five percent respectively the figures are provided by the stockholm international peace research institute to cover the last four years of arm sales by the way this global. is worth around seventy billion dollars and four out of five of the world's largest stakeholders in this business happen to be permanent members of the un security council two out of which abstained from the vote that is russia and china they cite a lack of clarity in the language of the treaty in the part where it says arms transfers should be subjected to risk and human rights assessments for. just so it's supposed to tie arms sales to the buyers record on human rights which sounds like a very good idea but then this raises all kinds of questions like do brain or saudi arabia have a perfect human rights record so the treaty leaves lots of room for all kinds of interpretation is russia being actually supportive of the effort to regulate arms

sales says it abstained from voting for the treaty also because it has not been arms sales to non-state actors. despite the calls of the number of states it was not reflected was the ban of the supply of weapons to iran or through state and this is a significant shortcoming in limited me in that it will be effectiveness of the international arms trade treaty. even though the united states supported the treaty at the way congress has made it clear that they will not let anyone tell the us who to sell arms to so it would be like the kyoto protocol the one that set obligations on industrialized countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases the u.s. also signed it and yet never ratified it gun manufacturers like lockheed martin or a northrop grumman have an army of lobbyists on capitol hill to make sure that their ability to sell weapons and profit is not constrained in any way but then thomas countryman the assistant secretary of state to lead the american delegation

to the talks defended the treaty saying it will actually give american weapons manufacturers a better competitive competitive position in the world so maybe the u.s. government is actually trying to help its gun producers by supporting the treaty anyway the international community seems united on one thing and that is something has to be done about the unabated flow of arms in the world but as they say the devil is in the details in washington i'm going to. know to one of all top stories this the fall raging in the tortoise skyscraper in the chechen capital grozny for. update on the story has of course joining me live lindsay a massive four fight your operations underway there what more can you tell us. well it's reported that this one hundred forty five metre skyscraper has got it a huge fire going on right now that may have begun around the thirtieth floor it's

got forty floors total now this is a luxury hotel and apartment building in the center of the city it's what's known as the cross the city complex that cost about a two hundred fifty million dollars to build the entire complex now it's reported that everyone escaped before this this fire began to engulf the entire inside of the building at this point there are reports that local fire brigades are having a very difficult time accessing the fire so as to contain it helicopters from surrounding regions of rosny are bringing in water to help to extinguish the flames and get this under control so hopefully it doesn't spread we're following the story very closely again there have been no reported injuries and certainly no casualties at this point we do not know the cause of the fire as of yet although there are reports that a criminal investigation is underway to see if fire safety procedures were in any

way violated when a fire began in this in this huge a luxury complex will be following this very closely now it's also important to remember this complex is it's a brand new project for cross me and it's something that the leader of chechnya holds very dear to his heart in fact runs on could do it off actually bestowed one of the apartments within this huge complex hollywood actors yard day part two became an official citizen of the russian federation so it's been a highly publicized placing rosny so i will be keeping a very close eye to see what may have caused the fire if there are any injuries to report so they spectacular thank you very much indeed reporting live that. the taliban has claimed responsibility for attacking government offices in western afghanistan at least forty four people have reportedly been killed and more than ninety wounded during the onslaught in the town of it's the deadliest attack in the

country for more than a year the latest violence comes despite attempts by carmel to appease the militants the afghan president has said the taliban could be given a chance to enter politics and even contest the country's top post because if you have a karzai the taliban leader may run for the presidency in next year's elections but only if the militants renounce terrorism and enter towards r.t. contributor have seen returns he says the insurgency is gaining popularity among afghans and the occupying nato forces actually helping to boost this trend the american public may be thinking what was the point of this debris relatives of all those thousands dead they must be getting a very strange picture of afghanistan and the taliban under more though more is going to run afghanistan is it going to be a pullout of course lots of people are asking one hundred fifty thousand nato troops there now and already people are talking about fifteen thousand remaining on five different bases the continuous drone attacks the atrocities committed by u.s.

and nato and i say have troops of course do catalyze pro taliban support it was only in the past week or so that a u.s. commando unit were thrown out of new york province after allegations of complicity in kidnapping torture and summary executing people in the province because i told the americans they better get out and of course those kinds of atrocities abound about it i would not support. as the british government champions for further austerity scores of families across the nation are struggling to put food on the table we must supermarkets and restaurants are throwing perfectly edible products away. as more. plumbs so that's again going to be good going into the desert once and see hydrates. down here we've got. lots and lots of. again. goods and absolutely free daniel volunteers at the people's kitchen

it's an eco conscious collective in east london their aim to save food that would have been thrown away by shops and markets at the end of a day's trading today daniel and chef tom are preparing to wow two hundred dinah's with a feast made from discarded food as a chef i've seen for being wise to every restaurant and i've ever done on a big scale in the supermarkets and even larger scale at these big markets so the food that we're taking is not good enough to so to throw away it's kind of a not agree there's a forgotten nobody's really doing anything about it in the western world and it's just sad really that nobody has respect for the food it's just kind of ok to get someone to when there's people starving not just in the other countries where this food came from. in this country one in five of the u.k. population lives below the poverty line but there's a dramatic discrepancy the rest of the population spends an average of just eleven percent of its budget on food the institute of mechanical engineers says that

that's fueling a tragic throwaway culture with four point four million tonnes of food been avoidably each year in this fridge with. it's ridiculous you know loads of you can see. these are just perfectly good maybe one or two. really amounts of salt in them having someone to store them so this is a huge scale the fact that someone managed to salvage for their kitchen is likely to end up here phil in fact over ten billion pounds worth of food is thrown away in the u.k. each year that's a colossal amount of waste to such a tiny island and before fruit and vege even hits the shelves up to three quarters of it is discarded by farmers just. good enough at the moment we pay supermarkets and other food businesses to trash the planet to grow food and waste a bit we need to make

a demand as consumers they change their behavior as well when we go to a supermarkets and see that all the carrots and all the apples look the same we need to say. why do all those fruits and vegetables look the same what did the supermarket do with all the demand actually they stock fruit and vegetables as they grow in a huge variety of uniformity. markets don't help by tempting customers. consumers alert into buying excessive quantities of food. which ends up in the bin or spent many years visiting the skips of supermarkets literally. and what you see is a ray of perfectly fresh good vegetables and fruit and other foods that have been thrown away and most people think gosh how disgusting to get food. it's true it is disgusting but what's disgusting is that with way the consumption food and every link in the supply chain continues to. tom and dan can keep proving

that finale there really is such a thing as a free lunch. he east london. well you've seen the footage on this very channel how they're going online the newest member of the r.t. family the video agency ruptly is now working at full speed and you can find their brand new website ruptly dot tv it's designed to give the world's media access to stories and perspectives mainstream news providers ignore the project kicked off less than a year ago but it's already creating waves in the news making world providing real time and archive footage from a walled wide net of stringers headquarters in berlin and now operating twenty four seven with state of technology do you go online and get involved with the new generation video news content ruptly dot tv. well that brings up today for the moment talk about with the news to move in half

an hour from now in the meantime cross-talk is next on our t.v. stay with us. choose your language. with no if. some of. the concerns you. choose to give to us that invigorating. choose the stories that in real life. choose the access to.

more news today. these are the. operations or. at least. a little unwelcome the cross talk all things considered i'm peter lavelle a promise made a promise not the prison facility at guantanamo bay remains open and not to be closed any time soon many of the inmates there have been cleared of any wrongdoing nonetheless they languish mostly about obama's integrity and what to say about

america's commitment to justice and due process. to cross-talk the hunger strike in guantanamo bay i'm joined by thomas wilner in washington he is head of the international trade and investment practice that should remain in sterling also in washington we have charles stimson he is the chief of staff and senior legal fellow at the heritage foundation and in nashville we cross to. he is an assistant professor of law at vanderbilt law school or a gentleman cross-talk rules and i think that means you can jump in anytime you want thomas can you talk us through why did the hunger strike started getting and what's going on there at this moment. the hunger strike started because of some change in conditions actually the people running that camp changed and they changed some of the conditions a lot of the detainees felt that their qur'an is were being mishandled and they.