two does make knowledge an end to the war constantly reminded about the realities of those who continue to fight and die in these senseless conflicts one such stark reminder is the planned twenty seven acre expansion to the iconic arlington national cemetery patrolled the remains of this nation's fallen soldiers why only because they're running out a room for dead bodies and expanding the cemetery would mean adding an additional twenty seven thousand new grave plots a horrifying forecast for what lies ahead personally i think we should say no to the expansion say no to those who will send american citizens to die abroad to fight richman's of wars and if you're with me and stick around i'm about to break the set. well guys b.p. also known as british petroleum is back in the news and no it's not for talks to

find humanity which they do quite well and quite often it's because this time it's actually to celebrate the peas new says because you see in just the first quarter of two thousand and thirteen the corporation made a record profit of twenty billion dollars double the amount they made last year in the same period in fact it was the highest grossing profit record and b.p.'s history according to their chief executive bob dudley it demonstrates the progress b.p. is making in delivering the performance miles stones that underpin our commitment to material operating cash flow growth by two thousand and fourteen always about that cash flow isn't it and that's ok guys because b.p. also paid two point eight billion dollars in taxes won't get too excited but only amounts to about six percent compared to the average us taxpayer who pays close to thirty percent but here's the glaring difference the average taxpayer can take barrels of toxic waste or one hundred million gallons of crude oil and dump it into

the gulf of mexico you and i can spray toxic dispersant all over the top of the ocean and hire slave labor to stage p.r. cleanup efforts you and i can't do that because well if we did we'd go to jail for the rest of our lives but no not b.p. b.p. is too big to jail that even though the c.e.o.'s haven't been prosecuted we could at least rest easy knowing that they're not going to be awarded with new government contracts right. wrong sort of holding anyone accountable other than a few sacrificial worker lambs b.p. execs free other than a small fine and a slap on the wrist and the scorn felt against the company fell on deaf ears of the defense department because immediately following the gulf disaster b.p. became the pentagon's biggest oil and gas provider receiving forty nine percent more in defense contracts than the number two field provider valero so the corporations making record profits after causing one of the most devastating

environmental disasters in u.s. history and to top it off they're continuing to receive government contracts but at least we know that in alw lease they're being better regulated and that safety standards are actually being enforced right. apparently not because the company is now being charged with committing another barrage of agree just safety violations late last year b.p. was responsible for a spill in the north sea and one of its major operating systems leaking one hundred twenty barrels of oil and sixteen thousand kilograms of gas into the ocean norway's petroleum safety authority stated that the accident happened because of poor maintenance on the part of b.p. and blame the company for quote serious breaches of regulations there were a watchdog is now reviewing the company's management operations and demanding an explanation for their continued lack of oversight and neglect keep in mind this is the second serious censure on b.p. in just the last two years look i think it's becoming very clear why b.p.

is making record profits it's because they're consistently sacrificing the health of humanity and the world to meet their bottom line time and time again so i'll leave you with this question how many more millions of gallons of crude oil needs to spill before we do something about it. looking for a better shape i mean like. yesterday at least seventeen people were killed and thirty three others wounded by three bombs in a grenade attack on a mosque in baghdad iraq unfortunately it's just the latest in a wave of violence that has rocked the country in recent weeks in fact according to un assistance mission for iraq april was the deadliest month in the country during the last five years of corn in the report seven hundred people were killed in april alone and another sixteen hundred injured the violence is thought to be the result

of the april twentieth election iraq's first since the us us military which are in late two thousand and eleven and while the country saw a little bloodshed on that day the violence has endured but much of the unrest and the fighting centered around the future of iraq's leadership the latest elections reflect the dwindling support for the prime minister has been mired in crisis over how to share power between shiite muslims sunni's and kurds so to talk about what might lay ahead for a nation or sectarian lines or hardening politics even more polarizing i'm going to go to you professor of international relations at american university thank you so much for coming on thank you so give us a sense of what the political representation looks like right now in the wake of the election right now what we have seen is going to change prime minister over modern magic year with this. coalition remains the leading. seat when these he has the biggest number but he has lost a large number of votes in number of problems including the southern provinces

which provided him with some support significant support in the past he has some very large girl who's lost her children something like. eighty seats although there are a number of people who like you to enter into a coalition with them. if you in take decent or county probably would have lost somewhere between fifty and sixty seats there's also another. party which is. supreme council for iraq which had lost a lot of votes in the past elections but they have regained some significant. number of votes right now with this election saddam has more or less remained the same one of the interesting things also is that there's a local. list which one significant the votes in the city of najaf which is the holy place but one of the most important things that i

found very interesting and in a way is the loss of the secular parties they were the biggest losers in a sense in this in this election parties such as i got off the. list the white yorkie and the new iraq and all of these parties there are also some parties such as the sunni parties especially in some of the northern provinces in central provinces are up made some gains. but this all tells us that we witnessing more polarization and more sectarian and so we certainly are you know i can't help but wonder why this election so only a fifty percent voter turnout eligible voters compared to the seventy two percent and the u.s. military mission in two thousand and nine do you think that it's due in part to people just scared for their lives to participate in a democratic process because of the insane surgeons and violence in the country actually what's interesting is that during the election process there wasn't much

filing when people want to talk to the polls but with the same time there were a number of incidents and attacks that took place but i think the main problem is that people many people of lost faith in the hole in the process or certain extent many people are very much concerned that their vote doesn't really matter very much the country just continues to face problems basically with the basic essential services such. electricity water education. measure of problems which are continuing to come from the people of iraq and that's also i think affected. but in addition to that there is this sectarianism we've touched on certainly hard to go to inject a form of democracy completely foreign to another nation so i don't i'm not surprised that it's taking a long time and it's tapering off in terms of support voter wise but what it does

it terry and violent start because i think a lot of people look at iraq they don't understand that this is relatively new and why have we seen such a dramatic resurgence of it when i think this is this is a great question and a lot of it of course iraq is a complex country with many diverse ethnic religious groups with many sects with many tribes and clans but one of the biggest problems i think is that the invasion and its aftermath exacerbated the situation in the way the u.s. government. authority in iraq they dismantled iraq's many of iraq's institutions including the military including for example. some of the security services the police and that's created a lot of problem but more important than that and a sense leading to the current situation is that they lebanon iraq iraq now became something like lebanon you have a president who is

a kurd you have the prime minister who was a shiite you have the speaker of the parliament to have certainly this is something unusual iraq has always had some problems with sectarianism but during the fifty's sixty's seventy's we saw a strengthening national identity now what we have seen in part as a result of the policies pursued by that time is that every version to tribal identity to sectarian identity to religious identity. and these helped contribute to two different parties each one feeling in secure and as a result the band security they more or less they stand together as a community we have about a minute left but how difficult is it to be moving forward by representing the vast diversity of kurds sunnis and shiites how are they going to move forward and represent this is the biggest challenge i think we need we need. conciliation we need to marginalization of some of the groups which have led to the

violence that you talked about a little bit earlier what happened and. who was actually a major. polarization and threatened increased. radicalization so basically we need to return to dialogue and i think people will and they may need help from outside as well that might be useful for the yuan to provide some but i think basically they need to sit down together and begin to really communicate and i'm open and honest probably so it certainly makes calls into question why a million people had to die for a war that's kind of sliding them back and authoritarianism i mean essentially infighting and whatnot thank you so much for coming on breaking down some of the complex situation. professor of international relations at american ever say for sure that. america is going to take a quick break but stay to hear my interview with a journalist who has found

a truly creative way to cover some of the most difficult stories in the world. free. free. free. free free. free . or media projects and free video down to r t dot com you. wealthy british style. pastime. markets finance scandals find out what's really happening to the global economy

with max kaiser for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report on our israel's massive attack near damascus days ago why the syria's raging civil war then fears the issue of chemical weapons should western support of assad's enemies people drawn if it is proven that the rebels are using them against their own people.

i. i i every year in nepal it's estimated that over ten thousand young girls are sold to brothels and forced into prostitution according the nonprofit tiny hands weak law enforcement open borders with india and relax attitudes toward the booming sex trade have turned the south asian country into the hub of human trafficking let's just call it like it is modern day slavery now it's difficult to estimate how many millions of people are subjected to human trafficking but every region in the world is affected by the practice which generates billions of dollars every year in the black market the u.n. estimates that eighty percent of the victims are women and young girls and while this heinous practice continues transparency over how pervasive it really is is

largely limited my next guest however has found a unique method of storytelling to raise awareness about this this issue and many others his name is dan archer a u.k. based comics journalist and educator who combines art and journalism to report on a wide range of topics including human rights issues particularly those concerned with what you've won and young children i first asked dan to explain the concept of what a comics journalist is and here's what he had to say. so it's going to be a common journalist is the same as the traditional journalist i just in addition to doing interviews and researching a piece is a commission journalist would i produce comics i follow my stories as sort of visual narratives one of the main reasons i wanted to do that was being inspired by joe celko as well. and effectively trying to i guess hijack the visual storytelling medium to tell stories that i wouldn't be normally all that might be considered sort of dry or. they would sort of ordinarily be passed over. typical typical

subjects you know like human trafficking for example i think a lot of people get desensitized to to hearing about it you know and. no i'm really not really hearing survivors talk from the first person perspective and seeing you know the images i think it creates a connection to to an audience the traditional text alone. and you just mentioned human trafficking as a major theme in your most recent comics how did you first become interested in the issue of human trafficking and what brought you to nepal. so it started in two thousand and nine i was lucky enough to work with. the fulbright program on a similar project to what i'm doing now in the poll which is effectively taking the stories of human trafficking survivors and adapting them into a comic that was called borderline and translated into ukrainian and russian and distributed by the international organization for migration and that really sort of

laid the pathway for trying to combine this innovative form of journalism with collaboration to me the reason comics journalism and trafficking goes so well together is that you're able to i'm able to tell the stories as i mentioned earlier of survivors without necessarily having to take their photo result a conventional means of reporting that either would you know was to put them at risk from from traffickers for. purposes or make them feel uneasy and sort of the you know i want to make them feel as comfortable as possible so let's talk about that part of your work as an educator teaching victims and survivors of human trafficking about how to tell their story in comic form and talk more about this project and also if you find that it was easier for the victim to express their trauma through her is this really a lost form of therapy here. well i mean i'm no therapist and i do ensure as any journalist would. there are counselors on hand and that i go through all the necessary channels before i talk to survivors because obviously what

they've been through is highly traumatic and the last thing i want to do is try to bring any of that to the surface. as i have. actually my experience in the pull a lot of people focusing much more on the trauma whereas i like to think about my work is focusing much money success stories how these what happened often necessarily what happened before what are the sort of the means and the ways in which these dolls were traffickers were able to ensnare these people and how how they were able then the other sort of side of the story to extricate themselves and reintegrate themselves into society and this sketch that you just showed just that i guess shows what i'm doing in an interview i draw them so this was done live as on taking notes in the way i take notes is actually just in speech balances you can see them sort of grow around the subject and so that way i'm able to actually show them what i'm producing in the instance so it's not like a traditional journalist who might for example shoot video or record audio and then

the subject never has the chance to listen to that and really represent outside of the story so they're able to see it and say ok you know corroborate some of the details oftentimes i will sketch scenarios that they're trying to remember like room layouts and comics is actually very helpful when i see it is a sort of a distillation of diagrams and info graphics and. you know you can combine so much more than just what we traditionally associate with comics which is you know spawn the superhero. right well it goes beyond the so much that just a photo can too because you're you're freezing on time like a photograph but then you're also bringing in the elements of the story the backstory and also just building on that so much and it's kind of this integrated thing with the subject and the person who's doing the drawing really really fascinating and really amazing let's talk about some of your other work focus on u.s. government involvement in global issues i mean you've covered a lot of topics but by coincidence my producer had a copy of one of your comics and titled the honduran coup three were you point out

the u.s. involvement and support for the coup as well as the brief history of u.s. involvement in the region why was this specific comic so. successful. well this so this is this is actually just prior to so obviously the talking in two thousand and nine and what was interesting there is that i find as you just mentioned comics are a great way of pausing moments or allowing you to juxtapose certain moments that ordinarily might not be connected in the reader's mind and sort of make the transition between these two periods relatively seamlessly obviously by dint of being pitches you can collapse time you're not bound by a chronological format it doesn't have to be linear so what we were trying to do is really highlight the links between you know as you mentioned covert cia involvement in. this sort of but not a republics and you know united through all the sort of the major companies that were sort of less than. well mine of the insidious aims and so we we

wanted to tell the story of the coup because there was so much misinformation about it but we also wanted to try and dig into the actual underlying facts and i mean it was a great i think it was so it was so popular because it was really obama's first phone policy challenge and the fact that he did such a conspicuous face on it i think was. you know. it provided a chance for you know a lot of material shirted to see the history of the uncensored on history that we don't really learn about in american history books about dan are people more receptive to your message through comic book form i mean not just in nepal of course working with people who tell their story through that it might be hard for them else elsewhere otherwise but but i just around the world in general are people receptive to this form of truth telling and news reporting. well i'd like to think so i mean the i recently did a piece for the b.b.c. and had almost a million hits in the first day so i think it's undeniable that there's a great deal of interest in it and i think what's particularly interesting about it

now is that there is it lends itself very well to a digital format so you know some bollea which is a. illustrated magazine for comics journalism is available on tablets a lot of my work has been incorporated interactive elements and i think you know as people sort of become increasingly drowned by the sort of the twitter firehose of news comics going to sleep condense a lot of information down into quite an accessible digestible format although obviously that leaves that leaves the equally open to you know the traditional criticism that people have a lot of the just reductive but i think that sort of you know that sort of opposition is healthy so we are not information war and comics are definitely another way to tell the truth and tell these under-reported aspects of what's going on in the world thank you so much dan archer where can people find out your work really quickly oh thank you yeah. comics with an x. dot com or graphic voices dot com thank you so much dan appreciate the time.

guys let's talk about the n.y.p.d. the new york police department you know the most oversized bloated police agency in the country well ever since nine eleven this department is valid to vengeance on anything and anyone who would dare harm their city in the name of terror remember when a.p. revealed that the n.y.p.d. was spying on muslim neighborhoods outside of their jurisdiction bating privacy keeping tabs on mosques all in the name of national security don't forget that that six years spying project resulted in zero intelligence and zero leads in any terrorist cases but as a servant as it may be to think about police departments overstepping their jurisdiction chose to wait because they're most of them surveillance project was just scratching the surface there are now and why pretty officers station in

countries all around the world in london they're working with the scotland yard and the lions they're working with interpol and they're also in hamburg toronto and of course tel aviv israel not to mention the detectives that have traveled across the middle east and participated in interrogations with suspects at guantanamo bay so taken and my pretties why reach into account i guess it shouldn't be too much of a shock to see them moving to the philippines according to alter net the n.y.p.d. is investigation of a jeweler murder suspect led them to the island nation and rather the man might be calling on philippine police to capture the suspect while they're planning to send their own men in blue across the world to capture him on the name of justice of course and on the dime of the taxpayer and fact the n.y.p.d. has played such an instrumental role in the post nine eleven surveillance and police state build up that new york mayor michael bloomberg has dubbed this thirty thousand member force his quote private army and upon closer inspection i couldn't

think of a more accurate way to describe this particular group. of law enforcement so if these cops are an army but i guess commissioner ray kelly is there general just months after he was sworn in kelly put together an antiterrorism unit comprised of at least one hundred twenty five members whose sole job is conducting surveillance and i had to give credit to the new york magazine for extensively laying out kelly's police palace a model of the headquarters of the n.y.p.d. also boasts a global intelligence room where twelve giant flat screen t.v.'s deliver four news program and twenty four seven as language specialists and translators listen in kelly's office also boasts an s t u which is a secure telephone unit or line that enables them to have direct speed dial contact to the white house and the pentagon and crypted at the turn of a key must be nice on top of following regular leads there are frequent deployments of elite special forces who have been hercules teams and their sole purpose is

intimidation show force how well they hold up in black suburbans armed with submachine guns and bullet proof vests just to verify anyone who even thinks about doing something to hurt the city but it wouldn't be the n.y.p.d. without being rented for hire by a lead businesses and private corporations that's right there taking glorified house calls businesses going to hire these teams to scope out an area or location just to make sure there's no imminent threat. honestly though should we be surprised at the tight relationship between big businesses and police i mean right before the occupy wall street movement broke out j.p. morgan chase bank even unprecedented four point six million dollar donation to the n.y.p.d. as a way to ensure police loyalty and guess what they sure got it because over the next year the n.y.p.d. was one of the most brutal forces during protests against the wall street but back to the general of the n.y.p.d. army mr ray kelly i think that it's perfectly ok to conduct operations of this

magnitude in a new york magazine article kelly explains why he says i knew we couldn't rely on the federal government we're doing all the things we're doing because the federal government isn't doing them it's not enough to say it's their job if the job isn't being done since nine eleven the federal government hasn't taken any additional resources and put them here i guess mr kelly doesn't think that the federal government's creation of two new agencies plus the one point six billion dollar contributions and nine eleven counts as additional resources but then again no resources are not in the n.y.p.d. is unilateral war on terror. real damage and complexity of this oil spill was not something you grasp just by looking at dirty birds we have between four to five million people in this directly

affected area of the coast. it's pretty clear why it's not being reported because b.p. can't afford to have a reported all along the gulf coast are clean they are safe and they're open for business if b.p. is the single largest oil contributor to the pentagon the u.s. war machine is heavily reliant upon b.p. and their oil this is a huge step backwards slid. toxic is a look a lot like. it was it was not a picture either the government or b.p. really wanted to have out there i don't want dispersants to be the age. of this girl's. safe.

please. please. more news today. if these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. operations are today.

mission to teach me.

how to. take a look at the.