did you or your media project c.e.o. don carty dot com. coming up on r t it looks like the united states is inching closer to a military strike on syria but many world leaders from the u.n. and beyond are trying to put the brakes on any sort of u.s. intervention the latest on the tensions in syria up ahead. and back in two thousand and eight the bank bailout was quickly rolled out in response to the economy's downward spiral but at least one banker spent his government cash on a new condo in florida more on this misuse of taxpayer money coming out. and facebook continues to amass more users and join the ranks of wall street but is the tech site protecting your privacy tell you about that later and today show.

there it is thursday august twenty ninth five pm here in washington d.c. i marinate and you're watching our two we start today with the crisis in syria as the united states and its allies weigh their options for military intervention after the chemical attacks last week in damascus now despite denials from the syrian regime the white house said it is undeniable that president bashar al assad is the is behind the attacks setting the stage for an international brawl now president hassan rouhani of iran has said he will press forward with efforts to ward off military action by western nations against syrian president bashar al assad ronnie was quoted as saying military action will bring great costs for the region it is necessary to apply all efforts to prevent it. now according to state t.v. reports president rouhani said both iran and russia would work in cooperation to prevent any military action against syria meanwhile the united states and its

allies continue to pair for a potential strike though president obama told p.b.s. yesterday that he did not want a prolonged military intervention if we are saying. in a clear. and decisive but. very limited way we send a shot across the bow saying stop doing best that can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term and may have a positive impact in the sense that chemical weapons are not used again on innocent civilians now the white house announced that it will brief members of congress later today on plans to move forward with a military strike and it will release evidence of the assad regime's responsibility for the attacks later in the week earlier i was joined by our t's middle east bureau chief paul of sleep here in beirut lebanon and i first started off by asking her what iran's backing of the syrian regime means for the country and possible military action by the u.s.

and its allies. well of course iran is a close ally of the syrian president bashar assad and what we're hearing from iran is that it will apply pressure to prevent any kind of military action happening inside their country we're hearing from mehdi tired who is a confident of the supreme leader ali khamenei and he says that syria is iran's thirty fifth province and that if we leave syria we lose tehran the concern from the iranian side is that any kind of western military action inside syria will merely open the floodgates and that iran could ultimately be next what iran can do in retaliation to this is it can first be close the ports of hormuz that sees about twenty percent of the world's petroleum of course the international community is not going to want to see something like that happen it can also activate hizbollah and the radiant revolutionary guards corps that have networks around the world and that they could carry out potentially terror attacks against those countries that are supporting military action this is not going to be something that the west once

and of course this is something that they need to mull over in their considerations we've also heard from iran here the chief of the revolutionary guard saying that an attack on syria would see the immediate destruction of israel that is not going to be something that washington is going to take lightly as a threat now as they view us and its allies prepare for a military strike what is syria doing to prepare for what may come. well from the reports we've been receiving the syrian army has evacuated almost all of its personnel from army and security command headquarters inside damascus as for army units that are outside the capital city here they have been confiscating from the reports we're receiving trailer trucks which understandably will be used to move heavy equipment from one location to another we're also being told that the syrian mavie is docking in areas that are usually reserved for civilian traffic

that they're docking alongside civilian ships so the military is certainly getting ready for a possible whiston attack now the white house a survey of the intelligence documents that they have that prove there was a chemical attack and it came from assad's regime they want a slam dunk what exactly does that mean what that expression is a throwback to two thousand and two when the western intelligence at that stage supposedly conclaves proved that iraq had weapons of mass destruction under saddam hussein as we know that later was proven to be false and that expression came about referring to false and incorrect intelligence information i mean we're hearing from the british prime minister david cameron as much as much as this already he's saying that all that there is not one hundred percent concrete intelligence that assad did

use chemical weapons so this expression really does who food to the the supposed a conclusive proof proof that assad has chemical weapons there are a number of questions that still have to be answered not only whether or not assad carried out that chemical attack but also who owns the chemical weapons at the moment inside syria. paul you're joining us now from lebanon and that's a country that has been caught up in the growing syrian crisis what are you hearing from people in beirut about very country's role and fears regarding the conflict just next door. well i spent several hours this afternoon in the palestinian camp here in beirut and a lot of syrian refugees mostly palestinian syrian refugees have actually sought refuge there this is because it's a neighborhood that's very very poor the rain to steepen and a lot of the syrian refugees who are coming across actually cannot afford to live

in beirut you have a figure of some seven hundred thousand syrian refugees currently living here just in one day there were thirteen thousand they came across and that is why the lebanese president is going to the united nations next month to seek further assistance for the influx of refugees it's interesting that from those are spoke to while some do support assad some do and almost all of them were unanimous that they were against any kind of waste and strikes with people telling me that they believe that this will only lead to bloodshed down the line i want to also make the point that his below the militant organization based here recently said that it would not stand idly by if assad was attacked and this is important because it's the strongest statement so far indicating how his by the will place itself in any kind of attack on damascus his will of course in the past has same fighters to assist a side but we haven't heard such direct claims as of yet of course hizbollah will react by firing missiles into israel this will lead the united states to need to

respond and so you have the whole possibility of a regional conflict evolving when you talk to ordinary lebanese of course they don't want to see any kind of western intervention they very concerned about the very delicate political sectarian balance that this country has and what is happening in syria has a very negative effect on that. thank you paula that was artie's middle east bureau chief paula sawyer in beirut lebanon i was joined earlier by gareth porter investigative journalist and historian along with richard murphy the former u.s. ambassador to syria to help shed some additional light on the latest developments out of syria i start off by asking gareth what is the purpose of these military strikes. but that's the question i think that everyone is asking around the world really. it is so so difficult to figure out what the administration really thinks that it's doing that one way here in the united states has published

a come comedic take on this in which he has obama saying i pledge to carry out a strike against syria with no objective whatsoever. and seriously though you know it is sometimes stated that we have to do it for humanitarian purposes and sometimes because of international law both of which are highly debatable to say the least in terms of recent history as well as a previous history of u.s. policy and you know it begins to look like the there's a small coterie of people within the administration susan rice the national security adviser secretary of state john kerry in particular who have gotten the idea that they want to do something. and that they have played upon you know a lot of domestic pressure from the republican party some of the people the republican party not all of them and they have somehow prevailed on the president

to do something that he apparently didn't want to do and that presents a real mystery of major proportions now richard i want to ask you president obama said yesterday that while he wants to send a message with the strikes that they're not intended to destabilize the assad regime so what kind of message what these strikes realistically defending. i think he his message is been pretty clear he wants to send a very strong signal a strong slap if you will that the regime will not repeat the use of chemical weapons i think that's that's his basic message no how it's going to be done we don't know yet but he's. perfectly clear on that and he's not talking about to international law because he doesn't have the security council with him he's looking for international legitimacy which is why he's consulting with

a wide range of countries today. now this morning british parliament they debated why is the burden on the u.s. and the u.k. to strike syria militarily rather than the middle eastern allies such as kuwait qatar turkey saudi arabia and the gulf what do you think about that. when i don't i wouldn't expect the individual arab states to strike nor did i expect the arab league to endorse a western strike us just going too far given the history of the area this is of the west of the united states it's sort of a we have some very strong friends there but they don't want to be standing out alone and saying welcome uncle sam come in send your military in and do something nasty to a fellow arab state that just runs aground runs against the grain now gareth i want to ask you why were the chemical attacks the tipping point. well the real there's a very serious question here which we haven't talked about and that is how what is

the state or the status of the actual evidence that a nerve gas attack took place. and the answer to that is that the evidence is still very much subject to confirmation and the only real confirmation that can be provided is from the u.n. investigation that is now just about finished with its work but it appears that the obama administration is not prepared to wait until that investigation presents you know the final report of its work and that's a very that's a very strong indication that there are serious questions that the administration wants to kind of push under the rug and i would add that one of the most one of the biggest pieces. of of evidence that the administration relied on in its initial presentation of its case by secretary kerry was that medicine soft on tear had made a statement of that presented the evidence that they'd gotten from hospitals that

more than a thousand people had been several thousand people had been treated and three hundred fifty five i believe had died of symptoms suggesting a nerve gas attack but now the frontier has issued a statement saying we cannot confirm this information and we refuse to have this used to justify military action in syria now richard i'm going to i'm going to ask this to you you said last week that quote the timing of this allegation that several hundred people have died as a result of poison gas or nerve gas in the course of the last day or is odd what did you mean exactly by that odd. we don't have the full context there could could you requote me on that please sir you said the timing of this allegation that several hundred people have died as

a result of poison gas or nerve gas in the course of the last day is odd. what did you mean by that i think it was the the fact that the statement came out so quickly after the attack and it's quite true we do not have confirmation in public as yet and i think that the president is going to have to come. up with a good deal to justify any u.s. action and expect that to happen because this white house is too living haunted by the memories of two thousand and three and the bush administration's. weapons of mass destruction were. you know there's clear weapons there's one other point about timing that i think is very important to make and that is the the timing of this alleged chemical strike just at the time of the the u.n.

team is already there in damascus and clearly able to go and then the timing of the the assad regime soon yes to the request to go visit the site no it is simply not explainable it's not explicable in any way shape or form the assad regime would carry out a chemical strike and then allow the u.n. to go in and take samples to prove that it exists that was gareth porter an investigative journalist and historian and richard murphy former u.s. ambassador to syria. and then financial news today talk about mis management of funds now in two thousand and eight darrell lane woods a chairman of a small missouri bank received one million dollars after applying to the united states treasury for bailout money under the troubled asset relief program however just days after main street bank receive the funds would spent more than a third of them on a four hundred thousand dollar waterfront condominium in fort myers florida now on

tuesday woods pleaded guilty to criminal charges in federal district court in jefferson missouri jefferson city missouri and the investigation which led to woods's arrest was headed by the special inspector general for the troubled asset relief program or tarp and while many people are pleased to see justice being brought to those who abused bailout funds it raises questions about why larger financial institutions have not seen the same level of oversight to discuss this subject i was joined earlier by a co-host of prime interest bob english and i started off by asking him how well tarp really worked. unfortunately tarp did not work it was sold to the public on the promise that it was going it was going to help people with underwater mortgages and unfortunately it just bailed out the big banks so what hank paulson did he was the goldman you know treasury secretary at the time he went to congress and he he instilled a lot of fear in people and what he said was if you don't do this we're going to

have financial armageddon wow now what kind of conditions were established for the use of that money. like i said there were there were conditions that were empty seat into the in unfortunately that those conditions were not followed so when you find out what tarp actually did all it did was bail out the big banks interesting now to your knowledge kind of just touched on this smaller financial institutions kind of seeing more of an oversight from the special inspector general which is a great name and and the justice department in general when it comes to kind of overseeing these bailout funds unfortunately the smaller financial institutions are at an extreme disadvantage what happens with them they don't have access to the same money privileges to be the federal reserve that the larger institutions do so and also they have stronger regulatory oversight so what you see happen when you

know when these regulations are passed and j.p. morgan itself goldman sachs are writing the regulations and then the smaller financial firms are not able to take advantage of them now do you believe the government will go after those bigger banks the same way they've been going up this kind of well there is this there's this funny thing it's called too big to jail unfortunately the government is not going to these bigger banks and there is a push there is a push to go after some of these mid-level employees like j.p. morgan has this energy scandal that's going on right now and they're going after a guy named bruno excel but he's turning states. but in going after his boss in a subordinate but they're not really going after the big fish they're not going after the whales even though he was the london whale that's very interesting now do you believe you kind of just said no but i'm going to ask you. point blank do you believe that justice will be served to the public by prosecuting those from the big institutions that maybe potentially with all the noise the media is making we'll

see some of that and upcoming months unfortunately one of the things that's happening is that the f.c.c. is going after insider trading which is a crime but it's not the biggest crime and hedge funds were not the proximate cause of the two thousand and eight panic and they're not going to be the cause of the next panic so the federal regulators are not going after the right people right now and unfortunately that is the case so that as you see they're going after this this guy name stevie cohen back capital management but you know he's not going to cause the next financial crisis right so they're kind of focusing their energies in the wrong place i think that you're saying that's exactly what i'm saying what do you think they what did steve cohen do to really anger the federal government to make them go after him opposed to the people who gave money to him oh that's a loaded question. i think he made a lot of enemies you know along his trail he had one of the biggest hedge funds he's a very influential financial guy and he just made too many enemies and then when the i.c.c. decided to start cracking down on insider trading he was just an obvious target

well bob thank you for joining us today that was bob english co-host of prime interest. here in the nation's capital americans mark the fiftieth anniversary of the one nine hundred sixty three march on washington yesterday where martin luther king made his famous i have a dream speech the event was attended by a number of politicians many of which addressed thousands of people at the lincoln memorial speakers included president barack obama former presidents bill clinton and jimmy carter congressman john lewis and governor martin o'malley among many others and interestingly those politicians all have one thing in common they're all democrats in fact no elected republicans spoke at the historical event at all but that doesn't mean they were invited former and double a.c.p. chairman julian bond told n.b.c. yesterday that event organizers invited quote a long list of republicans to come but each declined now speaker of the house john

boehner and majority leader eric cantor were some of the most prominent republicans invited but they each turned on the speaking opportunity now both former presidents bush senior engineer declined due to health reasons and the interpretation of the anniversary right leaning cable news network fox was interesting. this was the topic of conversation used to discuss where the african-american community stands today it reads fifty years after march on washington some see rap music as a problem. and now to our weekly tech report where we delve into the latest news and technology on all things digital and today we're talking about facebook and social media behemoth saw its value climb to over one hundred billion dollars for the first time ever and this comes only one year following its record low the company closed at forty three dollars and thirty four cents earlier this week bringing its value by market capitalisation to about one hundred point six billion

billion with a b. dollars but fortunately for facebook this week also saw the end of an extended court case in which facebook will pay twenty million dollars in settlements to users who objected to their information being used as part of advertiser promotions and a pew research report shows that teens are wary about these same privacy issues here with me now to discuss all things facebook is he mon shoe founder of s. as to how are you doing. having me thinks now it is nice to have you are going to start out some readers are becoming more stern with privacy but the rate at which teenagers and adults are sharing information is so incredibly high can you a key tell us a little bit about this fifty one percent i just honestly answer fifty one percent of teen users teen app users have avoided certain apps due to privacy concerns twenty six percent haven't installed an app to do personal info collection and forty six have turned off location tracking features now do you think i want to talk about this in general but do you think we're turning

a page where people are actually starting to connect the dots between their online profiles and their privacy in their daily lives. i think what you're saying is that teens are way smarter than people in our generation make them to be the first thing the second is teens are i think looking to the future are going to have a much brighter future than we expect when it comes to the intersection of technology and privacy and many ways their understanding of those things work they're taking control over themselves rather than doing what many people in our own generation have done which is the victim why did they do this to my stuff and what teens are saying is no i own my i own my privacy if you mess with it i'm not going to like it and i will take action and i think that's what the pew pew pew research is showing now five planes they filed a class action lawsuit against facebook in two thousand and eleven saying that it had shared users' likes of certain advert of certain advertisers with friends without paying them or allowing them to opt out of this this program are we going

to start seeing more lawsuits like this or more carefully written user agreements. well i think what we should do is first let's look back at when this lawsuit happened it was over i think about over two years ago when the conduct occurred and at that time facebook was planning to go public chair or are investors out there were looking at and saying how are you going to make money and they were trying all sorts of things to say that we can generate revenue this was one of those things and unfortunately they did at least from what it appears crossed the line in terms of what they were allowing and and taking from a privacy perspective what you're seeing though when you fast forward to today is that customers and consumers don't like that privacy is about transparency you have to tell people what you're doing you have to give some kind of control over it and i think facebook if anything is going to learn from this as are all the other companies who are watching which say well wait when consumers demand certain type

of features certain control you have to deliver because not only can it become a legal issue but it can also impact your business bottom line when your consumer trust you less now him of this is something that we found pretty interesting here so there's a lot of reports coming out that the credit worthiness of customers is judged on a guilt by association basis for of lending companies which takes into account things like one's facebook friends and especially those who have frequent interactions on facebook should we be concerned about this. well there's a saying that comes to mind which is you are your friends and i think for hundreds of years we have looked at people and said let's determine their reputations based on who they hang out with who they party with who they're who their friends with and these banks ultimately have one goal in mind and that is when i lend money to you i want you to pay it back and if they're going to look at all sorts of things that determine who you are as a person we can at least from one perspective see that as

a good thing now the other side go ahead i'm sorry i have to go ahead go ahead proceed yes so the other side of this is the opposite which is it's not proven technology there's no research that i'm aware of that's going behind these algorithms that are being created there's no ten years of experience that says when you type in a bigger fight you have one personality versus a smaller fund those things thing haven't been proven yet which means there will be false positives there will be a customer out there a potential one who doesn't get the loan that should have gotten the loan and that would have been the bank's best customer and i think this is going to be learn as you go kind of a scenario and eventually things will get worked into the system where this becomes one part of many but not definitely the controlling part now what's kind of interesting here should people who say lose their jobs kind of now get ready to be different as well talk about insult to injury events if things are happening like that when do you think i could be a problem well i think everyone has friends that they put up with i mean if you

look in your own circle of friends i'm sure there's somebody that you're kind of the they're invited to the party you really don't want him there but they're there and people say well why is that person here i think at some point people going to start realizing we're all like that we have been like that is he it's human nature to have friends like that and we're going to continue to do that so at some point i think that's going to become less significant of an issue and who you are just like going back five or ten years when people started posting images everyone was having a heyday of what are you going to do future employers are going to hurt you because of this and then people start getting used to it and i think it's always that story first generation panics the next generation learns third generation just makes a part of their daily living. humor thank you so much that was him on shoe nigam founder of s s p blue they spread and finally if you're looking to get a new much larger brain you may be in luck scientists for the first time have

successfully reproduced miniature human brains in a lab that's right scientists are using embryonic stem cells or adult skin cells to create the part of the embryo that develops into the spinal cord and brain now in fact the piece size structures have reached the same level of development as a nine week old fetus look at that picture pretty interesting there but before you get too excited these miniature brains they aren't capable of human thought or the brains are still being put to good use according to one study a developing organ the developing organs have already been used to help scientists gain insightful information into rare diseases not to mention the potential for a real breakthrough in organ donation so perhaps we won't get a revamp brain but we will get to see and save a lot more lives and that does it for now for more on the stories we've covered you can go to youtube dot com slash r t america and check out our website r g dot com slash usa can also follow me on twitter at aaron eight i'll see you right back here at eight o'clock.

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you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. perfect world. series technology innovation hall the list of elements from around russia we've. covered.