i'm. going to be. coming up on our t.v. u.s. relations with brazil continue to sour after was revealed by edward snowden the u.s. for spying on the brazilian president she's canceled a planned visit to the white house and also wants her nation to have its own internet we'll tell you more about these developments ahead. and d.c. is now the scene of a growing wage battle between workers and wal-mart attempts to make the company pay a living wage in d.c. have come up short but is the fight over more on that coming up. and we may be on the cusp of a medical crisis in the u.s. there's been an increase in bacteria that can resist antibiotics an increase that has the c.d.c. worried we'll tell you what's behind this increase later in the show.

it's wednesday september eighteenth four pm in washington d.c. i'm sam sachs and you're watching r.t. and we begin in syria and the u.n. investigators are planning to return to the war torn country in the next few weeks to collect more evidence of alleged chemical weapons use this comes shortly after a u.n. report published on monday concluded that sarin gas had been used and then august twenty first attack outside damascus though the report didn't assign blame to who carried out the attack while the u.s. the u.k. and france say the details of the report implicate the assad government russia another member of the security council argues that u.n. investigators overlooked evidence that suggested otherwise evidence that implicates the syrian rebels in the attack today russian foreign minister sergei lavrov said to submit more evidence. bubble's to the u.n.

security council in the coming days but as your other investigators now plan to return to syria they're returning to a country that still experiencing unspeakable bloodshed on a daily basis as the more than two year civil war churns on arches maria for inertia has more on syria's efforts to show the rebels carried out a chemical weapons attack russia's foreign minister sergey lavrov said that russia will tourists for the evidence that it received from the syrian government according to we each as the syrian government says the the rabble the radical rebels i'll be hind the deadly chemical attack here in the syria last month the little girl you have a lot of information about the oldest chemical attack in ghouta we'll examine all of this at the security council along with the u.n. chemical weapons report we still have to figure out who is behind the attack but let me just reiterate that we have a great deal of information to work with so that the russian officials confirmed

that they received this evidence and now we know that they are ready to transfer it to the u.n. security council and that is a breakthrough anything to see. they stay sygate out called who is now here in damascus to discuss the deal on chemical weapons i design them and sad that the un report is biased for war distorter you are one sided. conclusions drawn by experts are not for germans we are at me very good we eat from far reaching. is being produced from on that basis for what we do we refuse to teach them the over their knowledge to read from each and we are to share a moral question of where in the report what you. get your call from and where there will be or we begin working on what to do next we need to figure out why it

is for a while and why any group over your neck for if not go away no yet here to continue to give her the figures for free or three for their birth certificate for thirty three for the rossdale many questions in this story in this is why most school is continuing to call for it to un best a geisha and in order to determine who exactly is responsible for the attack in all this and who was behind that. there was archie's maria for notion of reporting next month president obama was scheduled to meet with brazilian president dilma rousseff to discuss a host of security and economic issues that meeting is not going to happen it was cancelled by brazil and the white house can blame vienna a statement released tuesday by the brazilian president's office offers

a glimpse into why the meeting was canceled it read the illegal interception of communications data belonging to citizens companies and members of the brazilian government or a grave matter an assault on national sovereignty and individual rights and are incompatible with relations between friendly nations. artie's merino pour niobe has more on this diplomatic dustup. as the n.s.a. spying scandal continues to undermine america's global standing one u.s. ally is not willing to forgive and forget brazilian president dilma rousseff has been handled her signal visit to the white house next month and pulling out of what is supposed to be the first official state visit of u.s. president barack obama's second term it would have also been the first for a brazilian president in nearly two decades in addition to breaking dates for cilia is also taking steps to divorce itself from the u.s. centric internet while seeking its own sovereignty in cyberspace president rousseff

has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater brazilian online independence including storing citizens data locally to protect from n.s.a. snooping according to reports the brazilian government is also planning to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to europe and also link to all south american nations currently most of brazil's global internet traffic passes through the united states now experts say if other nations follow in brazil's footsteps the us cloud computing industry which stores data remotely could lose tens of billions of dollars in business by two thousand and sixteen brazil's path towards internet sovereignty follows revelations that the n.s.a. intercepted president communications hacked into the network of the state owned oil company and spied on brazilians in trusting their personal information to u.s. companies like facebook and google president rousseff says she intends to push for

a new international rules on privacy and security in hardware and software next week when all the heads of state gather in new york for the u.n. general assembly on tuesday the brazilian leader is set to open the u.n. g.a. debates and her u.s. counterpart president obama is set to take the stage made. ellie afterwards reporting from new york marina port niamh r.t. now turning to the n.s.a.'s activities within the united states the shadowy pfizer court is revealing some of its secrets about the n.s.a. section two fifteen bulk phone metadata collection program and those secrets implicate members of congress and telecom companies according to a pfizer a court ruling released on tuesday judge claire egan noted that to date not a single telecom company has challenge the n.s.a.'s collection of their customer's metadata the court ruling read today no holder of records who has received an order

to produce bulk telephony metadata has to challenge the legality of such an order indeed no recipient of any section two fifteen order has challenged the legality of such an order despite the explicit statutory mechanism for doing so in other words with just a rare exception of qwest communications in two thousand and six not a single one of the telecom companies that we trust with our data protested when the government said hand over the data but the opinion goes on to reveal that the court believes members of congress were being fully briefed on this program to the court says quote in light of the importance of the national security programs that were set to expire the executive branch and relevant congressional committees work together to ensure that each member of congress knew or had the opportunity to know how section two fifteen was being implemented under this court's documentation. we now know that didn't happen congressman justin amash congressman alan grayson and

congressman morgan griffith have all come forward to talk about how requests they made for more information from the house intelligence committee were teen lee rejected by committee chairman mike rogers so while the pfizer corded self has received a lot of criticism for its secret defenses of the n.s.a. spying program this newly declassified ruling shows that blame can be spread around to the telecom companies and members of the congressional intelligence committees to this declassified pfizer court opinion marks the first time the pfizer court has decided to release one of its opinions on its own. then this week forbes magazine she is before was magazine released its annual list of the four hundred richest people in america bill gates tops the list for the twentieth year in a row but there's another familiar name on the list that of walton yes the walton heirs heirs to the wal-mart fortune occupy spots six seven eight and nine in the

list with their combined wealth topping one hundred thirty five billion dollars it's good to be owning the world's largest company that's spinning off stores from coast to coast and all over the world but there's one place wal-mart hasn't been able to conquer and that's right here washington d.c. until now while more recently announced its plans to open up five stores in the area but those plans were nearly derailed when the d.c. city council began considering a measure that would have required large retailers like wal-mart to pay their employees a living wage of no less than twelve dollars fifty cents an hour in wages and benefits wal-mart which in tory's the pays much much lower wages announce that they would have been in their plans if indeed the measure passed well the measure did pass over d.c. mayor vincent gray vetoed it and on tuesday the d.c. city council failed to collect enough votes to override the mayor's veto walmart said it now plans to proceed with its initial plans to bring stores to the nation's

capital so is this a good thing or a bad thing for this city and other cities that wal-mart may come to next to open up new stores let's talk about it they have an e-mail fisher a producer for recent t.v. in new york and reverend graham and hagel are the senior pastor at plymouth congress congregational and the d.c. chairperson of faith strategies welcome to you both thank you thank you reverend haggard i want to start with you here what impact might a wal-mart opening up and what impact might that have on d.c. especially without any of these living wage laws there to protect workers while at the sheer size of the corporation and the and the economic might that it applies to any situation. it has the ability to drive salaries down or to lift salaries up it basically sets the marketplace just by its own weight its own economic weight in the end in an environment like d.c. one correction i'll put they're not proposing to build five stores they're proposing to build six stores in washington d.c. so it's an even greater weight that is going to be applied in d.c.

and so as they pay minimum wage or just above minimum wage they will have the ability to drive down the expectation around wages and benefits in the city or do you say to people who say you know look d.c. has an unemployment rate a point higher than the nation won't this bring some some jobs to the area well it's in it'll bring jobs but it also wipe out jobs because the reality is you already have a business structure small been the structure of them is existed through thick and thin through good economic times and bad economic times that have existed and basically right now i can go out and i can look at all the sites and you can see all the businesses that will not be here two years from now a year from now because they will be wiped out and the fact is what what what what takes place in environment like this is not the amelioration of economic condition but the worsening of economic condition and because of the sheer weight of volume of a wal-mart in its ability to also wipe out all the cons of economic infrastructure

of their own to bring you in here over the last you know year or two we've heard this tom term job creators really be thrown out in our political debate here and wal-mart is considered one of these quote unquote job creators but studies show that if it's job creation record or a bit spotty we have a two thousand and study from the journal of urban economics said that they looked at three thousand counties where wal-mart had had a wal-mart and found that wal-mart kills on average one hundred fifty retail jobs at the county level another study two thousand and nine from the oil loyola said that wal-mart in chicago created a net zero jobs and in two thousand and study in maryland sewed that it actually cost four hundred jobs when wal-mart moved in why should we expect that the retail giant will improve washington d.c. economy given this track record. well i mean the democratic mayor of d.c. vetoed the city council because he understood that having three large businesses that are going to employ a lot of people in low income areas is a good thing and that ultimately it's better to have nonunion non-unionized jobs

than no jobs at all and nationally wal-mart pays pays their employees comparable wages to unionized supermarkets so the idea that they were just that they are destroyers of small businesses is actually not met by the data nationally well you know actually that's incorrect because when you look at wal-mart the reality is wal-mart yes pays some salaries but they don't pay benefits very often and the benefits that they pay are too costly for most workers who are called associates and wal-mart to access i mean that's the reality and in fact when you look around and see what happens with the wal-mart associates is that they end up on public assistance or they end up having to tap into food stamps or they end up in the emergency room so the reality of it is not only the destruction of the jobs that already exist but it is also the economic destabilisation of an entire community that's that's interesting point anthony it's known that

a lot of wal-mart workers rely on federal benefits mainly because they just don't get paid enough to make ends meet and this this is true of a lot of workers not just at wal-mart but at the very least isn't it a corporation's responsibility to pay their workers enough so that taxpayers don't have to go in and foot the bill. well i mean if the first of the term living wage is fairly arbitrary i mean we could say that eighteen dollars an hour of course why not wal-mart's a huge corporation why couldn't they pay eighteen dollars an hour why can they pay thirty dollars an hour the idea that raising the wage thirty percent is going to solve all their workers financial woes is is kind of foolhardy and the fact is wal-mart except ten applications for every job they fill people want these jobs just the same way people want to shop there nobody's putting a gun to anyone's head and say you have to shop at wal-mart people in low income areas shop there because it's the best value for the products they're trying to get and if they can get them at cheaper rates than they can get at unionized

supermarkets or specialty stores that cater to high income people then i don't see why it's socially just that they should be denied the opportunity to shop at a place like that well in a sense you know one of the things that folks miss was that we weren't trying to deny a wal-mart access to the d.c. market we were saying that you have a responsibility to pay to pay a decent and meaningful wage everybody wants that and particularly in washington d.c. you've got eleven hundred families a month moving into the city new families you've got sixty cranes in operational in any given day in washington d.c. building luxury condos and and all that type of stuff the cost of living has gone up so high that it's really has forced the working families out of d.c. because they can't even afford to continue to live here and so in a sense i understand from my gospel if i may put that out to whom much has been given much is required and to whom much has been intrusted even more will be

demanded and that's the that's the principle we are applied to all of these big box stores looking at those who generate a billion dollars or more in revenue that they need to pay more than they need to pay a decent wage earner is i mean i get that this is the city council great many of them oh there are jobs to labor unions who help finance their. and pains and those labor unions support unionized supermarkets who are in direct competition with wal-mart and who don't pay substantially better wages sometimes they don't pay better wages that all see that's the fall so that's the focus that you miss is that even when you talk about a collective bargaining agreement you're not talking about wages simply in a collective bargaining agreement you're talking about other things like wages pension you're talking about paid sick days you're talking about all of those of a kind of benefits that come with a contract now here in this living wage bill we were talking about twelve dollars and fifty cents minus benefits because we were hoping folks would bite the apple and pay some benefits to their workers so if you got there by paying ten dollars an

hour and tool dollars and fifty cents in benefits then you comply with the law that's not unreasonable we have the right to be able to demand who have a comes in to try to exploit our community we have the right to demand that they should pay a living wage and anthony clearly much has been given to the wal-mart heirs i mean they occupy spaces six through nine on the forbes list they're worth over one hundred thirty five billion dollars this is the world's largest retailer doesn't it just sound like greed when they say no we can't afford to pay workers give workers a way to give workers a wage where they can make a living but i'd prefer not to debate gospel if we're debating policy which is the issue at hand here we're talking about the city council. deciding to voting on a bill that would make certain businesses but not others beholden to a substantial increase in the minimum wage and the business in question responded by saying ok we won't open some of these businesses in your city and then again the democratic mayor of d.c. said hey it's better to have these businesses it's better to have these jobs than

no jobs at all evident another part of the concern here too is this homogenization of the economy i mean how many unique mom and pop stores may go out of business thanks to wal-mart's cheap prices which are possible thanks to outsource labor what you make of this argument that goes kind of beyond economics and speaker. more the character of communities well i mean personally i'm i am one of these. big city types i've only ever lived in big cities i the only times i've ever shopped at a wal-mart or when i've been on the road so it's not like i've got any stock in the company or anything like that but it and i generally like to support mom and pop businesses as well but not just because they're mom and pop businesses i don't shop at the most expensive specialty places just to feel good about myself or or support the character of my community i shop there because they provide a good or a service that i want at a price i can afford. last question here what do you plan on doing to keep pushing this living wage bill here in d.c.

well we won the debate i want to say that we won the debate even though they didn't override it because all of a sudden yesterday at the legislative session there were three raised the minimum wage bills that were introduced into the council by those who voted against the legislation except for one the fact is when we did a poll over the weekend we discovered that seventy one percent of d.c. voters wanted the living wage bill and wanted the city council to override the mayor's veto that's how i should like all my that's the only company that has to deal with it is it is not part of this is it is not the only corporate corporation have to deal it's all the big box stores of seven cents seventy five thousand square feet or more and your company generated in least a billion dollars in revenue why because of the whole much has been given much is made is required that's why that's the economic principle how dare we build a society without an economic prince how dare we build a society continually where the rich get richer at the expense of the people poor going to have to leave it there exploiting people we need to change our paradigm

right we're fresh out of time that was this debate will clearly continue that was antonio fisher producer the reason t.v. evergreen that haggard the senior pastor of plymouth congregational the d.c. chairperson of faith strategies thank you both thank you. and now on to new orleans louisiana where convictions against five former new orleans police officers for committing civil rights violations in the post katrina chaos have been now tossed out by a federal judge back in two thousand and seven five officers were found guilty of shooting and killing two individuals and wounding four others on the danziger bridge in new orleans less than a week after hurricane katrina made landfall in two thousand and five among those killed by the police a seventeen year old as well as a forty year old mentally disabled man both were unarmed but the attorneys for the former officers convicted in two thousand and eleven argued the trial should be avoided since the prosecution engaged in what they called a secret public relations campaign against his clients allegedly prosecutors in the case posted anonymous comments on the web site of a new orleans newspaper that

a federal judge kurt angle hart now says created a carnival environment that perverted justice in the case judge ingle heart has ordered a new trial for the officers. of the same antibiotics that doctors are prescribing us to fight diseases actually creating super diseases a new study by the center for disease control took a look at the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria and the effect it's having on americans the study found that every single year two million americans fall ill from antibiotic resistant bacteria and that twenty three thousand americans died from this resistant bacteria again every single year there are a number of explanations for this uptick in deadly resistant bacteria ranging from factory farming to overprescribing of antibiotics and earlier i spoke with dr brad spellberg from the infectious diseases society of america and i asked him about the c.d.c.'s numbers and just how serious of an issue this really is. well the numbers

are actually low the c.d.c. in releasing the report emphasize that they used very conservative calculations and of course they had released numbers you know i'm going to say about five years ago that suggested the numbers are closer to ninety nine thousand deaths from those types of infections they tried to use a different a little bit different methodology here so the bottom line is it's a huge problem people are dying of infections in some cases that we've completely run out of treatments for they are pan resistant to every available antibiotic and how is this happening i mean how is it that we've found a way to cure the certain bacteria and now it's coming back and we can what is the mechanism at work there well i think we need to remember that antibiotics were only discovered by people they were actually invented by a bacteria probably on the order of two billion years ago with a b. and they've been using these weapons to kill each other for two billion years and so they've created defense mechanisms resistance mechanisms what we call them to defeat antibiotics when we apply antibiotics to patients or to livestock or in

agricultural settings it kills off the susceptible bacteria and leaves behind the bacteria that are already resistant so that they can then grow and spread their resistance genes will to survive because a lot of these. bacteria people contract this by a bacteria in hospitals and we think of hospitals as these stark white wash places but really should we fear going to the doctor and actually fear what the doctors prescribing us when he gives us these antibiotics are things like the common cold or something well i would not say that we should fear going to the doctor i do think people need to understand that the hospital is an inherently dangerous place and it's not because hospitals are dirty or doctors or lazy or anything like that think about it this way you're taking the sickest people in society crowding them into one building tearing new holes in their bodies that they didn't used to have by placing plastic catheters in their bloodstream in their blat. we're putting

tubes down there into their lungs that they can breathe for them and we're using very large quantities of antibiotics to treat infections so that's a perfect breeding ground to generate antibiotic resistant bacteria so the point is you go into the hospital if you have to you work carefully with your team to get out of the hospital as soon as you can and i think patients should be empowered for example if patients if health care providers enter their room and the patient doesn't see them wash their hands the patient should say hey do you mind washing your hands everybody you know nobody's perfect and patients should be empowered to remind providers to wash their hands. you know even though i mean as you're saying here that a lot of this people contracting and biologic resistant bacteria all infections is a result of too many antibiotics being prescribed to begin with that's still the prevailing way we do medicine in this country why is it i mean are doctors unaware

of these risks do they not care about these risks why do you think we're still pursuing this ok it was so the first point i'm going to make is you're now talking about the twenty percent of antibiotic use in this country which goes into human beings eighty percent of the antibiotics used in this country go into animals the vast majority of that is to promote the growth of livestock so that it's cheaper to produce meat so we're not even touching the eighty percent in this conversation for the moment let's stick with the twenty percent i think the real at the end of the day what drives inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions is fear it's fear of being wrong it's fear of the unknown it's fear of missing a bacterial infection and if you think about it in it if i'm in countering a single patient and i'm wrong about that patient there could be catastrophic consequences the harm to society of one prescription is pretty small it becomes huge when it becomes magnified millions of times over every. we're so this is the

phenomenon that has been has been called in science the tragedy of the commons many people doing something that has a very small injurious effect to society when it's done once but it's done so many times that it causes great harm but that's hard to remember when you're facing one individual patient who's sitting in front of you so now moving on the other eighty percent that you mention which comes from this factory farming in pompano animals full of antibiotics that we have benchley eat how difficult is that to address given the economic incentives there are in using this in a given are just are or are american diet is pretty heavy well you know the bottom line is it can't be that difficult because europe's already done it right europe has already shown that you can hand growth for motional antibiotics that not only not experience harm to animals but that the country that did it first denmark experienced

a six hundred percent increase in hog production after they've banned growth promotional use of antibiotics so yes is it hard yes it's politically hard but it's not scientifically hard it's already been done very interesting dr brad spell bird from the infectious diseases society of america thank you you bet and that will do it for now i'm sam sucks we'll see you back here at five. i think. we're going to go to jail the price is the only industry specifically mentioned in the constitution and. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy albus. in fact the single biggest threat facing our nation today is the corporate takeover of our government and across several we've been hijacked why

a handful of transnational corporations will profit by destroying what our founding fathers but once i'm job market and on this show we reveal the big picture of what's actually going on in the world we go beyond identifying the problem trucks rational debate and a real discussion critical issues facing america five for ready to join the movement then walk a little bit of. a mission and free cretaceous free in-store charges free. range month free risk free. to tide free. download free broadcast quality video for your media projects and free media oh don the hearty dr tom.

summer is coming to an end didn't talk to the crew of the academic field of his waiting for the mother doors and there was such a station to pick up the winter. everything has to be done quickly if the wind gets any stronger the helicopter won't be able to take off and there's no other way of getting people onto the ship from the station they need to hurry winter begins tomorrow. used to be the soviet union.