coming up on our t.v. u.s. relations with brazil continue to sour after it was revealed by edward snowden the u.s. was 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 then 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 in the u.s. federal government faces another potential shutdown that's if congress doesn't approve raising the u.s. debt ceiling we'll tell you more as the clock ticks toward another washington induced crisis later on today show.

it's wednesday september eighteenth five pm in washington d.c. i'm sam sacks and you're watching r.t. and we begin in syria 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 come shortly after a u.n. report published on monday concluded that syrian deaths had been used in an august twenty first attack outside damascus though the report didn't assign blame to who carried out the attack and while the u.s. the u.k. and france said 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. said he. but ends of chemical weapons used by the rebels to the un security council and the

cup. but as you can invest period they return to a country that still experiencing unspeakable. we know that they are ready to transfer to the u.n. security council and that is a breakthrough in an interview to see russia's deputy foreign minister sergei that quote who is now here in damascus to discuss the deal on chemical weapons design

them and said that the u.n. report is biased toward war distorter if you are one sided. conclusions drawn by experts are not for sure and we are at me very we eat from far reaching. there's been produced on that basis for what we reference to teach of over there mom to read from asian winter to cheryl question of where in this report what your fun is yourself remember there will be or we begin working on what to do next we need to figure out why it is for all and why any group over your neck for not throwing the year period to continue. for free.

for the ra still many questions in this story in this is why most is continuing to call for a true. 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 a. report in. the moving on next month president obama was scheduled to meet with brazilian president dilma rousseff to discuss a host of security and economic issues but that meeting is not going to happen there was cancel by brazil and the white house can blame the n.s.a. a statement released tuesday by the brazilian president's office offers a glimpse into why the meeting was canceled. ed the illegal interception of communications data belonging to citizens companies and members of the brazilian government are a grave matter an assault on national sovereignty and individual rights and are incompatible with relations between friendly nations and artie's marine important

as 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 there has been canceled her scheduled visit to the white house next month pulling out of what i suppose 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 like brasilia 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 rousseff 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 it may be. afterwards reporting from new york marina porte ny an r.t. now turning 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 to fifteen bulk phone metadata collection program and those secrets implicate members of congress and telecom companies. is a court ruling released on tuesday judge claire egan noted that to date not a single telecom company has challenged the n.s.a.'s collection of their customer's medha data the court ruling read today no holder of records who has received an order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenge the legality of such an order indeed no recipient of any section two fifteen order has challenge the legality of such an order despite the explicit statutory mechanism for doing so in

other words with the 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 handed over the opinion goes on to reveal that the court believed members of congress were being fully briefed on this program court said quote in light of the importance of the national security programs that were set to expire the executive branch and well a tive 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 routinely rejected by committee chairman mike rogers so all the fai's a court itself 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 come 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. this week forbes 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 there that of walton yes the walton heirs the heirs to the wal-mart fortune occupy spot six seven eight and on on the list with their combined wealth topping one hundred thirty five billion with a b. 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 in washington d.c.

until now wal-mart recently announced its plans to open up six stores in the area but those plans were nearly derailed when the d.c. city council began considering a measure that would require 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 the tories lee pays much much lower wages announce that they would abandon their plans if indeed the measure passed well the measure did pass over d.c. mayor vincent gray heeded it and on tuesday the d.c. city council failed to collect enough votes to override the mayor's veto wal-mart 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 made come to next to open up new stores to talk more about this i was joined earlier by anthony l. fisher a producer for reason t.v.

in new york and reverend grayling hagler the senior pastor at plymouth congregational the d.c. . our person of faith strategies and i started by asking reverend hagler what impact would opening a walmart in d.c. have without any living wage laws to protect the workers but 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 live salaries up 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 there not proposing to build five stores they're proposing to build six tours 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 the wages and benefits in the city or do you say to people who say you know look this is an unemployment rate

a point higher than the nation won't this bring some jobs to the area well it's in the 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 kinds of economic infrastructure of their own to bring you in here over the last you know a 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 creator. it's job creation record are a bit spotty we have

a two thousand and eight study from the journal of urban economics said that they looked at three thousand counties where wal-mart had that had a walmart and found that wal-mart kills on average one hundred fifty retail jobs at the county level another study two thousand and nine from oil loyola said that wal-mart in chicago created net zero jobs and in two thousand and eight study in maryland shows sowed 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 sours 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 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 is it's 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 all 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 couldn't 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 the. 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 is 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 and they need to pay a deal so i. guess i mean i get that this is the city council great many of them oh

their jobs to labor unions who help finance their campaigns 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 at all but 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 on 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. the 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 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 space is six through nine on the forbes list they're worth over one hundred thirty five billion dollars 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 where you make this argument that goes kind of beyond economics and speaks to more the character of communities well i mean personally 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 a field. 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 with it's all the big box stores the seven hundred seventy five thousand square feet or more and your company generated at least a billion dollars in revenue 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 so we need to change our paradigm right we're fresh out of time that was this debate will clearly continue that was anthony fisher producer reason t.v. ever green light haggard the senior pastor of plymouth congregational the d.c. chairperson of faith strategies thank you both. the united states government is

quickly headed for another shutdown unless republicans democrats can come to an agreement on something first the government will run out of money on october first unless congress approves of new spending but even worse sometime in mid october the treasury is expected to hit its debt limit which could put the united states into default unless congress acts to raise the debt ceiling as we've seen in the past this is not an easy task today president obama spoke to business leaders at the business roundtable and showed his frustrations with the current debt limit debate you have never seen in the history of the united states the debt ceiling or the threat of not raising the debt ceiling being used to extort. a president or. a governing party. and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and have nothing to do with

the debt now for a deeper look into this debt limit debate artie's perry and boring the debt ceiling debate is heating up as we approach the october first and default danger zone politicians think tanks and special interest groups are using a host of tactics to gain public support president obama however if as this is not up for discussion i will not negotiate over whether or not america keeps its work and meets its obligations. i will not negotiate over the full faith and credit of the united states. and house democrats are backing him so far representative peter welch have collected they have these signatures on the letter and going to obama that says we appreciate your strong leadership on this issue and share your view that defaulting on our obligations would cause immediate and irreparable harm to america and the economy but some house republicans are challenging this claim and

a press conference this morning a majority leader eric cantor gave details about the spending bill he and his allies are drafting he said it will lift the debt ceiling and provide one year of government funding but it will to fund obamacare and will also include a grab bag of republican good evening quoting tax reform support for the keystone x.l. pipeline and other budget reform provisions but there are cracks are calling their bluff you have some republicans in the house of representatives who are promising to shut down the government at the end of this month if they can't shut down the affordable care act the affordable care act has been the law for three years now it passed both houses of congress the supreme court ruled it constitutional it was an issue in last year's election and the candidate who called for repeal lost however this idea of leveraging a one year delay of obamacare over the debt ceiling if gaming traction and might

already have the two hundred seventeen both needed to pass the house representative tom graves told politico the proposal that we put forward to have a unified our conference like we haven't seen and many many months. a vote on this bill is expected this week and policy groups off the hell are helping get public support for the republican plan the conservative think tank the heritage foundation hung this sixty seven foot long billboard in times square that read the warning obamacare may be hazardous to your health and addition heritage president former senator jim de mint traveled to nine cities throughout the country to try and gain more support for the funding obamacare but is it working well rethink kaiser poll found that fifty three percent of people who oppose the affordable care act support efforts to continue to stop it but the president is standing firm and this morning he spoke for the second time this week about the debt ceiling at the business

roundtable in washington he was trying to gain support from corporate executives we are just twelve days away from the end of the fiscal year and lawmakers are running out of time to cut a deal to avoid a government shutdown if that happened most government employees would not work there with central services such as the law enforcement and providing for national security would continue made atory benefits payments such as social security and veterans' care it would also continue and washington d.c. period boring r.t. behind schedule and over budget those are the characteristics that have come to define nearly every major project being employed by the nuclear arm of the department of energy every year more and more funds are given to the national nuclear security administration with the purpose of improving national security but its funds increase oversight and accountability on the administration seems to deal

with government watchdogs and auditors now taking a stand against the nation's overblown nuclear spending budget artie's a mere david reports. on june nineteenth two thousand and thirteen following the g eight summit president obama stood at the brandenburg gate and berlin germany and gave a speech about nuclear proliferation and he was president of strength in our efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. and reduce the number and role of murtha's nuclear weapons. president obama said he wanted to bring nuclear warheads to their lowest levels since the one nine hundred fifty s. but in that same month his administration simultaneously unveiled a two hundred and seventy five billion dollars plan over the course of twenty five years to modernize its nuclear warheads and production capacity in response to the administration's move greg maalouf of the los alamos study group said that this proposed budget reflects bad management bad priorities for the nation and a lack of political courage and even savvy on the part of the president his party

and his appointees it is a real disappointment a travesty of management and policy now according to a new report by the us government accountability office the government's gross mismanagement of nuclear weapons also extends to the nuclear infrastructure that's already in place you see one arm of the department of energy is called the national nuclear security administration or the n n as a it's supposed to improve national security through the military application of nuclear energy but whether it's been able to do that effectively is questionable just take the los alamos national laboratory located in los alamos new mexico after a seven year two hundred and thirteen million dollar upgrade to the security system that protects the labs most sensitive nuclear bomb making facilities the security system does not work and will require millions of dollars and improvement but aside from the wasted money even the placement of the laboratory is problematic you see

these facilities sit atop a fault line and remain vulnerable to collapse and therefore dangerous radiation releases but let's go from new mexico to. to tennessee where the price tag for a new uranium processing facility has grown seven fold in eight years to more than six billion dollars all due to a number of structural problems that weren't caught until the final stages of the building's development now those are just two examples but the reality is that almost all of the major projects under the and as say are seeing major errors and development according to the u.s. government accountability office ten of the agency's major projects combined are thirty eight years behind schedule and sixteen billion dollars over budget now advocates say that spending is what we need to keep the country safe but critics like us senator claire mccaskill chairwoman of the senate homeland security financial and contracting oversight committee say that the agency which is run by

ninety two thousand contractors has turned into a massive jobs program she said unfortunately for the taxpayer cost overruns schedule delays and technical failures are the rule not the exception we need to find a better way to do this because we just can't afford the status quo anymore. it's all a result of years of ineffective accountability and a nearly automatic increase in funds that increases have been so large that many are calling this budget bloated and that means it may be time for a nuclear diet in washington to mirror david our team. that does it for now for more of the shorts recovered go to youtube dot com slash archie america check out our website. say you can follow me on twitter. we'll see you back here. unexplored antarctica what is it in this icy expanse that attracts the people who

come here. now i only go to the dock. and enter into. a new generation of polar explorers is coming. we have a new group of specialists here now all of them are young how are they going to get along with each other and i don't know. do. i used to be a bureaucrat. seriously. what adventures await in this mysterious land where they live what do they eat and what are they actually doing in antarctica.