coming up on ard t.v. in new york the u.n. general assembly continues diplomatic talks circling around the thawing u.s. iranian relations and if a resolution can be passed to dealing with syria's chemical weapons the latest updates ahead then in california a law was just signed that gives teens in online eraser button all that was passed to give more power to net users there's growing privacy concerns over future twitter ads we'll talk about that and more into days tech report. and synthetic marijuana is slowly becoming an alternative to the real stuff here in the united states but it's an alternative that can have deadly consequences and now local governments are battling to regulate it we'll tell you more in a special r t investigation.

it's thursday september twenty sixth five pm in washington d.c. i'm sam saxon you're watching r.t. and we begin with the latest news coming out of the united nations general assembly in new york city first the five permanent members of the u.n. security council continue their efforts to find agreement on a resolution addressing syria's chemical weapons secretary of state john kerry and russian foreign minister sergey lavrov have been working closely to draft a resolution compelling syria to give up its chemical weapons the syria situation is at the top of the un's agenda this week also today john kerry is meeting with iran's foreign minister and top diplomats from four other countries to talk about iran's nuclear program earlier today iran's president hassan rouhani called for the

complete abolition of nuclear weapons all around the world. no nation of all you should possess nuclear weapons. since there are no right hands for these wrong weapons as you mr secretary general have rightly put it. he's determined. to make every effort to reenter the vision. within. world without further delays also today the general assembly heard from palestinian authority president mahmoud abbas regarding palestine's efforts toward permanent membership at the u.n. and the prospects of peace with israel joining me now from our new york studios for the latest on all of this on a stasia churkin

a thank you want to start here let's start with the u.n. security council we're hearing reports that a deal may be reached on syria a russian foreign and foreign minister sergey lavrov addressed reporters just within the last hour what did he say and what are you hearing in regard to this deal and well our family can finally confirm that a diplomatic breakthrough has finally been reached on syria resolution to now be voted on in on the secu by the security council the russian foreign minister sergei lavrov has in fact confirmed that a text has been agreed upon by russia and the united states this was something that was worked on for days if not weeks because of a major disagreement on whether a clause on the use of force should be mentioned in this resolution russia's position consistently has been that this is out of the question and military intervention are you so force or so-called chapter seven of the u.n. charter should not be mentioned in this resolution whereas the west believe the

opposite and we can now confirm that they did agree that the use of force will not be mentioned in this text that basically the security council today will already start putting together the document that they're likely to vote upon in the shortest time to come. maybe tomorrow maybe in the days to come and importantly what is going to be in this resolution. it is the framework that the u.s. and russia had agreed upon back in geneva in september last year when they decided that a political transition for syria would be best and now this text will continue to ensure that syria moves its chemical weapons under international control interested so that is breaking news there coming from the u.n. moving on to the iran nuclear program russia will play an integral role in whatever talks come related to the foreign minister lavrov addressed this issue too in his press conference sam no iran was not addressed in this particular press conference

that was very brief to update us on the latest on this latest breaking news on syria but we do know that a meeting between iran plus five permanent members of the security council plus germany should be underway as we speak where they decide where they continue to discuss the uranium enrichment program also a breakthrough meeting in a sense because it's the first time in quite some time when the u.s. secretary of state and the rainy and foreign minister sit face to face in the same room for talks because certainly there's been a major disagreements between the west which believes that iran's uranium enrichment program is dangerous whereas iran has consistently said it's peaceful but with now a new iranian leadership a new raney and president that has been indicating really left and right that tehran is ready for a lessening of the tensions between tehran and washington that they're ready to cooperate and get rid of any concerns and we've certainly heard barack obama earlier this week say that he believes. that the door for diplomacy is still open

if tehran is willing to walk through it so this meeting today that is has to be going on right now as we speak is going to determine exactly what steps come next when it comes to iran will this meeting comes in i mean this you you briefly mention this iranian president rouhani addressed the general assembly session on nuclear disarmament this morning he called for a nuclear weapon free world so given that he said the small. does that give us any insights into what's going on in this meeting that's taking place right now about iranians nuclear weapon nuclear program to some to some extent it does sam because certainly it's shows us that a change of tone has taken place really between iran and the united states in this speech that you referred to rouhani said that these dangerous weapons. cannot be and no hands that hold them are the right hands to have these weapons so basically he has indicated yet again that iran believes that the world should be nuclear free and so certainly this is something that is welcomed by the west that has been

expressing concerns so really we should be waiting just staying put and waiting to hear what comes out of these latest talks because they could in fact be a game changer although it could also be kind of baby steps in the positive direction of dialogue we'll have to wait and see also the president of the palestinian authority mahmoud abbas address the general assembly now syria and iran have been taking up all the news here but the u.n. is always been focused on the middle east peace process has this u.n.g.a. move this process forward at all and we're just cosigned stand on its bid for permanent membership at the u.n. well us sam we certainly know that obama's administration has really barked at all of course although syria and iran did steal the headlines at this general assembly and we know that of course the middle east peace process has also been i would say maybe the third headline in their list of priority is least this week we heard from palestine today mahmoud abbas yes he really remembered i guess the international community that palestine is thankful that it received observer status at the u.n.

g.a. last year and this is certainly been something that the palestinian people have been thankful for and he said that a new round of talks have been going on over the last several weeks and that there is the hope that finally the peace process will also move forward this is of course something that has been a difficult issue for many years but. it was a very hopeful message today bad for the negotiations and talks that have been underway may be able to push this process forward while there was artie's on the stasi the church giving us the latest on the un general assembly from new york city . now stuck in the middle of the more than two year long syrian civil wars the small town of maluco home to just over three thousand residents mostly christians are to has been bringing continuing coverage from the city as it became a battleground between extremist rebel fighters affiliated with al nusra and the

assad government the fighting continues around in the town is dealing with the chair of destruction there recently r.t. spoke with an archbishop of the syrian church for the eastern us who told the story of maloof and the hardships brought on by the syrian civil war. very ancient town northeast of the mask is and it is on the list of the heritage. centers the u.s. coalesced. is made of mainly christian and some muslim families who have lived together for many centuries peacefully. is one of the very few towns and cities in syria where make is still spoken. of course the habitants of my rule originally come from the aramaic people of syria which was the dominant race in syria before islam now many are around malula are biased

through language and through other things but my really kept its make. identity malula is no different than other christian and claves and population of christians in the large cities they have always felt that what's happening in syria right now is against their own interest as citizens of syria especially as christians as it's well known and documented christians and the as a rule. have lived relatively very peaceful. conditions and the government and the syrian population have been really nice to the christians because the christian after all these inhabitants of syria the original inhabitants of syria therefore keeping the christian prison in the middle east especially in syria is a richness and is. in reaching the syrian society therefore they always stood

with the country i cannot say with the government because they love the country and that's why they think the current regime is good for christians ates a secular regime and they are very much afraid of what comes after. blue is on the unesco list of tentative world heritage sites famous for two of the oldest monasteries surviving in the country and the same talk of the convent residents are urging the international committee of the red cross and other government and non-governmental organizations to prague provide aid to the village as well as the convent and residents who have taken refuge within it. though mid all the bluster on capitol hill about government shutdowns debt limits and green eggs and ham very quietly efforts to reform the national security agency are moving forward in sort of a big way now since june edward snowden's revelations about how the n.s.a. goes about spying on american citizens have led to more than

a dozen pieces of legislation being introduced to rein in the n.s.a. and bring light to the top secret foreign intelligence surveillance court this week all of those bills were fused together into one bill the most comprehensive and most aggressive n.s.a. reform bill introduced yet the bill was and veiled wednesday by a bipartisan group of senators including ron wyden mark udall richard blumenthal and rand paul it will restrict the n.s.a.'s ability to continue the mass collection of americans phone data under section two fifteen of the patriot act it also limits collection of certain internet communications under section seven zero two of the amendments act and it closes the backdoor that allows analysts to search through americans data that may have been swept up into the n.s.a. data bases the law also reforms that buys a court by putting in place a special constitutional advocate to act as an adversary against government

requests for more information today and as a chief keith alexander was called to testify in front of the senate intelligence committee alongside the director of national intelligence james clapper who once again defended his spying programs. all of us in the intel's community are very much aware that the recent on authorized disclosures have raised serious concerns both here in congress and across the nation about our intelligence activities we know that the public wants both to understand how it's until this community uses its special tools in the thor days and to judge whether we can be trusted to use them appropriately we believe we have been lawful and that the rigorous oversight we've operated under has been effective now sensing congress may take action the n.s.a. is making appeals to the american people keith alexander spoke at the national press club on wednesday saying quote the american people have to weigh in and help us get the tools we need to defend this country. of course since the leaks polling

has routinely showed the american people on comfortable with the n.s.a.'s activities. they're on to some interesting developments regarding online privacy first there's twitter which announced this week it will seek a one point five billion dollar initial public offering on the york stock exchange but is the social networking a news giant readies to cash in there are concerns that it might sell out its pretty solid privacy record you see twitter recently purchased an online advertising platform known as mo pub which takes bids from online advertisers to create targeted ads for individuals on their mobile devices thanks to the unique way people use twitter and all of their mobile devices and how twitter collects users' web traffic data from sides that tweet from the coming together of twitter with mo pub could give online advertisers unprecedented access to data on millions of twitter users so should we expect twitter to soon be met with the same sort of

privacy skepticism that now plagues facebook while speaking of privacy on social networks this week california became the first state in the nation to give minors the right to have their data erased completely of social networking sites the new online eraser bill requires websites that cater to teenagers including most social media sites to give users who are under eighteen years old the ability to delete any posting they made on the website the website must also clearly inform underage users how to do this the idea is to give minors who weren't fully aware of the implications of posting certain things on the internet a chance to erase it all before they enter adulthood and start you know applying to colleges and jobs that law is slated to go into effect on january first two thousand and fifteen joining me for some tech talk on these issues and others is baron soca president of tech freedom baron welcome thank you so let's start with

twitter generally it's got. better privacy marks than some of it's some of these other social networking sites like facebook but with a huge i.p.o. in its acquisition of this company mo pub you see twitter changing its tune on privacy here well certainly they're going to criticize but a lot of that criticism comes from misunderstandings of how online advertising works so a lot of people are afraid that somehow twitter is going to share information with advertisers the way that people have said that about facebook that's not how an advertising works it's very simply that if you're an advertiser and you have a list of twitter accounts or names you can have twitter show ads to those users but that doesn't mean that you the advertiser get any information about that user so people will see better ads they're more useful advil be more profitable to twitter so twitter can provide more services to us but there really isn't a privacy problem here because advertisers are not going to be seeing any more information but in regard to this this company mo pub or something which kind of i

guess is sounds like this online marketplace where advertisers can see what where people are on social media and bit on what ads to show these individuals is it a legitimate concern that if that by acquiring this company twitter can populate mo pub with all of this data from its users and then when online advertisers go to mo pub to figure out which users to target they suddenly have a lot more information than they had before well it's important to just understand as you say that what all that would be happening is that the ads on most public be better targeted advertisers wouldn't be getting more personal information so there is always a concern when more information is shared about data security so long as twitter has good data security and is letting users opt out as they've said that they will there really isn't a problem here and it's important to note that this is not the kind of information that the n.s.a. or government agencies really care about what they want is contents of e-mail browsing history that sort of information that's truly sensitive that's not what we're talking about with online advertising in regard of privacy and that is some

pretty sensitive stuff you don't want you know people are uncomfortable with the n.s.a. knowing where they're making phone calls from who they're associated with and all that stuff. couldn't privacy stretch though to not wanting corporations to know what you're searching for on the internet maybe you're searching for some stuff that might be personally embarrassing and then you log on and you're suddenly in a danger with these ads and people can infer oh well this person must be searching well so privacy means a lot of different things to different people so the situation you just described maybe is the situation that's over your shoulder privacy someone looks over and sees what's shown on the screen if that's what you're concerned about you can do private browsing modes on on all the major browsers out there today that will actually conceal even from the company that you're using the search engine what you're searching for and the ads that will be shown or not can be targeted to you so you can opt out effectively if that's your concern about or you can use do not track let's move on to this new law in california aimed at protecting minors from making poor decisions on the internet before they're fully aware of the

consequences do you think this is a good law and if you do think it's a good law why should only minors be protected from their given the chance to make a second decision about what they post i don't think it's an exaggeration to say that there's never been a good state law regulating the internet the states have tried consistently california has over two hundred bills pending right now that regulate the internet states are not very well situated to do this they don't have a lot of technological competence and they're also legally questionable as to whether they're actually able to do that this particular law is of course something everyone can understand and relate to on a on a visceral level but it raises a host of problems it by allowing people to delete things that they've posted online that are public postings which you really may end up doing in practice is removing online discussions with other users so that's not the kind of thing that we generally embrace in a country that values free speech but conceptually should there be a mechanism by which people who post certain things on the internet have

a way to get that off the internet should they choose to in the future and how do you go about creating a so it's so i don't think you legislated there are certainly tools that companies . like facebook have offered you can remove postings you can delete your account on facebook there's a great set of privacy controls that allow you to see what you shared in other and share it with certain people or deleted all together and that's fine the problem is that when you start legislating when you tell people that there's a silver bullet solution that will remove every piece of content out there you create a false sense of security because the reality is anything posted on the internet no matter what the law says can be copied and it's very difficult to take it down once it's been put up so the most important thing is teaching kids especially younger kids to post responsibly and it comes down to personal responsibility i guess ultimately when it comes to what you're doing on the internet now there's another component of this california law that prevents websites from targeting minors with ads for things like cigarettes tobacco and tanning booths was one of them what do you make of this effort as well well it's another example of how states try to

regulate the internet they come up with all sorts of rules any one of which might make sense but over over time if you get fifty states writing rules like that it becomes very hard for the internet to work as a global medium so again that's why if there are going to be laws they should be done at the federal level not by all fifty states so bernie seem somewhat optimistic about where things are going to he's not as concerned as a lot of people are saying this where do you see this in ten years or even sooner as far as targeted advertising you see that senior minority report with the guys who are there on the screen the ads do you see it going that direction should that worry i think i think a lot of the things that we get worried about today that we're concerned about will realize we're not the real problems in the future the real problems are things like n.s.a. access and yet for the last ten years many people in the privacy community have to worry about online advertising and frankly i think it's pretty silly it reminds me of when the camera first came out people threw a fit about it it's where modern privacy law came from the idea that suddenly you can have a camera that would take a photo of you without sitting still for an hour that disturbed

a lot of people and we got used to it and we're going to get used to things like online advertising too most younger people have i think will discover that what we're really worried about in privacy is the guy. from an identity thieves and then peer to peer privacy it's making sure that our friends don't see things we don't want them to see and i think on those scores we're making good progress at least where the government isn't the problem that's a hard fight and when we should keep fighting interesting stuff baron soaker president of tech freedom thank you so much thank you. now on to the month santo protection act you remember that act right it's the provision that was quietly inserted into a spending bill last spring and then signed into law that basically allows months santo and other biotech corporations to continue distributing their genetically modified seeds even after a court has ruled that they may not meet certain environmental tests and basically makes the g.m.o. seed industry exempt from the court system well since that provision was inserted into a short term spending bill earlier this year than it expires when that spending bill

expires to which is at the end of this week you know when the government shuts down now the house is spending bill passed last week the one that defunded obamacare also included an extension of the month santo protection act but the senate which is currently working on its own spending bill now will not include an extension of the month santo protection act that's at least according to senate appropriations chairwoman barbara mikulski and senator mark pryor so as if there weren't enough differences between the house in the senate when it comes to a burning a government shutdown the months ahead to protection act could be a sticking point too on wednesday the senate caucus on international narcotics control held a hearing on the rise of synthetic drugs testifying at the hearing was michael bought a cheli the deputy director of the office of national drug control policy in the hearing discussed the difficulty of cracking down on these synthetic drugs since their producers often change the chemical make up of them so that they are quote

not technically illegal here with senator dianne feinstein speaking at the hearing . and it's very hard because it's not at all clear cut. i don't know how you keep making can make cases if the chemicals keep changing but the intent of the cell of the producer is what i would go for because clearly the intent of the producer is for human consumption and they guys it this way and was not intended for human consumption and by name you know basque bice's or candy or whatever it might be right and i think this is what makes it so diabolical or teasmade and lopez has been looking into the dangers of synthetic marijuana here's part two of her investigation. it's a wonderful town i love it i love this place where we've got great character about great people the quiet little city of frederick maryland is perhaps best known as

the final resting place of francis scott key author of the stars spangled banner. and while this little city no longer has to worry about bombs bursting in air fredrick is now a battleground of a different sort we got to the point where we realized we had to do something something about a drug problem taking over the city since that it marijuana it's a designer drug where nail polish remover mixed with chemicals is sprayed on dried herbs sold. similar to that of actual marijuana with sometimes serious side effects you're smoking chemicals you're smoking something that is laced with your even know what you must just be smoking lighter fluid what started off as just a community nuisance quickly turned into a public health emergency we started noticing it more with some reports from our

from the physical world hospital and we were realizing something was happening in our town as well the u.s. as a whole put a ban on twenty six types of synthetic drugs in two thousand and twelve but the chemical makeup can be so easily manipulated the drug makers quickly found ways to skirt the law we had to figure out how the ban it and what was banned in every combination of it it wasn't that easy frederick came up with a stricter law of its own last year than in any synthetic substances that mimic the effects of drugs that are illegal under federal law yet just a short drive up the road where towns don't have laws of their own the product still stocks store shelves so i wanted to find out for myself how easy it really is to get your hands on these synthetic cannabinoids so i went right outside of frederick city limits so within the county of frederick but in the city of jefferson and sure enough right off the highway is this gas station where i was

able to get my hands on this bag this is a four gram bag that cost me about thirty two bucks it's just as easily accessible in much of the u.s. and is sometimes wrongly described as a marijuana alternative in order to truly understand the complexity of it we need a quick chemistry lesson it looks like marijuana in that they are both kind of a green brown plant material but to a forensic chemist these look very different and it all comes down to science now in the beginning there were only a few classes of the chemical most notably the j. w. h. series named after the scientist who. scabbard it john w. hofmann it's formula is c. twenty four age twenty three in oh well let's just say that i add an extra oxygen molecule over here and i made all of these nitrogen well then i have a whole new chemical or what happens if i took a couple of those nitrogen molecules away again i've created an entirely new drug

this is how many of those drugs are actually slipping past regulations drug dealers have come up with over two hundred compounds and counting and it's tough for authorities to identify them with you know like heroin and cocaine and stuff we have these little kids that you can drop something in that changes the color we had no kid like that so how do we say. this is illegal we have no way of testing to make sure it was illegal so by the time the lab has the results the drug dealers have already come up with a new chemical structure more and more local governments are trying to make laws that are not only stricter than the federal law but more and forcible so far forty three states have taken it on the state of maryland will join that list october first it's a daunting hurdle facing the drug enforcement agency this is the new frontier of drugs and drug trafficking and drug abuse we were dealing with this five years ago

over the past two years the da has conducted two major operations operation logjam resulted in ninety arrests four point eight million tackett seized and material to create another thirteen point six million packages they are making progress but this public health emergency doesn't only rest on the d.e.a.'s shoulders this is like any drug issue in the united states we're never going to arrest or enforce our way out of drug problems what we need are for parents to be better we need kids to be better in washington meghan lopez r.t. . and that is going to do it for now for more on the stories recovered from the u.s. and to the n.s.a. go to youtube dot com slash r t america and check out our web site r t v dot com slash usa for the latest breaking news and you can follow me on twitter at sam sachs we'll see you back here at eight pm thanks for watching.

spice came to scooby snacks the insulting thing is that they actually have the nerve to call if. you smoke and chemical you're smoking something that is laced with you don't even know what. many different. things are out there no real. no with new regulations on. the must just be smoking light no idea what is in the. welcome of the kaiser report imax kaiser a man in the u.k. has been tasered by a poll.