in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want. a little. coming up on our t.v. water water everywhere but not a drop to drink in detroit water services have been cut off of thousands of people whether been able to pay their bill and now the traders are reaching out to the u.n. for help a report from detroit just ahead. and the supreme court has spoken today the high court handed down two important decisions and that includes a ruling against the warrantless search of the rest of person's phone an in-depth look at that coming up. and the white house received a special visitor today israeli president shimon peres met with president obama in the oval office what's on the agenda find out later in the show.

it's wednesday june twenty fifth five pm in washington d.c. i'm in the area david in you're watching r.t. america we begin today with the young going battle over water in detroit earlier this year the detroit water and sewage department announced it would begin shutting off water services to fifteen hundred to three thousand customers every week if their water bills were not paid and just last week the city approved an increase in the price residents would have to pay for water now a coalition of activists is pushing back by appealing to the u.n. high commission for human rights to intervene on behalf of the bankrupt city's most vulnerable citizens to break all of this down earlier i spoke with artie's make a lopez who is on the ground in detroit i first asked her why residents are having such a hard time paying for these bills. when you're really depends on who you ask if

you ask the folks at the detroit water and through our department they'll tell you that people are simply putting these bills on the back burner and giving precedence to some of the other bills that might me shut off more immediately things like. your cable bill or your electricity bill because in the past we really haven't seen any mass shut off in detroit like we are seeing currently if you ask people on the other side however people like the detroit water brigade they will say this people simply cannot pay their bills because of what is going on this city so right now in the city there is a forty percent poverty rate and an eight percent unemployment rate and people are really having a hard time kind of paying those bills off now just to give you an idea of how high those bills are those bills have gone up one hundred twenty percent in the past ten years so it is much higher than the national average here and there are a bunch of reasons for that including aging water infrastructure and fewer people actually using the water but the national average is about forty dollars for a monthly water bill here in detroit it is sixty five dollars every month for your

water bill and on top of that the detroit city council just approved another measure that will raise rates another eight point seven percent on july first adding five more dollars to every month's bills so as you can imagine that is a huge financial burden but at the same time the detroit water and sewer department has been wanting to shut off the water for quite some time to people that are thousands of dollars delinquent on their bills they just have not been able to do it until now and the reason is because they saw an unusually harsh winter in detroit there is a moratorium that they will not shut off water if the temperatures drop below thirty two degrees and that's not necessarily for the consumers benefit that's for the benefit of the pipes simply said that means that the pipes will freeze if there is not running water going through those types at thirty two degrees or below so now that the temperatures are warming up they're actually going ahead and shutting off types of thousands of people around the city and there is on the converse i had

no moratorium if the temperatures get too high. all right so the u.n. special repertoire received a plea from activists asking for help in addressing what they've described as a human rights crisis has a special repertoire responded yes. they have indeed responded to it briefly hugh the special repertoire to the un water and sanitary commission went ahead and talked to the independent what she said first of all is that she does not have enough information about the situation specifically in detroit in order to be able to jump to any broad conclusions she says if it is true that detroit is shutting off the water to people who simply cannot pay for their bills because they don't not have the money for that and that might constitute a human rights violation here's another part of what she said to the independent quote this connection due to nonpayment is only permissible if it can be shown that the householder is able to pay but is not paying in other words that the terrace is

affordable the problem though with that statement by cattery to albuquerque is that it's very hard to prove what people in this city can and cannot afford that's because the water bills go to the address and not necessarily the person that's living in them so the detroit water and sewer department doesn't actually know if there are children living in the household what the demographic breakdown is if they're elderly if there are people who have medical fees for the water so they really can't determine what kind of economic basis these people are living under simply they can determine that there aren't they are not paying their bills at the moment certainly hard to distinguish between the two now you spoke with a spokesman from the detroit water and sewer department today did you get a sense as to what their justification is for shutting off the water supply. right a mirror their justification is simply it's like every other service you get what you pay for if you don't pay for the service you cannot have it what they are kind

of dealing with right now is this massive debt we are talking about the city of detroit is dealing with an eight hundred bill. in dollars worth of debt twenty three percent of that debt is due to the building you see behind me the water and sanitary commission so five billion dollars in total they say that their parish their pipes are aging that their infrastructure needs repair and replacement that water quality standards are going up and that people simply need to pay if they expect the services and the quality of water to be the same now i spoke to spokes person jeff gregory ino and here's what else he had to say about the justifications for this. d.t.d. consumers rise in eighteen c. they have to in the way that the. try to solve that is by temporarily interrupting service so we're not the only ones that were there is a consequence if you don't pay your bill bought we are not on a show off initiative it's

a bad debt collection initiative. so you can't back up his point there in may alone to detroit water and sewer department should also water to forty five hundred homes in the twenty four hours twenty seven hundred of those people are about sixty percent came to this building pay off their debt and have their water back on now of those who are remaining the eight hundred or so forty eight percent of them had their water restored within forty eight hours because they were actually able to come in here so he says that this is proof that people are in fact able to pay their bills off they simply are not doing it and the majority of the people who cannot pay their bills off need to come in here to be able to seek the financial assistance in order to have their water restored all right meghan looking forward to a full report on this when you come back archie's making lopez in detroit thanks. to major ruling came down from the supreme court today in a historic unanimous ruling the country's highest court said that cell phones and

smartphone generally cannot be searched by police without a warrant during arrests ruling on two cases from california and massachusetts the justices noted both a right to privacy and the need to investigate crimes but they ultimately ruled on the side of privacy in the court opinion issued today it said modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience with all they contain and all they may reveal they hold for many americans the privacies of life and another separate ruling the supreme court handed down a decision on the constitutionality of aereo t.v. streaming service in a six to three ruling the court found that area of service violates the. the right act by capturing broadcasters t.v. shows through dime sized in tennis and charging subscribers but the delivery even though it legally captures those shows over the air i was going to earlier to discuss the implications of the two decisions that came down today by criminal

defense attorney jon katz and attorney david lightman i first asked john for his reaction to the ruling on cell phone searches i'm ecstatic and also this means that the supreme court is still protecting the fourth amendment the united states constitution which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures with the supreme court the is that even if in arrestee has a canister in his pocket a film canister the police can open that up and find drugs in it and the person can be prosecuted for it if the same person who's arrested is found with a camera in his sorry a cell phone in his pocket the police now need to get a search warrant from a judicial officer to be able to search that camera to say that cell phone generally and david how big of a when do you think this is for privacy advocates. well it's certainly a big win in terms of the criminal aspect of. the the issues i think

the bigger long term issue is whether private companies can continue to mine people's dot is and what what use is that private companies can put to them so this does address one small problem the warrantless searches. for example you know with the n.s.a. spying situation those are searches that are done with warrants in a secret court so there's still a lot of work to do for privacy advocates absolutely all it's incredible to think about cell phones i mean they're so integral to our life ninety percent of american adults own a cell phone the court opinion poll did one poll that says nearly three quarters of smartphone users report being within five feet of their phones most of the time some of them even use the phones in their shower which is was crazy to think about so considering how you know how near and close we hold these phones to us what could a cell phone potentially reveal about someone. well i think you know people use

their cell phones now as the remote control of their lives and i think it's you know basically a digital imprint of everything going on in your life and so it is a very big deal you know to protect the privacy of those communications the way we used to protect certain phone calls and and in person conversations i have many clients that prefer to simply send e-mails or. rather than talk on the phone now so it's it's also a question you know for lawyers or protecting attorney client privilege as well absolutely that's a really good point and john a big question that's now lingering is what does this latest ruling really mean for the many people who have been convicted based on that information that was alternately you know taken by a police officer does it does it change their fate whatsoever. what the supreme

court usually does is to say that if this is a new change in the law that people already convicted under the old law maybe can't get something some sort of relief so the defendants should go ahead and challenge their convictions have it was because of related to warrantless searches of their cell phones but they're not guaranteed to get really. now as i understand the police can still examine the physical aspects of the fallen as just to make sure that it's not a weapon for example if they got pulled over are there was an altercation in your mind does it does that leave any will go room for any invasion of privacy whatsoever if they can do that or is that a bare minimum expectation for officers to have well sure police officers can look at the outside of the cell phone as long as they don't open it up as long as they don't operate electronics the u.s. supreme court for decades has gone down an area where there are many areas where police can go ahead and search people and search their information without getting

search warrants what happened today with the supreme court's decision is going to hopefully make police think twice about getting a search warrant or not for instance in an adjoining county in virginia it appears that police will routinely seeking search warrants for cell phones even before this ruling came down from the supreme court just in case a ruling like this came down and they protect themselves that way and chief justice roberts said the following of the court's ruling he said we cannot deny that our decision today will have an impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat crime privacy comes at a cost so he makes a really interesting point i mean should we be concerned at all about the effect this will have on law enforcement ability to do their investigations the bill of rights to the united states constitution does not provide protection to the police and the police function it provides protection to individuals and supreme court chief justice roberts is by no means a liberal and if he came down on this ruling this way that requires warrants that

salimi. and sentence considering police functions as well. and david moving on to the second ruling that i mentioned earlier aereo it's a streaming service what was areas our argument and their defense and why exactly do you think it didn't stick well their argument was that you know if they used all these tens of thousands of tiny antenna is that they could evade the copyright law because they were essentially doing no more than somebody who puts rabbit ears on their t.v. to get a local television signal they were just doing the job as an equipment manufacturer for for the consumer the supreme court didn't buy that argument and consistent with their past approach to say you can't use technology just to evade the copyright laws and because the area was making a second transmission in other words they were taking the transmission and then

making the transmission to the users that the transmission fell under the public performance right under the copyright. and david this is one of the biggest rulings seen by the television industry since the one nine hundred eighty s. one thousand nine hundred four i think what kind of implications does this have on how americans interact with television. well i think it has very little because most of the services that consumers use like in netflix or hulu or other streaming services that the networks themselves are putting out are legally licensed aereo and a few other companies like aereo who copied what aereo was doing were really trying to evade the copyright law and not pay for the content so i think at the end of the day this result will you know will cause very little change whereas had aereo prevailed it would of really been an issue for whether or not a lot of companies could afford to put content out there that was just going to be

used for free right do you do you think there's any concern that this could have you know stifled some perhaps healthy competition to a largely powerful industry. no not not not at all this area was in fact not really used by that many that many people and the service that it was providing was really not that useful so i don't think there's any issue with respect to technological innovation there can be lots of technological innovations in the entertainment industries where services that develop great technology can take licenses under the copyright law to to to do what they want to do and to get content to consumers copyright is a permission based legal regime it's not you know you take first and then ask for permission later you have to ask for permission first an area wouldn't do that all right criminal defense attorney john katz here in d.c.

and also attorney david lightman any york thank you so much thank you you thank. the u.s. chamber of commerce and the national association of manufacturers are preparing to publicly break with president obama over the prospects of more sanctions against russia and anonymous sources told bloomberg news that the two major business lobbies are planning the published newspaper advertisements and the new york times wall street journal and the washington post tomorrow stating that more russia sanctions risks harming u.s. workers and businesses the u.s. and european told russia that it could be further sanction if it does not make efforts to deescalate the crisis in ukraine but in a positive move separatist leaders agreed to a cease fire proposed by russian president vladimir putin taken military intervention in eastern ukraine off the table asked the upper house of the russian parliament to revoke its march ruling that russia could use troops in ukraine and

brazil or president of the parliamentarian assembly of the council of europe called this a positive step take a look. this crisis has a tremendous impact on the military inside of the people who are deployed this displaced to take away the power of intervening military in russia by mr putin and then by the council of the federation is really a positive step which we welcome we should build on that step as well as the peace plan the sanctions the parliamentary assembly took and i only can speak for the parliamentary assembly of the council of europe we suspended the voting rights of the russian delegation and to take part in the executing body but we did not exclude them on the contrary we want them to to come and to work with us and i

think that is important. on signs that the crisis in ukraine is beginning to settle ukraine's president petro poroshenko is set to sign a sweeping new trade deal with the e.u. this friday one which originally sparked the crisis and ultimately drove ben ukrainian president viktor got a cold edge from office but all hundred page document will take roughly ten years to implement if ukraine can comply with many of its complex provisions. president obama met with outgoing israeli president shimon peres at the white house today the ninety year old pres is making his final foreign trip before leaving office next month the nobel peace prize laureate has held nearly every major position in israeli politics during his sixty five your political career joining me to discuss his trip to the u.s. have missed some very tense foreign policy relations abroad i want to bring in our tease merino point nine re nothing's becoming done thanks very much and have you so

what was on the agenda today well president obama and. a variety of issues they discussed the harrowing developments in iraq negotiations over iran's nuclear program the stalled middle east peace process with respect to iraq president said that the sectarian conflict is not just a threat to only the arab world it's a threat to the entire region with respect to iran president obama said he wants the israelis to trust that he would never allow iran to develop a nuclear weapon we have to remember that israel is quite angry and frustrated with the u.s. over coming to an interim agreement with iran but lifting sanctions a little bit if iran halts part of its nuclear program israel wanted the entire program completely dismantled before saying sions were lifted tel aviv believes that tehran is using its nuclear program to build a nuclear weapon and iran maintains that it's only enriching uranium for peaceful

purposes and it's no secret that president obama has not had the easiest time dealing with israel elise and the last several months with iran being one of those sticking point issues was this trip meant to sort of smooth over relation the relations between the two countries possibly you know president acknowledged this strain in relations he describes it as countries having tactical differences obviously iran is one of those major differences it is on. a cli that the meeting between these two leaders particularly because president prez's is going to be leaving soon that it's going to change much there is still a lot of animosity that exists you know they they smiled they shook hands they they spoke about what they agree upon they reinforce the fact that they are allies the u.s. and israel but we do have to remember that when the obama administration's peace efforts collapsed back in april israel's defense defense secretary said that secretary of state john kerry is delusional and messianic for his efforts to broker

a deal between israel and palestine is obviously those harsh words are coming from a place where israel is very frustrated uncertain after sixty years he was unfortunately not able to enter any kind of deal while both countries certainly have a vested interest in seeing a stable iraq i know you mentioned they spoke about this is it clear at this point that these two countries have a very different approach as to how big would deal with isis for example meaning meaning israel and the u.s. right well it's interesting because look because isis is such a threat to so many countries the u.s. is in a position where the enemy of its enemy may become its friend here's an example secretary. secretary lindsey graham senator lindsey graham a major hawk as you know recently said that the u.s. actually needs iran's help to all hold baghdad to keep it from collapsing into the hands of isis iran has its own interests in preserving the shia government in iraq

and also doesn't want the radical insurgents coming into its own country so iran has said they're willing to do what it can to help iraq and then you have isis militants that are in syria unleashing bloodshed to try to topple the syrian government of president bashar assad so you have a position where you know the u.s. iran and syria all do have a common enemy some would argue they. might need to work together to defeat isis but israel on the other hand has said that that the us should just allow the enemies to fight one another not get involved that's that's what israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu said he said that he does not want to see the us make a friend out of iran in the context of iraq he actually said that still considering what's happening in iraq that. iraq iran's nuclear program is the biggest threat to

the globe not isis not not these terrorists that are cutting off people's heads and eating human hearts i don't know how we decide that they're not that much of a threat when iraq certainly is going to shake up the diplomatic dynamic covers your all right r.t. correspondent marina thanks for that reporting absolutely when a tree falls it's pretty hard to hear in the middle of the rain forest right and with most of those trees falling by the hands of illegal loggers one startup is looking to fight back using our even waste a san francisco based startup called rain forest connection is looking for donors to help turn recycled cellphones into traps for illegal loggers kickstarter project would turn old smartphones into solar powered listening stations that can detect the sound of chainsaws and then can alert local authorities to help catch loggers in the act take a look. the moment when our devices to text the sound files of chainsaws or the problems alert systems local rangers contribute in real time and hope of walking

with each one of these devices bridges you something you put lipstick in three thousand cars off with a particular tire square mile would you force created to look like black flowers on the trees of the amazon the devices are also equipped to detect gunshots and the sounds of animals in distress so they could also help combat poaching and also hopes to add anathoth would allow mobile users to listen in on the sound of the rain forests and real time so far the group as a test of the device is in indonesia and plans to expand into africa and brazil with the new funding not a bad way to use waste to save the world and that does it for now for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america check out our website r t dot com slash usa and follow me on twitter at amir david c. right back here at eight. washington well it's

a mess it is being sued dad if they're. using the media. on the street going to do that i mean really doesn't do much to add revenue my own ted agriculture journey and seventy six year old american farmer in india fallout do you think this is going to create for the cia a do you think is what's triggering the right to say that it's also the largest debtor nation in. britain is that is mostly about turning the status on a good deal of. working for the american dream the next they were just trying to survive it's time for americans and lawmakers in washington to wake up and start talking about the real causes of.

the nineteen twenty two seven states got together and the colorado river compact was born under which the hoover dam was the contact was meant to allocate water rights between the states to get the dam built when the contact was pretty that has to mix for how much water would be flowing into the dam will be way too high and that might not have been such a big deal except for the fact that we now have massive amounts of overconsumption and climate change to deal with in the last fifty years the population served by the colorado river went from twelve million to thirty million meanwhile the average flow on the river has drastically fallen and the colorado river is in

a state of long term decline if a new report by the l.a. times is to be believed the situation is now poised to cause a major water war between the states in the not too distant future the rules set forth in the compact are rigid and don't provide much detail about how states might work together in times of shortages which most experts agree are only set to get worse one possible solution would be to dream lake powell another reservoir formed at another dam on the colorado river but utah wyoming colorado and new mexico could then get screwed as then california arizona and nevada would have rights to both so the water another possible solution would be to buy out farmers claim on the water under the compact farmers get first dibs on the water and they're using huge amounts of the water for crops and. for now that largely get shift to china so x.

birds are now considering trying to buy water rights back from farmers but that presents a whole other gaited. the only thing experts seem to agree on is that the solution to this growing massive problem is going to be complicated and more contentious than it already is as an example they point to the last major effort to rewrite water allocation is called the quantification settlement agreement it was reached back in two thousand and three but eleven years later it's still under litigation and that doesn't even come close to providing a water allocation framework for the future so the us dreamed up a water scheme that they knew was a fairy tale and now with the entry later the entire south west of the country is about to start seriously paying for it just how bad these water wars might get only time will tell but with the way things are going we might not have to wait too long to find out.