to come. from from. from . it's one pm this friday here in moscow no breaking news to start with moscow tells the u.s. that it should reduce the number of diplomatic staff it's got in russia but a statement comes just after the senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new round of sanctions against russia we'll tell you all about that also coming up in this half hour of news human rights watch claims an iraqi army division previously trained by the u.s. has carried out extrajudicial killings in mosul. to our legs of the supposed nine eleven torture program could be set to go on trial in the united states still no later today we speak exclusively to a colleague of one of those men. it

was kevin owen thank you choosing our to international live from h.q. moscow here and it's rush hour in the headlines this hour moscow said that the u.s. should cut the number of diplomatic staff it's got in russia now by the first of september the move follows the approval of the new russian sanctions bill by the senate this year or be it to be signed through by trump well for more details let's talk to kate partridge this came in about half an hour ago it wasn't to be unexpected russia even earlier on this month said it was running out of patience even though this bill was and being voted through by it looks like this is going to happen so what is being proposed when it's exactly as you said there kevin the russia the one i did here is interesting russia offers to limit u.s. diplomatic staff in russia effectively what they're saying is while we have four hundred fifty five people over there we want to make sure that you have exactly the same number over here and the key wording also if you look to the states as well as tit for tat effectively it's

a retaliation this is how many people that you have over over there in the u.s. we want to ensure that you have exactly the same numbers here and it's not just in moscow as well if you look across the whole of russia looking at you catherine burke about it last hour just. in terms of storage as well and compounds and that's a key word that we've heard about before as well because of the compounds in america exactly because this has been a story has been bubbling around as well as these two diplomatic compounds over the russias give back to the worst most roads being going on for a long time and that also comes up in the statement as well effectively russia has looked at some of the wording here that's true in the sanctions bill and also she said about the compounds around key words are coming through their illegal holdings the fact that these a diplomatic buildings and therefore they're subject to certain laws and conventions and therefore this movie is has not at all gone down well so that notwithstanding this bill going through or not whether it signs were eventually by donald trump which is a whole nother story too it looks like what's being proposed here is going to happen anyway if the bill goes through there even more could be considered is that a picture absolutely it says here going through the wording again russia will

respond to the top measure so anything that the u.s. comes up with effectively russia will respond in kind and also as we've been hearing before as well this is something that's been boiling away you mentioned it yourself and we heard from president putin yesterday is a press conference and he was effectively saying russia has been patient over she said the compounds and the situation the bubbling sanctions issue and basically they've lost patience and now it's time to react. to the news of these sanctions are completely illegal they go against international law and the rules of the world trade organization we're being very patient and very reserved but at some point we will have to respond we can't endlessly tolerate aggressive behavior towards our country these actions can be perceived as aggravation and i would even say exceptional cynicism. or has some of those words an aggression and cynicism and also looking at the sanctions while russia is concerned about the economic situation and also as we've been mentioning before about the implications not just for russia but also third parties as well so the ramifications of this not just

russian global we're going to cover so much thanks for that. so what is going to go through as far as the americans are concerned or not this new set of sanctions or many knowsley president troubles being in a tough. position either which way either one side is going to take a hard line on the kremlin or the other let down his party and try and go against the will of congress i suppose a political commentator john boston this he told me things trub should veto the bill in order to exercise his authority you know in my estimation of donald trump i don't think he cares that much about what an opposing senator in opposing congress thinks about him his votes came from the american people he is the head of the executive branch of the u.s. government the executive branch leads in foreign policy under the supervision of congress and what's happening here is congress is attempting to take over presidential powers and as the president the president must veto this if he wants

to retain his full powers it's possible that somebody might be advising trump to let them play their game a little bit but i'm relatively optimistic. as kate was saying just now there are also fears in the you that these proposed sanctions would hit european companies germany's economy ministers criticize the u.s. over the plans she says that washington is abandon the shared position now on anti russian sanctions and even suggested counter measures themselves khaled moped went on the streets of new york to us new york is there how they would feel about having sanctions imposed on them. the economic minister of germany is saying he wants to put sanctions counter sanctions on a country in coordination with the world trade organization. russia may be u.s. troops u.s. then a sway i probably in the states on the united states oh you know well and how do you feel about that i faked that our trade policies under the present current

administration it's got a right i can't believe it because the president are trying to protect themselves with trouble being president you got to expect a lot of crazy things not good but we have to stand out it's not good for us and it's not good for the world we think that we can exist by ourselves we can the world is a much bigger place now with becoming less and less important it's a trade war a trade war between us and the jar and the germans us and the rest of the world it saves a lot of people i think voted for mr trump. because he was hoping not to keep our continual adventures in foreign countries to reduce the wars and what we're having here is just we're creating more of a worse situation in were and we're needing our european partners as well and we're basically we've got a congress imposing their own foreign policy without regard to the impacts on

europe nor really the considerations on the ultimate objectives of of mr president trump as well. let's check some of the big stories today. a new report from human rights watch claims that iraqi soldiers have executed dozens of prisoners in mosul the rights group says those killed were suspected members of islamic state that face trial international observers cited in the report describe what they saw in that city. a group of iraqi soldiers that food naked men down an alleyway after which they heard multiple gunshots. through the doorway of a damaged house the bodies of a number of naked men lying in the doorway they said one of the dead men was lying with his hands behind his back and appeared to have been handcuffed and there was a rope around his legs to sixteenth division soldiers who scooted one observe and showed the seven head of what the soldiers said was an american female isis sniper whom the had to capture sated it was not clear whether the decapitated her alive or

after her death this is one of a series of reports that human rights watch has issued on the final weeks of the battle in mosul against isis and in these reports what we have seen is numerous extrajudicial killings by iraqi forces of men that they say were linked to isis without any judge without any trial simply executing them on the battlefield really all the iraqi forces that are involved in this fight against isis have been committing rampant abuses including war crimes we have yet to see a single incident be properly ex investigated by the iraqis or any commanders to be held accountable. the report for the more close the executions were carried out by one iraqi unit that played a significant role in the liberation of mosul but unit had received american training and assistance. twenty fifty bocas feel again for human rights watch says

it's unclear though whether the iraqi troops are still being supported by washington the u.s. has publicly for a long time to publicize the work that it started training the iraqi military sixteen division that it calls on its own website has press releases up highlighting the training and support that the us has given to this specific division now we as human rights watch do not know if support to the sixteenth division is ongoing but we have not seen anything thing to suggest that that support ended in the recent past. torture and killing allegedly carried out by the iraqi army had previously been documented by a cameraman embedded with one of those units he claims to have filmed abuse and extrajudicial executions some of which he said were also recorded by the officers themselves. spoke to that cameraman back in june must warn you there are disturbing images coming up. understand the dark background is intended to conceal where you

are how serious is the threat to your life after you made these revelations about all this torture and wrongdoing in iraq. my family received many threats from the especially from captain mourners are he wrote to my father on facebook he said they would come and night and kill them they can contact me because i was in hiding of course i understand that my life is in danger you spent a lot of time embedded with iraqi forces and i know i spent some time in mosul i know how hard it was to you know get in touch and embed yourself with iraqi forces in the specially difficult to gain their trust but what was your position within the emergency response division. and how do you work together every day we all slept together i spent more time with them than with my family i thought they were heroes they were so brave fighting on the frontlines every day but then i saw the other side the torture the raping the killing first they didn't want me to film the

torture and other bad stuff but eventually they relented and gave me permission how did you feel when you first witness these torture scenes and how did you feel as time went on and as they got more brutal and violent and fatal. at first it didn't register during the second week i went home to my relatives asked me what was wrong with me after that it all changed it affected me my psychology i kept thinking about the torture of those people and their suffering it got worse and worse and after five weeks it became so horrible that i decided to publish. everything and. i know it was unbearable but i made myself continue to film because they knew it was important to torture people and kill them over and over. as i remember it happened on december twelfth katz an insurgent hider came back and started to show us a video we saw how sergeant hyder started to shoot he shot

a man six nine times then we heard the voice of captain omar hyder stop the sonos want to talk to him then he shot the man three times and so. another photographer recorded the devastated city and its residents steering the battle for mosul and also off to the city was liberated. the last couple days we witnessed there was really just this tremendous push to just just crush the remaining fighters who were very deeply entrenched i guess in the city there's this vast tunnel network i guess that is sort of existed for thousands of years you know dating back to mass but tamia but spiders have also dug in their own tunnel network system underground in mosul and there was just this and it was a very aggressive push by both the iraqi forces and the coalition to just pretty much and i await their remaining fighters. you know i will result in being kind of heavy civilian cost i think that what you know what the mainstream media sort of

sort of does they try to they try to generalize you know the conflict in what's happening they try to package it into these very easily accessible headlines you know like most liberated and so you know you read that headline and you think oh you know the battle is over you know the operations are over and you know everything must be tied up and tidy but that's just not the case so i guess that that was one of the biggest shocks to me was that you know there's this this narrative that you know the fight is over and you know it wasn't the case at all and that the scale of destruction in mosul is just you know it's an unimaginable hell the city is littered with. you know unexploded ordinance from you know from airstrikes and it's just going to take you know decades to rebuild this city. to military psychologist regarded as the architects of the cia's enhanced interrogation program we're going to find out later today whether or not they'll stand trial over their participation in torture bruce jessen and james mitchell

created personally tested methods they form the company that profited from the program the techniques we used on suspected terrorists held at secret cia prisons following nine eleven but the twenty four team told europol released by a senate select committee found that some of those who subjected to the brutal interrogations. not even baby involved with extremist activities. meantime michael kearns who worked with one of those psychologists had devised a program to help u.s. servicemen withstand torture he says his work on sierra as it's known was used by one of those men then to develop new and more brutal torture techniques. the resistance to interrogation program we don't actually use the word torture in the

training however there are torture techniques that are used to certain levels during the training this is all part of a program that's called sere s e r e survival evasion resistance to interrogation and escape so what we were doing were protecting those operators those people on strategic reconnaissance flights doing operational work of around the world to collect intelligence and also those that were operational and working in counter terrorism how to resist enemy interrogation and those techniques were educated to fill a very precise and were not used to hurt or harm the students and every student had a stop code a code that they could use at any time to have all activity stopped so again torture in the mind of a student is different from being tortured for days and days and weeks which is what we're hearing about the bush she torture program all of the activities that

went on by the cia were grossly beyond anything at the circe school standards for my opinion please understand that i retired from the us air force in one nine hundred ninety one only in two thousand and six or two thousand and seven did i even have an inkling that these people that i haven't seen for dozens of years were doing this roger aldridge bruce jessen and jim mitchell were the people behind the torture program it was the people that i worked with for several years that had taken and reverse engineer. the harsh part. and turned it into the te's the enhanced interrogation program. brutal techniques. the lawyers for the two psychologists in question say the innocence and should be viewed like the supplies of poison gas to the nazis where that is simply doing a business in line with a contractual agreement one form has to whistleblower told me that the men received eighty one million dollars for their work the reason why mitchell and jessen were

put in charge of this terrible this important program was because the cia simply had no experience in this kind of thing nobody in the cia was trained in interrogation that's an f.b.i. job but the cia wanted to be the organization that did it themselves and it's because the cia blamed itself for the nine eleven attacks well because they had nobody internally who could do these interrogations they decided to hire mitchell and jessen at a cost of eighty one million dollars to come in and teach the cia how to torture people at the end of the day michel and jessen were the ones who flew out to the secret prison site overseas and actually carried out the torture themselves we know from the senate torture report for example that it was mitchell and jessen who were personally torturing these prisoners there was no discussion of ethics there was no discussion of morality and once the memo was signed by the president there was no

discussion of legality it was it was as though the cia was just winging it they were taking it one day at a time they didn't care if they were breaking rules they didn't care if they were violating the laws they didn't care about professional ethics when vice president dick cheney said that we were going to turn to the dark side they meant it they meant that the cia was going to go overseas and it was going to kill or capture everybody that it encountered and then just deal with the fallout later that's why guantanamo was created. so much more to come including trouble again at a holy site in jerusalem could once again be the flashpoint for violence between palestinians and authorities in israel a live coming up from correspondent and much more.

if we take for instance the size large enough to destroy a city say forty meters or so of the million or so asteroids out there we have discovered perhaps a percent or so of that ten thousand of those. so in other words i means that ninety nine percent of them are undiscovered so you should expect that the great majority of asteroids are very close to the earth to come as a surprise. police

in jerusalem are preventing men now under the age of fifty from entering the temple also known as around the sharif for friday prayers israeli authorities say they're concerned there could be more violent protests in about holy sites been a real hot spot this week when i live it kind of was expected this take us through what's going to happen they think later today. well kevin in the last moment the midday prayers here in ras al-ain would neighborhood have ended now this is a volatile neighborhood in arab east jerusalem that has been the scene of violent confrontations in the past and particularly after last night's clashes at the al aqsa mosque the israeli police are putting in place a heavy hand as you say they are preventing main under the age of fifty from reaching the mosque that is why most of the men here are younger than fifty and at

the same time there are some entrances to the mosque that remain closed so the situation on the ground is extremely volatile extremely tense the israeli police have brought in reinforcements you literally cannot move around the neighborhoods of east jerusalem there are also checkpoints that have been put up throughout the west bank and israel to try and prevent any kind of food the confrontations the israeli prime minister binyamin netanyahu has said he will strengthen a security first around jerusalem we're also hearing from the israeli police that they will be a harsh response they've been threatening casualties if any of these soldiers are thrown out attacked with stones rocks or monitor of cocktails there were a number of buses that was stopped trying to reach east jerusalem with arab israelis wanting to come here and pray now at the same time there has been a day of rage called for by palestinian groups they are threatening a harsh response to what they say is the continuation of israeli security measures at the al aqsa mosque so certainly the mood on the. ground is

a very tense and we are standing by seen for violence they could erupt any moment now. i i i. i. i i was i was. i. was a little i think. elsewhere it's believed around fifty four people are being treated for injuries after a commuter train crashed into buffers this morning in the spanish city of barcelona that incident happened in the russia could have been worse the driver of the train is among those injured video from the scene shows the front of the train badly damaged seem to go right into those buffers no comment on the cause of the crash

should be made yet we'll keep you updated if we hear any more on that at least it appears that no fatalities there but again for changes we'll let you know. one of the most famous classical music festivals in the world is now underway in the austrian city a salzburg and for the first time in history it was opened by a russian conductor more than two hundred thousand people are expected at the event where they'll have the chance to watch two hundred performances as well by the world's most renowned artists that first was going to run until the end of august the day here in r.t. will be crossing but will forward to the home of mozart to catch up with the russian musicians there. european commission news conference is one of the most exciting of events usually unless maybe they involve president john claude that is true because you begin to find to compromise on that issue so well that. it's my way or the. premise it is

you know it was me. oh those pesky phones it was making a joint statement with the slovakian prime minister when he decided to try his hand as a bit of a stand up comedy and that's just one of the many stunts that charismatic politicians pulled of course during his years in office let's take a moment to remind us. the. music of a different kind of a great role in. five six hours because the soyuz spacecraft is due to blast off

the international space station later today set to carry the next. door down for us. is this the is market that will carry it through to the international space station where they will spend one hundred thirty nine days in all enjoying the time they won't just be enjoying music they have a whole list of experiments they need to get through and some of those sounds. as if. one of the most peculiar sounding experiments to be conducted on the international space station this time involves testing sensitivity to pain in zero gravity i asked people how they think it will be done but you could do some tweaking but. other the face but. i think because you know when you're in the gravity everything's very slow with imaginations running wild i decided to get the details from the crew themselves decent lives there is

a device you put your finger inside it in small voice begins to squeeze as soon as you feel a little pain. there's also a thermal sensitivity tom you put your hands on and it starts to heat up when it comes to what you. want ridges. over the years of experiments in space have touched on everything from the way it's to the wonderful but the question is that most people really want to know the answers to all. less complex. question. but the punishment. is what the species the smell. the stench all. the money mushrooms having to answer the same old questions that it's a small price to pay for the incredible journey he says making air and reporting from from by can. you know is a bit of a thrill with nothing takes information as well ok that's it for me kevin and for

now we'll continue to bring you reaction to responses come in in the last hour or so to america's latest sanctions threat telling the u.s. now to significantly reduce its diplomatic stuff in russia really long with a rush over there in the states we'll have the latest developments on all that and the rest news and hopefully. for many particularly his critics a trumpet ministration is nothing less than chaos on steroids for some who know the president this is merely business as usual for him is this a winning strategy for the president america and the world. is which will make. the most get

a little bit cooler than. it was but i guess sort of kind of on this side of this yes. she refused. to. wear the blue he will get a good. area for immigrants it's hit and miss we never really know for sure but this has been a active area. that van jones is certainly no stranger to controversial statements but few can say he

doesn't provoke thought and he's my guest on this edition of politic. politic and on larry king you know van jones is sometimes in the news for controversial statements on the air an awful often what he says leads to deeper discussions between conservatives for aggressives and even those who don't know if i is either as i think he formerly served as president barack obama's green jobs adviser he's a new york times best selling author political commentator and president of the dream corps his latest venture is we rise tours launches this week that initiative will be fueled by something he calls the love army will find out what he means by that later in the program then jones joins me here on set ok before we go

.