coming up on our team america china wades into the conflict between the united states and north korea with the asian empire laying out their terms of hostilities increase. and at the heart of this week's conflict is the tiny island of guam often called the tip of the u.s. we're in the pacific but where does the tiny island territory stand in the dispute . and president trump declares the opioid problem and national emergency tonight part two of our special report on the growing addiction facing the united states.

it's friday august eleventh four pm in washington d.c. i'm an election and you're watching r t america we begin today with the ongoing conflict between the united states and north korea after president trump threatened the d.p. r. k. saying the u.s. was locked and loaded and would retaliate with fire and fury unlike the world has ever seen north korea in turn slammed trans comments as quote nonsense and went on to say no serious dialogue is possible with the u.s. president who they described as a guy bereft of reason now earlier and claimed that it was preparing plans to fire four missiles near the u.s. pacific territory of guam russia's foreign minister has just said that the risk of the u.s. north korea tensions turning into war is quite high art go has more. sergey

lavrov has said that nothing can be decided through war and that in the case of north korea a potential military conflict can be an enormously dangerous. thing that the risks of very high especially considering the writs troops there are a direct threat for us difference matus once again stating that they'd be a huge number of casualties i think when a foot is brewing. from the danger line should be taken by the stronger and. the russian foreign minister here was referring to the statements by the secretary of defense just to remind you we heard mr mattis warning pyongyang against the actions that could quote lead to the destruction of its people so what was a part of a warning get he still said these words out loud at the struction of a nation so things are getting asked serious as they can ever get now in the meantime some of america's main allies in europe the likes of the u.k.

and germany they're calling on the american president to deescalate the tensions in agel merkel once again stressed the urgent importance of a diplomatic solution in this conflict. between the escalation in breath rick certainly doesn't solve the problem i don't see the solution to the conflict right now and i don't think the escalation of wrath very different approach so we may read into donald trump's tweets as many times as we want but we cannot still say for sure what is definitely on his mind the question is right now which voices will affect his decision making most and perhaps doubt well we'll find out very very soon. tensions in the korean peninsula are ratcheting higher as the back and forth between washington and pyongyang continue last night beijing took issue with the u.s. navy sailing destroyers in the chinese waters and today china issued strong words

regarding north korea the chinese government is now saying that if the u.s. strikes north korea first that they would have to back their southern neighbors quite shocking words to learn more about this and what this might mean for the u.s. china relationship i'm now being joined by wang he's the chief political correspondent for america want thanks for being here with us today first as we just said china says that they would back north korea if and only if the u.s. strikes first first can you one pack for us the reasoning for china to say they would back korea at all. it's a myth that china would unconditionally back north korea actually china's foreign ministry has yet to issue any formal statement. at all the only are to go that we can sneak a peek through which you can sneak a peek into china's pollute position is the global times article that says is north

korea south korea and the u.s. first china would remain neutral but if the u.s. you know attacks in the north korea subvert the regime and push the u.s. military to china is a very border china would in this word. take actions to prevent that from happening china did not say it would take military actions against south korea or the u.s. ok so that's very important distinction to be made that it's not necessarily a military course of action so is it in china's interest though to keep kim jong un and power because many observers argue that a level of destabilization along that peninsula will ensure the type of growth that we've seen across china for the past twenty years what do you think of that well first of all i think here in washington the washington establishment. and also the us establishment media are saying that. blaming china for not doing enough with north korea but this really a myth because how can washington expect china to how advance america's security

interests when washington keeps patrolling the south china sea regularly keeps selling arms to taiwan and keeps much of its cold war forward deployment military architecture change but in spite of that china did do quite a lot more than people in washington give it credit for china along with russia were on board for seven rounds of un sanctions against the d.p. r. k. not just once but seven times but here you what you are in the western headlines it looks as if. the you know i think the halley and the u.s. force china and russia to be on board with this sanction but in fact they are out of china and russia in the initiatives that certainly what you're hearing across the echo chamber that is the american mainstream media so it is quite interesting to hear i think for a lot of viewers to know that china has actually taken at least seven out of out of ten steps in the past few months against north korea that yeah especially on trade to you know here you read headlines where he says china is not doing enough with the economic leverage against north korea that's not accurate because what they're

saying is overall trade between china and north korea are increasing in twenty seventeen that is true but if you break it down you see a different story actually imports from china. from north korea to china. was down thirteen percent and also import of cocoa from north korea down seventy five percent exports to their throws up but whether those x. boards those are mostly textiles and food stocks and shares north somewhere and the koreans and we get the north. yeah and people with either one star of north korean civilians to death and how much do you think that the strongman rhetoric coming out of president trump is playing into china's current response well. well we know the president has. track record of contradicting his foreign policy teams and his tweets and improvised remarks made on this is surely reflect america's foreign policy so a.p.

just reported this morning that in fact american diplomats and north korean diplomats are having secret negotiations you know besides those hostile rather excess let's not underestimate what secret negotiations can do think about what they did to us in cuba two years ago and china and the us four years ago and last but not least should this happen what would china backing north korea look like well i think china made it very clear china's foreign minister well you said last year that china north korea relationship. was normal state to state relationship people people remember much about the korean war where china helped the north koreans fight the u.s. led the u.n. troops but there was sixty years ago and now it's a very different story china has its own national interest security interest to consider you know its border security its economic security and also this economic partnership with the u.s. very well put not necessarily military but trying to keep the peace it sounds like

thank you so much for sharing your insights with us along one chief political correspondent at an american thank you. this week the tiny pacific island of guam has been all over the news it's home to two u.s. military bases and is often called the tip of the spear for its strategic importance in america's operations in that region however the political situation on guam is almost never ever mentioned that there's an entire movement which believes washington oppressed is the native population of guam r.t.s. alexy are chefs he has the story. since north korea reportedly threatened to fire missiles into the direction of guam the small pacific island has understandably been in the spotlight of the mainstream media a lot has been said about guam located some seven thousand miles off the west coast of the united states home to one hundred sixty thousand residents five thousand of which are u.s. military personnel and stationing two u.s. military bases what you would not hear on your t.v. is that there's also a long standing dissent on the island against the u.s.

military presence after four centuries of being a spanish colony guam was occupied by the us in eight hundred ninety eight as part of the treaty of paris which effectively ended the spanish-american war for the next office century it was ruled by the us naval governor who banned the native chamorro language from being taught or spoken in one thousand nine hundred two the supreme court also ruled that the us constitution did not apply to territories like guam and all that time the natives of the island had been sidelined in just about any decision last year gloms governor eighty calvo even suggested a plebiscite to determine his land future statehood status quo or independence he specifically said that this american territory was not enjoying democracy or the right to determine who the people's leaders could be just a few months later though the idea sank into a bit with the governor himself suggesting that despite waiting for this moment for hundreds of years the referendum was not meant to happen just yet there's even

a commission on decolonisation established on guam which explicitly states in its manifest that despite certain rights and protections were given to the island's residents in one hundred fifty it's effectively ruled by those on the capitol hill and that due to its strategic placement and small size washington would not even consider changes to go on political status it's not too hard to see why when the first talk of a u.s. military presence at all came now in japan to be halted came about the pentagon thought of relocating almost nine thousand troops to guam local activists. protested and managed to keep this number at just under five thousand as well as scrapping the plan to see part of the island used as a firing range and this came after years and years of protests and borderline despair by many activists and go on to change things as signified by this twenty to an interview by one of the leading anti-military zation activists on guam melvyn one pod borgia with democracy now he said then that this case people were not even

given an opportunity to say no to military bases expansion and that they were forced to accept whatever the u.s. government decided to do but now with the attention focused on the island again the island which in the eyes of many is nothing but a mix of military bases and the jury of hotels maybe the good i mean is replied for self-determination will receive some kind of new boost alexy russia s.q.r.t. reporting from washington d.c. president donald trump called the opioid epidemic in the united states an emergency on thursday. and i'm saying officially right now it is a. lot of a lot of a lot of money for the opioids but. the president trying to declare an official state of emergency the president offered little in the way of concrete solution to the crisis which has already claimed thousands of lives wednesday we showed you in

depth what are to america discovered regarding the opioid epidemic and no other health crisis in the making in several places we came across dozens and dozens of used needles in one place considered to be a wealthier side of town we even found a used needle just yards from a child playing with her family on the beach but the question is if there are more resources now than ever why is the problem getting worse artie's natasha suite looks into this growing problem. right now there are twenty three million americans in recovery from being addicted to opioids just imagine there are more than eleven million other americans still struggling with their addiction today and the way trends are rising health officials predict that number to increase significantly there are many moving parts in this equation and for some they say it all started in the doctor's office doesn't number of americans abusing opioids continues to increase many are wondering how we even got here. i mean you know you go around

this country and you hear about eighteen twenty year olds twenty five year old fifty year old eighty year olds i mean people who get started by a well meaning physician for a well appropriate injury it's a nightmare that so many people are blindsided by a vicious cycle taking lives and ripping apart others have surgery to get started opioid them three six eight months later still on the opioid they're addicted or they're dependent they can't get off to decatur to detox to get off of it when we want to go to detox that sounds horrible that's out for me that's for somebody else to go through and it's a very you know very complicated you know web a complicated web that according to dr nelson began increasing at an alarming rate in parts because doctors were taught to overprescribe starting in a teen eighty's and it also wasn't as widely known of just how addictive these pills were more recently has been some efforts to just sort of scale to some sort of take back some of the liberal opiate prescribing that we had been accustomed to

doing or sort of forced to do for the past twenty years but now under prescribing has caused many to take pain into their own hands through the use of heroin but heroin is no stranger to the us back in the one nine hundred seventy s. black tar the heroin coming in from southeast asia was all across the country but things changed in twenty ten according to the office of national drug control policy roughly eighty percent of the world's heroin began coming out of afghanistan the poppy production drugs in afghanistan are the only industry in afghanistan now . there is no other industry there matthew hoh was stationed in afghanistan as a marine corps captain in two thousand and nine even losing a friend in the da there he saw firsthand how widespread the business of heroin was in afghanistan if you go down to the border crossing points you can see the trucks the fuel trucks that are full of the liquids that are the precursor chemicals that are all those chemicals that you need to make. the drug the poppy

into heroin i mean this is a business the country saw a whopping forty three percent surge in production in two thousand and sixteen in part from a gently modified poppy seed introduced from china in two thousand and fifteen but now things are changing once again even with afghanistan's huge increase in production according to the dea is national drug assessment mexico is now the primary supplier of heroin in the u.s. similar to heroin mexico is now also shipping large amounts of fentanyl it's a painkiller eighty to one hundred times more potent than morphine but addiction causes something else to it cause. in dreams that are never fulfilled in families that are torn apart in lives that are lost we don't just measure our success in dollars and cents senator rob portman who is one of the first in congress to point out the u.s. the supplier is switching over to mexico he's passed the comprehensive addiction and recovery act authorizing one hundred eighty one million dollars in annual

spending for drug education prevention and treatment senator portman points out the problem of addiction often stems from the exposure to opioids through prescription pain killers when you go to a doctor and someone who you trust prescribes. opioid pain medication and says here's sixty percocet to take this forward this is oral surgery you've had your trust set doctor and now other lawmakers are joining forces seventeen states have now limiting the number of painkillers that doctors can prescribe others like ohio arizona connecticut delaware and massachusetts are tightening the duration that someone can be opioid in washington to talk to sweets artsy for more let's be joined by the reporter behind this story natasha sweet. tell me i mean you were out there on the field you were working on the story for quite a while how shocking was it to actually be there and find all these used needles out in the open i mean i couldn't believe my own eyes my photographer and i we certainly weren't expecting to see needles literally everywhere we shot. and many

times we will look down and there were used needles by our feet and i mean we almost were having a plan b. discussion before we went there ok what if we don't see meals what are we going to do ok we're going to use pictures that were sent to us but we didn't need to use anything we just we saw so many needles and as you saw in the first part it was just so sad to see that many times it was close to where children were playing whether it's a park or beach and so it just makes you think twice of taking off your shoes yeah i mean it's got to make people wonder that they've got to look down more often and kind of and really examine what's around them because you really don't know what's what's on those needles and just this week the president has declared a national emergency on the opioid crisis so what's next yeah i mean that's something that everybody wants to know we know that senator portman as i mentioned in the report has passed legislation you know a lot one hundred eighty one million dollars a year for education and prevention treatment but that's not really going to solve the problem now these new laws going to effect of limits seen the duration of

people's perception it's not going to help those people who are already addicted and so the question is what is going to be done for people who are already hooked and as the doctor had mentioned in the report that you know they overprescribed and he also mentioned to me that doctors used to be compensated according to patient's . pain level they would talk about how much pain they had or didn't have so if they overprescribed they would get compensated more it was a win win until everyone started becoming addicted so must've been a really tough story for you to do thank you so much for filing that report the tosh suite. now to a report that suggests the twenty six thousand d.n.c. hack was an inside job former n.s.a. employees have begun to examine the twenty sixteen d.n.c. hack and suggested that it had to be someone with access to the d.n.c. internal systems trinity chavez explains. former n.s.a. intelligence officers are saying there was no half of the d.n.c.

system last year but instead it was a leak and they claim hard evidence proves it published this week in the nation a lengthy article details for the first time what the experts call solid evidence in the case their results there was no hack of the democratic national committee system on july fifth last year not by the russians and not by anyone else hard science now demonstrates it was a leak download executed locally with a memory key or similarly portable data storage device. after analyzing the transfer rate of the alleged hacked material the experts found the transfer times of the files would simply be impossible without someone being actually in the d.n.c. building according to the report on july fifth two thousand and sixteen one thousand nine hundred seventy six megabytes of data were downloaded from the d.n.c. server the operation took eighty seven seconds this produces a transfer rate of twenty two point seven megabytes per second and twenty sixteen no internet service provider would have had the speed capability to enable

a hacker to download those files further proving that it would be impossible for groups of her to run the so-called hack from romania because the findings suggest there would have been delivery overheads which would slow down the speed of the hack even from the maximum achievable speeds the article states timestamps in the metadata indicate the download occurred somewhere on the east coast of the united states not russia romania or anywhere else outside of the eastern time zone to determine the maximum achievable speed friends of k. to recently ran a test download of the comparable transfer rate forty miles away from his computer through a server that was twenty miles away and came up with us. eleven point eight megabytes per second half of what the d.n.c. operation would need if it in fact were a hoc further investigation is needed but if there are four proves to be true the former n.s.a. computer engineers claims that this will be the first piece of hard evidence in the d.n.c. hack reporting in new york trinity chavez r.t. and a new article in the nation magazine questions the allegations that russia hacked

the d.n.c. computers while most of the mainstream media blamed russia immediately intelligence professionals continue to question these claims as the evidence increasingly points to an internal leak and not an external hack. there's been months and months where i think the official narrative which was produced by the f.b.i. n.s.a. cia not by all seventeen intelligence agencies but it has been unfortunately because there was not much out there countering it it's been accepted and it's furnishing the basis for you know. practically a world war situation a cold war at very least and also it's just serve to discredit wiki leaks we have the cia director calling wiki leaks and hostile intelligence agency and that he's going to ensure that he gets them none of this is. good and

in fact it's been accepted without information you will see a really lot of of comprehensive d.t.l. information a timeline that really shows how this this you know basically what i would say is similar to what happened with the rat when they sold the the war in iraq you have this kind of campaign that was rolled out after in the summer of two thousand and sixteen and so if you look really look at the evidence right now and it's not conclusive but if you look at the evidence there are just lots of holes and gaps in the official narrative that the united states intelligence agencies again it's wasn't done the proper way it was not the whole intelligence community just the cia and they were all lee basing their conclusions on in from. work that was done by crowd strike crowd strike is

a biased cyber and faulty by the way they've been proven faulty of more than once and they're very biased because they're headed by a pair of bitch if i'm pronouncing his name correctly who is an anti russian a.t.o. lagann atlantic and and all. so other things and so when when the f.b.i. did not do its own work they relied on crowd strike and very quickly crowd strike said within a couple of days this is russia those conclusions now have lots of holes in them and i would just encourage people to to google adam carter gusa for two point zero zero this seems to have been a false internet attribution pointing blame on russia and also on wiki leaks for the hacking of the d.n.c. and and maybe other hacks of the democrats aren't back does it for now for more on the stories we just covered go to you tube dot com forward slash r t america and

check out our website r.t. dot com powered flash america you can also follow me on twitter right there at manila chant remember the question we're up here back here at five pm eastern. larry you are watching our t.v. our version more. in case you missed it this week everyone was talking about nuclear war with north korea the war in fear mongering was once again ratcheted up conveniently in what was otherwise a slow news week in this go around came john and president are both making

outrageous remarks for his part while speaking at a meeting about the opioid epidemic a current real threat to the lives of americans the president used the opportunity to throw some scary words at north korea when he said that the country would be met with fire and fury like the world is never see you. so of course the media jumped all over that saying how irresponsible those words were pretending to be outraged by these words they didn't deserve anything more than an eye roll and the media eleven politicians also lined up at the mike pretending to be completely angered and shocked by those words and of course one of the politicians was none other than john mccain he did an interview saying that he took exception to the president's comments he invoked the wise words of teddy roosevelt's when he said speak softly and carry a big stick he got this thing wrong according to x.e. as he said walk softly and carry a big stick but we know what he meant he was saying that the president's loud words would only bring us closer to

a serious confrontation and that is very very very serious three very and he said great leaders don't threaten unless they're ready to act which all sounds nice and dignified like a politician should sound right except that those words ring a little coming from john mccain because when he was gearing up to run against barack obama back in two thousand and seven while on the campaign trail. he actually made a song about bombing iran and laughing about it he made a song to the beach boys tune of barbara and that went bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb iran bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb iran he actually saying that on the campaign trail and the audience. and now this is the guy who say great leaders don't threaten the us they're ready to act and should speak softly but carry a big stick but i don't like it when world leaders threaten to use bombs either it is not nice it sucks it is classless but for john mccain in the mainstream media to

pretend like it's anything new just makes the whole thing all the more and barest thing to the american. what you have for breakfast yesterday why would you put those through. your wife. now i did did you do to one symbol. of. people who got to know whether or not fair presenter support american people deserve to know you and your friends at this point does it mean a guard against the military industrial. we shall never know.

for sure no old and very old yes we do but we might. think oh yeah. futures the sacred. texts.