those years ago i don't know that but we're not sure of. the stories that shaped the past seven days on r.t. with no close to being wiped out in syria the country's civil war rivals moved towards forming a political solution and their own long standing conflict with peace talks in russia we'll tell you all about that we recap it also this week two we visited russia's toughest prison rare insight into what life is really like for the country's most dangerous criminals. it is here that some of the country's worst maniac serial killers terrorists and even cannibals held. and unsettling times in the last week for germany and chancellor merkel as coalition talks broke down leaving more question marks over her future is leading.

a life this sunday morning from artie's main street moscow is kevin owen here with the weekly thirty minute round up of the big stories of the past week and first with islamic state facing its final days in syria attention is now turning to finding or trying to at least a political solution to the country's long drawn out civil war peace talks in russia resort city of sochi then brought together some rival groups who've spent more than six years locked in conflict or monday the syrian leader made his second visit to russia during four hours of talks with president putin but sheriff says he's ready to hold discussions with parties interested in resolving the crisis some of those groups later arrived in sochi is trying to explain this. it looks like

tsotsi is shaping out as the new platform for dialogue on syria the resort has become the venue for the first major round of talks on the syrian crisis the syrian president bashar assad was here on monday then mr putin had a long phone conversation with donald trump vladimir putin gave donald trump a full update on the talks with syrian president bashar assad mr putin also told mr trump about the upcoming summit with the presidents of iran and turkey it was these three countries that were behind the so-called astronaut talks in the first place and with the terrorists now almost gone this format could prove to be more crucial than ever. launch scale military actions against terrorist groups in syria coming to an end i'd like to note that thanks to the efforts of russia iran and turkey we

have managed to prevent it is the dissolution of syria stop it from being captured by international terrorists and avoid a humanitarian catastrophe we heard the leaders confirm their assessment the syrian conflict has entered a new stage the era of active fighting is over and time has come for a new settlement opportunities but after roughly one and a half hours of talks we finally heard about the number one decision for the new stage the creation of the syrian national dialogue congress it will be an unprecedented platform for inclusive of all syria talks and all kinds of political ethnic religious groups are expected to be involved in the leaders say that it should pave the way for a new constitution in syria and new elections it's this kind of communication somehow involving different sides like washington moscow damascus ankara until

iran that is giving us a reason to say that things may be looking promising here. you know politics professor hammer and he told us the talks were a positive development but the tough days lie ahead. fast on a faux. fur and talks in sochi have. pushed the part of the process forward of course things have shifted in change of enormously on the ground and hopefully these talks will help pave the way for. the conflict to come to an end but i think that it looks good on paper but it i'm sure it's going to be very complicated and the weeks and months ahead there's a lot to do and it's not clear if the americans and their allies are going to help this process move forward or whether they are going to improve and competed but i think what is what is very positive is that these countries seem. to be determined

obviously all three of them have their own opinions but i think the very fact that they're getting to get they they're getting together and they're making these statements public show that there is a strong degree of determination. some media even compared the soul she talks to the groundbreaking talks after the second world war which brought together the leaders then of the u.s.s.r. britain and the u.s. but these days solving serious conflict is going to involve more than just political negotiations one sticking point is the ongoing presence of u.s. forces more on the jaclyn volga i thought has been losing territory in syria at breakneck speed and it's all a defeat looks to be on the horizon even the u.s. seems to agree on that front secretary tillerson has engaged a great deal of sort of personal diplomacy on syria the defeat of isis and now that isis in terms of as a physical caliphate will be gone by the end of the year syria has in fact already declared victory over eisel and issued a warning to the u.s. that it's high time they left as well the syrian arab republic again cools for the

immediate and unconditional withdrawal of u.s. forces from the territory of the syrian arab republic this presence is an aggression against syria's servants and independence and will be dealt with on this basis. and that shouldn't be a problem given that trump himself has said that america's interest in syria is reserved to fighting islamic state we have very little to do with syria other than killing isis so theoretically if i saw only has a couple of months left then so does the u.s. presence in syria right don't hold your breath the u.s. secretary of defense james mattis recently hinted that what the u.s. will need to see before they leave we're going to make sure we set the conditions for a diplomatic solution not just you know you find the military part of it and then say good luck all the rest of it we did it for that to support the diplomatic solution but that's a turn we've heard before which would mean waiting around for the opposition groups some of whom the u.s. supports and the legitimate government who never invited the u.s.

into the country in the first place to come to the table and figure out who stays and who goes matta says u.s. soldiers have a right to be in syria despite damascus as objections the u.n. said that isis basically we can go off to isis and with to take them out but that doesn't mean we just walk away and let isis two point zero pop back around but that remark about the u.n. isn't one hundred percent true the u.s. does not have a u.n. mandate to deploy station troops in syria a u.n. security council resolution only authorized sanctions to be used against eisel such as freezing assets or an arms embargo but nowhere is troop deployment to a sovereign country mention the syrian democratic forces one of the groups who the u.s. backs and who happens to be at odds with damascus have welcomed america's long term plan for syria. they have a strategy for decades to come there will be military economic and political agreements in the long term between the leadership of the movement areas and the us administration so while i feel is on its way out all signs point to the pentagon

taking an objective former u.s. diplomat jim jett trysts talked to us about washington's seeming reluctance to leave syria even after i still eliminated them any attempt to stay in syria has nothing to do with isis or isis to or to think of the sort u.s. troops are out there legally in the first place unlike iraq where they have been invited in by the government of that country the only resolution that comes even close to suggesting some kind of authority to go fight against isis made it very clear that they could only be done in in compliance with international law and with national sovereignty and that means with the authorization and the taisha of the syrian government which the us forces do not have so there's simply no way you can stretch the language of any of the relevant u.n. security council resolutions to say that it gives legal authority to the american military presence in syria. now the stories are both just going as

a high security prison in the russian new rules in which there are hundreds of inmates who never likely to taste freedom again that's because they are among the country's most dangerous offenders and many will probably see their days inside black dolphin arguably russia's toughest jail this last week the nazis morganti it was given unique access to see what it's like inside. in these provincial town at the edge of siberia is a prison but it's no ordinary prison the mere sight of the statue has broken the mooched soulless butchers the black hole for russia's highest security prison it is here that some of the country's worst maniacs serial killers terrorists and even cannibals i held in this cell a man who raped forty four miners and killed five children aged seven to eleven

some of the people in this prison will never be allowed out so we dread for the things that they've done and then the man in a drunken killing frenzy killed six of his friends in this cell a murderer killed eleven people. seven hundred inmates sentenced to life between them they've killed almost four thousand people everything is procedural everything intended to minimize risk from sleeping schedules to how inmates are a school that bend to the waist and blindfolded so they can't memorize the prisons layout. it may seem excessive humiliating even but do not forget what these people did to be here to that end every cell door has a description of the inmates crimes any sympathy the guards might feel disappears

immediately. when you ask me if i do it again i thought about it it would have been better if i died with them eagle was just over twenty when he and his father took on a rival gang after killing their enemies they attempted to get rid of witnesses ordinary civilians in a restaurant seven dead eight injured both he and his father and castrated here. when he fell ill they transferred me to help him for a while the most important thing is to avoid becoming him bitted it is so easy to turn into an animal here but staying human that's harder some say a life sentence is worse than the death penalty. i've been here for seventeen years and i've never heard anyone say they don't regret it or that q. more. i regret it everything is lost the years go by your health worsens

everything passes by they are show you that you were wrong totally wrong you can't do that. dmitri saluted his family his father his mother and his brother he was twenty now he's forty five. we watch t.v. we see people who have committed two or three murders get sentenced to seventeen or nineteen years that isn't so terrible yes we are guilty before the law yes we are guilty before the public but if they're left out after twenty years why are there fraid of letting us out the difference is that life sentences are mostly reserved for crimes of such brutality that they escape reason for individuals deemed a permanent danger to society one inmate released early from the black dolphin committed the murder on the very train that was taking him home. most will never see release. inmates can pick where to work in the wood

shop. on the suing machines they earn money with which they can buy extra food personal items make calls and pay compensation to their victims they even have visits four times a year i think that. if you take the period when we came into solvent and compare it to know the conditions are entirely different prisoners now have special terminals where they could review their cases complain about abuse or apply for work they have a library a small church which was built and painted by the inmates themselves they can also take walks sort of the exercise yard isn't anything to write home about but every prisoner has the right to spend an hour and out of here every day walking around exercising or just sitting still so long as they

don't mind being watched god's check on everyone every fifteen minutes in cell cameras a monitored twenty four seven and there's three doors to every cell it's easy to see why no one has ever escaped from the black dolphin and for most of the uni sure way out is in a coffin for i guess the of odyssey from solar let's russia. germany's political futures up in the air after talks to try to form a three way coalition collapsed on monday it could mean then snap elections on the cards in which far right parties are predicted to make further ground against the more established ones and all this means germany's now considering going back to square one in effect in another four years of a grand coalition poll moody's biggest lisa we should value possible talks with the

social democrats of course we're prepared to have talks that have been in and around collision for the last four years and have done a good job which you do a lot given you invited and of course the s.p.d.m. the acting federal governments will continue to work together but the reason there are the way only one thing is now completely clear the talks must be carried out though that in this way we can always defend our institutions the members of our party would agree on that for the preferred choice after the election was the so-called jamaica coalition between angela merkel's party the free democrats and the greens nicknamed that way because of the color of each of the party symbols with merkel now struggling to find a way out though our europe correspondent looks at the options she's got left. the day after the bundestag election in september angela merkel said that she was confident that by christmas she would have a ruling coalition government in place or fast forward through weeks of torture

a sit times negotiations with the green party and the pro-business free democrats while the wheels of that coalition health fell off well and truly with christie and lynn of the free democrats delivering the killer blow the event ones we will not abandon our voters for a policy with which we are not convinced it is better not to govern than to govern badly ingrained differences between the parties on key issues such as climate change refugees and the budget saw the so-called jamaica coalition breakdown.

one other option available to angela merkel would be to rule over a minority government most likely with the green party. but a minority government would be unstable at best and would certainly require horse trading on gargantuan proportions with the other four parties in parliament if the government was to well pass anything more than just time in the chamber it's also worth noting that this would be a first in modern german history and wouldn't exactly fit the profile of the german voters who do love stabile if he so where does this leave us the other option would be we go back to the polls for fresh elections. so back to the polls we go well step forward german president frank vault steinmeyer it's predominantly a ceremonial role but when it comes to installing

a government that's where the german presidency has executive power it will be up to mr steinmeier whether he decides that he accepts angola merkel as the head of a minority government or whether he dissolves parliament triggering elections and for the long serving leader mrs merkel that could well prove to be a storm she doesn't whether that's for somebody has got to be responsible for that the federal chancellor created the situation she's been in power for what feels like a hundred years and now she should be asking herself maybe i have something to do with this situation. mrs merkel has failed it's time for her now to take a step back that night at the end of the merkel era began europe's biggest economy is heading into uncharted territory with current polling suggesting that a new ballot wouldn't return any results too different from what we had in september it does seem that there is no immediate solution to the current

instability germany is facing and of course the implications that has for the why do european union peter all of a r.t. berlin we've got expert opinion on the recent twists and turns in the bundestag and whether it's going to affect michael's popularity. i think it's really any chance that she's going to be able to make the thirty four percent that she made in september i mean her momentum is clearly down on her basically standing has been hurt and she's on the way out and he's between a rock and a hard place this jamaica coalition has basically not been doable. minority government in germany on a federal level has never been done and nobody really thinks that that would work or would be stable and in other words within a year or two it would probably collapse anyway and you'd have reelections living the end of the air of under merkel. she was not able or capable or willing to change her policies regarding the currents of the euro crisis would still divides

europe she was not willing to change of policy regarding the illegal mass migration the problem is the stubbornness of mrs merkel to go with her objectives into this coalition she cannot continue with mass migration policy if she cannot continue with the euro crisis but if she did. and the democrats understood this and they said no stop this is an end we cannot do it migrant tries this is that main issue but there are of course some others to prop up no. currency germany has spent billions of euros to decide on countries which germany never see back next as energy merkel has realized green plan to go out of traditional energy and into renewables doesn't work and makes energy very expensive these are issues that could have impact but the migrant crisis is more than fifty percent.

with the lebanese prime minister absent him saying he'd resigned the political crisis and shaking lebanon took an unexpected twist in the week on wednesday when the pm reversed his decision. we look now i announce my resignation from the post of prime minister with my certainty that the will of the lebanese is stronger that they will be able to overcome the tutelage from inside or outside the house and i discussed my resignation with the president of the republic he won't speak to wait before submitting it to put it on hold and to allow for more consultations into the reasons behind it are complied saad hariri announced his resignation while in saudi arabia and then took a small deed to a rather big one in fact before returning back home again to lebanon as you can see here these are the places he visited he visited leaders in france egypt and cyprus is a recap of events than. in some

the bomb. bomb or the brian ministers are really was forced the resignation was not his desire or decision alone. by. some. and are looking i am here in the kingdom of it as a free man. the the.

during. some of the one. lebanese prime minister was welcomed home by supporters in the capital beirut on shoes day but they say no it's impossible to take next what's ahead for hariri. i hope that all the other countries in the region will leave lebanon alone so the lebanese people can decide their future for themselves it's unprecedented that saudi arabia held the lebanese prime minister by force and pushed him to resign while he was outside his country. we have to tell ourselves we want our country to stay out of regional conflicts when it comes to the saudis meddling i'm sure it will continue and it's not only riyadh's interference into liberties affairs many

other countries are doing it too i'm sure assad have you really wants to help his country lebannon i think that the way saudi arabia treated him is very wrong international relations professor gemma wacking believes saudi arabia used to reread to put more pressure on iran i believe that his figure got damaged a lot here received as severe blow specially the lebanese public think prime minister probably was humiliated in saudi arabia we need to admit that. his father really ideally. for a long time but it wasn't that of soul the influence in lebanon and that is a widespread belief in lebanon that sort how did he was forced to as ignition by so known at the time when the crown prince of saudi arabia. is trying to increase the tension in iran especially in lebanon they lost their

influence in iraq. and syria. the most on monday that google's parent company is working on d. ranking stories from r.t. and the sputnik news agency in web searches the move would make articles hard to find basically elphaba boss eric schmidt's comments came at a security forum in canada when he was asked about our team's use of google's ad sense this. i had a subscription for google alerts in german language and getting them every day out of ten results between five and ten every day we have sputnik news which isn't russian german programming outlet and when i clicked on them they were monitor rise to sense this is really necessary to monitor rose russian propaganda outlets with google it's so we're well aware of this one and we're working on detecting this kind of scenario you're describing and again the ranking the ranking those kinds of

sites it's basically artie and sputnik are the two and there's a whole bunch of coverage about what we're doing there but we're well aware of it we're trying to engineer the systems to prevent it we don't want to ban the sites. good dear eric schmidt who you just heard there's a long time relationship by the way with the democratic party leadership in the u.s. he was reportedly a donor to barack obama's campaign later becoming an advisor to his administration he is also believed to be the tech mastermind behind hillary clinton's presidential campaign although he's never confirmed that himself now the pressure from the u.s. authorities google recently launched an investigation into alleged russian meddling let's talk about that for a minute but its own report to congress says it found no evidence that r.t. had violated its policies or manipulated youtube in any way to get its status as the most viewed news network something we are really proud of despite that google dropped our channel from its you to prime out list in the u.s. without any notice or any explanation it only explained later to congress hearing

when grilled on why the firm hadn't carried out the move before this or sell gado why did gould google get preferred status to russia today a russian propaganda arm on youtube. there was a period of time where russia today qualified really because of algorithms to participate in a an advertising program why didn't you revert artie's preferred status after the i.c.a. came out in january two thousand and seventeen it took you to september of two thousand and seventeen to do it the removal of r t from the program was actually a result of the as as i understand it is a or is a result of some of the drop in viewership not as a result of any action otherwise so there was there was nothing about r.t.e. or its content that. meant that it stayed in or stayed out ok.

meantime eric schmidt's remarks have been contradicted by a google representative who said there are no concrete plans to deal russian media including r.t. we discussed developments with human rights lawyer diane koval ik them it is a form of censorship in the idea is to lead readers away from r.t. content and it will have an impact on the discourse in this country google's already started the process against north american alternative media sources in august there was a report that they've already been deal ranking twelve different north american alternative media sources all of these sources have now reported a huge decrease in readership think the attack on r t which has a very different view of those things. is an attack on those alternative narratives of issues that are very important to the american people. a spike in

suicides among french police officers this year's intensified concern about the stress caused by overwork of the country's high terror threat levels shiela do been skiing has been to me one officer who's made not one but who would terms to take his own life. if i was considered as a troublemaker i also had problems in my private life and with my children i felt abandoned he spent your entire life to build your pessimal and professional life and one day you say to your south everything would be better without me or hardly not real name is an officer with moving two decades of experience having joined the police at nineteen she was very moved to feet and excited about the job but jeez latent the pressure of her work drove her to two suicide attempts the latest just seven months ago. our ministrations taking decisions on the people's anger is tending against us we are suffering from the image our government created for us

today many people are calling for policeman to be killed. the most important mission of the french police today is preventing terror attacks yet the offices themselves have become the primary targets of the hardest. how much all of. an impact has the threat of terrorism how to live police. we suffered enormously physically and psychologically from the terror attacks we worked extremely hard but that was our duty.