then he died instant jar i was desperate after his death and i went to stay with my other brother he's poor and has young children all girls. a lot of other news thousands of documents relating to controversial episodes in british history appear to be missing the u.k.'s national archives claimed or misplaced or removed by civil servants the revelation a spark quite a bit of an outcry the british people deserve to know what the government has done in their name and their laws will only fuel accuse ations of a cover up as a historian it's impossible to believe this loss the declassified files themselves show governments view the public largely as a threat the threat of democracy is deeply embedded if it happened in russia for example would be up in arms about corrupt governments but hey this is the british way to avoid scrutiny of its past misdeeds artie's poly work only looks now at what pages of history have been lost. well the national archives is a very important resource especially for people like historians and journalists

because it keeps documents relating to the country's history and the idea is a perfectly transparent system whereby once government documents are deep classified anyone over the age of sixteen can go to the national archives and access these files but not all of them because it appears that some of them have gone missing some of the files relating to thorny a moment in british history among the files missing are papers relating to the full clinton's war there are documents missing relating to the northern ireland troubles as well and perhaps most controversially the files relating to the famous. letter from way back in nineteen twenty four that was a huge political scandal at the time because m i six almost certainly forged a letter that was then leaked to the press that well it was just discredited the

labor government at the time and ultimately resulted in its downfall now the files missing are all listed as misplaced while on loan to government departments so there is this situation now where a number of different government departments are under pressure to explain why they have taken these bits of paper but they have failed to return them now we've asked the home office for a comment on that is an obvious letter we still haven't got a response we have however heard from the foreign office now the foreign office had misplaced a file relating to the markov case that was way back in one thousand nine hundred seventy eight it was the shooting of a dissident both gary and journalist on waterloo bridge which isn't too far from where i'm sitting now this is what the foreign office. to say about those documents take a listen seventeen of nineteen documents have been recovered and sending them back

to the national archives when still searching for the documents they have not yet been accounted for so an explanation there and clearly efforts being made to shall we say correct what has happened because the public care has a right to access these files access these chapters of british history rather than finding that they have been misplaced and according to some misplaced a little too conveniently we did contact the national archives they had told us that when files go missing they request that action be taken as a national affairs commentator jonathan steele says that the huge loss of sensitive documents raises many questions which is an absolute scandal because as you pointed out most of them refer to incidents in the past britain was in a very bad position because there was a question of torture in northern ireland there was no obvious letter interestingly

when the time when we're talking about a fake news to be used to tamper with elections all kinds of allegations being made we haven't got the evidence that was once a variable has now gone missing references being asked to do did you did you keep documents did you make copies did you make. the duplications why didn't you then send the originals back if you were making a copy why didn't the government department to send you back to the national archives where they belong if they borrowed them just on the turn prevent a whole series of questions that need to be answered. and the leader of russia's chechen republic has had his facebook and instagram accounts blocked of the u.s. treasury included his name and a list of sanctioned individuals has more. so since last weekend the facebook and instagram accounts of the head of russia's chechnya region ram there of have been unavailable that's smaller than just regular offline status isn't the pages were

blocked it was big news in russia and chechnya since mr could tear off is a really big fan of social media it's a bit like donald trump and twitter on a smaller scale but the total of four million subscribers that's something it's more than china's population could arabs instagram became one of the main if not the number one new source in the region the reasons for taking the chechen president offline were first unclear but it's easy to start drawing conclusions given the bad followed us sanctions so quickly and there you have it a few days later facebook admits it if you read the network's terms of use you'll find it rather difficult to interpret the rules on banning people but the question is why have the pages of russian companies for instance mostly hardware producers which are also under sanctions not all so been blocked so after all facebook seems

to be quite vulnerable to pressure from washington some may now even say that they could have seen it coming after hearings like this in america the extent to which the russian exploited your platforms maybe this isn't some this isn't some just the government has to do this is something that you guys have to deal with and fix this brings us to the question of who won or who lost in this indeed the band is an inconvenience for and i was on he ends up having to switch to russian equivalents of facebook and instagram think of it as let's say switching from apple to android but where does this leave the reputation of facebook and its attempts to keep up the image of being independent time will tell but. i bet users will start having second thoughts about their social media lives after this not only in russia but around the world. let's get more insight now from charles alltel private investor

and writer thanks for joining us good to have you on the program this move by facebook who actually follows obviously the u.s. government's decision to impose the sanctions on mr could there of the travel of financial restrictions that cetera under the act for alleged human rights abuses i mean i gotta be careful here not to add too into a sort of get five but do you think this is a coincidence here do you think the move has anything to do with the u.s. act here. well i don't i mean i think first of all mark zuckerberg and the facebook teams leans very heavily to the left so it's highly unlikely that that team would be cooperating actively with the trump administration in my view i think there are proper and deep questions that need to be asked about the power that facebook and google and twitter now have in the modern world where there are so few global platforms and so many of us put so much of our personal and other information on these platforms not thinking how valuable that information may be and the patterns

may be to the advertisers that pay mark zuckerberg and his stockholders and the other stockholders lots and lots of money for information that we basically see is as worthless so this is an area where i actually think government authorities around the world need to think more carefully about just how much power facebook and others like facebook have i mean in terms of the corporation you mentioned there with the trumpet ministration i mean the leaders of these tech giants the facebook google twitter they were grilled you know just a couple weeks ago by congress over those russian allegations of meddling as a result you know accounts were filed some of them are believable by and as well i mean how much pressure do you think these tech giants actually find themselves under not specifically with their arms on kind of case but we're talking in general here with these you know accusations. i think that the tech giants may believe for the moment that they're invulnerable but what they have to understand is you know yes their market values probably approach of you depending

on whose you include half a trillion dollars which is a lot of money and it's concentrated typically in the hands of a very small person the number of executives in each case you know they've got to worry i think about when our congress and governments around the world will start asking questions how anti-competitive might their behavior actually be and what sort of fear warnings should be given to users before they part and actively get engaged in those various communities so i think a reckoning approaches for those companies i don't but i wouldn't look at any of them as being overly pro trump at this point i think they're decidedly antitrust just in terms of you know you mentioned that the warning is given to individuals this isn't the first case of an individual either being having their blue tick removed from social media or being banned outright by social media platforms we've had a number of right wing figures suffer similar fates does this overall precedent

set a warming trend where tech just giants can decide that the somebody even with a large following somebody that you know the public might want to hear their opinions of in the case of eighty four million followers they can take the decision to ban them. absolutely and you know how our google search results higher what's the hierarchy of deciding what appears first who get screened out of the google search which is i think one of the most important tools that people now use around the world how fairly are the algorithms applied you know why in the case of amazon are the book reviews so heavily skewed towards on hillary clinton's latest book when her book is i think a disaster why does it make it look positive i mean there's a lot of tough questions that i think really need to be asked and not the way we do it in congress were each congressperson gets five minutes and you never get ahead of steam to ask the kind of probing questions that really need to be asked and answered right charles will tell a private investor and writer thanks for your take on that story here today on r.t.

great to have you on the program. the pentagon is being sued by three major u.s. cities new york philadelphia and san francisco as well accuse it of failing to report back soldiers who should not be allowed to purchase firearms the u.s. military is supposed to report felony equivalent court martial convictions for certain crimes to a federal database and the pentagon however has admitted failing to submit information about individuals who went on to commit massacres one case is that of an air force serviceman who was discharged over domestic assault in november killed twenty six people at a texas church. with this video that we talked about going back. ok let's bring in jennifer breed an

international criminal law attorney an expert on terrorism good to have in the program thanks for coming on today as we mentioned there are three cities major cities new york philadelphia san francisco suing the pentagon over the failure to report convictions are not aware that this president this particular case unless you can correct me i mean do you think they have a strong case here at all. well there are couple issues going on here on the facts itself on the merits of the case they do have a strong case because the air force has admitted that some of their lower officers are in noncompliance with current federal statutes that say they have to report when there is a criminal act by a military servicemen and not only is the air force admitted that but some other departments of the military such as the army the marines and maybe they have stated there are failures on their parts and some of their lower service men to report these crimes to the f.b.i. for the national gun registry things like that so in terms of the merits itself yes i think there is there is enough merit to bring this to cases not that there is

a precedent as hasn't really been seen in terms of suing the department of defense this is something that's gone on for the past twenty years where the units have failed to do this i think the bigger question is the standing that they have because you're talking about three cities this is philadelphia new york and san francisco who are claiming that the that the department of defense is failing to do this well but the only example that they're bringing is a serviceman in texas that the texas church shooting which was a former air force person so my question is why don't we see in texas cities where the texas authorities why don't they think that that this is a case that's worth bringing against the department of defense you know why are texas authorities there we haven't seen that going on where as there has been a lot of scrutiny on philadelphia new york in particular because you've had two terrorist attacks in the past month one in harrisburg pennsylvania over the last week was an actual terrorist attack against police officers this person was not in the military so it seems a little bit a little less like really caring about the failures of the apartment of defense and

a little more like trying to shift blame from some of these city giants like philadelphia new york for their failures of state law enforcement against actual terrorist attacks to the department of defense for something that happened in texas . it's easy to you know have gone saw it and spoke about it here and of course on side. so you have twenty twenty vision but i mean could the massacre of the show goes in the springs the one you just mentioned could that have been prevented could the impact have been less if the gunman if given kelley's a conviction had been reported to the f.b.i. he might have been prevented from purchasing those forums or intercepted the games . could things have gone differently absolutely i think that these laws are in place that the laws that are in place a lot of that are in question now are actually to prevent things like that happen with devin kelly in texas in fact there was one local gun owner in texas who refused to sell

a firearm to mr kelly just for reasons that were undisclosed but there are loopholes still even in the law so for example even if ivory single military body and military personnel reported criminal convictions which landed in the gun register database they still have what's called a gun show loophole and in some states if there's a gun show a private sellers things like that not all of them have to do it here or they should but not all of them here to federal gun laws so they won't look into this so that's another loophole that still problematic but to answer your question yes these are the kinds of federal oversight programs that is supposed to prevent especially some of our most highly trained military men and women from purchasing a firearm if they have a criminal conviction the pentagon actually recently acknowledged believes that it had failed to comply with requirements they turned back to the nineteen million to use quite a while back i mean this is a question really of accountability is that do you expect any officials any senior officials to be held to count two of what's happened. i believe so but i think you

know we're seen a lot especially in the last decade we're seeing a lot of trying to shift the blame to other things and so we really need to see our administration i think you're seeing this now attorney general jeff sessions is then calling on the a.t.f. bureau alcohol tobacco and firearms to work more closely with the f.b.i. and other local law enforcement agencies but really you know we're going to have to see people stand up and say look there's going to be oversight you're going to lose your jobs if you don't comply with federal laws we have to see more of that from the top down and we have to see more compliance between different agencies and local law enforcement rather than holding on to information and not have. jennifer jennifer braden international criminal or attorney. thanks for your insight today on that story thank you. i want north korean soldiers who defected to the south earlier this year has been found to be carrying. in his blood the discovery has raised concerns that pyongyang may have developed biological weapons kim jong un

has the capability to weaponize more than a dozen biological agents within just a few days if he wants to wreak havoc on the korean peninsula i mean he was either exposed to or vaccinated for the deadly bacteria it comes of it increased concern that pyongyang is developing biological weapons something long suspected by the international community and. a recently the south korean government reportedly purchased one thousand doses of a vaccine against anthrax the surprise with it in november according to media reports to give you some background back in twenty fifteen the u.s. military admitted to accidentally sending a rock solid balls to a base in south korea however no personnel were infected and the deadly bacteria were destroyed author and human rights attorney jim gave us his views on the story i find it very interesting that these are in the blood.

it's clear. or that the north koreans likely immunize their soldiers to a fury even for purposes of b.p. propaganda purposes but if you remember in the lead up to the iraq war when the united states invaded contra to its statute sent to the un. they said saddam hussein had biological and chemical ins and it became the one of the bases for going in and invading iraq and these were never fobbed what we really facing is how do we have this regime brought into more of a mainstream with the international community my concern is that by dehumanizing it even further and raising the immediate risk factor of the few around chemical and biological weapons we begin to grease the path for war. a major prisoner swap has been concluded between the ukrainian

government and the two breakaway republics of the net scuttle got skirt on cos there was that he's got the full details. this is the largest prisoner changed since the beginning of the conflict back in that's when c. four hundred seventy four ukrainian soldiers were a reserve from donetsk and lugansk. while three hundred and six were supposed to be returned from kiev here to the nest and look guns however that figure has changed at the very last minute with the authorities in kiev claiming that some of the prisoners had already been released and some of the prisoners had refused to be ritzer back here the final number all those who read third home to the let's go to guns stands at two hundred and forty the people however everything went smoothly during the prisoner swap as the thirty's and a key have failed to close the checkpoint as it was agreed for this prisoner swap

and they changed to a little bit longer a lot longer than planned and this surely of course this prisoner swap with the humanitarian part of the minsk agreements which are designed to settle the conflict here in the east of ukraine however one positive that can be taken out of this is that the families will see their loved ones for the new year holidays both in ukraine and here in the contested territories as well. to me as he has demanded an apology from the united arab emirates off the emirates airlines by and women from boarding flights to the u.a.e. last friday they saw to the possible to terrify the reason for the move has understandably provoked widespread anger. i just am she to believe my when i go to a country that wonder exactly if that's the case and we should also imposed on the united arab emirates. these are parishioners are

a force preventing an arab from visiting arab countries is unacceptable when we see westerners going from country to country freely the most rigid is one of the tunisian state must defend the rights of two new zealand women and force the u.s. to apologize. passenger by and was left at the very same day the gulf states foreign minister later tweeted that the measure was necessary for security stressing a vote at the u.a.e. respects and values to women seriously was that offer to near zero which would tell you if it by banning all emirates flights from landing at its ports this tweet was posted by the airline informing customers that flights had been suspended we heard from a to museum blogger and activist become so dire that what happened is file ation of titian women rights but it's a violation of women rights in general the spokesperson for the national presidency

talking about security problems but this doesn't justify what happened if a small female babies were not allowed to go on planes i don't think that a toddler is. the tunisian government is still asking for official apology and it happened under the pressure of people here in tunisia. that's the headlines for this hour for myself and a whole team here at all times in asheville thanks for staying with us according to richard it will be with you. a robot governments can be much more rational and lots more compassion to. all the dark human governments that we have people will be more happy with the new

situation than they are with the. hello and welcome to cross talk we're all things considered i'm peter lavelle president donald trump's two thousand and seventeen national security strategy report tells us how he sees the world or rather how the washington foreign policy leads for a candidate who ran on a message of change the report is on remarkable in its defense the status quo policies and views clearly washington's neo cons are running the show.

the national security strategy i'm joined by my guests in washington michael o'hanlon is a senior fellow at the brookings institution and we have brian becker he's the director of the answer coalition as well as host of loud and clear a daily new show on radio sputnik all right gentlemen crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i always appreciate brian let me go to you first i'll be quite blunt i mean i read it quite carefully it seems more or less a continuation of what we've seen for almost. last thirty years it actually seems a lot more. confrontational i would say. the some of the points that about trade actually agree with on immigration i actually agree with but more or less the same guy only the people that wrote the two thousand and seventeen report could have written the one justifying the iraq war if you actually compare tex they are very similar in the words they use go ahead bring. well i think

i'm glad you mentioned the iraq war because the national security strategy which is a congressionally mandated report from the executive branch. it sometimes is a predictor of what's coming in in the case of george w. bush six months before the invasion the shock and awe invasion of iraq. bush came out with a national security strategy which provided although we didn't use the exact words of preemptive war it was the logic of preemptive war another words the us arrogating to itself the right to perceived threats and go to war against them even before the us has been attacked of course that would be a violation of the un charter and international law but nonetheless it became a powerful logical explanation for what came later the question now with donald trump's national security strategy is does this predict where trump is really going in and i think it i think it does i mean he mentioned china twenty four times in

the report mentions china twenty four times all of them in a bellicose aggressive way it mentions russia in a in a bellicose and aggressive way there's no kind words for either china or russia iraq and north korea rogue states and of course non-state actors terrorism is the third dimension of the threat to america and so you have the trump administration sort of bringing together the america first or overarching sort of agit prop of the trump election campaign with this idea that the rise of china or the reemergence of russia now back on its feet means that america is receding that america is being humbled that america is the victim that america is threatened and so i think what trump has actually done is articulate the not just the possibility of a new cold war but the logic of a new cold war and thus it becomes almost official in washington and. things will

follow from that ok well that's a very interesting takeaway mike what was your reaction to it because when it was over a year ago i think it was when we still had candidate trump and he was. in the national interest i think his article was i mean this principled realism i still don't see anything principled and i don't see any really real is a minute here go ahead mike. hi peter nice to be with you i agree with some of what brian just said i do think that there is a tone in the report that is strong and tries to push back and that push backs pushes back strongly against china russia north korea iran i agree with all that i do however and by the way you're aware i'm not a supporter of president trying but i never was but i know who he is and i know why he got elected and the putting america first concept if i could just begin with that in my in my first comment because that is the centerpiece of the opening page and i think the title of the reporter at least the subtitle and i think frankly the

way in which that concept is described is basically ok now i share some of your and brian's concerns about the tone toward certain countries that we can come back to that but putting america first of course can be interpreted as a zero sum competition among nations or it can be interpreted as hero principles we're going to try to live by we expect others to live by them and if we can all do that then we can all prosper and at least in terms of the theory of the report at least in terms of the language that's on the paper i think that it's more the second that in fact there is an effort here to say we should be able to get along with other countries so some of the criticisms about the sort of generally negative tone of the report i don't really agree with that i do agree that the report is very tough on china and russia and north korea and iran ok let me read you a short fragment here and this is directly directed to russia and china these competitions russia and china require the united states to rethink the policies of

the past two decades policies based on the assumption that in gauge human with rivals and their inclusion in the in international institutions and global commerce will turn them into benign benign amazing actors and trustworthy partners for the most part this premise turned out to be false i mean this is really really remarkable it is you know it's not the international system it's the international . the system as it's perceived and constructed by the washington consensus and if the chinese and the russians don't want to play by our rules want you to rules they are rivals even adversaries like i pointed this language extremely arrogant because it doesn't it doesn't bring good policy foreign policy result for the united states and i would say put the world go ahead brian yes absolutely i'm so i'm so glad that you read that particular part of the report because it says so much it's not just that that part of the report is not simply an attack on russia or china it's

a repudiation of past u.s. policy or the perception of u.s. policy since the end of the soviet union when they're talking about going back a couple decades we're talking about going back to the time of the collapse of the soviet union and the socialist bloc countries so trampas repudiating the past twenty five years well during the past twenty five years the united states sought to function as a unit polar dominating power but still used multilateral institutions in other words kept the framework of multilateralism and the hallmark of american foreign policy at the conclusion of world war two and keep to the construct of the post world war two world order that had the united states in charge but in a multilateral framework where different powers including its defeated enemies from world war two japan and germany had a place they had a place as junior partners where they were given access to markets etc rather than what happened after world war one trump.