if things would take them with a grain of salt because. you know trump may say those things but he can't act on them because he's got a whole bureaucracy that doesn't agree with them so. it's very destabilizing and i think it's undermining us ability to negotiate solutions to problems so whatever policy donald trump is concocting stirring trouble on twitter is something that is going to stay it was done of. well of all the world leaders north korea's kim jong un has been perhaps most targeted by trump's twenty eight after one of his most recent posts the battle of words between the two to descend into insults about the size and power of their nuclear buttons. the entire us mainland is within the range of our nuclear strike and the button is always on the table in my office space you clearly know that this is certainly not a threat but rather

a reality will someone from his depleted in food starved regime please inform him that i too have a nuclear bomb but it's a much bigger and more powerful woman his and my but more work i hope personally such rather rick by the side of the p.r. k. by its supreme leader or by the united states through its president donald trump will calm down the world does not need such jingoism or war rhetorics right now the situation is in a stalemate. he has gained a time to develop the super weapon in the more and more sophisticated way and united states has not yet reached the point of. deciding to use military means to solve the problem but i don't think everything has been exhausted to his student need to try their best even though all the likelihood of a diplomatic solution is becoming remote and that remote. well in

a slightly more positive development kim jong un has reopened a cross border communications link with south korea and what's being seen as a significant diplomatic breakthrough however the standoff between the u.s. and north korea does look set to continue into twenty eighty nine after what's already been twelve months of personal attacks and vicious threats from both sides . era of strategic patience. with the north korean regime has failed. what. make it want to read to the united states. they will be met with fire and fury. the u.s. neglects the international community's will establish peace on the korean peninsula behave like children fighting each other in kindergartens and nobody can stop them . and we can have.

out there shooting rockets all over the place we will have no choice but to totally destroy north korea. rocket. is on a suicide mission for himself no one of them prompt himself is on a suicide mission. oh yeah i guess. we need a pause we need dialogue. is a sick puppy. ok want to discuss trump's latest comments let's bring in jason chang he's a professor and political analyst who with hong kong city university joins us now good afternoon we were just hearing there some examples of insults both leaders have traded over the last few months or so how dangerous is this relationship do you think between trump and kim jong considering the joking it seems about the size

of each other's new clear buttons i mean that's not something to joke about is it nuclear war. this is certainly not anything to joke about but i think the situation despite the confrontational rhetoric has been step allies some warped there is a recognition that the use of the military option by the united states is going to be very dangerous very risky. will be strongly opposed by beijing and moscow and will not be supported by seoul however the atmosphere is still not right for the initiation of negotiations there are some hopeful indicators the american secretary of state rex tillerson a few weeks ago did indicate the possibility of negotiations even without

preconditions and at the moment has indicated that it will like to take part in the winter olympics in south korea. talks toward states and may well soon begin so there's a recognition that there is a stalemate and perhaps some experts to really feel as being explored do you think that's what this is a bag with reference to that meeting between north korea and south korea i mean we're hearing officially this is about north korea's entry into the winter olympics but is there a chance it could be a lot more than that. usually persisted beginning of some kind of negotiations when both sides are willing to sit down and talk this is at least an improvement of atmosphere. given the talks and the actual participation on the part of young in the winter olympics

there may be a cessation of. missile tests on the part of punk. for some fall short period of time. we cannot be very hot paul we can only say that the possibility exists and it seems these are the not the tool careers are willing to explore the possibilities donald trump resort of giving this meeting a lukewarm reception why isn't he more positive about it you think. i think i think he finds it a bit difficult to explain to the american people why he is willing to talk to. after all this rhetoric you need a certain opportunity you need a sort of process to be a scully the rhetoric as we were seeing. probably

was some kind of feeling but. it's not strong support from the white house yet certain me donald from at this stage does not believe that. he is ready to make the first more so perhaps the two koreas me make the first move ok joseph that we'll have to leave it there but nice agility this afternoon that was joseph cheney professor in political analyst at hong kong city university thank you. twenty seventeen did see world changing events but it was also a year that was sometimes hard to tell fact from fiction. or the term fake news swirled around global news coverage more than ever last year shouting booga now explains what propelled it into the mainstream. fake news the

term that has filled the headlines and your social media feeds for the past twelve months has been deemed two thousand and seventeen word of the year at least by collins dictionary the nation relies on me to read truthful facts that i caught say that sad which is of god on strike. it's news stories. like. you. and the mainstream media would have you believe that fake news goes hand in hand with topics such as russia putin and the kremlin fake news that's being spread by russia they can use is dominated the true had lines fake news spread by russia big news fake news kremlin spread misleading or otherwise fake news certain outlets even to the battle against the fake news phenomenon to the front lines this is an apple. some people might try to tell you that it's a banana you might even start to believe that this is a banana. but it's not. is an apple.

facts first should go without saying but the mainstream media have found themselves in the wrong on a staggering amount of occasions even c.n.n. has been guilty of it they were forced to retract their report on a connection between anthony scaramucci who was on trump's transition team and a russian investment fund manager issuing an apology for the false story three people lost their jobs over that one but of course there was the breaking news one in september by most major outlets in the u.s. dropping the bombshell that the russians had attempted to hack the election systems in twenty one states caught red handed it was the evidence everyone had been waiting for to prove the russians did it until one by one states came forward saying no hack here and the story of two thousand and seventeen quickly crumbled onto december and some of america's most influential news outlets spread another explosive and one hundred percent false news story to millions yes the wiki leaks token of help to the trump campaign and the hacked d.n.c. emails wiki leaks equals russia there for once. plus one equals three and the

kremlin and trump are in cahoots message sent in the final stretch of the twenty sixteen campaign if this e-mail on september fourth gave donald trump his son and others the decryption key for hacked wiki leaks documents illusion question right because we could weeks was essentially acting as an agent of russian intelligence the media frenzy was however short lived the files had in fact not been handed over before being made public but after so not the knockout blow to the president they were all hoping for surprisingly about the whole story was based on one e-mail from our random guy and somewhere in the build up to the revelation hitting the headlines numerous people had read the date incorrectly the list of fakes goes on and on especially for russia somehow in the mix and inflammatory claims centering on russia are some of the best out there and that's despite one major outlet being caught admitting the hype was all just a big red herring what do you think's going to happen this week you told russia. it was going to be really so perhaps the word of the year should be anonymous i

grabbing headlines and allegations quickly turned to guilt despite no evidence all it takes is anonymous sources. reporting now has been a deadly start to twenty i mean yemen what's been happening in a couple of. little . little.

local blogs. in these talks the battles that are going to lead to new socks for the tell you that the because of the public by itself a little bit. about how to take you on the cool enough to buy their product a little. bit. of all the legal. welcome back now yemen has suffered its first deadly air strike of twenty eighteen with more than twenty killed in the key port city of who died on new year's day three of the world's biggest humanitarian agencies have now joined together to highlight that yemen has passed the grim milestone of ensuring more than a thousand days of war explaining that three quarters of the yemeni population

needs humanitarian aid and also that about two thirds deprived of food water and proper sanitation. if. i am poor and have no time to work and live i suffer from the cold. i was given a place to sleep when some people to warm up on hard right on the sidewalk. there is no help from the area where once a year maybe but now we have no help or blanket i started fifteen people are

sleeping or. in other news the ukrainian president is looking forward to getting hold of new lethal weapons from the united states petro poroshenko here tweeted that ukraine's military budget is increasing to a record three billion dollars and that the u.s. weapons will be bolstered by locally produced hardware the war in ukraine started in twenty fourteen after an uprising saw the government the post but it met with resistance from the pro russian east of the country leading to two regions and sharing armed conflict against government troops more than ten thousand people from both sides have been killed in the conflict according to the un and he was campaigner richard becker thinks that washington's arms sales though have nothing to do with bringing pay. the aim here on the part of the u.s. government remains the same that it has had for several years and that is to

attach ukraine not only to the european community which the u.s. doesn't care that much about but to bring the ukraine into nato as well which would pose a very great threat to russia if that were to take place considering that the i'm going huskily that's expressed from washington and from nato headquarters is so prevalent so we can't really distinguish between her draw some sharp ly and between offensive and defensive weaponry in this case it's all of the offensive and defensive weaponry both necessary for any modern and forces. life a syrian and iraqi twenty eighteen doesn't mean emerging from the shadow of i saw this brutal room fact few families were left unscarred by what they went through

but a ghastly as the story now lifting young syrian struggling to survive after being left alone in the ravaged city of diesel. meet sally she's five maybe six perhaps seven she doesn't know and they smog hits the streets. surviving isis's see each of their disorder was no mean feat so many perished as a result of starvation sickness violence. if. sally is a survivor she a sister and brother were abandoned by their parents years ago they divorced and left the children to fend for themselves out on land. zero. zero zero zero you are now almost done on the land she spends her days begging stealing playing and surviving no easy lot for them

in this life former neighbors who knew that family have taken pity on the kids and have looked out for them but it's not easy to mock us now by the government i wanted to take her in she kept escaping that i sent people to look for her but she never stays in one place long and shallow escapes. there. sally's system all she has left since her brother died of starvation we found the older girl at the end of this gloomy bullet riddled cargill is a room with a broken windows in it lives a young girl with only flies bloodstain mattresses for company.

about a month ago sagitta who doesn't remember age was brought in with a head injury when she fell she damaged an implant that siphons away the fluid different people tell different versions some say the full was accidental others attempted suicide but i'll but i but the fluids keep building there will be consequences she will lose her sight hearing and the ability to swallow much of the pressure on delivering it as gram. and host in hospital i don't know she'll find new cures in datasource as we were filming a nice a shell landed just a few hundred meters away sagitta needs to get to damascus to survive but lacking identification relatives and trapped in a war zone it's difficult to see how that's possible. sagitta doesn't get many visitors but there is one little person who

always makes us smile that. if left alone sagitta begins to scream and cry she needs people there is cool is for optimism. sidesteps suffering has touched a chord action is being taken to get the girls out of bed and so on but for now all they really have aside from promises. is each other or i guess. from that it's all syria. and you can see other reports safe from syria ikechi channel that scene from ny i will have more news for you and hop on.

here's what people have been saying about rejecting the night with you i suspect it's the long austin the only show i go out of my way to find you know a lot of the really packs a punch at least yampa is the john oliver of marty americans do the same we are apparently better than blue nothing's better said i see people you never heard of love right back to the night my president of the world bank hey i'm going to write me seriously send us an e-mail. a plate for many clubs over the years so i know the game and so i got. the ball isn't only about what happens on the pitch for the final school it's about the passion from the fans it's the age of the superman to kill the narrowness and spending to get to the twenty million one playa. it's an experience like nothing else not to because i want to share what i think of what i know about the beautiful game but greats it's

going to. members of my close. street racing in the heat of the night this new orleans is. the best place in the world. alone and welcome to cross talk or. bitcoin for some it's the perfect marriage of technology and finance for others it's a get rich scheme though no one can deny its market value was soaring and becoming

an attractive alternative to the them is bitcoin revolutionizing the world. cross talking bitcoin i'm joined by my guest firesign in new york he is a fund manager and author of the book planet ponzi in atlantic we have jeffrey tucker he is director of content for the foundation for economic education and in cambridge we cross to garrick hileman he is a research fellow at the university of cambridge right gentlemen cross-talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i always appreciated gary let me go to you first in cambridge explain what is going on with bitcoin i mean i'm of the age and i used to work in finance i can remember the dot com bubble and then it's melt down here and not being very well versed in bitcoin what is going on here is this just speculation or is this the new shiny radiant future go ahead

in cambridge. i think i think a little bit of both to be honest and certainly we've seen you know some aspects of this story before as you mentioned you know after the dot com bubble exploded in two thousand two thousand and one there were a number of winners that emerged from that area and a number of new companies that were born after that have done quite well you know big has already been declared dead several times in two thousand and eleven wired wrote a article saying the rise and fall of a coin we saw the crash in two thousand and fourteen yet it keeps coming back so wouldn't surprise me if we have another crash maybe a few more in front of us but it does seem that there is something important happening here with regards to the future of finance the future of money yeah well at least a small number of people have become at least i guess technically in the cloud somewhere fabulously rich it's really an amazing story jeffrey i mean kara called this i think in an article a minor miracle is that it would you use the word miracle here let me go to jeffrey in atlantic. i read that article and i of i appreciate that term actually it kind

of has nobody ever thought anything like this was possible before two thousand and eight before the white paper of two of october two thousand and eight we didn't really have the means to do what the block chain does today just for background to block changes the real underlying technology of the crime in the real reason for its value going to show is an expression of that a logical value. chain allows us to do something we've always wanted to do with something actual but never had the ability to do it thanks to these distributed networks and cryptography we can do it now you know mitigates against jeffrey kind of put it in the same cli for me because you know i was in finance for a number of years and there's always you know what's it backed up by you know you know what are the assets you know you know you always look at that and then but would jeffrey just said they're kind of explains it it's the technology is the safety that's what backing it up here do you buy that because you know you can say this is a scheme it's a get rich but i mean there's something to it and people are making money here and

you have to makes everyone interested to get involved in it if you have the means go go ahead mitch how do you explain it all. well i mean we need perspective i think bitcoin has come about in a time where the central banks reckless central banks around the world has distorted every market and too much credit too much debt and too much leverage have created instability in the financial markets so we need to add perspective so we need to look at risk versus reward with bitcoin and the bitcoin trade so bitcoin has gigantic volatility you're seeing thirty percent moves either way in a day or forty percent moves for us so it's not for the faint of heart so you know my perspective from an investor and being in the banking community internationally for thirty eight years you look at the iconic figures like jamie diamond who said it's a ponzi scheme and it's going to zero he's totally wrong but the establishment banks and the way that the fractional banking system works people want to escape from

that people want to escape from the establishment but what we've got going on here just to be clear is we've got inflation in every asset class stocks are trading at stratospheric valuations apple has a market cap approaching eclipsing one trillion dollars facebook at six hundred billion so if you look yesterday or a couple sorry if you look. recently you saw a poll back in the nasdaq the fang stocks facebook apple and all the technology issues they lost sixty eight billion dollars in market cap in a day where the market cap of bitcoin is what around one hundred sixty billion dollars so on a relative basis it's a much smaller move and it's a very emerging market so i think we've got to look at where we are in this in alternative asset class i mean you're looking at are a leonardo da vinci painting trade that run or hundred fifty million dollars so i mean we need to put it into the proper historical perspective now stocks are way

overvalued so are bonds and so is property so people are looking to get out of the dollar system and i happen to agree you need to diversify but i think you should also get. some precious metals gold and silver which have been currencies for six hours and years i mean dollar is backed by fundamentally not nothing ok good let me go back to cambridge carol i mean there's a lot of people are saying that. large investors are getting involved in trysted in bitcoin is that distorting the price because they have the deep pockets that this price level to get into the market is there something behind out there that you know that because i having been in finance i mean this is this is speculation ok i mean that people are not buying on facts or buying on speculation right now go ahead in cambridge. right i think certainly the hedge funds the big whales that are coming in the billion the billionaires we read about you know are certainly influencing the price direction but i think there's still a lot of money on the sidelines i was at

a hedge fund conference recently and less than twenty percent of of the funds in the room there are some pretty big funds in the room have taken a step into this space and i think the ones that have a lot of them have done so as individuals rather than putting their funds in because you know it's still very difficult to short yep there's major counterparty risk a lot of the exchanges cryptocurrency exchanges will do things like reveal their financials or audited financials to fund so things that you know hedge funds are used to having in typical markets they trade in are not in place yet here but they're coming if see i mean nasdaq do come into the market with futures platforms you know if things like e.t.s. and you know other things roll out bring more regulation to the space then i think you will see even more hedge funds come in the price you know could go either way frankly i think the investment playing field has been a bit lopsided in favor of the bowls and that could level and a lot of the hedge fund guys are passionate about crypto and frankly they would

probably i think from a psychological perspective prefer to make money if it crashes on the way down the well that would certainly help them rationalize their lateness to the mark nick you know market you know jeopardy is very interesting is that it's i think one of the interesting phenomena about big calling is that it's a lock of regulation and going back what mitch had to say here and we have to remember this phenomenon came into being after the financial crash crisis of two thousand and eight which the banks were responsible for and so it's an element of that here is because that the freedom of here but the go ahead jump in go ahead . yeah you know this certainly is the i think of the success of big kind is in part attributable to the fact that it has not been managed from the center is not been regulated and that allows a lot of innovation and for people to try out things you know you want to talk about market caps you can talk about one hundred fifty billion for a big client but really you have to look at the whole class of crypto assets right now and you're looking at last i checked about three hundred fifty billion once you

include all of the various tokenize block chains that are out there all the various the ferry m applications the various all coins and we're just beginning to see things we're going to see things coming up within the next year like these lightning networks that are going to be used for small transactions that are going to fix the prevailing problems that exist in big cloud which is that the networks are vastly clogged right now and it's very expensive to send and receive bitcoin it's going so hard so fast that it's almost become unusable just by itself for regular small transactions that. are looking for things like oh yeah that's the reason why i never really got into it because it's not easy to move around lease i'm not adept at doing those kind of things or you know mitch another the other people are saying that this whole thing with the because you know it's really just an investment it's not really. a mechanism to buy and sell it is.