next olympics it's not government policy it's the. ravings of a person who speaks before thinking tweets before thinking you know one would hope that the people on the receiving end of these 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 behind him that doesn't agree with them so. it's very destabilizing and i think it's undermining u.s. ability to negotiate solutions to problems so whatever policy don't trump is concocting stirring trouble on twitter is something that is going to stay done of. you as we heard there of all the world's leaders north korea's kim jong un has perhaps been criticized the most in dollar terms tweets and after they isolated country's leader issued a new year's day nuclear warning to washington the u.s.

president was keen to hit back. the entire u.s. 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 when someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that i do have a nuclear bomb but it's a much bigger and more powerful woman his and my but this is certainly not anything to joke about but i think the situation despite the confrontational rhetoric has been step allies somewhat there's a recognition that there is a stalemate rex tillerson a few weeks ago did indicate the possibility of negotiations even without preconditions donal's from probably believe that this kind of talk remains popular with his right wing supporters certain me donald trump at this state does not

believe he is ready to make the first small so perhaps a tool careers may make the first move kim jong un has now reopened a cross border communications link with side career in what's being seen as a significant diplomatic breakthrough but the standoff between the u.s. and north korea looks set to continue in twenty eighteen after what's already been twelve months of personal attacks and vicious threats from both sides. the era of strategic patience. with the north korean regime has failed. north korea. getting more interested the united states. they will be met with a five year period. the u.s. neglects the international community's will establish peace on the korean peninsula

behave like children fighting each other in kindergarten and nobody can stop them. and we can't have mad men out there shooting rockets all over the place we will have no choice but to totally destroy north korea. rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself no one of the trump himself is on a suicide mission ahead and i know you've. got a plot you know we need a pause we need dialogue. he is a sick puppy. french president emanuel micro-loan has valued to take the fight against fake news to the next level in twenty a day during a media conference he also into that new regulations against media influence by foreign states. you which will be redesigned in twenty

eight will be increased to fight against any attempt to destabilization by television controlled or influenced by foreign states. well in whedon's this speech the french president wasn't specific about which countries could be influencing french media however r.t. and sputnik have already been firing line he denied both accreditation during his presidential campaign and later explained by labeling this channel nick as propaganda. russia today and spinning have been influential outlets that have several times spoken mistruths about me and my complaint that's why they were not invited to my headquarters all media including russian had access to my campaign russia today and sputnik have not behaved as media outlets and journalists but as organs of influence and force propaganda. at the end of twenty seventeen this

channel brunch tied to the french speaking world with the launch of our newest channel r.t. fronts on it immediately calls quite the stir several french public figures published an open letter calling for r t france's license to be revoked they supported their claims by saying that r.t. house repeatedly faced various allegations from the u.s. and different european countries joining us live now to the scots this further is political commentator adrian good to have you on the program hello to you while i'm on whom i crawl praises france for promoting press freedom something he's repeatedly done on this channel has been under pressure there even from the leader himself why do you think that is. i think that. sputnik and got off to a bad start in the early part of his relationship with his campaign to become president and i think that that has not improved over the last year or so whether he does or

doesn't have a point is slightly irrelevant i think what he is now trying to do is to change the french civil code in order to prevent what he sees as a quote of him from his press conference today i threats to democratic life of the nation he clearly sees altie and sputnik as part of that but i think that he also wants to change the narrative of the conversation to make this more about the use the head of what he calls false news fake news and of course there is a difference between fake news and propaganda there is a difference between expressing an opinion challenging received orthodoxy perhaps those for example that don't agree that climate change is manmade they have a right to say that but doesn't it crosses the line when it starts going into false news where it starts to disseminate lawyers that affect democratic choices he saw himself very much as the outside figure in the run up to the presidency didn't he chose to ignore in fact the press during the early months of his presidency and even called the french media totally narcissistic. it's me contradicting themselves

by not praising its country's media is there some sort of flip going on here. ok what needs to be understood i think is that france has a very long a very credible history of her freedom of expression it dates back to seventy nine eighty nine ten and eleven in the french constitution and shrine in french law and have been for over two hundred years the right to express yourself in the right to choose your own religion without those that disagree with you preventing you from expressing your president views of course from stars have also the european convention of human rights as a signatory that's also signatory to the european union charter fundamental rights so like article like amendment one to the american constitution freedom of speech in france as it is ingrained in the constitution and what he sees i think is that freedom of speech is being used is being misused i would suggest to. her that the democratic life of the nation to influence. the democratic choices that people make ironically since he won. didn't have much effect and clearly he wants to now change

the civil code to prevent that because this is not the first time that the president of france has done this back in two thousand the federal code to strengthen the rich and trying to bolster the press's inability to negate the concept of all free and innocent until proven guilty i just about. i just want to play this video quickly just reiterating my point this is mccrum refusing to talk to journalists have a listen giving comments is not the role of the president. they don't think you should give up hope not that i'd like to see. in the quest for something for something else to consist simply i don't have all forces are far safer over that issue. i consider from my part that it is not word of the debate take place in a public forum could that not be argued that it was a hostile approach to the media. oh indeed it was and i think it was very shortsighted of him and i don't think he played well internationally as

a result of it the reality is the international media television news internet is now a fact of life and if you wish to be a statesman on the world scene you need to engage with media rather than running away from it he in my view did himself no favors and i do think that he's very clearly now trying to do a bit of a huge and trying to sort of embrace those who support him whilst perhaps shunning those that don't so you hasn't done himself any favors just in the overall spear of things here could this proposal of a new law to bottle sunni and fake news actually prove effective. well it depends what he's actually proposing at the moment all i've seen is the is the comments that he made earlier on reports in the morning this afternoon so i'm not sure what it is exactly that he is posing it's all very vague and it's all very aspirational so until we see the final details it's difficult to comment but what is very clear is that he does see faith in the world of what he calls fake news as a threat to the life of the democratic like the french people and i mean that he may have a point it's very clear that there are

a number of fake news outlets that apparently have affected democratic choices across the western world over the last three or four years and clearly he wants to protect france from that but i i think he needs very carefully i think that it's a very thin line between exercising new rules that protect. people's rights and not have their their views challenged by untruths and actually clamping down on for the expression so you could find himself acting unconstitutionally. thanks very much for your time and thoughts this are a political commentary green yellow and. judging by across words the so-called fake news phenomenon looks set to continue dominating headlines this year jacqueline fu good now explains what propelled it the actual term into the spotlight in the first place. fake news the term that has filled the headlines and your social media feeds for the past twelve months has been deemed two thousand seventeen's word of the year at least by column stiction ary nation relies on me to read truthful facts so i can't say that sandwiches of god on strike.

it's news stories are sick. 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 fake news has dominated the true had lines fake news spread by russia 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 might even start to believe that this is a banana. but it's not. isn't. 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 then 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 therefore one plus one equals three and the kremlin and trump are in cahoots the 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 simply 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 with gold rush. really so perhaps the word of the year should be anonymous i grabbing headlines and allegations quickly turn to guilt despite no evidence all it takes is anonymous sources. well with his first year in office drawing to a close the u.s.

president has been talking up his economic record in typical trump style the can now make miracle created more than two million jobs unemployment is at a seventeen year low the stock market is at an all time high fantastic for the economy our economy has already surged to three percent growth unemployment is at a seventeen year low liberated the american economy and our economy is doing well. or one man who doesn't share our president trumps optimism is former u.s. congressman ron paul he told us that the growth has led to success for the privileged. if you're in the stock market no wealthy person here doing quite well but what we're forgetting here when we listen to this rhetoric of all this optimism is that there's a large segment of our population that's haven't a difficult time where there is prosperity and more jobs it depends on death yes an individual can feel very good if they have a line of credit to the bank but eventually that line of credit runs out we in this

country benefit because we have the reserve currency of the world we can run up a lot of debt and we can spend a lot of money and even with that we've had a great deal of difficulty is last eight years trying to get out of the recession now i see everything we do is a big bubble and all those q.e. s. that we have dealt with in these last eight years have just created a huge bubble and everything is in excess whether it's our military budget our overseas gage friends whether it's the welfare state and that bubble will come to an end we're going to have a sudden cataclysmic and which is sort of what happened to the soviet system it's not going to be identical and our states aren't probably going to break up but i do sincerely believe that we will no longer be able to afford our empire around the world. yemen has suffered its first deadlier strike of twenty eighteen a new year's day with more than twenty killed in the port city of who data just

that we previous three of the world's biggest humanitarian agencies joined together to highlight that yemen has passed the grim milestone of injuring more than a thousand days of war explaining the three quarters of the yemeni population needs humanitarian aid and that iran two thirds are deprived of food water and proper sanitation. i am poor i have no tender i can live i suffer from the cold. i was given a place to sleep by some people to warm up on hot days we sleep right on the sidewalk.

there is no how help comes very rarely once a year maybe but now we have no help our blanket is tattered fifteen people are sleeping on. for syria under a rock twenty eighteen means emerging from the shadows of ice shelves brittle group few families were left on scarred by what they went through rock as the it has the story now of two young syrian girl struggling to survive after being left alone in the robert city of terrorism. meet sally she's five maybe six or perhaps seven she doesn't know and this market these streets over surviving isis's age of the resort was no mean feat so many perished as a result of starvation sickness violence. sally

is a survivor she her sister and brother were abandoned by their parents years ago they divorced and left the children to fend for themselves. can't oh i'm. still on the land she spends her days begging stealing playing and surviving no easy lot for them in this life former neighbors who knew their family have taken pity on the kids and have looks out for them but it's not easy. i wanted to take her in and she kept escaping i sent people to look for her but she never stays in one place long show escapes. well there.

are no. sally's sister 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 her 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 if fluids keep building and there will be consequences she will lose her sight hearing and the ability to swallow the pressure on her bring is

growing. in hospital i don't know she'll find new cures indeed as order as we were filming and i says 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 so many visitors but there is one digital person who always makes a smile. if left alone sagitta begins to scream and cry she needs people there is cool is for optimism cited as suffering has touched a chord action is being taken to get the girls out of bed as order but for now

all they really have the side from promises and p.t. is each other or i guess the. from that as or syria. rowing pics we in fact have some positive news i want to update you on young. since that report was filed back in october she has since made it to damascus artie's local source informed us that she underwent surgery at a hospital where she's now back in duress or with her sister we can only hope twenty a day and brings them a brighter future. is all the news i'm back in thirty minutes time with more global news but more our t.v. program start in just a moment. alone

and welcome to cross talk for all things considered i'm peter lavelle 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 current global banking system is bitcoin revolutionizing the world. talking bitcoin i'm joined by my guest mitch 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 crossed garrick heilman 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 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 ike 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 an 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 for a small number of people who 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 decline in the real reason for its value going to just an expression of that logical value. 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 is 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 in the bitcoin trade so bitcoin has gigantic volatility you're seeing thirty percent moves either way in a day or forty percent moves for 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 a couple sorry if you look. recently you saw a pullback 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 at running one 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 some 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 crashes on the way down the well that would certainly help them rationalize their lateness to the bartunek 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 claim 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 the various tokenize block chains that are out there all the various the ferry i'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 decline which is that the networks are vastly.