in the story. in south korea. just hours before the opening ceremony their appeals against a doping related rejected. by the u.s. led coalition. forces. hundred people. carried out to defend an american backed group. out of washington social media firms over the coals over suspected.

the biggest stories that we've covered here over the past seven days first off the winter olympics in south korea got underway on friday with a grand opening ceremony in the city. and any three thousand athletes from ninety two countries took part in the event however in the run up to the celebrations demonstrations and scuffles erupted outside the olympic arena people supporting peace between north and south korea had gathered for a rally while another group protesting north korea's participation in the games clashed with police. despite the scuffles on the streets korean politicians are taking steps to find a solution to the long running conflict the south korean president says he's ready

to accept an invitation to visit the north if certain conditions are met now this potentially sets up the first meeting between the countries in more than a decade the invitation was delivered by kim jong un's sister who's attending the winter olympics she's the first member of north korea's ruling family to visit the south since the nine hundred fifty s. she met with president moon for three hours of talks on the games opening ceremony also hinted of warming relations with both teams marching together. well the two koreas were able to march under a single flag russian competitors of a neutral banner and are taking part as

a limpid athlete from russia away all it's off to the international olympic committee banned russia following a doping scandal over the russian flag being forbidden by the i.o.c. it still found its way into the stadium when i heard that russia can watch under their own flag i felt quite sorry for the athletes you know the athletes who were completely clean and had no problems but they were deprived of the right to represent their country and so i thought i would support them by putting the flag out there carsley said because you know i was looking forward to seeing the best in the world and while the russians are the best in the world a lot of things so i can't see them which is kind of sad but mostly mad because they've worked for years for these olympics and now they're being told you know they don't even have really proof they just have suspicions and now they're being sold without really a chance to properly appeal they can't compete and i just think that's really unfair and i was a spectator mention there a last minute appeal from forty five athletes in two coaches against a ban preventing them from competing failed the lawyers branded the decision as sanctions in disguise you need to try and report from the olympic host city. guss

arbitrators of concert at the process created by the i.o.c. to establish an invitation list of russian athletes to compete. at least from russia could not be described as a sanction but rather as an eligibility decision so there you have it according to the court of arbitration for sport ridding the russian athletes of their own pick invitations isn't equal to punishment and cast is perfectly happy with the criteria that the i.o.c. and mission we chose for these invitations the president of the world anti-doping agency is pleased he says that the timing is great and that all the clean athletes should now be reassured the i.o.c. are happy to they have applauded the verdict as you can see and this tweet though the russians are obviously totally devastated i don't know what to say i'm really

disappointed i can't understand the cast decision first they cleared the athletes and now they say sorry you can't go to the olympics this is some kind of madness it's terrible not just for fleets but for all of international sport did i expect cas to reach this decision fifty fifty especially after thomas buck in one of his later speeches pressured the court of arbitration for sport after ruled in our favor he was literally threatening the court he was only saying he would dissolve the court if it route again in favor of russian athletes. coach albert dempsey and co who was by the way one of those to sue the i.o.c. was referring to all the things that were being said about the court of arbitration for sport ahead of the hearings including these statements by the president of the i.o.c. kind of the decision is extremely disappointing. the decision shows says the need. for reforms in the

internal structure of cars here thomas bach was referring to the previous cas verdict and that requires a bit of background the forty seven russian athletes and coaches who were suing the international olympic committee were from two groups thirty two hadn't been sanctioned by the odyssey investigators as a result of the russian doping scandal at all fifty received a lifetime bans their medals were taken away by the i.o.c. a few months ago but then the very same court of arbitration for sport last week cancelled these lifetime bans due to insufficient evidence the abuse of the sanctions and notes and the individual results achieved in such reinstated so the decision that we have right now completely contradicts the previous one and this is

a real disaster for the country the athletes both the ones who are still going to compete and young saying under a neutral flag and those who are banned the coaches the fans they are baffled by how unfair it could get i have no where. i was hoping that cancer would rule in our favor right now i don't know what to do i'm disappointed but of course i won't give up on subordinates i have a lot ahead of me and i will compete and win medals for my country. and to the very end we will bring the. you would go. now i feel sadness and so rude. i have enough strength from the opportunity to compete in the next film. i have no emotions left we had all or. you were just waiting for it it is the. situations make you stronger emotionally and well histories be made to this year's olympics

nigeria has entered the winter games for the first time with the women's bobsled team athletes managed to get to pyongyang thanks to a crowdfunding campaign they hope their example will encourage other athletes from across africa i think we definitely put ourselves on the map in terms of ok we don't have all these things but these things are still possible to get us back. africa is a beautiful today and we are representation of the africans here in our historic stance of being the largest number of africans we are a representation of exactly what that beauty genuinely is and so if we can encourage others to live in so that and take away whatever stigma is maybe associated with the consulate with regards to growth and development i think that that's huge that's very important in the hope that we can do that. but i think if we continue to encourage those things in the future it will start to come together but you have to start some. serious calling on the

un to hold the u.s. led coalition to account for wednesday's airstrikes against pro-government forces the number of casualty has not yet been confirmed but some reports do claim that up to one hundred people might have been killed the pentagon described the attack as a defensive move but russia's defense ministry says the unit was engaged in an anti terror mission. while carrying out an operation to locate and terminate an sleeper cell near form oil refinery a unit of pro-government forces was suddenly shouldered then hit by airstrikes by the u.s. led coalition vis was overkill if the numbers are true i'd said demonstration of she have brute force perhaps you know to send perhaps the send a message nevertheless the united states says that it's it's in syria and it will defend itself and it has the right to defend itself in this instance syrian

democratic forces acted in self-defense with support from the coalition to defeat an unprovoked attack by syrian regime forces in eastern syria if the situation is like how they describe that they were indeed attacks while fighting isis to make up the right to self-defense well if you take them at face value you could think so but people they just killed were also fighting isis and recently they have been making much better progress against isis then the united states led coalition or their partner forces the the s.d.f. the syrian government has of course called all of this an act of aggression unwarranted and unjust but just for you information all of this happened in there is or near a rich oil field and refinery conoco it's called it was liberated last year by the u.s. led coalition very quickly and in fact. u.s.

partner forces seem to have a knack for liberating areas with the oil under them much quicker than they do those areas that don't have oil under them since since all the oil rich areas were taken in that as ordered by the s.d.f. progress against isis seems to have dropped to a snail's pace but you know regardless here. america has said that it is in syria only to fight isis today isis has been all but defeated in syria but you don't see the pentagon packing its bags our military policy in syria has not changed our priority remains to defeat of isis whether it's in iraq or in syria that is our intent to defeat isis and not do anything more than that the united states will maintain a military presence in syria focused on ensuring isis cannot reemerge total withdrawal of american personnel at this time would restore assad who continue his brutal

treatment against his own people so as to put its ability to the lack of a fundamental commitment to our agreement that is typical of current u.s. diplomacy including the reasons why the americans stay in syria rex tillerson peter he stated that the only goal in syria was the defeat of ice or now they've got far more ambitious plans with more of the most with the mixed messages here is the pentagon staying general mattis said that the united states will stay in syria we'll fight in syria for as long as the united states wants to fight in syria i mean that's you know pretty direct now you see how this might sound strange go to syria and advice it and while there you start killing syrians in syria in self-defense. we can all experts told us that with islamic state practically gone from syria washington is now targeting the government instead. they are not just in syria to fight their own. have been in syria for

a long time because they want to through our side as the spate of feeds as it becomes clear that it is the syrian forces themselves and large who defeated die age the priority of overthrowing assad begins to reassert itself in the pentagon and in the white coats so i think that's really the answer the questions the overthrow of assad was always the protocol prone the reason why the americans were in syria the army in treating these groups intervening with air strikes in saudi they were diverted from that by no with the possibility of a defeat of diet inside syria the that policy that reasserts itself this is coming at the end of a long war the united states has taken about twenty eight percent of syrian territory and over fifty percent of its oil this is leverage in order to roll back iran and get rid of assad also doesn't i get it he wants to do well for himself

there was a race only a few months ago that would get those fields and he's broadening undoubtedly under the pretext of biting isis the united states didn't think it was so the united states is trying to lay down the law here and not let anybody pro and as we know the turks threatened in mended to take on the americans over there so the united states i think is very patients that goes and turkey will begin to push america out to try to push america out of northern syria but he likes. russia bid farewell to military part of the room on flip of on thursday the major became a national hero after his plane was downed by militants in syria with more details his medina cotton of. the funeral for a major roman filipe of who died tragically fighting in syria takes place here in his hometown of fight on earlier we saw hundreds of. people attending the memorial ceremony as family members friends his colleagues people who didn't know him all

came to pay their last respects at the palace a plane was shot down on saturday in the northwestern part of syria which is still controlled by the latest incarnation of the terrorist group oh no sra roman tried to stay in the air as long as he could he then managed to a jacket from the airplane only to find himself surrounded by terrorists the pilots of the plane supporting role months shared the details of their last communications his voice remained calm when i was there all of the you get out of the maneuver yes i see them was the commander's reply and then he said so evenly as if it was something ordinary and an important i got hit hard the right is on fire moving south the lift slowing down too and about twenty seconds later here i did google search and. then he ordered me to gain altitude of course i didn't do it to

leave my command is the last thing i would do i always tried to have his back during flights and now i have to do it on the ground while he was fighting i stood there and made several attacks to vehicles that were getting closer to the olive groves where room on touchdown i stayed until the fuel was extremely low i barely made it back to the airfield roman had waited for the terrorist to get closer to him and only after that he decided to detonate a grenade taking his own life but avoiding capture he even managed to shout this is for our of lads what he did that russia's defense ministry released several facts about his life he left a wife and a four year old daughter behind he was an experienced pilot and was not his first time serving in syria he was part of a dozen successful military operations and he died as a hero fighting terrorist at the age of thirty three. you're watching the weekly from british m.p.'s have been trying to pin down the world's largest social media

companies for alleged russian interference in the votes i'll have the details on that for you after the break. boy and entertainment have become good in our culture and we have children grow up playing playing on the computer this one has somehow been to mystic cited as entertainment to russia there's nothing funny about it is so serious russia will be the last to give up nuclear weapons because russia regards nuclear weapons as the bow. against inflation by the superior coalition of. politicians to. put themselves on the line to get accepted or rejected.

so when you want to be president and. want. to go on the press this is what. three of the more people. interested always in the water. all over again three of the world's biggest social media firms were tackled on thursday by british lawmakers who took the unusual step of conducting a parliamentary hearing outside britain as they tried to pin down the companies over alleged russian interference during the breaks and vote but it seemed there was little if anything to back up those accusations. we looked at all advertisements with any connection to russia and we found no evidence of our services being used to interfere in the referendum a very small number of suspects it's not research agency linked accounts forty nine

such accounts were active during the campaign which represents less than point normal some of the total number of accounts these are very low level thing judgment until we complete this investigation we won't know but what we haven't had is. information that's enabled us to target on a particular page or a particular phenomenon despite all their commitment enthusiasm and hard work spanning over a period of really several months when this inquiry kick started it seems like the u.k. parliamentary committee that's trying to find out the truth about a russian any brecht's that meddling they seem to be really hitting a brick wall this week they travelled all the way to washington thousand thousands of miles presumably having spent thousands of pounds to get there and what they ended up with while questioning the executives of twitter you tube and facebook was just

a frustration it seems and that was thick in the atmosphere investigative journalism for instance as it led to suggestion that there are lots of campaigns going to have it looks like you haven't looked have you that's the thing you haven't looked at this economy. going on in the horror well it seems who did look with twitter and what they said they found was that there were only forty nine accounts connected to russia during the time of the bracks that referendum again i'm no mathematician so correct me if i'm wrong perhaps but it seems that there is and this is really nothing to write home about given that twitter has hundreds of millions of accounts and despite the chair of this committee damian collins saying that his quote instinct tells him that the number should be higher that did not turn out to be the case so despite this goes. i think continuing in the committee keeping asking the executives to look harder it seems no fruitful results so far. and there's seemingly a huge appetite for this in the british media even though there's little for them

to work with take a look at some of the headlines first of this one reads twitter has finally conceded that russian accounts tried to influence breck's it but there's only a passing mention to explain that the story is about a few dozen accounts the same with a headline in the times which admits the existence of so-called russia trolls the first paragraph then reveals there were only forty nine suspicious accounts just one more example for you and you need to dig even deeper to find the actual numbers in this lengthy article radio talk show host john gaunt told us that the russian investigation might be a wild goose chase after all. this is a farce these employees want all the way to washington to question their honesty of how the internet works they could have got them on a skype call in question though it's far soko i'm sure waste of my taxpayers' money and it served very very annoying it's a joke they are children almost kangaroo court fashion following questions that you

and hardly waiting to listen to the answers you know or i don't think the british public care they know why people voted for let's just get over it and accept democracy. support for women's rights and gender equality has been picking up pace online with a number of prominent hashtags but when it comes to feminism it seems that people can't agree on what's acceptable to say what's not as police explained are you a feminist if you put on a muslim headscarf or on the contrary if you take it off and even burn it according to the internet it could be either you just have to choose your harsh tag there's world hejab day that's the one that promotes women's rights to wear a headscarf it's going big in the u.k. and the us i have job has nothing to do with oppression it's a feminist statement but many a man and man had to be women this piece of clothing is the very epitome of

oppression but then there's also the no hit job movement the one that condemns muslim headscarves as a form of oppression it's especially relevant in iran right now where women are being arrested for casting off their they and the anti hejab brigade is outraged. i have you know you have to. earn the earn. but if you thought religious stress was a minefield or simply that it doesn't apply to you beware because language is getting political too in case you one of faith with the new rules using the word mankind is kind of

a foe pa that's precisely what the canadian prime minister justin trudeau tried to explain to a female journalist who used the word in a question to him little did he know that an even bigger focus on no matter how much of a feminist you are is mansplaining to a woman that she shouldn't be using the word mankind but don't worry the internet told him maternal love is the love that's going to change the future of mankind so we're like you to look what we're going to say people are going to not necessarily mankind. and there's lots of things you can do to be a better feminism but here's

a simple one don't interrupt women but what about formula one bosses who presumably thought they were acting in an enlightened and pursed weinstein manner when they fired all their grade girls those are the promotional models who traditionally adorn the racetrack there is support the band say that being a pit babe object. good byes and sexualizes women but try telling that to the grid girls many of whom all move or not said trying to think up a new profession i've never had even the slightest hint of feeling exploited. i've wanted to be that i worked hard to get that they paid me well to do the job and i saw my outfit before i agreed to do it i knew i was wearing i knew what was expected of me the world has gone completely mad. i don't see a problem with promotional work tools we all do it by choice and we're not forced

into the what and go supply for the job it seems these days you come right perhaps all the hashtags could now be replaced with one much less binary one something like freedom to choose. boy that's all from a column by this sunday get updated online any time by checking us out on facebook at all to don't go kevin i was here in half an hour we go next week thanks for watching. tens of billions hundreds of billions probably a trillion dollars of u.s. government subsidies a shot on the energy industry yes government can subsidize mining big brother crypto currencies and put those into the wall it's called american citizens give each have an automatic wallet tied to the social security account and they can get a daily and weekly or monthly air drop points that they can then years to boost

economy with the government can easily do that. with lawmakers manufactured been sentenced to public will. when the ruling closest to protect themselves. with the crime and merry go round to listen to the one percent of. the time to ignore middle of the room stick. to the real news is. here's what people have been saying about rejected in the senate it's full on awesome the only show i go out of my way to launch you know what it is that really packs a punch how bleak yampa is the john oliver of our three americas do the same thing we are apparently better than blue nothing. to see people you've never heard of

love or down for the night not the president of the world bank so very funny girl at me curiously send us an e-mail. previously on the great american pilgrimage rather opponent in massachusetts you are just color what you got here this is all the boston mess yeah so so i'll go as ted kennedy i really did. everybody i'm stephen ball. task hollywood guy suspect every proud american first of all i'm just george washington and r.v. . uncle steve. boyd was this is my buddy max famous financial guru and we'll she's a little bit different i'm honest abraham lincoln why not you know we know the last but not least my larger than life. the night an aspiring star rio.

with all the drama happening in our country i'm shooting the road to have some fun . meet everyday americans. and what's america. and see how things got so crazy i was naked. right. hopefully start to bridge the gap this is the great american pill. it's day two in new england and steven makes his way to a historic restaurant to meet with a local vietnam veteran and a single father who was had more than a few obstacles to overcome. coming. from post say hi.

good afternoon gentlemen how are you doing good what's your name. some steve just a real. piece pretty cool. you go just. mystery osip. you can tell dear really impressed well when asked but i need some help we take him for a walk. thanks buddy yeah. he paid to go right down there by the water. and bruce jr and rio set up to have some good clean fun. while you do it so bruce as i understand it the old no here is one of your frequent hangouts of my correct yes well. you're like me brother.