in september of two thousand and seventeen officials estimate hurricane maria to have a ninety to one hundred billion dollars in damages is reported as the third most expensive tropical cyclone in the u.s. since one thousand nine hundred more than seventy thousand homes were destroyed three hundred thousand homes were damaged still power has not been fully restored this as some sixteen thousand people still remain without electricity the more than eight month lockouts is the longest in u.s. history the army corps of engineers ended their work on the island earlier this month restoration of thousands of downed power lines are now in the hands of the u.s. territories bankrupt utility the puerto rico authority professor donald berry at the university of texas as at least one expert questioning the study by harvard however island officials are in brace in the new reports and more investigations will be made in los angeles and sweets. but you know we have billions to spend on defense we really just need to spend on the birds but not

enough to help puerto rico and wow when you see the official estimate sixty four compared to what over four thousand that's just ridiculous i mean to think that only sixty four people asked their lives during that is ludicrous i mean first of all there's this thing about i just don't understand this is the money if you're talking about defense defense and the u.s. you know our military even says that climate change and whether these things whatever is causing it is the biggest threat to our safety and to me it's not as if hurricane season is a surprise it happens every year you know you know when these things are coming you can watch why are we surprised why is there ever a moment when feedback every year should just be ready you are you know somehow if these things happen there should be a plan well i'm not i don't think that's a lot to ask for people you know and that's the thing it's like we are priorities of what we choose to spend money on as a government what our congress dictates what a president calls for is absolutely ridiculous. and like you said i think you hit

the nail on the head tab we know these things are coming yes we don't know how bad the devastation will be until after the fact but the trends have all been pointing pretty strong that you know category four category five want to after another after another we know it's coming june first we know june first in the middle member board likely probably going to be some major hurricane damage on the way why are we preparing for this because once again we we don't recognize puerto rico as part of the united states and those are american citizens are american lives and you wouldn't do this any other place if houston said we lost four thousand people and don't don't underestimate the appeal of disaster capitalism either all right as we go to break watchers don't forget to let us know what you think of the topics we've covered in facebook and twitter so our poll shows that r t v dot com coming up we explore the new h.b.o. documentary on it was over senator john mccain with author and journalist matt stay tuned to watch this.

must be much stronger in making the decision at twenty eight can we around the table agree on the measures on these or china always the u.s. in the end the unfortunately easy answer to that so far is not truly europe is being too weak and that's why we end up being beaten on the head some time by the chinese some time as the american does to stuff. well you know there are things we kind of adopted because we were called tyrants for so long. i mean they're in this small ball of sticks you know hard to achieve anything. the little

self to be told fish already ninety percent of the dots on a ball in the car. fifteen school seventy five tons they do it several times a day with a big fleet now you get an idea on why. we have to understand we can not stay still and just. be with them this will be used for you they are. doing this because i want them for the future world to future generations to have and enjoy the ocean we have.

in john ford's epic western film the man who shot liberty valance a senior reporter after hearing the actual truth behind the legendary killing off of the title character proceed to tear up his notes and announce to shock jimmy stewart this is the west's or when the legend becomes fact print the legend. ask any student of real history of the united states and they'll tell you that more often than not it's the legend not the facts that are most often taught in high school history classes across the country this is why today in the age of fake news corporate censorship puffed up punditry and twenty four hour cable news cycles the fight to print the truth before the legend is all the more important which brings us to senator john mccain and h.b.o.'s recently released documentary on the arizona republicans life and times dramatically titled john mccain for whom the with bell tolls for some the documentary provides a beautiful final bow to the ailing senator's long career but for many including

journalists tell you the documentary puts the legend before the facts as t.v. rights and rolling stone quote the myths aren't just about mccain either but also an effort to gloss over about six decades of american history and how we got to the terrible place for him today so just how dangerous is the myth making surrounding our current political figures in times let's find out as journalist and author of mad t.v. joins us now live from new york city welcome. thanks tabitha you know matt i got to say first i got to compliment you one of the best descriptive lines of former heads of state in this country was wax museum escapees which started all of your article that's absolutely brilliant when describing the likes of henry kissinger who you know what i want to ask you what stood out to you is the biggest kind of myths surrounding the political legend of john mccain that were played so straight in this documentary. well first of all. i covered john mccain on the campaign

trail a couple of times and. they always laid it out very thick the idea that he was a maverick and a change agent that term was tossed around quite a bit but if you actually look at mccain's history he does have a history of opposing some people within his own party he certainly has a history of personal dust ups with members of his own party but in terms of actual change he was very much in line with most american policy particularly when it came to military interventionism he was never really able to come to grips with the mistakes of the war on terror. or even really the vietnam era for that matter and he was one of the one of the earliest proponents of the iraq war and i say this hating to criticize the guy who's a who's got you know terminal brain cancer but there was always this this myth

making around him that was that was always laid on very thick and that is sort of the thing that makes a so hard to understand and i think that's what's and frustrating for a lot of people yes he's in this position and nobody's nobody's taking heads on and i think that that are more intense but there is this idea. political legacy. doesn't always ring true you know what do you write you know mccain's. legacy which of these sort of reality is our narratives do you think will ultimately went out the legend or the fact. well the problem is that there are two completely diametrically opposed ideas about what john mccain's legacy is if you were to watch this film the idea that you would get is that john mccain represents a time in a place where reaching across the aisle and. and and dealing with the other party and compromise. we're encouraged that they sort of

presented him as a kind of modern day henry clay but the reality is that john mccain really helped usher in this era of divisiveness he played a crucial role in that narrative by bringing sarah pailin on this ticket in two thousand and eight which as everybody admits within the campaign was a calculated gambit designed not for any ideological reason or because they thought it was a good idea but purely because they were they were desperate and they they felt that they needed to do some kind of a search mary in order to win so i think you have to look at it in terms of the latter you know bringing pailin in unleashed something within the republican party that we're still dealing with today and that's what i want to ask you about too is when you mention you know and when you watch the documentary you do get this feeling that kind of the good they do they gloss over about the decades of u.s.

history that all kind of political decision making was to us the brought us the age of you know schumer and ted cruz and trump and what we're dealing with today and now it's never just one thing when you look back at history but if you had to marrow it down what do you believe is the biggest kind of political decision that's responsible for the state of things in d.c. today that we just refuse to acknowledge as a as a process and as a public. but i think the ongoing theme in. john mccain's career certainly is just . it's all centered around this idea of of america's role in the world military intervention ism continuous war and whether or not that's popular and whether or not there's a backlash against that i think the the backdrop to what happened in two thousand and eight when mccain took on barack obama was not just that mccain had the misfortune to be to be opposing

a historically gifted politician in terms of his ability to rally his base and barack obama but also there was an incredible amount of discontent not just over the economy which of course was cratering at the time but over the iraq war i mean . george w. bush's approval ratings were lower than donald trump's ever were at the end of his presidency he was down and in the low twenty's at one point and that had almost everything to do with the iraq war an invasion which mccain and most of the people featured in the film supported or wrote it for and so i still think we haven't come quite come to grips with the enormity of the error though was our decision to invade iraq and the subsequent decision to remain in the middle east and to have this you know expansive presence everywhere to openly. what do you think the reason is that we're so quick to to go for the legend instead of the reality i mean is it

really as simple as we don't want to you know hit somebody when they're down we don't want to be that person but you know what is it they keep says or what one makes journalists jump to that well tell the maverick story as opposed to looking at things realistically you know george w. bush we've seen them all everybody like oh is that me or darling of the lad. wired why do we do that. well i mean the simple answer and as a former campaign reporter i would say is that when you're covering a campaign you just have a tendency it's unavoidable to reach for the nearest cliche. and. essentially covering a presidential campaign is two years of covering a story we're not a whole lot happens and so the press and up having to invent story lines and to shape and mold the story in order to get people interested and one of the things

they do in order to make the story more digestible for audiences is they create a caricature is of the people involved so john kerry looks french and is bookish and is that intellectual and an upper class windsurfer who is out of touch with the cond and where is john mccain as a straight talker and that cliche of course was taken to be heavily advantage of by the mccain campaign which immediately started painting buses with names like the straight talk express so we come up with this shorthand caricature is as a way to kind of so the characters in the campaign drummer in political dramas and it's the same way we do it with you know reality shows everybody in survivor or you know. flip but i love that we all give them one of shorthand the same thing and we do that with this wow it's so like rock of love bus and capitol hill are really

talking about us and. you know it's interesting because when you when you look at history and when you really look at the you know the different versions of history that were always sold you know i have to ask is going forward how dangerous is this kind of mythmaking of political figures and their actions or just in general be kind of well let's take the better so let's take the side of the page that's in the best light as opposed to the reality of what we did how dangerous is that. i think it's incredibly dangerous because it leads us to subsequent errors i mean if you look at the arc of mccain's life and again i hate to talk about the example through the lens of his personal experience because he undoubtedly suffered horribly in vietnam in a way that you know part somebody like me could never comprehend but the reality is you know our presence in vietnam as a country we never really came to grips with what we were actually doing there the enormity of the damage that was done to that part of the world the number of

civilians that were killed the number of people in countries like cambodia and laos that were killed in bombings that had nothing to do with with any real milt military reason our failure to come to reckon with that history leads directly to our failure to to realize the mistake we're making when we when we go into iraq and so we continue to perpetuate these mistakes and the inability to puncture these myths leads to electorates and to groups of politicians who continue to repeat the same political mistakes over and over again so it's always dangerous when you make myths and in modern american in the modern american american lead media landscape are always making myths that are comfortable for all audiences to digest that don't scare or upset them and that's just very hard to do and when you're talking about the cold hard facts of history it most definitely is and that's the thing that i think i applaud you know journalists like yourself and others who are out there you

know kind of challenging the contemporary myths and there's a lot of great documentarians lot of great journals to go out there and do the good work to then challenge the historical missed of that where we can have a better idea of how to vote how to make decisions as an informed public moving forward matt taibbi always a pleasure having you on thank you very much for all the great work thanks so much terrell take care. the cornea is the highly sensitive outermost layer of the eye it's responsible for. meaning transparent to allow light and well you know to let us see however according to world health organization coral blindness is the fourth leading cause of blindness in vision loss globally with over fifteen million people around the world requiring a cornea transplant and while the causes of such vision loss may have why vary widely scientists at newcastle university may have just saw the light on how to fix that three d. printing that's right by using a mixture of stem cells i will generate and college and scientists from the university were able to form a special bio ink and three d.

print the world's first human cornea researchers say they hope that after further testing the new three d. printing technique could be implemented worldwide combating the shortage of corneas for transplant wow that's that's incredible yeah that's and it's really people don't always know this but when you you know if you donate your body or donate organs one of the things you can do is corneas and it's very it's one of those things are really need but those means that we could treat a lot more people praying site back up that's where those are those things when i see stories like that and say look at how far we've come but yet we can't save the people of puerto rico what does the thing it's like we have the technology to do it we just have to get our elected officials to actually listen to whisper a change that's the challenge i put out to you guys all right that is our show for today remember everyone in this world we are not told the world of the earth so i tell you all i love you i am tired old and dirty and on top of them all and keep on watching those talks of the great day and night everybody.

fifty years ago breaking within to come together as a sleeping pill does this is what i mean because our to this is said this is the side effects were terrible but not on the road. across europe victims are starting legal battles demanding at least some compensation in two ways first will the physical damage itself as well there's a constant reminder that the people who actually perpetrated this crime has never been the justice and there's been a couple of. the american political soap opera widely known as russia gate appears to have no wind no evidence has been revealed

to trump campaign colluded with russia there is mounting evidence the intelligence community or should i say the deep state monitored even spied on from the world. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to us from the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then. i. think what. was said it.

was how out it was. a russian journalist who was supposedly murdered in ukraine turns out to be alive arkady back janko says he faked his own death to school to kremlin plots to have him killed. the european budget commissioner apologizes to italians for telling them how to vote as the country's political stalemate causes financial jitters across the e.u. . and we preview our tease exclusive interview with syrian president bashar al assad's talking about the war in his country and troubled relations with the u.s. .

i'm kate politician you are watching the latest headlines here at r.t. international thank you for joining us. a russian journalist whose death made global headlines has revealed his very much alive arkady about those murder in ukraine was apparently staged to catch the people trying to kill him artie's. nisha ceci joined harvey in the studio earlier with the details just this morning we saw a lot of finger pointing headlines across the media blamed russia officials are quick to say that russia was the mastermind behind this operation but today's picture is now completely different there was clearly no murder as russia has been saying all along much to the confusion of everybody. is alive and well in fact he appears at a press conference together with the head of the ukrainian security services jointly they said that all this was done to foil some russian plot that was tipped

off a couple of months ago that someone wanted to kill him and that somebody is now in custody and house being arrested as well that being said though it will have to wait and see what kind of evidence if any that they have to prove that this was a plot at all as the reaction from moscow i presume because they have been big to be blamed for some involvement well russia is now in the standard fuel ria being falsely accused of killing journalist russian foreign ministry spokeswoman as well has said that it's great news is alive but the whole operation of some is somewhat of a propagandist nature she called the scituate situation a masquerade and we've also had some strong words from reporters without borders they called this whole stage operation pathetic and regrettable regardless of what motives kiev say they were pursuing they also say that it was very dangerous for a government to play with it but even if we look at the media reaction worldwide it

simply being one of confusion let's take a look what on earth is showing him so it is very much a developing story we're obviously still getting information but it definitely is a very very bizarre one and certainly the russians will be quite angry at the fact that they've been accused of killing this man but in reality he is very much still alive as we're seeing now becky who is. certainly. only agrees to the middle of the fake news conspiracists and didn't one of the twists is that cave in says that this was about falling as you said a russian plot to kill this journalist and it's not the first time is it that the russian government's in been accused of trying to knock off journalists a lot of journalists have been killed in ukraine recently over the years and in many cases fingers were quickly to be pointed at russia but it tends out that moscow didn't have anything to do with them let's take a look at a few of these examples.

so back to the current unexpected situation here and that with this latest bizarre twist now we're left questioning how much credibility we can actually put in camps words with a host of artesian going underground afshin rattansi things the way some media outlets covered by those fake deaths might undermine public trust in their reporting. it is at first sight bizarre i'm going to say journalists of course make mistakes i've made my share of mistakes but even in that clip from c.n.n.

which is our becky anderson the anchor there doesn't respond to the news that they've been reporting all day about a russian journalist death is being nonsense by saying we have to check a bit better in the way we do our journalism and the twitter lines of all the mainstream that so that famous phrase the so-called mainstream media saying russia is to blame for this how could they do this now they'll be people questioning their media whether they're going to be told the truth but certainly today's events are going to be they're going to be quoted for days months to come certainly during the world cup as a knee stories about russian involvement in murder in provocation in killing in who knows what else moscow is about to be accused of. well here's a quick recap of how the story unfolded from ati's online project in case you missed it.

now the e.u. budget commissioner going to has apologized for a t.v. interview in which he advised italians against voting for populist parties but also it's just my expectation is that the coming weeks will show that the markets government bonds and the economic development of italy could prove to be so drastic that this would be a possible signal for voters not to vote for populists and the left all right. as you have made those remarks after plans for a year or skeptic governing coalition were blocked by the president italian political uncertainty has shocked financial markets worried about italy's possible exit from the euro but one of the leaders of italy's failed coalition luigi de mio says that's why dave was never in that program. or you did at the markets are worried it's a big. leave the euro that's because someone has been saying this government wants to do it despite that never having been our plan. or won a euro skeptic of

a nation failed to form a government its leaders blamed pressure from the e.u. artie's peter oliver has more on the role brussels has played in italy's political turmoil. on sunday night when sergio matter relative italian president vetoed the proposal of a euro skeptic for the role of economy minister he essentially scrapped a coalition between the populists of the five star movement and leader nord but what he also did was he said essential center talian voters back to the polls he sent the markets crashing down and he sent accusations flying that the e.u. had put a bit of pressure on him to do just that well it also saw. the e.u. budget commissioner say that this down toilet this downturn in the markets was a message to italian voters for next time that if they vote with the euro skeptics then well they will see financial troubles on the horizon well mr has rode back

from those comments now but he was also criticized at the time by some of his closest allies donald the european council president and john claude young of the european commission president all saying this isn't the type of language you should be using as a member of the commission from the populist solve norden and the five star movement well they were outraged by mr ting his comment saying that he was the type of person that viewed italy as just a place to go on holiday or sensually these comments from to get they played right into the hands of the euro skeptics because they're now getting ready for new elections which could come as soon as september they can now say to their voters look we said last time they were trying to take your sovereignty away look what they did when we tried to put in place a government in italy so it was ultimately left to the european commission president to try and smooth things over between the populists and euro skeptics in

italy and the commission in brussels it's in his fate does not lie in the hands of the financial markets regardless of which political party may be in power it. as a founding member of the european union that has contributed immensely to european integration the commission is ready to work with italy with responsibility and mutual respect italy deserves respect as i said those elections in italy could come as soon as september and between now one polling day will show to be a lot of people keeping an eye on what comments are coming out of brussels with regards to which feet which direction italy should proceed in the future while the euro skeptic coalition failed to form a government after the italian president rejected their choice of finance minister he was seen as anti european the president then appointed a pro europe prime minister sergio math that earlier since granted italy's two populist leaders more time to form a government.