in zimbabwe for the results of the first election since a long time leader robert mugabe was ousted opposition supporters have gathered outside the electoral commission headquarters and quickly became agitated. so far only partial results have been released but the ruling zanu p.f. party is on course for a parliamentary majority amid claims of vote rigging and voter intimidation the e.u. observers have criticised the delay in declaring the final results and will give a further assessment later the presidential election result isn't yet declared either but unrest is feared if you've obviously accessor emerson. power the opposition m.d.c. alliance has already declared its candidate as the winner. millions were drawn to polling stations on monday turnout thought to be around seventy five percent to first time candidates are in a close race for the presidency after robert mugabe was deposed in a military coup last fall his former right hand man. took over and is being

challenged for the top job by nelson chamisa the electoral commission house until saturday to declare the result. let's bring in our own johnson who's an african affairs expert and founder of viewpoint africa welcome to the program now the ruling party is in line for a parliamentary majority is that an indication of whether god what will stay as president. well more than likely he would stay as president provided there's a difference between the parliamentary elections and the presidential one the parliamentary or showing that the zanu p.f. is already leading more than likely to achieve the two thirds majority to change all laws in that country should you wish and of course the presidential election is yet to be determined but more than likely from the scene what's happening in the parliamentary if that transcends in terms of the voter style of voting more than likely he will become the next president now there have been angry protests in the capital already as opposition supporters cry foul over the election process itself

if their candidate does not win how do you see those protests developing. well process already happening right now the pressures on the electoral commission is on the huge pressure to actually deliver the results quickly efficiently but again we're already seeing inconsistency is that have already been expressed by the observers on the ground not to mention the the political affiliates who are not in the who are like in d.c. who are actually saying clearly that as far as they're concerned these elections are rigged and they've been to many consistencies and they do not believe that they've got a fair shot especially when there's too much weight against them the media is heavyweight against them the political machinery is against them and they don't stand a chance in having a competitive race for these elections the boys of course been plagued by widespread poverty and ninety five percent unemployment it's struggled for many many years at this point do you think that either of these candidates have what it

takes to turn that around. poverty is a problem in zimbabwe again the economy hasn't worked for a long time so we have a fragile state and with many fragile state there fragility is always exposed do lection times and more so exposed there after in terms of bringing the economy back to roots but what's key here is that if it's true that men got what ends up winning these elections if it's true that the rule parts of the country of which the vast majority are have actually voted for them then they believe that the zanu p.f. would change their lives they believe that zanu p.f. would bring about the level of economic reform the problem is the west those negri if these elections are not certified by the electoral commission i'm not such a fide mosel by the observers more than likely the sanction the from the united states would not be lifted or likely to be a welcome back to the commonwealth of nations and i'm also the i.m.f. in terms of financing that's required for zimbabwe to get its economy back on track

will not happen so there are some huge challenges and huge repercussions for whoever wins. well speaking of the west will the results of this election change the relationship that the country has with the west. it all depends on who wins if . m.d.c. wins. then more than likely the west will be happy if they've got wins and it's deemed that there was some irregularities the question is if these level if the the west doesn't feel that they've had a fair shake in terms of these elections then they could keep the sanctions going they could keep some of the factions that have actually helped or prevented zimbabwe from developing on evolving and for its in growth to to happen and of course. left in a limbo so then bob think that these elections are pivotal this is a crossroads and the decisions that are made from there from now on the specially

that of the presidency be to mr to mr maher or mr. would determine whether the west would support their claim. johnson african affairs expert and founder of viewpoint africa thank you so much for your time. mario gotten that made headlines last month after being arrested in the u.s. on charges of acting as a russian agent in addition to allegedly working on behalf of the kremlin to interfere in u.s. politics it's also been claimed she was trying to lure american money to russia r.t. america has spoken to portugal for about the case the full interview will soon be available on the you tube channel. well i think if you read the indictment of the case he's alleged to be an agent over russia who failed to register with the attorney general and so essentially that means is they haven't charged with espionage and if you read the against or know the allegations or

anything spy like about it the sense of the government is conceding that even under their own theory it should fall the piece of paper with the attorney general's office at the beginning of her trip to america everything she did was legal and so my point is this is more of a registration type crime than a crime and yet the media and the government some extent are treating it like an espionage crime. well i mean i think that that allegation was particularly damaging to maria because it it makes it more like a spy novel and frankly easier for the public to digest and so editors and producers like those kind of allegations because it seems like this is more like the red sparrow and that is an allegation that was set forth in a proffer by the government meaning they did not produce evidence to back up that allegation at the time we're still waiting to see that and we're not sure it exists or that exists in any meaningful form in the interim it's very hard to see your

client kind of dragged through the mud like this while been trying to push back on that we're back after a short break. most of the people in the last month or so it's very loosely that. we were in number one in this room. all day it's clear insists all of those similar lives were still massive growth as. something you would not outsource that. you know world of big partners through a lot of things and conspiracy it's time to wake up to dig deeper to hit the stories that mainstream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door on the back and shouting past each other it's

time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the troops the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks. welcome back twitter has issued a twelve hour suspension to austin peterson a republican candidate in the u.s. state of missouri senate race for what it describes as abusive behavior his suspension came after a writer for the left leaning share blue website drooling between petersen's acceptance of bitcoin for campaign financing and the alleged russian hacking of a democratic senator peterson then responded with a gif featuring joseph stalin the post was deemed to have violated twitter's rules

but the image was actually from its own collection and can be found on the platforms database peterson joins us live now to discuss what happened welcome to the program now first of all has your account been on blocked at this point. yes it was a temporary ban of twelve hours which doesn't sound like like much until you consider the fact that we are now six days away from a very critical senate primary race and twelve hours is a long time when you only have six days to be able to get your message out to voters twitter is directly interfering with the election here in the state of missouri at the behest of a democratic super pac that is working for my opponent claire mccaskill here in missouri they are trying to tie me into a narrative that is that would see me as someone who is colluding with russia an order to facilitate an attack on my democratic opponent which is bald faced egregious lie and frankly i think that this just serves to continue the narrative

that twitter suppresses conservative and libertarian voices from being able to get their message out because they have a bias and it's deeply disturbing and a threat to american democracy that twitter said that you were engaged in targeted harassment how would you respond to that and was there anything else besides the image that could have triggered the suspension of the political correct police are out in full force at all times as my good friend ben carson might say at one point but the fact of the matter is is that this was a simple response jeff that was a joke to someone i was actually claiming that they were the stalinist and it is quite ironic because their whole tactic they were attacking me my response was a was a picture of joseph stalin which was meant to be humorous saying off the gulag and then of course they mass reported me and at first the twitter send me e-mail messages saying that i had not violated any terms of service and that i had not even committed a crime i have those emails but still two days later

a ban was issued saying that i had threatened that there was a credible threat of violence as if i have access to a gulag here in the state of missouri that i could that could be a credible threat it's absolutely ridiculous and again this just goes to show that the social media john. i am who have banned me before facebook they had to me before twice during this election twitter has now done it once and frankly i think that this is a suppression of the speech of political candidates and it is something that could be actionable because there have there was a. a representative in the in the state of florida who had the same thing happen to him he was shadow banned on twitter and he issued as an f.e.c. complaint basically that this amounts to an illegal campaign contribution to my opponents something that we're looking into now twitter of course also hasn't removed the gifts since then so presumably it doesn't consider it to be offensive so do you think this really is direct interference and not some sort of mistake no

i do not see this as in the state whatsoever simply because i had received those messages from twitter that i had not done anything wrong three different e-mails were sent to me about this saying that i had not done anything wrong mysteriously two days later the band was issued it almost seems as if something had gone on behind the scenes and that this was this was an attempt to suppress my speech during a critical election i do believe that this is interference by the social media networks to influence the outcome when i was banned from facebook before after we had done some digging we actually found out that facebook's chief operating officer sheryl sandberg had been contributing the maximum to my opponent claire mccaskill in the saloon election so they were banning me and they were funding my opponent it's a very sincere threat and something that americans must pay scale and people overseas should pay close attention to mr peterson if you can stay on the line we'll be back with you in just one moment short mr peterson's ban comes as twitter brings

together a special research team to come back prejudice and promote what it defines as collective help and openness on its platform but the plan seems to be causing upset with the assembled team already being accused of a strong anti trump bias. something tells me you will suddenly start seeing more republicans in congress testing the waters and pushing back against trump you know because they're brave independent actors and all. trump when you can trump donald. trump's twenty sixteen digital team in cambridge analytic or help the russians figure out who to target in their fake news campaign on facebook. the team will work on algorithms that root out incivility and intolerance on twitter and excel access the extent to which people engage with different viewpoints. i can talk again now to austin peterson now of course theoretically it's unknowable i'm

jack to try and clean up twitter but what do you make of how the site's going about achieving that well it strikes me as very interesting that a platform such as twitter would allow things like hard core pornography on their platform and yet somehow be offended by a photo of an old soviet leader to me i think that this speaks to the new desperation of the left they are committed to taking down donald trump conservatives the republican party as well as libertarians they do not care much for free speech they seek to blot out speech that they disagree with and they're willing to use the weapon of social networks they have weaponized social networks with the extreme russo phobia that we are seeing from democrats right now it's very likely that many people who believed that were correct may have correctly believe that if hillary clinton had been president of united states right now we could very easily be at war with russia the hawkish militaristic behavior of the democratic party today shows that they are very content to silence speech that they disagree

with and to use any tactic that they can to shut down debate because they've lost the policy argument and now they're litigating this is why we see these investigations into president trump many people complain about the president attitude but i believe he's been under investigation nearly the entire time that he has been president of the united states i'd be a little grouchy too but like i said it seems as if the democrats are seeing red it reeks of mccarthyism and it has no business in american politics today and what do you make of the team being created should it possibly be openly sourced from a wide poll of academics to ensure it's free of bias. i mean i'm not quite sure what twitter plans to do but what i've seen is that there apparently have been has been an organization chart that has shown the biases of the people who are there to confront biases of course everyone has a bias if you're a journalist and you decide what story to cover you may cover that story faithfully but you have a bias just by choosing which story to cover facebook did this it experimented with

stories that were curated that were supposed to be top stories that we're trending and of course that curation itself lent itself to a bias towards the left and they silence conservatives when conservative stories were trending on that platform i would expect to see the exact same thing from twitter which does have a very noted open and liberal biases but i don't trust the social networks any more than i trust the mainstream media i seek out alternative news sources in order to determine what is right and what is wrong and and of course use you're trying to put your confirmation bias is aside to try to determine what is factual and what is not when if as you say bias is unavoidable what do you make of twitter saying that they're working toward serving a healthy conversation is that even achievable with over three hundred million users you know all on their platform right now. frankly i would say that the answer is no i tend to believe that free speech we don't have free speech in the united states in order to be able to discuss the whether we have free speech in the united

states that we can discuss very controversial things i don't mind if a social media network has a bias i assume a bias but what i prefer is transparency about that bias for example ben shapiro an order noted conservative pundit here in the united states comes out frequently and states that he is open and honest about his biases so that people can understand where he's coming from i frankly find that kind of terrence parents a refreshing i don't expect to see that kind of transparency from twitter or facebook or any of the other social media giants but if they did want to be intellectually honest that is the approach that they should take. austin peterson republican senate candidate in missouri thank you so much for your time and joining us on the program tonight thank you for once that's our wrap up of the day's top headlines for now but in the meantime you can find us on all of your favorite social media platforms for up to the minute reports thanks for tuning in.

russia is one of the countries that most buy capacity in all the very high population does that mean russia does need to be concerned about sustainability i would say yes absolutely you are no lock a situation where you have a lot of farm per person so to say you know you have a lot of wealth ecological wealth and but the word is very scarce so that's a huge economic advantage as well and saying wow this is an amazing farm let's look after it well because that's said that book made a loss to live well the long run. it wouldn't make us manufacture consent to public wealth. when the closest project themselves. with the famous merry go round this doesn't mean that one person. we can

all middle of the room sit. in the real news room. that. means if.

it's in the december morning and i'm on a bus headed down south from chinatown new york there breathless driver speeds up on the ice who really it's i'm traveling across the states in a snowstorm because of a book. written over dishpan of twenty years back and forth from the mining area some eastern kentucky the book by italians called our place. is a monumental collection of moral history it tells the struggle of the words built around mining of coal when any grants were to come to the area to work well paid but often has faded jobs the book tells the story of harlan county that's where i'm going. to marry. this repast. own.

land. i'm headed to the deep the mary kom of this book i want to see what's left of the. three years since his first visit now that the us is shifting to major and gas and coal mines for shutting down one after another i do not expect to find a lively city when i drive into the heart of i find a ghost of a city where people are stuck like car turns from black and white picture their

stories and their. have not changed much from those recorded by pushed fields research and today are leading me in this journey round. world. with. well we really don't know what he'll be. back would have been in thirty. plus at least two it would be. worth. no ma'am. but i am proud way from their place now it's. like oh it appalachian man but.

appalachian eating. its. prime are summer fall. are shallow. i got married when. i was sixteen years old and my husband was seventeen years old and lead me in myriad about six months then he went into the mountains and then six months after that down and i went to court next thing. i had two week old son. lady who lived down the street here only. killed. vertebra you know what it

really. oh no. where else could a company wanted to hold real that's georgia said also that cole ready for the christmas they wanted him there and we. shot the whole deal but done it was done by a dad that walt. wrote killed him if. they know it much. to three boats that look at it one through still in the back field and. not even fit to see. robert.

i find remnants of the mining history all over memories of the casualties in the hard labor are alive in the stories told by the young and the like they're not had for the glory of collective struggle and hard work paid off. speaking to the local scene dusty barson saloons he conceded their life was and still is mine mine is harder now. relief their collective legend and whether played a part where said when private sector survived the war it disappearing before day i ask for the rose parade rest. in their stride granted a bit of a work first reraises gone she'll but they first come in six of them at minus grove so. it was work and i got there as my grandpa grandma

a six awful sweater. that made it rain you. will. go. in every lady made home a and at it. he always had peace because you know now we face the life that you'll say you. are going through. you won't want to hear that there's no water in the mine and soon you would have to drag through longer it would get it over your knees and. the horses would have to pull through the opponent's

mouna and then they would be laid to bow foliage for tracks sometimes when they'd run outrank people here named were you know anywhere. there's nothing for him to day and there have been all the young papers the turning to see after this and. if it were some one would have to stay and said. a our government would get interested in this place this part of kentucky i think we. could make it but if they don't there that i never die. out for dos in this say you know that.

mr palmer. eight point seven debbie emptied into downtown weisberg this is johnson brain needs an arcade until ten o'clock tonight so i'm talking with some of the best music of two thousand and thirteen right now playing the song but all.

is holding its own groove. in one thousand nine hundred i was the first the woman to work in this one particular mine and my job was what they called the belt boy and then they started calling me the belt person because i was a female so when i would go underground everybody would be kind of gathered to see this one. when coming out of the mines you know and then i remember my face would be all black with the coal dust and i was a little bit vain so i would have a handkerchief and i would wipe my face off before i would come outside so it would be all clean. so that it but the guys would always be looking for me to come out because it was just so amazing i guess to them to see a woman working in the mines molding it's all true.

for manalo no. i remember when i was in high school i loved earth science i love the mountains of anything to do with rocks and my earth science teacher back then said there's going to be eight hundred years of coal and when he said that that's when things were good you know where everybody was working like the guys that worked in the mines they always had nice cars like the camaro i remember thinking when i was younger that if anything ever happened to coal mines here and that it would become a ghost town but i never thought in a million years i would see that and it's happened it's happened.