mood. when i was a child's seemed wrong when all the rules just all. the world is yet to shape our disdain you can't get educated and engagement equals betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground.

this is the one business show you can't afford to miss friendship or in washington here's what we have coming up the united kingdom is taking a pioneering new step in the fight against kobe as the nation will be the 1st to test mix vaccine doses we break down the revolutionary new movement where the globe stands in the fight against the pandemic so this comes as the treasury secretary janet yellen has claimed she wants to quote understand deeply the game stop trading dustup at the united states top economic leaders meet to discuss the recent developments and later major tech firms in the u.s. are feeling the heat as leading congressional figures are unveiling legislation to take on the new wage giants we're going to break it all down for you with a packed show today so let's dive right in.

and we leave the program in the united kingdom as the nation attempts to make its backs a nation efforts more versatile now the country is launching a new trial to explore whether using different coben 1000 vaccines for the 1st and 2nd doses will show strong efficacy the trials will be led by oxford university and run by the national immunization schedule of valuation consortium now the 1st trials that will involve more than $800.00 volunteers above the age of 50 and test effectiveness of 4 combinations of 1st and 2nd shots of the astra zeneca oxford university vaccine and the fires are biotech vaccine results of the trials are not actually expected until june or july on thursday u.k. minister for coping 1000 vaccine deployment that. the how we promised this would not affect the current vaccine rollout and spoke about the work done to make sure vaccines would protect against the roughly $4000.00 variants of the virus all monies that she has a biotech. and dollars are looking at how the.

vaccine to make sure that we are ready and a very robust force 1000 barriers around well. now and will keep me alive all the bearings we're ready to be able to. all be on. charlie bars me and. so with this in mind let's take a look at the state of the vaccine rollout as well as the trends and spread of the virus with r.t. correspondent saya tavenner so where are we thursday so brand here in the u.s. since vaccination have started which obviously hasn't been long about $27000000.00 people have received at least one dose of the coven $1000.00 vaccine including about a $6000000.00 people have been fully vaccinated now some states are obviously doing better than others for example west virginia their lead in the country with

a 4 percent of their population fully vaccinated followed by alaska a 3.8 percent and north and south the quota at 3.6 percent it's now health officials are administering about $1300000.00 doses per day and that's on average an hour while president by then he has promised to administer $100000000.00 vaccines by is 100th day in office and to achieve that the u.s. would have to administer 1000000 shots a day which they appear to be on track right and now you know taking a look at the number there obviously nowhere near. clear there is nearly 450000 deaths just in the u.s. over $2200000.00 around the world and don't forget we're also at the deadliest point of the pandemic while health officials there are warning that it's going to even get

a lot worse with the new variants emerging but still president biden has promised some sort of normal a see a big part of that being to get people back into the crowd classroom students and teachers but here is the problem with teachers are right now categorized as essential workers under the c.d.c. vaccination plan but states they're still allowed to categorize the vaccine distribution as they see fit so vaccinating teachers remains one of the biggest hurdles to returning kids and teachers back to the classroom right now 24 states 24 states they're providing vaccines to some teachers though some of those states now they only consider teachers eligible for the vaccine under certain conditions for example again in west virginia teachers are eligible for vaccine only if they are age 50 and older then there is a. limited number of teachers are allowed to get the shots if they have specific

medical conditions and in states like texas and florida officials they have ordered school syria open for in person learning but teachers are not yet eligible for the vaccine yet both states you know they also have the worst of the outbreak right now brant you know how it feels being actually divvied up around the world right now so max and nations they have fast tracked in wealthy countries but it seems you know poor countries they're being left behind right now the makers of the 3 main vaccines that have the most widespread distribution that being astra zeneca pfizer an estimated total production. capacity of $5300000000.00 doses for this year 2021 which would cover about $3000000000.00 people now this spud negri vaccine could cover another $500000000.00 people outside of russia and now these other a 6 vaccine candidates if they're included there's

a total of $10000000000.00 doses of the vaccine that's going to be available this year but it's also very important to mention that they're all at capacity so we're talking about 10000000000 max but most of this capacity that we have this 10000000000 doses is already spoken for by these countries the is this leaves a very short supply left the low and middle income countries and most of these poor countries they are relying on a program called kovacs that's an organization that provides vaccines for low income countries that under kovacs countries will receive doses in proportion to their population size was most going to india pakistan indonesia and brazil now the 1st of this aid in the form of vaccine is right now going to north korea where they will receive about 2000000 doses in yet in january in north korea they once again claim that they have 0 coded and 19 cases.

another one in this group is going to be iran that they're also set to get about a 1000000 doses brant or 2 correspondents are actually reporting as always thank you so much for keeping us up to date. and there is another legal settlement in the opioid crisis which is taking the lives of more than 4 100000 people in the united states since 1990 felting for mckinsey and company will pay out at least $573000000.00 to do its work advising oxycontin maker producer and other drug makers to market the painkillers that the deal allows and can be to avoid civil lawsuits that could be brought against the company the majority of the settlement made with more than 40 states will be paid right away while the rest will be doled out in 4 year lease payments beginning next year this is the 1st nationwide settlement made amid the opioid crisis as some companies have reached deals with individual states to avoid trial

a $26000000000.00 settlement with 3 distributors and johnson and johnson has been negotiated for more than a year but no final deal has been announced. and a follow up to a story we did wednesday u.s. treasury secretary janet yellen said thursday that she and financial regulators need to work to quote deeply understand what happened with the red if you will game stop surge before she is ready to take action yellen told a.b.c.'s good morning america hater america regulators really need to make sure that our financial markets and functioning are functioning properly efficiently and that investors are protected thursday morning yellen met with officials at the securities and exchange commission the federal reserve the new york fed and the commodities futures trading commission to discuss the situation at time of broadcast no further information about the meetings was available but let's dig into him for more details on this let's bring in tobin smith c.e.o. of transformative research and october and the c.e.o. of optimists l.l.c.

thank you both so much for being here tobin i want to start with you here the treasury secretary was covering bases today while on good morning america when she said she wanted to quote deeply understand what exactly happened here but it certainly feels like this all happened right in front of our eyes did it not i would imagine. you tobin you're very smart man you understand it so in your opinion the regulators actually need to address what happened with game stop. this is the 1st short squeeze that ever happened are you kidding me i mean it's a function of the business number one number 2 if we were like almost every other developed country and had our stock exchange you know on that internet thing so when you buy a stock and sell a stock it closes automatically almost all countries have that we have 2 days to clear what happened was was you got all the you know these new read it. in buying everything they were buying they were selling so when you when when when you

buy something you have to show up a cash to the clearing agent when you're selling something it's presumed you're going to get the cash so they could balance it out what happened was is all all they had was buy orders they had no sell orders and they ran out of cash as a deposit so that that could have been fixed but beyond that brett you know you're too young to remember this but we used to have the same called the uptick in downtick rule in the stock market which meant that you can't short a stock if it's going down you know that's like football that's like piling on if we reinstated the uptick rule then we would take a lot of this volatility out and both parties here are acting like like this is the 1st time it's ever happened you could me i mean come on it's a 21st century and we're still use and you know like guys driving their bikes through wall street and handing out stock show it octavio i mean this whole saga has been cast as retail investors would be in and sticking it to wall street but

the wall street journal actually published a story when they tell the story of sun best management hedge fund which had bought game stock back in september and made nearly $700000000.00 profit after the surge so we clearly see this hasn't been all bad for hedge funds was it octavio. well not all of this is some hedge funds have long positions in the stock and so said miss was not by any stretch of imagination the biggest one so you had some like. ventures for example had a much much bigger position when the stock reached that point in terms price which almost such $500.00. mentions had a valuation for that position $4700000000.00 now i don't know if it had liquidated i doubt i think they held onto it but nevertheless they saw their stock price and that absolutely through the roof blackrock is another asset manager who had a very large position in game stop and so they did very very well as well and i don't know whether they liquidate that position at exactly the right time but i think a lot of these already it's river lucian areas who are taking on the big evil hedge

funds for now scratching their heads and saying did we really want to enrich people at blackrock that was really what we were trying to do and i doubt many of these retail investors made much money with this i mean some certainly did go in early enough and out soon enough but i doubt many of them are such skillful traders that they have read the market that well in terms of when things are going to go up and down so some of them made money some lost money and there's a bunch of hedge funds who made off like bandits out of this so i think they must sort of be saying to themselves well is that really what we want to have happen not quite so they scored a bit of known own gold to put in and really we haven't seen a lot of stories about their relatives who spent maybe thousands of dollars and bought high and lost it all so we haven't seen that yet where they're complaining about that but i'm sure as you just mentioned that have to be the case but i want to move on to the recovery here jobless claims total $779000.00 or $77.00 not a $707.00 i have but i wasn't for the week end of january 30th

a drop of about $33000.00 from the previous week and well below estimates from dow jones in fact jobless claims for the week were at their lowest level since late november if this is a sign that we're trending in the right direction how much does further stimulus actually affect this recovery. or i will too question number one we are trending finally and it's because of vaccines it's because it is you know winter there's things that have helped but the vaccine in the vaccination rate is almost 100 percent correlated with job recovery so you want more jobs you get more vaccines. you know on the recovery i'm sorry your other question was about the stimulus does the stimulus actually really going to affect this recovery moving forward yeah well 2 things about 40 percent of people households live in poverty or in working poverty working poverty meaning that they can't pay all $10.00 bills every month it is going to help them it's sort of insane that my aunt is going to get

a $2800.00 check because her income is relatively low because she's in a $10000000.00 mansion and so you know biden i think is got to come up with a way to say guys let's just not make this all about free money because from the politics of it free money is the greatest politics in the history of the planet and it it makes no economic sense from the other hand which is that we're now saving brigid you ever think you'd say that the united states has a 12 percent savings rate of household income we have 3 and a half trillion dollars of cash sitting in checking accounts that people didn't spend so this idea that somehow you're going to run out and buy a porsche or $2400.00 it doesn't hold water and we also have about $11.00 trillion dollars that hasn't been spent from the last one so come on it actively on if they were covered before we end here. with actually talk about the toll the pandemic has taken on the oil industry and we saw that this week at some

majors have really taken hits in earnings but thursday prices rose due to the falling us in the tories and opec plus continuing production cuts what is your outlook for oil at this point. well i mean the price of oil has basically sort of recovered to pre-code levels at least in terms of price but that's come with big production cuts so opec has been carefully sort of fine tuning its monthly meetings that they have now what exactly production targets should be and it seems that the producing countries are large and here in so you've seen a fairly large reduction in a now puts in sort of the supply of oil we've also of course in a big reduction in the demand for oil i think what we're seeing now is that factored into the price is sort of an assumption that things are going to get back to normal relatively quickly so we will start to see people travel again you see the airlines pick up again and things are sort that seems to be baked into the forecast in terms of oil prices that we're seeing at the moment and of course that assumes the vaccines are going to work and they going to be rolled out and

everyone's going to go back to living their lives away before and we've had some disappointments and reversals on the way so i would say the balance of the risks look at the downside for oil over the coming months as we sort of get this rocky road banks recovery tolbert where the transformer research and active you are and the of up with elfie thank you both for your time today. and time now for a quick break but hang here because when we return major tech firms are back in the crosshairs of u.s. lawmakers if you trust part oh those have been unveiled just ahead we're going to break down the latest as we go to break here the numbers of the close.

look at the believe the case near the city really can show. you just be suitably. flat with that i suppose you notice that's there something that. you know numbers could be in a bull episodes didn't you go to see you she's. doing your force well you could be near mushed on this today if not thoughts about spirit i pity you a bus more than 6 pm in 10 you know. if de gea clue. shows to ski schulman's for you to post the a 2 foot by 6 to move. the story keep lists to they were but it.

wasn't under make notes you know borders just to nationalities. so much we talked about seriously we took the backseat to pete's sake. 2 commentary this is the sentence. we can do better and we should. everyone is contributing. but we also know that this crisis will not go on forever the challenges created with the response has been so many good people are helping us. it makes us feel very proud that we are in it together . industry comes to life in los angeles every night. dozens of women sells abilities

on the street many of them under-age. police reveal a taste of the daily challenge if you're going to exploit a child here in los angeles they were going to come as you see offices going undercover as 6 workers enter customers to fight 6 trade. their welcome back sen amy close but shar has unveiled sweeping new ethics trust legislation that would significantly raise the risk for companies like facebook and google club which are who is now the chair of the senate judiciary subcommittee has proposed the competition and law enforcement reform act which would make major changes to the law granting enforcement agencies more powers to impose bigger fines

and shifting the burden of proof for companies over mergers here to break it all down it's the us coast investigative journalist ben swan ben what kind of fines are we actually talking about for these companies and how would they actually be enforced. yes so the fines are pretty significant in terms of upping the value here you know you and i talk about this all the time or that that's part of what's been built into these tech companies and their bottom line as in doing business is to say well we know we're going to be painful because we're going to break the law that's the way they do it and so they build that into their cost of doing business so right now the maximum fine that a tech company can face is $100000000.00 that is the current max for any kind of a trust by elation what senator coburn char's bill would essentially do is increase that amount to 15 percent of the gross annual revenue of a company so just do some math they call it if you think about the fact that facebook has what $70000000000.00 'd what they did in 2018 if you take that and you

say well 15 percent of that in the year that's a $1000000000.00 so if per infraction you can jump from $100000000.00 to a $1000000000.00 there's a significant increase there where you definitely have to make them feel the pain if you want to stop people from breaking the law that's for sure now there's also a collision in the bill regarding the acquisition of smaller companies why is that in there and what would the changes actually be. yes ok bill things here the idea here is that you know companies like facebook and apple and google what they do is they just gobble up smaller companies and obviously there are a lot of tech companies that are being built for the purpose of acquisitions let's be clear about that it's not as if all these companies are somehow helpless they want to be acquired in fact for a lot of tech startups that is also in their game plan they launch their start up with a plan of what is our exit strategy and how do we get acquired but in this case what makes it a little bit different is that if you think about for instance remember facebook and instagram there's a whole conversation about the fact that when facebook 1st approached instagram

back in 2013 instagram's owner said later on in front of congress that he believed that if he did not sell to facebook essentially facebook would would crush them and that's how he felt at the time that's why he went ahead and sold instagram that's what he claimed anyways so the idea here is not that the government needs to do the legwork of trying to figure out whether or not this acquisition is good but that instead the companies when they try to merge or acquire a company have to show proof to the government in advance that this is not something that's been forced upon the company and that they're not also buying them up just to show for the company in order to eliminate competition well as evilly as you say when you talk about companies gobbling up these small little tech companies like you may not know siri was actually a small company created that for the purpose of basically selling it to a tech giant they sold it to apple and it's on every phone that apple sells now same with google's deep mind ai those are all things that were developed dependently and bought by the larger companies now this bill also actually calls for authorizing $300000000.00 increases to the annual budgets of the department of

justice and to trust a vision and the federal trade commission which in force antitrust laws how much of an impact is that big budgetary increase going to be. if you look at it it's going to make some impact obviously when you move $300000000.00 into any agency that obviously their main focus would be you would think on tech companies it doesn't guarantee that it would be but you would think it would be there something interesting go to the siri story that you told a minute ago and that's an important story but there's another caviar to that which is that when apple 1st bought up the company that created siri they actually didn't buy them to use the technology they actually bought it because they saw serious a threat and they shelved siri for several years until one of their workers found it and said hey this might actually be good to include it in the phone and that's the other part of these big tech companies like google and facebook and apple and amazon that a lot of people aren't aware of is that one part of the strategy is to acquire companies to use them there is another strategy where you buy of companies and you shelve them so that they do not become potential competitors in the future or your

potential competitors don't use that new technology you actually sit on the technology so in theory you know adding $300000000.00 to enforcement helps to find some of that the question is will they bust cosen investigative journalist ben so i will definitely keep up on this you know how much we love talking about it thank you so much for breaking it all the other. well with a new space race heating up at a weight of rocket launches being rolled out have we entered the new age of privatized space travel well our teens john heidi takes a look at the evolving sector where billionaires are fighting for control of the stars and he files this report. if you want. it started off well enough the starship asinine an early prototype for a rocket space experts carried the 1st humans to mars when they seem to be on track

for it to transport it climb to about 6 and a half miles before then turning and rotating and then falling back down to earth crash landing in a fiery informatic in space explain the problem on a rocket engine malfunction the f.a.a. says it will investigate the crash and has ordered space x. to halt operations and is testing facilities in south texas while regrettable the mishap is unlikely though to have a major impact on space x.'s partnership with nasa when space x. joins forces with nasa it changed the lunar landscape proving that public private space partnerships are not only possible but viable with space x. sending the 1st 2 astronauts aboard the dragon rocket to the international space station last year elon musk announced recently also that he plans to send the 1st civilians to space by the end of the year at amazon's blue origin and virgin galactic into this cosmic business blender and you have

a nice hot space to have healthy competition and on that note the space race is heating up between jeff bezos ilan musk squabbling with the federal communications commission and each other for that matter over their company's respective satellites love to verify you have something behind me here to allow space x. to lower its darla. satellites in orbit a modification that amazon has objected to saying that would interfere when amazon's planned project hyper and amazon's more than $3000.00 found alights perhaps a foreshadowing of the fight to come with billionaires bustling over space in a showdown that will be written in the stars. reporting from john how do you know that's it for this time you can catch a boom bust on demand on the brand new portable t.v. app which is available on smartphones or tablets or google play in the apple app store by searching portable t.v. you can also be downloaded on newer models samsung smart t.v.'s as well as roku devices or simply check it out at portable t.v.

. joining me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then.

that was when i learned how to love them out of love that i'm not out of the mouth of the money that they let examine. this was a good time to. try to move. mom. knows that i wasn't going to have enough money not why not. all people we believe just a little bit here. a lot of my kids i don't want them up with johnny who are the other moment i thought a mother having a little accuser is a little odd i'm a little white community old enough to want the pimp i don't want to put out a lot more how do i know the mother bludgeoning.

her headline stories this hour brush it spells diplomats from germany poland and sweden for their alleged attendance authorized rallies in support of jailed opposition activists alexina from. its mobile rolo. corona virus vaccine continues because a run receives its 1st. still fighting for justice the current summer british teenager killed in a road accident involving a u.s. woman. after a court was told she was working for an american intelligence revelation that could impact her claim to diplomatic immunity. we need to find out some more information about her status and how.