the 31-year-old faces 20 years behind bars on espionage charges which he and his employer have vehemently denied. clare sebastian is joining us live with more. if we look at the trend of americans who are held in russia, was this an inevitable outcome for this hearing? reporter: i mean, i think, yeah, the hearing was basically a formality at this point. he had already had his pretrial extension in may. so the fact that they did it again was hardly a surprise especially given the worsening relations with the united states and given the fact that of course the elephant in the room is that evan gershovich is potentially a high value swap for russia in terms of a prisoner swap. it is clear now that there is a long road ahead for evan gershovich. this detention now stretches to november 30th, it could be extended beyond that. both paul whelan and trevor reid spent more than a year in pretrial detention.
that this is potentially a high value swap for russia. we don t know anything about that yet. but as for the evan gershovich case, we know from precedent that russia wants to tend to wait until a trial is over to show that they are going through the legal process before they do any kind of swap and we don t even have a trial date. clare sebastian, thank you. donald trump may have skipped the first primary debate, but eight of his rivals were there hoping for a standout moment on stage. we ll have the highlights. plus treated radioactive waste water from fukushima is now being released into the ocean, a controversial move that has drawn protests in the region. we ll have a live report from tokyo. and also ahead the climate crisis is fueling wildfires in canada, europe and other parts of the world. details later.