oh. the world in turmoil as everyone awaits the next move in libya why is there a blind eye turned that a brain and what exactly makes your dog be so different from the rest we'll take a look at america's foreign policy how pulses from now are so stated with a policy. and japan on the brink of a chair noble like catastrophe isn't really possible to prevent a full scale nuclear disaster with so few resources. and while libya and japan are in turmoil president obama head south to a more stable and growing region of latin america the crude this now be

a game of catch up. it's friday march eighteenth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for zone you're watching our team i want to start now with the situation in libya or much of the rest of the world has come forward with its reaction as we told you yesterday the united nations approved a resolution to impose a no fly zone there with britain and france taking the lead in the plans we did hear from president obama earlier today who said the united states would not supply ground troops into libya and would not use force to go beyond a well defined goal specifically the protection of civilians in libya. and may just be me about protecting civilians has in the past meant using force. anyhow moammar gadhafi has also said that he's calling for a ceasefire but it's unclear what that actually means as reports of violence there

to new start with an inside look from our policy or certainly hearing that rebels feel it's a little more than a contradiction they simply do not believe the gadhafi regime they say that they will not heed this ceasefire call they point to the fact that clashes still continue in the east of the west of the country we know that in the town of misrata which is some two hundred kilometers from benghazi which is a rebel stronghold there were receiving reports of people who have been killed among them children clashes that also continue in the town of ajdabiya which is a little bit closer to benghazi we've heard unconfirmed reports that there had been two explosions outside the capital city of tripoli are now in the foreign minister was certainly surprised the international community mr mousavi who so when he did that libya would be implementing a cease fire immediately he said that they would be the station of all military activities he said that the government had a responsibility to protect humanitarian assistance to provide humanitarian assistance to protect human life to provide protection to foreign assets and

foreign citizens he also called a full open dialogue now the international community particularly the e.u. is struggling to make sense of what the libyan foreign minister meant and what the position of the gadhafi government is you need to remember that it is less than twenty four hours ago that gadhafi some say called islam say that one of this would be over within forty eight hours and he said he was alluding to move violence and more protests and more military action on the ground we hearing from france that they are remain i think we're hearing from london that he needs to be judged by his actions and not by his words and we're hearing from the u.s. secretary of state hillary clinton that the international community is still going to go ahead with input implementing this no fly zone but she too saying that only then can get there to be judged in terms of like his real motives are the rebels who really do support the call for a no fly zone even but. they are particularly cautious and they are against that no fly zone being enlarged to mean something more the question being asked is if you

no fly zone does not work if indeed a no fly zone is not able to stop the gadhafi regime from punting come continuing with these military activities what will be the next step then experts have been banking the question of when exactly will this no fly zone be implemented we still have no timeframe how long will it continue for what if all of libya who exactly will be involved and who will have the chain of command now we are hearing parallels being made with the situation in the operations in iraq and afghanistan here to the core is the civilians to be taken care of but as we saw in iraq in afghanistan a lot of innocent people died and as we've heard from germany which was one of the countries to abstain from voting on this u.n. resolution they say it carries considerable dangers and risks the same caution was voiced by the russian ambassador to the united nations russia of course another country who abstained from that u.n.

resolution problem it was a national missile range of questions raised by the russian federation and other security council members remained unanswered questions which were both concrete and legitimate questions regarding how we're going to fly some of the before used and the rules of engagement and limits to the use of force provisions were introduced into the text potentially opening the door to scale military intervention responsibility for the inevitable humanitarian consequences of the excessive use of outside force in libya fair and square on the shoulder you might undertake such actions if this happens then the civilian population is. holding peace and security throughout the whole region because. there's a need to avoid such destabilizing. so that does raise concerns back to the question of where exactly all this no fly zone and many unanswered questions many fears. a lot of concern and certainly a feeling i'm certain to hear in libya that was hard to correspond policy we're

reporting from tripoli libya president obama spoke about this matter in libya this afternoon and in no uncertain terms that if the donkey does not back down that the u.n. security council resolution will be enforced through military action here gadhafi is threat against rebel forces to try to make his case for a firm and just yesterday speaking of the city of benghazi. a city of roughly seven hundred thousand people he threatened hope we will have no mercy and no predicts no mercy on his own status so was going to president obama thinking bigger about this we've got to ask probably a run i get involved in other countries also in dire situation like yemen and bahrain well to help answer that question earlier i spoke with author and researcher adrian. first of all i think this is deja vu all over i mean i can

hardly believe my eyes and ears when i see that they are starting to do again in the balkans that they are threatening now i think almost exactly eight years ago against iraq over alleged weapons of mass destruction not even exists but it did cost one point three million iraqi lives so i think we have to be very careful as to the pursuit decision of the information those given by the western mainstream media regarding what is really happening in libya and of course we will not like some of those images but if britain work to fight against the ira or spain against the separatists p.t.a. group and they are going to take action would we be also threatening with the nato we will be already threatened to intervene in britain in spain or if washington state was the seat of the union in america would we be accusing obama of being violent because we wanted to stop it. i think it's really important that you brought up the situation in the balkans back in one thousand nine hundred nine the

nato approved deal that happened there were the situations i mean there are starting to be a lot of similarities we've got you know well down those of us back there we've got khadafi here there are two leaders that are. stubborn keeping their position and there's also this violence that's happening do you think similar outcome will happen here as then usually yes the similar outcome usually has to do with people having to be a little runt of all the violence from both sides whether it be nato or whether it be ongoing with g.m. but i would suggest to bring something new to the table that we have to see the overriding agenda of the global power it needs that i think are driving the decisions in london and in france and in space and in the united nations because what we've been seeing over the past three months in all of north africa and the better part of the middle of the middle east is an attack forward gene change and

this all has one thing in common by getting rid of the our friendly are not so friendly or even enemies of solitary and regina's friendly egypt i'm friendly in libya but they are doing it they are basically eroding the nation state which is built on the global power and needs agenda notably the trial commission the builders the council on foreign relations for at least forty years so the fact that they are eroding all these nation states even dragging libya into a veritable civil war is necessary and the fact that they are talking about american style democracy which is really basically both mechanism so subordinate to the money power i think we have to understand what the larger interests are and precisely they refer to the roshan of nation states libya and egypt being cases they won't even stop us from eugene it will even go on to saudi arabia and kuwait but adrian i don't understand here i mean here we are on live. a sovereign nation and they're not attacking anyone else what's happening is i think can be considered

internal affairs and it's always been sort of the establishment that outside states don't have a right to interfere with these internal affairs how is this being justified not anymore and it's not being justified because the global power elite is rocking localized stations as a stage in global development that is already done with and they are slowly enough so slowly ushering in world government and world government there will be no sovereign nations games so they either coming nicely or they come in violent libya in one of the war on unfriendly states they will be dragged into a civil war if need be it were to impose their position egypt is not able to give a little bit more my daughter was one of their boys so i think that we now have to understand the whole concept of sovereign nation state is under attack under question and the mainstream media are providing the russian now the excuse for them to do so legally because not legitimate i think another thing that we've heard time

and time again is that the humanitarian piece of the puzzle certainly president obama and some of these other countries have said you know we need to get involved because the people there the rebel forces the regular old civilians they are in danger their lives are in danger so we've got this humanitarian effort but we can't forget what we just saw with the drone attack on the afghan pakistan border i think in north waziristan forty one people killed by a u.s. led drone attack and we've got that and then we've got let's do a no fly zone in libya in the name of humanitarian aid which is that. it's called double standards when your friends do it it's ok when you do it it's ok when someone else does it it's not ok again eight years ago we were seeing the outright invasion of iraq the destruction of the act it cost one point five one point three actually million lives iraqi lives all based on solely false otherwise what is of mass destruction that were never found and nobody ever even says i'm sorry the same

goes for afghanistan the same goes for parts of pakistan the thing goes for palestine's perma be an attack by the silliest of us if they are our guys it's ok but probably when somebody else does these things it's not just global weather because the sea or uranian i thought all of us. but the thing is as always we use double standards then regrettably united nations and the mainstream western media our apologies to inflame to promote psychological warfare so that the bulk of global public opinion will assert the good guy bad guy rationale which only exists in world disney cartoons i think a lot of questions quite a lot of people have this question on their minds what exactly are we trying to achieve and do we have the resources to achieve it we'll keep an eye on the situation but and thanks so much author and researcher aid adrian's our duty he was joining us from brighton cyrus on our chaos of a different kind of chaos and devastation and increased fear in japan happening with the nuclear situation there now at this point about three hundred engineers

christine are working to restore power at the pumps and four of the reactors so the question is is it possible to prevent a turnover like nuclear disaster r.t. five or bennett is in japan and has more. right now they're still trying to reconnect power to the site so they can get those cooling systems up and running and bring the temperature down inside the reactor something about the only way they're now going to prevent what could be a real nuclear disaster they're now focusing on reactor number two because this morning a they actually saw smoke rising from the reactor they don't know what the cause was of that i don't think it was an explosion that wasn't heard clearly the temperature inside is very hot what they already managed to do was to lay a power cable from the main cause really a kilometer long cable to try and restore power but they haven't managed to connect that up yet the radiation is very high still and also the. casing of the reactor the containment vessel was badly damaged in the explosion that happened earlier

this week in the meantime the are trying everything they can to try and keep the temperature down to try to cool the reactors. off the first thought actually had explosions the earthquake for example yesterday at reactor number three they doused in sixty four tons of water from helicopters from above and water cannons from below and the early hours of this morning the tokyo fire department a sense of their fire engines are referring everything they've got at least the head of the u.n. nuclear watchdog the international atomic energy agency who's in tokyo right now meeting with the japanese prime minister he came out and said that to prevent this turning into a full scale nuclear disaster they are going to have to cooperate with the international help the government spokesman mr garneau the chief cabinet secretary has come out and said that although there are very high radiation readings in some places he said that it doesn't pose a direct negative effect to the one's health because in these places it's not

coming into direct human contact however a number of countries actually don't believe this and what they're doing is actually warning they're not to go within eighty kilometers of shima a nuclear power plant whereas the japanese government has imposed an exclusion zone of twenty clinton can. we're in a way yes the very top the coast a little bit from the east coast who was who we think i can't see what residence. this is the town of o r i around halfway between tokyo and fukushima i'm still a hundred fifty kilometers south of the nuclear power plant but already the radiation levels here over double that of those in tokyo the geiger counter i've got just started beeping wildly and shot up to no point five not receive it's per hour it's not harmful to one's health especially just yet but it is certainly a concern so much so that the army has started to hand out these face masks here that people are wearing. and we're very frayed on the radiation who can do no much

important can do the media and trust the government is saying. the tsunami did actually come in this far inland with the town escaped most of the damage however since the earthquake they've been without drinking water here in the residence of the can and fill up the water they need from points like this in the town have been set up by the army further up the coast it's a similar story we've been travelling along this road for the last ten fifteen kilometers looking for a place to have lunch but none of the restaurants are open. it will take another week until we can loop and we have electricity because we can't do anything without water. this is the start of japan's ravaged east coast norene life the other day every just life strewn all over the place here so walls collapsed over here thousands of fallen down such as the force of the tsunami this is also the point where we're going to turn back because it's like a county's reading the highest it has done all day one point zero four microsleep

it's played out in cotton wool my fear is that i won't be able to live here anymore and this is my home obviously i feel for my help with the radiation but it's not just that i'm afraid i will be able to come back here we're only around a hundred and twenty kilometers south of fukushima power plant now if the wind blows this way and even worse if the rain comes in the radiation will shortz arrive to inforce and that was our to correspond and i were bennett. well for more now on the nuclear disaster looming in japan helen caldicott joins us from montreal canada she's the author of this book nuclear power is not the answer . heather helen i wanted to get your take on exactly what's going on it seems that every new report every update we get out of japan from that nuclear plant there seems to get worse and worse what is your take on what's happening here. well i mean the excellence in the ways i mean just beginning but the problem with regret

when follows one aren't you know the words are on the road and the world for all very curly mccool's or three are infallible one has no rules and that means as for roads we dropped. the car the i'm climbing and parag will ignite mixing with their own name and that will allow the rug was pulled down for bottom how regular life and metals in general most on my i'm not really a really huge amount of radioactive material including is into the charges it would be carried by the wind. is that true or your times of old or so the god of wind and certainly those were working on that are really working day by day moment by moment really just trying to cool these reactors down but they're starting to come some solutions are proposed solutions for the future and i know one of them is

the idea of varying this nuclear plant and concrete and sand have you heard about this concerning it was a source i do but it didn't from the most enormous early radiation some notable the new york compiling a science has caused us to come up with a. sponsor the entire fossil papers in russian into english and october millions of people have already arrived. and that's the beginning braunstein most or all pharmacies thinking one thing never lasts this year the twenty miles from hostile million years i might buy or come to try to start or is this week in the thirty's shine for you then you are in line most when they're ready to act we will be one hundred. and referred growing there is right here right in there i don't know if we do. in truth. obviously based on the title of your book helen we know

your position on this but i know i think it was back in two thousand to a report came out by the united nations saying a lot of these things that happened these reserves we revolt of chernobyl were actually. over exaggerated what's your take on this i mean this is a u.n. report that says a lot of the drama that sort of came out of there wasn't true so you're in the have in the line there is not wholly allied with agreement between us now so it's alarming in this yard fence and the world health organization or in fact they sold the side that if there is a nuclear accident the property rights always have an organ that mother are not the i which you flee across a lot of them was murder huge and spiritual cover up a lot of which i have never ever seen in medical deeper hole. keeping with this connection to chernobyl i know that when that happened thousands upon thousands of people were brought in to help to deal with that crisis and it's

really interesting when you look what's happening in japan i think that numbers in the low hundreds why is so few resources and do you think that this will be able to i mean with so few people that there will even be a chance of making the situation better sarsgaard. so it might well for the people bizarrely there and so i mean you know like getting such huge solar radiation from under my mouth was little to use radiation elmer and i will be degrees in sort of we dying or we're throwing out goldman things and believing that we're there you we're even brought their frustration inside you brush your mommy in about i give minions the political liquidiser i might be hurt but i was with are not with rock around the king out here or in a bad hand you spread and run you are responsible for it and she will be the leader

of our brady. we've been maintenance brown and nuclear and their arms and legs. so much space. and so being a very. graceful sort of alien i know certainly not an optimistic outlook but we do thank you this is something that you've spent a lot of time researching and writing about helen caldicott author of nuclear power is not the answer and while thousands in japan struggle to stay warm after the massive earthquake and tsunami it's also a struggle right here in the u.s. a lot of people have felt this for years poor americans they've been forced to choose between heating their homes and putting food on their tables this as oil prices worldwide skyrocket but he didn't help is on the way from an unlikely place

that is well in president hugo chavez and this is causing quite a stir in washington are to scale and ford has more on the oil spat that's heating up on the hill. but the dorothy day house every day is about doing a lot with a little play this wednesday i'm cooking needed bastable bread salvaged from the trash can food donated at christmas that must last a year and feed twenty five formerly homeless families live under directly days roof sharing meals parenting support and heat up until three years ago heating oil was the shelters biggest expense looking at the thermostat was something ember mason dreaded ok wait a little longer do we have that many into it so expensive kathy boylan has lived and worked here for more than a decade helping homeless mothers have back on their feet with a budget of a thousand dollars per month and we try on a shoestring to this home for twenty people were at the moment functioning

so when citizens energy offered her free heating oil from venezuela she took it and that's how much we had to pay for three thousand and twenty dollars so it's more than you know one of three quarters of our our budget paid by so this innocent citizens energy is a nonprofit chaired by joe kennedy for six years it's distributed donated venezuela heating oil to the poor in twenty five u.s. states and your help is on the way heating oil of course. raised then where but after a diplomatic freeze that sent venezuela's ambassador packing two months ago the only thing heating up between venezuela and the us is the thermostat republican congressman publicly denounce kennedy he should not allow his name to be associated with a career in latin america who is bent on talking about hugo chavez bent on destroying the foundation of what america stands for but did call for an embargo on the forty

billion dollars in trade the u.s. has with the chavez government. that goes all the. right. you were asked to call for an embargo or. venezuelan oil well i just think that it's interesting that the blimey organization that he's chosen to put in his gun sites is a little nonprofit or for big oil companies like google philips exxon mobil and chevron texaco just start selling ten billion dollars a year worth of venezuelan oil here able to fund all of these congress people because of the profits that they're making and that they could be using some of the profits to help the poor matches when citgo to start giving it away even as president obama announced two point five billion dollars in cuts to america's own low income heating oil assistance program following a diplomatic spat washington in caracas remain without each other's ambassadors in

their countries but with an arrest in revolution in the middle east americans may be forced to depend more on venezuelan oil as these families are to do kaylin ford artsy washington d.c. and at this hour president obama is headed to latin america of course venezuela is not on his itinerary and instead he'll make stops in brazil el salvador and chile so what is this visit about is about competition or future business earlier i posed that question to deborah james the director of the international programs for the center for economic and policy research here's what she had to say. well i don't think that the obama administration is going to frame it as competition but it's very clear china became the biggest foreign investor in latin america last year and the way that the obama administration has framed this trip is really about opening up new markets and expanding the u.s. presence in markets in brazil we have to keep in mind that we in the united states because of i think republican opposition were not able to do

a stimulus program that would have been adequate to jumpstart our economy given the crash experience and so because of that the obama administration has announced a policy of doubling exports twenty fifteen and what that means really is that we're sort of asking the rest of the world that bail us out because we weren't able to do it the most sickly and brazil they see is an emerging market and a place like to help us do that so the entire framing of the administration around the strip really has been around trying to place more u.s. products in markets in brazil and i think from the brazilian point of view it's a little striking because they actually went from a very big trade surplus in two thousand and six to a very big trade deficit with the united states so this is not sort of a perspective that's necessarily going to resonate with them i think they have a lot of other issues on their agenda that's what i was going to say i mean it seems that this is not a totally new idea trying to do business and improve relations with these countries it seems that in the past in the past recent past that latin american countries have said you know washington you might have been

a big deal in the past but not so much now years i think it's really striking in the last five or ten years how much latin america has become a region that is quite independent in terms of its foreign policy from the united states it is notable actually that america is more independent from the u.s. than is europe at this point and if you look at a number of the key issues on brazil's agenda for this trip as well as some of the key foreign policy issues brazil has taken a different stance from the united states on many of the key ones we can go over and really is striking it's not sort of the time. of you know ten or twenty years ago do you think he has a good chance on this visit done to try to win their hearts and minds while their top priority really for this trip i think has to do with getting u.s. support for a seat for brazil on the u.n. security council and as you know the very powerful foreign minister of brazil celso amorim actually published an op ed this week saying this is a great opportunity for the united states to do that sort of it's time for the

security council to become more relevant to today's power dynamics globally and brazil really does deserve a seat it's unclear whether obama will announce that but i think if you look at many of the different policies just take what's happening right now with libya there was a vote on the security council this week and brazil abstained along with many of them urging market countries that's something the u.s. would have liked to have seen support on i think i don't think the united states was happy last year in november when brazil announced that it was going to be recognizing palestine as a state that's something that ruffled a lot of feathers within the foreign policy establishment in congress here in the united states i don't think there was obviously a very big problem last year when brazil worked together with turkey to negotiate a nuclear arrangement with iran to try to come up with a solution and that does cause some ruffling feathers in the united states as well and that's just on the big international issues that was every day director of the international program center for economic and policy research.