france's a military initiatives in libya back home with mounting criticism of the country's leadership and protests against the three week intervention which shows no sign of ending. the cleverest spencer going to join us from the start the new do be a state nato is accused of incompetence in libya why auntie could be forces after an airstrike kills at least five rebels on the frontline. this currency is dead it is deceased is is it is extinct. survived plans to bailout that stricken portugal sparked anger among europeans concerned that strong economies are once

again forced to pay for others to prop up the eurozone. and our top story in business an arbitration court in london uk holds the injunction blocking the share swap deal between b.p. and russian state owned. you and me and twenty minutes for more details on that. worldwide news live from moscow this is arts. friendly fire of a nato air strike has killed at least five and he could have rebel fighters in libya some sources suggest it may even be in gazans that will only add to the criticism coming from the opposition who say the alliance is not doing enough to help them and for those countries who are pushing for this operation three weeks ago the very real chance of a stalemate looks likely to bring some a grand ambitions ambitions rather crushing down trying to push

a lot of reports from france. froths was among the first countries to push for a military solution in libya but now watch as a questioning its justification for going it wants to get in on what i call every year imperial condominiums a recurring question of africa already having long term connections on the continent paris can't forgive colonel gadhafi for fighting its military in neighboring chad in the 1980's and challenging its corporations in the region ever since the french quarter. is it the french quarter see or or is it a sarkozy see the way that he tried to convince the. management. to be the leader of the g. twenty. and also the way that he'd tried to survive in frost reports le pen by god was plotting an invasion already last year have prompted accusations of revived

imperial ambitions calculated as a coach whether france's president the move has backfired french foreign minister islands you paces your vision could last days or weeks but not months into its third week war in libya is turning up longer and harder than wanted to. live. with that peace force is still standing firm rebel gains only come with the heavy had nato helping war in libya with both the food for interpreting the broad congress government the popularity of power instead of the ball being continues oppositional both sides is growing these demonstrators say they see through for all these noble claims that they can claim humanitarian intervention but it's really in paris and in local elections nicolas sarkozy got thumped he's you had people to just pointing percent of the faults the fridge president hope for

ratings lift from. he's got the opposite. of most. presidents for ever for the last forty years given france's troubled history in the region maybe fear some other countries may remember they couldn't post and unite against their former colonial master. countries that have genuine revolutions genuine grazing and then being able to unite i think that is something which the imperial powers don't really want to see with france facing a growing backlash at home and abroad any talk of a quick fix sounds out of it you. see paris. front line shifting towards uncontrolled weapons traffic and chaotic allied air strikes and now the. foreign intervention in libya russian journalists seized by

rebels our correspondent who's out there on the ground in tripoli let's talk to her now and get the latest now paul it's a bit bizarre the russians not even involved in the coalition intervention in libya he we see russian journalists being taken hostage or before we get about take us back if you will about these are these friendly fire rebel deaths to be having more and more details about. what we're hearing now from nato is that they might mistakenly have hit a group of opposition fighters in and around the city of brega that is in a strategically important oil city in the east of this country that nature refusing to apologize for that incident but we're hearing from nato officials is that they say the situation on the ground is extremely fluid and they were unaware of the fact that in recent days rebel fighters have acquired tanks we are hearing from doctors that at least five opposition fighters have been killed and some twenty two injured what we understand happened is that using this heavy weaponry the rebel fighters have tried to advance some of the supposed to be a surprise attack on good up these forces that they were being struck by these nato

air strikes we are being told increasingly that nato pilots are finding it more and more difficult to discern who's who on the ground particularly now when both sides are using almost the same machinery now the year has been a lot of demoralization on the ground for some days now against nato rebel fighters increasingly feeling that the international community is not going far enough in its airstrikes but that demobilization is now turning to anger and we hearing some of the rebel leaders say you came here to protect us not to kill us this is the second such incident in two weeks just last week thirteen people were killed in a similar nato mistake now the rest of the country in the city of misrata away fighting continues between pro and anti gadhafi fighters we are hearing. they from the world food program that it has successfully managed to bring its first shipment of humanitarian aid to the poorest of misrata there onboard are doctors medical supplies food items the world food program saying that this one is starvation

a very significant humanitarian corridor that will help alleviate the crisis unfolding there in misrata now we have been hearing reports as well that two russian journalists who work for a popular russian newspaper as well as a russian television crew has been taken by rebel fighters in just a short time ago the editor of one of the one of the editors of that used paper confirmed that he had spoken with his journalist via satellite phone and they said that they were on their way to benghazi now this is strange response we know this is the first time that journalists have actually been taken by the opposition forces they are usually the one that provide cover to the journalists most in a sign bit with the rebel fighters and that is how they are able to report on the frontline we at this stage know that gadhafi has at least four foreign journalists and that is usually the situation gadhafi forces taking journalists hostage and not rebel forces. but it's bizarre rebel fighters they've taken some russian

journalists hostage that pro-government fighters know if they can just sounds a bit confused chaos policy a lot in tripoli thank you. for your time journalist pepe escobar from times when he was the coalition's actions in libya leading to a stalemate. the nature of going on is nato incompetence number one ok you know what they want they want colo off tanks cut off the forces sit in the desert place sitting ducks so they can bomb them at will what gadhafi forces are doing there disguising their remaining tanks and armored personnel carriers inside or around the cities he's using guerrilla against the guerrilla cleverest spencer going general strong to start the nudist would be a stalemate the u.s. and the brits basically want to arm the rebels you know that could happen any effect is already happened they redid some of arms depots eastern libya and this

al-qaeda related fringe out there to the already have surface to air missiles and they took these out of libya so it's probably somewhere in shot in central africa so this is already happening can you imagine if these rebels are armed by the cia pentagon s.a.'s from britain and all that can be measured this is six months we're going to have mujahideen to suit. so as the foreign intervention in libya drags on and the struggle to justify it just gets tougher i still see our cross talk show that's coming your way in twenty minutes. and the. terrorism is kids around here. and their government as a whole is something that the whole entire war there is not happy with doesn't really want to have you have that if you're all so the world there's actually moved in and save. lives if i may jump in here john john john if i was to go to you i

mean if we look at recent memory you could ask it was being run out of the cold i think we recall that these arguments were exactly the same as the arguments used for the invasion of afghanistan and iraq and nobody thinks that what we've got in either place is a model of democracy and the argument that at the very language. is a dissembling language to say that the world community there is no world community i'm a citizen in this country my country is at war a majority of people in the opinion poll don't want to be bombing libya our government and the army is one factor is that it's touring the middle east so the weaponry do they want to go to the go to war isn't true but there is some sort of this embodied world community that is backing this. and you can see course talking about twenty minutes time from now here at r.t. well the rescue operation for portugal's economy is starting as e.u. ministers meet to discuss a bailout package for the country however critics say that once again european

taxpayers will have to tighten their belts to meet the bill and as john gaunt of the e.u. referendum campaign told us here about see the heavily listing ship of the european economy could eventually be signed by the euro zone. we don't have a duty to play law portugal we didn't have a duty to tell our island we made seven billion pounds worth of welfare cuts and then we gave seven billion to ireland go figure that is not a and now spain's going to go the same way and our lousy coalition government won't give the british people the right to have a vote and you know the reason they won't give us the vote because they know that seventy five percent of people in a recent e.u. referendum campaign and congress poll said they want to get out of this expensive undemocratic club and the euro is still a crash and burn strain will follow portugal and i say not a penny to portugal not one single penny one single cent one single euro it's nothing to do with the united kingdom we want our country back thank goodness we

never ever joined this madness how can you link the economy of an economic powerhouse while the united kingdom or germany would somewhere like greece you know well the answer is you can't and it fails and the sooner it collapses let that sound we're having a referendum on may the fifth on the alternative approaches system that's not a referendum we need the referendum we need in our great country is it straight in or out should we stay or should we go should we say to you and the british people want outs but whether we get a referendum no it's kind of becoming irrelevant because this currency is doomed the old not you part in sketch you know this power to cities to cease to power is no more well let me tell you this currency is dead it is deceased is is it is extinct it can not survive spain will go next. well i don't come out for your analogy it's not just europe that's in trouble. the u.s.

debt problem is big fourteen trillion dollars big meanwhile the solutions lawmakers are coming up with to solve this problem are small party looks at the gridlock as the u.s. tries to agree upon a two thousand and eleven budget and make threats to its credit rating. but point out how britain's prince harry got trapped in the arctic and whether he'll make it back in time for his brother's royal wedding. well in japan radioactive water is reported to have leaked from the fuel pools nuclear power plant following a violent shock measuring seven point one the planet is less than one hundred kilometers away from the stricken fukushima plant for what from the citizens and nuclear information center says they want to go abroad has been left without proper attention the focus has been exclusively on the fukushima plant which is certainly in much much more serious condition but nobody has really looked certainly no independent people have really looked closely at what's happening in because it was

isolated by the tsunami a few weeks ago. all around it was devastated it's hard to imagine that that plant is in the sound condition. three and a half years ago. because recent wanted a large earthquake hit if you from japan and it took three or so years to bring the first of those back online after extensive inspections and there's still a lot of criticism about it. will take at least as long as that to bring back online and nobody really knows what's going on there. this is art so you know in the united states republicans and democrats can overcome their differences on the spending cuts needed to agree upon a for a budget for two thousand and eleven but the proposals seem a small fry in comparison to the nation's debt under threats from rating agencies that could make paying for a lot more expensive parties law and restrictions. more u.s.

lawmakers in washington bigger over the budget and hurled blame across the aisle for the gridlock calling opposing colleagues relatively smaller string group of india logs who are dragging down the budget negotiation process give me a break another group of decision makers has been weighing in on that to being one of the country's top credit agencies telling the feds something has to get done on this debt ratings agency standard and poor and moody's have been warning for months that the u.s. debt could threaten that country's golden aaa credit rating telling investors in u.s. bonds essentially they may have to worry about getting paid the u.s. debt problem is big fourteen trillion dollars big meanwhile the solutions lawmakers are coming up with to solve this problem are small this tiny dot represents even the larger sixteen billion dollars in cuts republican lawmakers originally proposed meanwhile the u.s. government each year continues to spend

a lot more than it takes in resulting in more than a trillion dollars in budget deficit so with all of this there rating agencies see as unsustainable and a concern and if the path the u.s. has been on for a while forty three cents of every dollar we spend this year. we vote against the future of our children continuing on this trajectory of borrowing and spending however would not be an option according to financial analysts if the u.s. was downgraded so what would happen there would be another crisis it would create global shock waves in part because most models and understanding of the global investment landscape landscape take is their sort of central aim for the u.s. ten year treasury the risks as it is the interest the u.s. pays on its debt is staggering it was one hundred eighty seven billion in two thousand and. it increases to eight hundred forty four billion

that number would grow exponentially faster with a downgrade because the west would likely have to pay higher interest rates to borrow money meaning less money to spend at home then we have to start cutting really aggressively and for many things they're too important for americans really to be able to agree to cut them right now drastic cuts in everything from energy to education to the military whether the u.s. would really be downgraded is up for debate the u.s. has the exorbitant privilege after all of printing dollars the global reserve currency to pay its global credit card bill the scarier scenario may be that the u.s. has even reached this point a situation that once would have been unthinkable foreign minister r.t. washington d.c. . sorry for more details on the stories we're covering you can always go to our web site that starts you can come find a lot of things there developments on many of the international stories as well for example you can find out the details of the latest declassified documents that

russia has handed over to the president in the investigation of the nine hundred forty massacre plus we've got some dramatic pictures of an anti drug sting in siberia police seized a large pair of. nearly forty cars have been left out and three people hurt after a major road accident involving a gas tanker in the russian city of start up off the truck hit a pole turned over burst into flames when passing a. school field torched the cars there that were just part of you can see from the footage three injured people which includes the truck driver received severe burns and were taken to hospital what's being described as a grave condition. but now let's go to some other headlines from around the world

at this hour and in ivory coast more than one hundred forty seven some of them reportedly burned by the alleged killings occurred in the west of the country and are believed to have been carried out by liberian mercenaries un representative said the incidence of peer to be at least in part ethnically motivated the slaughter comes amid the current standoff between the internationally recognized president alassane ouattara and incumbent leader who is still received inside his bunker. says two of its members have been killed by the latest israeli air strike on the gaza it comes after the hamas government declared a cease fire in an attempt to prevent a further escalation of violence heavy fighting took place across the border on thursday when israel was. shelling of a bus with airstrikes and tank fire. and the so dramatic for the chair shows children fleeing from a killer shot twelve dead and wounded at least twelve others and brazil

a twenty four year old former student of the public school where the tragedy took place and the building and opened fire in two classrooms. afterwards the country's president has declared seven days of mourning the massacre the first of its kind in brazil mirroring school shootings in the united states. prince harry has been left stranded in the arctic along with four war veterans and he'll be came to make sure he isn't back in from the cold for the wedding of his brother william in about three weeks because he is the best man let's get details now from marty's pre-driver peter harry's not stranded he's just trying to avoid making the best man's speech certainly what we're getting out of. prince harry's been taking part in a a two hundred mile trek to the north pole is part of his role as the patron of the charity walking with the wounded now as you mentioned those taking part in. included for amputees who were injured during the conflict in afghanistan british

soldiers there know how he had hoped how in the charity hope to raise two million pounds from this war that they've been they've been taking part in and they just about finished it currently in the russian territory on the on the arctic flights home however they want me to crack in the ice on the landing strip that they were due to take off from it's meant that they couldn't do that at the moment. so he's having a cracking time. just really bad brother william prince william chopper pilot can we just send down his brother to rescue him is it possible to be stuck in this icy trap for long well of course we're hoping that he will be able not only to get back for the royal wedding at the end of the month but he's due to be on duty on monday in his role as a british army. officer so he'll be there's plenty of people wanting him back and back on duty but i think if he is locally william to fly in and rescue him just yet we're hearing from the organizers of this trek that

a rescue party is on its way and how he should be taken off but i spoke very shit very soon. yesterday prince harry was supposed to leave the station for spitzbergen borneo was drifting station and unexpected situations can happen any time this was a bit more serious because the clock went right through the runway which is the only possible way of leaving the station only is restored and the charter plane is on site to return the prince to civilization but. there we are so set to be returning home after well as you say rory could have been the best way of getting out of having to deliver a best man's speech other. thank you. right now that type of business with korea. how i welcome to visit is good to have you with me and arbitration court in london ruling on the legitimacy of the sixteen billion dollars saswata tween b.p.

and ross have has held in tongues and blocking the deal that had been his decision appears to mark another victory of our access renault was part as well for tank a b.p. they are has strongly objected to beat his proposed tire with ross have to say it could break their shareholder agreement. for more now cross live to artie's laura and that's in london hello to laura so so how's the second round on to beat these russian partners and thank you. well this is as you say essentially a yes or no the victory for. the consortium of russian shareholders in t.i.n.k. b.p. it means that b.p. doesn't get what it wants that b.p. rosneft cannot at the moment go ahead we remember that this was part of the agreement refers to ross nafta receiving five percent of b.p. and b.p. in exchange receiving nine in the halls. and this is merely out holding an

injunction that was already made earlier we saw a court say that the entire deal which also involves a tie up between b.p. and to explore parts of the optics where there are believed to be huge reserves of oil. what they had already said that that wouldn't go ahead then b.p. came through and said well maybe if we can't go ahead with the exploration deal maybe we can just go ahead with the shuswap on its own and the court has today are held the injunction saying it calms b.p. . b.p. the a.a.r. consortium that the deal between b.p. and russ never breaks elements of their foundation agreement when they first set up being paid p.p. which said that any business and he wanted to undertake in russia had to be agreed that b.p. had to have first refusal on that work and they say that this breaks the terms of that contract now they are has said that they welcome the court decision they say that it's balanced and b.p.

has said that it is still committed to working in russia and investing in russia and. its main investment vehicle but this is probably not the end of this story b.p. is looking to extend the deadline for the chefs what which was supposed to be the fourteenth of april that was when they had to take place under the terms of the original deal they're now looking to extend that and see if they shuffle and go ahead to later date so they probably will be reapplying to the court to see if they can make this deal work in some way. oh it's obviously not the end of the story arc is lower and much reporting from london thanks very much for that. and we continue oil prices have extended their rally with ongoing unrest in the middle east and africa weakening dollar is also contributing to the growth is that new highs almost one hundred twelve dollars a barrel brant blend is trading currently at more than one hundred twenty four dollars per barrel reports say and zero three the media has been damaged human concerns the civil war may destroy the country's oil facilities now sent to markets

european markets are trading in the black keys footsies trading point eight percent higher and germany's dax is up half a percent in the in the black nine instead who is leading on high gold and silver and copper prices because of maize and b.h.p. billiton are up between one and a half and two percent airspace and defense sector also post gains would be eighteen systems and will for scoop up two percent. here in moscow both the r.t.s. otherwise it's had a good start this pride eight but then we created a bit though still trading in the black energy majors are leaving on both the board says as all trades above one hundred and eleven dollars a barrel now let's take a look at some individual share moves now gazprom is up more than one point four percent only r.t.s. look who is trading almost point eight percent higher and pulling that is also on the rise on strong precious metals prices shares are up one point three percent. now the eagle has made steady gains against the dollar and the euro's and the

beginning of the year the strong has added further increases to the rise but to give to fuel from the t.v. capital believes the russian consummating clubs to its peak. ruble appreciation is probably close to running its course because first you have physically strong current account in the first quarter and then resume for growth this factor influencing the ruble will diminish and second we still have kept one flows and i have beaten a little bit but it looks like this is a structural stand right for for now and kept a lot more my continue going going forward and that's all we have for you this hour but don't forget to log onto our web site r.t. dot com slash business with most stories not so much.

question is this so much given to a huge musician the right time to mark latham logic or guillemots you could humanitarian interventions as would be of crimes and to stalemate the outside powers find themselves pulled deeper into. disarming saddam hussein. past charge of iraqi citizens. this event brings further assurance to torture chambers and the secret police are gone forever.

flies again over embassy in kabul. chance to launch occupied afghanistan. now occupy sales at guantanamo bay. met. it is appropriate to that in accordance as which is the case if he could even. face lab stomach slap if you can just enough so that it shocks them especially for just stuff but you don't actually break in terms of could deter a geisha techniques that we use in j. pick on tom cruise but the city should. give you a. leap. if wealthy british style. is not.