the intended target during last night's airstrike in tripoli was a military missile site. however from our initial assessment of the facts it appears that one weapon did not strike the intended target due to a weapons systems failure although officials in tripoli claim more than eight hundred civilians have died in nato raids the nine people they say were killed in sunday's bombardment of the city have become the first civilian casualties officially acknowledged by the alliance well known saturday nato has also admitted another mistake in a strike this time on rebel forces neither live in oil port of bragg or with the number of casualties not been disclosed do you hold me to you hold mr cameron mr sarkozy this bit of scorn in mr obama has already shown me good it is possible for the deaths of these innocent children innocent wasn't here and innocent fathers and mothers you cannot justify this attack would you name it was.

sunday's fatal error occurs in the rising concerns within nato about his operation in northern africa only eight out of its twenty eight members have joined the mission to protect civilians in libya which raises the question how many would support one to kill them. r t tripoli well with civilian casualties in libya mounting and no end in sight those paying for the intervention might be stumping up more than they bargained for the u.k. has announced that its taxpayers might see one point six billion dollars of their hard earned cash diverted to fund the intervention and authorities or at reports there's little patience left on an already dissolution public. they're already calling it the billion pound war it's calculated that if the war in libya goes on for six months it will cost the british taxpayer one point six billion

dollars but that initial humanitarian mission. is now get rid of gadhafi operation and that could take a lot longer assuming that their goal is to simply oust him from power one imagines that it's not going to end until he or until he leaves office so this could potentially drag on for months more and as we've seen they've already extended the operation by another three months that's unlikely to be popular with the british public that's watching government spending like a hawk already firas seeing services and jobs slashed even so downing street swore it is open and it's taking the lead in libya data gathered by britain's guardian newspaper from defense ministries and news reports shows that britain has flown twenty five percent of all sources in libya second only to the us by the second week of may six thousand strike missions had been ordered blogger daniel rennick says the u.k.'s likely to have weighed up the cost but with

a warm wind blowing westwards from libyan rebels and us movements britain reckons a billion pounds is a pretty good investment it's about having control of north african resources particularly the areas. where we made for the transitional council that seems to be very clear some bombs cost up to one and a half million dollars each and with the u.k. cutting defense spending analysts say they may not be replaced and when you're dealing with such big numbers small things make a big difference you're a fighter type food cost maybe one hundred thousand pounds hours of flying so small changes in the number of hours you estimate produce big changes a cost estimate for the operant. wars are always expensive but the costs back home could prove harder to afford next in line to strike a million public sector workers who are being asked to work more and get less the disruption to services could run in two weeks the commitment to continue in libya

for however low suggests a blow. the deployment of apache helicopters doesn't appear to have given the tactical advantage. and every time a plane takes to. the cost. of. a repeat of the libyan scenario in syria would be unacceptable and everything must be done to prevent it all that's the view of russia's foreign minister said. russia will do everything it can to prevent the libyan scenario happening in syria together with the international community we can urge to put the reforms into practice as soon as possible and to call on the opposition not to ignore suggestions to discuss these reforms but to start negotiating them. it came as

serious president bashar assad addressed the nation to this third major speech since unrest began in the country in mid march and in it assad promised liberal reforms but he declined to go into detail something that was picked up on by the opposition the president stuck to his stance that foreign influence was behind the uprising and said no change was possible until the violence died down experts say the speech could become a turning point if the president follows through on his promises. and coming your way later today artie's peter lavelle and his guests discuss whether the international presence in libya and other african countries is really likely to improve life for the people there or watch that next hour in our program. now a five day long a nuclear security forum has kicked off in vienna the japanese atomic crisis has prompted a comprehensive discussion of the future of nuclear power delegates from most of the one hundred fifty member states of the international atomic watchdog the

i.a.e.a. are at the gathering to work out tighter universal safety regulations for reactors japan is expected to be criticized for its slow response to the fukushima disaster has already submitted a report admitting it wasn't prepared for an accident on such a scale. thomas travel to a city well outside the official exclusion zone where locals are concerned over high radiation levels. the ominous and constant ticking of geiger counters scientists working in fukushima city concerned. i'm in charge of the group of radiation detection and survey from fukushima university when i was thinking their vacation protocol and process set up by the japanese government is not enough and myself i think i should evacuate from this area but because of my job at the university. my family and my friends family or. officially

fukushima city is in a safe area eighty kilometers from the daiichi plant reactor one and a full sixty kilometers outside the band danger zone but still radiation levels here are much higher than normal. just to give you an idea of the consistency right now the dagger count is really quite two nine a micro ring it's about thirty times what it is more than the accepted level but if you come down here to where i just saw it all and i'm not quite to the regular quickly jumped out but it's still climbing earlier we got a really good night and now i know my car and it's about a thousand times more than what is an acceptable level of really going. but in order to claim that fukushima is truly safe from leaking radiation the japanese government has had to be creative with the numbers but the government need a change the redish on quantum level are stunned at the levels from one. minute. to twenty minutes even twenty times. the.

standards before the accident and now. they raise the. standard so that they can say it's safe but actually the standard has changed the new higher levels mean that fukushima can be classed as being outside of the exclusion zone some say that evacuating the city would be simply impractical given the huge numbers of people affected to try and mitigate the circumstances to some degree a group of scientists have teamed up to find a simple ways to reduce the radiation levels. we're just trying to do a. project and do the decontamination work by ourselves and we are not the using are specially equipped men we just use normal child. scoops. you just. a small effort to bring some security to

a community facing a scary and uncertain future in fukushima city sean thomas r.t. . and to talk more about the possible implications of the i e s current forum we're joined by malcolm grimston a policy analyst from the chatham house think tank in london thank you very much mr gibson for joining us now as we know all the your fukushima related discussions are scheduled to be held behind closed doors with only summaries being made public by the obvious question is why what are they afraid of emerging and is it even appropriate considering there are so many questions that still need to be answered regarding the fukushima disaster but i think this is a very annoying and and foolish decision quite frankly understandably all of those want to know as much as we can about the present situation clearly sometimes you need discussions behind closed doors to. discuss things that may not be the case but which would cause a lot of fear if if they were announced then turned out later not to be the case

but for such a major and meeting of this sort i do believe that a demonstration of openness is extremely important but i think this is the wrong decision. just following up on that why do you think they're doing that are there details they don't want to come out. there's seem to be some technical reasons around the problem is of course people are going to think. they don't want to come out even if that's not the case i don't believe personally that we've seen a massive cover up of information coming from japan what we have seen though i think is a very slow response to questions an attitude which has been far too backward looking about this is what we think might have been happening two or four weeks ago instead of this is what we think might happen in two or four weeks time and when that is the attitude. people are going to think that they're all foreigners are sitting on the information of they don't want to release so until they are more

open about it of course people are going to think that way ok well they say that their goal is working out a new safety recommendations for nuclear power plants and well some would argue of course that the only way of having safe power generation is by facing out nuclear energy altogether like germany and switzerland so which side would you agree with. well one can say the only way of having safe coal generating electricity is to phase out coal the only way to have safe hydro power is to phase out hydro power the fact of the matter is that the world needs huge amounts of energy the world energy council believes will be using nearly half as much energy in just twenty years time as we are today we can either generate that electricity with oil coal and gas and out to climate change we can generate with renewables this home reliable and therefore we face the risk of a much higher cost of power cuts on a regular basis and they have huge health cause huge health damage we can use nuclear which actually has the best safety record of any major way of making energy but also we've seen in fukushima also has its risks if nuclear energy were simply

a matter of being a choice i think everyone would oppose it but the fact of the matter is we have no really attractive ways of making energy we do have a desperate need for more and more energy although i will show the meeting come up with some hues full recommendations the i.a.e.a. cannot enforce any of the safety rules so they can basically only recommend them so in this in this regard is the agency completely toothless and is something else needed to replace it. i have to say my view is that trying to internationalize safety is probably a mistake at the moment every country that uses nuclear energy has followed its own technological path and has a very different technological approach to nuclear energy for safety to improve what i think we need are robust national general regulators who understand the industry in each individual country coupled with i think a much more open approach on the part of plant operators to invite other people in

from similar nuclear power plants in other countries to work off a peer review to offer a common sense of how they're operating but already has happened far more so since chervil than was the case before and i believe fukushima will pushes more in that direction but there's a real danger firstly that international body would simply be an extra level of bureaucracy getting in the way of safety but also that international politics would interfere i wonder what the reaction would be if an indian scientist say was on the team going to inspect the pakistani reactors or if an american inspector was on a team going to look at the iranian right there's a sheer i think the danger is that you would get a international political squabble getting in the way of good scientific advice thank you very much very interesting examples there welcome grimston a policy analyst from the chatham house think tank in london. now president medvedev is still keeping that russia and the rest of the world guessing whether

he'll make a bid to stay chief of the crime went for a second term however in an interview with london's financial times he appeared to rule out a puttin medvedev face off in next year's election artie's it got that he has a lot of our reports on what else the president had to say. it's definitely the question that the russian president has been asked most frequently in the recent odds with the way they decided to keep the suspense up. but is it doomed the new leader especially one who walking past the president's seat has to be willing to run for reelection however it's not a question of whether he would make that decision for himself i suggest waiting a bit longer and keeping the intrigue. of course the main intrigue of the twenty two of the presidential election still remains with him and they did answer some questions in relations to who will run for office and one thing is certain both he and with him approaching will not run for the same office it will just be one man

who are still remains to see who will that be. it's hard for me to imagine we're putin and i both running for president of the same time for at least one reason the thing is we strictly speaking represent the same political force competition between us would bring harm to the goals and tasks we've been working on for the past several years it wouldn't be good for russia and it wouldn't be good in this particular situation it was a very long interview that the russian president gave to the financial times that were so many issues were raised throughout the course of it of course pertaining to russia's national and foreign policies many aspects that our interesting both people living in russia those observing from the specifically of course questions relating to the goals that the president set out for himself during his term in office they say should that only option was no interview that is taken by western media source has gone by without the issues that were sealed will try

listening for a first president reiterated his position that that was his release should it happen not in any way be a danger to society like any russian citizen serving time that holds. has the right to an appeal of course it wasn't just matters of domestic policy that were touched upon the russian president speaking quite harshly about the nato military intervention in libya saying that some of russia's partners basically chose to misinterpret the resolution passed by the united nations security council resolution that russia let us hoping that it will be observed and kept to as it is worded but of course me david it is said that basically a very good resolution turned into a meaningless a bit of paper with nato as a military intervention in libya and that precisely because of that no resolution will be passed on to syria what it was it all was serious matters of course that

were discussed we do know that the russian president is very fond of his gadgets he is rarely seen without his i pad and he did slip that he has a special on it that lets him monitor exactly what his employees are doing and which of his tasks have already been fulfilled is a very useful thing i personally plan to check out the app store to see whether it's been specifically custom made for the president or whether it's available for the general public. well log on to our website r t v dot com and there you can find that interview with president medvedev in full and leave your comments and also on line for you right now even though the angry birds mobile game is not one of the application of the russian leader frequently uses he still gave a special thank you to its creator owned by about why at r t v dot com. and who's next to the terrorist crosshairs al qaida has launched its own hit list featuring pentagon officials and u.s.

politicians. from. a russian mother is facing criminal charges over the death of her daughter who it is alleged was not given proper care after catching him on yeah or the case sparked widespread outrage what it was revealed that the mother failed to call in doctors and instead is sought advice on the internet. or has been finding out why some parents prefer to avoid the services of medical institutions. asio was an eagerly awaited baby adored by her mother and everyone around she was a lively newborn for three months when she became ill and died within a week doctors say had been hospitalized earlier she could have had a chance of survival however us his mother julia hesitated too long and she's now

facing criminal charges for negligence which. you have to understand we did want to avoid unnecessary medical intrusion but we're not in a coat we cared about her children's health and wanted only the best for them this is julia's heartrending response in a t.v. show called let them talk on russia's first channel. in the programme she was hounded as an irresponsible mother who watched her daughter die online after her desperate those asking for help on the internet reached the wider public julia's tragic story is just one among those who chose to give birth at home and resort to self treatment rather than trust official health care they may be a fraction of russian society but then number is increasing and doctors are alarmed . there are usually three reasons behind a woman's choice first is when the mother falls under the influence of an alternative group that makes business out of it delivering babies without

a license the second group are those who prefer everything natural as it was before hospitals and the third is the most unpleasant for us when a patient has a bad experience connected to a medical establishment. stories of medical maltreatment or even were. continue appearing in the russian media and unplanned amputation of a baby's limb and an alleged swap of a woman's health a new born for a disabled one are among the most recent cases those dark stories often have another side to them but they're scary enough to make young women dread any hospitals drugs and doctors. people who are afraid of clinical medicine have their reasons for that they're afraid of the complications they might get in maternity wards of unnecessary medical intrusion there's quite a large number of deaths and crippled lives. so veronica believed her mother when she told her doctors might harm her and her baby the idea of natural delivery at

home sounded very convincing to me until my son and i nearly died in the birth i'm like neither of us ended up in a grief the ra nica is one of those who opted for home birth with insistence of only a midwife a practice that is unregulated in russia and skates on legal thin ice making it open to abuse their only because midwives barely had any relevant training but took the money and never asked if the baby survived. despite the controversy over home birth everyone agrees that in today's russia if you want to minimize the risk giving birth in hospital is the answer but with mothers wanting more choice the system as it currently stands could do with a rethink after all it is these little people and their health that matters most and their arrival. should be a happy one. and now let's get the latest business news with katrina.

wired welcome to aunty's business bulletin increased demand for gas in europe has largely benefited the russian state company gazprom but the company has been criticized for charging far more than the market spot prices alexander medvedev deputy c c e o of gazprom believes however that the disparity between spot prices and long term contract prices will soon be minimal. that's leadership in the next two years so we can expect prices to go significantly higher gas futures while we do twenty love and then twenty thirteen if they're not already high enough we'll be around four hundred dollars per thousand cubic meters this is equal to the price for you know long term contracts. china and russia getting into the green business together they've agreed to create a new company which will develop energy from agricultural waste russia has enough resources to produce almost seventy billion cubic meters of bio guess

a year that's enough to cover the annual electricity needs of countries such as indonesia or egypt. now let's have a look at how the markets are performing oil was sharply down on monday but has since made a comeback grange is trading at one hundred twelve dollars a barrel which is flat at ninety two dollars. despite the lower european and asian markets the u.s. markets about been slightly in the black monday though speculation that they will fall throughout trading is high due to continuing concerns over the debt crisis in greece. european stocks are lower as well monday with investors avoiding risks on fear that the e.u. finance ministers were able to reach a solution to the greek crisis despite meeting over the weekend. and bearish sentiment is dominating the russian markets monday both the r.t.s. and the my six are losing around one point two percent this hour the losses heading the markets toward the longest losing streak since two thousand and eight. ordinary

shares in ras telecom are losing more than four percent the massive selloff followed a rally early this morning when shares rose thirteen percent analysts attributed the rise to the inclusion of telecom shares in the r.t.s. index and on expectations that the stop will soon be included in the m.s.c.i. index energy majors are suffering losses drank down by the oil price gazprom is in the red despite its announcement of a twenty six percent in. greece in its forecast for this year's european exports bank is also down point seven percent more like company in just a moment. the first russian insurance i.p.o. may happen as soon as this year the country's largest insurer ross got struck has taken a six hundred forty million dollars million dollar loan to prepare for the listing analysts say the company could be worth more than two billion dollars. retail lending in russia is to receive a facelift with a strong with the addition of a strong new play on the country's largest lender spur bank is teaming up with b.

and p. paribus russian subsidiary the joint venture will install mon offices in many retail stores across russia but in about three years the company is expected to dominate with around a thirty percent market share analysts suggest that the company's key competitive advantage will be rooted in its lower interest rates spur bank is set to own seventy percent of the new firm with b.n.p. power about owning the rest. and that's all the business for this hour will be back with more in just under an hour's time stay with us for headlines with tessa next.

in some petersburg she's available in hotels a story a. speech the koto the trip let us return to the true speech otoh. you. see on this. visit.

here's a recap of the top stories on our nato admits it a launched the airstrike that killed nine civilians in a tripoli suburb while british taxpayers weary of reckless spending are handed the bill for three months of bloody stalemate. every head of state wants a second term but it's the people who have the final word so says president medvedev he still hasn't announced whether it will stand again that but did a face off with prime minister putin. the international atomic energy agency is expected to slam japan for poor handling of the fukushima crisis and nuclear safety for an open sea the vienna aimed at improving safety

regulations and preventing a repeat of the japanese crisis. at up next takes a closer look at the nuclear crisis in japan and we talked to the number two nuclear official in the disaster hit country that interview is up next. we are here with he day he call me she who is with the ministry of a colony here in japan specifically with the agency that deals with nuclear safety and thank you very much for taking some time to be with us today now as this. devastating event has happened in the news has spread out around the world it's become clear in the past three months that the information coming from the from nuclear plant has gotten worse can you tell us what's the situation on the ground right now the situation is improving. for example we're

steadily in introducing a water to the reactors of question my daiichi you need one two and three and they're fairly stable in code so already asian. exposure is becoming less and less a problem is the water which originated from that water we introduced into the reactors so we are now at the find there are testing process of introducing establishing waterproofing a system people on the ground say that they have doubts about the information that is coming from the government why do you think they have these doubts and what is the government doing to get this information out there. the japanese government tried to. distribute or make.