or we will back seventy years to the start of what became one of the deadliest sieges and world war two the leningrad blockade. that was to go to some other stories from around the world as many as two hundred people are dead and three hundred seventy missing after an overload of vessel capsized and sank off the coast of zanzibar after losing engine power in rough seas the ship began taking on water and eventually turned over survivors say the ferry was overloaded with cargo and passengers many of them children sons of ours president has declared a three day mourning period. as tropical storm nate has its way towards the mexican coast the search is on for several missing oil workers and a dozen fishermen commercial vessel and two fishing boats were a loss during needs for protein and no sign of a cruise has been found while coastal areas brace themselves for the storm air and sea rescue teams are continuing their search despite worsening conditions.

why monza look likely to elect a former military general as president and hope of bringing order to the country out of paris will lead us favorite worrying the leftist groups and human rights organizations still hoping to prosecute members of the country's former dictatorship but the key to action issues for guatemalans appear to be high crime rate and poverty which haven't golfed the country. this week marked seventy years since the beginning of a lot of the longest and deadliest seeders of world war two the leningrad blockade what is now seen put his birth survived almost nine hundred days of hunger and horror cut off from the rest of the country peter all over looks back at events through the eyes of those who somehow survived. cut off and take him to the brink of starvation the blockade of lead in grass modern day st petersburg by nazi troops was one of the most destructive sieges in the history of warfare

when the german army encircled the city it wasn't the shells and bombs that the inhabitants feared most it was hunger. a good while worse when the famine spread well there is nothing much terrible famine than to be the one hand nearest and dearest starve to death. those trapped inside the city had to resort to whatever means necessary to survive the horse slipped on an icy streak and collapsed in egypt the people rushed out of their houses to chop it up or derren out with an axe he managed to get something like a hoof the whole family lived off it for a week sometimes they need to we saw people take drastic action on your own your there were days when i would step outside my house and see dead people lying in the snow with their buttocks severed for meat this isn't something we should try to cover up with heroic stories that would be unfair to the history of the siege and the people who enjoyed it designated leningrad as one of his major objectives and

from all this nine hundred forty one the german armies north set about tightening the noose on the key baltic port this is where the blockade began on the eighth of september nineteenth forty one german troops arrived here occupying the city over. the last long connection to leningrad cutting off the city supply of food and military equipment with the city cut off from the lumbee only way to get aid to leningrad was across lake lugger in the short summer months we used but in the winter the frozen lake became a makeshift highway known as the road of life beer or bowl was one of those who worked on the ice helping to funnel valuable supplies into the besieged city the perils of living on a frozen. made the work dangerous enough without the constant german bombardment. one time and driving from the mainland came to bring us breakfast he noted that one

of our towns with thinking come out come out to devils you're about to drown he shouted the driver touched the times to the truck and pulled it out on to stolid ice many of the vehicles bringing in supplies didn't make it across some of those had no been raised from the bottom of the lake and can now be seen in the road of life museum so that seventy years on a sucker face is not forgotten because they're never that interested in photographs but actually seeing a historic really quit their own eyes they always ask is this thing authentic and when we tell them yes it is that's when their eyes widen it's more than a million civilians died in the brutal eight hundred seventy two day blockade which finally ended in the bitter cold january nineteenth forty three and many of those who survived went straight into the fight to drive the germans back their experiences during the siege sparing no more. after we were evacuated we joined the army to take revenge for what the nazis had done to our people in the city so many

civilians lost their lives through hunger and shelling so we proudly joined the red army to take revenge on the nazis peter older party. and for the fourth time the top prize at the venice film festival is coming to russia alexander's a corpse movie fast beat off other rivals to win the cold the line the jury was united in his decision with harry darren aronofsky praising the picture saying it would change viewers forever the two years of shooting and an overall price tag of over nine million dollars bounced it's a core of most ambitious projects inspired by guess tragedy dialogue in german has yet to be translated to other languages including russians often more about the director and his work you can go to our website. r.t. dot com. and in just a few minutes to we reported on the ever growing mass of plastic waste choking the world's oceans and that's half their work out of the week's top stories here on our

team. to.

the above. to do. in moscow all she's available in maria's friends her journal which colson royal myrtle ruler of renaissance. you know memory problems and. all of the. hotels. in the region country clubs so boring sure to find this piece of

the first. oh sure can pinsky switzer to close the whole. bigotry culture. welcome back you're watching r t let's take a look at today's news and the week's top stories the u.s. commemorates its worst terrorist attack of the divide of the world the nine eleven assault ten years ago prompted america to launch a policing mission that many experts claim has made the globe more dangerous. russia bids farewell to the players of a top national ice hockey team who perished in a plane crash the jet went down shortly after taking off in the region killing forty three people on board. and moscow was to sand a fact finding mission to syria to get firsthand information about the crisis there this as russia's president dmitry medvedev refuses to take sides in the conflict

saying talks are the only way to peace. will now explore what's being done to clean up the world's oceans of deadly plastic waste the first part of that special report is next. well it was because to book the normal super good earth this is. the perfect goal is to know if you come through a. door so shocking you are no good but it. just

is the first place to cold in the stomach of a bit if you translate it to human body size this will be to their fruits in the stomach. so in the past five minutes here in the concentrate i took a little walk around to see how many styrofoam cups i can pick up in five minutes what you see here is what six people would consume in a one week of drinking coffee every day so many people think that their individual actions don't really have an impact but if you multiply this by the millions and millions of people that drink coffee in los angeles alone you can start to

understand how we see something like this in every single river every single creek everest single stream and los angeles behind me is continent creek it's one of the many streams that drains the los angeles area now this stream will go into the los angeles river and then out to the pacific ocean the purpose of this boat is to to get attention and got politicians get other schoolteachers get the public to look at us and listen to our shores. listening to marcus and the story is like being immersed in the planet's seas and taking the time to look. around. in the mediterranean alone there are three million tons of garbage drifting around and eighty percent of it is plastic. we don't think about it but the sea bed wasn't always covered with these of an unidentifiable drifting on ships. we're

really the third generation to make massive use of plastics. all this is the result of sixty years of consumption. we've let plastic colonize the sea. surface. a few meters down. and at a depth of one thousand meters. with all of this material will be down here for ages especially where it's really deep there's much less oxygen and no light whatsoever i mean yours are factors which help break down the plastic sort of stuff will be around for a few hundred years have you kind of lose your dreams when you go really deep of the for the one thousand meters for instance and isto you imagine something mysterious and completely different and also when you get down there and you see

piles of plastic and rubbish it's just awful that was i was just so much of a three and i hope. the oceans being stuffed with plastic. we're force feeding them. but there's something we haven't thought of. the count digested. and the nets are full but there's nothing miraculous about the catch. this material has revolutionized on lives today but it won't produce. what happens to plastic once it's in the ocean is really inert as we've always been told doesn't really have no effect on animals or humans. is one of the thinking heads of a professional syndicate. once you are in and you realize all the benefits that

this plastic material is bringing to the society to the quality of life you are convinced that plastic is fantastic and then you wants to explain that to everybody to prove that this product is not their interest at all as is providing quite a lot of marvelous things if lest it wouldn't be existing the resources for the planet would this deal everything that planet we live on would be totally exhausted thanks to the plastic which has been invented in this really speaking in the fifty's we have been able to produce so much material some of the products that we use every day.

but just came back from a drive out to the desert one of the aircraft boneyard we picked up a cessna for a few hundred bucks now it's missing the wings is missing the engine everything else except for the fuselage this is ideal because it's lightweight it has the doors intact the windows are intact waterproof but will make a waterproof. marcus erikson is a dedicated militant against the last fifty years he's been paddling along america's rivets he's seen the pollution grow and it keeps growing. one day mark has had a dream for the whole world would care about the problem he hopes to mobilize the planet so you can see he's in an old airplane cabin sitting on fifteen thousand plastic boxed. with the energy of

someone who is determined to change the world he said thing out from two thousand five hundred mile trip will be ok. so this is. over a thousand people schoolkids across the country of chicago have given us messages about the ocean about plastics which we're going to take across the ocean and bring back and share with policymakers and try to get something done about this plastics issue. that's right yesterday but. this is the marine mammal center one of the biggest organizations of its time. for thirty five years a thousand volunteers have constantly surveyed the beaches and to send in talk on the phone to help undernourished sick and of.

who over the years they've had to learn to deal with new kinds of. their death by having crazy animals admitted to our facility with fancy. we had. this in mind that was attached to her that came out of an elephant seal stomach we have a big black bear and that was wrapped around a sea lion neck we have. monofilament line that was wrapped around the eye and back as well and inside of it now and then we had a lot crack and string that was found wrapped around a lovely bit first field actually i am doing that species so it's very much of a concern. last minutes don't stop fishing. there have been cases of strangulation in a fourth of the species of seals and sea lions.

eighty species of whales have suffered incidents with plastic. plastic khamenei pill. and also suffocate. although the volunteers of the marine mammal center managed to save dozens of animals every year the vast majority are inaccessible. but we can see that it's very deep their biggest problem with something like this is this our male female she's going to grow some more and that entanglement vault and after obama it could end up strangling her or stop her from being able to eat for all to find plastic items found in the sea come from what we threw away and land here is some of the first collateral victims three hundred marine species of victims of plastic.

twenty years ago young i'm from literally a duck siebert specialist started an experiment on siemens a common species in northern europe. he wanted to know what the h. . a completely straightforward investigation for. the book but its results were a big surprise i look at fullness and place there more or less by accident because in the early ninety's i found more or less states and at that time stuff i didn't know it all in in the stomachs which later proved to be industrial estates. well that the first time i realized there was a place that in a bernstein was. amazement. john has

alerted his european colleagues. his determines know how many films are affected. it's received and analysed three thousand birds found beached along the coastline of eight countries there's a piece of foam nylon royalist green bit this pieces of plastic still with and dirty ninety five percent of these birds are flying dustin's there's also lots of fragments of broken or plastic items and here this or at least seven industrial place that granules ok what their fear is the efforts place to call the end of a full moon in the southern north sea so if you translate it to you will the size. this is will be there for it's in the summer so in that case there's no need to discuss whether it's a little better for you we agree that this is not healthy. according

to the united nations plastic is now part of the doctor part of the species of c.b. . thanks to the use of plastics we protect the planet and we protect the climate evolution as well as you would have to replace the basic by getting that other material then you would have to milk supply the the weight of the beginning by for the price of the packaging by two and the amount of waste by one point six. fifteen plastic. marcus and his friend joe assailing new pacific is sitting on thousands of slightly leaky bottles. marcus's plan has already worked. his exploit is being followed by millions of people on the internet. it

affects some policy. some policy to help curb the exploitation of. the sympathetic chemicals that we had to use to our advantage short term advantage but now we're finding out just polluting our world and really i could feel that it's going to impact the next generation my kids are going to feel it so i feel like. obligated to do something obligation knowing something's wrong you can't do nothing otherwise interrupt your accomplice. in the one thousand times has an english peer at a not blandishments particularly far sighted idea. and he fitted a number of ships which regularly followed the same north european shipping lanes with the strange device.

it was a record of ships have been towing them every month ever since. these are time machines to be kept as treasures. the recorders contain cassettes with which you can trace the evolution of plantain in the english channel a north atlantic. one hundred seventy thousand samples of plankton that has been trapped over five million miles a spider's web woven over almost one hundred years. these devices have provided some unexpected and precious scientific proof.

cutters that of it's catching planktonic organisms and maybe it's catching small pieces of plastic at the same time so we went back through historic samples we sampled from the one nine hundred sixty s. the one nine hundred seventy s. and eighty's in the ninety's and then compared abundance through time and that's where when we showed that it had increased significantly when you compare the one nine hundred sixty s. and ninety's. this british scientist has proof of the increasing pollution of the channel and they planted. in fact plastic never decomposes into the environment it just breaks down into small bits over time so even if we stopped producing plastics tomorrow which is not something that i would advocate because i actually think plastics can bring many benefits to society and even if we did the legacy of the plastics that we produced there fragmentation would continue for many decades and centuries to come. norcross wants to share the scientific discovery.

all the plastic which has ended up in the seed is still there. three months and several storms later he finally reaches hawaii on his plastic bottle raft it was enough to make him a hero of modern times his struggle is starting to get some attention. but. there's a steady trend of increasing plastic and it's growing exponentially sort of the purpose of this is to get the world to where it's been talk about solutions what can we do about this issue.

this is busy consciousness raising on the other side of the planet richard thompson is busy collecting scientific evidence of the contamination of the marine habitat on plastics. i was just interested world this is a plastics that are forming by the breakdown of large places or what is the smallest piece of plastic present on the beach that was the challenge i set to two of my graduate students just a little over ten years ago richard has flown fragments of plastic that can be measured in microns finally human who. just found huge quantities of them.

of all of the pieces that we we extract that look a little bit unusual around about a third we confound the plastic he thought that maybe his findings with the result of the freak event particular plymouth beach so he analyzed the sound of ten other british beaches only took all stars in the same time worldwide but. we found these materials every place we've examined and that surprised me the ubiquity the fact that these we know that large items of debris are now covering the ocean's surface they down in the deep sea there but the fact that beaches world wide and now contaminated with small fragments of plastic was actually quite surprising to me i expected that maybe as we move to more remote places that perhaps we wouldn't find any plastics at this this microscopic scale but in fact we have. people often thing that plastic so

polluting and speakers the are totally ignoring the enormous amount of benefits benefits you get from the president material might means less consumption etc if you have the life life of the tools then automatically the consumption is very slow or one hundred kilo less for a car is zero point three eight liter program to kill him the. captain charles moore is fed up of seeing the oceans used as a dumping ground. a truce is the fruit of plastic back to the origin. of birds before becoming a. blister pack plastic comes from petrol then it is delivered to manufacturers in the form of little pellets this is all plastic.

they come out of this. right here. they come out of here there's a lot of brown and after many years. million. they call them blooming students without having been used through theme these pellets are on their way to the wood courses this facility is still releasing millions every time it rains so this is an illegal dump of pellets preproduction plastic pellets this is a bad factory these are polyethylene pellets they float in fresh water. these are the pellets from the rail cars that have been washed and blown down to the drain this is the drain that leads to the river these millions of pellets are entering the ocean through those little holes right there you can see pellets on every side of the drain we found two hundred feet.