at the start of the last century when it was about the ten percent of the victims of course it begins and about ninety percent in a trade but now it's the opposite and what's in preceding a gain of certain separte finale since world war two he is at sadly using more and more munitions to get the same military effect the invasion of kuwait by iraq and the cleanup of kuwait after the nine hundred ninety one gulf war is a very good example of the problems and the challenges of cleaning up the battlefield. after the war there was an enormous amount of refuse from the battles that took place these were trucks tanks aircraft all sorts of ordnance a lot of unexploded and what happened was the allied troops came in and they basically picked up all this metal debris and piled it in giant piles the size of a football field in various parts of the kuwaiti desert and left it there was an acolyte good

a lot of money and so from time to time these piles go up in flames and from time to time they explode here and there and no one really knows what to do what to do with unexploded ordnance what we call you expose in a case like this. among the most enduring legacy of modern warfare is unexploded ordnance or you x o a grenade shells and bombs that failed to detonate during that you act so remains on the battlefield long after the battle often hidden by vegetation or covered by soil. as weapons continue to grow more lethal the casualties of war are no longer confined to combatants nor to loot your ration no armed conflict one example is the cluster bomb a hollow shell which rejects multiple smaller nations called the use or bomb lets.

up to a third of these bombs can fail to detonate on impact affectively becoming landmines . not all unexploded ordinance is accidental eighty two nations are contaminated with landmines land mines that kill or maim fifteen to twenty thousand civilians per year in afghanistan there are ten to twelve landmine casualties each day the issue of land mines is a critical one in afghanistan and there are two ways that you can tell if they are they are present the first is of course if the grass hasn't been grazed if the grass is tall and standing and there's no evidence that it's been eaten there are probably landmines in the shepherds are keeping their animals away but the second

when the local people find land mines they tend to paint rocks and they paint them red on one side and white on the other on the red side is where the land mines are located. ok. ok. the problem is when you have a landslide or a flood which washes through a landmine area first of all the land mines are actually picked up and distributed across other areas and second the rocks become obviously mixed in jumbled up so we've been in a situation before we were driving down a road we came across a creek bed where flashflood actually washed landmines across the road so it was a major security risk and we couldn't actually move beyond the road until we got some mine clearance people to come in. don't touch the boy seeing these children in the sense of themselves it's part of the way it was praised by the british team that did favorite for their low cost and longevity land

mines were laid heavily by both sides during the cambodian vietnamese war today the un estimates that ten million mines remain in cambodian soil. i had occasion to visit a non-parent a few years ago and it was probably the most depressing scene. that i've ever encountered. there were countless cambodian men with their legs blown off above the knee who were scooting through the dirt begging in the marketplace. and they were for the most part mine victims. war is not healthy for anybody the combatants or the people who are caught up in it

recent studies in iraq and mortality come up with a range of excess mortality in the tens of thousands. children are particularly fond of the effects of war in a number of respects. honest and most disturbing studies that indicates the impact of war on children was a chain of expats from harvard which went to iraq in the right as the. call for the study chain is to manage but the war and the sanctions that followed resulted in existence of fifty to seventy thousand iraqi children these children were dying in large numbers from simple infectious disease such as china for its hepatitis it's a check and the reason for that was a deliberate decision that was taken in the nationally run war to just roy iraq's electricity generating capacity and without electricity sanitation water

purification situation can happen says children who are dying of epidemics of infectious disease. it would not take very long just a matter of weeks for washington d.c. or new york city to become pretty unlivable if we didn't have electricity for water purification if we didn't have gasoline for our sanitation trucks to remove the garbage we would be overrun by rats and other vermin our water would be completely animated we would develop cholera and dysentery and typhus we would have plague and we have forgotten all of this especially when we go out and destroy the infrastructure of other countries. question is that so much to me i mean was it ever a real mystery to you

a currency in crisis in an unknown future but is there a silver lining on. a timer here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture. wealthy british style. sometimes. on. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy

with mike stronger or a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kaiser reports. this is the building people back to work all cross the country this is the bill that will help our economy in a moment crisis a crisis that just won't go away so with his entourage of american workers in tow obama sends his new jobs bill to congress but with a major bank announcing major layoffs and with such a volatile markets are developed economies on the brink of collapse. the bank you. don't mind money. i don't want to. sound kid. seems like a simple request considering that these first responders are the ones who were there for america during her time of need so ten years later as the country

remembers nine eleven fire some forgetting about the heroes who risked their lives to help. and it's a cuban cold shoulder thirteen years of it so why has the mainstream media been so silent about the cuban five case in the us that are sounding the trumpets for bill richardson's fight for an american held in cuba. and from the cuban five to the white house twenty seven a group of activists fighting to shut down the school of america as well as for the criminal charges these activists now face after deciding to fight for their rights and their beliefs. good evening it's september twelfth eight pm here in washington d.c. i'm lauren lyster you are watching r.t. now fear in the markets today as investors and economists worry that greece could be closer to defaulting on its debt analysts are saying they don't believe the u.s.

can be insulated from this stress on european banks economists are already worried the u.s. is headed into recession and worry europe could be the tipping point but in this crazy world president obama took to the calm of the rose garden to try to sell his jobs bill though the world economy. that is full of uncertainty right now in europe and the middle east some of them may be beyond our control. but this is something we can control. obama says something we can control is passing his bill but he doesn't really have control to pass this measure with a divided washington it would seem so maybe that's why he felt he needed the extra support of an entourage this morning he said all those folks were teachers cops and construction workers who would be helped by his bill but just as he was making these public statements trying to instill optimism then cover america released

a public statement saying it was laying off thirty thousand employees to try to save five billion dollars so what does all of this mean for europe america and americans earlier i spoke to edward harrison he's founder of credit write downs i first asked him if he thinks greece is going to default. i think they will have a hard restructuring this year that means basically principal but i don't think it's going to be an unstructured of thought where they basically just run out of mali which you know is that they're going to get a top up in service of the bailout that they've already received even though they actually haven't met the the criteria for the austerity but you know it's the end of the law for this this program i think what's going to it is the eurozone is going to say look this isn't working we realize that there's no way they're going to be able to repay and do the austerity we have to take some haircuts that is we have to write the debt you know default and then we would have some sort of program

to deal with that in an orderly instruction world so who loses and that's an area the bondholders of the greek sovereign debt and that principle greek beggs but also foreign like german banks for inspects belgian birds so what does that mean for you or i sitting in america a country that some think is teetering on recession could this be the tipping point cannot you know i look at default as a positive it's about time that they did the it's unsustainable what we really should be concerned about is the occurred early both the united states and in europe because at the end of the day austerity which is what these countries are undergoing that's not a beneficial thing over the short to medium term you know when you start cutting people's when you start cutting staff which is what austerity is are cutting wages basically just sucking money out of the economy and so that's going to be negative for the. car to be like ours which has

a huge slug of private sector debt those people are going to run into big problems and then they're going to fall it is going there's going to sort of a spiral so this is true both in europe and in the. to the degree that you see something in europe negative in terms of the car to me that's going to feed back to us. but we have our own problems in that that sort of work so which is worse for the united states if greece defaults in a way you think it's going to fail or if it doesn't well it depends. because if greece defaults that everyone says ok doug says the faulty luckily we have heard of the way greece the other special case. good looks prosy all or they could say oh greece defaults and what about our a what about portugal what about spirit italy they look like greece maybe they'll default to. sell their bugs and get

out of those countries and then the same for the sitter's it's a play out there that we just played out in greece and what about banks in the united states as well that a hold of a lot of exposure to greet sovereign debt there is concern today over french banks getting a ratings downgrade because of all of the greek debt on their books well you know there's also the credit default swaps i think in the u.s. of the tickler that's where a lot of people concerned that is that if greece defaults in fact it will be a positive for american banks because they are on the other side of that is that. he greece will default when they are they do default these some of these banks will be a whole lot of the american banks will be will get the the the bill as a result ok so is that good or bad sounds like you're saying somewhere in there this is going very well that. there's the credit default swaps i think the bottom. level with us learn a lot of us as just normal people is the you. global financial system is so

complex there so with the things happening we don't know what's on the books of any of these large bags that anything that happens with the variations in it could just spiral out of control of the wire. in the same way as your lehman brothers did she does the ok why don't we brothers in two thousand and eight started the financial crisis in two thousand and eight and we as a country were supposed to have some reforms after that they were supposed to end too big to fail and keep this from happening again does this all just show that nothing has changed so you have to preserve your you know for instance who's the head of j.p. morgan chase just recently said you know what all of these measures the try to take a basel to make us increase our capital there. i know you're right edward we have that we have that both great can we bring it up a little read the quote straight from the article he said it in an interview with financial times he said i'm very close to thinking the united states shouldn't be

undoubtedly more i would not have agreed to rules that are blatantly anti-american our regulator should go there and say if it's not in the interest of the united states we're not doing it are these regulations not an interest of the united states to have capital or partly it's positive for j.p. morgan chase and it's positive for america if the world because it may be over the short term it's negative because their own needs will take a hit and they want to have the good sort of capital so you're saying that banks are just trying to preserve their interests and interest of making more money because of course they go if they make more body that's great for the because they'll be paid a lot of bother if bad things are good and they don't make a lot of money in fact it goes catastrophic we roll they'll be billed it out does it we're talking about with greece because you're talking about if it defaulted and bondholders architecting haircut would that be a change in that paradigm that we've seen because what we've seen is banks getting bailed out investors getting bailed out and average people getting screwed with

this be a change in that where investors are bailed out in large exactly and that's the good of what's happened it's a move in the right direction towards you know basically what we. all love will be mostly private sector and i think that greece is different in that regard in that you know really there are problems with public sector. but these does need to be written and that means that the institutions that hold is that they need to account for the losses and if that means that some of the words solve the. we have to deal with the average joe but we need to move on from that we need to write those debts that move forward and harrison with a bit of the silver lining for a greek default scenario he's founder of credit write downs now from banks possibly going offline to power coming online share power plant went online in iran it's the country's first nuclear power plant helped by russia in this effort but what is celebration for iran brings condemnations from others as the u.n.

nuclear watchdog for example issues a warning over iran's nuclear intentions now earlier i asked ivan eland senior fellow at the independent institute to set us straight and clarify the difference between producing nuclear energy for civilian purposes and developing nuclear weapons here's what he had to say. well one could lead to the other but in this killer case this reactor is a light water reactor so there's less proliferation danger. there's less of a chance that they could use it for nuclear weapons the other thing is that russia is selling the fuel and then taking the spent fuel in a lot of times the spent fuel can be. used to bomb fuel and so that's an added safeguard in this case so i think you know people who say that this is a proliferation risk might be a little bit but it's not it's not a it's not that much of one i think ok so you're saying that for example when the u.n. nuclear watchdog comes out and says that it is concerned about iran's nuclear intentions

when they're playing it on line are you saying these are unfounded. no i think there's some. foundation to the fears that iran is seeking a nuclear weapon i'm not sure this reactor will give them that much help in any time they get excess expertise etc but the proliferation risk comes when you take the fuel and you can make a bomb with it the iranians have done uranium fuel they have centrifuges going this particular reactor as long as they send to reprocess plutonium back i think they'll be fine or at least it will be a lower risk so i think there is a proliferation danger from iraq but i'm not sure that this reactor. see that very much so if there is not that there's over this reactor and this plant all right now in fact yes in fact if we if the international community won do something

they could allow iran to have these types of reactors and maybe that would get them encourage them to forego the the bomb making but we don't know for sure that they're after a bomb but there are some indications and there's a lot of fear among western countries and also the international atomic energy watchdog but they are ok but what this plan. to iran as promised to play by the books at the u.n. and let them inspect it that's just one examples so they've agreed to play by the rules why is that not enough well iran has been secretive about some facilities this one but other ones and that's what leads to the suspicion so i say if they would try to channel iran into more peaceful nuclear activities like this where you have the fuel coming in and going out and russia monitoring it and also the international inspectors monitoring it perhaps and there's no

guarantee of this because iran is in a bad neighborhood basically because israel with nuclear weapons there's other countries that are clearly trying to get nuclear weapons. there's other countries that are big and important turkey. you know other countries and they have the saudi problem the arab problem so you can see we're in there of course the u.s. . there's been some talk of taking out the iranian regime by in the u.s. so iran does have some incentives to try to graft or weapons it's interesting point made by ivan eland senior fellow at the independent institute now speaking of iran it was named as part of the axis of evil by george w. bush after nine eleven now some call that spam is iran was never revealed to have a role in nine eleven and that's just one example but it's not the only case of people spinning nine eleven to profit off of it on the tenth anniversary some are using the commemoration that we just had to make

a buck but are american heroes getting any payoff from their sacrifices are teavana and i found that out firsthand. we were the first to look disaster and we i take you through what was left of the collapsed towers were on or the heroic first responders who rushed to the scene and saved so many the honoring is yet to happen you don't expect to be discarded like a junkyard dog hundreds of rescue workers died on nine eleven and hundreds more are dying today the responders are fighting diseases the world mine a cancer and respiratory diseases along heart attacks since nine eleven a thousand and forty have died that i know about and now we have to fight to be compensated. you want the patients refuse to recognize a link between ground zero degree and countless illnesses among first responders the government tried to block them getting health care denied their sick lied and

all of the air was safe to breathe day one consciously the u.s. government would honestly just prefer that they shut up and or die and go away or retired construction worker t.j. gilmartin is one step away from cancer i had robert de niro i had him serving me crumble away do you think one person or for me a mask after over three hundred days spent in ground zero t.j. is facing long surgery but it's his memories that scare him the most frightening to have a woman's body and the only way you could tell was a woman's body looks like a big piece of chicken fried chicken he could nail polish on a finger tips on the fifty year old has traveled to washington dozens of times a week politicians up to reality and we had to bring bus loads of sick respond this is walking in with oxygen tanks and i mean these are guys who were faking it and every time we took a trip. there was another guy. you know who died

i mean it's disgusting politicians to keep it turned into these here. rosewell need a photo op to boost their patriotic credentials american politicians always talk about how valuable teachers are but they owe but then they strip them of their unionizing rights and reduce their salaries and treat them terribly and similarly the first group sponsors are merely the latest i would say suckers to have been taken in by the news first responders pushed to the side nine eleven has been used as a pretense for questionable politics countless times including a global war on terror there's a nine eleven fatigue in united states and the world because it's been ten years nonstop of using nine eleven as a politics of fear. for political gain gain has not only been political the tragedy has also been commercialized and moneymaking machine is operating in full swing on the temp out of her story up september eleventh nine eleven memorial line for just

over one thousand dollars right eleven remembrance sushi for twelve bucks a roll and nine eleven taught that for almost two hundred fifty dollars on offer in the u.s. to commemorate the tragedy all these vendors make money off all these bottles and products and it's turned into a type of weird halloween party where it's fun to get into the fear of the turban the bin ladin bogeyman ten years ago while political and commercial profit is all the rage the last to see big box or responders and as they die off so do the expectations of some like to just have somebody from the government say thank you. thank you. i don't want any money i want a medical thank you. and archie you know. the

sad reality and ken george is another nine eleven search and rescue worker he's very ill and he shared his story with me last winter we caught up with him earlier this evening and i thought i started off by asking him how with help it's now take a listen. that's the quantity skip and worse little at a time a month like t.j. was saying i'm on oxygen and you know i try not to use it too much in the house because i'm kind of embarrassed to like when my daughter's friends are over my granddaughter calls on the little string on my nose so you know ten bags can sometimes but that's what's happening to us nine eleven responders each time we keep getting sicker and sicker each time we go to about the something else is wrong you know is it just getting worse i'm so sorry to hear that i know you know one of the things when we last spoke you were looking to this is before the drug health bill had passed and now president obama has signed it and now before starting to get paid but was that a solution for many of your friends in your nine eleven first responder community

who are second no doubt or question what in front of kids is not included that so many people are dying from cancer it's unbelievable just like the old gentleman's before state t.v. every problem the bus trip somebody else's missed of somebody else was dying i got it done a good friend of mine has stage four throat cancer and you know he's that speck it's a big it i wanted a couple of the guys that matter a little get together they got here and said they got to go for biopsies and all kinds of like that it's scary you know it really isn't to see people driving a profit on the deal it's kind of aggravated how was it for you and your i know you're very close with and i love a first responder community you guys comfort each other and are close to how was the nine eleven tenth year anniversary for you guys what was what was the biggest feeling that you had. i was here this.

year anniversary with a lot of the first responders to actually go and senate even go see your memorial wall that they have for a sick respond as well here really and we so want to six hundred dollars only will get put up on a wall that was about it all they're going to shut the t.v. off and we've been excluded was too much to handle had a lot of people call me up because they were still upset. all the stuff that they went through you know it was just stuff like that right and all this time later and you mentioned that cancer isn't covered i just read a study that that you were three found that nine eleven firefighters are nineteen percent more likely to get cancer there are studies done on meth and it's not being covered how many of your friends are are sick with cancer that there were first responders i would say good three percent of them have cancer and i'm talking about

they have cancers that people don't usually get you know. between the forty's and early fifty's and these people are dying and they're leaving behind you and wives you don't it's unbelievable and some of the kids that i live even heard of and they're not getting help for it that was nine eleven search and rescue worker ken george now new mexico governor former governor meanwhile bill richardson has traveled to cuba to try to free a u.s. government contractor who's jailed in havana his name is alan gross everything richard said over the weekend was quoted saying he'll stay there in cuba until he gets to meet ross now while mainstream media has covered the trip to save alan gross as they've build it there is no mention of the cuban five cubans who are imprisoned in the u.s. who claims to be in the u.s. monitoring terrorist groups now they're marking thirteen years of incarceration in prisons across the u.s. government heard about them it's needed because the mainstream media doesn't tie.