nine thirty am in moscow these are today's top stories and look back at the week's news here on r t cannot these remaining supporters put up piers resistance in three libyan cities while his remaining supporters in tripoli say they're gripped by fear and oppression loyalist forces are deeply entrenched in a certain part he will lead and. get off he's whereabouts remain unknown. as nato moves ahead with fresh agreements on putting u.s. missiles in eastern europe there are security concerns of the kremlin and a call for urgent talks were mainly of poland and turkey poised to host elements of

the defense shield that moscow feels could neutralize its nuclear arsenal. moscow and london put deals before differences with david cameron securing a multi-million dollar contract during the first trip bribe it by british prime minister to russian six years both sides agreed to shelve their disagreements o'connor and still raise the few thousand and six london murder of former f.s.b. officer alexander litvinenko. and peacekeepers in kosovo on high alert as ethnic tension in serbia as a breakaway republic reaches a boiling point violence broke out recently when kosovo violently seems to serbian check. up next we take a look at how conflicts leave in irreparable scars on the planet stay with us. sometimes we think that it's easier to make war and to work to create an it or to clean up after it the military is a major player in terms of environmental outcomes.

the environment is wars silent casualty when we talk about the costs of war we rarely focus on what happens to the one of the animals in the rarely focus on that which sustains who and a lot. are completely out of sync now in defining threats to our security. at one time the principal threats were military they no longer are there now environmental in the homeland security department they're sleeping about vulnerability and preparedness and we just haven't made the same commitment yet in climate change but we really need to do that at the my midget syphilis sleepwalking instance i asked him we can't afford to straight walk into the future we must take decisions and action which creates a world that we want our children and their children to grow up.

the air. more has changed much over the centuries yet our perception of war has changed and little women morry allies the fallen take some note of collateral damage to civilians but in calculating the cost of war we seldom acknowledge its toll on the natural environment. but when one deals with warfare one has to realize that this tremendous amounts of damage that are done not just human damage but damage to the physical environment in which the battlefield takes place and whether it's a small war of a couple of days whether it's a major war world war one world war two vietnam war the recent wars in the middle east tremendous amounts of damage done by aerial bombs by napalm. chemicals that are used i would say there's very little consideration during combat operations to the effect on the environment what one gets totally preoccupied in

the firefight itself. after major combat operations are over at almost any war you have unexploded ordinance. staggered about the landscape you deny the use of agricultural land to the population you can poke tension only in fact water supplies and the food chain and i would say that that's basically the case almost anywhere that you use fire power either air power or artillery. the primary goal in warfare is to beat the enemy and when you want to defeat the enemy as quickly and is. probably cost effectively as you'd like but you use the most dangerous weapons you can for the most part unless you're your own troops or your own population happens to be on the

battlefield. with three six battle. each capable of firing up to six women all of these dragon ships every day. when i arrived in vietnam. february of one thousand seven doing. there was a really a great deal of destruction we were taken out on missions mainly by helicopter our missions were called search and destroy we would try to search out the enemy and destroy the enemy in because cheering. there were in numerable tunnels and usually we would try to blow these tunnels up a c. four explosives. and we seldom saw the enemy we tried to destroy the earth. concealed and sustain me and. i

often wonder if our struggle is not against human beings but against the earth that sustains them. we've become experts in blowing the earth up using bombs i tell me more doors see for gunships and napalm to reduce the earth to ashes. everybody they got. you know in the history of life on earth there been five moments. and wish to spend a major spasm of extinction and the best known is when the time a source left the stage as it were we are now clearly in the first stages of a potential sixth strasser extinction the human footprint on nature

is it's just the way you can see the increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere you can see it in the proliferating to some coastal waters around the world you can see it in the oceans becoming acid in terms of warm preparations for war that becomes a list of things in itself whether it's. are sonic booms a factor in rumoring mammals or it's the burning oil fields around the iraq war yet steroid coral reefs are in the pacific for rampant purposes are. the worst just goes on and on in war time damage to habitat and wildlife is a given sometimes unintended sometimes the result of a deliberate strategy one of the list examples of the environmental impact of four fate was seen during the iraq invasion of kuwait in one nine hundred ninety one and the deliberate igniting of the oil wells in kuwait by saddam hussein's streets but

also spilling of vast amounts of oil in fact tens of millions of barrels of oil into the patient gulf region and this had it charitable effect on the marine farm and on the life in the area gregory and now if they're it's. one solution that is it had his fun and they have it and it is it is not just a collection of millions of patent was of sand it is that is an eco system and for vast amounts of oil and to make his sister not that is terribly destructive for. all's fair in love and war as they say and that's why. aircraft will hit chemical industries will sink tankers will hit nuclear power plants they'll hit anything that might bring out a society or a city or wherever you're fighting it to its knees as quickly as possible with tremendous amounts than likely of environmental damage such deliberate targeting of the environment during the vietnam war prompted the addition of article fifty five

protocol one of the geneva conventions article fifty five of protocol one additional to the geneva conventions of nineteen forty nine states that care shall be taken in war to protect the environment against widespread long term and severe damage to the united states. although it is accepted almost all of the provisions of protocol one has taken exception to that. in our bombing campaign and nineteen ninety nine most of which did not capitulate and just a few days as we had anticipated and we bombed for seventy eight days we had bombed oil refineries resulting in a mile long oil slicks that extended down the ban you through remaining

into the black sea. we've bombed petro chemical plants and fertilizer factories spreading mercury. other carcinogens on the landscape an end to a can now lead into the danube river it will take the eco systems decades to recover. forests are among the ecosystems that are most often damaged or destroyed in combat itself the main reason for that is because they are very useful for gorillas trying to find concealment from forces with superior firepower forty years ago when the united states was trying to prevail in vietnam and

its enemies the vietcong were using the forests for concealment the american forces tried to fire and chemical defoliants to clear large parts of the forests of vietnam. not in build up. they think of themselves as wrong until. they fly seven days in the week fifty two weeks and. most days the planes of spew out the total of nearly eighteen thousand gallons of people here. from one hundred sixty two to nineteen seventy one u.s. military conducted a large scale defoliation drive code named operation ranch hand planes helicopters and tanker trucks sprayed nineteen million gallons of herbicides on south vietnam. i should mention agent orange which was also

one of the main ways of the way and was ravaged a place that had been spring and would would die and sometimes the we sort of say banana plants would become enormous and then they would die and it looked like a ghost landscape almost everything had been killed agent orange was developed actually in world war two at that time it was not thought that this had any effect on human beings so this became a wonderful commercial product but also a very potent product that could be used just. jungles to destroy from crops to be able to be used as a tactical weapon of war without being considered chemical warfare in the sense of rice and yes there can percent of the agent orange consisted of a chemical called two four or five t. which. unless the conditions of manufacture were carefully controlled would become

contaminated with dioxin which is an extraordinarily potent toxic chemical so much of the agent orange or this purpose side that was sprayed in vietnam was heavily contaminated the americans do not it will be a good idea to homs humans. on the right on the wrong of him wasn't like most people the age of vietnamese while fighting morning anyway these are baffled by my disgust and mobile but it makes no more than a lot of mission accomplished. in one thousand nine hundred for us veterans who were attributed a variety of adverse physical symptoms to agent orange exposure several out of court but the manufacturers twenty years later their families fought to have a plaque added to the vietnam veterans memorial it states in memory of the men and women who served in the vietnam war and later died as

a result of their service. and remember their sacrifice. neither the united states government nor the manufacturers of agent orange have compensated the vietnamese people. when we first started working on afghanistan and one of the things that surprised me was that it it actually was an area where natural and violent pistachio woodlands grew i didn't know that they actually existed there before in fact they were a significant part of the pre-war economy people picked at the stash isn't actually exported it was worth millions of dollars as a source of income to people. the deforestation we see in afghanistan is a product of three forces first of all you have the mujahideen that were using the forests for cover the soviets destroyed some of the force to prevent that second of all you have the afghans themselves harvested the forests and stockpiled the wood

because they feared that they be taken away during the collectivization process. and third you had land mines were put in agricultural areas by putting the land mines that are cultural areas that forced people to find other areas to grow food and the most obvious where the the forests and woodlands of the country so those three factors have led to virtual one hundred percent deforestation in some areas this photo was taken during a field study for the united nations environment program holes in the soil indicate were trees have been uprooted to plant crops. after three decades of war only the smallest patches of forest remain in northern afghanistan barely detectable by satellite and the reason we don't see some of these woodlands and forests regenerating is also complex at the moment if the seedling happens to take root and start growing and you actually have grazing of

goats and sheep over virtually the entire landscape and those codes and sheep obviously simply eat anything that comes up so what we saw you know in a number of different sample areas was not a single seedling had taken root. when you have such fragile soils and you have such heavy grazing on them you really amplify and cause soil erosion to the point where recovery is going to be extremely difficult if not impossible. i think. it was funny i actually started with my farber when i was probably ten years old he was a marine. who had fought in the battle of wall canal salvado and storm world war two and i heard the stories of his experiences of storming the beaches running out of supplies and. sword fighting with the japanese soldiers on the islands just for

. they saw their supply ship the blown up by japanese aircraft to try to explain that feeling of of seeing their food and their source of self-defense just completely destroyed from their eyes. i was doing some research on oil spills in general off the australian coast and that that story came back to me and i thought well his ship is still there and i but the oil still on board. there nearly four thousand world work to ship wrecks in the south pacific right now and over three hundred of those are oil tankers. if no measures are taken on this these ships will collapse they will release their oil. one side oil answers them are in environment will be very difficult to remove it. the pacific's highest concentration of world war two wrecks can be found in the federated states of micronesia choke lagoon service forward anchorage for the japanese imperial fleet

until an air attack by american forces sank sixty ships and more than two hundred planes the way that the reefs are struggling around the world due to coral bleaching global warming overfishing and dynamite fishery added to those stresses a massive oil spill would just be the last nail in the coffin for these waves they were navios to regenerate and. to think that a war that we have. in the last century could still be destroying our future is really pretty shocking. when it is tracking things that current warfare is set up is just meant suppressant a natural scene of the victims of wolf a cowardly civilians and this is a routine around that one hundred kilo say you say cut the status of last century when it was about through who is that ten percent of the victims who are civilians

and about ninety percent there it's the opposite. and what's in a person a pain upset and said it's a family since world war two he needs that are we using more and more me nations to get the same military effect the invasion of kuwait by iraq and the cleanup of kuwait after the one 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 no build i am not certain what i thought about it 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 us in a case like that. among the most enduring legacy of modern warfare is unexploded ordnance or u 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 north of the eurasian no armed conflict one example is the cluster bomb a hollow shell with the jets multiple smaller missions called the use or bombers.

up to a third of these bombers can fail to take made an impact affectively becoming landmines . are. not all unexploded ordinance is accidental eighty two nations are contaminated with landmines landmines 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 landmines 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 raised 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 and 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 be on the road until we got some mine clearance people to come in. don't touch the boy seeing these children and listen to them so it's part of that awareness program run by the british team that didn't have favored 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 pan a few years ago and it was probably the most depressing scene. that i have ever encountered among there were calculus cambodian men with their legs blown off above the knee who were scooting through the dirt begging in the marketplaces. and they were for the most part mind 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 vulnerable to the effects of war in a number for states. on a semester stabbing studies that indicate see impacts of war on children it was a team of experts from harvard which went to iraq in the wake of the one thousand nine hundred call for the study chain is to manage that the war and the sanctions that followed resulted in excess states of fifty to seventy thousand iraqi children his children were dying in large numbers from simple infectious disease such as china for its cholera hepatitis it said and the reason for that was such a literate decision that was taken in the nationally run war to destroy iraq's electricity generating capacity and without the electricity sanitation water

purification safe can't happen says children are dying of academics of infectious to say so. it would not take very long just a matter of weeks for washington d.c. or new york city to become pretty unloveable and 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 become contaminated we would develop cholera and dysentery and typhus we would have played and we have forgotten all of this especially when we go out and destroy the infrastructure of other countries. british.

markets. what's really happening to the. global financial headline is to.

see.