a meteor all crashes to earth in central russia injuring of a nine hundred people we've got the first hand accounts in our special report in just a few seconds. the currency clashes on the euro zone's plight occupy the hearts and minds of financial decision makers meeting right here in moscow. and budget cuts in britain hit police numbers with thousands of layoffs in just the past year we take a closer look at whether a few offices means more crime. a very well welcome to you from all of us here in moscow on. the worldwide news

picture this it's eight fifty one in the morning in a mid-sized city just east of the your rules when the sky is lit up by a fiery path of a meteor right about to smash into its final resting place here on earth it's happening there right in the middle of russia we've got spectacular firsthand footage from those who witnessed the dramatic event some of the video you can see right here indeed so let's a cross over to our visa renegotiated now into joining us live from the studio to talk more about this there was a huge amount of panic when it all first happened what can you tell us absolutely well i have to say that i keep watching these pictures all day long and i'm still fascinated by it but what happened is that the meteorite broke into the earth's atmosphere and literally exploded there was a massive sonic boom but you know rather than me describing it let's have a listen to what it actually sounded like because it's tremendous. yes so it really did sound like

a terrible explosion and the ball would jettison actually there were a lot of speculation and speculation about what was actually happening people were saying two jets collided in the air some people thought the plane exploded and others thought that a war started actually here's more about what actually happened there what people thought was happening we have we have accounts from eyewitnesses including our own documentary. absolutely. we saw a huge hill in the sky light from an airplane and then there was bright fire and an explosion but the feeling was like the earth shattering thoughts of a military crashed or the. disaster it was a relief to. me what. i was told that a plane crashed right into a building then we were told that a wall has been partially dislodged and metal structures inside the blast wave it was very scary. but. you know you know i tell you when you listen to the sound of

that explosion i don't care who you are the worst possible scenario comes to mind absolutely that was a we're talking about a plane crash or some military experiment exactly of course about the injury was basically there the impact seems to be getting with every single moment we know that hundreds of buildings have been damaged because of the sonic boom of glass flying everywhere obviously the windows the doors were busted and that of course results in injuries and we're talking about somewhere around a thousand people already being injured one hundred more than one hundred have been hospitalized most of them with injuries that have resulted from the effects from the damage and. blast out the windows flaws people who absolutely a lot of kids actually there were at least eighty kids that are also free for medical attention so yes it's actually very very i would say we're getting to an event that would that's happening in china because it's all happening in the morning kids were told to stay at home today nobody went to school nobody went to

kindergarten actually people were advised to stay inside because initially the minister emergencies didn't know exactly what this was and i mean that where there is one meteor there could always be another me. i'm saying that this could be a part of a meteor shower that could be being brought by the meteorite that we're supposed to see or that is supposed to pass a really close to earth and that is supposed to happen tonight i'm actually thinking in a couple of hours now if you are less you up in a couple of hours it's going to be crossing over. pacific region. is not that far from the pacific and it could if indeed it does come flying over the atmosphere they could be seeing another paul two but of course also you would have the camera ready absolutely we do have it i was sitting crew there and of course i think you go over that they along with the people you mention everywhere in the world are hoping that we are not going to see anything bigger than what we're seeing right now that this was as you know as glamorous and as disastrous as well you know you could admire the glamour of it from a big distance it will be living in you know there is no it's

a ridiculous go thank you very much for that so i have the great pleasure of lindsay from now is sitting over at the main news desk and if you don't mind i'll come and join you here just for of i would offer having spoken to a really good just know one of the things that is just become so clear and so apparent is the fact that people would terrified but what i understand with you though there was a sense of relief the end of the day that's what's so fascinating about this this is an area with seven nuclear fuel plants so you can imagine what people thought might be happening was an attack or even a manmade disaster affecting these plants and so when they know that it's now a rock basically from the heavens that has crashed down and done a bunch of infrastructural damage they feel a sense of relief knowing that it's not another manmade disaster they too have been suffered in that area because as i said there are nuclear fuel plants there and during the soviet era during the soviet era it was sort of a nuclear test facility and it was highly guarded it was very private and and so there's always this fear that something could happen and that what we're looking at

right now is one of those one of those tests that went on back during the soviet era now people say it's a rock from the heavens they feel a little bit better about it. when you talk about what do you talk about nuclear facilities being in the area how do you speed meteorite impact of one of those we could be dealing with the fallout it hit as a zinc factory imagine if that was one of these fuel facilities we would have been dealing with something horror. effect on a scale we don't even want to but you haven't just been doing your research on the region today's morning of eight fifty one in the morning it's not exclusive to that i know it's actually quite shocking the area is just seems to be a magnet for this sort of thing starting from what we know anyway in one thousand nine hundred eight with the very famous. meteorite that crashed and desecrated two thousand square kilometers of forest and right there you know we've got video of this huge forest land that the government actually went out and took video of to show us all of it then you've got at least a handful at least for over the next decades that the last one was ten years ago in

all of these there are no recorded deaths or injuries says i mean that is shocking but that being said you would have thought that the global community would have come together by now i'm put their heads together to try to find some sort of sky shield to protect us from these things that apparently of violating national airspace one of only regular tell you something a little more effective than what we've got going on right now especially with all of these people in these in these mid-sized cities we're lucky it's not having bigger cities can you imagine what would it what would then be happening so. hopefully in the debris field of this meteor there's not anything worse that's going to happen in the coming hours but i can only imagine what those people thought when when this when this light lit up the morning sky well as a reader was saying a few moments ago the reporter there was a reporter there was a chance that there was another chunk coming in the next couple of hours over the pacific region so we hear about c. i will certainly be keeping all of you posted. it's a great pleasure to have you and thanks so much. well let's discuss the further

with monica grady a professor of planetary sciences at the open university she joins us live now from the united kingdom. a pleasure to see you thanks for joining us here at sea the fall of this meteoroid caused quite a lot of destruction and injured over nine hundred people who do you think all in all they got lucky or was it or was it a really bad strike. hi well i think i think there are unfortunate actually and i mean these things happen all the time. the sonic boom you played a recording of was obviously just immense and it was the boom shattering glass and causing that it was the boom that caused the destruction not the actual landing of the meteorite when i mean i believe it landed in a lake but it didn't do any damage so it's amazing explosion in the atmosphere is it breaks the sound barrier that causes the problem so it's very interesting that

you say that and ultimately the sonic boom the breaking of a sound barrier cause more destruction than indeed the actual meteoroid impacting earth do you think do you think that's crazy we should be concerned though about other space material that passes through the atmosphere that could eventually i suppose still still pose a risk well first of all you shouldn't worry about something else coming from this particular objects i mean this is this particular thing that is for lennon and slandered there's nothing else going to be chasing down its tail so there's there's no other meteorite going to be coming from this particular object now there's the other asteroid da twenty fourteen which is across the atlantic so in the pacific at i think seventeen hundred hours g.m.t. and that has got nothing to do with this particular meet your eye it's just one of those amazing cosmic coincidence that is what it does show you is that we are bombarded by this stuff all the time usually it's too small for us to notice

usually biggest stuff falls it falls in really really remote places like in antarctica or in the middle of the pacific ocean and we never see it but even so it's great even so you can imagine with today's modern technology we should be able to track these things fairly sure and i mean we're tracking we're tracking the one twenty four to. there. which king that one that's fifty meters across the thing that fell over you catch him there it's probably meet your across my back so fifty fifty meters across now you're talking about so so i've actually been a bit confused here at r.t. the next piece that is coming into the atmosphere in the next couple of hours has nothing to do with this morning's going to ride. today of itself but you're telling me it's fifty meters that. it's completely separate and it's not coming through the atmosphere ok it's passing beyond the atmosphere it's going past it's going between

your main base not coming to the atmosphere so it's not going to it's ok it's all right so we can tell i want to calm down but the part of all of this is not. points cards or anything else lands and i it's like yet another coincidence and you know it's terrible that the people in you catch him going around were scared and upset i'm not surprised they were given the sound and given the fact of the nuclear industry and stuff around there i'm not surprised they were scared but now they can stop being there and they can start being really really proud and excited . because if they can actually get some fragments of this meteorite and i believe to say it fell in a lake it was a real share a they've got some bits that they managed to get out of the lake or whatever if they can put that on display it's a really really interesting scientific resource for students to look at learn about

certainly i nail some of the secrets of the deepest part of the universe something that drops in a celestial event such as this i mean certainly the footage let alone that i mean the footage has been up salute the startling one of the great a professor of planetary sciences at the open university life in the u.k. a great pleasure to have you on the our team program today thank you you thank. well dot com right now we've got a live update streaming in on the meteor strike clued in how some enterprising locals are already trying to cash in on what's become a disaster for others some are trying to sell parts of the crashed meteor online the most expensive spence of being offered for now ten thousand bucks of course even if someone is willing to dip into their pockets for this there's no way to verify whether you're buying a piece of meat here right or just a bit of frosted old mud you've been warned.

it's a pleasure to have you with us here on our show in moscow potential currency war and the european debt crisis certainly dominating a meeting of finance chiefs from some of the world's biggest economies here in moscow russia the gathering is seen as a launch pad for the g twenty summit later this year. is following discussions are in the kremlin and joins us live here on. good to see you lucy thanks for jumping on so quickly a lot of talk are looming about a currency war ahead of the meeting anything been said on that so far. hi there rory o'neill lot's been said in fact a lot of conflicting statements have been said about this talk of the impending looming currency war which has led some folks some market watchers to be quite confused as to what we'll actually see coming out of this g. twenty talks here in moscow now at the center of the whole controversy of crisis is

japan due to its aggressive monetary and fiscal policies it has seen a weakening of the now this has caused a major rift between the sort of advanced rich nations who are heavily in debt who don't really see any way to stimulate the economy with the exception of drastic measures and a rapidly growing developing economies who are really making their their their money from exports those those countries really fear that there will be some sort of a wave of competitive currency devaluations as a result of what japan has done and so what this has resulted in this is essentially a clash between the countries very little consensus we did hear from a russian finance minister. who has said that this is certainly an important issue that of currencies that is very much on the table but at the very same time we've seen other world leaders come up and say that you know what currency wars aren't really a threat they're trying to calm down the market some have even questioned whether

japan's actions constitute a manipulation of the currency and so again a lot of dissent and disagreement about how to actually move forward what countries probably will agree on is that currencies manipulated artificially before we get carried away with all this mumbo jumbo let's explain exactly what this actually means basically when a country is in a dire fiscal situation such as of course as we all know many countries are today like japan for instance is one option that a country house is to devalue its currency so making something like this a twenty dollar bill worth less you can do that by a variety of means for example printing cash because why would you want to do that will. currency is worth less your manufactured goods are cheaper on the market and that gives you a temporary boost in the economy which could be pretty critical in tough times like this now what we've actually seen essentially the fear here is that when a country does that your trading partner strike back they say ok we're going to

lower the value of our currency and that sets off a currency war such as the one that we saw in the one nine hundred thirty s. which has led to the great depression now japan insists that it is simply trying to stimulate as kwame it's not doing anything to prompt a full scale currency war of course no country here wants to see that but the reason that we're seeing so much disagreement and so little consensus among the countries is that you know what for example the united states its policy isn't all that different the fed in the u.s. has been printing money like crazy so these developed countries don't really see any incentive in isolating japan in trying to really squeeze down of this currency manipulation issue because they don't want to mess around with their economies essentially so that is really the crux of the issue of course this is just one of the many conflicts that are going to be discussed at the g. twenty talks here in moscow and representation is one of them austerity versus growth is another one but of course this is a two day meeting so we'll have to keep watching to see how these things actually

develop. in moscow thank you. well our business desk is also closely watching the meeting of the g twenty finance heads and more news business correspondent natasha and yet more and what's cutting their attention. the other issue that's being actively discussed by the finance ministers here in mall sco is the so-called financial transaction tax in europe that the european commission claims will bring in additional thirty five billion euros choose the european coffers earlier today i actually spoke to the head of the o.e.c.d. on t.v. who said that this measure would only work if all of the world's leading economies would agree to it and he explained why you could watch that entire interview later on on our c. and of course all the details of the g twenty finance ministers meeting the coming

to you in the business bulletin at eighteen thirty g.m.t. . to join us for that within. this hour the republicans are blocking chuck hagel from becoming america's defense secretary. more about president obama's candidate and in just a few minutes here on the program we'll be joined by a reporter in washington about why hagel is causing such concern. at libya for. the uprising that toppled the gadhafi preparations and road blocks across the country and nato forces gather inside the capital this out the number of those protesting against the new government continues to rise and so much more after the break. good lumber tour. was to build

a new. route you leave. your new found anything to nj mission to teach music creation why you should care about humans and. this is why you should care only. british. markets. find out what's really happening to the global economy.

the global financial headline news. reports. twenty minutes. in the u.s. senate republicans have stalled an attempt by the white house to make chuck hagel the secretary of defense he fell just short senate has decided to push for more time to find out just a bit more about him. washington d.c. to give us a. good to see you can you can you give us a bit of the background to this why did the republicans. bid to be the new defense chief do you think. well those who blocked the vote on chuck hagel nomination this thursday know very well that he will eventually be confirmed as defense secretary there are enough votes in the senate to confirm him but the stalling of the vote together with the humiliating treatment that the senators gave chuck hagel two

weeks ago at his confirmation hearing this whole process is seen as a message all by itself those lawmakers showed that they could question anyone who would allow themselves to dissent from washington's core foreign policy beliefs chuck hagel remarks at the confirmation hearing disappointed even his supporters during the hearing which to many seemed like an inquisition mr haygood had to backtrack on many of the statements he had made before including that war with iran should not be an option including his criticism of israel's actions and some other foreign policy views that he had expressed as a senator so throughout that long and exhausting hearing mr haygood kept apologizing for much of the previous statements he had to take to previous positions he had taken as he bent backwards to show how quote unquote mainstream his views are in the senator's cape kept accusing him of not being again quote unquote mainstream enough to get the job chuck hagel swore to defend basically all of washington's foreign policy orthodoxies his confirmation process has been humiliating in many ways and it demonstrated the state of u.s.

foreign policy basically intolerant of the no eternity of vision alternative thought having said all that the president's decision to nominate chuck hagel of course knowing the position chuck hagel had taken before was also seen as a message president obama had said previously that there is too much war talk going on and maybe by nominating chuck hagel he wanted to play down because too many people here in washington are too eager to talk war and just during the confirmation hearing the word war was mentioned one hundred twenty times the word iran one hundred eight times by comparison of ghana's than the war that the u.s. is fighting right now just twenty six mentions of course those are just words but they may very well. show how eager many meeting in washington are to discuss new wars without even having to finish the old ones. there are some people out there saying that being a republican was a nominate for the post by obama so that obama down the road can blame him as

a republican if indeed foreign policy doesn't it will see its best of times and certainly the theories around the guy nature can in washington d.c. thanks very much indeed. now the british government's programme of cuts has resulted in a drastic drop in the number of police officers to the lowest level in over a decade and the radical reform package has already sparked many security questions . that a chance to ask m.p.'s on both sides of the argument if indeed the fears of. in the number of police officers up to the lowest levels for eleven years as the impact of a twenty percent cut and whitehall funding to police budgets takes effect just think more about these. joined by conservative m.p. . and labor and. thank you very much to both of you for joining us jim i'm going to start with the a lot of the piece that we were speaking with we've got is a bit of. forms but at the same time. the number of police. and police.

i mean it's quite confusing time i think for police to what's being expected. i understand that there may be slight consolation but given the battering the reputation of the police is hard over recent months the government had to take steps to shore up the reputation. of. the police service quite dramatically in my part of east london we've seen over one hundred fifty uniform stuff in the past two years. and crime which we've seen year on year for six years and reverse and for the past two years have been an increase in crime last year of nine percent so as certain parts of the country are being imposed are of saying the safety of people on the streets what do you say to. the lowest level of police now for eleven years. so i may not know the police are having to take

their share of the of the spending reductions along with the rest of the public sector to get the deficit under control and what we're actually seeing is it's not about police numbers it's what you do with the police or innovative ways of maintaining a police presence on the street and jim a home for you have a increase in crime his constituency but the fact of the across the country on average last year crime fell by eight percent and he fell in my force in leicestershire by eight percent as well so we are seeing a overall reduction in crime across the country at the same time as we cutting police numbers but they're doing innovative things like sharing back office services because the forces. to save money and keep those police out on the streets where people want to be sort of in offices filling in paperwork and small but with red tape is not just the police integrity it's the public perception of the police integrity and the reforms will help to improve the public perception of precinct. right thank you very very much for joining us you can join in our debate online dot com we've also been on twitter a lot of the public have been getting involved in this debate as well as members of the police. police reform to join in the debate about the latest police reforms.

libya's braced for fresh unrest the second anniversary of the revolution that toppled khadafi is being held under the threat of violence and security is tight and foreigners are leaving on mass the first protests against the current government are expected in benghazi the birthplace of the revolution former m i five agent annie marshawn explains why libya has seen any post arab spring optimism ultimately destroyed. people have invested a lot of hope in the arab spring i think now they're beginning to realize the harsh reality that a lot of it was backed by the west and the west wants to strip the countries of the mineral wealth i mean we're seeing the spillover into other areas like mali and niger as well and this is all part of a bigger sort of power play i think between the u.s. wanting to secure the minerals or says about africa generally and stop china getting them so in terms of democracy an arab spring you know i think it's very naive to think that that's what the west is trying to help these countries to

achieve we've seen an absolute mess left behind by the nato invasion of libya which is what happened two years ago let's not mince words and that was problematic on so many levels not just the international legal level where suddenly aggressive war could be justified as humanitarian intervention even though it destabilized an entire country and results in many more deaths than could be prevented and we're also looking at a situation now where the country has lost its stability where there are reports coming out from independent journalists about militias still holding great swathes of the country and their power where we have competing fairly fundamentalist politicians groups as well fighting over their territory without any of the promised ability wealth and democratic values that were suggested when nato went in so it's become such a mess and so many levels you know just a couple of minutes here what are to do stay with us or special report on the graves of european democracy this is art.

people don't understand what the european union is they don't understand how it's governed they don't know who are the people who are running it but they know that they were chosen by the people and so when they see the results are less than perfect they say who do we blame. they don't know who to blame because they don't know who these people are.

when i started out as a young environmental activist i had no idea that i should end up as a watchdog in the brussels machinery. but i was stunned to discover how fragile the political decision making process is and to realize how easily it can be manipulated. there's a dark force behind this machinery an entire industry operating in the shadow often in secrecy and very confidential. it. for. this industry is to lobby industry. when it comes. down to. it. not. in twenty years now i've been fighting to uncover. who are these people

who are pulling the strings to your decisions. and how do they operate. and hording to the news political and. religious belief. elect to speak to please. not that well listen i'd like to. to leave a message for for tomorrow i just wanted to confirm the meeting. that we have fixed . my name is mr kenny's best calculates kidney r. and s. . from from the european services federal d.s.s.

this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get time today to to go to those i want to that is it ok. thank you very much. one breast as is a small city it's a kind of province's but that's on this earth. when you know a bit further about it's brussels is really the place. this is where the this this is take place this is where they just station is dot i think there was the figure

is around eighty percent of all it's just stations which are. touching direct life of european citizens is actually initiated here thus. if you look at plus you epicenter of political power in europe you see the european commission on the one side next to the council of the e.u. . and all around that's where you find lobby offices most of them belonging to big multinational corporations you find them also in all of the side streets all over to the european parliament and beyond. who finds a good looking out for the large corporations who find industry lobby groups and there are. lovely operations being you know orchestrated from offices in that area . two thousand five hundred lobby structures are based in brussels fifteen thousand lobbyists the second biggest lobby industry in the world only washington d.c.

is bigger. so are there european union legislation this is complicated it goes through a lot of stages it always starts with the european commission they take. new initiatives for the for legislation for policies and then it goes to the as the two chanst opponents the council of ministers. and from the moments that the european commission takes is for the very first steps in developing new illustration all new policies industry wants to be there to influence it's.

i mean in a situation of so when you want to have the possibility to go. for the private sector where i would decide myself. what are we to i thought that that's more. something for me. and then i discovered. business around the loop institutions. are starting. to be lobbyists.

you know we. everybody believe the bad. the will make the institutions and institutions in the european union is about the commission the council of ministers and the european parliament but there is also. another world behind that which is how to influence the institutions to make a text to give a good idea to. propose amendments to trying to fine tune the text depending on the interest of the people we are to push more.

lobbying is it was originally envisioned is a good thing no lawmaker can be an expert in all the fields that he or she has to deal with and so they rely on other people giving them advice. but lobbying went from their field of expertise into what is more properly called hired guns so you now have people who may not be an expert in anything they're dealing with but they're paid for by clients who want them to pursue specific. objectives what makes them so effective is many of these hired guns will be what what we call revolving door abusers and these will be people who were in governments then come out of government and are hired by the very same

people that had business pending before them when they were in government and the mid ninety's we had come across so many examples of your policies that were basically captured by industry and industry lobbying we felt it was really a fundamental problem here the influence of industries is excessive and we decided to set up a group to document examples and to start developing a strategy to roll back this excess of influence and that's how it started this. one day and then the summer of one thousand nine hundred three i remember a fax came in on a fax machine in the office. and it came from the south of france. from the local environmental group. this group was fighting against

a motorway that was planned to go through a valley in the area they lived in the valley of asp a clutch of cleave very important to the area a very beautiful area and. the group asked if we knew more about the role of the european union and and specifically the european commission in this motorway project. so we started looking into this we discovered that this motorway project was part of something called the trans european networks. the transfer p and that works was the biggest infrastructure projects in history with a estimated budget of four hundred billion. euros. friends from sweden came up with another detail there was an influential lobby group behind this and they asked us you know about a year to the european round table of industrialists. i know. i started

digging for more information about the iraqi. i went to our archive and i didn't find anything. i started diving into the alien world of the business press newspapers like the financial times the economist german business newspapers and we found a reference to a new report that had been published shortly before called reshaping europe. but rather interesting and we ordered this reports at the european the round table at quarters. i wrote on the request mentioning as the purpose of research. i did not believe i would get anything but a few days later a big brown envelope arrived in my letter box. please booklets are inside missing links missing networks and resave in europe. may

take the first two publications going through them something strange about them somehow they look so familiar. euro tunnel. scam link. peyronie's corridor. i go to the archive. at. the t. and projects by the commission. i go through the papers compare them back and forth. striking similarity. projects are almost identical. commission seems to have copy paste. proposals. speak your language they will not advance. news programs and documentaries in

spanish matters to you breaking news a little turn to angles stories. that all teach spanish find out more visit eye eye to .