this is r.t. tonight chuck hagel is officially sworn in as the new u.s. secretary of defense after winning narrow senate approval but his policies have drawn fire from capitol hill with his own fellow republicans among his most vocal critics. it's amazing chaos tonight after the parliamentary election failed to produce a clear winner as european leaders fear the country's political turmoil could have a strong negative effect on the entire eurozone. this for a minor traffic offense this shocking video posted by a russian couple of eight year old daughter driving dangerously. good evening love you have you with us eight pm wednesday night here in moscow my name's kevin owen you're watching our t.v.

our top story than if you just heard chuck hagel now officially the u.s. defense secretary but only after being naturally approved by the senate he's been under fire from fellow republicans for his past criticism of the iraq war and the israeli lobby with some believing he could also be too soft on iran and it's also just two days of course before billions of dollars in budget cuts in the military can now than on the clash on capitol hill. chuck hagel was confirmed by the senate fifty eight votes for forty one vote against a narrow vote as you can see but he can find in louisville all that apologizing and repenting behind and he had to do a lot of that to get the job she has been working very hard to tailor his views so as to please congress as a senator chuck hagel allowed himself to oppose the surge in iraq or to criticize israel's policies to oppose seeing war with iran as an option but as the president's nominee for the defense secretary position he backtracked on much of what he had said before and did it as as even his supporters noted in

a rather clumsy way but in a way that showed how much he wanted the job and the whole confirmation process including the attack campaign against him including the filibuster ten days ago showed how intolerant the u.s. congress is of alternative thought on foreign policy ten days ago the senators knew quite well that chuck hagel would eventually be confirmed but they chose to block the vote as many say just to make a point president obama certainly knew that chuck hagel confirmation process would not go as smoothly as say john kerry's but he nominated him anyway it looks like president obama too wanted to make a point this is his last term he doesn't have to think about getting reelected and it is a good time for him to make a point by the end of his first term the degree of war mongering in washington has escalated and we should the point where even the president said there's too much war talk going on now mandating chuck hagel could be goes way over bringing it down a notch the president's also quite aware of the general war fatigue in the country

but the u.s. congress doesn't seem to have that same war fatigue this chuck hagel confirmation hearing showed quite to the contrary never too tired for war it seems one more thing it's saying important to point out here chuck hagel as defense secretary not be in a position to generate policy is there to fulfill the president's policies probably his main job will be managing the budget the biggest military budget in the world and figuring out where to make cuts but most of the questions senators asked during his confirmation hearing were about policies which is really not going to be in his field of work anyway. well meantime the u.s. could be considering a shift on syria secretary of state john kerry who is on his first european tour right now is signaled washington's readiness to support the syrian rebels some u.s. officials say washington is now thinking indeed of giving direct assistance to opposition fighters and possibly even training them the syrian national coalition initially rejected attending the international so-called friends of syria meeting

coming up in rome thursday in protest over what it sees is negligible help from western nations but the s.n.c. will return to see what's on offer the opposition accuses the u.s. and its allies of not intervening militarily and not arming the rebels we spoke to dr ali mohamed from the syria tribune online magazine he told us there's not much kerry can add to the aid already coming they are giving them a home in the neighboring country and they are giving them free from neighboring countries they're giving them even though the u.s. proxy proxies they are giving them as well all kinds of explosives and political situation just trying to prepare for the coalition for the next step which would be they all know if he thinks that by by giving them more even more political recognition and promising support on the ground he will push them over better but i mean this for they have accused definitely is fake and they have been putting a lot of pressure for this stream of change and the balance on the ground could not

change based on that they have tried every possible way including mr obama. more than a year ago and this did not work mr kerry things that he has a magic solution that we convince rather than push him to leave power which is. not known to us we don't know what it means by that but i assure you we also must work what mr here he needs to do is to give a clear and loud statement that it's only fair that is the way out is actually the coalition that. president clinton created should understand this and this is the only message that's given it's going to give. italy's looking for aware of its election limbo after a hung parliament put europe on tenterhooks and raised fears of fresh financial turmoil would stop markets mostly rose on wednesday offsetting the initial jitters the sufferer now parties want to parliamentary majority there the center left group secure the narrow victory in the lower house profile to win the senate from

a prime minister silvio berlusconi center right bloc became the second biggest in the upper chamber but the results show italian voters strongly reject the austerity policies of mario monti's government now the rival parties can't find a way out of the deadlock they'll have to have another election investment advisor patrick young told us a tallit uncertainty could be fatal for the eurozone. but your real crisis elephant in the room that nobody was talking about so far this year is back and it's back big time because ultimately fifty seven percent of the tires don't like the idea of a sturdy and they don't really want to do the sorts of things that the european union also posed upon them that's causing us a huge problem because ultimately you've got incredible new parties like betty greeley or surf ice storm movement you've got an incredible we have support that came back from mr berlusconi a former prime minister and so billy nations and of course now i it plays in the worst possible political limbo there's no clear ike right winner there's no clear

government it's going to weeks on end and ultimately markets despite the idea of uncertainty and what they're looking at at the moment is an awful uncertainty because they simply don't know whether it really is going to be a reliable member of the euro zone and if it really is not going to be all that reliable member of the euro zone then there probably is not going to be a euro zone the european union is affectively trying to support its banking industry which has never recovered from the korea's mortgage lending excesses of two thousand and seven two thousand and eight and that leaves us with a very delicate position but ultimately should investors lose money because of bad investment decisions well as an investor and advisor i have to say that's what we call capitalism that's what's happened it shouldn't just be a clear that poor people innocent people are forced to suffer incredible austerity apropos of billing ict investors and bankers. there were little easter made a high on the media agenda across europe as well as you'd expect artie's people all

of his belief in through some german newspapers and their concerns over how the key players might affect the wider european economy. the ongoing political turmoil in italy is making headlines not just in the country put around the world here in germany all of the major newspapers just about a carrying the talian election story on their front pages with many saying this well stalemate in italy means concern for the rest of europe the reason for that concern is that they can't be any agreement made on how that country should be run and it could be that if it's really sneezes politically then europe gets a severe cold economically that's the big fear so no are going for a more jokey look at it what some of the tabloids portraying the perhaps four front runners and cartoon form on the front saying knight the left nor right nobody knows

what they want the true though that they're getting most of the focus of the former comedian ben law and the former prime minister silvio berlusconi now the discussion between those two is repeated again in some of the more conservative newspapers here in germany those newspapers though also not giving much pity to the italian people they go on to say that it's really not remain governable that it must get back on track and let's get back to. it does seem though that as far as the german newspapers the concern down most of the rest of the german media the italian people find themselves with a clown to the left of them a joke to the right and they're stuck in the middle with very little idea of what they want politically. next tonight there's been no sign of progress following nuclear talks between iran and six world powers around faces possibly even more sanctions over allegations its building nuclear weapons something it denies this

the iranian people of course suffering most from these measures with a lack of medicine and food now the details from artie's more important. in an effort to stop tehran's nuclear program western countries have used an arsenal of crippling economic sanctions over the years in the interim america and its allies may have started a widespread medical crisis for the iranian people hundreds of thousands of iranians with serious illnesses such as cancer diabetes and all three of us can't reportedly receive lifesaving medicines because of international sanctions due to banking restrictions imposed by u.s. and european governments companies and hospitals in iran say they are on able to purchase pharmaceuticals from abroad now according to reports an estimated twenty three thousand iranians with hiv or aids have had their life saving medication restricted and medicine shortages for splits since specific blood disorders have

allegedly resulted in many deaths already i spoke with an iranian american who recently visited iran bringing his grandmother meds for her diabetes and author rightists alex shams told me that the stock of pain relievers he packed was for a hospital the people who are the most vulnerable the people with the most special kind of cancer or. illnesses they're the ones who right now are feeling the pinch the hospital that i brought medicine back it was a cancer hospital and they're right now it isn't getting that they won't have tylenol in a short in a very short period of time that they're asking people to hoard tylenol and bring it back. unfortunately that's how they're doing with tylenol i can't even begin to imagine how their stockpiles of cancer medicine are looking right now the latest round of u.s. and european sanctions have caused iran's currency to plummet and oil revenue to slash which in turn has pushed up inflation critics say western countries have unleashed catastrophic economic warfare against ordinary iranian citizens so far

producing all harm and no good they have weapons of mass destruction. that very very blunt instrument of fuse against nations sanctions the way that they are being propagated by the usa by the euro and indeed to a certain degree by the un against iran really very hopeful they don't achieve their objectives that penalizing the only person and i think it is totally unethical and immoral that we have to be very very care about what happens which is why i think a retooling and readjustment of the sanctions in this medical area is is critical within a very short time because as this begins to spiral so too then does the black or the cheering many experts warn that if the u.s. continues leaving a path of sanction destruction against iran the circumstance can manifest into

a repeat of iraq in the ninety's arena port ny r.t. new york. coming up soon squeezed in the middle of belt tightening brits whose incomes been cut from every direction these days it's the average this feeling of never living call such strip workers' wages with no more not few minutes time also to road age yeah this eight year old girl you have the right hate is really driving this car out one hundred kilometers an hour the video has gone viral it was posted by russian police on happy talk about the break to.

choose your language. choose the consensus. choose the opinions that you think rate to. choose the stories good in life choose the access to. the music sigrid laboratory to mccurry was able to build the needs most sophisticated robots fortunately doesn't give a darn about anything tim's mission to teach me creation why it should care about humans in. this is why you should care only on the dog.

well again you watch reality with me kevin i know reaching sixty eight in russia is a big moment for most youngsters when they can start on the road to getting their driver's license at the age of eighteen but some get a significant head start on the we'll just take a look at this video. go to at least one hundred your mother is filming here. and here all drive in a car my friend asked what have fainted and she saw this. posted on social networks . well there's a certain point in there can you believe what's happening this girl taking the top and german car to one hundred kilometers an hour at the ripe old age of just eight and in some shockingly bad parental guidance you could hear a father encouraging a to put the pedal to the metal on this country road the girls mom and dad posted that video online went viral or world saw it soon deleted the social network accounts of the police started investigating no surprise there of course just remind you you have to be eighteen years old to drive here in russia not the end of

it though the next video for the moscow region a bus driver here isn't averse as you're about to see to. fender bending it means teaching bad drivers a lesson or two in his head alexi says navan is willing to lay off the brakes if another car cut same up as you're about to see his methods have got to be involved in nearly one hundred minor road accidents but he's never been considered for the police alexy says it's a common misconception that a person who rear ends of the cars automatically considered the guilty party when he said anyway he adds that it could cause a more serious accident and lose his license if you were forced to swerve into another lane or into oncoming traffic to avoid a collision ouch. britain squeeze middle class is appearing the brunt of the country struggles to revive the economy a study shows tax hikes are leaving them two hundred eighty pounds a year worse off and more than half of them have no savings to fall back on it means major lifestyle changes for many years sarah firth explains. for

a large part of her life liz hoggard has been tapping away at building a life for herself as a freelance journalist she's been part of britain's middle class clearing credit cards to pay their mortgages on time and they thrived during being but then came the bust and with the decline of opportunities there were for so long a middle class perk i didn't get a contract we knew because budgets were being cut and so all those little things you have in place you always live slightly on credit you know you go into interest in anticipation that you'll get paid quite soon that. low incomes coupled with high living costs a stinking fears of a shrinking middle in britain is backed up in a report by the resolution foundation think tank it looked into what the future holds the ten million adults in the low to middle income households forecast another decade of hardship well unfortunately it's a bit of

a grim prospect prices have risen faster than earnings for quite some time now and what that means is that people. simmer about perhaps a little more but they can't buy as much with it a stark example of this is housing a couple of decades ago you've had to save for a couple of years maybe three or four years to get a deposit on a house if you're a low to middle income first time buyer at the moment you're looking at about twenty two years so middle class trimmings like foreign holidays meals out and home improvements are on hold for the time being as lives has found out she's having to sell off possessions to pay for essential is like dental treatment there's a fear packing up the quotes. it's quite emotional at times and you have a rush of memory and then you think of them for ten years and probably if there's something really important i can find online that has revolutionized it but i also

think. these books are. my investment in a way is really inching exhibition catalogues that i bought back in for not very much money just just a normal price and then of course they've become rare as the years go by so in some ways my stocks and shares been sitting on my shelves which i hadn't known about you see when you look on line and i'm something that was confronted so there is a sense of well at least i can pay for my newspaper my root canal surgery doing that. you know you have to not be a snob in something you cannot make times it can be hard to keep up the parents says it's like schemes like the one run by this store here in the that's proving so popular you bring along your designer clothes you need to fix things at the credit which could be in the store. but it was a bit further structurally where the first person. to actually combine the trust exchange element with the charity. and introducing the exchange voucher system

rather than buying stock in. that kind of give and take on them as more and more families look for ways to make their money go further the government's being warned that without shade growth britain risks becoming a country of two halves the rich getting richer and the middle class is increasingly losing out meanwhile lives in a generation like a facing up to the reality that the britons middle class is the next chapter is looking pretty bleak. london. on t.v. and online are two stories of the world we've got the details of america's web tonight a computer virus called stuxnet disrupting the rands nuclear research but which had been waiting in the wings long before to run was accused of anything forget to speed on bout one o t don't come also peeping through the curtain this to rescind north korea get to tag their pictures and send tweets from the reclusive country you want to take

a look at our website. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations are on the day. download the r.t. application. choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorite. if you're away from your television well it just doesn't matter now with your mobile device you can watch on t.v. anytime anywhere.

along with our team or world news now first deadly violence in afghanistan a rogue police officer drugged and shot seventeen of his colleagues with the help of local taliban militants now this attack happened at a remote police checkpoint fredrick kilometers south of kabul seven of the dead were new recruits who were still in training hours later a taliban suicide bomber detonated his device after getting underneath a bus carrying army personnel in kabul ten people were injured. and the world news headlines a fire a legal market in the city of call cutter in india has claimed at least eighteen lives there dozens of others wounded most of the victims reporters working in the six dollars building at the time from where chemicals and plastics were sold toxic gases hampered the rescue efforts by the hundreds of firefighters of attended the early morning blaze an electrical fault sort of calls it. a shooting rampage

a factory in switzerland has left three people dead including the gunman several others were wounded two when the attack it fired a handgun during breakfast in a canteen at a wood processing plant near new cern they say the forty two year old killer chose his victims carefully and suffered psychiatric problems recently now though gun ownership is high in switzerland shooting crimes are very low. immigrants often have to meet acceptance criteria birth in israel it's been revealed that some women have been forcibly medicated so that they don't become pregnant what's more many of the three opiate migrants who are of jewish descent were given the contraceptive without their knowledge despite the drugs has the side effects picks up the story but i'm up and. when i first arrived at the rundown transit camp i got pregnant and i gave birth he told me if you don't take the shots we won't give you a ticket so i took the shot but i didn't know that it would prevent pregnancies i

didn't know. but more and more israeli women were becoming suspicious like. who runs a youth center in an ethiopian neighborhood in four years only one child was born here and the alarming statistic in a community where family wealth is countered by the number of children and women figures show that the birth rate among ethiopian women in israel has dropped by fifty percent and all of us of the commonwealth in behalf of all i believe a few of the organizations who were responsible for bringing in the open immigrants to israel decided to administer a contraceptive to them we don't know who gave the instruction but we do know from what we were told that this treatment began and i failed them and a continued in israel where every three months immigrant ethiopian woman received a shot of the controversial depôt provera contraceptive drug that we said we wouldn't take the shot they said then you come to me great you won't get assistance

or medical care and if so we wouldn't be able to leave so we were scared we'll know how things worked in a different country although legal the american food and drug administration has warned that the side effects of this drug could be irreversible you must understand this was not normal contraception we're talking about contraception that has significant medical and mental effects irregular cycles the journal bleeding osteoporosis alongside mental side effects like depression mood swings wage and more and so this is contraception which is not recommended for most women and in fact most women in israel do not use it but two thirds of ethiopian women have been taking it without being informed that they don't have to and now for the first time an israeli official has admitted or for a teeth have been administering a to them in january this year the director general of the health ministry ordered all gynecologists working for or with the health maintenance organizations not to in new any deposed prevail or prescriptions for women originating from ethiopia or

for any other woman for whom there is. concern that they do not fully understand the implications of the treatment critics say it stinks of racism i think. this is wrong that they don't want poor all black children who can see a lot of from the west through an organization both going to kill all in other countries and without any given that they're all. very happy. very proud of that but the legal backlash is beginning and while nervous about coming forward human rights groups are encouraging if european women to sue for damages so far no one's taken responsibility organizations involved in the immigration of ethiopians to israel are all blaming each other their defense is that they offered several different types of contraceptives to ethiopian women and that all of them participated voluntarily in family planning policy r.t.

tel aviv. short it's not only martin talks to a medic who treated saddam hussein after his cup should as the u.s. led invasion of iraq as its ten year anniversary now thanks for being with us this is r.t. . there are twelve cities in the united states in which half of the people with hiv aids lives within a year of a diagnosis of hiv over sixty two percent of those patients i diagnosed with aids this is a problem that frankly is substantially preventable it was like the big elephant in the room and nobody wanted to talk about there were really good public health campaigns if people really focused on this problem you certainly should be able have a lot less h i feel a lot less human suffering. wealthy british style. but i was.