another radiation leak strikes japan's fukushima power plant as the operating company says highly contaminated water may have reached the ocean. shake up of the n.s.a. the u.s. spy agency is longest serving cheap is due to step down after months of damage control following edward snowden's revelations plus. eight kilometers from the capital damascus but it is like a state within a state. are to report from the heart of the syrian rebel movement where locals say they feel besieged by rival brigades battling for control.

this is r.t. coming to you live from the russian capital i'm marina joshie and welcome to the program a fresh alarm bells have gone off at japan's crippled fukushima nuclear power plant where record high radiation levels have been detected the plant's operator tepco says a storage tank has leaked contaminated water into a ditch where readings are now twelve thousand times higher than they were just a day ago tapp co suspects some of the water may have already seen into the ocean and as are reports this is just the latest in a series of calamities to strike the now infamous facility two and a half years to admit the painful truth japan needs help. we are wide open to receive the most advanced knowledge from overseas to contain the problem my country needs are knowledge and expertise the past few months have been marked by growing problems at fukushima several workers have been exposed to radiation the levels of

which are reportedly at their highest since the accident in two thousand and eleven and on top of that there is the issue of leakage this is the reactor inside it is the reactor core the actual nuclear part of the plant this is water which is used to cool the nuclear course or doesn't burst in flames that what it obviously has to go somewhere so it goes into a special container which is slightly below the reactor itself where eradicated water is stored and then filtered unfortunately at the fukushima plant the situation is such that this container with the ready it water is located on the very sea shore this is the ocean and the problem with the fukushima is that there is a leak supposedly right here so from there you read it water is flowing into the pacific ocean sadly russia has a lot of experience to offer when it comes to wiping up remnants of a nuclear catastrophe it has had its own deadly less than a quarter of

a century ago. when other before. should be treated just like chernobyl was a record that must be retired and put in a sarcophagus the problem with focus is that they can't decide whether they want to close it or to keep it going. closing the plant doesn't seem to be an option for tepco the company operating the facility which many in japan blame for the failure to handle the fukushima crisis in fact tepco is pushing towards reopening it because she was lucky facility the world's largest nuclear power station it was shut down in two thousand and seven following reports of radioactive leak after a powerful earthquake but the power giant seems undeterred by the prospect of having to malfunctioning nuclear power station on its hands maybe hoping an international effort would solve both problems at the same time it in english go r.t. . now because she has problems began when the earthquake and tsunami ruptured its cooling systems in march twentieth love and causing a meltdown it took

a whole year for japan's government to admit the nuclear disaster was caused by the improper handling of the crisis which the plant's operator tepco says could have been avoided two years after the crisis hit radiation was recorded in nearby fish stocks and a leak was discovered at a storage tank for contaminated water and when a tepco finally admitted the spill it revealed that up to three hundred tons of radioactive water was flowing into the ocean every day nuclear expert robert jacobs says there is no quick fix for the ongoing crisis which he thinks will last for decades. nobody really knows how to solve the problems at fukushima there is no nobody who has solutions to these problems of fukushima are unprecedented so even bringing in outside expertise all that they can do is try to problem solve there's no solution that other countries have that they can come in and. fix the reactor or

rather shut down the contamination shut down the leak so even other countries coming in and bringing their expertise will hopefully bring more professionalism in tepco has shown in the last two and a half years but even those experts will be at a loss if so how to solve the immense problems that will be facing for decades. you can get more updates and analysis on of crisis on our website r.t. dot com we've been closely following events since disaster struck and i have an extensive database there of reports opinions and eyewitness accounts and i was available for you just a click away at r.t. dot com. they have america's national security agency credited with a major expansion of the organization's covert surveillance operations is due to quit early next year army general keith alexander who is the emissaries longest serving chief has come under intense pressure since whistleblower adults noted

revealed the vast scale of government snooping artie's marine aboard i as the details the man who has made indiscriminate global surveillance and data gathering part of the fabric of america is leaving his position general keith alexander director of the national security agency is reportedly stepping down from his reign within the next six months it would be hard to deny that this unexpected exodus would be happening if not for whistleblower edward snowden general alexander's eight year tenure at the n.s.a. came under a worldwide criticism earlier this year after snowden a former n.s.a. contractor. revealed details about the n.s.a.'s global gathering of telephone e-mail and social media data foreign embassies the united nations and even the heads of states were allegedly targeted by america's dragnet surveillance political activist and author eugene per year says general alexander's resignation is more

like a fall from grace i think that the revelations from snowden are playing a big role here i mean i think for them to say that this is just sort of a random thing is is sort of absurd i mean it seemed like just a few months ago that keith alexander was being fed it is this great important general who had done all these big things that i think after everything that's been released by mr snowden very heroically that they're looking for a face lift initially general alexander defended the n.s.a.'s domestic spying practices saying the phone surveillance program he spearheaded has thwarted fifty four terrorist plots or events as it turns out that number was a gross exaggeration last week the n.s.a. director admitted he lied now america's top spy i has been nicknamed alexander the great a reference to all the influence and power he has amassed during his tenure but many say that changing the face of the n.s.a. will likely prevent journalists from continuing to report about america's questionable surveillance practices when greenwald who initially broke the n.s.a.

spy scandal has personally promise that there are many more bombshell exposes to come reporting from new york marina for not r.t. . well later aren't he's bringing this out also turns its attention to the spy chief and the events that preceded his departure here's a preview. you know after all those tours of duty that combat zone of checking people's facebook likes and their yahoo address books you can understand why he wants some down time it's pretty ridiculous because what they initially told us that first back in march james clapper the director of national intelligence told congress that they're not collecting any data at all on u.s. citizens clearly a wide perjured himself before congress should be in jail based on our existing laws but of course nothing is happening to him because he's too powerful and so that was back in march not collecting any data at all on u.s. citizens and then we have you know we're collecting data but it's only the metadata

don't worry about it guys go back to do whatever you do before car dash in kanye west or together disco focus on that stuff and then it comes out that oh they're actually harvesting hundreds of thousands in a single day hundreds of thousands of people's address book contacts people who have no connection to terrorism or crime and by the way people who are u.s. citizens. reporting on the war in syria is becoming too dangerous for manning with attacks on journalists forcing more and more to avoid the country a team from sky news or a beer when missing on thursday and that followed dozens of other abductions at least twenty five journalists have been killed since the start of the conflict there were the last artie's marie international mannish to make it into one rebel held city but tell you have next to the syrian lebanese border is just eighty kilometers from the capital damascus but it is like a state within

a state that has its own security forces and police and even the army can seize symbols of new authorities here everywhere graffiti or three stars that means free syrian army is controlling these area a syrian military cannot and term you have route is the center of a large mountainous area in western syria known as kalam in two thousand and eleven local residents room on the first to support the n.t.'s so it can pay its scenes being cut off from damascus and run by the rebels. i cover my head as all women here do because we are told this is an area under islamic law. we have civil and local councils we have shariah law tribunals and normal courts we have more teeth and lawyers the curio justice we run the town by ourselves the army can enter and even if they try we are ready to resist and defend our land my judge calls these

his land but in fact born in kuwait and having spent two years traveling the middle east and the gulf he only came here months before serious protests began. to resist to the end we have a plan and we have forces to make it happen. this is who he's talking about the self-styled free syrian army but these fighters don't work with other militants function instead as an autonomy as armed brigade. they leave an abandoned houses sleeping pray together and claim fighting bashar al assad is their only goal twice a week they hear an islamic lecture from a young man who everybody calls the shaikh he's taken part in the hellish pilgrimage to mecca and started the qur'an in saudi arabia all that effort is every monday and thursday we discuss the revolution the latest military developments as well as our daily routine we discuss what's prescribed or forbidden by islam i ask them whether the judge had the looser and then qaeda affiliated radical islamic

groups openly operating in syria like no no no no no we have no relation with the nusra we say. the newser is linked to the outside they follow al qaida and for decisions they revert to their army or even our here e al-qaeda leader we have normal relations with them next we are supposed to meet with people from a list but when our armed guys learn of this they do all they can to stop us the groups controlling the area are not only fighting assad they compete with each other even for me do. attention i mean among journalists is seen as something prestigious a school did and i told to film from the car but it one point twist top by a group of gunmen apparently from a hostile brigade and they ask about who we are later our guards told us the men were kidnappers from rema village at least nineteen forty journeys to held hostage in syria right now and the price and then lives varies. these areas supposedly run

by opposition fighters is in fact in the hands of a large number of separate brigades armed groups or just lone rebels with different ideologies and the only food and weaponry and these are locals who pay the bills. as christians have to pay so-called duty this is our input into society we go to church and pay it as muslims do also we pay for internal security brigades for relief aid and courts for the situation in your brood is critical a shortage of food in everything we are besieged. trapped in their own country where more than two years of deadly conflict has only seen fractions and goals increasingly divergent parties morea for national reports from fragmenting syrian rebel held territories. syria on the rebel group in our city.

half a million people are now believed to have died as a result of the nato invasion of iraq we asked one of the authors of a new study of the war just what lies behind that staggering figure what report that report is just ahead. and. this is a media lead us so we leave that maybe. by the seat cushions to the play your party is in the. shoes that no one is that still with the guests that you deserve answers from. politics.

could you take three. three. three. three. three. three blog video for your media project a free media party dot com. and a study based on visits to households all over iraq has concluded that almost half a million people there lost their lives as a result of the u.s. led invasion either through direct violence or the collapse on the health care system spoke to one of the service authors who says the high figure will come as a surprise to many in the west. clearly the public in both the

u.s. and the u.k. . underestimates the number of people who died in iraq as a result of the war and that's been true for a long time and i think it's the result of a very specific deliberate strategy on the parts of the coalition forces to keep the public thinking that the death toll is low these were fairly rapidly unpopular decisions to to do this invasion and the less the public was able to track havoc that we were wreaking mongar they could sustain the end of the intervention without public outcry. well the study didn't take into account a sectarian to for tat that continued after the nato pullout claiming over a thousand lives in september alone amy hagopian told us that's not the only thing

the fell through the cracks. one major fly of the study is that households who experienced a great deal of violence were very likely to leave the country and we are pretty sure we missed a lot of people who might have told us about deaths because those people have left so we think our count is actually low. now it may come as a surprise that even in the twenty first century mankind has yet to rid itself of slavery but how many people exactly are held in servitude on our planet today now website we've got a staggering report that says the number of modern day slaves across the globe exceeds the population of a country like that is whale. and . a tropical storm reveals a huge layer of oil was in the sands of louisiana beach three years on from the

b.p. oil disaster you learn more about this on our website our dot com. america is back in business as a government gets restarted after a two week long stalemate that cost the country about twenty four billion dollars the highly anticipated deal however does not solve a major political issue as financial analyst max from wolf explains who learned what lesson is a big issue we didn't really get a deal we got to kick the can down the road and revisit this later type of deal the risks are still huge they're still very much there but i do think however that this won't go on forever for two reasons one because i do think that there we have reached or are reaching the limit of public and corporate patience and the other one is you can only do this much damage to yourself publicly for so long before you're so damaged that the world doesn't care and your economy isn't strong enough to lose that much money i do think there's a possibility here that the more reasonable portion of the republican party and

there are a bunch of those the more moderate forces the democratic party can work together to cleave off the influence of some of the more destructive forces that we've seen come to the fore here in the last couple weeks if that's true that we suffered to get somewhere if that's not true then we just suffered to suffer more in the future and i certainly hope the second one is not how it works out. and fears of a fall pushed investors to pull forty three billion dollars out of u.s. based funds making it the largest one we did and over two years later today larry king speaks to the man who witnessed the previous shutdown from the speaker a seat in the house of representatives your wife calista wonderful lady has a new book out called yankee doodle dandy and i'm going to relate this to the current situation that my book deals with the american revolution the founding fathers how do you think they would react to what's going on in two thousand and thirteen in washington we are close and i talk about it because in her book ellis the elephant introduces forty year olds to american history and we were we were

literally talking with the fact that when the founding fathers needed to write the constitution they want to philadelphia they locked themselves in for fifty five days no press conferences no public attacks no leaks fifty five days of hard work i think if the president and the congressional leadership would spend fifty five days together we wouldn't be in the mess we're in they'd have found some common solutions and i think it's sad that we have degenerated from serious people doing serious business to the kind of politics we have today i. doubt police say thursday's break in at an apartment block of the houses russian embassy staff in the hague was most likely an ordinary burglary incident has attitude frictions developing between the two countries since both russian and dutch diplomats came under attack arches there's a confidence been investigating the details for us. well it's hard to say whether

this is a case of diplomatic tit for tat or just pure coincidence but an apartment housing russian diplomats in the hague was apparently broken into late thursday we do have more details from the russian foreign ministry spokesman let's take a quick listen employees from the russian embassy in the netherlands came back from work on the seventeenth of october to their apartments located in the house and blood count sort of embassies territory they discovered traces of unlawful entry into one of the flats the employee who lives there from the embassies administrative technical staff is currently on holiday so now the big question of course is whether there's any connection between that break and when days assaultive a senior dutch official here in moscow in that case two men posing as electricians broke into the diplomats home they beat him up and then reportedly drew a heart in lipstick on a mirror with the acronym l it g b t for a lesbian gay bisexual and trans gender this follows of course the arrest earlier this month of a russian diplomat on suspicion of mistreating two young children also claims he was beaten and custody the dutch officials had apologized for and that's the

detention as well now all this of course coinciding with rising tension over russia's jailing of three peace activists of the two dutch citizens who were onboard a dutch flagged ship campaign against drilling in the arctic so a very strange escalation of diplomatic conflicts here. now let's take a look at some other stories from around the world in paris students have blogged andrews's to their schools and. the floors importation of a woman girl the fifteen year old pupil who was detained by police during a school trip and deported back to cost of a with her family because officials said they have been denied asylum in france incident prompted calls for the nation's interior minister to resign. hundreds of activists protesting against the alleged unlawful treatment of migrants in germany have clashed with police in hamburg their rally in the city center of was blown off and surrounded by security forces for almost two hours comes a day after

a similar protests and when were crowds gathered in support of african migrants those two boats recently sank in the mediterranean and over four hundred people drowned in those incident. and in canada police have arrested around forty people for tasking a dance shale gas exploration clashes broke out after police tried to dismantle a highway barricade officers reportedly used pepper spray on demonstrators who fought back with molotov cocktails setting at least five vehicles and fire incident follows two weeks of environmental protest on saturdays at anger will be the focus of our special coverage on global frag down day.

island set to leave its international bailout program says the country's prime minister eighty five billion here emergency aid came after the banks collapsed in twenty ten but a man's tax rises and spending cuts to qualify for it even free of the bailout terms are still years of punishing hysteria have for the irish public to pay off the nation's debts and independent irish m.p. told my colleague kevin zero one that the country's great expectations of joining the e.u. were unjustified. one of today's major reasons why we're in this mess is because people didn't listen to people like antony cotton who when we joined the euro said step we're all laughing today bush will end in tears and how right he was and it created a situation where our public finances were sway as a way to mourn a cheap interest rates which could never have been sustained all the money of positives of the three years of austerity has brought your country how can you see positives in people not having enough to ace how can you see positives in

a situation where they were caught the disabled and you see a situation where you have people coming into my office on a zimmer frame looking for help and then you discover that they are the ones who are caring for someone even more sick at home we were told is when we joined up to this european monster that it would make us richer we are certainly not richer when we joined the european union we were not a still curfew when we started the european union we had our independence we unfortunately seem to want to give away everything fortunately there are people in this country who don't want to give away everything and actually believe we should move away from the eurozone and also move out of the european union altogether and try and try a few like const countries like switzerland and norway who manage to do quite well without europe interfering in their affairs and also piling massive bank debt on our shoulders. up next so he go talks to n.s.a. whistleblower mark and it's.

deliberate torch is on its epic journey to structure. one hundred twenty three days. through to the mother tongue to cities of russia. relayed by georgians oh some people for sixty five thousand kilometers. in a record setting trip by land air and sea and others face. a limp a torch relay. on r t r g dot com. splits divides the syrian opposition party takes a closer look at life on rebel ground is just a few kilometers from the capital damascus but it is like a state within a state free syrian army that foley's area they still in ministry cannot and tear

artie's morea for notion of reports from fragmenting syrian rebel held territories . syria on the rebel group on arts you. are welcome to it says the intel on civil shevardnadze and. government shutdown. it's a start bob or adam has made the world question yet again how all the major mechanisms

affecting the global climate to make sure that it's possible not to task. has it ever been for hasn't. been the. governmental. currency wars strike threats despite as you searches for peace conflicts have plagued the world. in times of technical progress and overproduction for humanity leaves in poverty and neglect well the internet is a most pople and helpful tool it's turned into a global civilians device and another conflict zone what makes good things bad is that's completely out of control or is it the meddling of the few who are weaving it to guard their own interests. and our guest today is another national security whistleblower and no it's not edward snowden and i was mark innovates and he joins

us from the american city of minneapolis mark it's great to have you on our program today so the drama in washington what was it is a comedy or a tragedy i tell you what it's really disturbing to refer to what's happening in washington as a joke and on behalf of all critical clear thinking americans i want to apologize to the rest of the world for our. circus clown college and congress and only the american congress could pass themselves on the back and break their elbows for kicking the can down the road instead of actually doing their job. and delaying this for another three months on an issue that they should have handled a couple of years ago but there is no default this time but only for now the root causes are really going away and neither political nor economic dontcha think. well the situation that.