to. look. to see. tonight another radiation leak strikes japan's fukushima power plant as the operating company says highly contaminated water may have reached the ocean. shakeup of the n.s.a. the u.s. spy agencies longest serving chief is due to step down after months of damage control following edward snowden's revelations plus. just a kilometers from the capital damascus it is like a state within a state report from the heart of the syrian rebel movement the locals say they feel besieged by rival brigades battling for control. or. for a good evening who just joined us it's kevin owen here at r.t.

tonight just past eleven pm here in moscow our top story alarm bells have gone off your pants crippled fukushima nuclear power plant once again where record high radiation levels and 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 tepco suspects some of the water may have already seeped into the ocean and that's on top of the countless tons of already reached the pacific during previous leaks and oceanic currents mean the fallout from the original meltdown will stretch far beyond japan a massive radioactive plume creeping along the seabed or deported to reach american shores next year plus global cohens could potentially scatter contamination from fukushima or cross the planet in various ways fish and sea birds are also contributing to the spread of radioactivity. as more next on the calamities gripping the battered power plant. 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 call the nuclear course or doesn't burst in flames that water obviously has to go somewhere so it goes into a special container where eradicated water is stored and then filtered this is the ocean and the problem with the fukushima is that there is a leak so from there it is ready and water is flowing into the pacific ocean sadly russia has a lot of experience warfare when it comes to wiping up remnants of

a nuclear catastrophe it has had its own deadly less than a quarter of a century. or another before ph should be treated just like chernobyl has 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 its 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 a college go our team. well of course problems began when that earthquake and tsunami ruptured its cooling systems back in march twentieth eleven causing that

melt it took a whole year for japan's government to admit the nuclear disaster was caused by the improper handling of the crisis at the time the plant operator tepco admitted the crisis could have been avoided if only it had done its job better now more than two years after the crisis hit a leak was then discovered at the storage tank for contaminated water there many of them there and when tepco finally admitted the spill it then revealed that up to three hundred tons of radioactive water was flowing into the ocean every day let's get some more thoughts now from nuclear power expert on the gunderson is joining us on the line either arnold i know there's no easy answer to this but why are these leaks still happening on such a regular basis we know the uphill struggle but surely more could be done no oh certainly more could have been done you know the problem is the japanese didn't fight this early on with the energy they needed to and with the money they did they needed to tokyo electrics not an engineering firm and they're simply overwhelmed

technically but even if they understood the problem they haven't had enough money to do the job right you know you mentioned on your lead here about the. plant they're trying to start up seven plants at the same time they're running out of money at daiichi there's not enough money to go around with all of the problems that tokyo electric has none of course without money coming in from so selling the electricity it's a vicious circle isn't it but the big problem here is what to do with all that coolant water the they've put up these hastily constructed tanks some of them are leaking then almost weekly you get operator error this is the big problem outing up for the future because the water's going to have to be continued to be pumped to coal it where are they going to put it in the future. they're obviously running out of space on the site and they're going to have to appropriate land off site build more and more tanks you know that this leak had something called strontium ninety

in it. ninety is a bone seeker and it causes leukemia in huge quantities so now when it gets to the pacific ocean admitted lee it gets diluted in an even bigger pond of water but it's truly frightening that we're releasing strontium ninety into the pacific ocean but given the scale of what the having to do here and the term of it the long term of it how long are they going to have to keep pumping water and storing it i mean those are going to go on full well i said back to two years ago during the accident on c.n.n. that this is going to be a long slog but this ice wall that they're proposing to solve some of the problems underground to act as a barrier yet it won't be done for two years so at least the next two or three years we're going to have week after week similar problems and it wouldn't surprise me that. these will be weekly incidents and even worse what if there were to be

another tremor not even a quake but a tremor what state is the. fukushima the whole plant in at the moment if something like that would happen even a moderate one. well they have a thousand tanks and they're all held together with plastic pipe almost like you put on the swimming pool so if there's a moderate earthquake the plastic pipes will fail and all that material will run across the ground surface into the ocean the facilities themselves the four reactors that are most damaged are you know they had serious explosions internally so it wouldn't take an earthquake as big as the one they had. two and a half years ago to potentially really do a lot of serious damage there and that's my concern depending on the report she read some scientists saying people should be living on the coast within two hundred kilometers either way of it but how is it affecting the most of the people in mainland japan how much impact having health wise well i think you know we've seen

a dramatic increase in thyroid. it increases in cyber and cancers already and i am on record as saying somewhere between one hundred thousand and a million people will over the next thirty years get cancer from this accident what about abroad what just sort of butt in we're going to show you one at a time but we're talking about the radioactivity this plume the talking about that slowly making its way with the top aides over to america how much of a danger is that end of the day well there's a really good study out of a newspaper and being predicting something on the order of a thousand additional cancers the ear from eating fish from the pacific we don't have good data or you know the american government and the canadian government they're taking that out and they're not sharing it with the public a final thought of course after this happened was very quick to pipe up and say germany is going to close all its nuclear reactors by twenty twenty two it's

a very big decision to make very controversial very costly as well can germany afford to lead europe like this and doing this i think they stand a chance of making a lot of money as a result if the germans can make a renewable economy the whole rest of the world will want that and it's just one more thing for them to export i think it's a good idea nice if you all down will good and some there are nuclear power expert on the line from the u.s. thank you thank you don't forget you can get more analysis yourself more updates on the ongoing fukushima crisis on our website we've been closely following events since disaster struck there's an extensive database of reports their opinions and eye witness accounts or just a click away at r.t. dot com. the head of america's national security agency credited with a major expansion of the organizations covert surveillance operations as you to quit early next year army general keith alexander who's the n.s.a.'s longest serving chief come under intense pressure since whistleblower edward snowden revealed a vast scale of government snooping ati's one important is called the story. 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 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 state were allegedly targeted by america's dragnet surveillance political activist and author eugene puryear says general alexander's resignation is more like 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 facelift 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 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. exposé is to

reporting from new york where enough or not r.t. . in syria government jets are bombarded the eastern city of durham follows the killing of a top military commander he was shot by a sniper during clashes between the army and opposition forces while reporting on the war in syria is becoming increasingly dangerous with attacks on journalists forcing more and more to flee the country. managed to make it into one rebel stronghold but tell your brother 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 police and even the army can see its symbols of new authorities here everywhere graffiti or three stars that means free syrian army is controlling this area they syrian military cannot enter your brood is the center of a large mountainous area in western syria known as. in two thousand and eleven

local residents were among the first to support the n.t. assad campaign it seems been 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 this and lawyers the curio justice we run the town bar so the army can enter and even if they try we are ready to resist and defend our land my god calls these his land but in fact morning kuwait and having spent years traveling the middle east and the gulf he only came here months before serious protests began. we 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

functioning instead as an autonomy armed brigade they live in 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. 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 first 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 media attention being among journalists is seen as something prestigious. courted and i told the 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 man were kidnappers from rema village at least nineteen fourteen journeys to held hostage in syria right now and the price of their 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 to food and weaponry and these are locals who pay the bills we as christians have to pay so-called duty this is our input into

society we go to church and pay as muslims do also we pay for internal security brigades for relief aid and courts. 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 diverged marti's morea for notion of reports from fragmented syrian rebel held territory. syria i rebel. to come up with a program still anti fracking raging canada the people who say no to the shale gas revolution and met with pepper spray a baton as we look into why fracking continues unabated despite phase of its environmental impact.

i. i. well. science technology innovation all the developments from around russia we've got the future covered. right to see. first strike. and i think that your. reporters.

in afghanistan a suicide bomb was blown up a car outside a heavily fortified residential compound on the outskirts of the capital kabul the woman and up to four children reportedly killed in the attack which was followed by an exchange of gunfire between gods and insurgents diode sultanzoy is a presidential candidate in next year's election in the country he told me a lack of government controls to blame for the recent increase in attacks. i'm afraid the increase has been very very evident in the past few months mr karzai is not leaving an afghanistan that will be remembered as a stable afghanistan and afghanistan that our government has public support a government that has been able to attack bigger problems the people are suffering

from which is poverty lack of jobs corruption lack of rule of law their baby some some some achievements but these achievements have not been because of this government these a few achievements have been because of the mass inertia of the presence of the international community and the global push towards freedom of speech women's rights or some technological advances in the communication area or in the in the media area these are not a government made achievements that were here because of the presence of the international community this government has not produced anything that is sustainable or tangible. in canada police have arrested around forty people protesting against shale gas exploration itself the clashes broke out as authorities try to dismantle the highway barricade offices reportedly used pepper spray on demonstrators in full but with molotov cocktails and several vehicles like the rest of new brunswick follows two weeks of protests activists are demanding

a local oil and gas company there stop fracking in their area saying it's going to devastate the environment problem without the fracking campaigner and if she wants that the race them for oil profits is becoming ever more extreme. what you've got is a situation where they're going for ever more extreme forms of fossil fuel in a situation where you know we know you know there's been recent reports from the london school of economics for example which show quite categorically that we need to be leaving two thirds of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we're going to prevent catastrophic climate change that being the case you know over the last very last thing we need to be doing is looking from for more fossil fuels in the extreme for when the only reason that that's going ahead is because of the why the be all and gas industry have got their claws into governments across the world you know. when you've got capitalist system. to short term profit from this from fossil fuels whatever cost in terms of the long term environmental and social benefits of the people in the area.

america is back in business as the government gets restarted after a two week long stalemate that cost the country about twenty four billion dollars u.s. economist richard de wolf told me the way out of the financial gloom lives through taxing big business. you can help get this economy out of a continuing recession which really ought to be called what it is which is a depression you could get it out the government could spend the money to get us out which is the only way we're going to get out and it would not have to borrow more money would not have to have a deficit and therefore would not have to worry about a debt ceiling if it did the one obvious thing which is to tax corporations and the rich in the united states simply at the rates they were required to pay back in the

one nine hundred fifty s. and sixty's borrow less tax the people you borrowed from more and you would have three quarters of this problem solved without all the theater and without all the harm done by these political hacks who refuse to deal with this issue in an honorable way all theories all of that unfold pushed investors to pull forty three billion dollars out of u.s. banks funds making it the largest one we dip in over two years larry king spoke to the man who witnessed the previous shutdown from the speaker's seat in the house of representatives. your wife who is the wonderful lady has a new book out called yankee doodle dandy and i'm going to relate this to the current situation that 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 alice the elephant

introduces forty year olds to american history and we were we were literally talking of 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 fair to do. we have degenerated from serious people doing serious business to the kind of politics we have today. i was not a source we hope you can find interesting on our website r.t. dot com there now it may come as a surprise that even the twenty first century mankind is yet to read itself as slavery would be that's not the surprise the surprise is the scale of it how many people are held in servitude on our planet today on our website we got a staggering report saying the number of modern day slaves across the globe exceeds

the population of a country the size of venezuela want to read up more get it from us the tropical storms revealed a huge layer of oil within the sands of a louisiana beach three years on from the b.p. all disaster a little more about that as well i don't r.t. dot com. dutch police say first break in an apartment block that houses russian embassy staff in the hague was most likely an ordinary burglary as they put it the instance added though to frictions between the two countries spot the recent attacks on both russian and dutch diplomats starting to see catherine off brings us the details. 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 housing block

out 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 stuff is currently on holiday so now the big question of course is whether there is 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 elegy 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 of that's the detention as well now all this of course coinciding with rising tension over russia's jailing of peace after the meeting to dutch citizens who are on board a dutch flagged ship campaign against drilling in the arctic so a very strange escalation of diplomatic conflicts here. some world news

a brief emergency service and soldiers in laos is still looking for the future large of a plane and over twenty bodies two days after it crashed in the mekong river all forty nine onboard wednesday's domestic like a presumed dead aircraft ran into bad weather as it was preparing to land at a nearby airport. in paris reporting students still blocking entrances to the schools in protest the forced the protection of a roma girl fifteen year old pupils detained by police during a school trip and then deported back to kosovo with the family because officials said they'd been denied asylum in france instead prompted calls for the nations of tear administered to resign. and hundreds of activists protesting against the illegible for treatment of migrants in germany clash with police in hamburg now the rally in the city center was blocked and surrounded by security forces from his two hours it comes a day after a similar protest in berlin where crowds gathered in support of those african migrants whose two boats recently sank in the mediterranean and over four hundred

of them drowned. that's the news from russia's northern city of measurements to according to a report on greenpeace official website six men wearing balaclavas elliot broke into the grounds of the organization's office there this is the security footage of the incident which was posted online by the we can't verify whether this is true or not at this point greenpeace though claims the intro just stole a mock it was going to be used in a protest against the detention of those thirty activists charged with piracy off to attend to the storm the russian oil rig in the arctic the key for the press that story if you bring you more details as we get it of the next so i'm sure. thanks be with us sir coming up the intricacies says he can strike at the intricacies of the u.s. government shutdown and the reopening again and how much it's cost america we've been talking about a lot of people have well said so in cross talk i'll see you just over half an hour .

you know as i look more and more into it i find that there were a lot of myths exaggerations about what happened at russia during the soviet era however one really bad rumor seems to be true if you were an outspoken advocate against the soviet status quo then you could be considered insane and be locked away until the psychiatrist convinced you that khrushchev was brilliant scary stuff but sadly famous grammy award winning singer lauryn hill might be living the life of a soviet does that right now she was convicted of failing to pay five hundred thousand dollars in taxes but strangely according to the international business times she was ordered to undergo psychiatric counseling because she believes in conspiracy theories related to the music industry who wrote in her own tumblr account that the music industry is manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex this is

a strong accusation from hill but is actually irrelevant if. it's true or not you see punishments are supposed to fit the crime and the crime of tax evasion should not have a punishment of mandatory counseling or as more paranoid types like me like to call it reprogramming they are usually trivial this celebrity case actually sets a dangerous legal precedent but that's just my opinion.