the last few weeks have inflicted completely unnecessary damage on our u.s. government shutdown comes to an end. but the debt ceiling raised the catastrophe as. protesters and. police. at the government's new austerity loaded budget. both of. huge spike in radiation levels of fukushima readings in a storage tank. thousands of times a day. inside

the notorious prison. really this is a place that. they don't ever think about it. to find out. why we're highlighting the top stories of today and over the week it is the weekly here with me. it was. default for america this week just as the nation was about to run out of cash congress sealed a last minute deal to reopen the government and push the debt ceiling even higher but the whole world was watching the deadline drama could cause yet another global recession though the end result was not entirely good news.

global market eyes were wide open while washington was shut waiting and bracing for impact. because that's not in households with a common and more not finished up she did. but at the so-called eleventh hour congress struck a deal to deal with it later if that's what it is the agreement reopen the government and funds it in till january fifteenth allowing the u.s. to continue borrowing until february seventh america barely avoided defaulting on their almost seventeen trillion dollars in debt brand america took a beating here sixteen days of a government shutdown halted the capital to a standstill put hundreds of thousands of workers out of jobs and the world economy on the verge of recession then surely the markets going we don't want to play this

. we're not going to leave you money at any price the scarce part global a valuation given the time and time again these political crisis appear in the us i think there would be more calls for sort of trying to reduce dependence in america in the same way as america has been trying to reduce dependency on the middle east for its oil ironically the shutdown didn't save money it cost the u.s. some twenty four billion dollars and credibility worldwide whether it's coming from the world bank whether the i.m.f. whether the leading bankers of the world or from china with now it's de americanization this was really a spectacle following a series of spectacles that has downgraded america's image worldwide to levels i've never seen so low as the gentleman from say the scare was just a way to come in and save the day at the last minute up on the table this is. the

creation of a crisis atmosphere wall street and you know the one percenter corporate sponsors all of them they're not going to allow the meltdown of the international economy well they sure fooled me and millions of others congress now has some more time to come up with a long term budget solution before a new deadline comes rolling on the hill they will also have to deal with damage control both at home and abroad all while trying to solve a debt problem in just three months something they couldn't do in the years leading up to this shutdown reporting from washington and he's now a party. and the us debt ceiling is skyrocketing already it rose a record three hundred twenty eight billion dollars as soon as the deal to raise the ceiling was in place and the two weeks of budget brinksmanship cost the u.s. government an awful lot of trust from voters before the long awaited bill was

passed here at our reaction from some of those on the other side of capitol hill it's really frustrating for the american people and for myself to see you know our government be so inefficient it's pretty bad. for a little bit. don't even want to go into the patheticness of. our government i think it's very sad we are the people this is for the people and people are going to remember this idiocy and food business during the shutdown i believe president obama had a plan that he was going to take and punish the american people but he went a little too far well last fall president obama he put the blame for the lockdown squarely on the republicans he said squabbles in congress dealt an immense blow to the united states probably nothing is done more damage to america's credibility in the world are standing with other countries. then the spectacle that we've seen

these parents several weeks balmer said the full scope of the damage is still unknown condemning what he called a self-inflicted crisis and there are now just a few months before congress will have to face the debt ceiling problem all over again james midway from the new economics foundation he says america's political system appears unable to do exactly what needs to be done it does look like a quite seriously dysfunctional political system and certainly most ordinary americans already view it is quite seriously dysfunctional they tend judging by the opinion polls to blame the republicans in particular for this dysfunctionality but it's very obvious that you can't run the world's largest economy on the basis of lurching from crisis to crisis i mean this is this period we're going through now is itself the result of a temporary resolution to reaching a debt ceiling earlier this year back in may so yes it's in deeply deeply flawed political system and that will be registered in these being registered around the world you'd be find people less and less to treat the u.s.

treasury bills and the dollar itself as a safe haven somewhere that's guaranteed to be where you can put your money put your savings put your wealth and it will hold its value over time and here is one of the more dramatic moments of the crucial nighttime vote in congress have a look right there in the circle of the house transcriber unleashing a rant about god and freemasons for stunned lawmakers right there you can see she was forcibly removed from the chamber explaining later that she was simply doing the will of the holy spirit. right to rome we go here on r.t. italy's economy ministry has been attacked by furious protesters angered by the government's cost cutting drive thousands took to the streets denouncing the ongoing austerity measures for failing to dig the country out of recession reporting for us they're. going off. at some point during this mass protest rally which has been taking place throughout the last two days really in central role a group of young radical protestors started throwing eggs at the finance ministry

and also throwing bottles sticks and these so-called thunder flashes or paper bombs as they're called here at the police who are providing security at the protest rally as a result several policemen were injured and we understand that arrests have also been made these rallies they've been going on for the past two days now and they are to protest against austerity measures and the heavy economic problems. italy is only going through according to different figures from fifty thousand to seventy thousand people took part in this event they are protesting against high taxes extremely high youth unemployment and also one of the other sort of points of this protest was against plans to build a high speed train line between italy and france since they say that it's going to be its construction is going to be harmful both to the environment and is going to be a threat to the health of the locals living in that area italy is going through the

worst recession since the second world war youth unemployment is standing at just over forty percent and really the latest protests have been caused by the release of the latest state budget which critics say doesn't really solve any problem. reporting right now this is live from moscow record high radiation levels detected around japan's fukushima nuclear plant on friday and water samples showing radioactive shooting up thousands of times in just a day reaching the highest level since the meltdown of twenty eleven this just being the latest in a long line of troubles the power plant it's been struggling with as a correspondent reports. 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 you read it water is flowing into the pacific ocean sadly russia has a lot of experience warfare when it comes to wiping up remnants of the nuclear catastrophe it has had its all and the last in a quarter of a century. when other footbridge 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 to be 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 leaks 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. . problems go back two and a half years that was when a powerful earthquake and tsunami hit japan disabling the. cooling systems and just causing a meltdown it took the government

a year to admit that mistakes by the operating company tepco led to the disaster raavan that of the natural calamity itself several months later the company also admitted the crisis could have been avoided if it had done his job a bit better and the some a leak was discovered that a storage tank for contaminated water and when tepco finally admitted to the spill it revealed that up to three hundred tons of radioactive water was spilling into the ocean every single day at a nuclear power expert on old gunderson he explained to us why all these issues and the facts and figures are so deeply disturbing. you know that this leech had something called strontium ninety in it ninety is a bone seeker and it causes leukemia in huge quantities so now when he gets to the pacific ocean it minutely 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. you know we also lost gunderson about the possible risks from natural disasters that of course all frequent that part of the world he said but now even a slight thwaite could cause yet another catastrophe. thousand tanks and they're all held together with plastic almost like you put on the swimming pool so if there's a moderate earthquake the plastic pipes will sail and all that material will run across the ground surface into the ocean and the facilities themselves the four reactors that are most damaged are you know they had serious explosions internally so you wouldn't take an earthquake as big as the one they had. two and a half years ago potentially really do a lot of serious damage there. of course you can always go to our website for the latest updates and more analysis on the fukushima crisis so we have been closely following the events since the disaster struck extensive reports opinions

eyewitness accounts all online right now at on t. dot com. are many more stories coming your way here on the program including why calculating the actual death toll of big u.s. war in iraq has proved less than simple for a brand new study suggesting that the real body count is far worse than anybody dead to imagine he talks to one of the surveys authors just ahead. according to the. numbers we have more than two thousand political prisoners and

behind right now of course if you look at the says. what the bahamian government is trying to do is they're trying to label many of these prisoners as terrorists. right to see. her strip. and i would think that your. orders. in. the in the. military will welcome to you from all of us here at the moscow if this is the weekly here on the program today a new report on the real death toll of the u.s. led war in iraq it came out this week it suggests though that over scuse me i

should say very nearly half a million people died as a result of the violence and out of the country's poor infrastructure the study is based on speaking to randomly chosen iraqi households under seeing as the most rigorous to date off one of the surveys authors why many still underplay the real human cost of the war clearly the public and both the u.s. and the u.k. . underestimates the number of people who died in iraq as a result of that 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 was low these were fairly rapidly unpopular decisions 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 and the latest out of iraq at least six people are being killed in the northern city of samarra after a suicide bomber blew himself up near a senior policeman's house over one hundred people are being killed in just this week alone iraqis striving to survive through daily violence and the secretary and divide all part of the deadly legacy of the invasion and occupation amy hagopian also told us here at r.t. that deeper analysis of the iraq war could unveil the even more shocking facts. one major flaw 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. on screen and on line get clicking away and

find out what we have for you right now dot com for example an immigration lawyer in the u.k. . this after receiving a. message from the british border agency tens of thousands of. those. illegal immigrants. from deep space to the water right here. chunk of meat here. we've got video of sailors rescued. in the. shift focus not about of syria or several people have been killed by a car bomb targeting a government checkpoint in the city of hama the violence in the water in countries shows no sign of letting up journalists are finding themselves either courted or captured by both sides. to access

into one of the areas controlled strictly by the rebels 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. police. can seize symbols of new associates here everywhere graffiti or three stars free syrian army area big syrian military cannot. yet root is the center of a large mountainous area in western syria. in two thousand and eleven local residents were among the first to support the campaign it seems 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 motifs 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 he only came here relatively recently born in kuwait and having spent years traveling the middle east and the gulf this is his parents native town niger that arrived four years ago 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 armed brigade. they leave 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 all day as it was every monday and thursday we discuss the revolution the latest military developments as well as our daily routine we discuss what's hollow and what's her what's prescribed or forbidden by islam i ask them whether the judge had the looser and then qaida affiliated radical islamic groups openly operating in syria like no no no no no we have no relation with the nusra we have a say in the news or is linked to the outside they follow al qaida and for decisions they revert to their army or even our hearing 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 the. 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 wrist talked 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 journalists are 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 own needs 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 it muslims do also we pay for internal security brigades for relief aid and courts funding is not the only cost 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 diverged brief nationality from rebel controlled syria. all right to paris we go to open up the day where hundreds of students rallied in support of a difficulty to roma schoolgirl it comes just quite an announcement by president francois hollande that she could return to france but without her family at least one person was arrested after trying to break through the ring of security officers . and there's less support for minority groups in the czech republic and the city of over three hundred protesters demonstrated against the country's roma community that they attempted to march towards of district heavily populated by the group but police stopped them in their tracks with tear gas. and watching t.v.

where a commuter train slammed into a platform injuring at least eighty people in the capital. it is yet to be determined why the locomotive failed to stop at the same railway station it was just last year fifty one were killed in a very similar crash. for now on the allegations of abuse force feeding and a two hundred day hunger strike guantanamo bay prison is rarely out of the news right now r t has been granted special access inside the infamous us jail is ati's an associate with a first hand look. after a few months of people work to get cleared to visit the beast the trip to get mohammad and escape from the big apple to fort lauderdale in florida and from there a short hour and a half flight one largely kept under wraps with no indications of it on departure boards. the minute we land we're greeted by escorts. the trip the

special guantanamo joint task force media team. one of them sergeant rebecca wood far from the stereotypical face you might imagine working at a place like this controversial military base as we soon learned the first of many surprises this is a really big break for me in my career from a military resume the people i work with every day day they share the same idea like they're all very proud to be here she joined the u.s. military a decade ago with no money for college a twenty eight one ton a most her second deployment you've heard about it like several movies but you don't really it is just a place that people forget about only they don't ever think about it getting to the main part of the base is a slow pace trip we have to wait for a ferry to take us across the bay and are taken to visit a beach first one of a handful of scenic locations you wouldn't really expect here we're headed to the logic area now it's about a twenty minute ferry ride one side of the area where the airport is. several

rebadge insists but the main part of the people we have the detention camp are over their head and given its reputation guantanamo isn't quite what we anticipated as we approach the meeting area it's sad interesting to note that to the unsuspecting this place looks just like another tropical island with an american flag you would never feel that the system in place policy going to united states or us presidents the lodging area were taken to is like any typical hotel with palm trees and a marina right out the window first impression this can't be the place that has been casting a long shadow in america's human rights image for over a decade where torture allegations hunger strikes and force feeding have been making headlines i remember when i moved here i thought i would just see like people in orange jumpsuits and fences everywhere but i mean the families all stay on one side and the rest kind of happens on another the other side as where total of seven hundred seventy nine detainees. of america's war on terror have been kept

since two thousand and two a total of one hundred sixty four now remaining at a whopping eight hundred thousand taxpayer dollars for a detainee per year even though more than half of them have been cleared for release we are in a remote location that factors into the cost the cost what it cost to do it right we're doing it right means to those running america's most infamous detention facility and what lays beyond the picture perfect scenery all the realities of guantanamo in our reports to follow suit you're going to r.t. guantanamo bay cuba. where the outside active camps have gone or where patients are or so that the router and or streit never turned the world's attention to the places that some. of our times. but has been a pleasure having you with us here on today i'm researcher live in moscow. here in

half an hour's time the next we take a closer look at gun control in a small county in the u.s. state of kentucky being locked and loaded can be the daily life for most sides. switzerland will soon vote if they should start giving out thousands of dollars in cash to every adult citizen in the country you heard me right there's a grassroots campaign that is trying to get the government to give out to every adult citizen two thousand five hundred swiss francs approximately two thousand eight hundred dollars per month the motivation for the project is that many in switzerland fear that the financial crisis has caused wealth inequality to skyrocket you know i'm not an expert at swiss culture so maybe people there are

different but if they gave out thousands of free dollars per month anywhere i've lived you would see the majority of people going into early retirement and not working at all and sort of like how they tell people not to feed the bears at parks because then the bears lose their instincts and will go hunt because getting a sandwich thrown at them is a lot easier i mean why go through the effort of auditing when the sandwich just magically appears handouts often creates law according to reuters some people are proposing a much better law for switzerland limiting executive pay to being twelve times higher than that of the lowest paid employee although this plan is making headlines it seems like a much better idea because it doesn't to motivate people to be productive and yet it would create almost utopia like levels of wealthy quality also if the bosses salary is tied to the employees that a lot of people be getting raises very soon this one to twelve p. ratio is much better than the free swiss francs and it gets my seal of approval but that's just my opinion.