by british rock bombs in yemen to tens of thousands dying due to british backed sanctions on venezuela we review the news that doesn't make me good natured mainstream media t.v. headlines with former mayor of london ken livingstone thirty three years since the chernobyl disaster a new book alleges the true death toll was covered up by the un the world health organization we speak to its author and professor kate brown all this of all coming up in today's going on the ground first today is a big day for anyone in the world conscious of this global multinational here using celebrities to promote clean energy initiatives. and today a quarter of the hague in all and decide on whether the company they're promoted by artists jennifer hudson pixie lott and others is responsible for what amnesty international calls horrifying human rights violations this is just one of the cases that has made the headlines of nigerian t.v. one of the widows of the nine men killed spotted large in military government and

nineteen ninety five is accusing all times shell of alleged complicity in the unlawful arrest the tension and execution of her husband and eight others shows it has produced no warlow gas from a gurney fields since nine hundred ninety three but it continues to serve as a transit route for pipelines transporting shell oil to other areas whatever today's court decision about alleged shell collusion in the execution of the ogoni nine the u.n. has already issued a report on the effects of the company's investment in nigeria this report is the first of its kind it's a scientific study of the impact of oil pollution on the niger delta or at least on one particular part of the niger delta and there's never been a scientific study before and the report reveals widespread devastating impacts of pollution and it talks about how the people of the gony learned how to live with this pollution for decades the report reveals the impact on economic social cultural rights on the right to food the right to water. the right to health. i

logged into our community and the walk out so we're walking to all of them. because they can go to fish now as you see already a war place where there was no fish or the eco system or less dead shells says it has publicly called for calling for reconciliation among the goalie's and between the ago knees and shell and that it continues a community development program in the area despite the fact it is no longer an oil producing area nevertheless the multinational face increased scrutiny after the london extinction rebellion protests which involved protesters damaging shells u.k. headquarters i protested yesterday as that action was ending because i feel you know it's absurd that i was walking off in handcuffs for criminal damage to the shell building when shell itself has been one of the main biggest polluters who has caused the largest amount of irreversible very serious harm that is happening all

around the world the climates this crash destruction that we're seeing as a result of you know thirty years of too little too late the of the actual environmental lawyer who helped draft the landmark twenty fifteen paris agreement for her young meaning there about why she's superglued herself and shell in london and joining me now is the former mayor of london ken livingstone to go through some of the week's headlines things going for going on before we go to this headline is slightly wrong in the wonderful daily mail apparently after forty years of noise and smears finally the daily mail was forced to apologize as the man on sunday ran a story a couple weeks ago saying i had said that it was an anti semitic hate the jews of israel and fortunately for the first time in my political career there had been done. on the internet and so everyone could go and see i never said that at all because i saw them and the minute i saw the mail i had learned thought you know what i don't think we should have been living some. this is the power of what they

are doing i still get people to now three years since that labor m.p. john mann claimed i said it was designed as i still get people stop know as they say why do you say it was zionist idea when i explained i never did they quite happy that go away you name it i live up to forty years one that's taken forty years and they want their big banner headline now it was buried away on page four. well let's go to the main story again emitted from our neighbors agendas and briana on death row to surpass two hundred thirty thousand by the end of this year as a un report so quarter of million and i mean literally a you've had a block eight social medicine discount cane food con came in disproportionately i think almost the majority of those who died to children it's appalling and why isn't that dominating our news headlines here is america backing and britain

backing saudi arabia britain surprising the weapons that saudi arabia uses to bomb yemenis and bombing hospitals it's bombing school is supporting one child every twelve minutes i should say it is across parts. of the support for this it's not a party political since we have cornered on selections of britain even though this is happening in the other european countries they're stopping arms exports in germany say yes but very britain is america's principal ally on you we've just gone along with virtue of their wards and i mean we are certainly with i think we're spending something like thirty times more on research in our military than we're doing on and tackling climate change research and things from a. military industry i am weapons producing firms have had a huge influence over labor and tory governments for decades and decades and that's a big part. their economy well you just mentioned climate change it's all those who

think we'd lose jobs looks good with his left foot forward yet governments should shift support from arms trade to redefine it is exactly the point i just like literally we could create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in britain if we invested in me creating all the technology to make our homes the inch of eighty eight put solar panels on average i mean invest in wind farms and that would be the quickest way of bringing down all our carbon emissions and saving our planet but you know the first thing this government did when it got elected back in two thousand and ten was slash spending on tackling climate change and into porting of course your successor in the way city current mayor of london came under a bit of pressure for allowing the extinction rebellion to talk about the environment on the streets of london he then said to the extinction rebellion people you've had your fun as it were what would you have done differently would you have led the demonstrations out i would have encouraged the demonstrations

because the simple fact is as david happened our recently said in one of his programs we face extinction by the end of the century so i'm not surprised that kids are out there they want don't want to drop in a world in which their children are become extinct because of climate change and it's the biggest threat to human life on the face of this planet so i would be encouraging our to take carry on with it on to michigan and join them and to think more should be done about the. quality they have been ages and this is all of course i mean legislature the has now started the introduction of a new system the tragedy is i started at just one of the election to bars virtually the first thing he did was stop all that and then under bush's eight years ninety five thousand londonistan my difficulty died prematurely again because they already pay me boris was appalling well boris johnson is welcome to come on this program and defend the environ. even in the united states under the cortez the new

generation of democrats they seem to be raising this arms control renewables again something that i think you see to be a big very good election in spain where the that the socialist party i mean as now measures that the new government with today anderson for lenin all across america now an emmy you've already got twenty people was running for the democratic nomination and then some of the socialists that was inconceivable twenty years ago in america but i think a lot of americans have recognized their system isn't working well as for the american government we i don't know if we use all of those why would why do we use a chosen candidate for venezuelan government leader as well as washington's this from the center for economic and policy research report finds the u.s. sanctions on men as well as sponsors will potential thousands of deaths and this is what supporting america's sanctions on venezuela just like on iran are illegal in

international law. but america has the veto it the united nations so i mean very often when for every country at the u.n. votes century america trying to stop its interventions it just has a cost that one american vote and that defeats that we had the reporter or lou could have heard what you just said about the legality of saying to the e.u. recognizes you know has done rather than merely rule in read the meter or not all across the west people have come up supporting a man who's talking about a military coup and you've got this is this maneuver in the arms business talking about sending follow down to eric brilliant blackwood or denying that reuters suggestion good good good good luck george you're going to be involved we don't have the right to intervene to overthrow other governments have been democratically elected since nine hundred ninety eight every single election in venezuela has been one. by the progressive party that first shot is now majority and that's when i

think that america hates the fact he's a government that seize control of its oil supplies put them at the service of the venezuelan people just like in cuba i mean when castro came to power he put the interests of the cubans. american interests and that's what all these in war do you think it will hurt your old friend was a live today and was watching the pictures of you do with military officers to get a coup would you think utility or you would just laugh it off because i mean i went and is right in two thousand and eight the support amongst the people because after a century of the elites running venezuela whoever was in government still but the two hundred richest families but she controlled everything suddenly they had a president who started building schools hospitals i mean make people got decent y. age he transformed their lives and even they kidnapped as famously in a failed coup this time around my company was talking about u.s. military involvement all options on the table. here it is talking about economic

warfare killing tens of thousands of venezuelans once again that are many will die i mean it will go on and as with the situation in yemen they will mainly be children this is outrageous amount my defining decade was the one nine hundred sixty s. where america's intervention in viet nam three point eight million vietnamese died in that war and all the vietnamese wanted was control of their own country and they'd been subject to try to notice them i mean i represent three and america's got to stop intervening in other people's code to slowly usas of the e.u. what do you mean for all to get dragged along often behind america's interests goes we linked in i mean american e.u. there our economies are very interesting together but you still get and use some degree of dissent occasionally today there was a hearing on julian assange founder of wiki leaks where he leaks has told us so much about all of the. interference in other people's countries assyrian sondra

spied on by it could always diplomatic star at the london embassy there is the lawyer claims there's bizarre stuff that they were alleging which sounds was smearing the set from then on the wall of the embassy and so on i've find out why one port disputes that a simple fact there is a new video of a disparity having them and then they went to release a recording m. is secretly recording his doctor coming and examining him and things like that i mean you think about it if you've been confined to an embassy for seven years you might becoming a bit difficult an eccentric he should never have been subject to that he was simply exposing the lies and smears america's corporate interests and at some going up on wiki leaks and we should be proud of people doing that and helping us to understand the truth you know i grew up in that post-war world we were told we were under threat from the soviet union the cold room that we now now is a war you know i and therefore people write

a song to come out and actually make sure we get to know the truth we should be giving them an owner i mean not. arresting them and getting ready no doubt to deport them to the x. rays of american hearing indeed is to more or do you think i mean we began by talking about media character assassination of you and an apology from them do you think this is all softening us up because all the media of being centering on these claims about his behavior in the embassy rather than collateral murder in iraq or any of the i mean literally that the establishment doesn't want someone knowing i had a son getting away with this the one thing he's got on his side is the british courts would be very reluctant to deport him to not use aged men to where he could be executed and we stop execute the ecuadorian say that they're going to go and he won't be would you believe and donald trump telling you he's not going to execute you i mean frankly they're livingston thank you. after the break. as

environmentalist back nuclear power to tackle climate change we speak to the mit professor blowing the whistle on an alleged cover up of the threat of low level radiation elizabeth coming up about to going on the ground. zero and head of state. is a. shuttle looks funny you can see the swelling i mean it will soon mystic just like she was drinking in that. somewhere we will use it even though we mostly focus on the political aspects that are clogged and when i don't discuss the object side it was no interest to us to sort of still bring sister just there for we try to do something fun that simply a joke or sleep. on

the you know on the. on the water. or not he didn't. oh. you ought to go to. move for your. welcome back in the fast cough we had from former mayor of london ken livingstone about the dangers of air pollution that the world health organization says killed four point two million a year but did the w.h.o. along with the u.n. cover up another literally invisible threat to public health low level radiation a new book proposes that a positive prolific you can get away. button's testing and the future of

environmentalists catalyze nuclear power commissioning might lead elites to suppress facts about the potentially deadly effects of low level radiation the book is a manual for survival a charitable guide to the future and its author a mighty professor joins me now from paris cade welcome to going underground so in discovering new information about the chernobyl you trace where the earth exists today is of twenty nine thousand the russian were bombs went off and thyroid cancer tripling between one hundred seventy four do any good gene sperm counts declining in america your are both radio new zealand how how do you think it is that more people don't know how it should all be a little another disasters like fukushima. are about to give a kind of failure of human human organization in capitalism yeah well you know it leads you to wonder you went into the archives first i started in kiev and i went on to minsk in moscow and what i learned is that you know much of what we've been

told about the chernobyl disaster is just wrong or incomplete people were far sicker far more people died than we've been told radioactivity was not contained inside the churn obols own in fact i found that pilots went up and manipulated the weather so that radioactive rain fell on rural below roofs in order to save the big russian cities nobody told the two hundred thousand people living under those rain clouds and you know there's a story is just quite different when you look at the archival records and i found i was the first person usually to check out these files and i think that's why we haven't really known this story. and then i went on to u.n. archives to said you know why don't we know about this big public health disaster and i worked in five un archives and i found there that certain key influential individuals were helping the soviet leadership minimize the record of the health impacts of the disaster and i found you know i was like why would they do that.

that and i found that they were the big you know nuclear powers the u.k. u.s. france russia were facing lawsuits at the end of the cold war from their own testing and production of nuclear weapons for you know forty years prior to that and what they had done our leaders in the name of peace and nuclear deterrence they had you know emitted five hundred times more radioactivity into the environment than sure noble and you know i was left at the end of this book manual for survival wondering why we haven't been more curious as a society about our exposures to billions and billions of curies of radioactivity in nuclear fallout most people would think well this is a problem of soviet communism in the us so why would you go it was because you say in the book there was a false impression that persisted in deep in the western capitals meds and was superior to them it's in practice in the us is in the immediate aftermath of general yeah that's right unfortunately the soviets had

a lot of nuclear spills during the cold war a lot of accidents and they had doctors who because the doctors were not privy to the radiation doses that their patients were getting that was considered classified information the doctors became extremely good at detecting doses and symptoms in their patients just by studying their mostly the blood the. chromosomes their blood counts and looking at other sort of neurological factors teeth enamel things like that so the soviet doctors really had a what i consider a more sensitive and more developed radiation medicine than those in the west but as you know at the end of the soviet union everything that was soviet was considered bad the soviets had bad politics bad economics and it followed that it was easy to slander soviet medicine and science and i find that that was you know the the real. tactic. western experts came in and said oh you know soviet

scientists they don't know what they're talking about these people out in the villages we do find that there is a record of sickness and they are sicker than they should be but that's because they drink too much they smoke too much they have poor diets and they have radio phobia they're they're just nervous about their exposure to radioactivity now the book is structural it's blame but you did mention the un there i mean you say that the media took the figure of fifty four deaths and six thousand cases of thyroid cancer and this was influenced by fred methyl or author of the i.a.e.a. report what is the role of institutions like that in in conveying to the media or the wider public actual facts. well they wrote the big reports they wrote the author of the first big un report was after that u.n. consultants did a study of about sixteen hundred people in the double contaminated territory as they did that nine hundred ninety that issued

a port report one thousand nine hundred one other reports filed in one thousand nine hundred six and the big one in two thousand and six achievable for a report and they kept really enunciate in the same kinds of messages first they said in one thousand nine hundred one we found no record of damage and we don't expect to see anything but a few childhood direct cancers in the future and then in two thousand and six that they repeated the same message fifty four people dead six thousand kids with thyroid cancer and really no other detectable impact from chernobyl now the ukrainian officials have a count of thirty five thousand people receive compensation because their spouse died from a chernobyl related illness that's just people old enough to have married doesn't include children who have died people who are widowed or unmarried the unofficial count in ukraine alone is one hundred fifty thousand and that is ukraine which received the least amount of radioactive contamination dello russo western russia received far more so that's

a minimum number thirty five two hundred thousand dead from chernobyl but i mean even his reason is because she the way the mainstream media have talked about accidents is always that there can be high radiation then there's less radiation and then it becomes safe you seem to suggest that there are a u.s. government coverup that benefits the promotion of an idea that everything from medical tests to atomic just to safe by saying low level radiation is going to dangerous well yeah i mean the u.s. government was involved in hiding evidence and denying evidence of their own testing of nuclear weapons in the american heartland right nevada americans were. americans and the soviets were the only people brave enough to have nuclear test sites blowing up bombs in their continental heartland so they were busy in the early one thousand nine hundred trying to cover that story up because they wanted to avoid billion dollar lawsuits the french government was engaged in this kind of

activity about algeria and french polynesia the british government had detonated bombs also in the south pacific and in western australia nobody wanted these lawsuits to come home to roost and so if you could say chernobyl was the worst accident in human history worst nuclear accident human history and only thirty five people died or fifty four people died and six thousand kids got easily treatable cancers then hopefully those lawsuits could go away and the whole record of nuclear testing could go away and that's indeed what happened in the early one nine hundred ninety s. by defeating chernobyl making sure that you know low dose impact on health they had no precedent they were managed to slip away from those lawsuits so in that sense it was mission accomplished except that records stay in the archives for a long time and after twenty and thirty years historians get to see them and then we see you know what happened in the past to be clear you explain why radioactivity

was driven right through the food chain using. affected insect paul in the tos and to the point that the european the european union their berries on the shelves the radioactivity that you could dres jubal right yeah i went after i worked in the ministry of health archives i went to the ministry of agriculture archives you know during the soviet period and what i find is that a good portion of the food chain was saturated with radioactive contaminants milk we honey wall would you know sort of you name it was emanating radioactivity and even find in some air. areas of the southern belle rose twenty two percent of women's month breast milk was contaminated above permissible levels for radioactivity in and that's a pretty amazing thing when society has to set permissible levels of radioactivity for women's breast milk since ukraine joy the european association in two thousand

and fourteen they have been sending. produce over the border to poland to be marketed in the e.u. and then globally and i found that thousands of people are picking blueberries from the pretty marshes that's you know between two hundred and fifty kilometers from the chernobyl plant and because the swamp circulates radioactivity and because blueberries soak up minerals and radioactive mimics of minerals so well those berries are radioactive all of them a radioactive some are really radioactive they pick them all they get it they get of mix to reach the permissible norm and then it goes globally and i found that these radioactive berries were crossing in trucks from canada into the u.s. and the border guards the nuclear security guard stopped them because they found this radiating mass in a truck they look in blueberries from ukraine there with them permissible limits

and in they go now i'm not saying that these berries are necessarily if you eat them in small quantities they're terribly dangerous for us but what my thought is that rather than take radioactive produce from the contaminated territories and send the the radioactivity around the world would be better just to pay those pickers to pick those berries and then dispose of them as a nuclear waste which is indeed what they are just vimy there is a clause dimension to your book side the globalization there that you just didn't imply you say that in the immediate aftermath of the i.m.f. economic disaster brought upon the former soviet union you couldn't tell whether it was nuclear good does your economic catastrophe does the radiation today affect the poor. more than the rich it tends to if you look around the map of the globe. nuclear power plants tend to be put in areas they're not near big you know popular wealthy places they usually put them in places where people are dying for jobs and

they call them nuclear villages and they give them perks they give nuclear ploy perks like child care and little bit higher wages and nice municipal facilities and so when accidents happen they tend to happen in poorer more rural places take share noble take fukushima take the windscale accidents up in northern england and all of our problems out in the american west this is an issue of environmental justice as well. thank you and that's it for this show of the seas will be back on saturday investigating today tomorrow's critical u.k. decisions and wiki leaks founder julian assange to speak to one of the world's greatest got to do steve bell until then he would talk to us social media. my son doing drugs my nephew was still in drugs my sister just with drugs it was

like an epidemic of drug abuse america's public enemy number one in the united states is. sort of going after the users in the prison population or we started treating sick people people who are addicted to these drugs like criminals while i was on the hill. the war on drugs the stink there are a number of people who are in prison for. sins for minor minor offenders in the drug trade it's a lot watching your children grow up in issue in waves and say bye daddy answer. asking an abyss is just it doesn't get easier. we have no political agenda here we just if it if it costs more to get out then what you get when you get it out that's a call all loss it's

a minus sign that's it if you can't figure that out you think there's a political agenda. you're blinded by your by. if you come and blow our brains out at any given time if we can't really do anything actually america is the only country in the world where you can to keep both. war and legally get away with. the whole of the fire crawls stillbirth all the troubled years before all the points it's hollow for you to k.k.k. want exists because america wants it to exist the of the biggest terrorist group to ever operate in this country and they're dead to me they're worse also than the people who destroyed the world trade centers of the scroll white. water.

mark. may day celebrations are drowned out across europe instead marred by mass rallies violence and arrests. he said taurine general testifies to the senate as democrats accuse him of me fleeting the public and they mean the report. and weak links founder julian assange just sentenced to fifteen weeks in prison in the u.k. for escaping bail back in two thousand and twelve when he claimed asylum at the atlanta where amnesty.