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Hello again, and welcome back. I’m Jim Tedder inWashington with a program that will help you learn andimprove your American English. Today we continue tolook at the situation in Ukraine. The country’s formerpresident was recently overthrown, and many thinkcorruption was at the center of his downfall. We willprovide details.

And then …bang…not just any bang, but the biggestever. We’ll explore what may have happened billions ofyears ago when our universe first came into being.

The program is called As It Is, and we are coming yourway from VOA.

Many Ukrainians and foreign observers say the government of oustedPresident Viktor Yanukovych was extremely corrupt. He and his aides aresaid to have taken billions of dollars in public money. The country is now inbad financial shape. Milagros Ardin looks at some of the issues Ukraine faceson the road to recovery.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in late February. Sincethen, people have come to visit his richly equipped home and estate, near thecapital, Kyiv. They got an eyeful: a huge house built from pieces of wood andset on 137 hectares of land. The property has been valued at more than $75million. Reports say improvements to the dining hall and a tea room alonecost $2.3 million dollars.

The estate began as a property of the state. President Yanukovych turned itinto a private home. And, many Ukrainians believe he paid for everything bystealing and through corruption. Many also accuse him of letting close friendsrob the country.

Anders Aslund is with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Hesays the amount of money taken is unbelievable.

“Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has mentioned $37 billion as the totalamount of loot of the Yanukovych regime. That, of course, includes, also,other members of the regime that are not considered members of "the family"such as Andrei Khluyev and Borys Kolesnikov. You can look upon theUkrainian government under former President Yanukovych as an organizedcrime syndicate. And, a major purpose of the syndicate was to loot as muchmoney as possible from the government.”

Ukraine's new government is working with the United States, the EuropeanUnion, and others. It wants to block the use of money and property connectedto Mr. Yanukovych and his aides. The hope is that some of what was stolencan be recovered.

Some groups say the West is partly to blame for Ukraine’s financial lossesand must take responsibility for it. Nathaniel Heller works for Global Integrity, an independent, non-profit group.

"To ignore the role that financial institutions in the West, that multilateralinstitutions play, I think, is just seeing the glass not just half full, but sort ofseeing only half the glass.”

As Ukraine struggles with both economic and political crises, Anders Aslundsuggests two ways Western lawmakers can help.

"The easy thing is to introduce a law on competitive tenders for publicprocurement. You need to clean up the gas industry, which has been the mainhub of corruption throughout, which means to adjust gas prices at all levels to the market level - or cost of recovery level”.

He and others say reform is also needed in Ukraine’s legal system, which iswidely believed to suffer from corruption. For laws to have real teeth in them,they say, judges must be willing to punish people who take money from thestate. I’m Milagros Ardin.

Oh, What A Bang It Was!

Look up at the night sky. You will see stars, stars, more stars! And planetsand things that are greater than a human mind can understand. How did it allcome to be? And when? These are perhaps the most puzzling questions we will ever ask. With what may be an answer, or at least part of the answer, isour newest team member, Jonathan Evans.

Scientists say they have discovered evidence of what caused a hugeexplosion billions of years ago. The discovery provides firm support for themost popular scientific idea of how the universe began. It is called the “BigBang” theory.

The new research provides the first strong evidence that the universeexpanded quickly in its first moments of existence. Scientists are calling thisperiod ‘inflation’.

Experts say the research may be one of the most important discoveries in thehistory of science. Max Tegmark is a physicist at the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology. He says this is the kind of discovery that wins Nobel Prizes.

The Andromeda galaxy as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.

“I think this is going to go down, if it stands the test oftime, as one of the greatest discoveries in the entirehistory of science, and I really don’t say that lightly.”

This sudden rate of growth left gravitational waves inspace. Albert Einstein had predicted the existence ofsuch waves, but none have been observed until now.

Marc Kamionkowski is an astronomer at Johns HopkinsUniversity in Maryland. He says scientists do not knowwhat the force was that drove those waves.

“One of the reasons why this discovery is exciting is because inflation doesrequire that there’s some new fundamental physics beyond the four forcesthat we know about.”

Michael Turner is with the University of Chicago in Illinois. He describes thisforce as “the dynamite behind the Big Bang.” He believes it may be the forcethat unifies gravity, which acts on everything we see, and quantummechanics, which governs the world of subatomic particles.

“We see a link between them. And the question is, can we figure out thetheory of everything? Can we put it all together?”

He adds that nearly 14 billion years after the Big Bang, evidence of inflationcould not be easily found.

“Looking for the gravity waves from inflation by many was called ‘folly’ orchasing a wild goose.”

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led the group ofresearchers who made the discovery. They worked at a radio telescope inAntarctica at the South Pole. The air at the South Pole is dry, and there is littlehuman interference.

The researchers examined the background radiation of the universe. Theysuspect this is the last sign of energy from the Big Bang. They found aturning, twisting pattern in the extremely small differences in radiation levels. The scientists say these variations mark the movement of gravity waves.

The research has yet to be published in a scientific journal. Experts who haveseen the evidence say the findings are interesting, but that other scientists willneed to confirm it. I’m Jonathan Evans.

And I'm Jim Tedder in Washington. This is As It Is on VOA.