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CNN Live At Daybreak

International Line-up

Aired September 06, 2002 - 05:35   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Let's take a look at other international stories, though, that we'll be following throughout the day here on CNN.
For that, we turn to our international assignment editor, Emer Fleming, who is in Hong Kong this morning -- good morning.

EMER FLEMING, CNN INTERNATIONAL EDITOR: Good morning, Carol, and welcome to Hong Kong.

And this is our Asia regional production center, where we do all of our news gathering. I'll just give you a little quick look at the news room here. We have dot-com down here and they cover everything, all Asian news for our Web site, cnn.com. This is actually where I sit, right here. And we do news gathering here. We've got shows and so on.

Some of the stuff that we're covering at the moment and some of the difficulties that we can have from time to time in covering stories is, for example, the news out of Cambodia today of the sentencing, the life sentencing that a Khmer Rouge warlord has just gotten. And, you know, it's so hard sometimes to get the phones through and to get the information out.

The trial itself is being conducted in the Cambodian native language. So, of course, we have to have people in there who understand the language. And we, we're getting reports back from there and that's working out.

Also, in Beijing, our reporter, Lisa Rose Weaver and Jaime FlorCruz there still watching that story about the 50 North Korean asylum seekers who are still holed up in that German embassy school. Well, their sources are telling them that they may be released and come out over the weekend because, as you know, those German school kids have not been to school in five days. So I guess they're all keen to get back to school.

But just to glance around our news room here, we have "Asia Tonight" sitting right here. And they're working on a show that's going to be up in about an hour and 25 minutes. We've got "Biz Asia" on this side, a business show, a half hour business show that covers all of the Asia business news and a lot more.

But another thing that we do here in Hong Kong is we do series. And one of our most successful series that's just coming to an end now is called "The Rich/Poor Series." What we did is we talked to our reporters in the region and we got them to look at the rich and the poor, Carol, in their city and to do a comparison, you know, give me the life of a rich person and a poor person in Hong Kong, in Tokyo, in Seoul, in Manila, in Jakarta and -- in India, also.

And we had a package run each day. Like, for example, today we have Tom Mintier, who looks at a guy who was very wealthy during the boom. He was a Mercedes dealership. He owned one. And then things just went downhill. But he actually has built himself back up. So in that case Tom Mintier in Bangkok was looking at the life of somebody who had experienced both being rich and poor.

COSTELLO: And I can only imagine, if I can interrupt you for just a second, I can only imagine that the contrast between the rich and poor would be a much bigger contrast than here in the United States even.

FLEMING: Absolutely. Absolutely. It really is. And some of the education in New Delhi in India, Sir Hasni Heider (ph) looked at the money that, you know, a rich child has to spend on education and the money, Carol, that a poor child has not. And in some cases with children being child laborers, there are mobile schools that come to the child, to where they are working to give them an education.

But also, Carol, if you look outside our window -- we're going to go to a shot of that now -- you'll probably see a very foggy site. You may not be able to see some of those very high buildings out there. And we are going to start working on the whole pollution and the haze and the smog. I mean people in L.A. sometimes think they have it bad, but I don't know if you can see out there, it's pretty foggy out there, pretty smog and fog. And that can cause a lot of health problems for children and everybody living and working here -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Definitely so.

Thank you very much, Emer Fleming, reporting live for us from Hong Kong.

FLEMING: Thank you.

COSTELLO: Thanks for giving us a little taste of your world over there.

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