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Two Swimming Records Broken In Rio Games; Interview With First U.S. Muslim Athlete To Wear Hijab While Competing In Olympics; A Moment Of Celebration In The Streets Of Aleppo; Marketplace Africa. Aired 2-2:30a ET
Aired August 07, 2016 - 02:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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NATALIE ALLEN, HOST: A busy and fast first day at the Olympics. Two swimming records get broken as some of the world's finest competitors take to the water. One woman makes another kind of history. CNN speaks with the first U.S. Muslim athlete to wear a hijab at the game.
Plus, a moment of celebration in the streets of Aleppo as rebels break a hole when the Syrian government sieged the city.
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ALLEN: Took to the streets, (inaudible). Hello everyone, I'm Natalie Allen, this is "CNN Newsroom" thank you for joining us.
The Rio Olympic ends its first day of competition without a hitch. No major problems reported other than a controlled explosion of a suspicious package near the end of the men's cycling road race.
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CNN's Christina Macfarlane has a wrap-up of today's big events and a look at what's to come on Sunday.
CHRISTINA MACFARLANE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It was a busy opening day in Rio, where the 31st Olympiad got under way with 12 Olympic gold medals across seven disciplines.
And the first of the day went to the United States, 19-year-old Jenny Thrasher in the 10m air rifle pulling off a surprise upset to beat the 2004 Athens gold medalist Du Li of China.
Just days after 273 Russian athletes were finally cleared to take part in the Rio Olympic games after allegations of state-sponsored doping, Russia's Beslan Mudranov cemented his country's place on the medal roster with gold in the 60 kilogram judo competition. A poignant moment after a turbulent few months in the Russia doping scandal.
Perhaps the most dramatic event of the day, however, was the men's road race after Italy's Vincenzo Nibali crashed out in the closing stages. A three-way sprint for the line saw Belgian's Greg Van Avermaet take gold on the closing stretch of the Copacaba.
Over at the Baha'I Olympic Village meanwhile, the opening day of the men's gymnastics saw a horrific accident befall French gymnast Samir Ait Said has suffered a horrific leg break while performing in the vault. The 26-year-old's left leg folded beneath him as he landed badly during the men's qualification event. He's currently undergoing treatment in hospital for a broken tibia.
Well it was a record-breaking night for women's swimming after Hungary's Katinka Hosszu shattered the 400m individual medley world record by just under five seconds claiming the Olympic gold that has long eluded her after missing out at London 2012.
And shortly after that, the Australian women streaked ahead to defend their Olympic title taking the 4 x 100 meters ahead of team USA and medal favorite Katie Ledecky making her first appearance in Rio to close out the night.
Plenty more to come, though, from Ledecky on Sunday when she takes to the pool as the clear favorite in the 400m freestyle. And we could see our first glimpse of 18 time gold medalist Michael Phelps in the men's 4 x 100m relay. 14 gold medals in store for Sunday. The Olympic games in Rio well and truly under way.
Christina Macfarlane, CNN, Rio.
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ALLEN: They certainly are and here's a look at the medal standings after the first day.
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ALLEN: Australia and Hungary are tied with first for gold medals won, with two each, the United States, South Korea, Japan and Argentina, each won one gold. But Japan and the U.S. lead in total medals won, both countries took home five medals Saturday.
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ALLEN: One U.S. Olympian is making history before she even competes. Meet the fencer who's setting a first for American athletes all by what she wears.
IBTIHAJ MUHAMMAD, U.S. FENCING TEAM: This summer I will become the first Muslim woman to represent team USA while wearing the hijab. When I heard that there had never been a Muslim woman on the U.S. team that wore the hijab that is when I made this conscious decision to go for 2016.
I knew I had it in me to qualify for an Olympic team and I wanted to hopefully be that change that other minorities could see that you know with hard work and perseverance anything's possible. Fencing is one of the most expensive Olympic sports. It can cost you
more than $20,000 a year to participate in fencing at the elite level. When you look at the outfit for example a mask can cost you $500. Jacket can cost you $250. The pants can cost you $250. Sneakers can cost you $200. The blades depending on what weapon you fence can cost you you know $300 or $400.
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MUHAMMAD: I wouldn't be in fencing were it not for even the club that I fence for. I train at the Peter Westbrook Foundation here in New York City and before digs, before visa, that was really my driving kind of way that I paid for the sport and I was involved at this level. They subsidize a lot of my cost and they have kept me going.
But one of the awesome things about being a you know team visa athlete, and having a great sponsor like Visa, they are definitely helping to financial fund my journey to Rio. They have a crowd funding campaign that we launched to help you know kind of subsidize our family costs to get myself and my four siblings and my parents to Rio.
And what's cool about the sport, is that it's you know it's just uniquely accommodating to the tenets of my faith. I'm covered but I'm also you know pursuing my desire to be in love in the sport.
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ALLEN: She's got a cool mask there to fence in.
Well we turn to other news now that we're following. People in the Syrian city of Aleppo found a rare glimmer of hope on Saturday.
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ALLEN: And they took to the streets to celebrate. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says that rebel forces have punctured the government siege on the city and Alliance and Islamist factions have been trying to open up supply lines back up after government regime forces cut them last week.
The U.N. has warned of humanitarian crisis, for the 250,000 civilians remaining in Aleppo. There is still no viable exit route from the city.
Elsewhere in Syria, the Syrian rights group says almost all of the strategic city of Manbij is now under the control of U.S. backed militias. Kurdish and Arab alliance forces are sweeping the city to clear any remaining ISIS fighters. Manbij lies between the Turkish border and Raqqah, the self-declared capital of ISIS operations. Losing Manbij leaves Raqqah largely isolated, a major step toward ousting the terror group overall.
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ALLEN: Belgian police say a man wielding a machete wounded two female police officers Saturday in the city of Charleroi. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ALLEN: A third officer shot and killed the attacker. Police say the assailant was heard shouting "allahu akbar" an Arabic phrase meaning god is greatest. The city - the city south of Brussels where suicide bombers killed dozens of people in March.
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ALLEN: On the campaign trail, Donald Trump suggesting again that Hillary Clinton is not mentally fit to be President.
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ALLEN: The Republican Presidential candidate is using a term Clinton used to defend how she handled classified emails while Secretary of State. On Friday, Clinton said she "short circuited" when implying that FBI Director James Comey said Clinton had been truthful in explaining her handling of the emails to the public. That claim was false. Comey had said her answers to FBI questions were truthful.
DONALD TRUMP, U.S. REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It was in front of some friendly reporters. They asked her a very easy question and she short circuited. She used the term, short circuited. She took a little short circuit in the brain. And she's got problems. I mean, if we had real people, this would be a real problem for her, but I think that the people of this country don't want somebody that's going to short circuit up here.
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Wikileaks is walking back a claim that it is trying to get its hands on Donald Trump's tax returns. Trump has yet to release them despite many calls for him to so. The comments came from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at the end of an interview with Bill Maher on HBO.
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BILL MAHER, HBO: Why don't you hack into Donald Trump's tax returns?
JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS FOUNDER: Well, we're working on it.
ALLEN: Saturday morning, Wikileaks sent out a tweet saying "Wikileaks isn't working on hacking Trump's tax returns. The claim is a joke from a comedy show. We are working on encouraging whistleblowers."
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ALLEN: Well at least six people were killed after heavy rains triggered landslides on Saturday in Veracruz, Mexico. Our meteorologist Derek van Dam joins us with more about that. Derek?
DEREK VAN DAM, CNN METEOROLOGST: This is all from hurricane Earl that made landfall about 48 hours along the coast of Belize. It moved inland across Guatemala. And then interestingly the center of the storm actually went over the southern sections of the Bay of Campeche, formed again, and made another landfall in Veracruz which is on the eastern coastline of Mexico.
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DAM: I'll help put this in a geographical reference for you.
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DAM: Look at my graphics. You can see well unfortunately some of the images coming out of this area. This is the landslide that unfortunately caused six fatalities. Extremely dangerous situation, very mountainous across this part of Mexico. If you can imagine, with rainfall totals well in excess of 250 millimeters, seeing this destruction, really should be expected as unfortunate as it is
Here's the rainfall totals. 254 millimeters across this area. There's Veracruz. Here's Belize. It's tough to see what's going on here but the storm moved across this region, just south of the Yucatan. There's the Bay of Campeche, that's in the southern sections of the Gulf of Mexico. The center of the circulation of the hurricane was just far enough over water where it was able to draw in some of that warm, moist air. And then it slightly strengthened before making landfall, again over the eastern sections of Mexico near Veracruz. Really a lot of rainfall and moisture associated with the system so it produced the heavy rainfall, the torrential flooding that led to landslides and mudslides across that area.
Now going forward as this storm, very disorganized storm system moves across south central Mexico it is going to move over the Pacific waters. This pesky storm system is actually going to potentially regain strengths and we're going to monitor it as it moves further and further to the north and west potentially impacting some popular tourist destinations like Cabo San Lucas and the Puerto Vallarta region on the eastern sections of Mexico. Heavy rainfall anticipated across that area.
Here's the storm system. These are the various models that we're looking at so we're going to keep a close eye on the San Juan peninsula.
Take a look at this though, this is very interesting because hurricane Earl was named that originally in the Gulf of Mexico. But now, that it's changed to the Pacific, it's actually going to be renamed Javier, something that I've never personally witnessed before as a meteorologist.
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DAM: All right, well that's the latest from the CNN World Weather Center. Very active in the tropics to say the least.
ALLEN: All right, Derek, thanks very much.
DAM: You're welcome.
ALLEN: And thank you for watching "CNN Newsroom" "Marketplace Africa" is next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ZAIN ASHER, HOST: Hello, everyone. Welcome to "Marketplace Africa" we cover the biggest economic trends impacting the continent. This week we are focused on the business of drones in Africa. It is still an industry that many countries are trying to figure out, trying to understand, trying to regulate. But there is a lot of money to be made a lot of money up for grabs.
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ASHER: So walk with me over here a second so I can show you some of the numbers in terms of what we are dealing with. According to Pricewaterhousecoopers, the potential value for drone services is more than $127 billion worldwide. A huge amount of money. And there are many uses as you can imagine for drones, including by the way, military combat.
According to a Think Tank New America, 3 of the 11 countries with armed drones are actually in Africa. And I'm specifically talking about Nigeria, Somalia, and South Africa. And five countries on the continent produce military drones. Let me show you those countries, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa.
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ASHER: And there's another use for drones that's becoming more popular. We visited one company using drones to deliver life-saving packages in Rwanda. Take a listen.
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UNIDENTFIED MALE: Well why don't we go ahead and load this package into a vehicle we're about to fly.
ASHER: When a start-up tech company partners with one of the biggest logistic companies in the world, innovation takes flight.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Launching zip 16 in three, two, one --
ASHER: The company is called Zipline. This U.S. based team makes drones, or as they call it, zips that deliver medical supplies too hard to reach areas. They have partnered with UPS and the Rwandan government to debut the project in Africa in early August.
KELLER RINAUDO, COFOUNDER & CEO ZIPLINE: The partnership that we signed with the country of Rwanda is going to use Zipline to deliver all blood transfusions to about half of the country starting in July of this year. And the reason that they are delivering blood is really important is that they deliver about 35,000 transfusion as year as a country.
ASHER: Rwanda, often called the land of a thousand hills has a challenging terrain. And that's where UPS comes in. LAURA LANE, PRESIDENT AT GLOBAL AFFAIRS, UPS: We put $800,000 in seed
money into Zipline and this partnership to be able to develop this service and we've invested a lot of our senior staff in terms of their logistics expertise. We've got some of the sophisticated mapping technologies and we've been testing these capabilities and so from our perspective, it's just about mapping more the Rwandan territory and making sure that it gets delivered at that very point that it should be.
ASHER: It can take doctors several hours to get crucial blood deliveries in Rwanda. Zipline says there are drones which travel up to 135 kilometers per hour can reduce that to minutes.
RINAUDO: They can now use Zipline to send a text message, they will get a text message back, saying that a zip has been dispatched, that it's a few minutes away. They'll be able to walk outside, watch the delivery occur and then they will have what they need to save that patient's life. And the accuracy of each delivery is extremely high. We're actually able to deliver into their mailbox, which is about the size of three parking spaces.
ASHER: Here on this cow farm in Northern California the Zipline team works on everything from the simulation systems to the drones themselves.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A lot of parts of the plane are 3d printed so if you look at parts this vehicle this is 3d printed here and so is this.
ASHER: Not all parts of the production are high-tech.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So when you open up the payload bay and you can see that we are just using rubber bands here.
ASHER: The company's CEO says they've raised about $18 million in funding so far. Investors include Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The venture in Rwanda will start with delivery of 15 drones.
RINAUDO: The economics of this system are really simple. We are working directly with the Ministry of Health in Rwanda. And the great thing is the cost is similar to or less than the cost of making a similar delivery using a motorcycle.
ASHER: According to Zipline most deliveries will cost between $15 and $30. Operating in Rwanda will put the system to the test but there are advantages compared to other parts of the world.
RINAUDO: The nice thing about operating in a small fast moving country like Rwanda is they have both a much simpler air space and a they have a small civil aviation authority that can move fast and actually adopt modern regulatory practices sooner than a country like the U.S.
ASHER: As drone technology rapidly advances, it's expected that more countries will embrace the high-level, yet cost effective solutions it presents. RINAUDO: It is definitely the case that you're going to see a lot more
innovation in regulated markets like drones in places like Africa because small countries in Africa both often have a higher need for this kind of technology and because they have less regulatory baggage they're often able to adopt modern regulatory much faster.
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LANE: Tomorrow it could be more than just Rwanda. Think of all the challenges across sub-Saharan Africa and the difficulty of delivering in remote locations. If it works here in Rwanda, we could take it everywhere.
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ASHER: Time for a quick break here on "Marketplace Africa." When we come back we'll continue chatting about technology and you'll hear from the head of the company behind the very same web browser you might be using right now. Don't go away.
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ASHER: Welcome back, everybody. The Mozilla foundation is the not for profit organization and parent company behind the Firefox web browser. The foundation was established back in 2003. The company says its goal is to promote openness on the web. And according to the web-based data company's Statcounter, last year Firefox had about 16% of the web browser market, that's in 2015, it ranked third behind both Google Chrome and Internet Explorer respectively.
Mark Surman is the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. My colleague Eleni Giokos caught up with him when he was in Rwanda. They talked about how popular Firefox is on the continent and the opportunities technology offers entrepreneurs, take a listen.
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MARK SURMAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR MOZILLA FOUNDATION: What many people don't know, they know us as Firefox the browser. It's big here. It's big in lots of places. But Firefox is actually built and translated by volunteers around the world. And that's actually the exciting African story. We have all kinds of volunteers who say translate Firefox into key Rwanda, here in Rwanda.
An exciting thing is not only do people use Firefox across Africa but we have a whole community of African innovators and entrepreneurs and young techies who are trying to really make the web about Africa.
ELENI GIOKOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Can they get it right though? What do they need?
SURMAN: Can they get it right or can they break in? And if you look at the places where people are making money on apps it's basically the U.S., in particular Silicon Valley, and China, in China as the U.S. is really the global export market and people who make money from apps. But you look at like the top ten smart phone markets in the world they're all in emerging markets, and about half of them in Africa. So where actually the users are coming from, Africa. Where the money is being made, Silicon Valley.
GIOKOS: What apps do you think will work on the continent.
SURMAN: Well I think actually is where, like find something special, something that actually really makes sense in this context. I think probably media is one of the places you might see breakouts because it can be local. It can be in a local language, a local artist. And so looking at something at you know the mainstream tech play are not trying to do.
Another interesting thing is going to be the so-called internet of things. Once all of the stuff like our chairs and our cameras and our houses are connected what is like African life and what kind of devices or products are people going to want that really kind of appeal to Africans.
So looking I think probably in those two places, media and internet of things may sound far away but it's probably where entrepreneurs should be looking.
GIOKOS: What about e learning?
SURMAN: Yes, I think e-learning is something that Africans can break through but I would actually focus more on learning digital than digitally learning in the sense that what you really want is for people to understand how they can wield and shape the tech. That's absolutely essential to getting new ideas, getting innovation that comes from here.
So often you still have -- if people even have computer lessons in school they are going to be learning power point. Why not learn how to make an app, why not learn how to build a digital business.
GIOKOS: What role do you see Mozilla playing in the greater context?
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SURMAN: Well you know Mozilla's role has always been to help there be that kind of choice and opportunity. We took on Internet Explorer and Microsoft at a time when they had 98% of the market. Our goal wasn't to topple them, our goal was to give people a choice. And the rest of the internet should always work that way.
The internet should be an open market, an open system whether you want to be an artist, whether you want to be an entrepreneur, the internet should be for all of us to pursue our dreams. So our job is a little bit of like trying to keep the internet open and honest so all of us can benefit from it.
GIOKOS: How much competition has Chrome created for you.
SURMAN: Eee! Well Chrome has definitely been a factor for Firefox. In the end, you know part of the joke is what's the best version of Firefox that we ever released. And the answer is Internet Explorer 7 which is the version after we released Firefox.
Our job was really actually to have all of the browsers improve. And Chrome in some ways is a success story. When we started out there was one browser and it was taking the internet in the wrong direction. You know we came in, we competed with Internet Explorer, and then Chrome came, and then Safari. Choice is actually what we want. But now we're back at a spot where there is really one social network and one search engine. How do we actually break that out? How do we create four search engines, four social networks and all the other things we can dream of in the future.
GIOKOS: Are you falling behind Chrome?
SURMAN: Well, we haven't fallen behind Chrome in terms of the browser itself. We are actually neck-and-neck. And we're different, we're really about independence and security and privacy. They have really displaced everybody in terms of market share. You know we've gone down, Internet Explorer has gone down, Safari has gone down. But Firefox is still 400 million people around the world using it. Those are people who believe in independence and privacy, and we think are a voice for the web and we still stand for that and feel great about that.
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ASHER: And Surman also said that although there are many challenges there are still a lot of opportunities for Africans to actually start using web browsers and search engines that are made in Africa.
Don't forget to go to our Facebook page and our website to keep with all of our stories, and share your thoughts. I'm Zain, Asher, thank you so much for watching, we'll see you next week in the Marketplace.
