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CNN Live At Daybreak

Morning Conference Call: Public Inquiry Into Johannesburg Soccer Stampede; Remembering War in Eritrea

Aired July 19, 2001 - 08:34   ET

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

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, every day we have a tool we use here at the network to plan all of our coverage today, as well as the future. It's called the "Morning Conference Call." Today, we're checking in with Cynde Strand. She is a CNN producer in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Cynde, what are you working on?

CYNDE STRAND, PRODUCER, CNN SOUTH AFRICA: Hey, good morning, Carol. Well, we're keeping our eye on a public inquiry into a soccer stampede that killed 43 soccer fans here in Johannesburg last April. And this week, the testimony was from the stadium manager. We're expecting very powerful testimony from some of the survivors.

Because we're so busy here and we have quite a small staff and we're doing other stories at the same time, what we're doing is we're monitoring and recording the testimony in our office because there's so much interest and there's been such shock over this event. The public broadcaster here, the local broadcaster, has decided to carry this testimony live. So, when we're in the office we monitor it while we're in the office. And certainly, we're recording the whole time.

LIN: All right, Cynde, are you guys expecting to file later today?

STRAND: Well, we won't be filing on this. We're kind of caught up in some -- what's happened here are land invasions. But we'll be filing on this story probably in the weeks to come.

LIN: All right, thanks so much, Cynde. We'll be looking for the story as well.

Katherine Bond checking from Nairobi, Kenya. She's our Nairobi bureau chief there.

Katherine, what are you working on?

KATHERINE BOND, NAIROBI BUREAU CHIEF: Well, my crew's gone ahead of me to Eritrea in the northeast of Africa. They've been shooting in 50 degree Celsius heat in the desert. We're told by United Nations peacekeepers, it's an area inside Eritrea on the border with Ethiopia. We're doing follow-up stories after the end of the war a year ago between Eritrea and Ethiopia, in which Eritrea says it lost 19,000 soldiers, men and women who died in a two-and-a-half year conflict.

I figure that Ethiopia has described, perhaps facetiously. That's ridiculously low. The casualties from that conflict were known to be extremely high. But initially, we're looking at a story -- well, Eritrea has very high military casualties. It has a very low civil crime rate. And we're looking at its low crime rate, for example in Eritrea. There has been only one recorded murder in the past eight months. So, we're looking at why a country that's been embroiled in military conflict that has occurred so many deaths, in fact, has almost no murder. It's a virtually crime-free country -- Carol.

LIN: Interesting. All right, Katherine Bond reporting in from Nairobi, Kenya.

Every once in a while, we're going to be checking with our bureaus around the world. We have some 30 different bureaus, to see what our crews are working on that day.

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