Return to Transcripts main page
Next@CNN
A Look at Building Internet in Iraq; Expedition 6 Crew Prepares to Leave Space Station; Military Showcases Planes at Florida Air Show
Aired May 03, 2003 - 15:00 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.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: NEXT@CNN begins right now. Among the stories we're going to be covering on today's show, a look at building the Internet in Iraq. How do you get a shattered country back online, or in some cases, online for the first time?
We'll also go live to the International Space Station, where one crew is preparing to leave after more than five months in space.
And to an air show in Florida to see some high tech military hardware put through as pieces.
Those stories and much more coming up on NEXT@CNN.
But first, we check in on the homecoming of a ship that is winding up a marathon deployment in the Persian Gulf region. The USS Abraham Lincoln is heading home to its home port of Everett, Washington, and our Frank Buckley is on board, and he has a special report for NEXT on some of the technology on the ship. Good afternoon, Frank.
FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, there, Anderson. We're here on the navigation bridge of the USS Abraham Lincoln. This is where they're actually steering the ship. And what we're going to do is show you some technology that's been deployed for the very first time on the Abraham Lincoln, and also on the Mobile Bay. It comes in the float coat that I'm wearing. The float coat is what people wear who are out on the flight deck or who are on in areas where they might fall overboard and into the water. There are tools in this float coat that will keep you alive.
I mean, one of the things that they have here is this strobe light that is a part of all of the float coats. They also have dye markers and whistles, and these are part of the sort of the standard gear of these float coats.
But the new float coat has something else, and here to help explain it to us is Lieutenant Bob McClafferty. Lieutenant, tell us about MOBI, which is the man overboard indicator.
LT. BOB MCCLAFFERTY, COMBAT SYSTEMS MAINT. OFFICER: The man overboard indicator was installed on the Abraham Lincoln battle group as part of a test platform for this deployment. And essentially, it's a very simple system. What is comprised of is four major units. Multiple transmitters, two direction finders, which one is located on the RIB (ph), which is the recovery boat. If we didn't have a Helo; Helo would be the first option. And the second one is on the bridge right behind us over there.
And the receiver. The receiver is the main piece of this. How it works, extremely simple. This gets wet, and these two terminals get shorted by salt water, lights off the transmitter, broadcasts on 121.5 megahertz. The ship, via its antenna systems on the weather deck, accepts that signal, lights off a visual and audible alarm on this receiver, notifies the OOD (ph) that there is a man overboard. He initiates ship's man overboard procedures. They correlate the number of this that's manually integrated (ph) on keypad by what's displayed to the ship's alpha roster, and we can identify specifically who was assign this MOBI to wear in their float coat. If another ship's sailor went overboard, we would also get indications that it's not the Abraham Lincoln, however it is an Abraham Lincoln battle group sailor who's in the water.
BUCKLEY: And what does it sound like?
MCCLAFFERTY: I can demonstrate it for you.
BUCKLEY: OK.
MCCLAFFERTY: This long cable is the antenna. And this is the manual operation here. Obviously we don't want the sailors to do this, because it would drive the -- it would initiate man overboard procedures. Simply press this, and we should be getting an alarm shortly. That ID number correlates to this specific MOBI. The junior officer of the deck, while the officer on the deck is initiating man overboard procedures, would bounce that number off the alpha roster that is provided, and we would know exactly who is in the water.
BUCKLEY: In the water, it can be very rough. This ship right now is moving at close to 30 knots and it takes, what, five and a half minutes to turn this ship around, and that's why it's important to know exactly where a sailor is, correct?
MCCLAFFERTY: Absolutely. I mean, the ship works, you know, 24 hours a day and there's guys on the flight deck in extremely poor weather, and not everyone is directly supervised such as if you're on the flight deck someone is watching your every movement. Sailors have jobs to do, and sometimes the climate is rough and people fall overboard. We did have a guy go overboard recently. He was seen. Life ring was thrown by someone who saw him hit the water, and this system worked as advertised. It did go off, because he had his -- obviously he had his float coat on. The officer on the deck correlated the number, and a helicopter that was airborne at that time recovered him. So it works. It's a life-saving device.
BUCKLEY: All right, Bob McClafferty, lieutenant, thank you very much. That's the man overboard indicator aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the first time this has been deployed on a warship -- Anderson.
COOPER: Frank, just a quick question. I don't know if Bob is still there, but maybe you can answer it. What is it that causes people to go overboard? I mean, is it the weather, the rough water, or is it all the stuff that's happening on the flight deck? BUCKLEY: Well, on an aircraft carrier -- you know, Lloyd's of London once said that the four and a half acre flight deck is the most dangerous four and a half acres in the world. You have jets that are landing and taking off. At one point, there was a person who went overboard when a jet blast knocked him off of an aircraft carrier deck. That happens occasionally. Sometimes people simply slip and fall, even though they have nonstick surface. There's all sorts of oil and things like that. It is very easy to just simple slip and fall, and the weather conditions can also affect a person's stability on the deck. It's sometimes pouring rain, the wind can be coming across the bow at 30, 40 knots, and it's difficult to walk. And in those conditions, there are people out there sometimes, and sometimes they simply go overboard.
COOPER: All right, Frank Buckley, thanks very much.
Well, in post-war Iraq, some tools like phones and the Internet don't need to be rebuilt; they need to be created for the first time for a lot of the population. Technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg joins us with a look at some of the obstacles and the opportunities ahead. Hi, Daniel.
DANIEL SIEBERG, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Anderson. That's right. A very unique opportunity, in a sense, to build from the ground up. You know, some people started working on rebuilding Iraq even before the war started. The U.S.-Iraq Business Council launched 11 months ago with the goal of letting democracy and technology help build a modern, post-Saddam country. And joining us now from Washington is the group's founder and president, Iraqi native Rubar Sandi. Mr. Sandi, thanks for being with us.
RUBAR SANDI, U.S.-IRAQ BUSINESS COUNCIL: It's my pleasure.
SIEBERG: Let's start with the current state of tech affairs in Iraq. The telecommunication system and the media, because they were run by Saddam's regime, they were targets in the war. What is the current state of that right now? Could somebody make a cell phone call, for example, or even a landline call, for that matter?
SANDI: Well, the current status is in such an extreme poor condition. I don't know if it's worth to repair or rehabilitate the existing one. But because it was one of the very first things that were targeted by the air raid in 1991, and also, as one of the industry that was neglected by Saddam Hussein, with the exception of the one that he built for his military might.
You cannot make a phone call. Right now my family is in Baghdad and their phone does not work. But you can make a call -- they can call you through this phone, they call it the Turaya (ph) phone. It's a satellite telephone that's used now in Baghdad and other cities, and initially was used in the Iraqi Kurdistan. So it's (UNINTELLIGIBLE) since 1991.
SIEBERG: All right. Well, even in the best of times, a lot of everyday Iraqis had no access phones or computers or the Internet. And after so many years of repression, do you think there's a lot of hunger in the country right now to get wired, to get connected? Does this matter to the average, everyday Iraqi citizen?
SANDI: I think it does matter, from the surveys that we have conducted and from the contact that we had with the Iraqi people, both in the Kurdish area and the rest of Iraq, they are looking forward. They do want to know what's happening in the world. They do like to get connectivity to the education system, to the health system and to the rest of the world, access information and to see what is happening in other parts of the world, rather than just being fed the government information. In the past, it was totally controlled by the government. Less than 3 percent of the Iraqi people have wired phone, and practically the Internet and the cell phones do not exist in Iraq even now.
SIEBERG: That's a good lead-in into my question, that is how should this access be allocated or controlled in a sense? Should schools and hospitals first have access to it? How can it be controlled or rolled out in a sense, when it's not abused in any way?
SANDI: Well, I think one of the two options. We either go through the rehabilitation stage for the one that exists right now, and that could go through three stages. Phase one is to rehabilitate and reconstruct the existing one, just to give the essential communication to the people. Then you go to the next step, which introducing the data network, which is computers for the ministries, to distribution centers, to warehouses, hospitals so they can share the information.
The stage three, which is a few years down the road, you can go ahead and start converting to totally digital and combine probably voice and data into one system. But that's probably down the road.
So, it depends which way. This way, it would cost billions of dollars just for the cell phone infrastructure. One phone, if you give per 100 it will cost between $100 to $120 million to build that cell phone infrastructure. If you go with the new technology, today's technology, which unified the wireless and the Internet, that is obviously much cheaper. But that will give you an instant access to the world.
Now you have the other side of the coin, is the side that probably some of the Iraqi families or organizations or community would not like to see their children and their families to have that type of access to information.
SIEBERG: All right, well, Rubar Sandi, I'm afraid that's where we are going to have to leave it today. Thank you so much for joining us...
SANDI: My pleasure.
SIEBERG: From the U.S.-Iraq Business Council and from the Future of Iraq program. Thanks so much for joining us. And we'll keep an eye on the technology and as it develops and progresses in Iraq. Anderson, back to you.
COOPER: All right, Daniel, thanks very much. We'll see you a little bit later on in the program.
And coming up later in this program, another side of rebuilding Iraq. What is it going to take to restore wetlands that Saddam Hussein had drained?
We'll also bring you a live picture of the International Space Station as one crew heads home and another, smaller crew takes over.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: "Purple Haze." Want to update you on a story that could have an impact on the way you fly. You may remember back in 1988 in the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland a bomb went off in the cargo hold of PanAm flight 103; 270 lives were lost. Well, here we are 15 years later, and it's hard to believe, but airlines may still be vulnerable to such a terrorist attack. CNN's Kathleen Koch has been looking into efforts to bomb-proof commercial planes. And Kathleen, with all the focus on terrorism, why is this issue still out there?
KATHLEEN KOCH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Anderson, it's because even though we do have bomb-screening equipment in our airports, no system is full proof, and then there is cargo that goes in right next to your luggage. It is never screened. So the government wants a back-up system in order to prevent possible disaster.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KOCH (voice-over): A stunning 1998 FAA test showing what a bomb in a forward cargo hold can do to a passenger aircraft. Three and a half years later, equally dramatic video of a technology designed to thwart terrorist bombs.
BILL GREER, TELAIR INTERNATIONAL: It effectively contains the blast within the volume of the container to the point that it does not rupture and cause any catastrophic injury at all to the aircraft or to the passenger.
KOCH: But though such blast-resistant containers were certified air worthy by the FAA in 2001, the government hasn't yet ordered airlines to use them.
ADM. JAMES LOY, TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATOR: They're exorbitantly more expensive than a normal container. And the durability issue is yet to be really resolved in our (UNINTELLIGIBLE) to the satisfaction of our technical people.
KOCH: Specifically, blast-proof containers cost 15 times more than a normal cargo container, and are about 150 pounds heavier. On a flight from New York to Tokyo, that can add $5,000 in fuel costs. Still, U.S. lawmakers worry that bombs are a serious threat, especially in cargo, which, unlike baggage, is never screened for explosives.
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D), CALIFORNIA: This is the soft underbelly that remains in the transportation industry. It would be so easy to slip something into air cargo and have that air cargo explode on a passenger liner.
KOCH: One aviation safety advocate, who lost his daughter in the 1988 bomb of PanAm flight 103 cautions explosives can also slip past luggage screeners.
PAUL HUDSON, AV. CONSUMER ACTION PROJECT: We need to have a fail/safe system with backups to the backups.
KOCH: Manufacturers of the blast-resistant containers say they could an be made affordable by renting them to airlines on a per-use basis, and by using them in combination with new ultralight luggage containers to offset the extra weight. Using blast-resistant containers would also allow airlines to start carrying larger pieces of mail again. The practice was stopped after 9/11, cutting airline revenue by more than $1 billion each year.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
KOCH: Even though the FAA just finished field testing the durability of blast-proof containers, some five of them, it doesn't mean that they will be on planes anytime soon. Cash-strapped airlines want the government to pick up the tab for the new technology. No surprise, Anderson.
COOPER: So airlines, commercial airlines are just saying, this thing is too expensive?
KOCH: Too expensive, too heavy, and they say it's the government's duty now. Since 9/11 the government is supposed to be in charge of airline security, so they say, yes, this is the government's job now.
COOPER: All right. Kathleen Koch, thanks very much for that report. Appreciate it.
When we come back, a new system designed to alert people when an earthquake is coming, and how a few seconds' warning could save lives.
We'll also take a look back at the beginnings of the Worldwide Web. I remember it like it was only 10 years ago. In fact, it was.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): This week, as an earthquake shook parts of Turkey, killing dozens of people, scientists at Cal Tech and the U.S. Geological Survey were working on an early warning system for earthquakes. Reporting in the journal "Science," researchers say the system will some day give people only a few seconds' notice, but it's enough time to save lives.
Here is how it works. Earthquakes, like the one that hit Northridge, California in 1994 release at least two types of waves. The faster moving wave in blue called the primary or P wave is not destructive, and in this case moves five seconds ahead of the damaging secondary wave, in red, the S wave. The idea is to monitor those P waves and notify the public through the Internet, pagers or phones that more damaging shockwaves are about to hit. A few seconds' warning is enough time to take cover, get under a desk, grab (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and hold on. It's enough time to signal traffic lights to turn red and reroute traffic heading towards the quake. Seconds could give companies time to cut power to high voltage lines prone to swing into each other and short out. In the future, buildings could be hooked up to the early warning network, designed to adjust their own tension and better absorb the shocks of the oncoming quake.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: These kids today, they don't understand what it was like back in the old days, I'm talking about the early '90s, back when there was no Internet as we know it, no Ebay. Back in my day, if you wanted to buy junk and sell it, you had to do it at a swap meet like everyone else. There was no downloading back then. If you wanted to buy smutty pictures or pick up a stranger, you had to do it on the street, like every other red-blooded American. Memories.
I mention all this because this week marks a birthday of sorts. Ten years ago, the Web's first browser was formed. Miles O'Brien pinches baby net's cheeks and admires how much it's grown.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on camera): All right, kids, let's turn the wayback machine back about 10 years. Remember those days when that newfangled Internet was just out there? This is the 10th anniversary this week of a thing called Mosaic, the Internet's first Web browser. Ultimately it became Netscape. So how far has the Internet come? Well, it has gone a lot further and become a bigger part of our lives than I ever would have guessed when I did a piece you're about to see, in January of 1995, when I interviewed one Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and one of the guiding forces, the author of Mosaic, about this newfangled thing called the Worldwide Web. Take a look.
(voice-over): His office may be cluttered, but 23-year-old Marc Andreessen has brought rhyme, reason and maybe soon the masses to the mystifying world of the Internet.
MARC ANDREESSEN, NETSCAPE FOUNDER: I just think it makes sense, We had these really powerful networks with these really powerful computers on everyone's desks, and no software to actually use on them.
O'BRIEN: But for all its promise, easy access to the Internet like this is still not truly practical for most home computer users.
(on camera): Conventional phone lines will send the graphics and the audio clips, but at a painfully slow pace. So for now, this will be primarily useful at businesses and universities, which have special high speed connections to the Internet.
ANDREESSEN: We want to bring it to everyone who possibly ever has use for it. Over time, we think that's everyone.
O'BRIEN: All right. Joining us now is the man you just saw in the piece, Marc Andreessen. I don't know who that reporter was. Some young guy.
Marc, good to have you with us.
ANDREESSEN: Some punk.
O'BRIEN: That's right.
Happy anniversary, I guess, is in order.
ANDREESSEN: Thank you.
O'BRIEN: Ten years ago, let's talk about what has come true and what has not about the Internet. First, what has -- what dream has been realized that you had way back when you were at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana tapping out Mosaic.
ANDREESSEN: Yes, I mean, it's gone way beyond any of our expectations. I mean, we never no idea it would get this big or this broad. And, you know, our hope was people would find it to be useful.
But the thing that's just amazed me is the thousands or millions of ways that people have found to use it that we never even thought of.
O'BRIEN: Like what?
ANDREESSEN: So there's just been this explosion of creativity.
Well, you know, eBay, for example. You just talked about auction scams. I mean, who would have known that there were millions and millions of people who would spend all day long sitting in front of their computers, buying and selling, you know, Pez dispensers and everything else that, you know, in their garages. I mean, who would have guessed?
And the -- you know, there's -- there's -- there's so many stories like that and there's so many people, you know, who earn their living by doing things like that now. There are -- are -- it's changed so many people's lives. We never had no idea any where near, you know, this level of growth.
O'BRIEN: All right. And what among your predictions 10 years ago have not come true or what has disappointed you most, I guess, is maybe another question.
ANDREESSEN: I don't know. It hasn't been -- there really hasn't been anything particularly disappointing. It's just been -- it's just been such an extraordinary phenomenon.
You know, a couple years ago -- you know, three, four, five years ago, it was starting to look like things were maybe going to stall out because it was looking like broadband at the home wouldn't be arriving that fast and there was a lot of disappointment around that. And then in the last, you know, three or four years, even during the -- you know, the big bust, you know, broadband to the home has just taken off and DSL and cable modems and all these things -- I mean, people all over the country, you know -- huge -- tens of millions of people have broadband to the home now. So even the stuff that took longer then maybe people would have hoped it's -- it's -- it's happening.
O'BRIEN: So there's a bit of impatience there, but -- I mean, it sounds like a stupid question but I guess it's worth asking. It is here to stay, right?
ANDREESSEN: Oh, yes. Yes. I mean -- and this is what we think -- you know, we think it's funny back in Silicon Valley is people, you know -- you people, you know, out here in New York and other places say, you know, the Internet's dead. You know, stick a fork in it. There's no, you know, opportunity or anything. And -- and, you know, the business opportunities are over and you look at the Internet, every fundamental metric behind the Internet, the number of users, the number of minutes per day they spend online, the number -- the amount of money people spend on e-commerce, the number of Internet auctions -- every single metric is up and to the right continuously, every day, every week, every months all the way through. And so, you know, it's just -- it's just a steam roller.
O'BRIEN: It just kind of got carried away there for a little while.
All right. Just -- just for a moment, I'd like you to give me a sound bite that I'm going to use 10 years from now when we do the 20th anniversary. Make your prediction what lies ahead for the Internet and browsers and the business in general.
ANDREESSEN: Yes, I think it's going to be very hard to predict how the Internet gets used in five or 10 years. But I think that what people are going to be really surprised at is how wrong people were in 2002, 2003, 2004 that you know, technology was getting boring and that, you know, people weren't going to be doing anything new and that innovation is dead and, you know, all the things you read these days. There's a new article in "Harvard Business Review" talking about how there's no new innovation in technology and the Internet's just another -- just like the railroad and it's just going to fade into the background and it's not going to be important.
I think people are going to be stunned at the amount of growth and the amount of creativity and the number of new applications and things people are doing with it over the next 10 years.
O'BRIEN: So there's a second wind lurking there? Marc Andreessen. Great to have you with us. Congratulations on success that no one could have imagined 10 years later.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Just ahead, we're going to check the latest headlines, and then the marshes of Iraq. Saddam Hussein tried to destroy them; the question, can they be brought back to life? We're going to talk to one of the people who may try.
Also, if you've gotten used to downloading your music for free, well, you may be in for a rude awakening. Stay tuned.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(NEWSBREAK)
COOPER: Now back to NEXT@CNN. Want to talk about southeast Iraq. It's an area once considered the birthplace of civilization, and it is not the fertile land it used to be. Today only about 15 percent of Iraq's rich marsh land remains viable. John Vause joins us now from Basra with more -- John.
JOHN VAUSE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Anderson. Well, actually, the figure now is probably close to 10 percent. The latest studies show that the marshlands have been decaying at a rapid rate over just the last few years alone, and scientists know this because they have been studying satellite imagery.
One of the big problems has been trying to get people in on the ground, for obvious reasons. Now, that has all changed. In fact, for the last few days, a team from Britain has been assessing the situation, and the situation, they say, is grim.
The marshlands, as you say, sprawled across a huge area of Iraq, two times the size of Rhode Island, almost as big as the country of Wales. Once supported a marsh Arab population of about a quarter of a million people. They had a very traditional way of life, hunting and fishing, living on the water. It was a civilization, a cultural way of life, which dated back 5,000 or even 6,000 years. Now, their only crime was to join an uprising against Saddam Hussein after the end of the last Gulf War, and the response from the Saddam Hussein regime was swift and brutal. Their homes were burned, the water was poisoned, the water was laced with mines as well. And when he couldn't get his tanks in there to finish the job, his engineers began a complex system of levees and dams to drain the marshes. In fact, one of the man-made rivers is called the Mother of Battles. That was completed in 1991.
And to give you an idea of how long construction has been continuing, the last dam which was finished was completed in January of this year, down near the Iraq-Iran border. So that hat construction has been continuing for almost 10 years.
To be fair, the situation in the marshlands was not good before 1991, but certainly the last 10 years accelerated that decay quite rapidly.
Now, the situation, according to the Human Rights Watch, as few as 40,000 marsh Arabs remain. We spent the last few days talking with these people and visiting with them. Their situation is desperate. One of the biggest problems they have is no drinking water. They say even when Saddam Hussein was in charge of the regime, a water truck would turn up every second day, and they tell us in some parts that water truck hasn't arrived for 45 days. There's very little food. They are living on rice and tomatoes, because that's the cheapest things that they can buy. Their children are sick. There is virtually no health care.
What was interesting when we spoke with these people and we said, Saddam is gone, his regime is over, there is a chance you can go back to your way of life. People are coming to restore the marshes. Your culture may be saved. The response was fairly ambivalent. It was like, well, that's great, but where's the food? Where's the water? It seems that anything beyond tomorrow just doesn't really enter into the calculations -- Anderson.
COOPER: Interesting. John, and we know now that the idea of restoring the marshes may take a very long time. Want to bring in another guest, John. An international team, as you mentioned, of scientists is trying to restore Iraq's marshlands. One of those men, Dr. Bob Giegengack, is chair of the geology department at the University of Pennsylvania and he joins us now as well.
Dr. Giegengack, thanks for being with us.
BOB GIEGENGACK, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA: You're welcome.
COOPER: Why is it important to try to restore these marshes?
GIEGENGACK: It's important to try to restore these marshes for a lot of reasons. It was the home of a very large population of Madan (ph), or so-called marsh Arabs. It was an important stopover point for migratory water fowl in the so-called Siberian-Caspian-Nile fly- way. It was a source of enormous amounts of protein for people living in Iraq. Fresh fish was an important part of their diet. And the marshes have been, as John indicated, approximately 90 percent destroyed. And most of that destruction has taken place since 1985 and was accelerated in the years after the first Gulf War.
As John said, there you can see on the map, there's a portion of the marshlands between the Tigris and Euphrates which join there in the center of the televised map. The central marshes, called the Kurnamars (ph), the one south of the Euphrates, the southern margin of the map is the so-called Hamar (ph) marsh, and the one in the northeast, which adjoins the border of Iran is the Hawaiza (ph) marsh. The Hawaiza (ph) marsh retains the last little fragment of undestroyed marshland, primarily because it gets water from across the border in Iran.
COOPER: Let me ask you, I understand about 18 percent of the original marshes are left. A lot of it has been converted into agricultural land, can't be brought back. How do you go about trying to restore what you can?
GIEGENGACK: Well, we don't know what will be entailed in bringing it back. Probably would be difficult to dispossess people of their agricultural land, but there are areas which are not in agriculture from which the marsh vegetation has been removed and destroyed. And these presumably could be restored.
There is an industry of wetlands restoration, which is now well developed in the United States, in part mandated by state and federal law and in part the inspiration of people who are trying to restore lost environments. So we do have people who know quite a bit about the process of bringing the damaged wetlands back.
COOPER: But at this point, at this point, though, you don't even know what it's going to require.
GIEGENGACK: We don't know what it's going to require. But there are portions of terrain that have been restored to productive marshland that had been dry longer than these marshlands in central Iraq. It's expensive.
COOPER: Let me bring in John Vause. John, do you have a sense of where a lot of the people have been displaced, where they have ended up, where they've gone to?
VAUSE: Well, a lot of people have gone to Iran. I think the number is at about 40,000 that have fled and live in a refugee status in Iran. Others have just gone into the towns. They now have jobs, they now have electricity, they now virtually left that way of life behind.
But if I can just pick up on one point about restoring the marshlands, what was interesting, I was speaking with Baroness Emily Nicholson (ph) today. She is a British member of the House of Lords, and has campaigned long and hard to try and save the marsh, certainly over the last decade. She makes a point that this isn't like a cup of coffee. You just can't add water. If you add water to what's left of the marshlands, you will end up with lakes. What they have to do is to find out what areas can actually be saved, that's the priority for them at this stage, and then work out the process. How much water is added, how much salination is taken out of the process.
And what she is saying is that she believes that this can be done, and she believes it can be done by working especially with the local Iraqi people, the people who have the knowledge of how these marshes work, have the knowledge of the cultural heritage as well as how the water used to flow. Basic things like that. She also says she doesn't think it will cost a great deal of money, because, one, the wages here in Iraq are so cheap, and she is counting on the great deal of support from the 40,000 marsh Arabs who are estimated to still live in this particular region of Iraq, Anderson.
COOPER: All right. I guess add to the mix, though, the problem: Now oil has been discovered under some of these marshes. That, of course, adds to the problem of what to do with this land as well. Appreciate, Bob Giegengack, Dr. Bob Giegengack, appreciate you joining us this afternoon, and John Vause, as well, in Basra. Thanks very much. Interesting discussion. I appreciate it.
Well, the Expedition 6 crew, which has been serving aboard the International Space Station for five months is set to return to Earth today. Later on today, it's going to happen, aboard a Russian Soyuz space craft. They are leaving behind two men, the two-men expedition 7 crew -- Expedition 7, which arrived at the station on Monday.
Now, you're looking at a live picture right now. The Expedition 6 crew was supposed to return home in March aboard the shuttle Atlantis, but with all the shuttles grounded while the Columbia accident investigation is going on, the Soyuz is the only way down right now. Now, undocking from the station is scheduled for 6:40 Eastern time tonight. Landing is set for 10:06 Eastern time. They're going to land, the spaceship, the Soyuz spacecraft is going to parachute to the ground in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia. This will be a first for U.S. astronauts. Three have blasted into orbit in a Soyuz, but none has ever landed in one. So it's going to be a historic landing this evening. The Russians say it's considerably bumpier than a shuttle landing. Miles O'Brien is going to be here tonight in the 10:00 hour with much more. So, please, join us then.
Coming up next, we're going to go live to an air show in Florida and check out some top-gun style aerobatics.
Also, it may be time for music downloaders to pay the piper. Why the era of free music could be coming to an end.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: Well, to honor America's servicemen and women, Ft. Lauderdale's 2003 Air and Sea Show is kicking off National Military Appreciation Month. John Zarrella is live in Ft. Lauderdale with the latest. John, quite a day.
JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Boy, Anderson, what a day. This is the ninth annual Air and Sea Show. Of course, today a special tribute to the American military. The end of the conflict in Iraq, and I can tell you, there expected to be four million people here on the beach between today and tomorrow. I am sure several of them will spend the night here on the beach, as well, to make sure they get the prime spaces.
But one thing I haven't mentioned in the past live opportunities I've had, is this tremendous amount of boats that are out there. They say from the air you can see what looks like literally an island of boats. Everything from the smallest dinghy to sail boats and cabin cruisers. They're just lined up, anchor to anchor, one after another, and it's just phenomenal, the number of people that have turned out for this. The U.S. Coast Guard right now performing a demonstration of what, of course, is their primary role, which is sea rescue missions, and they have got a couple of their choppers out there right now performing that.
But of course, throughout the day, the star attractions have been the U.S. military, and particularly those high-performance fighting jets. The F-15 flew over here a little while ago, a couple of hours ago. The F-15 Eagle, and that, of course, is the U.S. Air Force's premier fighter jet. And it can fly at about 2.5 times the speed of sound, about mach 2 plus five, going about 1,875 miles an hour. It really awed the people. We had an F-14 Tomcat a few minutes ago come by here as well, and did the same thing with some of the aerobatic maneuvering they're capable of doing.
Now, the stealth fighters and bombers also showed up today. The B-2 stealth bomber called the Spirit flew in for a couple of passes. And of course, it's a highly controversial bomber, certainly was at a price tag of $2 billion a copy. The most expensive aircraft ever built, and there are only about 20 of them that have been made so far.
And of course, not to be outdone, the F-117 stealth fighter also flew in, and the F-117 stealth fighter first used in Panama against Manuel Noriega's regime, and then it was used in that, quote, "target of opportunity bombing" when U.S. forces thought they might get to Saddam Hussein early on in that very first day of the conflict, and it was used as one of the primary weapons in that strike on Baghdad, on the compound on Baghdad.
One of the neatest things we saw today was through a camera that was mounted on the U.S. Army Golden Knights parachute team. And one of their parachutists, he's actually their videographer, drops out with them, flies down through the sky. They are coming at about 120 miles an hour, parachuting through the sky, and dropping from 12,500 feet, and they perform about 350 jumps, the parachutists, each year. Many of them just practice and keeping themselves going, but a lot of them in these air shows.
Now, we were waiting for one of my favorite planes to fly over, but we haven't seen it yet, the A-10 Warthog, which is that old tank killer plane, that ugly duckling of aircraft, waiting for it to fly over. It should be coming in in the next few minutes, and that will be a real treat for the people here, as well. That was, of course, a real workhorse in the Gulf War in '91 and in this, the last conflict, Iraqi Freedom.
So, Anderson, it has been a fabulous day out here for the people. Bad weather earlier in the week cleared out in a hurry. Gorgeous skies, not a cloud in the sky, and just fabulous weather for the two million plus people here on Ft. Lauderdale beach today -- Anderson.
COOPER: All right, John Zarrella, thanks for the report. The A- 10 Warthogs, it's an ugly plane, but it is deadly effective on the battlefield. Thanks very much.
ZARRELLA: Very lethal.
COOPER: It sure is. All right, thanks very much from Ft. Lauderdale.
Dozens of countries near the equator were on alert earlier this week because a satellite was falling back to Earth, but the remains of the Dutch/Italian (UNINTELLIGIBLE) satellite plummeted harmlessly into the Pacific on Tuesday. It was launched in 1996 to study X-ray radiation.
NASA says one of the science experiments from the space shuttle Columbia has been found, and believe it or not, it is still in relatively good shape. It still contains living worms. They are the offspring of the worms that were on the shuttle, which, of course, disintegrated on February 1, minutes before it was supposed to land. The worm experiment was found several weeks ago in Texas, but NASA did not open the containers until just this week.
Name change to tell you about. An asteroid discovered in 1993 has been named after Mr. Rogers, the beloved TV show host who died in February. The International Astronomical Union made the decision, they're the ones in charge of naming asteroids and comments. Up until this week, the Mr. Rogers asteroid was known simply as #26258. And just in case you're wondering, Mars and Jupiter are the planets in its neighborhood.
Earlier this week in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, with characteristic panache, unveiled a new digital music service. Now, it's a pretty novel idea. Get this, consumers actually pay for the songs. Imagine that. Jobs said that free file swapping and digital downloading is a mixed bag.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STEVE JOBS, CEO, APPLE COMPUTER: There's a good side and a bad side to this. The good side is it offers users near-instant gratification, at least as compared to going down to the record store, and again, shows that the Internet was built for music delivery. But the downside is it's stealing.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: That is the downside. So how does the new service work, and will it work to stop the stealing? For that, technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg returns with some thoughts -- Daniel.
SIEBERG: Yes, Anderson, this new service is called I-tunes music store from Apple. Everything with Apple is i something, I-tunes, I- book, I-pod. The difference here is that Apple is offering tunes for $1 apiece, or 99 cents, to be exact. You go the I-tunes Web sites, you download their software, and you can get each song for 99 cents. There are about 200,000 songs currently in their library of songs. They have partnered with all five of the major recording labels to offer people this music online.
Now, a lot of analysts are saying it may not be the perfect way to go about it, but they are saying it's an advance from what we've seen in the past from a lot of these legitimate or legal sites that are already out there, and they've had some -- they put fewer restrictions on the files, and that is, I think, really key. A lot of analysts have said is the key to this service is there aren't as many restrictions on the files. In other words, you can burn them onto a CD or you can put them onto your mp3 player. So strong out of the gate for Apple, certainly.
COOPER: But there are plenty of sites still out there that you can download music for free. How is Apple going to convince people to pay 99 cents a song?
SIEBERG: Right. Some of these -- the sites that are already out there, like you mentioned, Pressplay, Musicnet, which CNN's parent company, AOL Time Warner is a part of, we should mention, Listen.com, these sites have been out there for a little while. But analysts have said they were slow to pick up on what consumers wanted. You know, Napster, originally started getting popular almost four years ago. So consumers who were online and looking for digital music, they know what they want. Analysts were saying that these sites were trying to wedge consumers maybe into too much of what they were trying to put out, rather than allowing the consumers to go after what they wanted.
COOPER: Now, we all know that Napster was shut down, but there are other free download services out there that people are using. How can these still continue?
SIEBERG: Well, the competition is going to be tough, because these sites, like you mentioned, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), KazaA, Morpheus, they are still out there. They are free. Sites like Apple's I-tunes and Pressplay, MusicNet, the key to all of this, analysts say, it has to be easy to use, they have to be relatively inexpensive, and they have to be basically just some place where people can go to get all of the digital music that they want. And this is all part of the recording industry's strategy to combat piracy. We've seen the recording industry say repeatedly that they blame online piracy for a drop in CD sales, and that they are going to have to do a lot to try and combat this. Apple with its I-tune service is going to have to open it up. Obviously, right now it's just for Apple users. They say in the future that will be for Windows users. It also does not offer a subscription fee, which a few of the other ones do. So it's a little bit new, a little different model than we've seen in the past. And again, the competition will be stiff, with the sites that offer or allow illegal trading to go on, in addition to the sites that are already out there, the legal ones. So it's going to be this battle going on back and forth for a little while.
COOPER: Let's just talk briefly about stopping the piracy. For a long time, the recording industry was going after the pirating Web sites. It now seems there may be a strategy to go after some of the end users.
SIEBERG: Right, exactly, that seems to be the strategy right now. For example, we saw this week that there was a settlement between four university students and the recording industry. These students were accused of sharing files within their campus, and we also saw that there were instant messages sent to 200,000 KazaA and (UNINTELLIGIBLE) users that just popped up, and the recording industry said, we know who you are, you are not anonymous, we could come after you. This comes on the heels of the U.S. District Court ruling that said that sites like KazaA or (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and Morpheus are not responsible for any content that is being shared on their site. They can't be held responsible, much like a VCR or something like that. That is what the court ruled. So the recording industry is, in a sense, scaring, or going after the individual user and literally trying to send them a message.
COOPER: All right. The battle continues. Apple has now entered the fray. Daniel Sieberg, thanks very much.
SIEBERG: All right.
COOPER: Well, coming up, a lot still to cover. When the wild, wild West meets suburbia. Wildlife ends up in some pretty unexpected places. We're going to see what it took to get this cat out of the tree.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DAVID KIRKPATRICK, FORTUNE EDITOR: Particularly when it comes to cell phones, you know, many, many countries, including China, it's been extremely difficult to get a wired phone line, and you've had to wait years and years and years, and you can leap frog this whole problem of not being able to get a wire line by just going wireless. And even though I think in some parts of the world, it is a stretch for people to spend money on a cell phone, they do it anyway. It has become a huge priority.
But what is really exciting a lot of the technology companies is that the emerging markets are very rapidly becoming gigantic markets. China will soon become the world's largest PC market. It is already the world's largest cell phone market. Then there are places like Korea, which is the most broadband connected nation in the world now, well over 50 percent of all households now have a broadband connection. That's like three times the percentage for the U.S. population.
And there's not a single category of hi-tech for consumers that is not being avidly lapped up in Korea right now. So it's one of the most important markets.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: Talk about a kitty stuck in a tree. A 2-year-old mountain lion wandered into a residential area of Colorado Springs this week. It took refuge high in a tree, and wildlife control officers tranquilized the cat, you just saw the guy there with a rifle, carefully carried it down, I would say so, carefully the key word there, released it back into the wild. Let's hope it has learned its lesson.
That's all the time we have for today, but NEXT will be back tomorrow, 5:00 p.m. Eastern time, with another hour of news seen through the lens of science and technology. One of the stories we're going to have for you tomorrow, a mysterious die-off of sea otters in California. We're going to talk to one of the experts working to save these threatened marine mammals.
That story and more coming up tomorrow. Hope you'll be watching. Thanks for joining us today. See you later.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Prepares to Leave Space Station; Military Showcases Planes at Florida Air Show>
Aired May 3, 2003 - 15:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: NEXT@CNN begins right now. Among the stories we're going to be covering on today's show, a look at building the Internet in Iraq. How do you get a shattered country back online, or in some cases, online for the first time?
We'll also go live to the International Space Station, where one crew is preparing to leave after more than five months in space.
And to an air show in Florida to see some high tech military hardware put through as pieces.
Those stories and much more coming up on NEXT@CNN.
But first, we check in on the homecoming of a ship that is winding up a marathon deployment in the Persian Gulf region. The USS Abraham Lincoln is heading home to its home port of Everett, Washington, and our Frank Buckley is on board, and he has a special report for NEXT on some of the technology on the ship. Good afternoon, Frank.
FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, there, Anderson. We're here on the navigation bridge of the USS Abraham Lincoln. This is where they're actually steering the ship. And what we're going to do is show you some technology that's been deployed for the very first time on the Abraham Lincoln, and also on the Mobile Bay. It comes in the float coat that I'm wearing. The float coat is what people wear who are out on the flight deck or who are on in areas where they might fall overboard and into the water. There are tools in this float coat that will keep you alive.
I mean, one of the things that they have here is this strobe light that is a part of all of the float coats. They also have dye markers and whistles, and these are part of the sort of the standard gear of these float coats.
But the new float coat has something else, and here to help explain it to us is Lieutenant Bob McClafferty. Lieutenant, tell us about MOBI, which is the man overboard indicator.
LT. BOB MCCLAFFERTY, COMBAT SYSTEMS MAINT. OFFICER: The man overboard indicator was installed on the Abraham Lincoln battle group as part of a test platform for this deployment. And essentially, it's a very simple system. What is comprised of is four major units. Multiple transmitters, two direction finders, which one is located on the RIB (ph), which is the recovery boat. If we didn't have a Helo; Helo would be the first option. And the second one is on the bridge right behind us over there.
And the receiver. The receiver is the main piece of this. How it works, extremely simple. This gets wet, and these two terminals get shorted by salt water, lights off the transmitter, broadcasts on 121.5 megahertz. The ship, via its antenna systems on the weather deck, accepts that signal, lights off a visual and audible alarm on this receiver, notifies the OOD (ph) that there is a man overboard. He initiates ship's man overboard procedures. They correlate the number of this that's manually integrated (ph) on keypad by what's displayed to the ship's alpha roster, and we can identify specifically who was assign this MOBI to wear in their float coat. If another ship's sailor went overboard, we would also get indications that it's not the Abraham Lincoln, however it is an Abraham Lincoln battle group sailor who's in the water.
BUCKLEY: And what does it sound like?
MCCLAFFERTY: I can demonstrate it for you.
BUCKLEY: OK.
MCCLAFFERTY: This long cable is the antenna. And this is the manual operation here. Obviously we don't want the sailors to do this, because it would drive the -- it would initiate man overboard procedures. Simply press this, and we should be getting an alarm shortly. That ID number correlates to this specific MOBI. The junior officer of the deck, while the officer on the deck is initiating man overboard procedures, would bounce that number off the alpha roster that is provided, and we would know exactly who is in the water.
BUCKLEY: In the water, it can be very rough. This ship right now is moving at close to 30 knots and it takes, what, five and a half minutes to turn this ship around, and that's why it's important to know exactly where a sailor is, correct?
MCCLAFFERTY: Absolutely. I mean, the ship works, you know, 24 hours a day and there's guys on the flight deck in extremely poor weather, and not everyone is directly supervised such as if you're on the flight deck someone is watching your every movement. Sailors have jobs to do, and sometimes the climate is rough and people fall overboard. We did have a guy go overboard recently. He was seen. Life ring was thrown by someone who saw him hit the water, and this system worked as advertised. It did go off, because he had his -- obviously he had his float coat on. The officer on the deck correlated the number, and a helicopter that was airborne at that time recovered him. So it works. It's a life-saving device.
BUCKLEY: All right, Bob McClafferty, lieutenant, thank you very much. That's the man overboard indicator aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the first time this has been deployed on a warship -- Anderson.
COOPER: Frank, just a quick question. I don't know if Bob is still there, but maybe you can answer it. What is it that causes people to go overboard? I mean, is it the weather, the rough water, or is it all the stuff that's happening on the flight deck? BUCKLEY: Well, on an aircraft carrier -- you know, Lloyd's of London once said that the four and a half acre flight deck is the most dangerous four and a half acres in the world. You have jets that are landing and taking off. At one point, there was a person who went overboard when a jet blast knocked him off of an aircraft carrier deck. That happens occasionally. Sometimes people simply slip and fall, even though they have nonstick surface. There's all sorts of oil and things like that. It is very easy to just simple slip and fall, and the weather conditions can also affect a person's stability on the deck. It's sometimes pouring rain, the wind can be coming across the bow at 30, 40 knots, and it's difficult to walk. And in those conditions, there are people out there sometimes, and sometimes they simply go overboard.
COOPER: All right, Frank Buckley, thanks very much.
Well, in post-war Iraq, some tools like phones and the Internet don't need to be rebuilt; they need to be created for the first time for a lot of the population. Technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg joins us with a look at some of the obstacles and the opportunities ahead. Hi, Daniel.
DANIEL SIEBERG, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Anderson. That's right. A very unique opportunity, in a sense, to build from the ground up. You know, some people started working on rebuilding Iraq even before the war started. The U.S.-Iraq Business Council launched 11 months ago with the goal of letting democracy and technology help build a modern, post-Saddam country. And joining us now from Washington is the group's founder and president, Iraqi native Rubar Sandi. Mr. Sandi, thanks for being with us.
RUBAR SANDI, U.S.-IRAQ BUSINESS COUNCIL: It's my pleasure.
SIEBERG: Let's start with the current state of tech affairs in Iraq. The telecommunication system and the media, because they were run by Saddam's regime, they were targets in the war. What is the current state of that right now? Could somebody make a cell phone call, for example, or even a landline call, for that matter?
SANDI: Well, the current status is in such an extreme poor condition. I don't know if it's worth to repair or rehabilitate the existing one. But because it was one of the very first things that were targeted by the air raid in 1991, and also, as one of the industry that was neglected by Saddam Hussein, with the exception of the one that he built for his military might.
You cannot make a phone call. Right now my family is in Baghdad and their phone does not work. But you can make a call -- they can call you through this phone, they call it the Turaya (ph) phone. It's a satellite telephone that's used now in Baghdad and other cities, and initially was used in the Iraqi Kurdistan. So it's (UNINTELLIGIBLE) since 1991.
SIEBERG: All right. Well, even in the best of times, a lot of everyday Iraqis had no access phones or computers or the Internet. And after so many years of repression, do you think there's a lot of hunger in the country right now to get wired, to get connected? Does this matter to the average, everyday Iraqi citizen?
SANDI: I think it does matter, from the surveys that we have conducted and from the contact that we had with the Iraqi people, both in the Kurdish area and the rest of Iraq, they are looking forward. They do want to know what's happening in the world. They do like to get connectivity to the education system, to the health system and to the rest of the world, access information and to see what is happening in other parts of the world, rather than just being fed the government information. In the past, it was totally controlled by the government. Less than 3 percent of the Iraqi people have wired phone, and practically the Internet and the cell phones do not exist in Iraq even now.
SIEBERG: That's a good lead-in into my question, that is how should this access be allocated or controlled in a sense? Should schools and hospitals first have access to it? How can it be controlled or rolled out in a sense, when it's not abused in any way?
SANDI: Well, I think one of the two options. We either go through the rehabilitation stage for the one that exists right now, and that could go through three stages. Phase one is to rehabilitate and reconstruct the existing one, just to give the essential communication to the people. Then you go to the next step, which introducing the data network, which is computers for the ministries, to distribution centers, to warehouses, hospitals so they can share the information.
The stage three, which is a few years down the road, you can go ahead and start converting to totally digital and combine probably voice and data into one system. But that's probably down the road.
So, it depends which way. This way, it would cost billions of dollars just for the cell phone infrastructure. One phone, if you give per 100 it will cost between $100 to $120 million to build that cell phone infrastructure. If you go with the new technology, today's technology, which unified the wireless and the Internet, that is obviously much cheaper. But that will give you an instant access to the world.
Now you have the other side of the coin, is the side that probably some of the Iraqi families or organizations or community would not like to see their children and their families to have that type of access to information.
SIEBERG: All right, well, Rubar Sandi, I'm afraid that's where we are going to have to leave it today. Thank you so much for joining us...
SANDI: My pleasure.
SIEBERG: From the U.S.-Iraq Business Council and from the Future of Iraq program. Thanks so much for joining us. And we'll keep an eye on the technology and as it develops and progresses in Iraq. Anderson, back to you.
COOPER: All right, Daniel, thanks very much. We'll see you a little bit later on in the program.
And coming up later in this program, another side of rebuilding Iraq. What is it going to take to restore wetlands that Saddam Hussein had drained?
We'll also bring you a live picture of the International Space Station as one crew heads home and another, smaller crew takes over.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: "Purple Haze." Want to update you on a story that could have an impact on the way you fly. You may remember back in 1988 in the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland a bomb went off in the cargo hold of PanAm flight 103; 270 lives were lost. Well, here we are 15 years later, and it's hard to believe, but airlines may still be vulnerable to such a terrorist attack. CNN's Kathleen Koch has been looking into efforts to bomb-proof commercial planes. And Kathleen, with all the focus on terrorism, why is this issue still out there?
KATHLEEN KOCH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Anderson, it's because even though we do have bomb-screening equipment in our airports, no system is full proof, and then there is cargo that goes in right next to your luggage. It is never screened. So the government wants a back-up system in order to prevent possible disaster.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KOCH (voice-over): A stunning 1998 FAA test showing what a bomb in a forward cargo hold can do to a passenger aircraft. Three and a half years later, equally dramatic video of a technology designed to thwart terrorist bombs.
BILL GREER, TELAIR INTERNATIONAL: It effectively contains the blast within the volume of the container to the point that it does not rupture and cause any catastrophic injury at all to the aircraft or to the passenger.
KOCH: But though such blast-resistant containers were certified air worthy by the FAA in 2001, the government hasn't yet ordered airlines to use them.
ADM. JAMES LOY, TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATOR: They're exorbitantly more expensive than a normal container. And the durability issue is yet to be really resolved in our (UNINTELLIGIBLE) to the satisfaction of our technical people.
KOCH: Specifically, blast-proof containers cost 15 times more than a normal cargo container, and are about 150 pounds heavier. On a flight from New York to Tokyo, that can add $5,000 in fuel costs. Still, U.S. lawmakers worry that bombs are a serious threat, especially in cargo, which, unlike baggage, is never screened for explosives.
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D), CALIFORNIA: This is the soft underbelly that remains in the transportation industry. It would be so easy to slip something into air cargo and have that air cargo explode on a passenger liner.
KOCH: One aviation safety advocate, who lost his daughter in the 1988 bomb of PanAm flight 103 cautions explosives can also slip past luggage screeners.
PAUL HUDSON, AV. CONSUMER ACTION PROJECT: We need to have a fail/safe system with backups to the backups.
KOCH: Manufacturers of the blast-resistant containers say they could an be made affordable by renting them to airlines on a per-use basis, and by using them in combination with new ultralight luggage containers to offset the extra weight. Using blast-resistant containers would also allow airlines to start carrying larger pieces of mail again. The practice was stopped after 9/11, cutting airline revenue by more than $1 billion each year.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
KOCH: Even though the FAA just finished field testing the durability of blast-proof containers, some five of them, it doesn't mean that they will be on planes anytime soon. Cash-strapped airlines want the government to pick up the tab for the new technology. No surprise, Anderson.
COOPER: So airlines, commercial airlines are just saying, this thing is too expensive?
KOCH: Too expensive, too heavy, and they say it's the government's duty now. Since 9/11 the government is supposed to be in charge of airline security, so they say, yes, this is the government's job now.
COOPER: All right. Kathleen Koch, thanks very much for that report. Appreciate it.
When we come back, a new system designed to alert people when an earthquake is coming, and how a few seconds' warning could save lives.
We'll also take a look back at the beginnings of the Worldwide Web. I remember it like it was only 10 years ago. In fact, it was.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): This week, as an earthquake shook parts of Turkey, killing dozens of people, scientists at Cal Tech and the U.S. Geological Survey were working on an early warning system for earthquakes. Reporting in the journal "Science," researchers say the system will some day give people only a few seconds' notice, but it's enough time to save lives.
Here is how it works. Earthquakes, like the one that hit Northridge, California in 1994 release at least two types of waves. The faster moving wave in blue called the primary or P wave is not destructive, and in this case moves five seconds ahead of the damaging secondary wave, in red, the S wave. The idea is to monitor those P waves and notify the public through the Internet, pagers or phones that more damaging shockwaves are about to hit. A few seconds' warning is enough time to take cover, get under a desk, grab (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and hold on. It's enough time to signal traffic lights to turn red and reroute traffic heading towards the quake. Seconds could give companies time to cut power to high voltage lines prone to swing into each other and short out. In the future, buildings could be hooked up to the early warning network, designed to adjust their own tension and better absorb the shocks of the oncoming quake.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: These kids today, they don't understand what it was like back in the old days, I'm talking about the early '90s, back when there was no Internet as we know it, no Ebay. Back in my day, if you wanted to buy junk and sell it, you had to do it at a swap meet like everyone else. There was no downloading back then. If you wanted to buy smutty pictures or pick up a stranger, you had to do it on the street, like every other red-blooded American. Memories.
I mention all this because this week marks a birthday of sorts. Ten years ago, the Web's first browser was formed. Miles O'Brien pinches baby net's cheeks and admires how much it's grown.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on camera): All right, kids, let's turn the wayback machine back about 10 years. Remember those days when that newfangled Internet was just out there? This is the 10th anniversary this week of a thing called Mosaic, the Internet's first Web browser. Ultimately it became Netscape. So how far has the Internet come? Well, it has gone a lot further and become a bigger part of our lives than I ever would have guessed when I did a piece you're about to see, in January of 1995, when I interviewed one Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and one of the guiding forces, the author of Mosaic, about this newfangled thing called the Worldwide Web. Take a look.
(voice-over): His office may be cluttered, but 23-year-old Marc Andreessen has brought rhyme, reason and maybe soon the masses to the mystifying world of the Internet.
MARC ANDREESSEN, NETSCAPE FOUNDER: I just think it makes sense, We had these really powerful networks with these really powerful computers on everyone's desks, and no software to actually use on them.
O'BRIEN: But for all its promise, easy access to the Internet like this is still not truly practical for most home computer users.
(on camera): Conventional phone lines will send the graphics and the audio clips, but at a painfully slow pace. So for now, this will be primarily useful at businesses and universities, which have special high speed connections to the Internet.
ANDREESSEN: We want to bring it to everyone who possibly ever has use for it. Over time, we think that's everyone.
O'BRIEN: All right. Joining us now is the man you just saw in the piece, Marc Andreessen. I don't know who that reporter was. Some young guy.
Marc, good to have you with us.
ANDREESSEN: Some punk.
O'BRIEN: That's right.
Happy anniversary, I guess, is in order.
ANDREESSEN: Thank you.
O'BRIEN: Ten years ago, let's talk about what has come true and what has not about the Internet. First, what has -- what dream has been realized that you had way back when you were at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana tapping out Mosaic.
ANDREESSEN: Yes, I mean, it's gone way beyond any of our expectations. I mean, we never no idea it would get this big or this broad. And, you know, our hope was people would find it to be useful.
But the thing that's just amazed me is the thousands or millions of ways that people have found to use it that we never even thought of.
O'BRIEN: Like what?
ANDREESSEN: So there's just been this explosion of creativity.
Well, you know, eBay, for example. You just talked about auction scams. I mean, who would have known that there were millions and millions of people who would spend all day long sitting in front of their computers, buying and selling, you know, Pez dispensers and everything else that, you know, in their garages. I mean, who would have guessed?
And the -- you know, there's -- there's -- there's so many stories like that and there's so many people, you know, who earn their living by doing things like that now. There are -- are -- it's changed so many people's lives. We never had no idea any where near, you know, this level of growth.
O'BRIEN: All right. And what among your predictions 10 years ago have not come true or what has disappointed you most, I guess, is maybe another question.
ANDREESSEN: I don't know. It hasn't been -- there really hasn't been anything particularly disappointing. It's just been -- it's just been such an extraordinary phenomenon.
You know, a couple years ago -- you know, three, four, five years ago, it was starting to look like things were maybe going to stall out because it was looking like broadband at the home wouldn't be arriving that fast and there was a lot of disappointment around that. And then in the last, you know, three or four years, even during the -- you know, the big bust, you know, broadband to the home has just taken off and DSL and cable modems and all these things -- I mean, people all over the country, you know -- huge -- tens of millions of people have broadband to the home now. So even the stuff that took longer then maybe people would have hoped it's -- it's -- it's happening.
O'BRIEN: So there's a bit of impatience there, but -- I mean, it sounds like a stupid question but I guess it's worth asking. It is here to stay, right?
ANDREESSEN: Oh, yes. Yes. I mean -- and this is what we think -- you know, we think it's funny back in Silicon Valley is people, you know -- you people, you know, out here in New York and other places say, you know, the Internet's dead. You know, stick a fork in it. There's no, you know, opportunity or anything. And -- and, you know, the business opportunities are over and you look at the Internet, every fundamental metric behind the Internet, the number of users, the number of minutes per day they spend online, the number -- the amount of money people spend on e-commerce, the number of Internet auctions -- every single metric is up and to the right continuously, every day, every week, every months all the way through. And so, you know, it's just -- it's just a steam roller.
O'BRIEN: It just kind of got carried away there for a little while.
All right. Just -- just for a moment, I'd like you to give me a sound bite that I'm going to use 10 years from now when we do the 20th anniversary. Make your prediction what lies ahead for the Internet and browsers and the business in general.
ANDREESSEN: Yes, I think it's going to be very hard to predict how the Internet gets used in five or 10 years. But I think that what people are going to be really surprised at is how wrong people were in 2002, 2003, 2004 that you know, technology was getting boring and that, you know, people weren't going to be doing anything new and that innovation is dead and, you know, all the things you read these days. There's a new article in "Harvard Business Review" talking about how there's no new innovation in technology and the Internet's just another -- just like the railroad and it's just going to fade into the background and it's not going to be important.
I think people are going to be stunned at the amount of growth and the amount of creativity and the number of new applications and things people are doing with it over the next 10 years.
O'BRIEN: So there's a second wind lurking there? Marc Andreessen. Great to have you with us. Congratulations on success that no one could have imagined 10 years later.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Just ahead, we're going to check the latest headlines, and then the marshes of Iraq. Saddam Hussein tried to destroy them; the question, can they be brought back to life? We're going to talk to one of the people who may try.
Also, if you've gotten used to downloading your music for free, well, you may be in for a rude awakening. Stay tuned.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(NEWSBREAK)
COOPER: Now back to NEXT@CNN. Want to talk about southeast Iraq. It's an area once considered the birthplace of civilization, and it is not the fertile land it used to be. Today only about 15 percent of Iraq's rich marsh land remains viable. John Vause joins us now from Basra with more -- John.
JOHN VAUSE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Anderson. Well, actually, the figure now is probably close to 10 percent. The latest studies show that the marshlands have been decaying at a rapid rate over just the last few years alone, and scientists know this because they have been studying satellite imagery.
One of the big problems has been trying to get people in on the ground, for obvious reasons. Now, that has all changed. In fact, for the last few days, a team from Britain has been assessing the situation, and the situation, they say, is grim.
The marshlands, as you say, sprawled across a huge area of Iraq, two times the size of Rhode Island, almost as big as the country of Wales. Once supported a marsh Arab population of about a quarter of a million people. They had a very traditional way of life, hunting and fishing, living on the water. It was a civilization, a cultural way of life, which dated back 5,000 or even 6,000 years. Now, their only crime was to join an uprising against Saddam Hussein after the end of the last Gulf War, and the response from the Saddam Hussein regime was swift and brutal. Their homes were burned, the water was poisoned, the water was laced with mines as well. And when he couldn't get his tanks in there to finish the job, his engineers began a complex system of levees and dams to drain the marshes. In fact, one of the man-made rivers is called the Mother of Battles. That was completed in 1991.
And to give you an idea of how long construction has been continuing, the last dam which was finished was completed in January of this year, down near the Iraq-Iran border. So that hat construction has been continuing for almost 10 years.
To be fair, the situation in the marshlands was not good before 1991, but certainly the last 10 years accelerated that decay quite rapidly.
Now, the situation, according to the Human Rights Watch, as few as 40,000 marsh Arabs remain. We spent the last few days talking with these people and visiting with them. Their situation is desperate. One of the biggest problems they have is no drinking water. They say even when Saddam Hussein was in charge of the regime, a water truck would turn up every second day, and they tell us in some parts that water truck hasn't arrived for 45 days. There's very little food. They are living on rice and tomatoes, because that's the cheapest things that they can buy. Their children are sick. There is virtually no health care.
What was interesting when we spoke with these people and we said, Saddam is gone, his regime is over, there is a chance you can go back to your way of life. People are coming to restore the marshes. Your culture may be saved. The response was fairly ambivalent. It was like, well, that's great, but where's the food? Where's the water? It seems that anything beyond tomorrow just doesn't really enter into the calculations -- Anderson.
COOPER: Interesting. John, and we know now that the idea of restoring the marshes may take a very long time. Want to bring in another guest, John. An international team, as you mentioned, of scientists is trying to restore Iraq's marshlands. One of those men, Dr. Bob Giegengack, is chair of the geology department at the University of Pennsylvania and he joins us now as well.
Dr. Giegengack, thanks for being with us.
BOB GIEGENGACK, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA: You're welcome.
COOPER: Why is it important to try to restore these marshes?
GIEGENGACK: It's important to try to restore these marshes for a lot of reasons. It was the home of a very large population of Madan (ph), or so-called marsh Arabs. It was an important stopover point for migratory water fowl in the so-called Siberian-Caspian-Nile fly- way. It was a source of enormous amounts of protein for people living in Iraq. Fresh fish was an important part of their diet. And the marshes have been, as John indicated, approximately 90 percent destroyed. And most of that destruction has taken place since 1985 and was accelerated in the years after the first Gulf War.
As John said, there you can see on the map, there's a portion of the marshlands between the Tigris and Euphrates which join there in the center of the televised map. The central marshes, called the Kurnamars (ph), the one south of the Euphrates, the southern margin of the map is the so-called Hamar (ph) marsh, and the one in the northeast, which adjoins the border of Iran is the Hawaiza (ph) marsh. The Hawaiza (ph) marsh retains the last little fragment of undestroyed marshland, primarily because it gets water from across the border in Iran.
COOPER: Let me ask you, I understand about 18 percent of the original marshes are left. A lot of it has been converted into agricultural land, can't be brought back. How do you go about trying to restore what you can?
GIEGENGACK: Well, we don't know what will be entailed in bringing it back. Probably would be difficult to dispossess people of their agricultural land, but there are areas which are not in agriculture from which the marsh vegetation has been removed and destroyed. And these presumably could be restored.
There is an industry of wetlands restoration, which is now well developed in the United States, in part mandated by state and federal law and in part the inspiration of people who are trying to restore lost environments. So we do have people who know quite a bit about the process of bringing the damaged wetlands back.
COOPER: But at this point, at this point, though, you don't even know what it's going to require.
GIEGENGACK: We don't know what it's going to require. But there are portions of terrain that have been restored to productive marshland that had been dry longer than these marshlands in central Iraq. It's expensive.
COOPER: Let me bring in John Vause. John, do you have a sense of where a lot of the people have been displaced, where they have ended up, where they've gone to?
VAUSE: Well, a lot of people have gone to Iran. I think the number is at about 40,000 that have fled and live in a refugee status in Iran. Others have just gone into the towns. They now have jobs, they now have electricity, they now virtually left that way of life behind.
But if I can just pick up on one point about restoring the marshlands, what was interesting, I was speaking with Baroness Emily Nicholson (ph) today. She is a British member of the House of Lords, and has campaigned long and hard to try and save the marsh, certainly over the last decade. She makes a point that this isn't like a cup of coffee. You just can't add water. If you add water to what's left of the marshlands, you will end up with lakes. What they have to do is to find out what areas can actually be saved, that's the priority for them at this stage, and then work out the process. How much water is added, how much salination is taken out of the process.
And what she is saying is that she believes that this can be done, and she believes it can be done by working especially with the local Iraqi people, the people who have the knowledge of how these marshes work, have the knowledge of the cultural heritage as well as how the water used to flow. Basic things like that. She also says she doesn't think it will cost a great deal of money, because, one, the wages here in Iraq are so cheap, and she is counting on the great deal of support from the 40,000 marsh Arabs who are estimated to still live in this particular region of Iraq, Anderson.
COOPER: All right. I guess add to the mix, though, the problem: Now oil has been discovered under some of these marshes. That, of course, adds to the problem of what to do with this land as well. Appreciate, Bob Giegengack, Dr. Bob Giegengack, appreciate you joining us this afternoon, and John Vause, as well, in Basra. Thanks very much. Interesting discussion. I appreciate it.
Well, the Expedition 6 crew, which has been serving aboard the International Space Station for five months is set to return to Earth today. Later on today, it's going to happen, aboard a Russian Soyuz space craft. They are leaving behind two men, the two-men expedition 7 crew -- Expedition 7, which arrived at the station on Monday.
Now, you're looking at a live picture right now. The Expedition 6 crew was supposed to return home in March aboard the shuttle Atlantis, but with all the shuttles grounded while the Columbia accident investigation is going on, the Soyuz is the only way down right now. Now, undocking from the station is scheduled for 6:40 Eastern time tonight. Landing is set for 10:06 Eastern time. They're going to land, the spaceship, the Soyuz spacecraft is going to parachute to the ground in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia. This will be a first for U.S. astronauts. Three have blasted into orbit in a Soyuz, but none has ever landed in one. So it's going to be a historic landing this evening. The Russians say it's considerably bumpier than a shuttle landing. Miles O'Brien is going to be here tonight in the 10:00 hour with much more. So, please, join us then.
Coming up next, we're going to go live to an air show in Florida and check out some top-gun style aerobatics.
Also, it may be time for music downloaders to pay the piper. Why the era of free music could be coming to an end.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: Well, to honor America's servicemen and women, Ft. Lauderdale's 2003 Air and Sea Show is kicking off National Military Appreciation Month. John Zarrella is live in Ft. Lauderdale with the latest. John, quite a day.
JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Boy, Anderson, what a day. This is the ninth annual Air and Sea Show. Of course, today a special tribute to the American military. The end of the conflict in Iraq, and I can tell you, there expected to be four million people here on the beach between today and tomorrow. I am sure several of them will spend the night here on the beach, as well, to make sure they get the prime spaces.
But one thing I haven't mentioned in the past live opportunities I've had, is this tremendous amount of boats that are out there. They say from the air you can see what looks like literally an island of boats. Everything from the smallest dinghy to sail boats and cabin cruisers. They're just lined up, anchor to anchor, one after another, and it's just phenomenal, the number of people that have turned out for this. The U.S. Coast Guard right now performing a demonstration of what, of course, is their primary role, which is sea rescue missions, and they have got a couple of their choppers out there right now performing that.
But of course, throughout the day, the star attractions have been the U.S. military, and particularly those high-performance fighting jets. The F-15 flew over here a little while ago, a couple of hours ago. The F-15 Eagle, and that, of course, is the U.S. Air Force's premier fighter jet. And it can fly at about 2.5 times the speed of sound, about mach 2 plus five, going about 1,875 miles an hour. It really awed the people. We had an F-14 Tomcat a few minutes ago come by here as well, and did the same thing with some of the aerobatic maneuvering they're capable of doing.
Now, the stealth fighters and bombers also showed up today. The B-2 stealth bomber called the Spirit flew in for a couple of passes. And of course, it's a highly controversial bomber, certainly was at a price tag of $2 billion a copy. The most expensive aircraft ever built, and there are only about 20 of them that have been made so far.
And of course, not to be outdone, the F-117 stealth fighter also flew in, and the F-117 stealth fighter first used in Panama against Manuel Noriega's regime, and then it was used in that, quote, "target of opportunity bombing" when U.S. forces thought they might get to Saddam Hussein early on in that very first day of the conflict, and it was used as one of the primary weapons in that strike on Baghdad, on the compound on Baghdad.
One of the neatest things we saw today was through a camera that was mounted on the U.S. Army Golden Knights parachute team. And one of their parachutists, he's actually their videographer, drops out with them, flies down through the sky. They are coming at about 120 miles an hour, parachuting through the sky, and dropping from 12,500 feet, and they perform about 350 jumps, the parachutists, each year. Many of them just practice and keeping themselves going, but a lot of them in these air shows.
Now, we were waiting for one of my favorite planes to fly over, but we haven't seen it yet, the A-10 Warthog, which is that old tank killer plane, that ugly duckling of aircraft, waiting for it to fly over. It should be coming in in the next few minutes, and that will be a real treat for the people here, as well. That was, of course, a real workhorse in the Gulf War in '91 and in this, the last conflict, Iraqi Freedom.
So, Anderson, it has been a fabulous day out here for the people. Bad weather earlier in the week cleared out in a hurry. Gorgeous skies, not a cloud in the sky, and just fabulous weather for the two million plus people here on Ft. Lauderdale beach today -- Anderson.
COOPER: All right, John Zarrella, thanks for the report. The A- 10 Warthogs, it's an ugly plane, but it is deadly effective on the battlefield. Thanks very much.
ZARRELLA: Very lethal.
COOPER: It sure is. All right, thanks very much from Ft. Lauderdale.
Dozens of countries near the equator were on alert earlier this week because a satellite was falling back to Earth, but the remains of the Dutch/Italian (UNINTELLIGIBLE) satellite plummeted harmlessly into the Pacific on Tuesday. It was launched in 1996 to study X-ray radiation.
NASA says one of the science experiments from the space shuttle Columbia has been found, and believe it or not, it is still in relatively good shape. It still contains living worms. They are the offspring of the worms that were on the shuttle, which, of course, disintegrated on February 1, minutes before it was supposed to land. The worm experiment was found several weeks ago in Texas, but NASA did not open the containers until just this week.
Name change to tell you about. An asteroid discovered in 1993 has been named after Mr. Rogers, the beloved TV show host who died in February. The International Astronomical Union made the decision, they're the ones in charge of naming asteroids and comments. Up until this week, the Mr. Rogers asteroid was known simply as #26258. And just in case you're wondering, Mars and Jupiter are the planets in its neighborhood.
Earlier this week in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, with characteristic panache, unveiled a new digital music service. Now, it's a pretty novel idea. Get this, consumers actually pay for the songs. Imagine that. Jobs said that free file swapping and digital downloading is a mixed bag.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STEVE JOBS, CEO, APPLE COMPUTER: There's a good side and a bad side to this. The good side is it offers users near-instant gratification, at least as compared to going down to the record store, and again, shows that the Internet was built for music delivery. But the downside is it's stealing.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: That is the downside. So how does the new service work, and will it work to stop the stealing? For that, technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg returns with some thoughts -- Daniel.
SIEBERG: Yes, Anderson, this new service is called I-tunes music store from Apple. Everything with Apple is i something, I-tunes, I- book, I-pod. The difference here is that Apple is offering tunes for $1 apiece, or 99 cents, to be exact. You go the I-tunes Web sites, you download their software, and you can get each song for 99 cents. There are about 200,000 songs currently in their library of songs. They have partnered with all five of the major recording labels to offer people this music online.
Now, a lot of analysts are saying it may not be the perfect way to go about it, but they are saying it's an advance from what we've seen in the past from a lot of these legitimate or legal sites that are already out there, and they've had some -- they put fewer restrictions on the files, and that is, I think, really key. A lot of analysts have said is the key to this service is there aren't as many restrictions on the files. In other words, you can burn them onto a CD or you can put them onto your mp3 player. So strong out of the gate for Apple, certainly.
COOPER: But there are plenty of sites still out there that you can download music for free. How is Apple going to convince people to pay 99 cents a song?
SIEBERG: Right. Some of these -- the sites that are already out there, like you mentioned, Pressplay, Musicnet, which CNN's parent company, AOL Time Warner is a part of, we should mention, Listen.com, these sites have been out there for a little while. But analysts have said they were slow to pick up on what consumers wanted. You know, Napster, originally started getting popular almost four years ago. So consumers who were online and looking for digital music, they know what they want. Analysts were saying that these sites were trying to wedge consumers maybe into too much of what they were trying to put out, rather than allowing the consumers to go after what they wanted.
COOPER: Now, we all know that Napster was shut down, but there are other free download services out there that people are using. How can these still continue?
SIEBERG: Well, the competition is going to be tough, because these sites, like you mentioned, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), KazaA, Morpheus, they are still out there. They are free. Sites like Apple's I-tunes and Pressplay, MusicNet, the key to all of this, analysts say, it has to be easy to use, they have to be relatively inexpensive, and they have to be basically just some place where people can go to get all of the digital music that they want. And this is all part of the recording industry's strategy to combat piracy. We've seen the recording industry say repeatedly that they blame online piracy for a drop in CD sales, and that they are going to have to do a lot to try and combat this. Apple with its I-tune service is going to have to open it up. Obviously, right now it's just for Apple users. They say in the future that will be for Windows users. It also does not offer a subscription fee, which a few of the other ones do. So it's a little bit new, a little different model than we've seen in the past. And again, the competition will be stiff, with the sites that offer or allow illegal trading to go on, in addition to the sites that are already out there, the legal ones. So it's going to be this battle going on back and forth for a little while.
COOPER: Let's just talk briefly about stopping the piracy. For a long time, the recording industry was going after the pirating Web sites. It now seems there may be a strategy to go after some of the end users.
SIEBERG: Right, exactly, that seems to be the strategy right now. For example, we saw this week that there was a settlement between four university students and the recording industry. These students were accused of sharing files within their campus, and we also saw that there were instant messages sent to 200,000 KazaA and (UNINTELLIGIBLE) users that just popped up, and the recording industry said, we know who you are, you are not anonymous, we could come after you. This comes on the heels of the U.S. District Court ruling that said that sites like KazaA or (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and Morpheus are not responsible for any content that is being shared on their site. They can't be held responsible, much like a VCR or something like that. That is what the court ruled. So the recording industry is, in a sense, scaring, or going after the individual user and literally trying to send them a message.
COOPER: All right. The battle continues. Apple has now entered the fray. Daniel Sieberg, thanks very much.
SIEBERG: All right.
COOPER: Well, coming up, a lot still to cover. When the wild, wild West meets suburbia. Wildlife ends up in some pretty unexpected places. We're going to see what it took to get this cat out of the tree.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DAVID KIRKPATRICK, FORTUNE EDITOR: Particularly when it comes to cell phones, you know, many, many countries, including China, it's been extremely difficult to get a wired phone line, and you've had to wait years and years and years, and you can leap frog this whole problem of not being able to get a wire line by just going wireless. And even though I think in some parts of the world, it is a stretch for people to spend money on a cell phone, they do it anyway. It has become a huge priority.
But what is really exciting a lot of the technology companies is that the emerging markets are very rapidly becoming gigantic markets. China will soon become the world's largest PC market. It is already the world's largest cell phone market. Then there are places like Korea, which is the most broadband connected nation in the world now, well over 50 percent of all households now have a broadband connection. That's like three times the percentage for the U.S. population.
And there's not a single category of hi-tech for consumers that is not being avidly lapped up in Korea right now. So it's one of the most important markets.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: Talk about a kitty stuck in a tree. A 2-year-old mountain lion wandered into a residential area of Colorado Springs this week. It took refuge high in a tree, and wildlife control officers tranquilized the cat, you just saw the guy there with a rifle, carefully carried it down, I would say so, carefully the key word there, released it back into the wild. Let's hope it has learned its lesson.
That's all the time we have for today, but NEXT will be back tomorrow, 5:00 p.m. Eastern time, with another hour of news seen through the lens of science and technology. One of the stories we're going to have for you tomorrow, a mysterious die-off of sea otters in California. We're going to talk to one of the experts working to save these threatened marine mammals.
That story and more coming up tomorrow. Hope you'll be watching. Thanks for joining us today. See you later.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Prepares to Leave Space Station; Military Showcases Planes at Florida Air Show>
