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CNN Student News

Aired February 20, 2002 - 04:30   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.
ANNOUNCER: You're watching "CNN STUDENT NEWS" seen in schools around the world because learning never stops and neither does the news.

MICHAEL MCMANUS, CO-HOST (voice-over): Another Wednesday rolls around on "CNN STUDENT NEWS". We get started with a look at President Bush's Asian tour. Then our travels take us to Russia for a night at the theater. Our road map leads us back to the United States, where we explore the Gullah culture. Later, find out how this cartoon character is serving up controversy at MickeyDs in France.

(on camera): Welcome to "CNN STUDENT NEWS". I'm Michael McManus.

U.S. President Bush visits South Korea, the second stop on his three-nation tour of Asia. U.S. President Bush visits South Korea, the second stop on his three-nation tour of Asia. During a key stop yesterday, he spoke with American troops at the heavily guarded Demilitarized Zone separating communist North Korea and democratic South Korea. Now Bush says he's not backing down from his "axis of evil" tough talk but is expected to renew an offer to negotiate with the North. Now can the administration successfully walk the tightrope between tough talk and conciliation?

CNN's John King attempts to answer that question.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN KING, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Priority one in Seoul is repairing a rift in a critical alliance and explaining just what he meant by this.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.

KING: The remark not only angered North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, but also rattled the South. President Kim Dae-jung has staked his legacy on engaging the communist North, his sunshine policy.

SAMUEL BERGER, FORMER CLINTON NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: To the extent that we are saying that he's engaged with evil, it tends to undercut the rationality of engagement. So I think it's very important that we get on the same page with the South Korean and Japanese on the Korean Peninsula.

KING: South Korea makes no secret of its disappointment.

YANG SUNG-CHUL, SOUTH KOREAN AMBASSADOR TO U.S.: Those escalation rhetorics, we're concerned, because it not only touches North Korea, but also sensibilities and the sensitivities of the South Korean people.

KING: The Bush White House is unapologetic.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: We believe that you can have a policy that speaks the truth, speaks clearly about the North Korean regime and yet leaves open the possibility of dialogue.

KING: One senior U.S. official calls it a good cop, bad cop approach. South Korea focuses on more personal issues like improving economic ties and reunions of families divided by war five decades ago, Washington on security concerns like the North's sales of ballistic missile technology and the 37,000 U.S. troops still stationed in South Korea.

But where the White House sees a necessary balancing act, many critics see a miscalculation, especially because Kim Dae-jung is in his final year in office.

MICHAEL O'HANLON, SENIOR FELLOW, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: The big concern is sort of the ticking clock, wasting time in this war of the words, which probably will not lead to any conflict in the short-term, but it could be passing up a big opportunity for improved relations and taking the next step.

KING: Mr. Bush will not back away from his tough talk, but he will embrace the sunshine policy and say he is prepared to immediately open a dialogue with the North.

(on camera): But many of those who favor engaging the North believe the damage already is done and believe Mr. Bush might have played into North Korea's hand by giving it an excuse not to negotiate with an administration that labels it "evil."

John King, CNN, Seoul.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCMANUS: Now despite some tough times, the people of North Korea remain loyal to their leader Kim Jung Il. Kim rules 22 million people in a job he inherited from his late father President Kim Il Sung.

You could think of it as Kim's Cult as Mike Chinoy explains.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MIKE CHINOY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A torchlight parade through the center of Pyongyang. Hundreds of thousands of people pledging their loyalty to the world's most extreme personality cult, a throwback to the China of Mao Tse-tung, Stalin's Soviet Union and the all-powerful dynasties of ancient Korea.

This is the side of North Korea the government wants you to see, a place of stifling socialist conformity where the leader, Kim Jung Il is treated as a virtual god. On the rare occasions when he appears in public, at carefully choreographed mass rallies like this, the people are indoctrinated to go wild.

Kim inherited the cult from his father, the late President Kim Il Sung, North Korea's founder, the man who started the Korean War, whose image is everywhere, who is also the object of intense veneration, from the giant bronze statue overlooking Pyongyang, to the immaculate marble halls of the mausoleum that contains his embalmed body.

Visiting North Korea, I've always been struck by how the extravagance of the Kim Cult and the resources devoted to sustaining it stand in sharp contrast to the other side of North Korea, a country of economic catastrophe and desperate shortages of food. Where the cities have almost no electricity, the hospitals no medicine, where over a million people are believed to have starved to death since the mid-1990s, and many remain at risk today. Most pictures of the North Korean crisis have come from aid workers like Kathi Zellweger, who's visited the country 36 times.

KATHI ZELLWEGER, CARITAS: The combination of a very dismal health care system, plus not enough food, of course, still makes people suffer and people do die.

CHINOY: But the breakdown of North Korea's rigid socialist economy has spurred some other, less evident, but potentially significant changes.

HAZEL SMITH, U.S. INSTITUTE FOR PEACE: Well, there's been massive change. This country's inextricably, can't go back. It's irreversibly gone into a market economy.

CHINOY: Hazel Smith just finished a year based in Pyongyang for the World Food Programme. She and other aid workers say that, while political controls remain tight, free markets are springing up everywhere, along with a growing awareness that North Korea must change.

SMITH: There's much more acceptance that, to survive, to move forward, the country and the people in it are going to have to intereact with Westerners and with the West.

CHINOY: For a fiercely independent nation, surviving on international handouts while seeking accommodation with longtime enemies has been a wrenching change.

(on camera): And that may help explain why North Korea is so hard to read. On the one hand, offering cooperation with tough condition, on the other, maintaining a huge army and selling missiles overseas leaving analysts and policymakers to debate whether it is really part of an "axis of evil" or simply the last relic of the Cold War struggling uneasily to come in from the cold.

Mike Chinoy, CNN, Seoul.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCMANUS: Holy observances begin today in Mecca. Millions of followers of Islam are taking part in the annual pilgrimage or Hajj. The journey is one of five pillars of the Muslim faith.

And for those who may be unfamiliar with Islam or the Hajj, CNN's Zain Verjee offers a primer.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAIN VERJEE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This is the spiritual center of the Muslim world. The Kaaba, a cube-like structure made of stone, draped in a black cloth. It's the direction to which Muslims all over the world turn to pray. Now about two million of them will walk around it for their ultimate spiritual experience in Mecca.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's unbelievable.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is my first time I've been to Saudi Arabia and the pilgrimage, and I love it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's great. I'm closer to -- I feel closer to my God.

VERJEE: Islam is Arabic for submission to the will of God. More than one billion people in the world follow this religion and every single one of them share two basic beliefs -- that there's one God and that this God has communicated to mankind through the prophet Mohammed and the sacred scripture revealed to him, the Koran.

The difference is within Islam come from how it's being interpreted and the cultural context in which it's practiced. Muslims are as diverse as western society. The streets of Mecca are filled with different faces and the sounds of different languages. Among the major practices of Islam, often referred to as the pillars, affirming the oneness of God, daily prayers, fasting during the month of Ramadan, giving to charity, and the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj.

Here at the Hajj, there's been some discussion between pilgrims about what it means to be Muslim and what Islam is all about. Many scholars believe that the key to understanding Islam is to ask this question -- whose Islam are we talking about and who is defining it?

Zain Verjee, CNN, Mecca.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCMANUS: Our look at the arts continue this week as we "Chronicle" the Bolshoi Theater. Bolshoi is Russian for big, but the Russian word many use to describe this historic building is "stada," which means old. It first opened for business in 1776 and has been host to performances and ballets ever since.

But changes are on the way, as we find out from Jill Dougherty. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JILL DOUGHERTY, CNN MOSCOW BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): Bolshoi. In Russian, it means "big," and everything about the Bolshoi Theater really is larger than life.

The vast hall with its skilled stucco molding and seats for more than 2,000 people. The box where czars, komisars and presidents have sat. And the stage, one of the biggest in world, alive with the spirits of artists who have sung and danced with the Bolshoi since it was founded in 1776.

But, behind the curtain, where the audience cannot see, is a theater that hasn't had a face lift in a century and a half, since the present building was reconstructed in 1856. Where hand cranks are still used below stage to raise and lower ballerinas. Where some of the wiring hasn't been touched since it was installed after World War I.

Now, the Bolshoi is about to undergo its first major renovation. A three-year project, estimated to cost $180 million, financed by the Russian government.

(on camera): The biggest worry for the Bolshoi is how to technically bring it into the 21st century without destroying its 19th Century atmosphere, what makes it one of the greatest theaters in the world.

(voice-over): Some things will be preserved. Like the incline of the stage. It tilts toward the audience, and dancers unaccustomed to it, feel they're spinning into the orchestra pit. And the Russian bells. 36 of them. They'll still be there, ready for another performance of the opera of Boris Godunov.

Another crucial thing to preserve, the Bolshoi's General Director tells us, the theater's world famous acoustics.

ANATOLY IKSANOV, GENERAL DIR., BOLSHOI THEATRE (through translator): The theater's acoustics are created by the walls. The sound reflects from them onto the stage and into the hall. As soon as you change those walls, you change the sound.

DOUGHERTY: Back behind the main stage, the Bolshoi will build a second stage, that can be designed and then moved forward, so the theater won't have to shut down for a week before premiers.

As the Bolshoi dancers rehearse a new production, the ballet's guest producer, himself a famous dancer, Alexander Grant, says it's the soul of the Bolshoi that should be preserved.

ALEXANDER GRANT, BOLSHOI BALLET GUEST PRODUCER: The actual fabric of the theater. I know and hope they will keep with the traditions, so terrific in this great theater.

DOUGHERTY: Audiences will be able to enjoy the Bolshoi even during renovation, which will be done in stages. At the very end, it will close for a season, then reopen. A new Bolshoi for a new century.

Jill Dougherty, CNN, Moscow.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Exploring our world, here now is "CNN STUDENT NEWS" "Perspectives."

MCMANUS: In "Perspectives" today, the second part of our look at a group of people known as the Gullah. They are descendants of enslaved Africans who have developed a culture unlike any other in the world, but now this centuries' old community is facing some very modern day problems.

Shelley Walcott reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SHELLEY WALCOTT, CO-HOST (voice-over): The Gullah people, arguably the most authentic African-American community in the United States with traditional cooking, crafts and language that can be traced back to the 16th century. It is a culture nearly 400 years in the making, one that still survives in communities around Charleston, Hilton Head and Georgetown. But now the Gullah say their way of life is being threatened by the ever increasing coastal development around these areas.

Veronica Gerald is director of the Penn Center, an organization dedicated to the preservation of Gullah culture. She says tourism in the low country is disrupting the Gullah way of life.

VERONICA GERALD, DIRECTOR, PENN CENTER: Throughout the geographic location where Gullah people traditionally live between the Cape Fear River and the St. John River, that area is heavily influenced by tourism. And the industry of tourism is based a lot on service positions so you have a kind of large lower class and a small middle class because of the very nature of the work that's being done in a tourist industry.

WALCOTT: But being restricted to the working class, Gerald says, is just one of the concerns of modern day Gullah. She and others worry that every new foundation laid for a high priced golf resort or a fast food restaurant or a beachfront property marks another chip in the ongoing erosion of Gullah culture.

QUEEN QUET, COMMUNITY ACTIVIST: The tourism industry has created this dire need for resorts and what people call developments but what we call destructionment.

WALCOTT: Rapid development along the coast has led to higher taxes in the area. Many local residents just aren't able to keep up with the rising cost of living and are forced to pack up and leave their ancestral home.

And there's another complicating factor, along the coast many black owned land titles can be tangled affairs. Extended families often collectively own land, a Gullah tradition called heirs property.

GERALD: Heirs property really is an ironic situation. Gullah people really base a lot of their belief systems on an African world view. And one of the things that came to the new country was the belief that land cannot be owned, it is shared by people and most often by family members.

WALCOTT: But often family members who have left the low country are willing to sell valuable land to the highest bidder while heirs still on the land desperately want to hold on to property that's been in the family for generations.

GERALD: So what turned out early on as a strength of group ownership now becomes a threat. Sometimes when it's heirs property, you can quite often buyout the interests of one person and then force a sale of the entire property. And quite often, people lose that property to that big developer.

WALCOTT: Gerald and other Gullah people say it is impossible to hold on to the culture if you don't have the land. A coalition of community activists has approached local, state and federal governments with their concerns. They have even made their case to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Switzerland. But they say their most effective preservation efforts are the ones that take place within the community at places like the Penn Center on St. Helena's Island, which invites tourists and others in for an education on the history of the Gullah people to preserve the heritage they have left.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCMANUS: One of the best known retailers in the food service industry is trying to make an impression with consumers. McDonald's has more than 30,000 restaurants in 121 countries around the world, but in some regions business could use a boost. That's where the marketing tools and tricks come into play.

Hala Gorani has the story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HALA GORANI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A typically American staple: the Big Mac. To promote it, not Ronald McDonald, but a very French comic book character, Asterix the Gaul.

McDonald's is spending millions of dollars on a series of commercials starring Asterix, promoting, for a short time, new exotic sandwiches with a Mediterranean twist. On the street, though, Parisians don't seem impressed.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: McDonald's with Asterix? I don't agree.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't like it.

GORANI: The fast food giant is trying hard to appeal to European consumers. Its profits have been dwindling recently, hurt by food scares in Europe like mad cow disease, while its image has been damaged by anti-globalization protesters, often grabbing headlines in France by mounting vigorous protests against the U.S. giant.

THOMAS SOTINEL, LE MONDE: The French like to think of themselves as the only true resistance against American imperialism. So it's funny to see one of the most potent symbols of American economic power using Asterix as a marketing tool.

GORANI: Add to that national food rivals, who have mounted a challenge of their own.

TOM BLACKETT, DEPUTY CHAIRMAN, INTERBRAND: They have developed very good products and services which compete with the Americans. And, also, extremely good advertising campaigns, which actually address the needs of individual countries and consumers.

GORANI (on camera): Well, I'm sitting at a McDonald's restaurant in Paris, with a Big Mac, fries and a Coke. But this could be anywhere in the world, and that's what McDonald's is trying to change.

(voice-over): But brand experts say tailoring marketing campaigns alone cannot succeed, unless McDonald's products continue to appeal to international consumers.

Hala Gorani, CNN, Paris.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCMANUS: Are you familiar with the metric system? You know centimeters and kilometers instead of inches and miles? Some grocers in Great Britain have lost a legal battle to sell groceries in the traditional pounds and ounces.

Caroline Kerr reports on why they're calling it the death of democracy.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COLIN HUNT, "METRIC MARTYR": Come up! Twenty-nine pence a pound green plantain.

CAROLINE KERR, ITN REPORTER: Just hours after he lost his case to the high court, Colin Hunt was back at his market store in London's East End, defiant as ever. He believes that being able to sell a bunch of bananas by the pound is an Englishman's birthright. And he told me his customers agreed.

HUNT: Every time they see me on TV or in the paper, they come down and congratulate me, and say: "Keep up the good fight, son. We're all behind you."

KERR: Colin Hunt was one of five self-styled metric martyrs at the High Court. To the disappointment of their supporters, the judges upheld the case against them, ruling that traders must primarily display their prices in kilos. Although they are allowed to show the cost in pounds, too, but in smaller writing. EDWARD FOX, ACTOR: If a market trader wishes to trade in a form of currency that he has been used to doing all his life, that his father was used to, his grandfather, way back into history. If he wants to trade that way, he shall.

KERR: The U.K. Metric Association applauded the decision, but said they'd rather the government educated the public instead of persecuting individuals.

NEIL HERRON, METRIC MARTYR DEF. FUND: Instead of pursuing traders through the courts, spend the money and give the British public a proper information campaign so they can understand it. It's a very, very simple system. It's not rocket science.

KERR: But this case marks the clash between laws made in Parliament and those made in Europe. And the traders say it's a matter of who governs Britain: Westminster or Brussels.

(on camera): The so-called metric martyrs may have been defeated, but they certainly aren't giving up their battle to sell fruit and veg in pounds and ounces, and are pinning their hopes on being allowed to appeal to the House of Lords.

Caroline Kerr, ITV News, East London.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SUSAN DAVIS, TALENT, OREGON: My name is Susan Davis from Talent, Oregon. I want to ask CNN: The federal budget has been expressed in millions, billions and now trillions of dollars. What denomination comes next?

ANNA BERNASEK, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Well, Susan, probably some day we're going to see a federal budget in the order of quadrillions of dollars, but that's not going to be for a long time. Right now we talk about the budget in terms of billions of dollars. Just look at last year, we had a record surplus of about $237 billion dollars.

Now it is true that we have heard the term trillions used with the federal budget but what that's really referring to is a projected surplus over a 10-year period. And given the economy and our trillion-dollar tax cut, it's really unlikely that we're going to see any kind of trillion dollar budget surplus anytime soon. So for now we really have to be content with a federal budget in terms of billions of dollars.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCMANUS: Freedom of the press is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. This First Amendment right is tested every day at news organizations across the country, but it doesn't stop there. High school journalism students are also becoming more aware of the rights and responsibilities of journalism.

CNN Student Bureau's Allison Walker explains how schools are dealing with censorship issues.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ALLISON WALKER, CNN STUDENT BUREAU (voice-over): School administrations across the country have the authority to censor school-sponsored publications.

MARK GOODMAN, STUDENT PRESS LAW CENTER: If students don't have the ability to write about issues that are important to them, even when they disagree with school officials, then no one can say they really have freedom.

WALKER: Mark Goodman is a lawyer at the Student Press Law Center. He provides free legal representation to student journalists. He says the best way to stop censorship is to expose it.

GOODMAN: Even if they are censored that doesn't make it right, and they have every right to question and complain and to make public the censorship that they are experiencing.

WALKER: But free press advocates argue that journalists within a school environment need to have limitations.

GOODMAN: The general standard that most advocates for student free press have argued is that if school officials can show that something is going to create a substantial disruption, a physical disruption of school activities or invade the rights of other students, then there may be reason for a limitation on that particular student expression.

WALKER: But if student journalists anticipate what their school officials might censor, the quality of their work suffers.

GOODMAN: The most troubling aspect of the whole censorship problem is students who really censor themselves in a way that prevents the school from ever having to censor but also ensures that the publications are mediocre and superficial because students just stray away from any issue that has any meat on it.

WALKER: The stories that are causing the controversy are not, perhaps, what most people would think.

GOODMAN: They're really good journalistic stories that are writing about or discussing the problems that exist in the school or the community or that are just perceived as critical of school policies and officials.

WALKER: Goodman emphasizes that independent student publications provide other avenues for expression, even if schools don't support them.

GOODMAN: At least at public schools have the right to distribute them at school, they have the right to write letters to the editor of the local newspaper, they have the right to create their own Web site from home in which they raise the issues that are important to them.

WALKER: If you're not happy with how your high school principal censors you, don't worry, it'll be different in college.

GOODMAN: It's fair to say that college journalists really do have very strong press freedom protections, must stronger than high school students and virtually the equivalent, in some cases perhaps even stronger protections than those of adults in the outside world.

WALKER: Allison Walker, CNN Student Bureau, Atlanta.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ONSCREEN: "Where in the World?"

Nearly twice the size of the U.S.

Legacy of achievement in literature, ballet, music.

Architecture features onion-domed churches.

Can you name this country?

Russia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCMANUS: That's our show for Wednesday. Have a great day. We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

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