NASA Satellite To Crash Friday
STOUT: I'm Kristie Lu Stout in Hong Kong. You're watching News Stream. And these are your world headlines. Now Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is pushing ahead with plans to request full UN membership on Friday that's even though U.S. President Barack Obama has strongly hinted at a U.S. veto and said direct talks, not settlement at the UN are the answer. Now thousands of Greek public transport workers are on strike today over government austerity measures. For 24 hours of industrial action involves bus, subway, tram, and train workers has brought much of Athens to a standstill with kilometers long traffic jams. And in a sign of support for Libya's revolutionary fighters, the U.S. is reopening its embassy in the Libyan capital Tripoli. And it is the first time the embassy is opened since Moammar Gadhafi's overthrow. It was ransacked and damaged earlier this year. Now the Pope has arrived in his homeland of Germany. The visit has triggered a huge police presence of some 6,000 officers providing security, that's because protests are expected as the sex abuse scandal casts a shadow over the Catholic church. Now let's take a look at another of our top stories: the six ton satellite that is set to crash back to Earth on Friday. Now NASA says it is too early to predict exactly when and where that will happen, though the U.S. space agency says it will not be over North America. Now most of the spacecraft will burn up in the atmosphere, but more than two dozen pieces of it are expected to survive. Our John Zarrella joins us now from CNN Miami. And John, how worried should we be about the falling pieces from this satellite?</s>JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, don't forget, Kristie, and NASA points this out, about 70 percent of the Earth is made of water. So they fully expect that the pieces of the UAR's satellite will likely fall into either very uninhabited areas or water. But they can't be sure. And what they do say now is that, as you pointed out, it will not -- it will not hit North America, but it will come down some time tomorrow afternoon U.S. time.</s>ZARRELLA: The clock is ticking. Sometime after midnight tonight, if NASA's calculations are right, an old, dead satellite will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up -- most of it, but not all of it. About half a ton will make it through.</s>MARK MATNEY, NASA ORBITAL DEBRIS SCIENTIST: There are some pieces that are made of stainless steel and titanium and beryllium that have very high melting temperatures and those pieces will survive. And we have a list of about 26 pieces and they range from a few tens of pounds to a few hundred pounds in size.</s>ZARRELLA: You heard him right, some of the chunks of junk could be hundreds of pounds. But there's no need for you to run out and buy a hardhat. NASA scientists in Houston say there's very little risk that any of the debris from the six ton UARS, upper atmosphere research satellite, will hit you.</s>JONATHAN MCDOWELL, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: You could be hundreds of miles off in where it's coming down...</s>ZARRELLA: Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell believes the space agency is probably right, because much of the Earth is water.</s>MCDOWELL: This is not like the old Skylab scare of the 70s when you had a 70 ton space station crashing out of the sky. This thing is only six or seven tons. So I agree with the folks in Houston, it's really nothing to be terribly concerns about.</s>ZARRELLA: Parts of Skylab did hit western Australian in 1979. So where will this one come down? Well, no one knows. Even minutes before re-entering the atmosphere, NASA won't be able to pinpoint the exact location. The satellite is traveling so fast it covers thousands of miles of space in just minutes. Right now the impact swath covers portions of six continents.</s>MATNEY: Part of the problem is the spacecraft itself is tumbling in unpredictable ways. And it is very difficult to very precisely pinpoint where it's coming down, even right before the re-entry. If the thing happens to come down in a city, that would be bad. The chances of it causing expensive damage or actually injuring someone are much higher.</s>ZARRELLA: One thing is certain, once it hits the atmosphere 50 miles up, it will take only a few minutes before the surviving pieces hit the Earth.</s>ZARRELLA: Now if it's dark with there UARs satellite comes down then NASA says it's probably going to be a pretty spectacular show like a meteor show with all of those pieces burning up in the atmosphere -- Kristie.</s>STOUT: All right. John Zarrella joining us live from CNN Miami. Thank you. According to estimates by policymakers, activists and scholars the number of modern day slaves ranges from about 10 million to 30 million people. But how many of those slaves work for you? Now that is the unsettling question being posed by a new online tool. It's called Slavery Footprint. It is the latest initiative from the anti-slavery call and response campaign in partnership with the U.S. State Department. It allows consumers to measure to what extent they are complicit in the use of forced labor around the world. And here is how it works. Now users answer a series of 11 questions about their homes, habits and consumption of everyday product. Take the question what is under your roof? Now you can add bedrooms or you can add bathrooms, a home office, a car, a scooter, a variety of objects here. And then by pressing this wheel you can then tally up how many items like light bulbs, pillows and textiles you have. According to anti-slavery activists all of these items on this list have some connection to bonded labor. And you can check out the statistic on the right. More than 200,000 children are forced to work in India's carpet belt of Uttar Pradesh. That would make the operation bigger than companies like Sony and Boeing in terms of employees. Now let's take a peek inside your medicine cabinet. And chances are you have a lot of these products in your bathroom -- sunscreen, soap, toothpaste. And you can click on any that you don't have. And here's the message, every day tens of thousands of women buy makeup. And activists say that tens of thousands of Indian children are forced to mine Formica, that's the material that makes makeup sparkle. And this one is for all your gadget geeks out there. If you have any of these electronic products from laptops and digital cameras, TVs, MP3 players, listen up, they contain Colton (ph). This is a metal used as a superconductor and mined by slaves in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Of course the point of answering all of these questions is to give an idea of how many slaves might make the products you use. The survey uses a formula based on where the raw materials for each product comes from and where finished items are made so you end up with a slavery footprint score. Now each and every one of us form a part of the slave supply chain even if we're not aware of it. And of course the idea is for us to use this information and to take action. And you can share your results on Facebook or Twitter, or you can send a letter to a company telling them you want to know about the use of modern day slavery in their supply chains. And the slavery footprints poignant question applies to corporations as well -- how many slaves work for you? So how many slaves work for anti-slavery activist Justin Dylan who leads the call and response campaign? Well, I caught up with the man behind this latest app just a little earlier.</s>JUSTIN DYLAN, SINGER: I took the survey last night and sadly I have about 86 people forced to work for me to produce the lifestyle that I enjoy.</s>STOUT: And with this application, with this knowledge that you want to share with other people, what do you hope to achieve with the Slavery Footprint app?</s>DYLAN: Well, with Slavery Footprint what we didn't want to do is create another calculator that only spits out bad news. What I believe is that people carry around stories and not necessarily statistics. So with Slavery Footprint we actually wanted to be able to tell you the story of your life and how it fits in with the globalized economy. Today, slavery is worse now than it ever was before, but most people have a hard time of understanding how it affects their lives. Slavery footprint is the first chapter for most people in understanding how it directly affects their lives, but most importantly about what they can do to change it.</s>STOUT: Now your worked with the U.S. State Department to create this app. What kind of support did they give you?</s>DYLAN: Well, they were phenomenal not only in their sharing of knowledge, but they helped the beginning of the funding of the app and really were able to use a lot of their relational equity to be able to bring the right kind of experts and stakeholders to bare on this. The technology that we've created and the algorithm that we've created around Slavery Footprint is a very vetted and multi-stakeholder approach where we're able to use vetted data to be able to determine the slavery in different types of products that we use every day while being very brand agnostic. We don't go after any particular brand, we're talking about different types of products that you use every day, which is very important.</s>STOUT: Now this new app, it follows the call and response app as well as your documentary of the same name. So do you feel that consumers are taking notice? Do you feel that the concept of buying slave free is really gaining traction now?</s>DYLAN: Well, I think we're getting there. I think we've just lit the fuse on the rocket. What's really going to make the rocket take off is if a consumer start to embed the story of other people who are being exploited to produce their lifestyles. If consumers can start to absorb that, that story into their lives, and more importantly amplify that story in the marketplace.</s>STOUT: Justin Dylan of Call and Response there. And join us this weekend for a CNN Freedom Project documentary. Ballywood actor Anil Kapoor shines a light on modern day slavery in his country. He takes us to a remote village in north India where nearly all the women have been sent into sexual slavery often by members of their own family. Now this documentary is called Trapped by Tradition here on CNN. You can see it this Saturday 9:00 pm in Hong Kong. And ahead on News Stream, social media is shaking up politics in China.</s>EUNICE YOON, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Ye Chong Pong (ph) is one over 100 candidates who has bypassed the establishment by declaring his intentions to run on Weibo, China's version of Twitter.</s>STOUT: But there has been a backlash from Beijing. We'll explain.