CNN news 2011-11-04
CARL AZUZ, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to November, and a new month of commercial-free headlines from CNN Student News. Coming to you from the CNN Newsroom here in Atlanta, Georgia, I`m Carl Azuz.
We`re going to start with an ending. After seven months, the NATO mission in Libya is officially over. NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Twenty-eight countries are members of NATO. And when NATO takes on a mission like it did in Libya, the operation is carried out by military forces from some of its member nations.
AZUZ (voice-over): In this case, that meant countries like the United States and France flying airstrikes over Libya. Part of the NATO mission was to protect Libya`s civilians during its civil war. NATO`s secretary- general went to Libya on Monday. You see him here getting off the plane. He announced the formal end of mission.
Now Libya`s new leaders said they thought that was a mistake. One official said he expected NATO to suspend its mission in Libya, but not cancel it completely. The U.S. Defense Department says it plans to keep monitoring Libya from the sky, at least for a little while.
AZUZ: Yesterday we saw another milestone that we talked about last week. The world`s population passed 7 billion.
AZUZ (voice-over): A lot of countries made claims, but this little lady was the first to make an official announcement as the world`s 7 billionth baby. She was born in the Philippines just before midnight on Sunday.
AZUZ: Some experts are concerned about population growth, as you might imagine. They`re concerned about whether or not there will be enough resources for everybody, talking about things like food and water.
United Nations officials say the world can overcome these challenges as long as people take steps to deal with them.
AZUZ (voice-over): It might be hard to wrap your head around just how large 7 billion is. It took the world around 12 years to go from 6 billion people to 7 billion. If you were counting from 6 billion to 7 billion, it would take you more than 30 years to do it. If you stood on the equator and took 7 billion steps, you would around the world more than 100 times. And 7 billion seconds ago, the year was 1789.
AZUZ: You might have been out celebrating Halloween last night. Some cities in the northeastern U.S. asked people actually to hold off on trick- or-treating.
AZUZ (voice-over): They`re still recovering from this massive snowstorm that hit the region over the weekend. Power was still out for more than a million people yesterday afternoon. Crews are making progress in getting things back on, but all of that`s going slowly.
Watch the bushes in this time-lapse video that one iReporter shot. As the snow comes down, it collects on the bushes, especially on the leaves, and it just weighs them down so much you can see them bending all the way to the ground.
AZUZ: One of the states that got hit the hardest by this weekend`s storm was Connecticut. In Hartford, the capital, a lot of travelers got stranded inside the airport, but other people got stranded on a plane. And what happened might have broken a rule that the government put into place last year.
Susan Candiotti fills us in on the details.
SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN REPORTER (voice-over): Twenty-three planes were diverted to Hartford, according to JetBlue, which says six of the planes were theirs, stranding passengers on the tarmac for eight and nine hours, no food, water, bathrooms unusable.
Passengers did have cell phones, and unleashed their fury.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They`re filled. They`re totally filled. Nobody can go in them anymore. And you just have to hold it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was going in and out, bathrooms are locked, people are quite upset.
CANDIOTTI (voice-over): A Department of Transportation rule enacted last year called the Airline Passengers Bill of Rights was supposed to prevent situations like this. Among the requirements, food, water and a clean bathroom within two hours of being stuck, and the right to get off a stranded plane after three years.
In a statement, JetBlue apologized, and says power outages at the airport made correcting problems difficult. The changes came after a February 2007 incident. Passengers were stuck on a JetBlue flight at JFK for eight hours.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There was no power, and it was hot. There was no air. They kept having to open the actual plane doors so we could breathe comfortably.
CANDIOTTI (voice-over): And now it appears history is repeating itself.
KATE HANNI, FLYERSRIGHTS.ORG: It is absolutely unacceptable that the airlines and the airport did not manage to get these passengers off the plane.
CANDIOTTI (voice-over): Kate Hanni fought the bill of rights after being stuck on a plane herself five years ago. She now runs a website that advocates for passengers, and says the airlines needed to cancel flights sooner.
HANNI: The flying public has overwhelmingly said they would rather have their flight canceled or be stuck inside an airport than they would like to be stuck inside an airplane.
CANDIOTTI (voice-over): An airport spokesman did not respond to CNN`s call seeking comment. The DOT`s new regulation doesn`t apply to airports.
HANNI: Hopefully, we can get airports added to the rule, because this is a real -- I knew when I talked to operations last night, I knew that they were scrambling.
CANDIOTTI: The DOT says its passenger protection rule has virtually eliminated all delays of three hours or more. A spokeswoman says no airline has been fined since the new rule came out, but because of what happened this weekend in Connecticut, the DOT has just opened a new investigation -- Susan Candiotti, CNN, New York.