上外版英语高级视听说上册听力原文

Unit 1

Pirates of the Internet

It’s no secret that online piracy has decimated the music industry as millions of people stopped buying CDs and started stealing their favorite songs by downloading them from the internet. Now the hign-tech thieves are coming after Hollywood. Illegal downloading of full-length feature films is a relatively new phenomenon, but it’s becoming easier and easier to do. The people running America’s movie studios know that if they don’t do something----and fast---they could be in the same boat as the record companies. Correspodent: “What’s really at stake for the movie industry with all this privacy?” Chernin: “Well, I think, you know, ultimately, our absolute features.” Peter Chernin runs 20th Century Fox, one of the biggest studios in Hollywood. He knows the pirates of the Internet are gaining on him. Correspont: “Do you know how many movies are being downloaded today, in one day, in the United States?” Chernin: “I think it’s probably in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.” Correspondent: “And it’s only going to grow.” Chernin: “It’s only going to grow. √Somebody can put a perfect digital copy up on the internet.

A perfect digital copy, all right. And with the click of mouse, send out a million copies all over the world, in an instant.”

5

And it’s all free. If that takes hold, kiss Hollywood goodbye. Chernin recently organized a “summit” between studio moguls and some high school and college kids---the people most likely to be downloading. Chernin: “And we said, ‘Let’s come up with a challenge. Let’s give them five movies, and see if they can find them online.’ And we all sat around and picked five movies, four of which hadn’t been released yet. And then we came back half an hour later. They had found all five movies that we gave them. ” Correspondent: “Even the ones that hadn’t even been released yet?” Chernin: “Even the ones that hadn’t even been released yet.” Correspondent: “Did these kids have any sense that they were stealing?” Chernin: “You know it’s… it’s a weird dichotom y. I think they know it’s stealing, and I don’t think they think it’s wrong. I think they have an attitude of, ‘It’s here.’” The Internet copy of last year’s hit Signs, starring Mel Gibson, was stolen even before director M. Night Shyamalan could organize the premiere. Correspondent: “The movie was about to be released. When did the first bootleg copy appear?”

6

Shyamalan: “Two weeks before it or three weeks before it.

Before the Internet age, when somebody bootlegged a movie, the only outlet they had was to see it to those vendors on Times Square, where they had the boxes set up outside and they say, ‘Hey, we have Signs---it’s not even out yet.’ And you walk by and you know it’s illegal. But now, because it’s the digital age, you can see, like, a clean copy. It’s no longer the kind of the sleazy guy in Times Square with the box. It’s just, oh, it’s on this beautiful site, and I have to go, ‘Click.’” Correspondent: “How did those movies get on the Internet? How did that happen?” Chernin: “Through an absolute act of theft. Someone steals a print from the editor’s room; someone steals a print from the person; the composer who’s doing the music…absolute physical theft, steals a print, makes a digital copy, and uploads it.” Correspondent: “And there you go.” Digit al copies like this one of The Matrix Reloaded have also been bootlegged from DVDs sent to reviewers or ad agencies, or circulated among companies that do special effects, or subtitles. Chernin: “The other way that pre-released movies end up (stolen) is th at people go to … there are lots of screenings that happen in this industry… People go to those screenings with a camcorder, with a digital camcorder, sit in the back, turn the camcorder on…”

Correspondent: “And record it.” This is one of those recorded-off-the-screen copies of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean. Not great quality, but not awful either. And while it used to take forever to download a movie, anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can now have a full-length film in an hour or two.

Saaf: “Well, this is just one of many websites where basically people, hackers if you will, announce their piracy releases.” Randy Saaf runs a company called Media Defender that helps movie studios combat online piracy.Correspondent: “Look at this, all these n ew movies that I haven’t even seen yet, all here.” Saaf: “ Yep.” Correspondent: “Secondhand Lions that just came out. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person in this country who has never downloaded anything. But maybe there is a few others of us out there. So I’m goi ng to ask you to show us Kazaa, that’s the biggest downloading site, right?” Saaf: “Right. This is the Kazaa media desktop. Kazaa is the largest peer-to-peer network.” It’s called peer-to-peer because computer users are sharing files

8

with each other, with no middleman. All Kazaa do es is provide

the software to make that sharing possible. When we went online with Randy Saaf, nearly four million other Kazaa users were there with us, sharing every kind of digital file. Saaf: “Audio, documents, images, software, and video. If you wanted a movie, you would click on the video section, and then you would type in a search phrase. And basically what this is doing now, it is asking the people on the peer-to-peer network, ‘Who has Finding Memo’?” Within seconds, 191 computers sent an answer: “We have it.” This is Finding Memo, crisp picture and sound, downloaded free from Kazaa a month before its release for video rental or sale. If you don’t want to watch it on a little computer screen, you don’t have t o. On the newest computers, you can just “burn” it onto a DVD and watch it on your big-screen TV. 5.And that’s a dagger pointed right at the heart of Hollywood.Chernin: “Where movies make the bulk of their money is on DVD and home videos. 50 percent of the revenues for any movie come out of home video…” Correspondent: “15 percent?” Chernin: “50 percent so that if piracy occurs and it wipes out your home video profits or ultimately your television profits, you are out of business. No movies will get made.” Even if movies did get made, Night Shyamalan says that wouldn’t be any good, because profits would be negligible, so

budgets would shrink dramatically. Shyamalan: “And slowly it will degrade what’s possible in that art form.” Rosso: “Technology always wins. Always. You can’t shut it down.” Wayne Rosso is Hollywood’s enemy. They call him a pirate, but officially he’s the president of Grokster, another peer-to-peer network that works just like Kazaa. Correspondent: “Ok, I have downloaded your softwar e.” Rosso: “Right.” Correspondent: “Ok, did I pay to do that?” Rosso: “No, it’s free.” Correspondent: “So who pays you? How do you make money?” Rosso: “We’re like radio. We are advertising-supported.” Correspondent: “And how many people use Grokster?” Rosso: “Ten million.” Correspondent: “Ten million people have used it.” Rosso: “A month.” Correspondent: “Every month, ten million people?” Rosso: “Uh-huh, uh-huh. And growing.”

10

Correspondent: “Use it to download music, movies, software, video games, what else?” Rosso: “I will assume. See, we have no way of knowing what people are downloading.” Correspondent: “That’s just a fig leaf. You are facilitating, allowing, helping people steal.” Rosso: “We have no idea what the content is, and whatever it is…” Correspondent:“Well, you

may not know the specifics, but you know that’s what your site…” Rosso: “And we can’t stop it. We have no control over it.” Correspondent: “But you are there for that purpose, that is why you exist, of course it is.” Rosso: “No, no, no, no, no, no.” Correspondent: “Come on, this is the fig leaf part.” Rosso: “No, no, no, no, no.” Shyamalan:“He is totally conformable with putting on his site a stolen piece of material. Am I wrong in that? If my movie was bootlegged, he’d be totally comfortable putting it on his site?” Correspondent: “Because I have nothing to do with it.” Shyamalan:“Yeah, right.” Correspondent: “Because I just provided the software.” Shyamalan:“Yeah, right. So, immediately, how can you ever have a

11

conversation with him? Because he’s taken a stolen material and he is totally fine with passing it around in his house. All these, all these are illegal activities. So, I’m not, it’s just my house, I’m not doing anything wrong.” But it is Rosso who has the law on his side. A federal judge has ruled that Grokster and other networks are not liable for what their downloaders are doing. Rosso: “So we are completely legal, and unfortunately this is something the entertainment industry

refuses to accept. They seem to think the judge’s decisi on was nothing but a typo.” The studios are appealing that court ruling. And they may follow the music industry and begin to sue individuals who download movies. And they are fighting the pirates in other ways, with ads about people whose jobs are at risk because of the piracy---people like the carpenters and painters who work on film sets. At the same time, Hollywood is trying to keep copies of movies from leaking in the first place. Chernin: “ You will very seldom go to an early screening of a movie right now where, probably you don’t notice until you pay attention, someone’s not in the front of that auditorium with infrared binoculars looking for somebody with a camcorder.”

12

And once a movie is released, or copies do begin to leak, the studios hire people like Randy Saaf to hack the hackers. Saaf: “What we’re just trying to do is make the actual pirated content difficult to find. And the way we do that is by, you know, serving up fake files.” It’s called “spoofing.” Saaf and his employees spend their days on Kazaa and Grokster, offering up thousands of files that look like copies of new movies, but aren’t. Correspondent: “So if I had clicked on

any number of those Finding Nemo offerings, I could have clicked on one of yours, or somebody like you. And what would I have found after my hour and a half of downloading?” Saaf: “it might just be a blank screen or something. You know, typically speaking, what we push out is just not the real content.” Correspondent: “What you are trying to do is make this so impossible, so infuriating that people will just throw up their hands and say it’s just easier for me to go rent this thing, buy the DVD or whatever, it’s just easier.” Saaf: “Right.” Correspondent: “That’s your goal.” Saaf：：“Right.”13

Correspondent: “Does that work? Is that a good idea?” Rosso: “No. It doesn’t work. I mean I don’t blame them but it doesn’t work because what happens is that the community cleanses itself of the spoofs.” He means that downloaders quickly spread the word online about how to tell the fake movie files from the real thing. Correspondent: “It’s like an arms race(军备竞赛）, isn’t it?” Chernin: “That’s exactly what it’s like. It’s like an arms race. There will be, you know, they’re gonna get a step ahead. We’re gonna try and get that step back.” Rosso: “But I’ll tell you one thing: I’ll bet on the hackers.” Correspondent: “That they will break

whatever…” Rosso: “The studios come up with.” Correspondent: “The companies throw at them.”

Hollywood knows that downloading off the Internet is the way millions of consumers want to get their entertainment---and that isn’t going away. Chernin: “The generally accepted estimate is that more that 60 million Americans have downloaded software onto their computers.” Correspondent: “60 million.”

14

Chernin: “At 60 million Americans, that’s a mainstream product. That’s not a bunch of college kids or, you know, a bunch of computer geeks. That’s America.” So, instead of trying to stop it entirely, the studios are looking for ways to embrace it, but get paid too. Wayne Rosso says the best way is to negotiate some kinds of licensing deal with him. Rosso: “If the movie industry acts now and starts exploring alternatives and solutions with guys like me, hopefully they won’t have a problem.” Correspondent: “What if they try to buy you?” Rosso: “I’d sell it in al heartbeat.” Correspondent: “You would sell, Grokster would sell to a movie studio?” Rosso: “Sure, call me.” The idea of making deals with wha t Peter Chernin calls “a bunch of crooks” doesn’t

appeal to Hollywood. Instead, Fox and other studios have just launched their own site, Movielink, where consumers can download a film for a modest fee, between three and five dollars. Chernin: “I think you would love the idea that you don’t have to go to the video store. Y ou can do this. And that’s what we’re working

15

on. But in order for that to be effective, we have to stop privacy, because the most effective business model in the world can’t compete with free.” Not that Peter Chernin is interested, but he won’t have th e chance to buy Grokster, at least not from Wayne Rosso. A few days ago, Rosso announced that he is leaving Grokster to take over as president of another software company, this one based in Spain. Grokster will continue under new management.

Unit 2

A plan to build the world's first airport for launching commercial spacecraft in New Mexico is the latest development in the new space race, a race among private companies and billionaire entrepreneurs to carry paying passengers into space and to kick-start a new industry, astro tourism.

The man who is leading the race may not be familiar to you, but to astronauts, pilots, and aeronautical engineers –basically to anyone who knows anything about aircraft design – Burt Rutan is a legend, an aeronautical engineer whose latest aircraft is the world's first private spaceship. As he told 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley when he first met him a little over a year ago, if his idea flies, someday space travel

may be cheap enough and safe enough for ordinary people to go where only astronauts have gone before

The White Knight is a rather unusual looking aircraft, built just for the purpose of carrying a rocket plane called SpaceShipOne, the first spacecraft built by private enterprise.

White Knight and SpaceShipOne are the latest creations of Burt Rutan. They're part of his dream to develop a commercial travel business in space.

"There will be a new industry. And we are just now in a beginning. I will predict that in 12 or 15 years, there will be tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people that fly, and see that black sky," says Rutan.

On June 21, 2004, White Knight took off from an airstrip in Mojave, Calif., carrying Rutan's spaceship. It took 63 minutes to reach the launch altitude of 47,000 feet. Once there, the White Knight crew prepared to release the spaceship.

The fierce acceleration slammed Mike Melvill, the pilot, back in his seat. He put SpaceShipOne into a near vertical trajectory, until, as planned, the fuel ran out.

Still climbing like a spent bullet, Melvill hoped to gain as much altitude as possible to reach space before the ship began falling back to earth.

By the time the spaceship reached the end of its climb, it was 22 miles off course. But it had, just barely, reached an altitude of just over 62 miles — the internationally recognized boundary of space.

It was the news Rutan had been waiting for. Falling back to Earth from an altitude of 62 miles, SpaceShipOne's tilting wing, a revolutionary innovation called the feather, caused the rocket plane to position itself for a relatively benign re-entry and turned the spaceship into a glider. SpaceShipOne glided to a flawless landing before a crowd of thousands.

"After that June flight, I felt like I was floating around and just once in a while touching the ground," remembers Rutan. "We had an operable space plane."

Rutan's "operable space plane" was built by a company with only 130 employees at a cost of just $25 million. He believes his success has ended the government's monopoly on space travel, and opened it up to the ordinary citizen.

"I concluded that for affordable travel to happen, the little guy had to do it because he had the incentive for a business," says Rutan. Does Rutan view this as a business venture or a technological challenge?

"It's a technological challenge first. And it's a dream I had when I was 12," he says.

Rutan started building model airplanes when he was seven years old, in Dyenuba,

Calif., where he grew up.

"I was fascinated by putting balsa wood together and see how it would fly," he remembers. "And when I started having the capability to do contests and actually win a trophy by making a better model, then I was hooked." He's been hooked ever since. He designed his first airplane in 1968 and flew it four years later. Since then his airplanes have become known for their stunning looks, innovative design and technological sophistication. Rutan began designing a spaceship nearly a decade ago, after setting up set up his own aeronautical research and design firm. By the year 2000, he had turned his designs into models and was testing them outside his office.

When I got to the point that I knew that I could make a safe spaceship that would fly a manned space mission -- when I say, 'I,' not the government, our little team -- I told Paul Allen, 'I think we can do this.' And he immediately said, 'Go with it.'"

Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft and is one of the richest men in the world. His decision to pump $25 million into Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, was the vote of confidence that his engineers needed to proceed.

"That was a heck of a challenge to put in front of some people like us, where we're told, 'Well, you can't do that. You wanna see? We can do this," says Pete Sebold.

Work on White Knight and SpaceShipOne started four years ago in secret. Both aircraft were custom made from scratch by a team of 12 engineers using layers of tough carbon fabric glued together with epoxy. Designed to be light-weight, SpaceShipOne can withstand the stress of re-entry because of the radical way it comes back into the atmosphere, like a badminton shuttlecock or a birdie.

He showed 60 Minutes how it works.

"Feathering the wing is kind of a dramatic thing, in that it changes the whole configuration of the airplane," he explains. "And this is done in space, okay? It's done after you fly into space."

"We have done six reentries. Three of them from space and three of them from lower altitudes. And some of them have even come down upside down. And the airplane by itself straightens itself right up," Rutan explains. By September 2004, Rutan was ready for his next challenge: an attempt to win a $10 million prize to be the first to fly a privately funded spacecraft

into space, and do it twice in two weeks.

"After we had flown the June flight, and we had reached the goal of our program, then the most important thing was to win that prize," says Rutan.

That prize was the Ansari X Prize –an extraordinary competition created in 1996 to stimulate private investment in space.

The first of the two flights was piloted, once again, by Mike Melvill. September's flight put Melville's skill and training to the test. As he was climbing out of the atmosphere, the spacecraft suddenly went into a series of rolls.

How concerned was he?

"Well, I thought I could work it out. I'm very confident when I'm flying a plane when I've got the controls in my hand. I always believed I can fix this no matter how bad it gets," says Melville. SpaceShipOne rolled 29 times before he regained control. The remainder of the flight was without incident, and Melvill made the 20-minute glide back to the Mojave airport. The landing on that September afternoon was flawless.

Because Rutan wanted to attempt the second required flight just four days later, the engineers had little time to find out what had gone wrong. Working 12-hour shifts, they discovered they didn't need to fix the spacecraft, just the way in which the pilots flew it.

For the second flight, it was test pilot Brian Binnie's turn to fly SpaceShipOne.

The spaceship flew upward on a perfect trajectory, breaking through to space.

Rutan's SpaceShipOne had flown to space twice in two weeks, captured the X Prize worth $10 million, and won bragging rights over the space establishment.

"You know I was wondering what they are feeling, 'They' being that other space agency," Rutan says laughing. "You know, quite frankly, I think the big guys, the Boeings, the Lockheeds, the nay-say people at Houston, I think they're looking at each other now and saying 'We're screwed!' Because, I'll tell you something, I have a hell of a lot bigger goal than they do!"

"The astronauts say that the most exciting experience is floating around in a space suit," says Rutan, showing off his own plans. "But I don't agree. A space suit is an awful thing. It constrains you and it has noisy fans running. Now look over here. It's quiet. And you're out here

watching the world go by in what you might call a 'spiritual dome.' Well, that, to me, is better than a space suit because you're not constrained."

He also has a vision for a resort hotel in space, and says it all could be accomplished in the foreseeable future. Rutan believes it is the dawn of a new era.

He explains, "I think we've proven now that the small guys can build a space ship and go to space. And not only that, we've convinced a rich guy, a very rich guy, to come to this country and build a space program to take everyday people to space."

That "rich guy" is Richard Branson, the English billionaire who owns Virgin Atlantic Airlines. Branson has signed a $120 million deal with Rutan to build five spaceships for paying customers. Named "Virgin Galactic," it will be the world's first "spaceline." Flights are expected to begin in 2008.

"We believe by flying tens of thousands of people to space, and making that a profitable business, that that will lead into affordable orbital travel," says Rutan.

Rutan thinks there "absolutely" is a market for this.

With tickets initially going for $200,000, the market is limited. Nevertheless, Virgin Galactic says 38,000 people have put down a deposit for a seat, and 90 of those have paid the full $200,000.

But Rutan has another vision. "The goal is affordable travel above low-Earth orbit. In other words, affordable travel for us to go to the moon. Affordable travel. That means not just NASA astronauts, but thousands of people being able to go to the moon," he says. "I'd like to go. Wouldn't you?"

By Harry Radliffe

United 3

For 300 years, the sea has been closing in on New Orleans. As the coastal erosion continues, it is estimated the city will be off shore in 90 years. Even in good weather, New Orleans is sinking. As the city begins what is likely to be the biggest demolition project in U.S. history, the question is, can we or should we put New Orleans back together again?

Life has been returning to high and dry land on Bourbon Street, but to find the monumental challenge facing the city you have to visit neighborhoods you have never heard of. On Lizardi Street, 60 Minutes took a walk with the men in charge of finishing what Katrina started.

Correspondent Scott Pelley reports.

Before Katrina, "There would be noise and activity and families and people, and children, and, you know, I haven't seen a child in a month here," says Greg Meffert, a city official who, with his colleague Mike Centineo, is trying to figure out how much of the city will have to be demolished.

Meffert, who is in charge of city planning, says it is "very possible" up to 50,000 houses will have to be bulldozed. Right now, most of the homes in the city are uninhabitable.

Meffert faces a difficult task. Every time he goes to a house site here, he says, "It's one more knife in me that says, 'She did another one. She did another one,'" explains Meffert, "she" meaning Hurricane Katrina.

When you walk through these neighborhoods and you see the houses, you get a sense of the pain of the individual families. But you don't get a sense of what has happened to the city of New Orleans itself.

It is estimated that there were 200,000 homes in New Orleans, and 120,000 of them were damaged by the flood.

The part of the city known as the lower Ninth Ward received some of the heaviest flooding. The houses are splintered block after block after block, almost as if the city had been carpet-bombed in war.

Meffert says that before the storm, New Orleans had a population of 470,000-480,000 people. Realistically, he thinks that half of those residents won't be coming back.

The possessions of thousands of families, the stuff collected over lifetimes is suddenly garbage, clawed up into mountains in city parks. With so much gone already, should New Orleans pick up right where it was?

"We should be thinking about a gradual pullout of New Orleans, and starting to rebuild people's homes, businesses and industry in places that can last more than 80 years," says Tim Kusky, a professor of earth sciences at St. Louis University.

Kusky talks about a withdrawal of the city and explains that coastal erosion was thrown into fast forward by Katrina. He says by 2095, the

coastline will pass the city and New Orleans will be what he calls a "fish bowl."

"Because New Orleans is going to be 15 to 18 feet below sea level, sitting off the coast of North America surrounded by a 50- to 100-foot-tall levee system to protect the city," explains Kusky.

He says the city will be completely surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico just 90 years from now.

Since this story aired on Nov. 20, there has been considerable discussion about whether New Orleans really is sinking, including on CBS News' blog, Public Eye.

"That's the projection, because we are losing land on the Mississippi Delta at a rate of 25 to 30 square miles per year. That's two acres per hour that are sinking below sea level," says Kusky.

That process could only be slowed, in theory, by massive restoration of wetlands. In the meantime, while Kusky's advice is to head for the hills, some New Orleans residents are hoping to head home.

Vera Fulton has lived most of her 81 years on Lizardi Street and returned to her home recently for the first time since being evacuated.

"When they say 'storm,' I leave. I can't swim and I can't drink it. So what I do, I leave," says Vera, who has lost her home to two hurricanes.

Vera is intent on coming back. "I don't have no other home, where I'm going?"

Three generations of Fultons, Vera's son Irvin Jr., his wife Gay and their son Irvin, 3rd, live around Lizardi Street.

Irvin says his house is "just flat" and he didn't have insurance.

That's the dilemma. The only thing they have left is land prone to disaster. They want to rebuild, and the city plans to let them.

At Vera's house, Mike Centenio, the city's top building official, told

60 Minutes homes can go up as long as they meet what is called the "100-year flood level."

The federal government had set a flood-level, but didn't figure on a levee failure that would flood parts of the city.

The official level is several feet off the ground. If people meet the requirement, they can rebuild their homes, despite the fact that we saw, for example, a refrigerator lifted to the top of a carport by the floodwaters.

Asked whether allowing people to rebuild makes sense, Centenio says it is "going to take some studying."

Right now, he says the flood level requirement is the law.

Twelve weeks after the storm hit, no one has an answer to where people should go. An estimated 80,000 homes had no insurance, and for now, the biggest grant a family can get from the federal government is $26,200.

Those without flood insurance face an uncertain road ahead, trying to piece their lives and homes back together.

"I don't think any of us get to be made whole. I don't know of anybody that's even getting back to where they were. It's just a matter of how much you lost," says Meffert.

No one wants to risk more losses until the levees are fixed but there is not a lot of confidence in that. There's evidence some of the levee walls may have failed from bad design or lousy workmanship.

Fixing them is up to Colonel Richard Wagenaar, who told 60 Minutes, that by next summer, the levees will withstand a Category 3 storm. But for a Category 5 storm, Congress would have to double the levee height to 30 feet.

Col. Wagenaar says building a 30-foot flood control system around the city could take five to ten years, and cost billions of dollars.

Asked whether he would live in New Orleans if the levees were restored to pre-Katrina levels, Col. Wagenaar said he would, after a long pause.

"There's a lot of long pauses in things I think about these days," Wagenaar added.

Another thing that gives you pause is the fact that one of the world's largest pumping systems can't keep the city dry with broken levees.

60 Minutes was there in September during Hurricane Rita. Crews were fighting with everything they had, cooling a pump with a hose and a coat hanger. When the station flooded during Katrina, Gerald Tilton dove under water to open valves.

Since then, Tilton and his men have been living at the station. "Most of us, our homes have been destroyed but a large number of us are still here doing the job that we get paid to do," says Tilton.

Tilton says he hasn't seen his home since the storm hit and only took one thing from the house when he left: his diploma. "I graduated from Tulane last year and that was the one thing that I wanted. I know it might sound crazy."

But sharp minds and heroism couldn't stop a second flood.

It took another two weeks to dry out and count the losses. Now, inspectors with laptops are identifying ruined houses.

"Every house in New Orleans is loaded into this database," explains Centineo. The reports are sent instantly to a computer at city hall, where the database is linked to aerial images of every address, both before and after.

When the reports are in, they will know how many billions it will take to rebuild, but not where that money is coming from.

Mike Centineo showed us, at his house, that you can't appreciate the loss until you walk through the door. He lost pretty much everything in his home. "We've lost a lot. What hurts is family photos. They went under water and I pulled them out to try to salvage what I could," Centineo says.

Centineo says he understands, probably better than any building official ever has, what the victims of Katrina are going through. "I'm one of them, that's true, I'm one of them."

He is one of about 400,000 people still unable to come home. That's the worst part now, the deflation of the Big Easy.

There are too few people to pay taxes or keep businesses going. The world's

largest domed stadium doesn't have a football team; In New Orleans, these days, not even the Saints go marching in.

Meffert has some clear feelings on whether the nation should commit billions of dollars and several years to protect the city.

"Is it commit or invest? I mean this is the thing that that people miss. The country has to decide whether it really is what we tell the world what we are. Or are we just saying that? Because if we are that powerful, if we are that focused, if we are that committed to all of our citizens, then there is no decision to make. Of course you rebuild it," says Meffert.

By Shawn Efran/Rebecca Peterson

Unit 4

For much of 2005, the news out of Iraq has overshadowed what has been going on in Afghanistan, where 18,000 U.S. troops are still fighting and dying along the Pakistan border in battles with the Taliban, al Qaeda and other Muslim extremist groups.

The rest of Afghanistan, at least compared to Iraq, appears relatively peaceful. But the country is facing another threat to its stability —its growing addiction the production and trafficking of heroin, which is controlled by some of the most powerful people in the country.

Correspondent Steve Kroft reports.

Afghanistan is now the world's largest exporter of heroin, and the opium used to produce it, supplying 87 percent of the world market. And it is creating an infrastructure of crime and corruption that threatens the government of President Hamid Karzai.

The heroin trade begins with fields of opium poppies grown in almost every province of Afghanistan. Last year, according to the U.S. state department, 206,000 hectares were cultivated, a half a million acres, producing 4,000 tons of opium, most of which was converted into 400 tons of illegal morphine and heroin in laboratories around the country.

How much opium and heroin is that?

"It is not only the largest heroin producer in the world, 206,000 hectares is the largest amount of heroin or of any drug that I think has ever been produced by any one country in any given year," says Robert Charles, who