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Hello and welcome. Fridays are awesome!
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I'm Carl Azuz, bringing you ten minutes of current events from around the world.
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Thanks for watching. It looks like the ISIS terrorist group
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is trying to gain a foothold in North Africa.
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That's significant because ISIS is an acronym
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that stands for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
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It's in those two Middle Eastern countries that the militants violently
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took over large chunks of land in 2014
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and that's where they hope to establish an Islamic called a caliphate.
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But Iraqi troops with U.S. support are fighting back.
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And in Syria, ISIS has been hit by American and Russian airstrikes,
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as well as attacks by the Syrian government.
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So, it's looking to other unstable nations to recruit
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and build its forces, and one of those countries is Libya.
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ISIS is under a lot of pressure in Syria and in Iraq
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because of the military campaign by the U.S.,
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but also quite frankly by the Russians and the Syrian regime.
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And so, therefore, they've been losing ground in Syria and Iraq
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and are actually telling recruits to go to Libya instead.
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SUBTITLE: Why is ISIS heading to Libya?
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New ISIS recruits are seeing Libya as an easier place to get into insurgency,
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to get into the realm of being part of the Islamic State
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and the reason for that is that it's much easier for them
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to use the situation that's in Libya right now,
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that state of instability, the state of lawlessness,
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the state of their not really being any sort of policing force that would stop them.
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That's why so many new recruits are coming in at this point in time
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and the U.S. says that they believe that the amount of ISIS fighters in Libya
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is somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 fighters.
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That's a lot of fighters, considering that Libya is a country with a very small population.
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In Libya, ISIS is strongest in the former stronghold of Moammar Gadhafi, in Sirte.
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In that town, ISIS was able to unfold
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and they currently have quite a bit of territory around Sirte.
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They have about between 150 and 200 kilometers stretch of territory that they control.
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What they want to control in that area and what's very important to them
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is to try and control some of the oil and gas fields in Libya.
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That's their main aim.
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They want to have access to that
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because obviously it would make them very rich and very powerful.
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An internationally famous musician suddenly passed away yesterday.
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The artist known as Prince, whose full name was Prince Rogers Nelson,
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died at his home in Minnesota. He was 57 years old.
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Prince pioneered what's known as the Minneapolis sound.
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It's described as a mixture of synthpop and new wave.
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Some of his music was controversial
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and contributed to the creation of parental advisory labels on albums.
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Over the course of his career which spanned from the 1970s until now,
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Prince won seven Grammy Awards and was nominated for 30.
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The musician had cancelled a concert earlier this month
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after saying he wasn't feeling well.
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On yesterday's "Roll Call" request page at CNNStudentNews.com,
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we heard from a Pacific island between Hawaii and the Philippines.
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We're talking about Guam.
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And in the community of Upper Tumon,
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it's great to see our viewers at St. John's School.
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From there, we're headed to the city of Champaign, Illinois.
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The Charges are taking in charge at Centennial High School.
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And in the own of the Gilbert, Arizona, we've got the Cougars watching today.
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Cooley Middle School is on the roll.
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Space exploration financing,
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we've discussed the money it would take to get to deep space
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and questions about whether it's worth it.
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Space exploration technology, we've shown you the potential vehicles and rockets
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that could take people far, far away.
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But what about space exploration psychology?
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Six people living on Hawaii's Mauna Loa Volcano are part of $1.6 million study
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in how the brain can handle the confines of living on Mars.
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It's crazy that you guys have been living in this dome for eight months.
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Six of you in here.
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Are you calling me crazy?
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But that's actually why these six crew members were chosen
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for this special mission, to see if they would go crazy.
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It definitely has that potential.
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I was one of the first civilians they saw in months.
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It's pretty tiny.
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That's because they were stuck living inside the small dome,
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pretending to be on Mars, except Mars is the top of this dormant volcano in Hawaii.
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Some say this is the most Martian-like environment we have here on earth.
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It's isolated. It's desolate. It's rocky. It's cold.
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I mean, I truly feel like I'm on another planet.
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They lived here because NASA needs to figure out a major problem,
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if the mind can handle a trip to deep space.
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These missions are incredible undertakings.
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They're unprecedented in terms of distance, duration and confinement.
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We don't know how it's truly going to impact our brains.
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Yes, exactly. We really want to be able to quantify this risk.
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And that's where the high seas mission comes in.
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The goal of this mission is to look at crew cohesion and performance.
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We want to see how we can select people and then support them
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so they can do long duration space mission without --
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Going crazy.
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Yes, basically.
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There have been similar experiments, but HI SEAS is one of the longest.
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And the first to focus solely on the coed mission to Mars.
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So, we have to wear this sociometers while we were awake
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and they would like measure interaction.
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So, those are the things that would measure
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how close you are to some of your other crew members,
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see who likes each other and who doesn't like each other. --
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Yes, how loud your voices when you're talking to someone.
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-- if there was strain, you're possibly having a heated discussion.
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That never happened.
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A Mars mission could last over a year.
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So, researches studied how the HI SEAS crew behaved
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during this extended period of time, in this very confined space.
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Is there any place in this habitat where you had any privacy at all?
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Visual privacy, you can go into your room
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and close the door, but there's absolutely no sound privacy at all.
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But it's not just how the crews get along.
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The data we're getting out is giving NASA engineers information
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about how much water crews used, how much food they eat,
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what kinds of food they eat, how much energy they used, how much space they need.
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This is the largest room in the house.
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The crew members selected for this mission are astronaut-like as possible,
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chosen for their education and temperament.
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But even they had a hard time.
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I had to try different things.
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I had to like, OK, well, maybe if I just go in my room
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and like stay away from people for a while, that doesn't work.
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But if we want to make it to another planet,
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we need to figure out how to deal with these feelings of anxiety, depression, even boredom.
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We played board games about five nights a week.
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Do you guys get bored a lot so you needed the board games?
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Well, yes. Movies and TV shows and board games were about the only social activities we had.
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And NASA psychologists say that a very important part of keeping us happy is food.
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So, this is where you guys did all your cooking.
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Yes.
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But this is not your typical cooking.
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I mean, you guys were dealing with freeze dried food here.
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Yes.
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Nothing really fresh.
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No.
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You can always find someone making something in here. So, it's kind of the most social.
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Stepping into the legs.
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And whenever they went outside to simulate space walks, they actually wore a spacesuit.
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Having gone to this experience, would you still go to Mars? Absolutely!
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Would you go to Mars? Yesterday.
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It's good thing dust devils are a lot weaker than tornadoes,
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because this one recently spun up at a softball game in Virginia
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and the players just seem to treat as a minor delay.
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These rotating columns of air are not particularly dangerous,
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especially in the eastern U.S. and they don't last very long.
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This one reportedly stuck around for about half a minute before dissipating into the air.
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Once it was gone, the game went on.
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So, it was nothing but a minor dustup and never changed the rotation,
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even though it clouded up the game for a moment.
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It ran outside the baseline, it didn't make anyone run home or call out
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or really do much more than bat an eye.
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I'm Carl Azuz and that's CNN STUDENT NEWS.