(CNN Student News) -- November 3, 2011
GROUP: We are fourth (ph) graders at Jefferson Elementary in (Inaudible), Ohio, and you`re watching CNN Student News. Take it away, Carl.
CARL AZUZ, CNN ANCHOR: I will take it away. Thanks to those students, and thanks to all of you for spending part of your Thursday with CNN Student News. I`m Carl Azuz. And first up today, we are heading to France.
That`s where President Obama and other world leaders are spending the next couple days there, at a meeting of the G-20. This is a group that represents different economies from around the globe.
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AZUZ (voice-over): Originally, the G-20 members were planning to talk about a deal that the European Union had reached that would help the nation of Greece with its debt crisis.
But the G-20 had to scramble and hold an emergency meeting after Greece`s prime minister announced Tuesday he wants his citizens to vote on whether or not they want the European bailout.
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AZUZ: So there are some questions for those leaders to address. You might have some questions, too. What is the G-20? How did it start? Who`s in it? We`re going to bring in Michael Holmes to fill in some blanks for us. Michael?
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MICHAEL HOLMES, ANCHOR, INTERNATIONAL DESK: The G`s really started back in 1975, when you had six countries get together. That was the G-6. And there you had the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, Japan and Italy. And they were the first. They were the six.
And they got together, actually, to talk about what was then the oil crisis that was going on and to have a bit of a confab about it. And then from there, it became an annual thing. They thought why not continue this on? They found it worthwhile. The next year they added Canada, so it became the G-7. And then a little bit later on, Russia came along and was admitted. And there you have your G-8.
The groups have always attracted critics, and in many cases, as we`ve seen in the past, violence as well, protesters from trades unions to environmentalists and anarchists as well.
A lot of the more extreme protesters blame the members of the G-8 for pretty much all of the world`s ills, from debt and poverty in Africa, all the way through to global warming. And they show up pretty much to make their voices heard, and say that it`s an anachronistic group, an elite group that, actually, far from solving some of the world`s problems, is causing a lot of the world`s problems.
Another criticism the G-8 has faced is that it`s not really representative of the world`s great economies. There are those who say, well, you`ve got Canada in the G-8. But at the same time, you don`t have India. You don`t have China.
The cause, partly, of that criticism, we saw in 1999, the formation of the G-20. They added in another 11 countries, and to be more inclusive, countries like Australia. There`s a bunch of others. But -- and 11 and 8 equals 19. What`s the 20th? The European Union. They came along for the ride as well.
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AZUZ (voice-over): United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is scheduled to be at the G-20 meeting today. Yesterday, he was in Libya. Ban and the current president of the U.N. General Assembly met with representatives from Libya`s National Transitional Council. This is the group that`s running Libya`s government, now that the country`s civil war is over.
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AZUZ: The fighting hasn`t completely stopped. Different militias who fought against former leader Moammar Gadhafi`s troops are now facing off against each other. Some of these militias are rivals. Some don`t trust others. Settling those disputes is a top priority for Libya`s new leaders.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Today`s first Shoutout goes out to Ms. Westgard`s geography class from Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton Junior High in Dilworth, Minnesota. What is the current cost of a first-class U.S. postage stamp? You know what to do.
Is it 27 cents, 35 cents, 44 cents or 50 cents? You`ve got three seconds, go.
Right now a first-class stamp will cost you 44 cents. That`s your answer, and that`s your Shoutout.
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AZUZ: Stamps are one way the U.S. Postal Service makes money. But since fewer people are using the government service, it`s ended up in some pretty bad financial shape. Yesterday a group of lawmakers released a plan aimed at saving the Postal Service.
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AZUZ (voice-over): It would close some post offices, cancel Saturday mail delivery and let the Postal Service buy out thousands of employees, meaning they`d give them some money to leave their jobs.
These ideas have come up before. People have gotten angry at the idea of their local post offices closing. And postal worker unions don`t like the buyout idea. Congress would also have to pass the plan. That could be a long way off.
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AZUZ: It`s been five days since a massive snowstorm hit the northeastern United States. Thousands of people still don`t have power. Utility companies are rushing to get things running again, but some folks are getting frustrated.
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SYDNEY SULLIVAN, RESIDENT: Cold. Our food went bad. Like our power went back on for a few minutes and then it -- like the transformer box blew.
We want our home back and just to be able to stay in our house and let our kids play there.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: See if you can ID me. Doctors use me to help diagnose injuries and illnesses. I`m not an X-ray or CT scan, but I`m used to view areas inside the human body. I use magnets and radio waves to make pictures of organs and other structures.
I`m an MRI, which stands for magnetic resonance imaging.
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AZUZ: Those magnets and radio waves force atoms in your body to move, and that movement creates a signal that`s converted into the pictures.
MRIs can help doctors find internal bleeding or infections, but one doctor in Maryland is using this technology to study something you might not immediately associate with medicine: creativity. Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains the research.
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DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): All that jazz: it`s improvisation, nearly constant reinvention. And those syncopated sounds are providing vital clues about what creativity looks like in the brain.
GUPTA: So you just came up with that.
DR. CHARLES LIMB, OTOLARYNGOLOGIST: Yes. That`s why it was so bad.
GUPTA: No, that was good. It was really good.
GUPTA (voice-over): Dr. Charles Limb is an ear, nose and throat surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. His love for jazz spilled over into his work.
GUPTA: So you`re listening to jazz, and you said, I wonder what`s going on inside that guy`s brain right now?
LIMB: Exactly. That`s exactly the question I`ve had.
GUPTA (voice-over): The next question: how to measure creativity in the brain. So Dr. Limb took jazz musicians like David Kane, put them into an MRI machine and let them improvise.
LIMB: Remember, it`s pretty loud (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Play melody.
GUPTA (voice-over): . while looking to see what parts of the brain activate.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stop.
GUPTA (voice-over): He then expanded his study to an unorthodox group of improvisers (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Inaudible).
LIMB: Well, this may not be what you expect when you`re trying to find the center of creativity in the brain, but it could be. On the screen over here, a guy named A-Clav (ph), he`s a freestyle rapper. He is rapping freestyle right now. And while that`s happening, we`re doing an MRI of his brain, a functional MRI, to find out what lights up and what doesn`t.
GUPTA: So jazz musicians, freestyle rappers, as a model for creativity?
LIMB: Exactly.
GUPTA: And what have you found?
LIMB: Well, this is showing areas of the brain that are active during musical performance and playing a piano. But when you switch to improvisation, you`ve got this area that`s shutting down, and you`ve got this area that`s turning on.
GUPTA (voice-over): So could that be the center for creativity?
LIMB: It gets really interesting when you start thinking about what those things do. This area that went on tends to be thought of as kind of a self-referential, autobiographical kind of area. This area that shut off tends to be involved in a lot of things, but among those things is self- inhibition and monitoring, conscious self-monitoring.
GUPTA: So you`re inhibiting one part, which may be that -- the part that would normally prevent you from expressing yourself, and you`re amping up the self-expression.
LIMB : At a very basic level, I do think that`s what`s happening.
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AZUZ: We love starting off our show with our iReports like we did today. We got this one from Sullivan, Ohio, that was just begging to be part of a "Before We Go" segment.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hello. This is seventh grade social studies class of Black River Middle School. And this pun-kin is almost as cool as Carl Azuz`s jokes.
GROUP: This is CNN Student News with Carl Azuz.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Back to you, Carl.
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AZUZ: A pun-kin. That thing is no joke. Thanks for the iReport from Black River Middle School. We`ll see you tomorrow on CNN Student News.
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