CNN 2010-10-12

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Hi, I'm Carl Azuz. Welcome to this Columbus Day edition of CNN Student News! We'll be talking more about Columbus Day in just a couple minutes. But first, we're reporting on a breakthrough in Chile.

And we mean that literally¹. A hole big enough to rescue those 33 trapped miners² broke through over the weekend. It's been more than two months since a cave-in trapped the men about 2,300 feet underground. Now, if everything goes according to plan, officials say the first of them could be back up on the surface by Wednesday. Yes, that is great news to family members who've been waiting at the mine for their loved ones to be rescued.

Right now, officials are putting steel tubes inside the path that they'll use to get the miners out. Those tubes will help reinforce³ the hole. Now, once that's done, they're going to send down a rescue capsule with a doctor and some other emergency workers to the room where the 33 trapped miners have been staying. The doctor and the rescuers will treat the miners for medical issues and start getting them ready to go up. This animation⁴ we have for you shows what that process will look like. The miners, one at a time, will go into the rescue capsule that'll take them up and out of the mine. It's called the Phoenix⁵ and, as you can see, it's a tight fit. Just 21 inches in diameter⁶. There's communication equipment in there so the miners can talk to the people on the surface. Officials are worried that the miners might get dizzy or get a little panicked while they're inside the capsule. So, they're trying to work on ways to help prepare the men for the trip up in the Phoenix.

Since these men were trapped, their attitude has stayed pretty positive; it seems like that is not changing. A government official told the miners that they would have to pick the order that they'd be rescued in. Listen to this: the miners would have to pick who would go up first, second, third and so on. And most of them -- maybe even all of the men -- volunteered to go last. Pretty amazing story.

Next story takes you to North Korea, where the government may be signaling who will take over as leader of that country someday. Now, here in America, citizens vote for their leaders. But North Korea is a dictatorship, where one person has all the power and picks who he wants to be next in line. Alina Cho filed this report on Sunday about North Korea's politics.