another. campaign spending in these off-year elections as we call the midterms sometimes is off the charts and following the dollars from our washington bureau is cnn senior political editor mark preston and from the campaign media analysis group evan tracy. mark, you wrote about this in your column today. 182 million dollars. for people not following these numbers very closely, $182 million spent on campaign ads not this campaign. this past week. just this past week. a 17% increase from the previous week. anyone that doesn t think politics is big business is fooling themselves. ad-makers here in washington, d.c., local television states across the country are making lots of money off of this election. again, what the candidates are hoping, by spending all of that money, is that they can win. they can push enough voters at the very end to come out and support them. what the interest groups who are spending lots of this money hope they can do is influence the election and get their ca
them off. reporter: the wilsons believe they ll ultimately lose their home to foreclosure. all i can say is i ll go as far as i can go. once i do that, then it s in the lord s hands. reporter: stephanie elam, cnn, chicago. tomorrow night cnn s soledad o brien is taking a look at how the black church is now fighting the financial crisis from the pulpit. check out almighty debt: a black in america special thursday night only on cnn. community fat burner. a mississippi woman helped neighbors lose thousands and thousands of pounds. her efforts land shd her in our top ten heroes of the year. asked to change the world. i said sure. well, let s grow some algae. and that s what started it. exxonmobil and synthetic genomics have built a new facility to identify the most productive strains of algae. algae are amazing little critters. they secrete oil, which we could turn into biofuels.
events. you re encouraging people to lose weight and showing them how to be fit. you even have a gym where people can bring their kids because that s one reason people don t get to the gym. they can t deal with what they do with their kids at that time. on the other side you have had a lot of people sign up. you had a whole bunch of people who lost five pounds apiece in a year. on an average five pounds a piece, absolutely. people were ready to do better. when i started this and issued this challenge people started to call, where do i sign up? so people really want to do better. let me say more than anything else being a cnn hero, what this has done is really multiplied that awareness that i could not have done in the time that it took just being a cnn hero. so i am so thankful that i was chosen to be a cnn hero. that just speaks volumes. and this is a gift to be able to bring that awareness out there. what is the awareness?
cnn s ivan watson has a rare look at how these weapons are made and their deadly effectiveness. reporter: u.s. army bomb hunters preparing to go on patrol. getting ready in the predawn hours for a dangerous mission. to find and disable improvised explosive devices or ieds, the deadliest threat to u.s. and nato forces in afghanistan. the convoy of futuristic vehicles rolls through an almost biblical landscape, past locals who aren t always happy to see them. these vehicles come with equipment like these rollers that are designed to set off hidden roadside bombs and that s to protect the vehicles themselves and the passengers. now, take a look at this. this is called a husky. it s a one-man vehicle. you see there s just one operator up inside.
mortgages, didn t have access to credit and suddenly they re being targeted. reporter: illinois attorney general lisa madigan is a leader the fight against both predatory and discriminatory lending practices. earlier she sued countrywide now under the bank of america alleging discriminatory lending practices in violation of laults. bank of america denies that and vows to vigorously defend against the allegations. statistics we were able to derive indicate if you re african-american making more than $100,000 you are more likely to be put into a subprime loan than a white person making less than $35,000. it s discrimination. reporter: those statistics are from a 2007 investigation by the chicago reporter. last year madigan sued wells fargo for similar practices. that lawsuit is still pending and wells fargo released this statement to cnn. with the overarching goal of doing what is right for our customers, wells fargo has a long-standing history of being a responsible leading lend