Hello, everyone, great to see you. Im john berman. Im michaela pereira. I thought you were going to start singing together again. Its been a long time. We begin with divers racing to force their way into that sunkle ferry, its blue and while hull has slipped beneath the oceans surface. About 270 passengers, most of them teenagers, still missing. Cnn now has a transcript of the conversation between the ferry and the vessel Traffic Center. It begins at 8 55 a. M. Wednesday with the ferrys distress call. This is the ferry, please notify the coast guard, our ship is in danger. The ship is rolling right now. Theres more back and forth in a full five minutes later at 9 00 a. M. , the ferry reports this. This is the ferry, currently the body of the ship is tilted to the left, containers fell over, too. The dispatcher replies, okay, there are no damages to people . And the ferry, currently its impossible to confirm. It is impossible to move as the body of the ship is tilted. Then the Traffic C
It is onboard australias ocean shield. It picked up two ping signal detections just over this weekend. The first one actually for more than two hours. The second for about 13 minutes. And cnn has now turned around what those clicks sounded like this weekend. Thats what they heard. Thats what theyre listening for again. Relocating these pings. Now the main focus. Today the search zone is drastically scaled back, reduced to 30,000 square miles. Here you have 14 ships, 14 aircraft involved in todays search. They are on borrowed time, as today we keep counting day 33 since that plane vanished. With the 30day more or less battery life of those black boxes, really more or less out of juice. Australias defense minister said theyre Holding Nothing back. You can be assured that we are throwing everything at this difficult complex task in these at least these next several days, whilst we believe the two pingers involved are still active. The underwater drone is collecting dust onboard the ocean
New day joins us live from Eastern Ukraine. A haul to get there. Not easy to get to that crash site. When you got there, what struck you most . Reporter well, thats hard to answer, christi, because this is such an usual situation. You have the obvious tragedy of this plane being taken out of the skies, and everyone onboard gone and laying in the field around us for the most part, but it has happened because of, probably, and in the middle of, an outright civil war. Theres no question about accounts of people hearing gunfire. Theyve used gunfire here today to move journalists when they dont want them to go beyond a certain point. These are local militias intent on making a definite show of force, of blaming ukraine for the tragedy of taking this plane out of the air. The checkpoints show such indications of heavy fire, i havent seen anything like it in quite some time. Trees completely stripped, some 40, 50 feet up by big artillery shells. Men hiding in these very shallow trenches. They
President ial election, the only american soldiers in afghanistan could be a pretty modest force protecting the embassy and capital of kabul. Jim acosta joins me now. Jim, weve heard a lot of numbers, in the recent two years. When i hear 9,800, that is new. Reporter that is absolutely new, brooke. When you consider that the president is going to be at west point tomorrow talking about his Foreign Policy for the next two and a half years of his administration, he was at west point a few years ago, laying out the surge in afghanistan, taking the force level up to 100,000 troops, and more. And so to hear the president come out today, as he will in the rose garden in about 45 minutes, and say that the u. S. Combat mission is coming to an end at the end of 2014, weve basically heard that before from this president , but that he also is going to lay out the residual force level thats going to be in place from 2014 and on. And that is basically 9,800 u. S. Armed forces, personnel, next year,
This as indonesian authorities focus on pin pointing the exact location of airasia flight 8501 officials confirming sonar imagery located wreckage believed to be if the aircraft submerged at the bottom of the java sea. Whats going to be of particular interest is what part of the airplane are there, the wings, the tail just to sort of try to understand whether the plane broke up in flight or remained intact. Other reports suggest the plane may be lying upsidedown according to the wall street journal. On tuesday Recovery Team brings in pieces of debris along with the remains of seven victims. A gruesome task recovering more bodies and identifying them. But some still hold on to hope one woman with six family members aboard tells cnn, theres nothing confirmed with what happened to the passengers and we are still hoping there is a miracle. At the Crisis Center in surabaya surabaya relatives gather for a Prayer Service inside the airport. Next the hunt for clues, answers as to what brought