CNN news 2015-05-18 加文本

cnn news 2015-05-18

Fridays are awesome! I'm Carl Azuz. Coming up on cnn Student News: exploring the deep blue sea and jetpacking over Dubai.

We're starting in Boston, Massachusetts, though, where the fate of a Boston marathon terrorist bomber is in the hands of a jury. 

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has already been found guilty of 30 counts. They include an act of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction which happened at the Boston Marathon on April 15th, 2013. The counts include the murders of four people and the injuries of hundreds more. Seventeen counts carry a possible death sentence. 

Prosecutors argued that Tsarnaev was a remorseless terrorist worthy of the death penalty, while the defense said he was repentant and deserves to be spared. Jurors have to unanimously agree to return a death sentence. Otherwise, Tsarnaev will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole.

The Admax in Florence, Colorado, the country's only federal supermax, it's known as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies." It's considered the country's most secure prison.

Today, there's 420 inmates in the prison. They've killed staff. They've killed guards. They've earned, if you will, the right to go to the supermax.

You're looking at people like Ramzi Youssef, the 1993 World Trade Bomber. Timothy McVeigh was there, Nichols was still there. The shoe bomber, the Unabomber, you can go on and on.

Soon, this could be home to the marathon bomber. It's closed off to the rest of the world. Inside, the most dangerous inmates are sealed off.

We've designed it so the inmates can't see the sky, intentionally. What it really hit you is that you're looking at the beauty of the Rocky Mountain in the backdrop. When you get inside, that's the last time you'll ever see it.

As you're pulling up to this complex, there're shotguns in plain view. There's a nine millimeters and there's tear gas. They're going by 12 gun towers. And that's before you even say hello to anyone. You'll be in leg irons, a belly chain, hand cuffs, and you're passing hundreds, hundreds of cameras.

It's almost all concrete. You're going to be in that box, these 84 square feet of rooms mostly likely for the rest of your life. His life if he goes there is pathetic, no matter how you spend it.

Investigators are trying to figure out whether it was human or mechanical error that caused an Amtrak passenger train to derail in Philadelphia Tuesday. The engineer has, quote, "no recollection whatsoever of what happened", according to his lawyer.

The NTSB says initial data indicate the train was going 106 miles per hour when it entered the curve where it derailed. The speed limit there is 50. Eight people were killed.

Experts say a PTC system could have prevented Tuesday's derailment. It stands for Positive Train Control. U.S. Congress has required it to be installed by the end of the year in many places, including the crash site. But some rail lobbyists have said that's difficult and expensive to do.

Positive Train Control is an idea that's been around for about 25 years. And putting it in place has not just been a budget issue, it has also been a technological issue, because you're talking about building a matrix of information around every train out there. Starts with GPS, satellite systems, to tell the engineer precisely where he is at all times and to tell other trains where his train is. 

Second element, basically ground stations that are alongside the tracks to tell them about switch positions where there might be work crews, other things to be concerned about. And then ground control stations that put all of that information together to make sure he knows where there are bends in the road, where there might be a trail, a overpass, anything like that. 

And it all comes out in a simple readout for the engineer that tells him at any given moment how fast he can afford to be going and when he has to start braking. And if he gets too close to any type of hazard out there, the computers from this big matrix just take over and they automatically slow that train down and even make it stop if necessary, so we don't have a catastrophe. 

What we would hope to get from all of that, and what congressional researchers believe we would get, is no more train-to-train collisions like we've seen before. We wouldn't see switching errors where somebody just doesn't realized they're being shunted off onto a different track, where an accident might occur. You wouldn't see trains running up on work crews. And importantly, you would not see what we just saw a couple days ago, which is a train coming too fast into a turn, because the computer wouldn't let any of this happen.

But this is important--in terms of train collisions and derailments, this would stop two percent of them, two percent. An important two percent, but many more would go on and it would do nothing to deal with people and cars getting on to the tracks, which actually kill hundreds of people every year.