DIANE SAWYER: Good evening. Let's get right to our top story: the breakup of the Moon. Here's Brian Ross, our chief investigative correspondent.
BRIAN ROSS: Diane, China has been sending manned rockets to the Moon since 2011. As you remember, the first group of settlers died mysteriously in early 2012. The Chinese subsequently discovered that their food was contaminated with melamine, resulting in everyone being poisoned. You'll remember that melamine was the industrial chemical that was found in baby milk, with many Chinese children dying as a result, in the second half of the previous decade.
Then they discovered that the building materials were contaminated with sulfur, benzene, and a few other noxious chemicals. The settlers were forced to live in a pure oxygen environment to compensate for the noxious fumes.
China never confirmed it, but experts suspected that China was drilling many, deep holes for mining. It was clear from orbital analysis of the returning rockets that something was being carried back to Earth.
It appears that a spark was generated somewhere. This caused a fire, and in a pure oxygen atmosphere, a fire is explosive, as we learned with the tragedy with Apollo 1 in 1967. The fire quickly spread to all buildings, killing most of the settlers.
However, the fire kept spreading, even beyond the walls of the lunar buildings. We are only speculating based on images taken of the moon by the Hubble Space Telescope, but it appears that China had manufactured either fertilizer or explosives in liquid form. As Tim McVeigh showed us, fertilizers and explosives are often flip sides of the same coin. These liquids were very dense and they spread slowly to the buildings housing the nuclear reactors.
DIANE SAWYER: How many nuclear reactors were there?
BRIAN ROSS: Only two, but these settlements were all interconnected by long tubes or passageways. Allowing the settlers to work without space suits drastically increased their productivity. Keep in mind that they were launching almost one mission per week since late 2012.
The burning liquids eventually ate through the walls and caused the nuclear power plants to explode.
DIANE SAWYER: I thought nuclear reactors were designed not to result in a nuclear explosion?
BRIAN ROSS: These explosions were not nuclear ones, only conventional ones. Experts believe that the explosions were part of the breakup of the reactors. And the design did not include a containment building, so the reactor cores melted through the floor a few meters down into the surface of the moon.
DIANE SAWYER: The China Syndrome!
BRIAN ROSS: Exactly. Enormous cracks caused by the explosions were then filled with the burning liquids. The fires caused the cracks to expand.
DIANE SAWYER: How could the liquid burn on the moon with no oxygen?
BRIAN ROSS: This is what makes experts suspect that the liquid was an explosive of some kind. Just like underwater demolition requires explosives to be formulated with oxygen in them, these liquids obviously contained sufficient oxygen to burn.
Then something we do not understand at all happened. Below a number of the buildings, massive explosions occurred. Experts believe these were caused by enormous hydrogen bombs.
DIANE SAWYER: Wait a minute! I thought you said that the reactors could not explode.
BRIAN ROSS: Experts believe these were nuclear weapons stored on the moon for purposes as of yet unknown. Perhaps the usual safeties were disabled by the fire -- or perhaps they never had any safeties.
To give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt, it is possible that they had stored hydrogen bombs for use against comets or asteroids. Or perhaps the bombs were stored for use against satellites and/or spacecraft of other countries, similar to how the Soviets were going to use the space platform seen in the movie Space Cowboys.
The massive explosions cracked much of the Moon. The Moon's lack of an atmosphere allowed the Sun to add to the fracturing by means of direct heating, and then as the Moon rotated in orbit, the dark side cooled rapidly to absolute zero, causing more stress fractures via thermal cycling. Eventually the cracks ran through enough of the Moon -- keep in mind that the numerous mines also contributed to the cracking -- to allow gravitational and orbital forces to split it in many pieces.
VIDEO: Scene showing enormous pieces of the moon over the horizon.
DIANE SAWYER: Is there any danger to Earth, the Space Station, or satellites?
BRIAN ROSS: No, no, the laws of physics ensures that the Moon fragments will remain in the original orbit, much like Saturn's rings. But their erratic spin precludes any further attempt at colonization, or even prospecting. Anyone left alive on the Moon fragments is doomed to certain death because rescue is impossible. And the effect on Earth's tides will be immense; severe tides as seen at places like the Bay of Fundy are a thing of the past.
DIANE SAWYER: I guess drunken rednecks will have to find a new name for pulling their pants down and showing their hind quarters. Thanks, Brian.
The Moon was not the only story today. Belarus inaugurated its new president, Olga Karatch, a former dissident. Let's go to Aaron Katersky in Minsk.
AARON KATERSKY: Hi, Diane. Olga Karatch is a former dissident who was jailed a number of times for her political opposition to the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko. She created an organization called Nash Dom or Our House. She was also the publisher of one of the largest independent weekly newspapers in Belarus, Vitebsk Kurier. After the assassination of Lukashenko and his henchmen, there was a struggle for power. The people were tired of dictators and were therefore attracted to Karatch. Her being a pretty woman probably helped.
VIDEO: Scene of Olga Karatch taking the oath of office.
AARON KATERSKY: During WWII, one quarter of the population of Belarus was killed. No family was unaffected. There was hardly a building left standing. There is a Minsk museum covering the conflict, the Belarusian Great Patriotic War Museum, that just about makes you cry because of the immense human suffering endured by Belarus.
One popular misconception involves the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Many people assume that the majority of the fallout landed on Ukraine where the reactor was located, but in fact almost 70% of the fallout landed on Belarus.
Karatch has already announced that Belarus will be friendly to both Russia and the European Union. She wants Belarus to be a bridge between the two. For now she said Belarus will remain outside the EU, but Belarus will not follow the path of Ukraine, where President Viktor Yanukovych has almost returned the country to being a part of the Soviet Union. The elections held during Yanukovych's term were as dirty as any held under Leonid Kuchma, the president from 1994 to 2005.
Karatch made it quite clear that she would not be another Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine who earned a great deal of money in the gas business under very suspicious circumstances and then became an Eastern European version of Sarah Palin, saying and doing pretty much anything to stay in power. Karatch wants Belarus to be just another Eastern European country, like Finland or Poland.
We'll keep watching Karatch, but things are definitely looking much better after Lukashenko, who was described as the last dictator in Europe.
DIANE SAWYER: We wish her the very best of luck. Thanks for that report, Aaron.
On a much lighter side, we sent Elizabeth Vargas to take the pulse of the economy. She is standing in a Omaha porn shop. Elizabeth?
ELIZABETH VARGAS: Diane, I'm standing in one of the few growth businesses in the USA today, along with liquor stores. I'm talking to the manager, Hardy LongDong. How is your business doing?
HARDY LONGDONG: Business in general gets better every day. People don't have money to travel to Europe, Hawaii, or even Florida anymore, but new sex toys are a relatively affordable commodity.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: Why would people buy sex toys in a store? Why not buy them on the Internet?
HARDY LONGDONG: I am sure that most people buy DVDs on the Internet, but sometimes customers want to see exactly what shape something is or verify the texture. Our sex toys are 100% made in the USA and every Internet sex toy vendor with which I am familiar sells ones made in China. And, of course, customers can get what they want with no shipping delay. But sometimes even buying in a store gets confusing.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: Yes, as we saw in the video we shot of your new employee who just started today. Let's watch.
VIDEO: Scene at the counter when a customer walks in.
WHITE BRUNETTE FEMALE CUSTOMER: How much for the white vibrator?
NEW EMPLOYEE: $49.
WHITE BRUNETTE FEMALE CUSTOMER: How much for the black one?
NEW EMPLOYEE: $49.
WHITE BRUNETTE FEMALE CUSTOMER: I'll take the black one. I've never had a black one before.
VIDEO: Scene of white, brunette, female customer paying the employee and leaving.
BLACK FEMALE CUSTOMER: How much for the black vibrator?
NEW EMPLOYEE: $49.
BLACK FEMALE CUSTOMER: How much for the white one?
NEW EMPLOYEE: $49.
BLACK FEMALE CUSTOMER: I'll take the white one. I've never had a white one before.
VIDEO: Scene of black, female customer paying the employee and leaving.
WHITE BLOND FEMALE CUSTOMER: How much are your vibrators?
NEW EMPLOYEE: $49 for the white, $49 for the black.
WHITE BLOND FEMALE CUSTOMER: How much is that plaid one on the shelf?
NEW EMPLOYEE: That's not a vibrator, just a very special dildo. It'll cost you $189.
WHITE BLOND FEMALE CUSTOMER: I'll take the plaid one. I've never had a plaid one before.
VIDEO: Scene of white, blond, female customer paying the employee and leaving.
VIDEO: Scene of Hardy LongDong returning to counter.
HARDY LONGDONG: How did you do while I was gone?
NEW EMPLOYEE: I sold one white vibrator and one black vibrator. I even sold your thermos for $189!
ELIZABETH VARGAS: That's all from here, Diane.
DIANE SAWYER: Thanks for that hum-dinger of a report, Elizabeth.
Let's go to Liz Marlantes with the latest on the oil spill in the Arctic.
LIZ MARLANTES: Hi, Diane. As you know, on November 10 the largest drilling platform ever constructed was crushed when a supertanker collided with it. Actually, collided does not quite do it justice. The supertanker was pushed through the Russian platform, back-and-forth, a few times, by the winds during an Arctic storm after the supertanker's engines failed. Just like in BP's 2010 spill, the shut-off valves did not operate. And since there is virtually no daylight during the winter months in the Arctic, not to mention the brutal weather, there has been no serious effort to stop the spill.
At the time, President Rand Paul made one of his typically bizarre statements. He proposed that the Russians should light the oil on fire to provide enough light for work crews to stop the leak.
Now that the weather and daylight have cooperated enough for the work crews to get a handle on the situation, they are reporting that the oil is gushing out at a rate three times the rate of the 2010 BP spill. They estimate that the Arctic is polluted by more oil than all of the world's other spills combined. There are hundreds of square miles of black, oily water, with dead polar bears, sea lions, and countless fish and birds floating in it.
We thought the story could not get any stranger, but it did once again. Russian President-for-life Vladimir Putin drove across the ice, bare-chested, in a Lada, toward the wreck of the drilling platform, reminiscent of the time he drove a Lada across Siberia in 2010. His Lada got stuck when the ice suddenly shifted. He exited his car to see if he could push the vehicle and free it, and was eaten by possibly the last remaining polar bear in the Arctic.
Back to you, Diane.
DIANE SAWYER: Thanks, Liz.
What do you get when you cross a polar bear with a Russian president?
A slightly larger polar bear.
As you know, three Supreme Court justices died earlier this week: Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Clarence Thomas. This is unprecedented, as a president has never had to replace three justices at once. Vice President Sarah Palin was asked about this earlier today. She said that her recommendations to the President were Perry Mason, John Galt, and Aqua Buddha.
Now we have an interview with John Stossel, former host of ABC's 20/20 and current Fox News contributor.
John, you keep repeating that the unemployment rate is only 10%, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics reminds us in its monthly report that a more accurate figure is U6, which includes people no longer receiving unemployment benefits, people who have given up looking in disgust, and people who can only find part-time work, even people who only work a few hours each week and not by choice. Why do you persist in using the lowball figure?
JOHN STOSSEL: There you go again, Diane. We should not even have unemployment benefits. Get rid of Social Security, too. All that money is coming out of my pocket.
DIANE SAWYER: There's a massive tent city outside Las Vegas, just to name one example. Police estimate that well over ten thousand families are living there.
JOHN STOSSEL: Send a bulldozer through it.
DIANE SAWYER: And most of these people have fallen off the grid. They have no phone and no home, and they pay no taxes, so they do not appear in any government statistics. These people should all be classified as unemployed, but the BLS admits that their official unemployment rate is very low, perhaps just 1/3 of the actual underemployment number.
JOHN STOSSEL: That's just Darwin's laws in action: survival of the fittest.
DIANE SAWYER: And people who have been unemployed for over a year tell us over and over again that companies will not consider them for any position. Companies only want to hire people who are currently employed, so companies end up just stealing employees from each other.
JOHN STOSSEL: If they had my brains and good looks -- especially my good looks -- they would not have any trouble finding a job.
DIANE SAWYER: And the children of homeless families or those forced to keep moving for various economic reasons, suffer the most. Their stress level prevents them from learning. Many of them are essentially starving, so they do not have the energy to study. Some of the children are eating so little that their growth is being stunted. If these children do not receive an education, they will have no chance of finding a good job.
JOHN STOSSEL: We'll just import more Indians, Pakistanis, and other foreigners using H-1B and L-1 visas.
DIANE SAWYER: And tens of millions of people are now working part-time jobs because there aren't enough full-time jobs to go around. Most of them work two or more part-time jobs to survive. And part-time jobs rarely come with medical insurance benefits, so many of these people are playing Russian roulette with their health.
JOHN STOSSEL: They should just kill themselves and stop being parasites on the rest of us.
DIANE SAWYER: No wonder we got rid of you.
Let's go to Joohee Cho in Shanghai for a story on traditional Chinese medicine.
JOOHEE CHO: Hi, Diane. When you really get to know Asian people, especially Asian men, they admit that certain animal parts will make a drastic difference in their lives, especially for improving sexual function, for example, tiger eyes, rhino horn, shark fin, tiger penis, turtle plastron, bear gall bladders, and seahorses. Needless to say, extracting these parts results in the death of the animal.
This practice is not restricted to China. South Korea still has bear farms for the extraction of bile from the gall bladders of bears. And given that Asiatic black bears, also known as moon bears because of the crescent shaped markings on their chests, are on the endangered species list, the practice angers animal rights groups. Organizations like TheBearTruth.org are trying to force South Korea to stop the barbaric practice.
It has little to do with traditional Chinese medicine -- it's all about lunch -- but during every major sporting event in South Korea and China, the trade in dog meat makes for ugly headlines.
Back to you, Diane.
DIANE SAWYER: Thanks, Joohee. Hmm . . . sexual function mixed with traditional Chinese medicine . . . gives acupuncture an entirely new meaning.
Thinking about the many pornographic movies I've watched, I cannot remember ever seeing an Indian man. And if anyone needs an improvement in sexual function, it is Indians. Back in 2006, BBC News reported that a majority of Indian men have trouble using internationally-sized condoms. Let me read the exact quote: "60% of Indian men have penises which are between three and five centimeters shorter than international standards."
Speaking of Indians, former President Barack Obama is in Washington DC today speaking with members of the Congress. As you remember, the day after he left office, he accepted a position with the government of India as a trade lobbyist. Many eyebrows were raised back in late 2010 when he push hard for India to be given a seat on the UN Security Council. Then he pushed for yet another trade deal between the USA and India.
And today we learned that the Islamic world will soon vote on President Obama's candidacy for caliphate of the Islamic world. He was quoted as saying: "No matter what happens, my true friends can continue to call me Barry."
On a different subject, we have been reporting on the vigilante killings of Wall Street bankers. Last week, you remember we reported on the death of former Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein. He was found crucified on the trunk of a large tree, with large nails driven through his hands and feet. Police suspect someone was making a statement on his comment that he was doing "God's work."
The latest victim is Martin Joel Erzinger, a former star broker at Smith Barney. Back in 2010, he ran over New York physician Steven Milo from behind in Eagle, Colorado, causing massive injuries; Milo had been riding on a bicycle. Erzinger drove away from the scene of the crime, eventually stopping in a parking lot where he called the Mercedes auto assistance service and asked that his car be towed. He was only charged with misdemeanor traffic charges.
Erzinger was found yesterday with virtually every bone in his body broken by a hammer. A note was found on him echoing an advertising campaign of McDonald's from years ago, "You deserve a break today."
I guess we can call that "breaking news."
Finally, we have a story on ballet. Here's Sam Donaldson on special assignment.
SAM DONALDSON: Diane, you might remember back in 2003, a Russian prima ballerina named Anastasia Volochkova was fired by the Bolshoi Ballet for becoming too heavy. Now there was more to it than simple weight, because she continued to work as an independent dancer after that, but the Bolshoi Ballet had a point: ballerinas can only be so heavy, because their male partners need to be able to lift them into the air over and over again without destroying their backs.
At the time, I remember a fat, black CBS Sunday Morning reporter declaring some nonsense like "Why, she might break right through the floor!" sarcastically attempting to impress us with her supposed knowledge of ballet. What a bimbo! She knew nothing of ballet.
Obviously Volochkova was able to find bigger, stronger male dancers to partner with. Since 2003, she has danced in many countries around the world.
We have recently learned that Michelle Obama wanted to learn how to dance ballet now that she has lots more spare time. However, given her height and weight, no male ballet dancer would work with her. She finally found a man who competes in the Mr. Universe competition to lift her.
Last week, the bodybuilder was attempting a lift with her when his back gave out. She fell on him, breaking his neck. The good news is that she was not hurt because she landed on her big butt.
DIANE SAWYER: Thanks for that uplifting report, Sam
We'll be right back with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's plan to donate his penis to science.
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