Special Millennium Edition Airing at 0:500 a.m. ET
MARINA KOLBE, WORLD NEWS: Hello, welcome to this Millennium edition of WORLD NEWS. I'm Marina Kolbe at the CNN Center in Atlanta. Coming up, we will examine one of humanity's greatest mysteries, past, present and future - the human brain. But first, a look at our top stories. United States officials are downplaying a glitch in the peace talks between Syria and Israel. Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa did not officially meet Monday after the talks opened. CNN Jerusalem bureau chief Walter Rodgers takes a look at the early sticking points and what's at stake for U.S. president Bill Clinton.</s>WALTER RODGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): President Clinton took Israel's prime minister Ehud Barak and Syria's foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa for a walk in the woods, trying to create a tranquil environment for these peace negotiations. It apparently did not work. The walk was the only time the three men met face to face the first day. A scheduled three-way meeting Monday night was canceled. An administration spokesman said the president and Secretary of State Madeline Albright decided the Israelis and Syrians were not yet ready to sit down together. Earlier, State Department spokesman James Rubin anticipated the difficulties.</s>JAMES RUBIN, STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN: I think it's fair to say the Charles Dickens novel "Great Expectations" is not the novel that is being read by the negotiators and the working-level officials. We do not expect to be able to achieve a core agreement in one round of negotiations.</s>RODGERS: The first day's talks had the president meeting individually with the Israeli leader, Prime Minister Barak insisting Israel's security needs must be addressed first. Syria's Foreign Minister al-Sharaa's priority was quite different. The Syrians are insisting Israel must first commit to a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights, all the way back to the 1967 borders. No progress to report, said one administration official. There is much at stake here for Mr. Clinton, who hoped to cap his presidency with a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty. But this second round of talks apparently got off to a rocky start. (on camera): All sides acknowledged a sense of urgency here, that there is a political opportunity not to be missed. But that sense of urgency is apparently not translating into either side making tough decisions contrary to its national interest. Walter Rodgers, CNN, Shepherdstown, West Virginia.</s>KOLBE: After several delays, the European Commission is submitting final papers to open its legal case against France over the country's ban on British beef. But as CNN's Christian Mayna (ph) reports, the legal solution to the crisis may be more than a year away.</s>CHRISTIAN MAYNA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Slicing through the European beef crisis will be a slow process. The European Commission hopes that where diplomacy has failed, the law will succeed. But it will take time. The European court in Luxembourg is expected to take at least 18 months to reach a final ruling on France's beef ban. Until then, the import bar remains.</s>JONATHAN FAULL, EUROPEAN COMMISSION SPOKESMAN: As for the question whether we might ask the court to expedite its procedure, that decision will be taken only when we have had an opportunity to see the French response to the action which the commission will bring.</s>MAYNA: Commission officials are said to be pessimistic about their chances of obtaining an interim injunction to lift the embargo. The issue is further muddled by France's own court action against the commission for endangering its consumers. This leaves France in the position of being both the accuser and the accused during its six-month presidency of the union, which starts in July. Of the 15-nation EU, only France and Germany have kept a ban on British beef. Germany has escaped action so far because its government has blamed slow parliamentary procedures for the delay. Christian Mayna, CNN Financial News, London.</s>KOLBE: Croatia's opposition is poised to put an end to a decade of nationalist rule by the party of the late president Franjo Tudjman. (voice-over): Early results from Monday's parliamentary elections give a coalition of social democrats and liberals a solid lead over Tudjman's Croatian Democratic Union. Opposition leaders are pledging to fight corruption and reduce Croatia's 20 percent unemployment. Tudjman's hard line and nationalism alienated many Western nations leaving Croatia politically and economically isolated. The ruling party was quick to concede defeat.</s>MATE GRANIC, CROATIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: The Croatian Democratic Union was practically 10 years in power, and definitely the voters didn't accept some of our mistakes, and that's the results of the election. Congratulations for the winners.</s>KOLBE (on camera): Granic added that he plans to run for president in the January 24 elections. Cuba, for the first time, has acknowledged a New Year's Day flyover by an anti-Communist pilot. (voice-over): Ly Tong dropped pamphlets Saturday urging Cubans to overthrow President Fidel Castro. In Miami, he surrendered his two-week old pilots license to U.S. authorities. No formal charges have been filed against him. An official Cuban newspaper accuses the U.S. of tolerating illegal acts against Cuba. The editorial says the U.S. has violated international law. (on camera): And the international dispute over a young Cuban boy is heating up. The lawyers for U.S. relatives of 6-year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez say the child wants to see his father in Miami. (voice-over): Tens of thousands of Cubans demanding the boy's return marched in Santa Clara Monday. Elian was found floating in the Atlantic in November. His mother died trying to escape Cuba, and as CNN Havana bureau chief Lucia Newman reports, a U.S. group on a visit to Cuba is echoing their demand.</s>LUCIA NEWMAN, CNN HAVANA BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): The head of the U.S. National Council of Churches traveled to the coastal town of Cardenas to meet with the father and grandparents of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez.</s>JOAN BROWN CAMPBELL, U.S. NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CHURCHES: This is a very loving family. We are more convinced than we ever were that this boy belongs with his family.</s>NEWMAN: The council, which represents 35 Protestant and Orthodox churches with 52 million members, wants to use its influence to help resolve a custody dispute which has turned the little boy into a political symbol on both sides of the Florida straits. The child was taken to live with distant relatives in Miami after he was rescued at sea, clinging to an inner tube. His mother and 10 others drowned when their boat capsized trying to get to the United States. The boy's father insists Elian wants to return home but is not allowed to express himself. "He's being pressured by the relatives there and by politics," says Juan Miguel Gonzales. "They practically don't let him communicate and talk with us." Dr. Campbell was received at the boy's school with a prepared program of poems and chants calling for Elian's return. Both Cuban and U.S. religious leaders say the boy belongs with his father, but that the issue is not political.</s>CAMPBELL: I think what we have to do is help our president see that the issue is a moral one and that the concern is humanitarian.</s>NEWMAN: The U.S. religious leader promised to push for a quick resolution. (on camera): The U.S. National Council of Churches has, in fact, offered its services as an intermediary. It says it's willing to bring the boy back to Cuba and hand him over to his father. (voice-over): Lucia Newman, CNN, Cardenas, Cuba.</s>KOLBE: And when CNN's Millennium 2000 coverage continues after the break - studying how we cope with an ever-increasing barrage of sights and sounds.</s>KOLBE: And time now for a quick check of the world weather outlook. Here's Guillermo Arduino.</s>KOLBE: In our ongoing coverage of Millennium 2000, we now take a closer look at the source of what makes us most human - our intelligence. The brain is the most complex organ in the human body, a biological mechanism of amazing ability and power that still holds mysteries for science. CNN's Michael Holmes takes us inside the human brain.</s>MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): "I think, therefore I am." The words of 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes succinctly describing what makes human beings unique among life on earth - our ability to think, to reason, to invent and to adapt.</s>NASA MISSION CONTROL: Lift off of the space shuttle Discovery.</s>WILLIAM GREENOUGH, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS: Intelligence, I think, is the ability to handle successfully anything that your environment may throw at you.</s>HOLMES: And as we enter the new millennium, our environment is increasingly throwing more and more at us. The most obvious job our brains have is processing the enormous amounts of sensory information that bombard us.</s>GREENOUGH: Everything that we know from studies of animals suggests that the brain is very, very well adapted to capturing and storing information from the stream that's flowing by us. So that we're able to, sort of, parse the stream of all of the things that we're seeing and hearing and experiencing through our various sensor modalities. Clearly there's something very special about the human brain that allows us to do that.</s>HOLMES: The brain is a three-pound package tucked safely within our skulls. Billions of nerve cells communicating with each other in a complex web of electrochemical connections. The largest portion is the cerebral cortex, the center of reasoning, planning, problem-solving, voluntary movement, language and writing, as well as processing sensory input. The second largest area of your brain is the cerebellum, which controls muscular coordination including walking and speaking. And the brain stem, it controls the most basic functions of life - your heart and your lungs.</s>GREENOUGH: In everyday interactions with the world, you would glide smoothly between using one set of structures for one thing you were doing at this moment to another completely different set of structures.</s>HOLMES: Scientists are only beginning to completely understand the full power of the brain, the complex interplay of chemicals and electrical impulses between individual nerve cells, activity we don't even think about.</s>GREENOUGH: In everyday behavior, most of what the brain is doing at any point in time is actually stuff that you're not conscious of.</s>HOLMES: It's morning. The sun rises, and so does most of the world. You may have been asleep all night, but your brain has not.</s>MICHAEL POSNER, DIRECTOR, SACHLER INSTITUTE: It's a very active organ, and it's never inactive. That is, even if you're at repose and not thinking hard about anything, some areas of the brain are quite active.</s>HOLMES: On the road, you're concentrating on the car in front of you while your brain focuses on a whole lot more - evaluating your senses, what you see, hear and even feel through the steering wheel, and reacting based on motor skills physically ingrained in your brain when you learn to drive.</s>GREENOUGH: The region of the cerebral cortex that specifically deals with the muscles of the body called the motor cortex is altered when we learn a motor skill.</s>HOLMES: In fact, all learning, formal education or day-to-day experience, alters the structure of the nerve cells in your brain.</s>POSNER: Learning, in fact, changes brain systems. We know that. It can change sensory systems, and it can change the connections between neural areas.</s>GREENOUGH: There are changes in the relationships among all of the pieces of tissue that make up the brain that are, as best we can tell, dynamically adjusting themselves moment to moment.</s>HOLMES (on camera): At every moment of every day, our sensors are being flooded. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the textures of our environment all flow into our brains, where they are then filtered by a structure called the thalamus. Now, that information is then processed and stored in our brains as memories, and you weren't even aware it was happening.</s>GREENAUGH: One of the things that really does contribute to human intelligence, human adaptability to a complex world is the enormous human capacity for memory.</s>HOLMES (voice-over): And you draw on those memories at all times as well. You may think talking to a friend is simple, but your brain is working hard, triggering memories stimulated by what you're hearing and seeing, choosing an appropriate response and causing the physical movements of speech. We're rarely aware of what it takes to do what we think are simple tasks.</s>GREENAUGH: When you do something you're aware of, like pitching a baseball, your body does all kinds of things that you're completely unaware of that prevent you from falling flat on your face.</s>HOLMES (on camera): Another example. It's a cold day, a little like today. Perhaps you feel your fingers or toes start to go a little numb. Well, that's a sure sign that your hypothalamus is working, regulating your body temperature, constricting the blood vessels in your extremities, and sending the blood to where you need it most to survive. Standing on a sidewalk next to a busy street, you'll of course hear plenty of traffic noise. But where you'd hear a screech of brakes, or a blaring horn, your body will likely respond with a jolt of adrenaline, preparing you for possible danger. (voice-over): That's, in part, the work of the almond-shaped structure known as the amygdala, which processes emotions like fear and anxiety.</s>GREENAUGH: Most people assume that the brain is a, sort of, passive organ, that it just, kind of, sits there and thinks, and they have no idea what an active, dynamic place the brain would appear to them if they could get inside of it and look around it when it's working.</s>HOLMES: The ability to thrive in a complex environment with a variety of fast-paced visual and social stimulations is a hallmark of human intelligence.</s>GREENAUGH: We've created an enormously complicated world compared to the world that we evolved in. The remarkable thing really is that we have a brain that is capable of handling this, that's been able to take on this enormous challenge and deal with it successfully. And we are the only species that's done so.</s>HOLMES: New technology and research has shown the brain is a remarkably complex and dynamic organ. And as we head into an even more complex millennium, our brains will be up to the challenge. Michael Holmes, CNN.</s>KOLBE: And coming up, we'll have market update and more WORLD NEWS right after this short break.</s>KOLBE: Time now to update world financial markets. Here is Todd Benjamin at the financial desk in London with our WORLD BUSINESS TODAY EXTRA. Todd?</s>TODD BENJAMIN, FINANCIAL NEWS: Hello, Marina. Europe's markets are slumping on the first full day of trading for the millennium. Zurich and London have started up again after the New Year's break, but the leading indices are all heading sharply lower as rising bond yields and a fall in the Dow Industrials take their toll on the markets. Bond yields are rising as investors begin to worry about interest rates. Influential Wall Street strategists are now predicting that the U.S. Federal Reserve will raise rates by as much as a full percent point by the end of the year. Here are the levels for you. London's FTSE 100 is at 6775. That's down over 2 percent, while Frankfurt's DAX is slipping 17 points at 6605. A 179-point loss also for Paris' CAC 40, and the SMI in Zurich is falling harder, down almost 3 percent. Well, leading software maker Baan is plummeting in Amsterdam this Tuesday. (voice-over): The stock is down 28 percent after the company warned its fourth quarter losses will widen. The business management software maker also is to cut its workforce by 4 percent. Those cuts start at the top. Baan's CEO is stepping down. But the investors are less than impressed. One analyst said the company's statement looked like a hidden profit warning. (on camera): And Racal Electronics is going up despite all the downness in the market today, up 8 percent, after French defense concern Thomson-CSF confirmed weekend press reports that it is seeking a tie-up with the British company. Thomson-CSF says it wants a "mutually acceptable deal." Thomson-CSF shares are 2.5 percent higher in Paris. Well, Tokyo celebrated the first trading day of the new millennium by closing above the 19,000 mark for the first time in a year and a half, and there was no sign of the widely feared millennium bug on the trading floor. Investors, instead, chose to follow the lead from the United States and the tech-based NASDAQ, which has chalked up another record overnight. The closing number for the Nikkei average 19,002. And over in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng fell on those interest rate fears. Index closed over 1.5 percent lower. Well, that's it for this business update. I'm Todd Benjamin in London. We'll have sports and world headlines right after this break. Stay with us.</s>KOLBE: Let's turn now to sporting news. Here's Pedro Pinto with the latest scores and highlights.</s>KOLBE: And recapping our top story. (voice-over): .peace talks between Israel and Syria are set to resume in the United States. On Monday, the Israeli prime minister and Syrian foreign minister did not hold talks because of a dispute over the agenda. The U.S. secretary of state is set to meet with both leaders individually. (on camera): And that's all for this millennium edition of WORLD NEWS. I'm Marina Kolbe in Atlanta. For all of us here at CNN and our staff around the world, thank you for watching. END TO ORDER VIDEOTAPES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF CNN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FROM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com