Attorney General Holder on WikiLeaks: Put American Lives at Risk; The New Facebook Applications
VELSHI: At half past the hour, here's what's happening right now. The legality of California's ban on same sex marriage is being put to the test this moment in San Francisco. A three judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will decide if a lower court was right to declare California's Proposition 8, banning gay marriage, to be unconstitutional. In France, a court has ruled that the Concorde crash that killed 113 people was caused in part by the criminal negligence of Continental Airlines and one of its mechanics. A piece of metal allegedly fell off a continental D.C. 10, which took off just before the Concorde, causing the Concorde to blow a tire. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says he's authorizing significant actions related to the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks for publishing U.S. diplomatic cables. Holder says American lives have been put at risk. All right. Google launches eBooks today. I want to talk to you about this. Jessica, one of my producers is here. She's been sort of studying it carefully. Google is launching these eBooks basically to allow you to not just to download books to a typical reader, but it's sort of like it exists in the cloud. It's not just about your reader?</s>JESSICA KAY-KING, SEGMENT PRODUCER: Exactly. You can take them wherever you go. You can download them from home and then put them on your Android, put them on your iPad, excuse me, iPhone, and you can just take them everywhere. The other really cool thing is that three million of these are public domain, which means they're free. So that's kind of a big step. A lot of them you don't have to pay for. Some you do. But that's the real kick here.</s>VELSHI: Jessica's here, by the way, because she's scared I'm going to break the wall. I don't have the best relationship with the wall. Here's another thing everybody's talking about. The Facebook. The new Facebook applications that are out there. Some of them are really interesting. But one of the issues that comes up is, we've pointed to you and Ali (ph), who's our famous floor director over here. And what you do is you can -- your homepage, if you choose to use this new model, is going to start to show you relationships that you have with people and the history of those relationships.</s>KAY-KING: Right. It's kind of cool. You can see with my friend Ali, that we've been Facebook friends since April. It's one of the new things. If we have any pictures tagged together -- which we don't -- they'd be right here.</s>VELSHI: Right. And then your mutual friends are listed here.</s>KAY-KING: Exactly. So that's really neat. The caution there, what people should be weary of is if you have potential job prospects. That sort of thing. Things you've written five years ago that could be incriminating, could be on this history. So that's something you really need to think about when you're putting things on Facebook, which we always talk about.</s>VELSHI: Right. You have to be careful with what you're putting on here. This is something that's still not entirely common to people who use Facebook. Some because they're not as familiar with the privacy settings and some because a younger generation is just used to putting more stuff out there. So what has happened now is it's become easier for others -- this could be a good thing or bad thing for you -- to see a lot of your history with people.</s>KAY-KING: Exactly.</s>VELSHI: You might have told Ali something a year ago that you don't even remember saying, but may not want everyone else being part of.</s>KAY-KING: Exactly.</s>VELSHI: All right. Well those are some changes to Facebook. By the way, when you go to Facebook, you can go on to the site. Click on it. Take a look at your privacy settings. Get a feel for this new thing. Do not assume that is all well. This might be something that suits you tremendously. You might really like it. It might be something that doesn't suit you. Check your privacy settings. All right. A sad, shocking story out of the New York area. Sixteen-year-old Thomas Adams loved baseball. He was a catcher. He'd been playing since he was nine-years-old. He was practicing with his school at a high school gymnasium in Patterson, New Jersey, over the weekend, when a pitch hit him in the chest. He was wearing protective gear, including a chest protector, but he collapsed with a heart attack. He was taken to the hospital and he was pronounced dead. His friends, his family, and his teammates are in a state of shock.</s>THOMAS ADAMS, SON KILLED BY PITCH: The heart and the ball hit at the wrong time and just sent his heart into a severe cardiac arrest. You know? So they couldn't get it back.</s>VELSHI: Wow. Doctors say this kind of thing does happen on rare occasions when a fast-moving ball hits the chest at a certain point in the cardiac cycle, the heart literally skip a beat. Doctor David Atallcheck a sports medicine and a team physician for the New York Mets told WCBS-TV that in cases like this quote, "A chest protector seems to make no difference at all." And that's the part that's really scary. A 14-year-old boy arrested in Mexico, says he was a hit man for the drug cartels. He may be a U.S. citizen. Globe Trekking up next.