48 Tones Of Silver From Shipwreck; Spammer Offline After Global Takedown
BLITZER: Amid growing speculation over his whereabouts, Syria's president appears on state TV. Lisa Sylvester's monitoring that and some other top stories in THE SITUATION ROOM right now. What's the latest, Lisa?</s>LISA SYLVESTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Wolf. Well, it is President Bashar Al-Assad's first TV appearance since the bombing that killed three of his top officials. The video shows him with his new defense minister, but there's no sign of where that video was taken. There have been some reports suggesting that he has left the capital. Violence continues to rage in Syria. Opposition forces say at least 94 people were killed today. Deep sea explorers are celebrating a record bounty. Get this 1,200 bars of silver pulled from a ship wreck three miles under water in the North Atlantic. The haul is from this British cargo ship torpedoed by a German boat in 1941. So far the expedition has pulled more than a million ounces of silver to the surface. And they think there may be a lot more still on the ocean floor. President Obama is getting some big name and big money support. We've learned actor Morgan Freeman donated $1 million to a pro-Obama "Super PAC" last month. In a statement the actor says the president has done a remarkable job in historically difficult circumstances. Hollywood power players like Steven Spielberg and Bill Maher has donated to the same group. And one of the world's biggest spammers has been knocked offline in a global takedown known as the "Grumbotnet." It generated around 18 billion spam e-mails a day. Take last week, it was responsible for about a third of all spam, today, not one single message. Security firms and internet service providers in three countries killed the network with an attack on its main servers. The question though is, is this going to be coming back? Are we going to see some other version of this, Wolf?</s>BLITZER: Spam. I get a ton of spam too. Unfortunately goes to a spam bucket out there. I don't have to deal with it, but there's a lot of spam out there.</s>SYLVESTER: Yes, it's a big nuisance. I know a lot of folks get tired of seeing that. But 18 billion spam e-mails a day this one entity was responsible for. At least we'll see a little bit of the slowing of that, Wolf, hopefully in our e-mail boxes.</s>BLITZER: That would be good. Thank you, Lisa. Modern technology is catching up with U.S. democracy. Stay there and you're going to find out which state is about to let people use Facebook to register to vote. And the House Speaker John Boehner tells me the election is a referendum on the current president. It's not a referendum on Mitt Romney. We're going to see what our Democratic and Republican strategists have to say about that.