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Russia Pushes for Total Ban on International Adoptions; Jeremy Lin Today; Facebook CEO Hands Out Breakthrough Research Awards; Behind the Tigers in "Life of Pi"; Cyberthieves Targeting Trade Secrets; Weatherman Passes Out on the Air

Aired February 21, 2013 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


PHIL BLACK, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Despite the obvious need for more people who are willing to love these children, Russia has banned Americans from adopting here. And some officials are now pushing for a total ban on all international adoptions.

The orphanage director, Nadezhna Hrekina (ph), supports international adoption because she says there aren't yet enough Russian families willing to do it. She says she hopes the government will now encourage more Russians to adopt.

Some Russian officials fought for the ban on American adoptions because they claim Russian children are often mistreated in the United States. It was also a response to an American law targeting Russian human rights abuses.

Critics of the ban, like the tens of thousands of Russians who marched against it, say the country's orphans are suffering because of a political effort to steer Russia away from the West.

The debate has split Russian society, but few here have ever spoken to its orphans.

Vika (ph) has been cared for by the state since she was seven. She's now 16 and no longer hopes to be adopted. But she says, when she was younger, she wanted it desperately. Because, she says, it's always better for a child to be part of a family.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN ANCHOR: Phil Black, he's joining us from Moscow. And Phil, you know, on this program, Michael and I have both talked to numerous couples who really are caught in limbo just not knowing whether or not they're going to be able to take those kids home.

And you've got the kids over there who essentially no longer have the possibility of adoption. Where does this go from here?

BLACK: Well, Suzanne, the logic here in Russia among those who are most outspoken on this issue say the national disgrace that so many Russian children have effectively been, in their words, "exported" overseas in the last few years, turned into commodities rather than being looked after here. And when you talk to international experts on adoption, they agree that it is usually preferable for orphans to be placed with families within the same culture or country.

But the concern in this case is that Russia is getting it the wrong way around, that by implementing the ban before it has built up a culture of adoption here with enough Russian families who are willing to take on the responsibility, Russia is effectively condemning so many more children to institutionalized childhoods.

MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN ANCHOR: Yeah, and the whole thing has expanded out. A lot of people want all adoptions banned internationally. Is there any chance, is there any talk there that this ban on, say, the U.S. adopting Russian kids could be reversed? Is there any kind of appetite for that?

BLACK: Michael, it doesn't seem likely at all, no. The one remaining battleground, however, is with American families who have begun their adoption process, but not completed it before that ban kicked in on the first of January.

These are people who have already spent a lot of money. They may have already been here, met children, formed a bond with them. They are still fighting for the right to complete that process and take the children home, but it is not looking good in their case.

And the outrage we've seen in Russia just in the past few days over the death of Russian orphan, three-year-old Max Shatto in Texas, that outrage, that concern, that has not helped their cause at all, Michael.

HOLMES: Yeah. All right, Phil, good to see you. Phil Black there.

MALVEAUX: One of the things that's important, I mean, a lot of those kids are disabled that Americans will adopt, that they're willing to adopt.

HOLMES: Yeah. And, as you pointed out -- no, as you pointed out, a lot of them just won't be adopted in Russia. It's very sad.

All right, we're going to switch gears when we come back. Have a look at this guy. You'll remember him. A year ago, all that basketball seemed to be talking was "Insanity."

MALVEAUX: So, where is Jeremy Lin now and what happened to all the excitement? We're going to hear from Lin in his own words, up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HOLMES: Welcome back, everyone. Of course, you'll remember the NBA and the fans got swept up in what became known as "Linsanity." Yeah, it was crazy, wasn't it?

MALVEAUX: And, of course, all the puns, you couldn't forget all that. There were tons of them, Lin this, Lin that, but after a spectacular few weeks with the New York Knicks, Jeremy Lin sat out the last part of the season with an injury. Then the team traded him to the Houston Rockets. HOLMES: Yeah, now, he hopes to help carry them into the playoffs. One thing hasn't changed. He is still a media sensation even though no pro team selected him after he graduated from Harvard.

MALVEAUX: But he told our own Rachel Nichols he's still -- he's bringing in the crowds.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEREMY LIN, HOSUTON ROCKETS GUARD: It's crazy how many people were there and how excited they were to just be able to be there, and so I felt kind of like the president almost just like being escorted in, you know, back way tunnels and like crazy stuff.

So, I was just like, wow, this is really intense.

RACHEL NICHOLS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And the experience that you went through, that intense cycle of something happens and then the Internet goes crazy and the paparazzi descend and it seems like everyone in the world is watching your every step.

Now that you've been through it, what advice would you have for someone who's going through one of those crazy times?

LIN: I would just say, slow down and embrace it all, soak it all in, and just have fun with it because at the end of the day, when I think back to it, all I'm going to really have is my memories and my thoughts and what I remember from that time.

And, so, I'm fortunate to be able to have what happened to me last year and I just remember how fun it was. And, so, that's just what I would encourage anybody else going through a similar situation to do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: Yeah, good advice, too.

Your alma mater, how was it at basketball there? Was it ...

MALVEAUX: We weren't all the best at basketball. I just -- I'm sorry.

HOLMES: It was an "against-the-odds" thing, wasn't it?

MALVEAUX: Sorry about that. We didn't do all that well. Sorry. You know, I've got to support my team.

HOLMES: You do other things well, however. You turned out all right.

MALVEAUX: Yeah, I did all right.

HOLMES: Yeah, all right.

Now, breakthrough scientists being honored with prestigious awards and some pretty big cash prizes. MALVEAUX: It is really cool. The Breakthrough Prize Foundation, that's what it's called, headed up by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other, of course, Silicon Valley heavy-hitters. They're handing out the group's first awards in research in curing deadly diseases. Pretty cool stuff.

HOLMES: It is, isn't it? Each of the 11 winners took home $3 million each, twice as much as Nobel Prize winners get.

Now, Zuckerberg says the money's well deserved.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARK ZUCKERBERG, CEO, FACEBOOK: The big thing here is that science and technology are very closely related and, when you're building these information technology companies, the market rewards you and you can make lot of money.

But a lot of these folks who are doing just such extraordinary work in science, don't have the same opportunity and, because of that, I think it would just be a shame if a lot of folks who are growing up trying to figure out what to do now don't choose to go into such critical work because of that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MALVEAUX: Good for them.

HOLMES: What a bright idea, yeah.

MALVEAUX: I mean, money goes so many other places. Good to see it going for something like that.

HOLMES: Good bit of philanthropy.

MALVEAUX: Coming up, kind of like a dirty secret for some of the world's biggest companies, something that they keep from their competitors, their shareholders and the stock market.

HOLMES: We're talking about big businesses falling victim to hackers.

Stay with us. We'll have that when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MALVEAUX: Welcome back. The movie," The Life of Pi," it is stunning, a visual success. In London, it recently won a BAFTA award -- that is the British Academy of Film and Television Arts -- for visual effects.

HOLMES: Yeah, though it looks life-like, check this out. Incredibly, 87 percent of the time, you're actually seeing a digitally-created tiger on the screen.

This is a terrific report here from Nick Glass.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) NICK GLASS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Making a regal entrance, every Bengal tiger is different. This male is 10-years-old and weighs in at about 500 pounds. His name is King, and he was born to be a star.

THIERRY LE PORTIER, ANIMAL TRAINER: Every animal has his own look, and King looks very sure of himself. Very -- he looks dominant. That's how (INAUDIBLE).

GLASS: This story is about King, and it's also about his miraculous identical digital twin made for the movies.

BILL WESTENHOFER, R&H VISUAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR: We knew if we had a real tiger that we had to cut up against that our digital tiger had to be flawless.

The tiger took about a year from start to finish just to build the model, and that's before sitting down and working on jots and doing the animation.

GLASS: Thierry Le Portier has been a professional big cat trainer since he was 16.

For our benefit, he put a younger, smaller tigress called Minh (ph) through her paces. He apologized she wasn't King, but King is much less easily biddable.

Over half the film is set on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, just the boy, Pi, and the tiger. It was shot in a water tank in Taiwan against special effects green and blue screens. For safety reasons, the actor and tiger were never filmed together.

Here is just Thierry Le Portier, the camera and King. Creating King's digital twin took about 600 animators.

WESTENHOFER: Someone starts painting textures, how the pores look on the nose, all little details of the eye.

They start working on the tiger and combing each individual hair. There were 10 million hairs on the final model, and each one had to be hand adjusted for the right amount of curl and wrinkle, the way the color starts in the base and ends in the tip. All those things had to be specifically controlled.

One of the shots that I'm most proud of is, near the end of the film, where Pi pulled a little blue sock onto him, that was a completely digital tiger.

GLASS (voice-over): Shot for shot (ph), what you see on screen is 87 percent digital tiger, 13 percent realty tiger.

LE PORTIER: Many friends of mine called me and they said to me -- they say, oh, Thierry, they did great. And they -- they did not even see the difference. Most of them thought that the -- the whole movie is a realty tiger. But we, of course, could see. It's too easy for me to see. GLASS: The truth is, King was marked out for the part, literally, as Ang Lee noticed straight away the very defined black stripes on his forehead matched the Chinese character for king. The special effects team, Rhythm & Hues in Los Angeles, is having a triumphant awards season, but it's bittersweet. The company has stunned the film industry by filing for bankruptcy.

Nick Glass, CNN, with King and his twin.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: I love that story.

HOLMES: It's a great story. Nick does some really good pieces.

All right, coming up, and we have a lot of this because the script says it's like playing Jenga. We've never heard of it, sorry.

MALVEAUX: (INAUDIBLE) play Jenga.

HOLMES: Yes. With a high rise, though. We're going to show you how the Japanese bought this building to the ground one floor at a time.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MALVEAUX: U.S. trade secrets worth billions of dollars, confidential document government and key information about the country's infrastructure.

HOLMES: Yes, these are all prime targets for cyber thieves. But Attorney General Eric Holder says the U.S. is fighting back, pushing for tougher cyber security laws and sharing intelligence with hacked companies.

MALVEAUX: And there are plenty of those. Thousands of those companies being compromised right now. Joining us from San Francisco, "New York Times" journalist Nicole Perlroth.

And, Nicole, good to see you again. You and I have talked about this before. You have a front page article in "The New York Times" today. You also wrote about it before, how "The New York Times" itself was hacked. This is a very big deal for a lot of companies and "The New York Times" disclosed this, but a lot of companies don't. Tell us why it seems to be a dirty little secret.

NICOLE PERLROTH, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": That's right. There are thousands of companies that we now know have been hacked and you only really hear about a few of them. So we came forward. And right after we came forward, you saw "The Wall Street Journal" come forward. You saw "The Washington Post" come forward. We reported that Bloomberg was hit as well.

But you really, these are just sort of the tip of the iceberg. The fact is that, you know, if you ask government officials, they say there's only two types of companies in the U.S. now. Companies that have been hacked and companies that don't know they've been hacked. And the reason you don't hear about the ones that have been hacked and know it is because they're scared about shareholder lawsuits, they're scared that it will brand the big scarlet letter on their company logo and so you just don't hear about it.

HOLMES: Yes, reputation and all of that.

Now, China, of course, we've talked about this as well, believed to be one of the biggest offender when it comes to hacking. We had that report from the U.S. cyber security firm that accuses the Chinese military of being linked to a major hacking group. This was in Shanghai.

I want to show you these pictures. This was our own reporter, David McKenzie, trying to get close to the building where the hacking is reportedly taking place. And you can see how they were greeted. They were chased away.

What do you make of that response? I mean -- I mean usually reporters get chased away when they're filming in China without permission. But, you know, what do you make of that response to that building?

PERLROTH: Yes, I think we were lucky because we were able to break the story. So our reporter was able to go out and take pictures pretty quickly with his phone. But now that the story's out, I know that they're being very cautious about letting media go report about this in China and it's just --

HOLMES: But China says it's not us. What do you make of that?

PERLROTH: Yes, I think their quote is always, it's unprofessional and baseless to accuse China of orchestrating these attacks. The fact is, there are thousands of attacks that are coming from one IP range in Shanghai. And we mention this in our report. We couldn't get in the building. But if it's not the Chinese, then there are thousands of hackers outside that building hacking into U.S. companies without China knowing about it, which, when you think about it, is a little preposterous.

MALVEAUX: And, Nicole, real quick here. I mean we know that they're stealing trade information worth billions of dollars. Do we have any idea what this is costing us here in this country?

PERLROTH: There have been estimates all over the place. There was one estimate last year that this will now cost the U.S. a trillion dollars in trade theft. But how do you really quantify that? I mean everyone values their IP's differently. And without companies sort of stepping forward and saying, hey, we've been hacked, we don't really know what's been taken.

MALVEAUX: All right, Nicole, thanks. We appreciate it, as always.

HOLMES: Yes.

PERLROTH: Thanks so much.

HOLMES: All right, now you know a good reporter will do anything to get a story, particularly an Aussie.

MALVEAUX: Oh, my God, this Aussie is crazy.

HOLMES: Yes. It's an Aussie weatherman. He may have taken things a step further than he could handle.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GRANT DENYER, WEATHERMAN, SEVEN NETWORK: I've been fascinated my whole life to do this and I don't want to do it anymore.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MALVEAUX: All right. He blacked out, 10,000 feet. We're going to explain how, why. Oh, my God. And what -- why did this happen.

HOLMES: And why on television as well.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HOLMES: All right, welcome back, everyone. An Australian -- why am I reading this?

MALVEAUX: Yes. One of you guys. It's the Aussies.

HOLMES: My people. An Australian weatherman known for his on air antics took it a little too far, passing out while on air live broadcasting from a stunt plane.

MALVEAUX: Yes. So his co-anchors, they were back on the seat (ph) in Melbourne. They were only too happy to let the world see it for themselves. Here's Jeanne Moos.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MOOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): You're about to see a weatherman's face become a little more weathered. Grant Denyer was doing the weather live from a stunt plane on Australia's Sunrise show.

MOOS (on camera): The hosts and the weatherman were all smiles, congratulating themselves that Grant hadn't gotten sick yet. In their words, that he hadn't spewed.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Not one spew this morning. Oh, sorry.

MOOS (voice-over): Grant describes himself as the crash test dummy of live television. The type who jumps through hoops.

GRANT DENYER, WEATHERMAN, SEVEN NETWORK: A man with a hoop.

MOOS: To make the weather crazy and fun. This time he wanted to experience the force of 8gs.

DENYER: I've been fascinated my whole life to do this and I don't want to do it anymore.

MOOS: But Grant urged the stunt pilot on.

DENYER: We're picking up speed. There we go. Right. And then we go left. Up (ph) again.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Squeezing. Squeezing. Keep squeezing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, my God.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Keep squeezing. Keep squeezing. Keep squeezing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, God. We don't want to stay. All right.

MOOS: Grant's camera went to black as he blacked out. Not that he realized he had as he later told us.

DENYER (voice-over): I could have sworn I didn't pass out. I passed out like a 12-year-old girl.

MOOS: After a little more than 10 seconds of silence, Grant started talking.

DENYER: That's unbelievable.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (INAUDIBLE) blacked out for a second.

MOOS (on camera): Grant is far from the first to have his eyes roll back in his head on live TV.

MOOS (voice-over): It happened to one of Glenn Beck's guests.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, you OK? Could somebody help him, please?

MOOS: It happens all the time at political rallies.

BILL CLINTON, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: That everybody agrees your there.

MOOS: Timber!

In Marie Osmond's case, instead of dancing, it was fainting with the stars.

The bad thing about passing out on camera --

DENYER: Man, I don't look pretty when I'm asleep. Yes, I started to look like a member of the Addams family there for a bit.

MOOS: And as the stunt pilot chants, "keep squeezing" in an effort to keep blood headed for the brain.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Keep squeezing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, my God.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Keep squeezing.

MOOS: Your anchor back on earth has already squeezed you out. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Better you than me.

MOOS: Jeanne Moos, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: That anchor, better him than me. Well, yes.

HOLMES: Yes, better him.

MALVEAUX: Well, what can you say.

HOLMES: I'm ever so slightly offended we used subtitles there on the Australian. I mean are we going to start putting them down there for me now?

MALVEAUX: We can barely -- can barely understand you. (INAUDIBLE).

HOLMES: You've got to see this. OK, got some great video for you. Tokyo, a new technique being used for the first time to demolish a hotel.

MALVEAUX: It's not an optical illusion, actually. It is time lapse video of a building being demolished from the inside, literally lowered floor by floor. Huge jacks hold up the ceiling as workmen begin destroying beams and columns for the floor itself.

HOLMES: Yes, and then those jacks lower and then they begin to work on the next floor. It just goes floor by floor. Apparently quieter, cleaner and, in a city as densely packed as Tokyo, safer than blowing it up.

MALVEAUX: And this guy, he should provide some inspiration for all of us runners out there. This is Fauja Singh. He is believed to be the world's oldest marathon runner, 101 years old.

HOLMES: Yes. Guess what, he's decided to retire after his last race this weekend. It's going to be in Hong Kong. He says he feels fine but racing for him is getting a little tough at this age. One hundred and one.

MALVEAUX: You kind of wonder what -- I kind of wonder what his time is. Yes.

HOLMES: Yes, four weeks, three days, 12 --

MALVEAUX: That's a shame.

HOLMES: You -- well, you're the big runner. You're the big runner.

MALVEAUX: Don't do that to the poor guy. Yes, I'm the (INAUDIBLE).

HOLMES: I drive to the mailbox myself, but, yes.

MALVEAUX: Well, speaking of drive on out of here.

HOLMES: You get (INAUDIBLE). I got to go.

MALVEAUX: I got another hour to do.

HOLMES: You've got to do it

MALVEAUX: All right. Thank you, Michael. Good to see you.