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International Polar Bear Challenge; Gun Debate Sparks Fiery Exchange; Parents of Transgender Child Sue School; Working From Home; Connecting With Friends On Facebook; Newtown Families Push Gun Ban; voting Rights Act Still Necessary?

Aired February 27, 2013 - 13:00   ET

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

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN ANCHOR: CNN NEWSROOM continues.

Once in a lifetime journey, the mission Mars, how a nonprofit group is planning to fly by the big red planet. We are just moments from hearing all the details. Then, they joined Facebook to connect with friends, instead they were recruited into sex trafficking.

Then, many companies are saving money by letting employees work from home but Yahoo! is reversing course telling its employees to get back into the office. Is this the end of working from home? We're going to hear from the reporter who broke the story.

This is CNN NEWSROOM and I'm Suzanne Malveaux. Right now, guns taking center stage on Capitol Hill this hour, happening right now. California Senator Dianne Feinstein presiding over a hearing on legislation that she wants enacted to ban assault weapons. Right? Well, just moment ago, things got pretty heated between South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: If it's such an important issue, why aren't we prosecuting people who fail the background check? And there are 15 questions there. They are not hard to understand if you are filling out the form. So, I'm a bit frustrated that we say one thing, how important it is, but in the real world, we absolutely do nothing to enforce the laws on the books. Now, let's talk --

EDWARD FLYNN, CHIEF OF POLICE, MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN: I'd be -- you know, just for the record from my point of view. Senator, the purpose of the background check --

GRAHAM: How many cases have you made -- how many cases have you made --

FLYNN: You know what? It doesn't matter. It's a paper thing.

GRAHAM: Well, --

FLYNN: I want to stop -- I want to stop --

GRAHAM: Can I ask a question? FLYNN: -- 76 -- I want to finish the answer.

GRAHAM: Well, no. I'm asking --

FLYNN: I want to stop 76,000 people from buying guns illegally. That's a what a background check does.

GRAHAM: How many AR16s are legally owned here?

FLYNN: If you think we're going to do paperwork prosecutions, you're wrong.

GRAHAM: How many --

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D), CALIFORNIA: All right. If you --

GRAHAM: How many cases --

FEINSTEIN: Senator, if you would withhold just for a moment.

GRAHAM: Yes, that's fine.

FEINSTEIN: Please, no expressions one way or another and let's keep this civil. Senator Graham and I just got recognized for civility.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: Quite a heated exchange there and controversial as well. Now, Newtown victims' families, they are also testifying. We're actually going to talk with one mother whose son was in the school during the shooting but was actually saved by a teacher.

And this hour as well, the parents of a transgender six year old, they are announcing a lawsuit against their child's school. Coy Mathis, he was born a male but identifies and dresses as a girl. The parents support their child. So, she wants to use the girl's bathroom, the six year old. Now, at first, the school was OK with it, but now the school has had a change of heart. We're going to have more on the controversy from Sarah Schwabe from our affiliate KKTV.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SARAH SCHWABE, CORRESPONDENT, KKTV: This is six-year-old Coy who was born a boy but now lives life as a girl.

KATHRYN MATHIS: When she was about 18 months and started to talk, as soon as she was able to, it was that she was a girl. She liked girl's things.

SCHWABE: Coy is now in first grade. She was going to Eagleside Elementary school in Fountain where she was treated as a girl and used the girls' bathroom.

MATHIS: After she did transition and was able to live as a girl as her true self, the difference was amazing. She -- I mean, her anxiety went away. The depression went away and she was finally happy. SCHWABE: The family then got this letter from the school district. It says that Coy was born a male and at least some parents and students are likely to become uncomfortable with his continued use of the girls' restroom.

MATHIS: It's not a safe environment for her. (INAUDIBLE.)

SCHWABE: Coy is now home-schooled. A lot of the parents in the neighborhood didn't want to talk but one mom says she admires the parents for sticking up for her child but ultimately agrees with the school.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: From a parental standpoint, I think that the school district did the right thing.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: So, Coy Mathis' parents, they are going to appear on CNN's "STARTING POINT" tomorrow morning to explain what is happening with their child and the school district.

Happening right now, scientists, they are laying out a plan. This is to send a man and woman from earth to Mars. Not science fiction. There is actually a group of space travelers, developers, they say it is absolutely doable and they're pitching their vision right now at a news conference in Washington. It is not NASA. These are actually private investors with big money and big dreams of the red planet. They want to send two people in a rocket that is already made on a roundtrip journey to Mars that would take more than 500 days. Pretty cool stuff, ambitious as well.

I want to bring in John Zarrella as well as Chad Myers to talk a little bit about what we think how this is going to work. So, John, first of all, tell us about the group who is making the plans. I understand they're -- you know, it's the rich folks who have a dream, yes? Possibly --

JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, they're going to need --

MALVEAUX: -- to make it happen?

ZARRELLA: Yes, they're going to need a lot of money, that's for sure, Suzanne. Inspiration Mars Foundation and the guy that's behind all of this is Dennis Tito. And Tito, a lot of folks, if they recall, he was a one-time NASA jet propulsion engineer. He's made millions of dollars in the private sector. He was the first space tourist back in 2001 flying to the International Space Station on a Russian rocket. And that trip cost him reportedly about $20 million, so he's got deep pockets. But to pull this off, they're going to need about $1 billion. So, they've got a lot of fundraising they're going to have to do.

The plan, of course as we know, 501 days roundtrip -- around Mars. They are not landing on Mars. That's the key. It's a lot cheaper if you're just going to fly around and not land. As you mentioned, a man and a woman, preferably, they'd like to send a married couple as well, up to -- up to Mars. And, you know, there's a lot of risks, a lot of challenges to do this, but they believe they can pull it off in 2018 when Mars is about as close as it comes to earth. But boy, that's a tall order in a short time.

MALVEAUX: All right, John, a real quick question for you here. Why a married couple? You'd think they might drive each other crazy up there, yes? Stay married?

ZARRELLA: Yes, you would -- you would but --

MALVEAUX: A real challenge to a marriage there, I think.

ZARRELLA: Yes. Well, but you know, 501 days in a small space capsule. I think that, you know, the belief is that rather than two men, and you don't want to send strangers up there, that it might work out better. And they want this couple to be older, out of the child- bearing years because of the issues of radiation exposure.

MALVEAUX: Oh, OK. All right. Well, that makes some sense there. I want to bring in Chad here to talk a little bit about -- can they even survive this mission? Is that possible? What do we know about this?

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Here are the numbers. You know, it was hard enough for us to get to the moon with people in the space capsule. That was only a quarter of a million miles away. This will be 35 million miles away, 35 million mile journey. So, you have to multiply that. And you -- it's so much farther away than what the moon was.

And the other picture that I had right here behind it, this may be the greatest obstacle to getting there and back alive which would be the sun. Caroma (ph) mass ejections pushing out big time radiation toward this spacecraft. It's not going to be very well protected. It's almost going to be like doing a spacewalk at all times. They are going to have to, in the next five or six years, figure out how to protect that man, woman from the radiation that's going to be flying out of the sun for sure at them at all times. And it's out there. We don't feel it here. I mean, we get sun burns, of course, but we have an atmosphere to protect us from that radiation that they won't have an atmosphere to protect them from.

MALVEAUX: And, Chad, I understand the timing is critical, right?

MYERS: Yes.

MALVEAUX: It's five years from now. Why is that significant?

MYERS: Well, because, right now, we're about 220 million miles away. We would never get there and back. I mean, they would be dead before they came back because they would be too old. So, what happens in 2008, is that we have this approach of Mars to our rotation around the sun and we are as close as we're ever going to get until 2031 again, and that's only a 30 to 32-million mile distance right there. That's when we're the closest. Remember we talked about that there's a window for launch of the shuttle?

MALVEAUX: Yes.

MYERS: That window is there because it has to catch the ISS, the International Space Station. Well, the window to catch Mars is coming up here in about eight years.

MALVEAUX: All right. Cool stuff. I love this stuff.

MYERS: Yes.

MALVEAUX: Chad, John, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Coming up in this hour, many companies, right, they're saving money by letting employees work at home, but now Yahoo! is reversing course telling its employees, get back to the office. Is this the end to working from home?

Plus, they joined Facebook to connect with friends, instead, they were recruited into sex trafficking. This is CNN NEWSROOM, and it is happening now.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MALVEAUX: Now, back to the contentious debate over gun control. The families of several of the first graders killed in Newtown, Connecticut, they are now on Capitol Hill. They are pushing for a ban on assault weapons and really the message very touching. Just watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NEIL HESLIN: Jesse was brutally murdered at Sandy Hook school on December 14th, 20 minutes after I dropped him off.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MALVEAUX: Erin Nikitchyuk's third grade son, Bear, he was in the front hallway of Sandy Hook Elementary school when the shooting began, and a teacher saved his life. Erin is joining us from Washington. Erin, it's been almost two months now and, you know, there's a lot of people who are still struggling. First of all, just give us a sense of how you and Bear and your family are doing right now.

ERIN NIKITCHYUK: We're doing as well as can be expected. Our entire community is struggling and we will struggle for, I think, quite a -- quite some time. You know, all things considered, we're back to a new normal routine and I'm just trying to move forward.

MALVEAUX: Erin, can you tell us what it is like to be in that room? We saw that gentleman there very emotional about losing his own child. I can imagine that there's a lot of things you're thinking about and feeling when you're in that room and you hear that day being replayed over and over.

NIKITCHYUK: It's particularly emotional. I don't think there were hardly any of us there with dry eyes and yet we've heard these stories before. So, I think the impact on the legislators and those of you from home watching will probably be pretty strong, too. You can't hear these stories and not be touched. This was just a tragedy.

MALVEAUX: And, Erin, we certainly are touched. I know there's a lot of background noise because you're in the halls of Congress there. If you could -- we'll try to under -- hear you just a little bit better if you could speak up a little bit.

NIKITCHYUK: Sure.

MALVEAUX: Tell us about -- we've seen members of Congress. We saw Senator Graham and this police chief from Milwaukee get into a rather contentious, this confrontation, over the whole issue of whether or not to ban these assault weapons. What do you think is the appropriate tone? I mean, what do you believe should happen in that room to convince people that these kind of weapons should not be allowed?

NIKITCHYUK: Well, I don't think that any of us want any legislation pushed through that isn't absolutely, positively understood, vetted. We need to educate ourselves. We need to make sure that we're doing the right thing to protect everybody without encroaching on the rights of those who need weapons for hunting, for sports, and those who feel that they are better protected with a weapon. I don't think it's particularly helpful to ask questions and not wait for the answers if you've got people testifying. I believe that most people were listening quite intently and hopefully the testimonies will give the legislators more information to base good, strong legislation on that would be fair for everybody.

MALVEAUX: Do you ever want to say to those guys, you know the guys in the room, the lawmakers, knock it out? Cut it out? We're trying to make a point here and it seems like a lot of people in Washington are just talking over each other or they are simply arguing. You don't have are that kind of -- the kind of discourse, I guess, that people are looking for.

NIKITCHYUK: If you're talking, you can't hear. You can't listen. And it's not a conversation. So I would encourage all of the lawmakers to really, really try to listen to each other. There is common ground here. I think there's a fair amount of common ground here. I think we can make even small changes that will make a big difference. I know particularly with assault weapons the claim is that the percentage of crimes committed with these weapons is not large but every percentage point is a human being and it's very easy to not think that three percent is significant until that three percent is somebody that you loved.

I think coming here from Newtown to support these hearings has been important because we are the ones who are the faces of this and we are there to remind them that these are real people, real lives, and real tragedies and they are preventable. Not all of them. We understand that we will not eliminate evil from the world but we need to reduce violence in our society and we need to prevent these senseless acts.

MALVEAUX: Erin, thank you so much. Really appreciate you talking with us and the best to you, your family, and your son Bayer (ph) as well. We're also focusing on forced spending cuts that start on Friday. The government already however making some of those cuts. How hundreds of illegal immigrants once were held in jails have now been released.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MALVEAUX: Pope Benedict XVI spending his last full day as pope delivered his last public speech. Tens and thousands of people crowded in St. Peter's square to hear him, to see him. The pope recalled moments of joy and light during his last eight years leading the church but he said there were difficult times as well, which he said, and I'm quoting here, seemed like the lord was sleeping. The pope also talked about his resignation, calling it a tough decision to make.

Military officials in Afghanistan want to make something clear. They cannot truthfully say, they are winning the war. They are talking about a mistake, basically some bad math, in a military report that wrongly showed violent attacks in Afghanistan were actually down in 2012.

Well, they were not. And here's the problem. NATO has been justifying the troop drawdown from Afghanistan with stats that show that the country is less violent now. A new fixed report says that the number of deadly attacks has not changed much. A drawdown plan calls for the majority of U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan this year.

It is unlikely that the president and Congress are going to stop the forced spending cuts that take effect in just two days. But at least they say they are planning to talk about it. So sources telling us that congressional leaders have now been invited to the White House on Friday. This is the same day that the $85 billion in cuts are going to start taking effect. So you're probably wondering what does this mean for me? How could they affect me?

There would be fewer FDA inspections of food manufacturers. As many as 70,000 kids would lose access to head start and unemployment benefits cut by 9 percent. Could be 4 million fewer meals for seniors and might be waiting longer at airport security checks.

I want to bring in our CNN anchor of "The Lead" chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper. Jake, first of all et's start off with this meeting on Friday. This is that that the cuts are going to take effect. It looks like a transparent photo op. What do we expect?

JAKE TAPPER, CNN CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: There are Republicans in Congress who share that view. They think that this is a photo op, that if the president wanted to negotiate, why not have a meeting yesterday or today or tomorrow? The White House says that's not the case at all. First of all, there is a Senate vote tomorrow on a bill that would help to avoid these spending cuts and that's one of the reasons they are waiting until Friday and then just as a purely political matter, once the cuts start to take effect on Friday, you have to think the White House thinks they will have a little more leverage to try to force the Republicans to compromise on the issue of raising taxes which is what they really want the Republicans to do as part of an effort to avoid the sequester, the automatic spending cuts.

MALVEAUX: Jake, we've already started to see effects of the spending cuts. I want to talk a little bit about this, because the White House has certainly been portraying really sort of a dooms day scenario, if you will, in the days to come. But you have immigration and customs officials now announcing they have plans to release several hundred folks, illegal immigrants, in this country who are -- who have been detained and the White House, I guess, was not completely aware that that was going to take place. What has this been about?

TAPPER: Well, the White House says that this was a career immigration bureaucrat who made this decision as a way to try to save money and that they were not aware of it. The leadership of the blanket organization that controls immigration, the department of homeland security, they said they did not know about it. Republicans in Congress say they need to get to the bottom of it. The chairman of the House homeland security just sent a letter demanding letters from the head of the immigration service trying to find out more. We should say, most of these individuals, if not all, are people who have small misdemeanor violations of the law, not dangerous criminal who have been let out. But some people think this is part of a larger strategy by the administration to try to gin up support for a compromise when it comes to these these forced budget cuts by trying to get people to see the kinds of things that might have to happen.

MALVEAUX: All right, Jake, good to see you, as always.

The right to vote, quite undeniably, one of our most cherished ideals, but how far should the government go to protect that right? The Supreme Court now taking a hard look when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MALVEAUX: Is voting right acts still necessary to prevent discrimination or is it an outdated concept of the civil rights movement? The is the issue that the U.S. Supreme Court took up today. Case is considered one of the most important that the justices are going to tackle this term. Lawmakers, civil rights activists, rallied outside the courthouse. They called on the court to keep the law in place because the voting rights of minorities are still in jeopardy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE REED, ALABAMA CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: For those who say that things are all right because we got a black president, let them come to Alabama. The state of Alabama and Mississippi where the voting rights act was considered to be the most needed, these states gave Barack Obama fewer votes than any states in the nation. Racism, racism, racism is very much alive.

AL SHARPTON, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: The right to vote is still under attack. Last year, the voter I.D. laws and the long lines and the ending early voting and the stopping Sunday to the polls show that Jim Crow's son, James Crow Jr. Esquire, is still trying to do what his daddy did and that's rob us from the right to vote.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MALVEAUX: I want to bring in our political analyst, Roland Martin and historian Douglas Brinkley.

Roland, first of all, let's talk very quickly here. Based on the questions from the justices, it looks like the court actually might be leaning towards striking down at least part of the law. Do we believe that is true and what is potentially the danger of that?

ROLAND MARTIN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Suzanne, I've been talking to a number of civil rights advocates and they have been warning in warning this for the past six to mine months. It wasd four years ago the Supreme Court just reviewed the Voting Rights Act in section five, and so for them to now be looking at it again four years later, they believe they are going to do that.

It's amazing at the Rosa Parks statue unveiling. And so, juxtapose that. Here you have Republicans and Democrats talking about Rosa Parks and fighting for the right to vote and just across the street you have the supreme security court hearing this case. Many are fearful they are going to absolutely do that and it's going to cause significant problems. We saw the voter suppression last year. The VRA stopped voter I.D. in Texas and other states as well. This is a huge issue that cannot be ignored.

MALVEAUX: We saw the head of the NAACP, Ben Jealous, weigh in there outside of the courthouse. How is he responding to the case that some folks are making that it's a hold-over from the civil rights era that isn't necessary?

MARTIN: Here's the deal. Look at last year. Look what happened when efforts were made to stop Sunday voting, when you look at changing of voting hours, restricting early voting also in Florida.