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Day of Mourning in Italy for Earthquake Victims, Damascus Suburb Being Evacuated; Trump, Clinton Continue Accusations of Racism; French Court Rules Mayors May Not Ban Burkinis. Aired Midnight-12:30a ET
Aired August 27, 2016 - 00:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[00:00:12] NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR: A national day of mourning in Italy. The country remembers those who died in this week's earthquake, in the stories of great survival.
Evacuating people from one of the most besieged towns of a Syrian civil war, why these people are finally able to leave their Damascus suburb.
And the main candidates for the next president of the United States sharpen their accusations of a racial discrimination.
It's all ahead here on CNN NEWSROOM. Thank you for joining us. We're live in Atlanta. I'm Natalie Allen.
Saturday is a national day of mourning for the 281 people killed in the Wednesday's massive earthquake in central Italy. The prime minister and president are set to attend a state funeral -- excuse me for about 40 of the victims.
At the meantime some residents went back to Pescara del Tronto on Friday to go through their belongings. Thousands of people whose homes were flattened are living in camps.
Rescuers are trying to find survivors and its unclear how many people may be trapped still. For the people already rescued and in various hospitals, their trauma is far from over.
Atika Shubert talks with some of the earthquake survivors pulled from the rubble.
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ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: A little girl plucked from the rubble alive, rescued 17 hours after the earthquake.
Many of the victims here were children enjoying their summer holidays with their families. Four-year-old Giorgia Renaldo survived because her older sister Julia shielded her from the rubble, sacrificing her own life for her baby sister.
This is Ascoli Hospital. And this is where that little girl pulled out of the rubble was brought to for treatment.
Ninety-nine of those injured in the earthquake were brought here. And this is where family members wait here for word of their loved ones still living the trauma of Giorgia.
Here Giorgia's father is coming to terms with the loss of one daughter and the survival of the other. He told doctors he was not yet ready to speak to media.
But others talked to try and make sense of the destruction. Giuseppe Bagnato was lying in bed with his wife Dominica when the earthquake struck. Now he is waiting for her to come out of a lengthy surgery.
"For us it's an end," he told us. "It's a house with so many memories and so much life but it's finished. We're scared. We won't be coming back. We saw death. We felt it. My wife"-- and then he breaks down in tears. He says, "We prayed. The Madonna wanted to save us."
This 19-year-old, Mattia Rendina was sleeping on the top floor of his family's summer house, his mother in the room next door when the house collapsed.
MATTIA RENDINA, EARTHQUAKE SURVIVOR: My first thought was my mother. My mother is here. But I can't help her.
SHUBERT: Rendina was buried in the rubble. It took his uncle an hour for his uncle to find him and dig him out with his bare hands.
RENDINA: When I came out, I kissed him because and -- I said to him that he was in my life and -- but my thoughts are still of my mother because she passed away to god. She gone.
SHUBERT: He survived with hairline fractures to several vertebrae. His greatest pain is the loss of his mother.
RENDINA: I like this because my mother teach me to be a person like this. To be strong, yes.
SHUBERT: Given new life the survivors of Italy's devastating earthquake are healing slowly.
Atika Shubert, CNN, Ascoli Piceno, Italy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ALLEN: In Syria thousands of civilians and hundreds of rebel fighters are evacuating a Damascus suburb that has endured a nearly four-year- long siege. According to state media they are being given safe passage out Daraya.
Under an evacuation deal between the Syrian government and rebels, Daraya has been heavily damaged by bombs and fighting. It's also faced constant water and food shortages. Syrian state-run media say families will be taken to temporary housing facilities in Damascus. Rebel fighters will go Idlib in northwestern Syrian.
The brutal Syrian civil war is affectedly getting even more complicated and multilayered.
Turkey vows to continue its first major military incursion into Syria after helping liberate a key Syrian town from ISIS.
[00:05:06] Ankara says its goal is to drive out the terror group along the Turkish-Syrian border. And prevent Kurdish fighters from seizing territory.
Our Senior International Correspondent, Ben Wedeman has more now from Turkey.
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BEN WEDEMAN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It was by the standards of the Syrian war a decisive victory. In less than 24 hours, fighters with the free Syrian army drove ISIS out of the border town of Jarablus. They couldn't have done it without the active participation of the Turkish military, the second largest NATO armed forces after the United States.
Fehim Isa commands the FSA Sultan Murad Brigade a Syrian-Turkmen unit.
"For now our focus is on ISIS," he tells me. "We came to rid this area of ISIS."
But he doesn't deny they've also clashed with U.S.-backed Kurdish militias which Turkey insists must withdraw east of the Euphrates.
The U.S. spent hundreds of millions of dollars to arm and train Syrian rebels but has little to show for it, while American official see Kurdish fighters as far more effective in the war against ISIS.
Turkish involvement, not American support help provide these Syrian fighters with a rare victory.
"The Turkish role here will be to protect the region," says the Commander Fahim because of the world's indifference and insufficient backing for the Free Syrian Army, Turkey is providing that support.
U.S. aircraft did strike ISIS targets during the push on Jarablus. But the non-Syrian boots on the ground are Turkish.
Officials here say one of the goals of this operation is to set up a terror-free zone in effect, a buffer zone to insure the safety of Turkish citizens living along the border.
This is the wall that separates Turkey from Syria. For years, Turkish forces watched from this side a Syria descended into an ever more brutal and complicated civil war.
Now, Turkish forces have crossed that wall and in a sense crossed the rubicund into a war, it may be very difficult to get out of.
Ben Wedeman, CNN, Karkamis, Turkey.
(END VIDEO CLIP) ALLEN: As for larger war or after nearly 10 hours of talks in Geneva, the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says that the U.S. and Russia are close to reaching a Syrian ceasefire agreement but he says Washington won't rush into a deal with Moscow.
For more here's CNN's Matthew Chance in Russia.
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MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, after marathon talks in Geneva, Russia and the United States were apparently unable to reach a final agreement to cooperate in Syria, although both sides reported progress on that front.
The U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said he had long and productive talks with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov. He said he achieved clarity with the Russians on most steps towards renewing a Syrian truce.
At a joint news conference in Geneva, the Russian foreign minister said the two had made a number of steps forward and it also discussed ways of addressing the humanitarian situation in Syria including Aleppo which he said was at the center of their discussions.
Russia and United States are on opposite sides of the war in Syria with Moscow a strong backer of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Washington calling on him to step down. But they have a common enemy in ISIS and other Jihadist groups. And talks have been focusing on how to cooperate for instance in the sharing battlefield intelligence.
It was also been talk of Russia pressuring the Syrian government to end air strikes on densely populated areas. Those discussions were told are still continuing despite the fact there was no conclusive agreement at these talks.
Matthew Chance, CNN, Moscow.
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ALLEN: The Tunisian parliament voted in a new government, Friday. Prime Minister Youssef Chahed's national unity party won with over 75 percent support. Tunisia's President won (ph) Chahed in early August after a no-confidence vote ousted the former prime minister in July.
In Bolivia five people are under arrest for the brutal killing of the country's deputy of the ministry of interior and police.
Authorities say, the minister was kidnapped and beaten to death by a group of minors on Thursday. He had gone to the region of Panduro to try to foster dialogue with striking miner's union, the suspects including union leader.
[00:10:00] Mining unions have been blockading roads over falling mineral prices and demanding lesser government restrictions.
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FRANKLIN PAREJA, POLITICAL SCIENTIST, (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): The cooperative miners in Bolivia are a privileged sector who for 10 years because of high prices of minerals had tremendous income.
Now, that the climate is no longer that good, to maintain their compensation and income they have confronted the government with completely unreasonable and illegitimate demands, this is what is generating tension and violence.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ALLEN: In addition to the arrest, 40 miners are under investigation in the minister's death.
In the U.S. presidential race, Republicans are denouncing new accusations against Donald Trump. What Tim Kaine said that has them so riled, coming up here.
Plus a French court rules on whether one town can stop women from wearing burkini to the beach.
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ALLEN: In the race for the White House, Democrats continue to accuse Donald Trump of racism on Friday. Their vice presidential pick, Tim Kaine told a Florida crowd, "Trump promotes values of the white extremist group, the Ku Klux Klan."
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TIM KAINE, U.S. DEMOCRATIC VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Donald Trump is their candidate because Donald Trump is pushing their values. Ku Klux Klan values, David Duke values, Donald Trump values are not American values.
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ALLEN: Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus condemn Kaine's comment stating, "Tim Kaine sunk to new lows with dirty and deplorable attacks which have no place in this campaign. No matter how desperate he is to distract from his running mate Hillary Clinton's litany of corruption scandals, there is no excuse for these vile and baseless smears."
Trump also fired back. He CNN's Anderson Cooper, Hillary Clinton is the bigot.
Jim Acosta has more on the latest attacks.
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JIM ACOSTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is shaping up to the race to the bottom. And the bottom is nowhere insight when it comes to their clash over race.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators.
ACOSTA: Trump fired off a new attack on Instagram reminding voters of Clinton's use of the term super predators and pushing her husband's crime bill back in the '90s.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You called out President Clinton for defending Secretary Clinton the use of the term super predator back in the 90s when she supported the crime bill. Why did you call him that?
BERNIE SANDERS, (D) FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Because it was a racist term.
ACOSTA: Trump is trying to bolster his case that the former secretary of state is a bigot. An accusation he defended to CNN's Anderson Cooper.
DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: She is a bigot. She has been extremely, extremely bad for African-Americans.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: But hatred is at the core of that or just like of ...
TRUMP: Or maybe she's lazy.
ACOSTA: The GOP nominee seems to be doing anything but clarifying his position on what to do with the nation's undocumented.
[00:15:04] Early year this week, Trump claimed his immigration policy is softening. Now, not so much.
TRUMP: Well, I don't think it's softening, I heard people say it's a hardening, actually.
ACOSTA: But Trump also appears to have abandoned a proposal he floated earlier this week that would have allowed law-abiding undocumented immigrants to stay in the U.S. if they pay back taxes.
TRUMP: There is no path to legalization unless they leave the country and come back.
ACOSTA: The campaign now wants those immigrants to return to their country of origin.
KELLYANNE CONWAY, DONALD TRUMP CAMPAIGN MANAGER: You can return home, and then if you like to go stand in line like everybody else is, the thing that we learn in kindergarten, stand in line, wait your turn.
ACOSTA: Clinton's advisers argue, Trump is simply stumbling over a dangerous policy that hasn't really changed. Her campaign's message, in it's latest ad, it's Trump who is the racist.
TRUMP: Your schools are good. You have no jobs.
Look at my African-American over here.
ACOSTA: Clinton's warning to the nation, "Trump will always be Trump." HILLARY CLINTON, (D) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: He has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia and it's deeply disturbing that he is taking hate groups that live in the dark regions of the internet and making them mainstream and helping a radical fringe, take over the Republican Party.
ACOSTA: Trump is denying those allegations.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you want white supremacists to vote for you?
TRUMP: No, I don't at all, not at all.
ACOSTA: And accusing Clinton of desperation.
TRUMP: When Democratic policies fail they are left with only this one tired argument. You're racist, you're racist, you're racist.
ACOSTA: So far, top Republicans haven't raced to the cameras to defend Trump against these latest attacks. The RNC's response to that, they are on vacation.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congress is on recess. It's August. And there's a lot of reasons.
ACOSTA: Trump is also facing new questions about his recently hired campaign CEO Stephen Bannon, who's once charged with domestic violence 20 years ago, a case as first reported by Politico that involved Bannon's ex-wife and was latter dropped.
A Bannon spokesperson told Politico the bottom line is, he has a great relationship with his children, the twins. He has a great relationship with the ex-wife. He still supports them.
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ALLEN: CNN's Jim Acosta reporting.
Representatives for Bannon and the Trump campaign did not respond to our requests for comment about that domestic violence charge sent a long ago. Police confirmed, the police report is authentic.
Federal police in Brazil are recommending charges against Former President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. They say Lula and his wife should be indicted for money laundering and corruption. Its part of a probe into an embezzlement scheme that state-run oil company Petrobras. Prosecutors must now decide whether to ask a judge for the indictment.
French mayors do not have the right to ban full-length swim suits worn by Muslim women known as burkinis. Friday's ruling does not affect all towns with the ban. But it could set a precedent. Why the ban in the first place?
Here's Senior International Correspondent, Jim Bittermann from Paris.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) JIM BITTERMANN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: This supreme administrative court ruled basically in the case of one particular town Villeneuve-Loubet in the south of France where the mayor issued a decree forbidding any kind of beach wear that was suggestive of religious affiliation.
He said that this was a provocation could lead to a disturbance in the public order. The court ruled that he overstepped his bounds essentially that a mayor couldn't rule that on his own, that in fact that kind of a decision would have to be made at a national level.
The question now is whether the other communities who have enacted similar decrees in there, about 30 of them. In fact whether those mayors will see as jurisprudence and say, "We're not going to try to enact -- enforce our bans or whether they will try to test this even further.
The court made it clear that anybody who is fined under the law in Villeneuve-Loubet, the decree of Villeneuve-Loubet can in fact challenge the mayor and bring countersuit. So the other mayors may think that this is too much and then may back down or they may continue to test it.
Politically there's another issue here and that is that the political parties moving ahead toward the presidential election in 2017 have taken this on especially the center right and far right parties and have suggested that they would enact a burkini ban if that's what you want to call it across the country, perhaps in the next legislative session.
Jim Bittermann, CNN, Paris.
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ALLEN: All right, will they solved that in France. Who goes into the water wearing what. You want to stay out of the waters according to Derek, if you're anywhere in the western pacific toward Japan.
DEREK VAN DAM, WEATHER ANCHOR: Yeah, that's true, because we are monitoring a fairly large typhoon that does have its eye set on the mainland. So something that's going to be a big story going for us -- over the next three days or so. But you do have time to prepare. I'll tell you where in just a little second.
[00:20:01] Take a look at these graphics and you'll see exactly where typhoon Lionrock is located. Wow, what a name huh. What do you think, Natalie?
ALLEN: I like it ...
VAN DAM: Well, we want this thing to be the last mean, don't we? It's 175 kilometers per hour this is the latest information from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, we like to pass that latest information up to you so you can plan accordingly.
This storm still not impacting land yet, however we have seen some strengthening with this storm. You can see a very defined eye. And a lot of the computer models are starting to show this northeasterly trek running basically parallel to the mainland of Japan. But in the future we're talking three to five days out.
We do anticipate more of a northwesterly turn. Exactly where, well, time will tell. But you can see the latest computer models that have shifted it just to the north of Tokyo. But it doesn't leave Tokyo you out of the cone of uncertainty which is the shaded area here. And you can kind of track the progress on how intense this storm should be going three to five days out anywhere between 140 to 160 kilometer per hour sustained winds.
So definitely something that people on mainland Japan basically north -- from Tokyo northern to Sendai and the Tokyo prefecture or excuse me, the Hokkaido prefecture, I should say. I need to monitor very closely that is already producing some rainfall across this region associated with this tropical system.
We have the potential of flooding and mudslides and landslides across mainland Japan again really for the northern third prefectures across the mainland of Japan.
Now, taking you into India, we've had a significant amount of rainfall lately as well. But we do have about 2 percent below the average monsoon rains for this time of year. We can just how much rain is already falling. More rain expected in the future. There has been flooding across the outer Kurdish region.
And I want to end with this. Because in the United States this is new to CNN as well, across the Kansas City region in the U.S. State of Missouri there has been flash flooding that's been ongoing within the past hour or so.
Take a look at some of these visuals so you can see what's taking place. Some of this just coming in from one of our affiliates and you can see cars, full SUVs actually inundated by this flood water, Natalie. This also will be a big story for us here locally within United States for the days to come.
ALLEN: All right, Louisiana and now Missouri.
VAN DAM: Now Missouri.
ALLEN: All right, Derek, thank you.
Will scientists creation could help us answer another secret of the universe. We'll have details ahead on the lab-made black hole that could prove one at Steven Hawking theory, that's coming after.
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ALLEN: A scientist in Israel has single handedly simulated a black hole inside his laboratory. What he created confirms a 42-year-old theory by physicist Stephen Hawking and could win Hawking the Nobel prize.
Ian Lee has our story from Haifa.
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IAN LEE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You are witnessing what few people on the planet have seen before, this blue laser creating a black hole, illustrated in movies like "Star Trek" cosmic black holes have enormous destructive powers to consume entire worlds. Jeff Steinhauer single handedly created this force of nature at his lab in Haifa, Israel.
[00:24:59] JEFF STEINHAUER, ATOMIC PHYSICS LABORATORY TECHNICIAN: While working on a different experiment, I suddenly saw a phenomenon and realized these atoms must be traveling at supersonic speeds. This is a analog black hole, a sonic black hole.
LEE: That was in 2009. Unlike Gargantua an interstellar, Jeff's black hole measures a 10th of a millimeter and lasts 2/10 of a second.
He first uses mirrors and lasers to chill the atoms close to absolute zero, creating a flow of atoms called a Bose-Einstein stream.
The stream enters a vacuum and the blue laser triggers the black hole. The edge of the black hole is known as the event horizon.
At our blue line here this is outside of the black hole.
STEINHAUER: Exactly.
LEE: We have the event horizon right in the middle and everything that is a bit lighter going that way that's inside the black hole.
STEINHAUER: Exactly.
LEE: What Jeff observed next excites him, confirming a 42-year-old theory by renounce physicist Steven Hawking.
STEINHAUER: It happens spontaneously. That's one of the very interesting aspects of the Hawking radiation is the sound wave coming out of the black hole has positive energy and the sound wave falling into the hole has negative energy.
LEE: Physically seen here by this gray line. Hawking has yet to comment on the discovery.
Jeff says his black holes aren't dangerous like we see in the movies. How do we know? His machine has created more than 4,000 and we're still here.
STEINHAUER: It's not a real black hole. It only absorbs sound waves.
LEE: Sonic black holes allow scientists to safely study their galactic cousins.
STEINHAUER: Well, they're both waves and the equations describing these waves are the same equations in the real black hole and the sonic black hole. So that's how one can test Hawking's predictions about light waves by studying sound waves.
LEE: This discovery, it's confirmed by the scientific community advances our understanding of the universe.
STEINHAUER: Probably one of the main reasons that one studies black holes is not to learn about black hole themselves but to learn about the new laws of physics.
In addition, laws of physics often have applications years down the road and no one knows today what they're going to be.
LEE: One more giant leap in unraveling the secrets of the universe.
Ian Lee, CNN, Haifa, Israel.
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ALLEN: Will he Peter Ponder that? That's CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Natalie Allen.
On China is up next after our top stories.
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