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Power Returning in Texas, Food and Water Shortages Persist; Allegations of Gang Rape in Xinjiang Detention Camps; U.S. Life Expectancy Fell by 1 Year in First Half of 2020; U.S. Winter Weather Causing Major Vaccination Delays; Vatican: Employees Refusing Vaccine May Lose Their Jobs; Japan's Ruling Party Invites Women into Key Meetings; NASA's Perseverance Rover Achieves Daring Landing on Mars; Trump Turns Down Meeting with Nikki Haley. Aired 12-12:45a ET

Aired February 19, 2021 - 00:00   ET

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

JOHN VAUSE, CNN ANCHOR: This is CNN NEWSROOM. Hello, everyone. I'm John Vause at CNN's world headquarters.

[00:00:53]

Coming up this hour, the mess in Texas from a winter storm goes from bad to bad, with many now having no electricity, millions are being advised to boil tap water. That is, if they have running water.

Beijing allegedly adds gang rape to its brutal and vicious campaign targeting Uyghur Muslim women.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Touchdown confirmed. This is history on the surface of Mars.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAUSE: And tango delta. An historic touchdown on Mars by NASA's Perseverance, skipping orbit for a direct landing, and the start in the search for past life.

It's a low bar, but the good news for Texas is the number of people without electricity is no longer being counted in the millions, as in three million, just 24 hours ago, but rather in the hundreds of thousands.

Still, the extreme winter weather over the weekend, which knocked out much of the state's power grid continues to wreak havoc. Many are without food and medicine.

More than 13 million people, about half the state's population have seen disruptions to supplies of running water. Millions more are being advised to boil tap water.

And in the capital, Austin, 325 million gallons of clean drinking water was lost, after pipes burst during the long, deep sustained freeze. Many are now lining up with buckets and containers and public pumps, while many others have been melting snow.

And what was a power crisis is now a water emergency, with firefighters struggling because of low pressure and frozen hydrants.

CNN's Camila Bernal reports now from Dallas.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is what we came back to.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Our whole apartment! Look at the -- y'all, I cannot believe this!

CAMILA BERNAL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Anger boiling over as Texans endure more pain. Millions are now facing a new problem: more water disruptions. This woman's apartment in Dallas, flooded.

QIANA ABRAMS, DALLAS, TEXAS, RESIDENT: And now we don't got (EXPLETIVE DELETED)! Everything that we brought here, we don't have nothing nothing, y'all!

BERNAL: Broken pipes, failing systems piling onto the pain Texans have felt since Sunday. The White House has declared states of emergency for Texas and Oklahoma, with 22 million from Texas to Louisiana now under hard freeze warnings.

PHILIP SHELLEY, FORT WORTH, TEXAS, RESIDENT: We're just left sitting in a cold dark room, in the middle of the night with a -- with a crying baby and a -- and a, you know, in pain life. And that's -- that's what hurts the most, is there's nothing we can really do besides sit and wait.

BERNAL: Texas Governor Greg Abbott pledging to reform the organization that runs nearly all of the state's power grid, known as ERCOT.

GOV. GREG ABBOTT (R-TX): I'm taking responsibility for the current status of ERCOT. Again, I find what has happened unacceptable.

BERNAL: And saying an investigation is underway.

ABBOTT: We have already begun a process to make sure that events like this never again happen in Texas. And that starts with reforming the agency in charge of electric reliability in Texas, which is ERCOT.

BERNAL: People trying to do all they can to stay warm, even burning a baby crib.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's the only way we can stay warm, because the power is out.

BERNAL: And this mother trying to keep her kids warm in the car.

SYLVIA CERDA SALINAS, MCALLEN, TEXAS, RESIDENT: It's horrible. We've been driving around during the day with the heater on in the car just to keep warm.

BERNAL: The water disruptions on top of everything.

MAYOR STEVE ADLER (D), AUSTIN, TEXAS: It is too much to ask of anybody. People are angry. They're confused, frustrated, and I am, too.

BERNAL: The cities of Austin and San Antonio issuing boil water notices Wednesday evening.

ADLER: This is a dire place.

BERNAL: ERCOT saying they were actually only moments away from an even more catastrophic failure.

BILL MAGNESS, CEO, ERCOT: It was seconds and minutes, given the amount of generation is coming off the system.

BERNAL: At its peak, more than three million people were without power, the vast majority have had their power restored. Some may be days away from getting it back, and people here want answers now.

[00:05:12]

RACHEL SIEGAL, DALLAS, TEXAS, RESIDENT: I expect a full apology, as to how this has been handled, and I expect some sort of solutions so that this doesn't happen again.

BERNAL (on camera): And most of the people that we've talked to over the last couple of days say they agree with the investigation. They want to know exactly what happened here in Texas and why this became such a big mess.

But before they get any answers, they need to deal with the problems in front of them, and for millions of Texans, that problem is water. Not just boil water notices. There are many people here who don't have any water whatsoever.

So what they're doing is collecting some of that ice and that snow, putting it into buckets, taking it inside their homes for later use.

In Dallas, Texas, Camila Bernal, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VAUSE: Judge Clay Jenkins is the highest elected official in Dallas County and director of emergency manager -- management, rather. Sir, thank you for being with us. I know your time is precious.

JUDGE CLAY JENKINS, DALLAS COUNTY: Thank you so much for having me.

VAUSE: OK, we're now days into this crisis. Normally, things start to get better this point. But in parts of Texas, it's gone from bad, maybe not worse but bad to bad. So right now, what's the biggest challenge facing the people of Dallas County?

JENKINS: Well, the biggest challenge right now, we've got heat again, but for many people there, water isn't safe to drink, and they're having to boil that water.

And then, as the ground heats up and as the temperatures heat up, you're going to have a lot of pipes that break from freezing during the four days that we didn't have any heat and electricity in homes. And so I'm very worried about our homes flooding and damage happening there. There are not nearly enough plumbers to go around, so we've still got dark days ahead of us, but at least now we -- we are freezing in our homes.

VAUSE: The governor of Texas, he had a message to all Texans who had been struggling during this crisis. Here he is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ABBOTT: The challenges they're dealing with are truly human struggles that they should never have to face. And as a human being, we want to alleviate the struggles that they are going through, most immediately. But from a longer term perspective as governor of Texas, I want to ensure this never happens again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAUSE: Given that officials in El Paso, Texas, who are not on the Texas power grid. They spent millions of dollars winterizing their systems after a huge outage in 2011.

And right now, they have electricity in El Paso, Texas. It would seem Governor Abbott had a long responsibility long before now to make sure this never happened in the first place.

JENKINS: He did, and there was a federal report and a state report after the 2011 event, which you may recall we had a frozen Super Bowl that year.

After that event, telling him he needed to weatherize our generation capacity, he chose to not order that for industries that were building new -- new plants to take advantage of fracking and some wind energy that was coming online.

And when you tell companies that are regulated that they don't have to do something in a commodity market, you are telling those companies not to do it, because it's about getting your -- your commodity to market at the lowest price, and you can't afford to do things that -- that your competitors are not doing.

So he made a choice not to have anybody weatherize and paid a very high cost for that. It was completely predictable. It's been talked about in reports. I -- I addressed the legislature two years ago and we talked about this.

VAUSE: There's also word that, if not for those sudden rolling blackouts, the whole power grid would have suffered some kind of catastrophic failure. This is according to the body which oversees the electricity providers in Texas.

The quote is, "If operators had not acted in that moment, the state could have suffered blackouts that could have occurred for months and left Texas in an indeterminately long crisis.

What's your understanding of how close Texas came to that disaster, because the governor is noncommittal. He says that claim will be looked at as part of an overall investigation.

JENKINS: They came very close. I had to see the power companies are caught, delivery companies all calling me and telling me just how precarious it was at the moment. And so it was very close to happening.

Our system is the oldest by far in the country. We have gas lines in the ground that are 70 and 80 years old that they stubbornly refuse to regulate and -- and get replaced, which froze and kept us from getting power to our biggest plants, the gas-fed plants. And so it was very, very close.

[00:10:05]

Look, ERCOT, the government is trying to blame a company called ERCOT, which is just a company that they hired to manage the grid. But it's like an air traffic control. I'm not saying the company did a good job, but an air traffic controller doesn't control whether or not the planes are worthy to fly and have deicing and equipment on them to fly in cold weather.

The governor is the person who determined whether those planes were fit to fly in cold weather. And he said, Build us cheaper ones that fly when it's not too hot and not too cold, and we'll deal with blackouts when we have extreme weather. And that was a bad choice, and we told him it was a bad choice 10 years ago, five years ago, two years ago, and he's refused to listen.

VAUSE: Still a bad choice. Judge Jenkins, thank you. We wish you all the very best and all the best for the people there in Dallas County. Thank you.

JENKINS: Thank you.

VAUSE: Well, this quick travel update now. The junior senator from Texas, Republican Ted Cruz cut short his weekend vacation to the seaside resort down in Cancun, Mexico.

From the moment he boarded the flight on Wednesday, Cruz said it just didn't feel right. These other passengers seemed to have a similar feeling. They posted pictures of a vacationing Cruz on social media, sparking a lot of criticism, given the crisis gripping his state.

At first, Cruz blamed his two daughters. He says he -- they wanted to take a trip with their friends. And then went on to say, in hindsight, it was all just a big mistake. He wouldn't do it again.

Now, new reporting from "The Washington Post" that Cruz violated CDC guidelines last Fourth of July with a trip to Jamaica.

Protesters are once again on the streets of Myanmar's largest city, marking two weeks now of public demonstrations against last month's military coup. Protesters are demanding the release of civilian leaders who have been detained, including Aung San Suu Kyi.

A Burmese human rights group says more than 500 people have been arrested since the coup.

Shocking allegations of gang rape are emerging from China's vast and secretive detainment camps in the northwest region. According to U.S. State Department, more than a million Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority, are being held in hundreds of interment camps, part of a policy which Washington says amounts to genocide.

Beijing denies the allegations but not the existence of the camps, which they claim offer vocational training and reeducation.

CNN's Ivan Watson has this report and a warning his report contains language some viewers will find disturbing.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

IVAN WATSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The traumatized survivor of a nine-month nightmare, Tursunay Ziyawudun, a refugee from China's Xinjiang region describes the torture and rape she says she endured between detention in a Chinese internment camp.

(on camera): How is your health today, after your experience in the camps?

TURSUNAY ZIYAWUDUN, FORMER XINJIANG CAMP DETAINEE (through translator): I was in a lot of pain and suffered bleeding after I arrived in the U.S., I had to undergo surgery, and my uterus was removed. I suffered a lot of damage.

WATSON: Tursunay is an ethnic Uyghur. In March 2018, she says police in Xinjiang detained her at a so-called vocational training center for women.

ZIYAWUDUN (through translator): Because I lived in Kazakhstan for five years, they wanted me to confess to say I was influenced by American propaganda and foreign organizations.

WATSON: During one interrogation, Tursunay says guards beat and kicked her until she blacked out.

In the camp, Tursunay says authorities began forcibly implanting female detainees with contraceptive IEDs. After a botched procedure led to bleeding, she says she was taken into a room.

ZIYAWUDUN (through translator): There were three guards. They inserted a stun baton inside me and twisted and shocked me with it. I passed out.

WATSON: On a separate occasion, she says guards wearing masks once again took her from her cell.

ZIYAWUDUN (through translator): In the next room, I heard another girl crying and screaming. I saw about five men going into that room. I thought they were torturing her. Then, I was gang raped. After that, I realized what they also did to her.

WATSON: Tursunay first revealed these claims in an interview with the BBC. The Chinese government did not answer our questions about the women named in this report. But Beijing did vehemently deny any human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

WENG WANBIN, CHINESE MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS: There has never been such a thing a systematic sexual abuse and mistreatment against women. China is a country ruled by law.

WATSON: There's strict state censorship in Xinjiang, and police followed and harassed CNN journalists when they last visited.

(on camera): Tursunay claims she was held at a facility outside the city of Ghulja. CNN has also obtained rare testimony from another woman who says she worked in a camp near the city of Urumqi.

QELBINUR SIDIK, FORMER TEACHER IN XINJIANG CAMP (through translator): The women all had their hair shaved off. They wore gray uniforms with orange vests and printed numbers on them.

[00:15:06]

WATSON: For 28 years, Qelbinur Sidik worked as an elementary school teacher. In 2017, she says she was ordered to teach Mandarin at an internment camp holding thousands of women.

Speaking from relative safety in the Netherlands, Qelbinur says on her first day of work in the camp, she witnessed a disturbing sight.

SIDIK (through translator): Two soldiers were carrying a Uyghur girl out on a stretcher. There was no spark of life on her face. Later, a female police officer told me the girl died on her way to the hospital due to heavy bleeding.

WATSON: Although Qelbinur did not know the cause of the woman's death, she says later that same female police officer told her male guards routinely gang raped detainees at the camp. The officer also told her --

SIDIK (through translator): When they drank at night, policeman told each other how they raped and tortured girls.

WATSON: In previous reporting on China's mass internment policy in Xinjiang, CNN heard testimony from Gulbahar Jaliliba (ph), a citizen of Kazakhstan, who alleges that she endured sexual assault from a guard during prolonged detention in Xinjiang.

CNN cannot independently verify the accounts of these women. China has attacked their credibility, calling these women "actors playing victims from Xinjiang."

(on camera): The Chinese government says no women are abused in the camps? What do you say to the Chinese government?

ZIYAWUDUN (voice-over): I'm a 43-year-old woman. Do you think this is something I'd be proud of sharing with the whole world? I would tell them that I'm not afraid of them anymore, because they already killed my soul.

WATSON (voice-over): She hopes her brave decision to speak out will encourage others to do the same.

Ivan Watson, CNN, Hong Kong.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VAUSE: Well, the winter weather in the U.S. is laying disaster onto a crisis, slowing already slow rates in vaccinations during a pandemic which we now know has taken a huge toll on how long Americans are expected to live.

Also ahead, NASA's perseverance brings a world of firsts to Mars. The first to search for signs of ancient life; first to record the sounds of Mars. The first to fly a helicopter on Mars or any other planet, for that matter. A lot more, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

VAUSE: The severe winter weather in the U.S. has forced a temporary closure of many vaccination centers. And several states reported delays in deliveries and problems with vaccine distribution.

But a White House COVID adviser insists no vaccine has been lost or wasted, at least so far. Nearly 58 million doses have been administered.

Meantime, life expectancy in the U.S. took a significant hit in the first half of 2020, falling from 78.8 to 77.8, an entire year. The drop was even more dramatic for minorities.

Jonna Mazet is an epidemiologist and disease oncology professor, also part of the Global Virome Project at the California -- University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Thank you for being with us, Professor.

JONNA MAZET, EPIDEMIOLOGIST: Pleased to be with you.

VAUSE: OK. This fall in life expectancy, it's been proven in by the pandemic in many ways, is it safe to assume it will rebound if and when the pandemic ends?

MAZET: It should rebound, if history tells us anything, and if we all get well. But that's critical. Right? We need to get well. It's a numbers game. We can't lose 500,000, almost. We're approaching half a million Americans just from COVID deaths. Not counting the deaths of people who have avoided going to see their physicians, and delayed treatment for things they may have lived longer, had they sought treatment.

So, just as we saw with the 1919 flu pandemic, and with tragedies from death counts from wars. We're seeing the numbers drop. And tragically, as you mentioned, the inequities in our society and the disparities, the racial disparities, are also striking.

VAUSE: Yes. If you look at those numbers, white Americans now live nearly on average six years longer than black Americans. That's the widest margin between these groups in more than two decades. And there's no real reason why that disparity has to be there. It speaks to a failure in public policy.

MAZET: Yes, I mean, we have hundreds of years of reasons why that is, and, certainly, this terrible pandemic is highlighting the racial inequities in our country. Frontline workers are much more well- represented in people of color, and we are that seeing those people are getting exposed and getting sick more severely.

VAUSE: Yes, well, the big winter storms have stalled vaccinations in many parts of the country. I want you to listen to White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, who says overall, the impact of this remains unknown for now. Here he is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: We do know that it is significant. When you have that swathe of the country that you just showed that is really, in many respects, immobilized. Well, obviously, it's an issue. It's been slowed down in some places, going to a grinding halt.

We're just going to have to make up for it. As soon as the weather, you know, lifts a bit, the ice melts, and we can get the trucks out and the people out and getting the vaccine into people's arms, we're going to just have to make up for it. Namely, do double time when this thing clears up.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAUSE: Yes. I think Dr. Fauci is a realist. He knows that nothing can be done right now, and you just have to try and make up at the end, you know, on the back end of all this. But what would you expect to the impact from losing 70 days, or maybe even a week or so, of getting people vaccinated?

MAZET: Well, it's a bit of a logistical nightmare. But I think people should understand and -- and feel a little bit less anxiety in that we do have a good buffer of time, especially for people who are really concerned about getting their second vaccine on time.

We can delay that second vaccine, up to a total of six weeks from the first vaccine. So -- so for those who have appointments right now, I'm sure it's very stressful, and we absolutely need to get people vaccinated as quickly as possible.

I know people are moving mountains to get vaccines to the people that need them. All of us, in fact. But this delay is devastating.

The only good thing I can say is that you have the time for your vaccines to still work, and on top of that, we are getting more efficient when we have the -- the systems, and the weather is not against us. So I do think that we can catch up.

VAUSE: Well, there is one issue, and it's good that we can catch up. But Michael Osterholm is also a White House advisor on the pandemic. He says there's another, much bigger issue we should be worried about. Here he is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAEL OSTERHOLM, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE RESEARCH AND POLICY, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: The biggest challenge we had, up until the cold weather, was not enough vaccine to begin with. So this vaccine will get into the system. It will get caught up in the course of the next two weeks.

The challenge we have right now is that there's about 22 million Americans who have received their first dose, waiting for their second dose, and there's no second doses of such.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAUSE: We speak to your point about the second dose and people being nervous and actually getting it done? There can be a time for delay?

But how much of a difference will Johnson & Johnson's one-shot vaccine make? And why does it take so long to be reviewed by the FDA for emergency approval? I think it's coming up next week.

MAZET: I think so, and we're very hopeful for that vaccine. I can't speak to the FDA's timing and what's going on with that review. There are differences. This is a different kind of vaccine, and the two that we are using right now in the states.

And so, it's a -- it's a process, like almost starting over. And the first two did take quite some time. There were just much more ahead of schedule than Johnson & Johnson.

We love the one shot and that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is a little easier to store, which will reduce some of the logistical problems. We also want to make sure that it's as efficacious and ready for some of the new variants that might come.

VAUSE: It will hopefully make a huge difference if it is approved for emergency use.

Jonna Mazet, thank you so much for being with us. We appreciate it.

MAZET: Thank you.

VAUSE: There's more developing countries accuse those wealthy nations of vaccine hoarding. The U.S. president is about to unveil a $2 billion contribution to COVAX. The global vaccine initiative led by the World Health Organization was snubbed by his predecessor.

Joe Biden's announcement is expected to come through in a call with G- 7 leaders in the coming days. Meantime, Brazil has now surpassed 10 million confirmed COVID cases,

the third most in the world after the U.S. and India. The Brazilian death toll approaching a quarter of a million.

For those who don't want to receive a vaccine, who work in the Vatican may want to think twice. The city state's governor says everyone must get inoculated or risk losing their jobs.

CNN's Delia Gallagher has details.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DELIA GALLAGHER, CNN VATICAN CORRESPONDENT: The Vatican told its employees if they don't get vaccinated for COVID-19, they risk losing their jobs.

A decree from the governor of the Vatican City state, Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, calls vaccinations a responsible decision and says that those employees who refuse without a legitimate health reason, may be transferred or have their contract terminated.

Pope Francis is a big proponent of vaccinations for COVID-19. He himself has been vaccinated, and he has called it an ethical choice.

The Vatican has about four and a half thousand employees, and they began vaccinations for employees and their families on January 13. And since the beginning of the pandemic, the Vatican has reported 27 cases of coronavirus. Most of those occurred among the Swiss guards who live together in barracks inside the Vatican walls.

Delia Gallagher, CNN, Rome.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VAUSE: Some unexpected diplomatic signals from the Biden administration to Iran. The State Department says the U.S. would sit down for talks for Tehran and other signatories to the Iran nuclear deal before either side takes any tangible action towards compliance.

Still not clear if Iran would agree to this. Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal back in 2018, despite Iran's full compliance.

The U.S. has also informed the United Nations it's reversing Trump's plan to reinstate sanctions on Iran and is lifting travel restrictions on Iranian diplomats.

The White House has unveiled a sweeping proposal that could eventually make U.S. citizens of millions of immigrants. The proposal faces an uphill battle in a bitterly divided Congress. One official says the president wants to start a conversation about overhauling the system, and he is open to negotiations.

Biden's plan provides an 8-year path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, expands worker visas, reduces restrictions on family immigration, removes the word "alien" from U.S. immigration laws, replaces it with the term "noncitizen."

Well, women lawmakers in Japan finally being invited into the room where it all happens, but they only get to take a look. New details after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[00:31:05]

VAUSE: Welcome back, everybody. You're watching CNN NEWSROOM. I'm John Vause.

Well, Japan's ruling party is allowing women to attend key political meetings, but if this was seen as some kind of progressive breakthrough, a step towards 21st century modernity, well, the party imposed one condition, which is now causing outrage.

CNN's Selina Wang has more now from Tokyo.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SELINA WANG, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is what Japan's leadership looks like. The ruling party now wants more women at key meetings, as long as they don't talk.

The Liberal Democratic Party proposed allowing five female lawmakers to join its nearly all-male board meetings but only as observers.

Toshihiro Nikai, the party's 82-year-old secretary general, said it's important for women to, quote, "understand what kind of political discussions are happening. So it's about letting them take a look."

Outrage ensued. Social media users decried the LDP proposal as tone- deaf and yet another example of deep-rooted sexism in Japanese society.

Japanese writer Miyako Kawakami (ph) tweeted that women are treated as second-class citizens forever here in Japan. Others mocked the idea as a field trip for women.

The proposal comes in response to criticism that the LDP's board is dominated by men. On February 15, Tomomi Inada, who is Japan's second female defense minister, wrote this letter to the secretary, asking for more representation of female lawmakers.

TOMOMI INADA, LAWMAKER (through translator): Japan is a democracy without women. The perception that politics should be done by men still widely exists here in Japan, and the perception that good women are those who behave properly and don't push themselves forward, also still exists.

WANG: Just days before Yoshiro Mori, the 83-year-old Tokyo Olympics chief, resigned after making sexist comments that women speak too much during meetings, resulting in international condemnation.

Experts say Japanese politicians have gotten away with blatantly sexist comments in years past. But no longer.

KATHY MATSUI, FORMER VICE CHAIR, GOLDMAN SACHS: Ten, 20, 30 years ago, people and just sort of brushed it off. Oh, that's another politician making, you know, a foot in the mouth comment and write it off. Whereas now, particularly in this world of social media, you can't get away with it that easily.

WANG: The World Economic Forum calls Japan's gender gap by far the largest among all advanced economies, ranking it 144th place on its political empowerment index between Qatar and Iran.

Fewer than 10 percent of Japan's House of Representatives are women, just 46 out of 465 members. Inada says Japan is still 20 years behind other developed countries in gender equality and that more drastic change is needed.

INADA (through translator): I think we should introduce a quota system. We are proposing to make 30 percent of candidates for elections female. Without doing this, I don't think we have enough change or even another 10 or 20 years.

WANG (on camera): What about yourself? Do you have plans to try and become prime minister?

(voice-over): She says, yes, and she'll keep challenging the status quo.

Selina Wang, CNN, Tokyo.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VAUSE: Australia's prime minister has made it clear there's no backing down in the dispute with Facebook. Scott Moore says he is committed to his media reform bill, which would force social media platforms and others to pay news outlets for the content that they use.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says there's a lot of interest worldwide in what Australia is doing. In response to the proposed bill, Facebook blacked out news pages for Australians and blocked users from sharing any news content on Thursday.

The Australian treasurer says he spoke with the Facebook head, Mark Zuckerberg, on Friday, and they will talk again over the weekend.

So far NASA's most sophisticated rover yet -- is yet on the right track. It successfully landed on Mars, and it's now ready to do things no other rover has ever achieved on the red planet. More on the historic mission, in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Touchdown confirmed, landing on the surface of Mars, seeking for signs of past life.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAUSE: Tango Delta on the LZ in Mars. NASA's Perseverance rover safely landed on the planet almost 10 hours ago now, marking the moment with a tweet. "I'm safe on Mars. Perseverance will get you anywhere."

We're told the rover is actually a she. Why? I don't know.

It was a very ambitious landing inside a crater that used to be a lake billions of years ago. These are the first images which were sent back. They're of the landing site immediately after touchdown.

The rover is packed with cutting-edge technology for an historic mission to search for signs of ancient life. There will also be other firsts, like the first audio recordings on Mars, the first helicopter flight on Mars or any other planning that matter.

Garrett Reisman is a former NASA astronaut and a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Southern California.

Garrett, it's been a while, so welcome back. It's good to see you.

GARRETT REISMAN, PROFESSOR OF AERONAUTICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: Thank you very much, it's always great to join you.

VAUSE: You know, it's a little busy up there right now. You've got probes from China. You've got the UAE. These both landed on it last week.

What was really impressive about perseverance, it took this direct path from lift-off on earth directly to Martians service, get that whole orbit (ph). And that kind of shows you how good NASA is these days at landing these things on Mars.

REISMAN: That's right. It's a gutsy move, and I'll be honest with you. I'm still -- I can't believe it works. You know, you have to be really precise with your navigation to do that, which is not easy when you're all the way out there in Mars.

It's not like you have GPS or radio beacons or anything like that for navigation. You're really on your own, and you have to be very precise.

VAUSE: And you know that, what, seven minutes of terror when the rover is out of contact for mission control?

REISMAN: That's right, yes. And it felt like seven days of terror to me. But -- but actually, one of the things that's remarkable about it as it's going through all those crazy seven minutes of very complicated maneuvers. You have a parachute. You have a heat shield that you've got to jettison. You have retro rockets that fire, a sky crane and four cables that lower the rover to the surface, all of that.

But the thing is, as we're watching that happen, of course, it's already done. There's about 11 and a half minutes of delay. So by the time we're watching our seven minutes of terror, right when it's starting, we know that it's already either sitting on Mars or it's a big smoking hole.

VAUSE: Spoiler alert. OK, it's more than, what, eight years, I think, what, since the last touchdown by NASA, which means there's now Perseverance and Curiosity exploring the surface.

But we talk about Perseverance it's got some really good upgrades compared to Curiosity, and that's a solar-powered helicopter, right? So what else are we looking here. What will that helicopter do?

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REISMAN: Well, you know, it does have a lot of upgrades compared to Curiosity. From the outside at a first glance, a cursory glance, it looks the same.

But what's very different about it has things like the helicopter like you mentioned. It's also got ground-penetrating radar so we can see what's underneath the sands of Mars.

It also has new instruments that detect direct signs of life, and Curiosity can detect things like phosphorus and carbon and nitrogen and other compounds. But -- but Perseverance can actually see direct bio signs with this instrumentation.

So we might have a chance of getting that holy grail of some indication of past life on Mars, which would be scientifically the most incredible thing that we could possibly discover.

VAUSE: That's the interesting thing about this mission, because it's -- you know, the primary goal is finding evidence of past life. The long-term goal, as part of that, is actually bringing these samples back to earth. I should mean we're still here beyond 2030. What samples, and how, will head back to us?

REISMAN: Right, well, it's too much to do in any one mission, so what, Perseverance is going to do is use its drill to take chalk-like, you know, chalk-like-sized bits of the Martian soil and rock and then encase it in metal casings and leave it on the surface of Mars.

And then in the future, another probe will come along and scope those up and then place it in a rocket that will blast off and travel all the way back to Earth, for its rendezvousing in Mars orbit with another craft that would take it to the Earth.

It's quite a complex bit of choreography, but if it all goes well, we can actually get pieces of Mars that we can take with a much more sophisticated instruments that we have here on earth and really do some serious analysis.

VAUSE: You know, there's obvious concerns about bringing stuff back, you know, from Mars. Could be bugs, life forms, whatever, you've never seen before; you don't know what they are.

What about in the roofs -- reversed direction? How do you know the China probe, UAE probe doesn't spread the coronavirus, for example?

REISMAN: Right. Thinking of the way things are going lately, they should be much more worried about us.

But yes, so we take great pains to sterilize these vehicles before we send them to Mars. I heard one of the JPL engineers say today that Perseverance is the cleanness spacecraft we've ever sent outside of earth orbit. We try very hard to do. And that's very important because we don't want to thank you found life on Mars when you really just found your own junk that -- you know, evidence or biological things that you shed from your spacecraft.

Or it's even a bigger problem when we finally go with people. And so that's why this is so important.

What we really hope comes out of Perseverance is indications of past life on Mars, and -- and more knowledge, so we know what parts of Mars we should leave alone and not contaminate and which parts of Mars are OK for human habitation.

VAUSE: Wow. We're looking forward to a new planet. I think we've ruined this one.

Good to see you. Thank you for being with us. Appreciate it.

REISMAN: Take care this one now. This one's much better.

VAUSE: Yes, this one. I agree with that one. Look how far we got. Thank you.

REISMAN: Bye-bye.

VAUSE: And thank you for watching. I'm John Vause. Please stay with us. WORLD SPORT is up next, and I'll be back at the top of the hour with more CNN NEWSROOM.

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