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Fighting Forces Civilians to Flee Homes in Idlib; Benefit Raises Millions to Aid Bushfire Recovery. Aired 12-1a ET

Aired February 17, 2020 - 00:30   ET

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

[00:00:00]

MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN ANCHOR: Hello and welcome to our viewers joining us from all around the world. I'm Michael Holmes.

NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Natalie Allen.

Coming up here on CNN Newsroom, Americans have been trapped on board, that cruise ship for two weeks in Japan, are now heading back to the US.

HOLMES: More than a thousand former prosecutors want the US attorney general to resign after he intervened in a case involving a longtime friend of the US president.

ALLEN: Also this hour, CNN goes inside Syria's Idlib province where the suffering and misery is unparalleled, as civilians try to outrun a war.

HOLMES: Welcome everyone. Right now more than 300 Americans are headed back to the US after being quarantined on a cruise ship in Japan during the coronavirus outbreak.

ALLEN: Imagine how they feel stepping off of that ship, and there they go right now toward home. Two charter planes took off from Tokyo just a few hours ago, one headed to an air force base in California, the other to Texas. But once they land, they're expected to start yet another quarantine for 14 days.

HOLMES: They were relieved to be leaving the ship, then they're heading into another quarantine. They'd spent almost two weeks in isolation already on the Diamond Princess. That cruise ship remains docked in Yokohama, Japan with more than 350 confirmed cases of the virus.

Now worldwide, the number of infections has topped 71,000 and the death toll jumped past 1,700 globally on Sunday, after officials reported 105 new deaths in Mainland China.

ALLEN: We want to bring you the very latest now. Let's turn to our correspondents in the region. Will Ripley is in Yokohama and Kristie Lu Stout is in Hong Kong.

Will, first to you, with more than 350 cases confirm from this ship, the people who were able to get off and head home must be so relieved. WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I think a lot of them are, Natalie. People had been calling on the United States government to help them as the number of cases on the ship continued to skyrocket every single day. When you have 67 cases one day, 70 cases the next day, and then the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledging that people on the risk likely face, people on the ship, likely face a higher risk of infection. A lot of people definitely want it off.

But certainly it is not. This relaxing trip home as they found out last night, it has been a long arduous journey. A journey that continues at this hour on those converted cargo planes. Passengers had to wait upwards of three hours just to get off the boat, onto a convoy of buses that were waiting outside during the overnight hours. Then some of them were sitting on the buses for another three hours plus with no access to restrooms.

You're talking about people who were in their 60s, 70s and 80s, who were getting into some tussles with the Centers for Disease Control officials on board those buses with them saying, what about our basic needs. We still have to, you know, survive this trip itself.

And then, of course, they get to the plane and this is not luxury transportation. This is -- they were told to dress warm because the interior of a converted cargo plane can get pretty chilly when you're up at altitude. There were kind of like essentially porta-potties set up inside the seats, along these floors, that had wooden and metal kind of slots. People, you know, crammed together. This is not a luxurious end to what has already been a holiday from hell.

But, look, in the coming hours when they land in either California or Texas and they're back on US soil, and they can hopefully get checked into rooms, on dry land and beds. And then they can start to eat familiar food and talk to doctors that they can more easily communicate with, you can imagine that for a lot of them it will be a relief even knowing that they'll have to endure another 14 days of quarantine before they can finally get back to their homes and back to their lives that have essentially been on hold through all of this.

ALLEN: Absolutely. And being stuck on that ship not knowing, with the numbers rising and rising, would they be better off to be off the ship? At least they are off and they're halfway home. All right, will Ripley for us. Thanks so much, Will.

HOLMES: All right. Let's go to Kristie Lu Stout now and talk more broadly and regionally. The numbers going up, can we expect that to continue and maybe get worse? What are you hearing?

KRISTIE LU STOUT, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Very much so because we're waiting for a report from China to take place about an hour from now. The numbers keep on rising and rising, the virus has infected more than 71,000 people all around the world. The global death toll has risen to 1,770 with 100 new deaths reported in Hubei province alone.

China's National Health Commission is set to release numbers for all of the provinces across China that should take place an hour from now. [00:05:03]

And many people are bracing for just a grim uptick in the death toll or in the number of confirmed cases. This follows that spike in numbers last week, after Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak, expanded the criteria and counting these new infections. And that also opened up a huge debate about just how accurate the data is coming from Mainland China.

Again, the global death toll stands at 1,770, the vast majority of those deaths in Mainland China. Outside the Mainland, we know that five people have died, including Hong Kong and the Philippines, Japan, and most recently France and Taiwan. In Paris on Saturday, an 80-year- old man, a Chinese tourist, died while in quarantine in hospital. That was the first coronavirus death reported outside Asia.

And then on Sunday, a man in Taiwan, he was in his mid 60s died. He is the first person in Taiwan to die from the outbreak and he had no history of travel to Mainland China.

Now on Saturday, we also heard from the chief of the World Health Organization, and he praised Beijing's response to the outbreak saying that "it bought the world time." We know that China, Michael, has been widely criticized for lack of transparency about -- and also, you know, just the environment that led to the late Dr. Li Wenliang to be silenced early on to prevent speaking out on WeChat in a closed circle conversation about this new SARS like disease that he identified months ago. China, we also know, has clout, is a wealthy WHO member has succeeded in blocking Taiwan's access to the UN body.

And this could have, as observers point out very real consequences as the Upwork (ph) break takes hold in Taiwan with Taiwan now reporting its first confirmed deaths from the coronavirus, Michael?

HOLMES: Yes. A lot of concern about how accurate the numbers have been coming out of China and going forward, a lot of concern. I know you're across it, Kristie Lu Stout thank you.

ALLEN: In China, about 160 million people are expected to return to work by Tuesday.

HOLMES: Wow, 160 million. But as David Culver there reports the streets of Shanghai right now, largely deserted.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID CULVER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This is the week that China is officially to come back to work, businesses are expected to start reopening following what was an extended Lunar New Year holiday. It was extended so as to keep folks from congregating back together and exposing each other potentially to the novel coronavirus.

However, it still feels as though it's very much in a holiday mode. You walk around and sure certain businesses are open and you've got people that are out and about like here on Nanjing Street, a popular pedestrian shopping plaza. But some of the businesses and some of the employees inside just desperate to have some customers come in. They seem to be just not experiencing much activity whatsoever

And then you walk past some of the residential areas, you'll notice several of them are chain close, even put it in English here, to make it clear to the tourists closed to the public due to the outbreak of coronavirus.

Now for the residents who live here, they're the only ones allowed in and they can only funnel through certain entrances where they have a guard posted. They require you to register, and then they can keep track of who's going in and out. And for those residents who do live in some of those areas, once they do register, they then in some cases, have to quarantine for that 14-day period assuming they've come from outside of the city.

It's a city that ultimately will try to get back on track. This is, of course, what China looks to, as it its business beacon. David Culver, CNN, Shanghai.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HOLMES: And Laurie Garrett joins me now. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning science writer and a former senior fellow for the Global Health -- for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Great to have your expertise on this, I've been reading your stuff. You have not acclaimed foreign policy. There's been a lot of praise for China having "transparency" despite clear local level covering up in the beginning. What has been like lacking in the data especially early on and also now? What's the fallout?

LAURIE GARRETT, AUTHOR, "THE COMING PLAGUE": Well, I think kind of deserves a praise for making samples of the virus available very quickly for sharing genetic sequencing out of their laboratory of the virus, all of that, very true. They deserve credit.

However, there was no -- there's been no new samples provided to the international just say it is, it's called, that's taking care of analyzing and comparing versions of this disease virus from every place that arises in the world. Nothing new has been said through since February 4th from China. So we don't know if the virus may be changing. We have no idea.

Meanwhile, the real problem is, we get these daily tallies of numbers and we have no idea whether they bear any resemblance to reality. We have many reasons to believe they are grossly under counting the epidemic. We know that all over the country, they've run out of test kits repeatedly.

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We know that they've made political decisions about which categories of people to test and which to leave, warehoused in giant quarantine centers, but untested. And we also know that people who tested negative but went all the way to pneumonia and had to be hospitalized

Were actually victims of faulty tests, and that as much as half of all the testing gives false negative results.

HOLMES: Did you, you know, I guess, you've answered this in a way, but I was going to ask you more about the worry that political considerations are outweighing health concerns. And how does information that comes out of China impact the strategies of other countries. It's tied together surely.

GARRETT: You know, about 99% of all the cases in the world are in Mainland China, so all of us worried as everybody is about what this epidemic may become, for everybody else on the whole planet. We're all watching China and eager for data and analysis that we can trust to anticipate what our needs may be, what forms of innovation and action are working, what aren't working.

And the problem is that from the very beginning, Xi Jinping, the president of China, has personally taken control of the epidemic response. We know this from speeches he gave that are recently leaked, starting around January 7th. Before then, it was in cover up mode in Wuhan.

And we know that there's been a really tight meshing of sort of Chinese Communist Party issues and biology so that, you know, sometimes the decisions being made better reflected what was going on politically at the highest level of the government than what was actually going on on the ground in the epidemic.

HOLMES: You recently tweeted a reminder, and it's a salient one, that the 1919 influenza pandemic, it killed tens of millions of people. I think the point of your tweet was that had a lower fatality ratio than what we're seeing now. Do you see this reaching the definition of pandemic? And what would that look like? What are the omens?

GARRETT: I would be very surprised if this did not reach pandemic level. And I don't want to scare the dickens out of people because you can have a pandemic but not, you know, mass death. A pandemic is a description of its geographic spread, not of its severity, all right? So it's possible to have cases spreading inside North America, cases spreading in Africa, cases spreading in Asia, and still not have total catastrophe.

But I think we already have spread in numerous locations in Asia that's independent now of the China's source. And there seems to be indications of that in the United Kingdom as well. They're on high alert throughout England, Scotland, Wales.

HOLMES: Yes. And to that point, actually, what are the risks if it gets to a more secretive country, one without the resources or infrastructure to deal with it? And perhaps if we're talking about a place like North Korea, the honesty to acknowledge a problem in the first place, what are the risks then?

GARRETT: Well, we've already seen that risk. I mean, this started in China and it was unwilling to acknowledge the outbreak in the beginning. So we know the risk, it spreads, and it gets all over the place and you lose control. Look, you know, it's -- I've been in so many epidemics now in my lifetime, so many, and I hear the same exact arguments every single time with every single outbreak. It always starts off with somebody like myself or somebody in government is whistling an alarm. And we get called Chicken Little. Ah, you're exaggerating. It's only 20 cases. It's only 10 cases. It's only in this group of people. It's not a big deal.

Well, the time to act is when it is only 20 cases, when it is only in a small group of people. If you wait until everybody agrees, this is an epidemic. Well, by then you've already failed to take the actions that could have saved lives.

HOLMES: Yes, that is such a good point. I mean, what then is the lesson to be learned because this has happened over and over again, mumps, SARS others as well. What are the lessons? What are we not doing right to have these things off?

GARRETT: Michael, there's so many things on the list that we're not doing. It's almost like asking, well, what are we doing because that would be a smaller response. You know, we have talked about what does preparedness looked like over and over, and over.

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We've had God knows how many role playing exercises were at the international, in the national, in the state, in local levels where people have role played how they would respond in an epidemic and representing their various agencies. And we always see the same problems arise. We always see the epidemic get out of control and all of these exercises, and yet the changes that need to get made never get made.

And when the constant problem for epidemic preparedness is that, when there is no epidemic for a while, politicians cut the money.

HOLMES: Yes.

GARRETT: Now they say, hey, you know, we don't see a problem, why are we spending this many millions? You know, we've got potholes over here, we've got leaky pipes in the city plumbing. Let's put it over there.

Well, of course, then along comes an epidemic and you've not been maintaining the infrastructure to respond to it. You don't have enough people, enough protective gear, enough doctors, nurses, the hospitals aren't ready, t he school systems aren't ready. You haven't coordinated the police, the fire department, all your --

ALLEN: Well, coming up next here, former US Justice Department officials are speaking out the sharply worded review of Attorney General Bill Barr.

HOLMES: Also Nevada voters lining up for the Democratic caucuses, candidates heading west and taking aim at the front runner. We'll be right back. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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ALLEN: And welcome back. Welcome back to CNN Newsroom. Accusations of political interference in the US Justice Department are intensifying. In an extraordinary public statement, former Justice Department officials are calling for Attorney General Bill Barr's resignation.

HOLMES: Now, this comes after Barr intervened in the sentencing of a longtime friend of President Trump, four prosecutors on that case against Roger Stone withdrew after the Justice Department recommended lowering the sentence.

ALLEN: Barr has also ordered the reexamination of the case against another Trump ally, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. For more now here's Jeremy Diamond at the White House.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, a firestorm of controversy is continuing around the Attorney General Bill Barr's decision to intervene in that politically sensitive case involving the President's longtime political advisor, Roger Stone. Barr taking that extraordinary action to reverse a sentencing recommendation from career prosecutors, and now we are seeing more than 1,100 career, Department of Justice officials, former Justice Department officials, some of them prosecutors career, some of them political appointees, but having served in both Democratic and Republican administrations.

And essentially what they say in the statement is that, while it's all well and good for Barr to be coming out and criticizing the president's use of Twitter to talk about some of these cases, putting him in a difficult position, they're saying that ultimately Barr's actions are what really matter. Here's what they say.

Mr. Barr's actions in doing the President's personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words. Those actions and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice's reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign.

Now, the White House for its part has spent a couple of days insisting that the relationship between the President and the attorney general is on solid footing despite Barr's rebuke of the President's use of social media as it relates to the Department of Justice. What we are also seeing is, the White House insisting that the President has confidence in Barr, but also a little bit of pushback on what Barr was saying. Here's the vice president's Chief of Staff Marc Short making that point.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARC SHORT, US VICE PRESIDENT'S CHIEF OF STAFF: I don't think that it's impossible to this job. In fact, I think that Attorney General Barr is doing a great job because a lot of confidence inside the White House. I think that the President's frustration is one that a lot of Americans have which feels like the scales of justice are not balanced anymore.

There has been a bias with inside the Department of Justice that Attorney General Barr is trying to correct. I think that he said that the President has not called him directly to say please do these things. He's acted independently to initiate these reviews, and I think he's doing a fantastic job with it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DIAMOND: Now, I asked the President on Sunday as he returned to the White House, whether he would heed his attorney general's advice in terms of stopping his tweets about the Justice Department and Justice Department cases. The President did not answer my question as he walk back into the White House.

And the President has already made it quite clear that he has no intention of changing his behavior. In the wake of Barr's, comments about the President's use of Twitter as it relates to the Justice Department, the President tweeted that, while Barr said that he had not asked him to intervene in any criminal cases at the Justice Department, the President maintains that he has the right to do so.

Jeremy Diamond, CNN, the White House.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: Democratic presidential candidates turning to Nevada, the first western state to hold caucuses this Saturday. Party officials encouraged by the strong turnout in early voting. The chairman said the party has worked around the clock to make sure they don't have the same problems with results that we saw in Iowa.

ALLEN: They wouldn't want that, would they? Meantime, the candidates are sharpening their attacks on front runner Bernie Sanders. Sanders supporters are accused of threatening the powerful Culinary Workers Union in Nevada for not supporting his Medicare for All proposal.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHUCK TODD, MODERATOR, MEET THE PRESS: If his supporters are attacking Culinary Union members who's responsible for that?

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Look, he may not be responsible for it, but he has some accountability. If any of my supporters did that, I disown them. Flat disown them.

PETE BUTTIGIEG (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Senator Sanders' plan by definition abolishes private plans like what the culinary workers and other workers across Nevada and America have. Mine does not.

[00:25:02]

AMY KLOBUCHAR (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I'm the only one on that debate stage when asked, do you have a problem with a socialist leading the Democratic ticket that I said yes. And that is despite the fact that Bernie and I are friends we came in together.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ALLEN: All right. Meantime, President Trump was focusing on a different type of race over the weekend. NASCAR's Daytona 500 kicked off on Sunday. The first couple took a lap around the track in the presidential limousine. You know what, it's called "The Beast."

HOLMES: Yes. Now, Mr. Trump did serve as the Grand Marshal commanding the drivers to start their engines and all that good stuff. He's only the second US president to do so. George W. Bush did in 2004, but not everything went to plan.

ALLEN: The race was postponed due to rain. It is said to resume in the coming hours.

Coming up here, caught up in a seemingly endless war in Syria, a look at life for hundreds of thousands of civilians trap by fighting, and they're in the grip of winter.

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ALLEN: Welcome back to CNN Newsroom, I'm Natalie Allen.

HOLMES: And I'm Michael Holmes, it's time to update you on the top stories this hour. Authorities say another 105 people in Mainland China have died of the novel coronavirus. The global death toll from the outbreak now at more than 1,700, and there are at least 71,000 cases confirmed worldwide, the vast majority of them in Mainland China.

ALLEN: In the state of Nevada, the Democratic Party, they're hoping the long lines for early voting in the caucus has been a big turnout this coming Saturday. More than 18,000 Democrats came out for the first day of early voting. The party chairmen saying officials are working to make sure there are no problems like Iowa had in their reporting results.

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MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: And in a rare move, more than 1,100 former U.S. Justice Department officials issued an open letter calling for the resignation of the U.S. attorney general. The statement comes after Bill Barr overruled four prosecutors in the second sentencing recommendation of President Trump's longtime friend, Roger Stone.

Now, in Syria, the government has been stepping up its campaign to take the last rebel stronghold in Idlib province.

ALLEN: Over 850,000 people have been forced to flee their homes since December. Families are walking for hours in below-freezing temperatures as they try to escape the war.

HOLMES: Yes. CNN's Arwa Damon is the only western reporter inside Idlib; shows us the hardships one family has suffered. We do want to warn you, some images may be disturbing to some viewers.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ARWA DAMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There is barely enough light to see as we head towards Simia's (ph) tent in one of Idlib's sprawling camps. A couple nights ago, temperatures dropped well below zero, and the family didn't have enough to eat.

"I fed my baby, and he went to sleep," Simia (ph) tells us, still in shock. "At 6:37, the children woke me up screaming. I touched him, and he was icy." The doctors told them he froze to death.

Her husband walks out before he breaks down. She does not have a photograph of Ardawahat (ph) alive, just this image as they said their final goodbyes. She can't forgive herself. She can't understand how life can be so cruel. Few people here can.

We have made multiple trips into Idlib province, none like this. Roads throughout the province are clogged with the traffic of those on the run. Unending waves. Many have been displaced multiple times before, but this time it's different. They feel like no matter what they do, they won't be able to out-run the war.

These children walked for seven hours in the middle of the night to get away from the bombing near their village, but it's not far enough.

(on camera): They want to leave from here, but they -- they need to try to figure out transport or something, because if they try to go walk, it would just be impossible.

(voice-over): Down the road, Dima (ph) and Betullah (ph) clutch their stuffed animals for the last time, for theirs is a world where toys are not considered essential. Survival is. They don't cry or complain as they are loaded into the truck.

There is a sense of finality, claustrophobia, compounded by the collective misery of those trapped here, with the regime rapidly closing in and emptying out entire areas. One village settled down among these Third Century ruins two weeks ago. A little boy shows us a picture in his father's phone of the bombing overnight.

(on camera): This is Mohammed (ph), and he's ten. And he said he was very scared the last night, because this entire area, the hillsides all around it were being bombed.

(voice-over): They almost took off walking in the dark.

"I would die than not be able to protect my children," Saif Adeem (ph) vows. He used to be the village's elementary school director. His tent is considered a palace by this wretched existence's standards.

(on camera): Two of his kids have fallen over into the stove. Her face -- her face was burned.

(voice-over): His children are too young to know anything but war and hardship. "Let Trump get a bit angry and send a couple Tomahawks," Saif Adeem

(ph) says, half joking. For those who know too well that, in the world's view, they are dispensable. The last nine years have taught them that.

Obait's (ph) tent is perched on a hilltop, away from the countless other makeshift camps.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

GRAPHIC: Warning! Russia fighter jet in the air.

DAMON: Our conversation is broken up by warnings from an app has on his phone about where the planes are flying and bombing.

His elderly mother lies in the corner. He's been that way ever since they found out that his brother died in a regime prison, and the regime is getting closer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

DAMON: Yes, you can hear that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

(on camera): DAMON: This is his brother, who was detained in 2012 when he was part of the protests. And then in 2015, they got notification that he was dead. This is the photograph they got of him, dead, in prison.

(voice-over): "All I have is this photo, just this memory," he says, haunted by his pain. Even if the regime tried to reconcile, it's impossible, he swears. "You can't trust them."

Nothing in this forsaken place is guaranteed. Gone is the schoolyard laughter and crowded classrooms. They have been converted into shelters and smoke-filled living spaces.

But even as new families arrive, some of those here are getting ready to flee again. Saif Adeem (ph), who we met at the camp in the ruins, sends me a distressing voice message.

(on camera): He's saying that the bombing was all around them overnight and that the aircraft are flying over the camps.

(voice-over): When we arrived, the sounds of the violence closing in echo through the hills. Saif Adeem's (ph) children are playing in the mud, seemingly oblivious to the encroaching danger, or just used to it.

(on camera): They've called for a truck, but they're being told that there is no one who can come here that quickly, because it's so -- the roads are so crowded and clogged up with other people's things.

(voice-over): Those who manage to get transport are packing up. They still cling to hope that someone, something will save them, that the world will realize it can no longer turn away, that they won't be abandoned to desperately search for a lifeline that doesn't exist.

Arwa Damon, CNN, Idlib province, Syria.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ALLEN: Excellent reporting there by our Arwa. As hundreds of thousands are displaced by the conflict, the U.S. in Turkey are condemning the Russian-backed offensive in Idlib.

HOLMES: President Trump and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spoke by phone over the weekend about the conflict and trying to end it. Mr. Trump thanked Mr. Erdogan for Turkey's efforts to prevent a humanitarian crisis.

And to find out ways that you can help Syrians survive this dreadful conflict, head over to CNN.com/impact. There's a list of organizations there that you can donate to.

ALLEN: Next here, artists from around the world are lending their talent to help Australia recover from devastating bushfires.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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ALLEN: In Michael's home country, millions of dollars are pouring in after artists from around the world came together to help raise funds for Australia's fire recovery.

HOLMES: A great cause and a great concert. More than 70,000 people filling Sydney's ANZ Stadium for the Fire Fight Australia concert on Sunday. It was huge.

CNN's Robyn Curnow with more.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROBYN CURNOW, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In a nation that has seen months of heartbreak, a moment of musical relief units Australia.

Rock band Queen plays for thousands in Sydney, helping raise money by reprising an iconic show. U.S. singer Adam Lambert, who fills in for the late Freddy Mercury, says Queen recreated their legendary performance at the Live Aid charity concert in 1985. Thirty-five years on, their 22-minute set is part of a fundraising event for those devastated by Australia's bush fires.

For ten hours, artists and celebrities from around the world performed for the cause. More than 70,000 people attended the concert, called Fire Fight Australia, which lasted for more than ten hours.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So many families have lost everything, so we're here to support them all.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Part of the people who help to try and bring things back together and bring smiles and -- and be part of that healing stuff that happens with community.

CURNOW: Since September, unprecedented fires razed nearly 12 million hectares of land, destroying countless homes and structures. Dozens lost their lives, and an estimated one billion animals have been killed.

During months of battling hundreds of blazes, firefighters, including many volunteers, were on the front lines. Some of the proceeds from Sunday's event will go to support them. Their sacrifice was also acknowledged there.

CELESTE BARBER, AUSTRALIAN COMEDIAN AND "FIRE FIGHT AUSTRALIA" HOST: Our volunteers across this entire country, they are the ones who have saved us. They are the ones who actively go out and help. They are the ones.

CURNOW: In the concert finale, queen returned, along with singer Olivia Newton John and others. Some of the firefighters joined the stars, too, on stage as the show came to a close, waving at the thankful thousands cheering them on.

Robyn Curnow, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HOLMES: And thanks, everyone, for spending part of your day with us and watching CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Michael Holmes.

ALLEN: I'm Natalie Allen. We're back in 15 minutes, but stay with us next for WORLD SPORT with Vince Cellini.

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