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Bombshell House Ethics Report on Matt Gaetz Released; Mangione Pleads Not Guilty to State Charges in New York; President Biden Commutes 37 Federal Death Sentences; Stars Voice Support For Lively Over Harassment Complaint; Nissan, Honda Could Join To Become Third- Largest Automaker; How 3D Mapping Tech Helped Rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral. Aired 4-5p ET

Aired December 23, 2024 - 16:00   ET

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

[16:00:29]

JIM SCIUTTO CNN HOST: Good evening. I'm Jim Sciutto. Thanks so much for joining me today for another hour of CNN NEWSROOM.

The US House Ethics Committee has released a damaging report into former US Congressman Matt Gaetz today, a report that many feared might never be made public.

The 37-page document lays out what it calls substantial evidence that Gaetz regularly paid for sex and drugs, along with a litany of other highly explosive charges.

All of this from the man President-elect trump initially wanted to become the highest ranking law enforcement officer in America. Gaetz has said that his past behavior was, "embarrassing but not criminal."

He has also pointed out that the US Justice Department declined to file charges against him. That is true.

I spoke with Katelyn Polantz last hour about some of the most damaging findings of the just released report, from what we should note, is a bipartisan committee in Congress.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE SENIOR REPORTER: There are text messages that the committee obtained and that they document in this report that show that Representative Gaetz was asking for women to bring drugs to him.

And in all, the committee says that they found at least 20 times between the years of 2017 and 2020, all years when Matt Gaetz was a member of Congress, where he was meeting with women who were being paid either with the expectation that he would be having sex with them or for drugs.

All of that put together in this House Ethics report, where the House says they believe that Matt Gaetz engaged in commercial sex, meaning paying for sex with women, statutory rape that is specifically related to the incident in 2017 at a party that summer where he had sex twice, allegedly with a woman who at the time was an underage girl, 17 years old, heading into her senior year of high school.

The House believes that may be a violation of Florida law, though Gaetz has not been charged with any crime. The Justice Department looked at some charges on the federal side, declined to bring any case against him.

The House also say that -- they also say in this report, they believe Matt Gaetz was using illicit drugs, and so they have compiled this all, not just in a narrative of what they found, documenting the evidence the text messages, the payments that the House has been able to trace, but also testimony they received from more than a half dozen people and that woman who was an underage girl, having sex with him when she was 17.

They have all of that together. They also have put out the evidence in the report released today that Matt Gaetz has been unable to stop. He wanted to stop the release of that report. It did not happen.

SCIUTTO: Now, this committee by design, is split evenly along party lines. So its release would have required at least some Republican support to release it.

POLANTZ: That's right. And in this report, there is even a page at the end where the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, Michael Guest, says that he doesn't have any issue with the findings in this report. He takes issue with the fact that the committee was releasing it.

Now, the committee did take a vote to decide to put this out there. This report was something that they had been working on for several years of this investigation, essentially picking up the work of the Justice Department after the Justice Department looked at Matt Gaetz, declined to charge him, and then the House Ethics Committee began doing much more in interviewing the witnesses, gathering the evidence, putting together this report, and they are deviating from what the past expectation was here, releasing this after Matt Gaetz resigned from Congress.

One thing that they found here and Gaetz does deny a lot, if not all of these allegations that the committee has made just flat out saying they are false. They are saying that they did not find any violations of federal sex trafficking by the former congressman. But this is all notable sitting here out in the public when Gaetz is still a prominent person in the conservative movement.

He is now on a right wing news network, and then on top of that, he is a person that Donald Trump wanted to have as his attorney general and withdrew just eight days after receiving that nomination just a couple of weeks ago.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

[16:05:10] SCIUTTO: The details certainly alarming.

Well, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO has pleaded not guilty to state murder and terrorism charges. Twenty-six-year-old Luigi Mangione made an appearance in New York earlier today, you see him there in the center, in now facing 11 criminal counts in New York. That is in addition to multiple federal charges.

Shimon Prokupecz has the full story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COURT OFFICIAL: The crime of murder in the first degree and other related charges.

How do you plead to this indictment, sir? Guilty or not guilty?

LUIGI MANGIONE, SUSPECT IN THE KILLING OF BRIAN THOMPSON: Not guilty.

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Accused killer, Luigi Mangione back in court, this time for the charges he faces in New York State, wearing khakis and a maroon sweater shackled at the wrists and ankles.

The camera in court capturing the 26-year-old as he faces 11 state charges that include murder in the first degree and murder in the second degree as a crime of terrorism for the alleged killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson.

KAREN FRIEDMAN AGNIFILO, MANGIONE'S ATTORNEY: He is a young man and he is being treated like a human ping pong ball.

PROKUPECZ (voice over): His attorney slamming the way Mangione was paraded before cameras when being brought back to New York City from Pennsylvania.

AGNIFILO: They are literally treating him like he is like some sort of political fodder, like some sort of spectacle.

PROKUPECZ (voice over): During the arraignment, with rare camera access being allowed to record the proceedings, prosecutors disclosing just how much evidence they have.

JOEL SEIDEMANN, PROSECUTOR: I have never seen a case with such volume of evidence aside from the issue of the quality of the evidence. This is not a usual case in terms of the thousands of hours of video tracking and the like.

PROKUPECZ (voice over): Mangione seen smiling at times while talking with his legal team.

Outside court, a small group of protesters gathered to voice their support for Mangione.

(PEOPLE chanting)

PROKUPECZ (voice over): The hearing ended with Mangione casually folding some papers before police escorted him away.

REPORTER: Luigi, do you have anything to say?

PROKUPECZ (voice over): Mangione also faces federal charges that include murder through the use of a firearm. The state trial is expected to come first.

Mangione faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for the state charges, and prosecutors could decide to seek a death penalty in the federal case.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: Quite a fall for the former high school valedictorian. ' Well, President Biden has commuted the sentences of nearly all prisoners currently on federal death row, sparing the lives of some 37 people. They will now serve life in prison without the possibility of parole. Just three remain on death row, all of them convicted of mass killings.

It comes just a month before Donald Trump takes office. Trump has promised to restart federal executions.

Kayla Tausche reports from the White House.

KAYLA TAUSCHE, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: The president, in his own words, said that he made this decision based on his own good conscience and his breadth of political experience leading up to this point. But there were certainly many, many warnings by activists that were discussing this with the White House and suggesting the possibility that when President-elect Donald Trump takes office once again, that there is the potential for what they feared would be a spree of executions of the remaining inmates on death row, leading these activists to urge the Biden administration, in no uncertain terms, to shorten or downgrade the sentences of the individuals that he has now gone and done that for.

The three inmates who will remain on federal death row, as you mentioned, are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Dylann Roof, and Robert Bowers, who respectively carried out the mass killings at the Boston Marathon, at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. So certainly, excluding those individuals from this decision is one to try to shield the administration from criticism.

But it does, Jim, represent a significant evolution on behalf of President Biden and the broader Democratic Party when it comes to the death penalty.

Biden was a vocal and staunch supporter of the death penalty at earlier parts of his career, but certainly the party has moved in a direction where they have wanted to suggest more sympathy for some of these individuals who they believe have been wrongly incarcerated.

But some Democrats are also critical of this move. They say that in some cases, it could make the party appear soft on crime, and it could also appear that the Biden administration is trying to challenge the authority of the judicial system. That was the criticism that House Democrat Mike Quigley specifically levied at the administration earlier today.

So, Jim, there is not universal support for the direction that President Biden went in, but the administration has been clear that they are reviewing and weighing thousands of clemency petitions. They continue to do so with the expectation that there will be more actions before President Biden leaves office -- Jim.

[16:10:06]

SCIUTTO: Thanks so much, Kayla.

Still to come, a far right party in Germany has staged a rally in the city where a driver rammed his car into a Christmas market, killing five. We are going to look exactly how that tragedy could impact the country's upcoming election.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: Members of Germany's far right AFD Party staged a rally in the city of Magdeburg, that is the site of last week's horrific car ramming attack.

The event was billed as a Memorial for the victims and was attended by the party's candidate for chancellor.

A Saudi doctor is now in custody for that attack. Motive unclear. However, he appeared to have expressed support for the AFD and was a vocal critic himself of Islam.

There is growing criticism of the German authorities over the warnings Germany received from Saudi Arabia about that suspect, but those warnings went ignored.

CNN's Matthew Chance reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN CHIEF GLOBAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Well, the German authorities have now acknowledged they did indeed receive a warning from Saudi Arabia about this individual that is now being held as the suspect in this Christmas market car ramming.

That individual has been named as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old man, a doctor, a psychiatrist who was originally from Saudi Arabia.

He is anti-Islam. He describes himself as an Islamophobe and has often posted on social media, you know, very aggressive messages against Islam. He called himself the most aggressive critic of Islam in history.

He has been warning repeatedly on social media that Germany is trying to Islamize Europe, posting conspiracy theories and things like that. You can see the marketplace behind me has still been sealed off with these police cordons everywhere as forensic teams scour through the debris of that attack, picking up any evidence they can, of course, while cleaning the streets, to be frank of the blood that has been left on the pavement as a result of so many casualties.

Meanwhile, that suspect has made his first appearance in a German court with the judge there placing him in pretrial detention as this intensive investigation continues.

Matthew Chance, CNN, Magdeburg in Eastern Germany.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: I am joined now by CNN's Global Affairs analyst, Kim Dozier. And, Kim, can you explain to me, AFD, in all of this? Because here is a suspect who has praised AFD before. AFD now goes to the site and holds a rally and uses that rally to then, as it has often done, rail against immigrants.

Now, we should note the suspected attacker, an immigrant himself, but from 2006, who then went on to rail against immigrants. I am just trying to figure out where AFD stands in all of this.

[16:15:00]

KIMBERLY DOZIER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Yes, it helps if you put them in two different categories. There is how AFD is capitalizing on this attack, and then there's the very troubled history and the strange logic that drove the attacker himself, at least as far as we can figure out.

So AFD has been already campaigning on decreasing immigration, sending many immigrants back to the countries they came from, especially Muslim immigrants, pulling Germany out of the EU, ending weapons supplies to Ukraine.

But it leads with this anti-other, anti-immigrant policy and the current AFD chief, who is the candidate for chancellor in the February snap elections coming up. AFD is doing well in the polls. It is already running second to the Christian Democrats, has already said, look, this person might not have been an immigrant who came in in 2014, but he is from somewhere else.

And the overall message is, as they often and say, Germany is for the Germans. That's a Nazi-era slogan that a supporter shouted out in a moment of silence at a soccer match in the past 24 hours in Magdeburg.

SCIUTTO: Well, listen, this country can certainly relate to anti- other, anti-immigrant feelings and certainly as reflected in politics. Does the AFD have a chance to win chancellor in that country, or at least to have a prominent position in any governing coalition?

DOZIER: Well, the latest poll of polls I saw does have them running second, and so they have the chance of getting a much larger share of political power than they have in the past and the more votes they get, the more chance they have of negotiating their way to getting the chancellorship, and from that would follow a number of changes across European union policy.

They might not be able to pull out from the European Union, but surely they will stop shipments of arms to Ukraine if they get the lion's share of political power as the AFD is a Russian ally or has expressed support, at least for Putin, and this all plays into this rather scary trend across Europe of nationalism, leading to shades of fascism.

The AFD, after all, is classified by German Security Services as an extremist group.

SCIUTTO: Yes, and listen, we've seen parties like this build a following in several European countries.

I wonder, you mentioned the influx in 2014, that, of course, a result of the war in Syria. Now that Assad has fallen, there is discussion, we spoke about this earlier in this broadcast. There is discussion of some of those refugees returning. Will that add to pressure inside Germany to try to, if not encourage folks to go home, force them to go home given the position of a party like AFD?

DOZIER: Well, certainly that is the message that German immigrants are receiving. There are some Syrians who would like to go home right now, but the UN and other humanitarian agencies have said they need time to stabilize the situation on the ground, help the current administration turn the lights back on, literally; secure economic passageways into the country, that sort of thing. So, it is not a good time for those immigrants just to be kicked out.

Ironically, this immigration, though, is one of the main things that drove the Saudi attacker. He had a website where, among other things, he posted on it: My advice is do not seek asylum in Germany. He started out as an atheist who came to Germany and would help other Saudis escape the kingdoms rule and other women escape Gulf countries' rule. He even talked to CNN and BBC about it back in 2019.

But then his messages became increasingly erratic. The CNN person he was in contact with cut him off. He has said he is pro AFD, anti- Islamism of Europe. He accused the German government of radicalizing and allowing an extreme form of Islam to spread across Europe.

Ironically, his attack on a Christmas market has spurred the same sort of animus that an ISIS attack would on such a place, and it seems to have fed into this anti-immigration sentiment right at Christmas and early enough -- close enough to the February elections, that it will surely have an impact.

[16:20:19]

SCIUTTO: Yes, witch's brew of emotions there.

Kim Dozier, thanks so much.

Well, several families of Israeli hostages taken captive by Hamas and still held in Gaza say they have recently received signs of life of their loved ones.

The news comes as Israel's prime minister says that "Certain progress has been made in negotiations to secure the hostages release and a ceasefire in Gaza." In remarks in Parliament today, Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas is taking blows while Iran and Hezbollah are licking their wounds.

He is vowing that Israel will act against Houthi rebels in Yemen the same way it did against other of Iran's proxies in the region.

In Gaza, the director of one of the last functioning hospitals there is making an urgent plea for the world to help before it is "too late."

He says that Kamal Adwan Hospital is under constant bombardment, accusing Israel of trying to kill or forcibly displace those inside.

Gaza's Health Ministry says the IDF has now placed what it described as explosive robots at the gates of the hospital. Israel denies that, calling it Hamas propaganda.

Horrific scenes, though, are emerging from Central Gaza after an Israeli military operation inside a refugee camp there. Authorities say more than 50 people have been killed or injured, all of them civilians. They say 20 residential units were destroyed by Israeli forces.

Elliott Gotkine is following the developments tonight from Jerusalem.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ELLIOTT GOTKINE, JOURNALIST: From Israel's war and ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, this corner of the world has been chock-full of dramatic developments of late, so much so that it is easy to forget that more than a year after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks of October the 7th, Israel's war in Gaza continues to rumble on and continues to exact a heavy toll on Palestinians.

In one of the latest incidents, Hamas officials say an Israeli operation in Nuseirat in Central Gaza killed or injured at least 50 civilians. When ambulance crews were finally able to retrieve bodies, they found cats feeding on them. The video is too graphic to show.

The IDF did not respond to requests for comment.

In the north of Gaza, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital says it has been under siege for almost three months. He now says Israel has placed what he describes as explosive robots at the gates of the hospital. On Sunday, the IDF told CNN there had been no strikes in the area in the preceding 24 hours.

Against this backdrop, there is renewed optimism about ceasefire talks aimed at securing the release of the hundred or so hostages still being held captive in Gaza. Israel believes around a third of the hostages are dead, but according to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, several Israeli families say that they recently received what they describe as signs of life from their loved ones.

Any deal, though, would need to be signed off by Hamas and of course, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Monday, he was in court for his fifth day of testimony in his corruption trial, facing charges which he denies of fraud, breach of trust and bribery.

Elliott Gotkine, CNN, Jerusalem.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: Those conflicts around the world intensified this year. More people are displaced today than ever before. The crises in Sudan, Gaza, Haiti and Myanmar continue to worsen, while the fall of the Assad regime has given Syrians the opportunity to return home.

I spoke to Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, about the state of the global refugee crisis.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: I want to talk about first, the potential for return to Syria. Of course, developments there are welcome. Assad has been horrible to his own people, but the NRC estimates that nearly 17 million Syrians need aid, the highest figure ever. That's inside the country.

So you imagine more coming in. Does the country have the ability to support people coming home?

JAN EGELAND, SECRETARY GENERAL, NORWEGIAN REFUGEE COUNCIL: No, they do not.

I was there now in November. Syria is really having an economic crisis beyond belief, in part because the rest of the world, the western countries have had them under sanctions, some of the toughest sanctions there is.

On top of that, as you said in your report, large parts of the cities are completely destroyed and I am shocked every time I go, there has been no rebuilding.

I think the internal displacement that has taken place will now lead to people returning from within Syria, from Idlib to Aleppo, from outside of Damascus to inside of Damascus.

[16:25:10]

Six million were displaced within Syria, but I think it will take time before the refugees will return from neighboring countries. It will happen, perhaps next summer, and then only if there is some help to rebuild and get the economy going again.

SCIUTTO: I want to ask you about two more places before we go. The first is Gaza, because you've been to Gaza several times since October 7th last year, and you were there in November. How has Gaza changed, and I might even say deteriorated during that time? And is it getting anything close to the help it needs for civilians there?

EGELAND: No, it is not. And again, Gaza is like no other place on Earth. I mean, Syrians could flee to Lebanon. Ukrainians could flee to Poland. Where can the Palestinians in Gaza flee? Because Israel, which is the country bombarding them day and night and also holding back all aid and the aid that gets in is looted with Israel watching.

Egypt is also not letting them in, neither Israel nor Egypt, and they are bombarded constantly. Eighty percent of all homes are either destroyed or damaged, and it is winter and they are not getting even tents. My heart breaks for the women and children of Gaza. Totally innocent of the atrocities of the 7th of October.

SCIUTTO: And more civilians died there just in the last 24 hours.

EGELAND: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Let's talk about Ukraine now, 6.8 million Ukrainians remain abroad as we approach close to the three-year anniversary of Russia's full scale invasion.

You were just in Ukraine as well, traveling across the country. Is Ukraine at all -- let's just imagine a ceasefire, which is perhaps a long way off. But if there were to be a ceasefire, tomorrow is Ukraine, after all the damage that Russia has unleashed there ready, able to welcome back those millions of refugees?

EGELAND: I think they will. But again, this is the age of destruction, really. You wouldn't believe how destroyed cities, villages are in the south, in the east, and in the northeast of the country.

I was in Kherson. It is a provincial capital. It was first captured by the Russians. It was retaken by Ukrainian forces -- and it is now pummeled every single day. There is 140,000 people. Some of them have returned even from Poland and Western Ukraine. But most who fled from Kherson will not go back until there is a ceasefire and then massive help for the rebuilding, and we are ready to do that as NRC, where in all of these places, but we are overstretched and underfunded. Those who would like people to return need to help us to rebuild.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: Well, we wish them the best of luck.

Coming up after the break, rising from the ashes, literally. How the restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral after a horrific fire relied on some high tech help. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:30:57]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF U.S. SECURITY ANALYST: A number of Hollywood stars are now voicing their support for the actress Blake Lively as she accuses one of her male co-star -- co-stars of sexual harassment. Lively has filed a civil complaint against Justin Baldoni, who also directed the movie they appeared together in, It Ends With Us. In the film, they play a couple haunted by a cycle of domestic abuse.

Lively's complaint says that Baldoni created a hostile workplace on set. She also accuses him, after the fact, of trying to destroy her reputation. He denies both allegations. Our Elizabeth Wagmeister has more.

ELIZABETH WAGMEISTER, CNN ENTERTAINMENT CORRESPONDENT: There are different allegations. First, there are the allegations of sexual harassment and a hostile, unsafe working environment that Blake Lively alleges that she was subjected to. She says that Justin Baldoni, not just as her costar, but as the director of the film, and it was his production company that was behind this film and acquired the rights to the book to make this film.

She says that he made numerous inappropriate sexual comments to her and that he and another male producer who are named in this complaint, entered her trailer uninvited, many times, sometimes while she was undressed, and another time while she was breast feeding her newborn child. So, that's the piece of the allegations of sexual harassment. Then the other big piece here, she says, because she raised these issues and these concerns in an effort to achieve a safer work environment for herself and her employees, but then she was retaliated against.

And you ask about the details and the proof. Well, in this lawsuit, there are hundreds of screenshots of text messages between Justin Baldoni's team which Blake Lively's team says proves that they had a sophisticated and coordinated campaign to essentially take her down behind the scenes. Now Baldoni's team is fiercely denying this. They are saying that it is completely normal for publicists to have private communications behind the scenes.

And they say the reason why they even hired a crisis management firm is because they allege that Blake Lively's team was planting negative stories about him. So, his team has denied this. And one last point I do want to make, Jim. Over the weekend, I confirmed with the source that Baldoni has now been dropped by his talent agency WME, which is one of the biggest agencies in the entertainment business and also represents Blake Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds.

SCIUTTO: Thanks to Elizabeth Wagmeister. A potential merger between Honda and Nissan to enormous car makers could reshape the auto industry. The Japanese companies say that they will spend the next six months exploring whether they should join forces. Vanessa Yurkevich has the story.

VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN BUSINESS AND POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jim, if you can't beat them, join them. Honda and Nissan, two rival Japanese automakers are now in talks to merge. Mitsubishi, which also has an alliance with Nissan, would be a part of this deal. The two companies, if they ultimately decide to join forces, would make the third largest automaker in the world behind Toyota and Volkswagen.

Honda and Nissan would be valued at around $50 billion. So why this merger? Well, the companies want to be competitive, especially against rivals like Toyota, which produces more cars than Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi combined. And Nissan is on shaky financial footing with analysts projecting they could go bankrupt in 2026. So, a merge with Honda would help save them.

And the merger would help to produce more electric vehicles to compete with other car makers. Nissan actually has better E.V. infrastructure than Honda does. And for the average consumer, if you have a Nissan, the company would go bankrupt. So that's good news, and more car options would come to market, including hybrid vehicles, which are very popular in the U.S.

Analysts say it's not really a question of if this happens because it has -- it really has to happen in order for these automakers to remain viable.

[16:35:07]

Now the two companies say, if they agree to this merger, it will be completed by 2026. Jim?

SCIUTO: Thanks, Vanessa. Whether you're driving headed to the train station or the airport, travelers in the Northeast us are bracing for heavy snow and freezing rain, the storms could produce either a wet Christmas or maybe a white one, depending on where you are. With more, Chad Myers, he's at the weather center. So, I'm in D.C., Chad. Am I going to get a white Christmas or is it just going to be cold?

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: You're not going to get a white Christmas. But tomorrow morning, need to be very careful in D.C. because there's going to be some freezing drizzle overnight. That first step you take on to those stairs on the way down to your car could be a slippery one. So, make sure that you plan for that and at least think ahead. Let's not take everything in my hands all by myself, because I may be using those hands to help stop my fall.

So, the snow will be from about Philadelphia back up to North New York City, but from Philly down through Baltimore and D.C., that's what we're going to see the potential for the ice event overnight. There's some snow on the radar, but most of it's in Ontario and Quebec right now. But we do have winter weather advisories that's way down from winter storm warnings like they have on up in Maine.

But that still means that tomorrow morning there could be something slippery on the ground. So yes, we're having some airport delays. San Francisco, even toward Dallas, Fort Worth, maybe for tomorrow with a little bit of rain. But here is the problem. Here is the 8:00 a.m. forecast. This is what the computer thinks the radar is going to look like. So, from Boston all the way down through D.C. along that I-95, the B.W. Parkway, that's where the snow would be coming down.

Now we're not talking inches of snow, but it doesn't take more than an eighth of an inch of ice, if that's how it comes down in your neighborhood, to really ruin your day. So, 89.7 million drivers will be out there going somewhere this time. The problem, Jim, is that the sun is at the lowest angle of the year. It's called Winter Solstice. It means the days as short as could be. It means the sun is low in the sky. So, if you are traveling this week, please clean the inside of your windshield because that sun's going to be right in your eyeballs and outside I know you have wipers for that, but it's the inside that gets dirty. You don't know why, but it does, and that film on the inside of the window could make your travel a whole lot harder than it really has to be if you just get out there and wipe it off, clean it up. Use some Windex, whatever you need to do.

So yes, there'll be some rain. Not a lot of white on the map, I'm afraid so. Not a lot of white Christmases out there. Airport delays, probably New York and even down to Philadelphia because of the icing tomorrow and then some clouds still into San Francisco. But here's where the icing could be. And that's not even a quarter inch, but it's just enough if it's on your roadway.

So yes, the forecast for snow accumulation is on up into the north of the Poconos, really on just the Alleghenies, and into the Adirondacks and also the Catskills. Back out west though, let's pay attention to this big snow event. If you're going skiing in Tahoe, you pick the right week. Well, so far, you could have picked almost any week because it has snowed a lot out there. They are very happy with the snow totals in the Sierra right now, Jim.

SCIUTTO: You know, I've never cleaned the inside of my car's windshield in my entire life and I do want to take your advice. I'm going to do it today.

MYERS: Yes. You will be amazed. You know, how did this get here?

SCIUTTO: Yes. All right. Chad Myers, as always with news you could use from the weather center. Thank you.

But one of the highlights of 2024 has to be the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, five years after it was nearly destroyed in a blaze. One of the reasons it was repaired so quickly was the help of a software company called Autodesk. It donated its resources to create a 3D model of Notre Dame as it stood before the fire. CNN's Samantha Delouya has more on exactly how that was done.

So, tell me, because I read a lot about how they used old methods to do things like cut the wood to be consistent with the previous architecture. So, how do they use technology to make it move more quickly?

SAMANTHA DELOUYA, CNN ECONOMICS REPORTER: Yes, that's right, Jim. It was sort of a marrying of this old way of building along with modern technology that made this even possible to be done in five years. When Emmanuel Macron promised in 2019 that Notre Dame would be rebuilt in that five-year timeframe. That seems like a tall order. But it was possible, and it was made possible with the help of drones and other advanced technology like 3D laser scans.

A happy accident actually helped as well. In 2015, an American professor that studies Gothic architecture took a scan of the Notre Dame Cathedral, and he collected more than a billion points of data to try to understand how this had been built in the 1100s. He did not know that this scan would eventually be used to help rebuild the cathedral, because this was before that fire.

[16:40:01]

But then, after the fire, an American company, Autodesk stepped in to build upon those initial 2015 scans and they helped create this full- scale 3D model of Notre Dame to help inform the rebuilding process and understand where, you know, even the pieces of the cathedral that were unseen, you know, how they were built. Ultimately, the complete view was made possible with drone footage, Autodesk scans, and then building upon those scans.

And experts said, without the help of this modern technology, it might not have been able to be recreated in the exact same way as it was, you know, all those hundreds of years ago, and it definitely wouldn't have been able to be recreated in that five-year window that Macron had promised.

SCIUTTO: Is it identical to what was there before or are there differences?

DELOUYA: Yes. So, you know, if you walk in, it looks almost identical to the original Notre Dame Cathedral, but there are some important updates. Namely a sprinkler system and a fire suppression system so that we don't get another repeat of, you know, the 2019 disaster that almost destroyed this iconic cathedral.

There's also now optimized lighting placement, and as well, you know, as you can see from that video, the cathedral looks a lot lighter and brighter, and that's because, you know, the engineers and the team cleaned off hundreds of years of candle soot from the walls and the ceilings and so that's why it looks like that now.

SCIUTTO: Wow, can't wait to see it myself. Samantha Delouya, thanks so much. So, as we count down to Christmas, two holiday stories to share with you. Christmas came early for one very lucky teenager who had met Taylor Swift at a children's hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, on Sunday, a special delivery arrived.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh my God. It's Taylor Swift.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK.

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SCIUTTO: Wow. After their earlier meeting went viral, Swift followed up with a gift. And as you can see, well, the reaction speaks for itself.

Patients at several hospitals in Croatia were surprised to see volunteers dressed as Santa Claus climbed down from the roof and into the wards. Instead of choosing the more traditional chimney method, they delivered about 500 gifts to the children. Their very unexpected appearance certainly made their day. Some great scenes there.

That's it for this hour of CNN NEWSROOM. I wish you and your family the best for the holidays. Coming up next, Marketplace Europe.

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