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House Democrats Hold Sit-In to Demand Vote on Guns; Brazil
Politicians' Secret Recordings Revealed; North Korea Propaganda Film
Backfires on Regime; India Lightning Strikes Kill At Least 90 People;
Japanese App Line Set to go Public;. Aired 12-1a ET - Part 2>
And adviser to former President Lula secretly recorded calling Amaral part of male genitalia. Where does it stop?
You yourself have been called a traitor, and there's been some very foul language used about you in some of these recordings. But have you yourself been shocked by the kind and the scale of the treachery in Brazil's elite?
DO AMARAL: This Delcidio is the most dangerous in the world, they say, because I knew too much. I'm not the person they're portraying. I really explained who was who and who did what. That's why they swear and they use the filthy language about my.
This Delcidio is a son of a --
WALSH: Brazil's elite sliding down the poll of public opinion together --
DO AMARAL: In Brazil, we have an expression, the stick that beats Chico also beats Francisco. It means if the conversation in which it was taped led me to prison and the loss of my political term, what about the others?
WALSH: Saint, sinners, kingmakers -- all live on -- even halos here are made of gold.
DO AMARAL: Politics is the only art in life in which you can resurrect more than once. You die, you're resurrected. You die, you're resurrected.
WALSH: Nick Paton Walsh, CNN, Sao Paolo, Brazil.
(END VIDEOTAPE) WALKER: Time to take a short break. When we return North Korea's attempt to manage its image and being in a propaganda blunder -- just ahead. What a film maker captured when the regime thought cameras were not rolling.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[00:32:30] VAUSE: Welcome back, everybody. You're watching CNN NEWSROOM live from Los Angeles, I'm John Vause.
WALKER: And I'm Amara Walker. The headlines this hour.
Polls in the U.K. will open in about 90 minutes as voters decide whether the country should stay in the European Union. Campaigners on both sides of the Brexit referendum rallied for votes until the very last minute. An opinion poll suggests that the race is just too close to predict.
VAUSE: In Washington, Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives are in the midst of a dramatic standoff. Democrats say they'll spend the night in the U.S. House chamber unless they get a vote on gun control legislation. The Republican House leader says the next round of votes will happen in the coming hour, though, he didn't say the gun control bill would be among those measures to be voted on.
WALKER: North Korea says it has conducted a successful test of a missile that travels 400 kilometers before it fell into the Sea of Japan. The state-run news agency did not specify when that missile was fired. But South Korean and U.S. officials reported that Pyongyang fired two intermediate-ranged missiles on Wednesday.
VAUSE: Meantime, North Korea, normally a master of propaganda, has suffered a bit of a setback.
WALKER: A documentary intended to positively promote the country has turned into a behind-the-scenes look at how North Korea manipulate appearances.
CNN's Brian Todd has the story.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For Kim Jong-Un's regime, it's seemed the ideal film project. It's called "Under the Sun", a profile of an 8-year-old girl named Jin-Mi, as she prepared to join the Korean Children's Union.
The North Koreans commissioned Russian film maker Vitali Mansky for the project, which they hoped would depict a worker's paradise. But tonight fallout. The project backfired.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Everybody stand up and loudly say, congratulations!
Can you say that? I won't say it again. TODD: A North Korean minder is felt, angrily coaching workers how to act during a scene filmed at a clothing factory.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Why was your applause so weak?
TODD: The minder seemingly thought they weren't being recorded, but the director kept his camera rolling.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Jin-Mi is sitting with straight legs.
Why are you sitting so funny? Like that. Sit like that.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They would come to the scene and would tell the people what they have to do, where they have to sit, how they have to sit, how they have to smile.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Try to say more. Let's do it. Don't forget to smile.
Smile! Everyone smile while your comrade is speaking.
TODD: And Jin-Mi's mother and others at a milk factory appear to do just that. At a dance class, Jin-Mi is driven to exhaustion and tears.
[00:35:10] UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): More, Jin-Mi! Do you understand comrade Jin-Mi? Do you understand or not? So what should we do, Jin-Mi, if you can't even learn these steps?
TODD: In scene after scene, minders are shown prodding, scolding film subjects to be more zealous.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): When the teacher speaks, repeat after her. Yes, recover soon and stop eating.
Still too gloomy. Do it with more joy. You can do it more joyfully.
TODD: The producer says there was constant argument between the Director Mansky and his minders. The North Koreans eventually scuttled the project, kicked the director out of the country, but the North Korean government made one mistake. They didn't keep full control of his footage.
ROBERT BOYNTON, AUTHOR, "THE INVITATION-ONLY ZONE": I think the biggest fallout would be probably for certainly the people who negotiated and allowed Mansky to enter the country, and secondly to the minders who guided his crew. They might be in trouble.
TODD: At the end, Jin-Mi is asked what it means to join the Children's Union?
JIN-MI (through translator): Now you feel responsible for your mistakes, and you wonder what else you should do for the respected leader. UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Stop her crying.
TODD (on-camera): We tried to get North Korean officials at the U.N. to respond to this documentary. We never heard back from them. But Jin Mi's mother has expressed her outrage in a North Korean government-run Web site saying, quote, "Is Mansky a human being? We thought he was making a documentary for the purpose of a friendly, cultural exchange. I had no idea that he would make my daughter the main character of his anti-North Korea movie."
Brian Todd, CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
VAUSE: We go to India now. Monsoon lightning strikes have killed at least 90 people across four different states.
One government official tells CNN, there has been more strikes than usual so far this season. Farmers usually look forward to those monsoon rains, especially now after two years of drought.
WALKER: Meteorologist Pedram Javaheri joining us now with more on this.
Hello, Pedram.
PEDRAM JAVAHERI, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Hey, good to see you, Amara and John.
Yes, you know, when you think about this and what's happened, of course, in India in the last 24 or so hours, a lot has been researched about it, lightning strikes, especially an increased number of lightning strikes as you heard.
An Indian official touch on that. But estimations put it that with every one degree Celsius increase in temperatures, you have a 12 percent increase in lightning activity. You extrapolate that over towards the 2100. That would give you a 50 percent increase there in lightning activity just because of the heating of the atmosphere, more water vapor in the atmosphere.
Of course, if you take a look at this region of India, well-known for lightning frequency especially this time of year as we approach the heart of the monsoon season. And then you consider the population and what they do here for their livelihood.
A lot of deforestation are already in place. A lot of farmers on the order of 300 million are believed to be farmers across the Indian subcontinent. So if you're in the open area, you're the tallest object, you're the target for a strike point, and that's why it's such a deadly scenario across this region of India.
And you compare it to the United States. The United States on average, about 33 people per year lose their lives due to lightning strikes. In India, that number somewhere between 2,000 to 3,000 people per year. Again, keep in mind, the population in the U.S., a little over 300 million, the farming population of India, 300 million.
So it kind of shows you when your livelihood puts you outdoor is you're in high risk there for lightning strikes, of course.
And you take a look. This is actually a radar perspective in the last couple of hours across the United States. I counted over 9400 lightning strikes across the Great Lakes region of the United States.
And one of the things that we certainly do not take for granted in the U.S. or any sort of western nation where you have a lot of information regarding lightning strikes, you know to get out of the water, you know to stay away from tall objects like trees that are isolated. That perhaps is something that, of course, people do not take into consideration in developing nations, places such as India.
Guys?
WALKER: All right. Pedram, appreciate that.
VAUSE: Pedram, thank you.
Still breaking, when we come back, a popular messaging app in Japan about to go public. What makes it different from its rivals? That's coming up next on NEWSROOM L.A.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[00:41:21] VAUSE: Well, Japan's popular messaging app, "Line," is on track for its IPO. The move could be the biggest tech offering of the year.
WALKER: "CNN Money" business correspondent Samuel Burke explains how it works.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SAMUEL BURKE, CNN MONEY BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT (on-camera): There's nothing unusual about seeing a business journalist outside the New York Stock Exchange. But it is highly unusual to see one like this.
This is all part of "Line," a new generation of messaging apps, taking selfies to a whole other level.
It's a crowded space: Snapchat, WhatsApp and WeChat are also fighting it out to be the instant messaging king.
Line has a major advantage. It makes tons of money as the most popular messaging app in Japan with more than 200 million active monthly users.
MAX WOLFF, MANHATTAN VENTURE PARTNERS: The best way to start to explain it is it's a souped up version of what Snapchat is to teens in the U.S. but for a much wider age demographic in the Japanese speaking world. BURKE (voice-over): It's the games, phone and video calls and increasingly stickers that keep them coming back.
(on-camera): Line which will have dual listings, both in Tokyo and here at the New York Stock Exchange, is the first stand-alone messaging app to go public.
(voice-over): It will use that cash to expand its service way beyond traditional messaging.
WOLFF: People are used to sending money to these messaging apps. And there's artificial intelligence you can ask and get customer support to questions. There's E-commerce on these apps, so we actually think the messaging app for the platform of the future.
BURKE (on-camera): Critics are messaging concerns.
Line is way smaller than WhatApp's more than 1 billion user base. Line is banned in China and key market for messaging. And user growth outside of Line's main market is falling.
WOLFF: They've been stuck a little over 200 million monthly active users for quite some time and there's a question about how successful this and several other Japanese technology platforms that are outside Japan.
BURKE (voice-over): Those concerns will surely weigh on Wall Street as it tries to rebound from one of the slowest ever year for tech ideas.
A successful listing for Line, though, could make it into a tech super hero and entice other companies to go public as well.
Samuel Burke, CNN Money, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WALKER: Pretty cool.
VAUSE: I thought it was terrifying, actually.
You're watching CNN NEWSROOM live from Los Angeles. I'm John Vause.
WALKER: And I'm Amara Walker.
John and I will be back at the top of the hour with a look at today's top stories.
But first, "World Sports" starts right after this break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(CNN WORLD SPORTS)
(Byline: John Vause, Amara Walker, , Jim Acosta, Ron Brownstein, Manu Raju, Pedram Javaheri, Nick Paton Walsh, Brian Todd, Pedram Javaheri Samuel Burke )
(Guest: Sandro Monetti )
(High: Two hours from now the polls will open and voters will decide whether the U.K. should stay in the European Union; Donald Trump is on the offensive, attacking Hillary Clinton during his latest speech; Democrats in the House of Representatives say they plan to spend the night in the House chamber unless they get a vote on gun control legislation; Brazil is in the middle of an enormous political crisis, some politicians are fighting for their own political survival amid a massive corruption scandal. North Korea, normally a master of propaganda, has suffered a bit of a setback. A documentary intended to positively promote the country has turned into a behind-the-scenes look at how North Korea manipulate appearances. Monsoon lightning strikes have killed at least 90 people across four different states in India. One government official tells CNN, there has been more strikes than usual so far this season. Farmers usually look forward to those monsoon rains, especially now after two years of drought. Japan's popular messaging app, "Line," is on track for its IPO. The move could be the biggest tech offering of the year.)
(Spec: North Korea; Entertainment; Europe; Treaties and Agreements; Politics; Congress; World Affairs; Government; Policies; Deaths; Weather; Science and Technology; Asia; Business)
