NOW-WITH-01
Candidates For Major Roles; Clearing The Deadly Landmines Left Behind By
ISIS; Russian Strikes Hit Targets In Idlib, Homs; Trump To Deport Illegal
Immigrants With Criminal Records; Syrian Military Resumes Assault On East
Aleppo; Why Bogus News Spreads So Fast; Fake Biden Pranks Take Internet By
Storm. Aired 3-4p ET - Part 2>
Matthew Chance, Will Ripley, Dylan Byers, Eleni Giokos, Jeanne Moos >
Germany and Peru. Marine Le Pen: Trump's Win "A Sign Of Hope"; Trump Team
Considers Candidates For Major Roles; Trump Gets First Presidential Daily
Intel Briefing; Clearing The Deadly Landmines Left Behind By ISIS; Russian
Strikes Hit Targets In Idlib, Homs; Trump, Putin Expressed Mutual
Admiration During Campaign; Mexico Preparing For Mass Deportations Under
Trump. The Syrian military has launched a renewed assault to retake rebel-
held East Aleppo. CNN Speaks To One Of Few Remaining Doctors In Eastern
Aleppo; Why Bogus News Spreads So Fast; Fake Biden Pranks Take Internet By
Storm >
Donald Trump; Latin America; Mexico; War; Military; Syria; Aleppo; Media;
Internet; Government; Politics; ISIS; Immigration; Policies>
Now we have seen a softening of that position, that parts of that wall might be a fence, for instance. What do you make of that? Would you qualify that backtracking?
FOX: Absolutely yes. And what I consider that he is a liar. That he cheated all of the people that voted for him under because they voted for him under an assumption that he would carry on with what he promised and now he is backing up. And I know he is going to back up further.
He has to sit in that chair and he will learn what is this all about. That it is not his own free will. That it is not his authoritarian decisions that are going to work. He will learn so many things that he doesn't know right now and one of them is the wall. That wall serves no purpose and he knows it. He just cheated his people for getting their votes.
GORANI: OK, so those are very harsh words. Let me ask you one last question about Donald Trump's electoral victory. He won the Electoral College, of course, but the Hispanic vote, the Latino vote in the United States for Donald Trump was a lot higher than people had initially expected, perhaps up to 29 percent according to the "New York Times."
Another organization estimated 17 percent. Either way, a lot higher than was anticipated. Why do you think that some Latino-Americans in much higher numbers in anticipated actually supported Donald Trump?
[15:35:08]FOX: According to some figures I saw in "New York Times," about 25 percent of the Latinos or Mexicans that voted did it for Trump and I think that is unbelievable, but if it happened, it speaks pretty bad about these Mexicans there that they didn't three or five generations and they denied origin and they denied their roots.
Number two, the outcome of the election, the amount of voters is extremely low, which I say it doesn't give the legitimacy that he would have as a president. He would have to do things on a very different manner.
He would have to unite a nation. He would have to work together with everybody and then he might start getting some legitimation, but to me, today, he does not have it.
GORANI: Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, thank you very much for joining us from Mexico City. We appreciate your time this evening on CNN. Thank you.
All right, let us talk once again about the Syrian tragedy. The Syrian military has launched a renewed assault to retake rebel-held East Aleppo. State media reports that Damascus is using war planes with precision weapons to, quote, "Target terrorist positions." This is what the state media is reporting.
One anchor described Tuesday the airstrikes as zero hour for wide scale operations. Of course, in the middle of it all, as always, civilians. Let's get more on what's happening in Aleppo now. CNN's Will Ripley is following developments. He is in Istanbul and he is live.
So talk to us a little bit about what is going on with the civilians in Eastern Aleppo, another terrifying night for them, but also just the last few remaining doctors in that battered city.
WILL RIPLEY, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It is a horrible situation for people who are living in Eastern Aleppo, Hala, as you know from this and in fact, there are some signs that people have really reached their breaking point.
A group of civilians were protesting in East Aleppo against the Free Syrian Army, asking them to stop the fighting before they have to endure what they expect could be a really horrific time with these just preliminary airstrikes causing huge explosions in a number of different neigborhoods around the city.
Also, residents raided a food warehouse of a relief organization and they tried to steel what food supplies they could because the prices at market for just basic necessities have become so high that many families simply can't afford it.
Also the supply of medicine running dangerously low according to one of the very few doctors remaining in East Aleppo who I spoke with.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RIPLEY (voice-over): Doctors in rebel-held Eastern Aleppo risk their lives just by going to work. Their city under siege for nearly five years. Eight hospitals still stands. The ninth hospital destroyed in a bombing earlier this year.
DR. HAMZA AL-KHATIB, DOCTOR IN ALEPPO: When we're at home, it's going to be rockets that will hit our home. But at the hospital, we know that it might be attacked at any moment.
RIPLEY: Dr. Hamza Al-Khatib says he is one of 31 doctors in the battle scarred city, 31, for more than a quarter million people.
AL-KHATIB: I guess, each doctor at the moment in Aleppo see between 100 to 150 patients each day.
RIPLEY (on camera): A day?
AL-KHATIB: Yes.
RIPLEY (voice-over): On normal days he treats the sick, but when the bombs fall, the sick must be turned away as trauma patients often children flood the emergency rooms.
AL-KHATIB: A young girl, 12 years old, lost her right leg. So that was a shock.
RIPLEY: He also treated a 4-month-old baby for a small cut, shrapnel from a rocket attack. They sent her home.
AL-KHATIB: Her home was also attacked again the same night and she lost her life.
RIPLEY: During the most recent month of heavy bombardment, some 500 people died in Eastern Aleppo including one week when 96 children were killed, which makes him hug his own baby a little tighter.
(on camera): She is beautiful.
(voice-over): Dr. Hamza lives at the hospital with his wife and 11-month- old daughter.
(on camera): Have you ever thought that you should try to leave Aleppo?
AL-KHATIB: Being with her in a safer place is very selfish. I would rather be here with my family treating patients.
RIPLEY: When you tuck her in at night, what do you pray for?
[15:40:08]AL-KHATIB: I pray for everything to end. I hope for the peace to break. I hope for hearing good news in the morning.
RIPLEY: But each morning seems to bring more bad news. Winter is coming. Food and medicine is running low, and in the battle for Eastern Aleppo, the worst maybe yet to come.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
RIPLEY: Dr. Hamza says maybe there is a two-month supply left of the most basic medical necessities. Some medications are already gone. For example, insulin, there is no insulin for people with diabetes. They just can't find it. He really told me that he feels like the international community has abandoned them, there in Aleppo.
They are very fearful that the timing of this final operation with the support of Russia could be timed to coincide with the U.S. presidential transition when the world is distracted, looking the other direction, and might not pay as much attention to what they predict could be some horrific atrocities there.
Just, Hala, just to live, just for the food staples, meat that used to cost $14 a kilo, now $45. Sugar that was 35 cents a kilo, $15 to a kilo of rice that cost $1.50 now $18.
You know that East Aleppo traditionally was a lower income part of the city anyway. People can't afford it and they're growing more and more desperate and fearful.
GORANI: Thanks very much, Will Ripley in Istanbul. We'll be right back. Stay with us on CNN. A lot more ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GORANI: A few months before Americans went to the polls, the pope backed Donald Trump to land the job in the White House except that didn't happen. It never happened. It was a fake story on this bogus, quote, "news website," but it spread like crazy on social media and this happens all over the web all the time.
Thousands of totally made up stories shared by millions of people on sites like Facebook. They're not sure what to do about it or even if they should do anything about it.
Let's get more now into this with our own Dylan Byers. He's in Los Angeles for us. And you have many more examples of fake stories, for instance, attacks against Hillary Clinton or quotes attributed to Donald Trump, all them absolutely fake but that were shared millions of times.
DYLAN BYERS, CNN SENIOR REPORTER FOR MEDIA AND POLITICS: That is absolutely right and these fake news stories come from over hundreds of different fake news sites. Some that are obviously fake and others that try to appear real, you know, give themselves a name like the Denver something to try and appear like a real news organization.
And you're right, they create extraordinary false stories. Among them the idea that the pope endorsed Donald Trump, not true. We also had a story recently which came up in Google searches suggesting that Donald Trump had not only won the Electoral College but that he had also won the popular vote.
[15:45:14]That also was not true. There are stories from earlier in the campaign cycle that went all over Facebook, one of them had Megyn Kelly being fired from Fox News because she was a Hillary Clinton supporter. And Fox News have found this out and vanished her from the building.
And then a story even about Hillary Clinton suggesting that an FBI agent involved in the leaks of her e-mails had been found dead in a murder- suicide. None of these stories are true. They are all categorically false.
I think any reader with any sense of perspective or the willingness to check any other credible news outlet would know that they are false and yet they have proliferated around Facebook, Google and other websites.
GORANI: Right. And as you mentioned, some of them mimic real news websites, so I guess, if you're not very familiar with news outlets and websites, you might mistake, for instance, something from the "Denver Guardian" for a legitimate news organization.
Now let's talk a little bit, though, about what Facebook is doing about this. Mark Zuckerberg has been asked directly whether or not he believes that fake news stories influence the election. We know that there is a task force and formal task force within Facebook that is trying to deal with this. What are their options here?
BYERS: Well, both Facebook and Google have said that they're trying to deal with it and what they've done is they're trying to target the revenue streams for these potential websites. So what they do is they take away the advertising for these sites or their ability to advertise on Google search platform or through Facebook.
Now both -- you know, if you look at Facebook and Google, they have two different ideas about what role fake news played in the election. Mark Zuckerberg has said he does not believe that fake news had any influence on the election.
The CEO of Google on the other hand says it is entirely possible if you just look at how close this election was. You look at the data, it's conceivable that, you know, people reading false news could have been swayed the election.
Either way the question is you're right, the question is, what can they do? They can target advertising. They can cut off the advertising. They can try to cut the revenue streams, but it is very hard to tamp down fake news sites and keep them down without betraying certain notions of freedom of speech and the web is a sort of even playing field for everyone.
And it then becomes an almost a game whack-a-mole (ph) where you hit down one fake news site and another one just pops up.
GORANI: Well, then, one just has to wonder what you do about it. I mean, yes, obviously the internet is all about sharing, especially social media, stories go viral, and then they go around the world ten times before a correction even makes it, you know, a meter forward. So there you have a big -- so are we just condemned to a world where half of the news stories out there are partisan and partially or completely fake?
BYERS: Well, there is one thing you could do about, which is you could put in place human editors who could sort of sift through all of the news and get rid of all false and fake news stories.
The problem with that is that the last time you and I spoke about Facebook, it was because Facebook had a controversy because those human editors were believed to have edited out several conservative news websites.
And that brings in the whole question of media bias and ethics. And Facebook has been resistant to describing itself as a media organization and to accepting some of those responsibilities that journalistic institutions bring upon themselves.
So how you balance having human editors who can sift through the fake and the true without giving the appearance of bias and sort of letting the algorithm run according to its own logic. Those are the questions that organizations like Facebook and Google are wrestling with right now.
GORANI: Absolutely. And Facebook will have to come to terms with just how much of the news on its news feeds and how many people actually get their news from Facebook and Facebook alone in some cases. Dylan Byers, thanks very much. We appreciate it.
Speaking of Facebook, check out our Facebook page, facebook.com/halagoranicnn. Coming up, Barack and Biden do Washington. The internet pays tribute to the ultimate political bromance with lots and lots of memes. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GORANI: More than 200 nations are in Morocco right now trying to find ways to slow climate change at the COP 22 Conference. As part of a special series on Morocco, we focus on one of the country's economic hubs, the Port of Tangier. Eleni Giokos has more.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ELENI GIOKOS, CNN MONEY AFRICA CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In Tangier, Morocco, an ancient port city, just 27 kilometers from Spain. For centuries, it has been a strategic point of commerce between Europe and Africa. Today, economic activity has expanded from merchants trading (inaudible) and other goods to high tech manufacturing for some of the world's biggest companies.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So this is our activity, we do about a million of these a year. It takes about six months to train people to be able to make a steering wheel in the correct time. So we started out with about two million dollars' worth of coordinating business annually, and now we have grown to about 40 million euro per year in sales doing more and more complex products.
GIOKOS: Julie Ann Fermin (ph) is GM at Poly Designs, an automotive leather company operating in Tangier since 2001.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We make a variety of interior turn parts for the automotive industry and we work for all of the main car companies such as Audis, Volkswagen, BMW, Jaguar, Landover, (inaudible), Kia, Ford, Volvo, so we have about 35 customers.
When we decided to came to Morocco because of the proximity to Europe and also the cost structure.
GIOKOS: An attractive cost structure because the company is part of the Tanger-Med Free Zone, one of several free trade zones created by the government and proving to be a boom for many companies like Poly Designs.
One of more than 650 businesses in a zone (inaudible) over 3,000 hectares. At the Lear Corporation, production is fierce as workers generate thousands of seats and headrest covers six days a week. Being part of a special zone pays dividends (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: On the free zone, the corporate tax is zero percent for the five first years and after that, it will decrease it to a rate of 8.75 percent.
GIOKOS: According to the World Bank from 2005 to 2012, Tangier has creating jobs three times faster than all of Morocco. The ease of logistics is also a contributor to the growth, at least for one fashion company which sources its fabrics across Europe and China.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Before the ports opens, the lead time was quite challenging basically. Coming from Asia was for 30 or 40 days, and it was coming to Turkey was in 12 to 15 days. Today we deport from Turkey to Morocco, we are talking about four to five days, and this is basically giving us a lot of advantage in lead time and we have been more competitive.
GIOKOS: A sentiment Julie Ann Fermin echoes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It opened up new markets and it's enabled us to have a longer reach for our products.
GIOKOS: A market expansion that's part of Tangier's renaissance, a renaissance businesses thriving in the free zones hope continues decades into the future. Eleni Giokos, CNN.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
[15:55:10]GORANI: As the White House prepares to say goodbye to Barack Obama, the internet is celebrating his close and apparently fun relationship with Vice President Joe Biden. Jeanne Moos shows us how the web hailing America's greatest bromance.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEANNE MOOS, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was as if President Obama was trying to wrap his lips around the name --
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: President -- President-elect Trump --
MOOS: Some on Twitter elected to imagine frank of mischievous Joe Biden might play on the incoming Trump (inaudible) born a meme of imaginary conversation between Joe and President Obama.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I ordered huge replacement door knobs -- huge.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Joe, we can't.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: President tiny hands.
MOOS: From the size of Trump's hands to President Obama's birth certificate.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come on, you got to print a fake birth certificate, put it in an envelope labelled secret, and leave it in the oval office desk.
MOOS: Obama's birth place gave birth to a lot of jokes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I left the Kenyan passport in your desk just (inaudible) -- and a pair of rug in your bedroom. He's going to lose --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Damn it, Joe.
MOOS: That tweet was written by left leaning, Josh Bilenson (ph) --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just trying to be funny at a time when it's really hard to know if it's OK to be funny.
MOOS: Josh loves Joe Biden and has authored at least ten of these memes.
(on camera): And then there was one based on a dirty trick that was actually played in real life. The White House transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, an investigation confirmed, the missing w's in the White House.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hillary was saying they took the w's off the keyboards when Bush won. I took the t's. They can only type "rump."
MOOS (voice-over): Josh who also wrote the t's tweet got an inquiry from a agent.
(on camera): They wanted to know if you are interested in a book deal.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I told them I'm interested in anything at this point.
MOOS: If the election has been pushing your buttons, maybe a tweet will provide relief.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I took a Staples red button and wrote nukes on it. It speaks to him in Russian when pressed.
MOOS: Jeanne Moos, CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GORANI: This has been THE WORLD RIGHT NOW. See you same time, same place tomorrow. I'm Hala Gorani. "QUEST MEANS BUSINESS" is next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
END
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