[clock ticking]
[upbeat music playing]
CARL AZUZ: It's great to have you watching
on this 3rd day of March.
My name is Carl Azuz.
We're starting with something a little different today.
We're explaining how we vet-- how
we make sure the videos you're seeing from Ukraine are real.
Often in times of breaking news, especially if it takes place
in a populated area, there's a flood
of information posted online.
Some of it like this footage of damage in a Ukrainian city
is real.
It's been a week since Russian forces invaded
the Eastern European country, and US officials
estimate that Russia has lost roughly 3% to 5%
of its military equipment in the war,
while the Ukrainian military has lost roughly 10%.
Because Russian forces are so much larger and more powerful,
officials expect they'll overwhelm Ukraine in the days
to come.
But conditions for both sides are constantly changing,
and information is constantly evolving.
The video you see here got more than 20 million views
on TikTok, with the top comment claiming the soldier
was recording an invasion.
But that's wrong.
The video is from an Instagram post in 2015.
This clip was recently shared on a Ukrainian government Twitter
page as if it were real, but the Reuters news agency
said it's actually from a video game called
Digital Combat Simulator.
One thing I always tell viewers to do,
especially if they're seeing news on social media,
is to check their sources.
Did it come from a reputable news site or a news
network you've heard of?
If so, chances are it's been verified.
If not, it might be real.
It might be fake news.
How exactly do networks like CNN go about verifying
the videos we show?
- Social media footage has played a key role
in our coverage of Ukraine, making
us able to identify military movements
and also possible attacks.
But it's also really important that we
understand the footage is real, and accurate, and current.
And so one of the ways that we've been doing this
is by geolocating that footage.
And here is an example of how our investigative team
has been doing that.
- [speaking ukrainian]
- It was an alarming scene--
Russian helicopters flying suspiciously low
over an area just a few kilometers outside
of Ukraine's capital Kyiv, with large dark plumes
of smoke rising.
The man filming says about 20 of them flew by.
And at the time this video first started circulating
on social media, February 24, it was not yet
confirmed the Russians were anywhere near Kyiv,
so our investigative team began looking to verify it.
So the most important thing is to establish
that this footage is recent.
We used reverse image search engines
to check the video had not been circulating before February 24.
It had not.
With that confirmed, we needed to establish the location.
Social media posts mentioned Hostomel
Airport 25 kilometers outside of Kyiv, so we started there.
Using Google Earth and Yandex Maps, a Russian search engine
equivalent, we zoomed in on the airport
and began looking for possible locations.
What we then wanted to do was to geolocate it.
And to geolocate it, we did what's called a panorama.
So we created various screen grabs from the footage that
looked significant, and we pulled up
various different shots from the footage that showed
us key identifiable structures.
The main, most-notable one was this yellow building here,
and there's a small rooftop structure as well.
You can also tell that there are some white houses and a gray
structure here to the right.
Using these screen grabs, we then
went back to our Google Earth to find
any situation-- any location near the airport
that matched that description.
And luckily, we found this.
Here's a yellow structure, and there's multiple white houses,
and there's also a gray structure nearby as well.
And because of that arrangement-- because
of the way they're situated, that
had to be the location near the airport
where this footage was filmed.
So we know the date, and we also know
the location of that footage.
Now with that verified, we were able to put
that footage to use.
And so we sent this footage to CNN's Matthew Chance,
and shortly afterwards, he traveled to where we're
geolocated on a map, and he was then up live for CNN,
creating an iconic moment where he was at the airport
with Russian soldiers interacting with him
and identifying that they were already
so close to the capital.
CARL AZUZ: 10 second trivia--
which of these Major League Baseball events
took place in 1972--
Pittsburgh won the World Series, Jackie Robinson retired,
the first player strike was held,
or the first division playoff was held?
The first time a strike canceled Major
League games occurred in 1972.
Now for the ninth time, work has stopped in the major leagues.
And the organization just announced that opening day,
which had been set for March 31st, will be postponed,
and the first two series of regular season games
will be canceled.
This is because of a lockout that started last December.
Lockouts are when owners decide to shut down team facilities,
while strikes, by contrast, occur
when players refuse to work.
In both cases, the sticking point
is usually a collective bargaining
agreement-- a deal between the two sides for the show
to go on.
Players' salaries, free agency rules, post-season rules--
they're all part of the collective bargaining
agreement.
When the two sides couldn't reach a new deal last year,
the lockout was announced, and any trades or new contracts
were put on hold.
So now what?
Well, despite ongoing negotiations
between players and owners, they're still said to be
far apart on an agreement.
So unless either side gives in or both of them
find a compromise on a path forward,
more of the 2022 season could be lost.
Up next, it makes perfect sense that the Asian giant
tortoise would be the giant-est tortoise in Asia.
But poaching-- illegal hunting of this animal--
has made it critically endangered in Bangladesh,
meaning there's an extremely high risk
it'll go extinct in the wild.
The reasons why and the action being taken to prevent this
are the focus of our next report.
- The Asian giant tortoise was thought
to be extinct in the country until 10 years ago,
when a few were discovered in the wild
with the help of this man.
And now, conservation biologist Shahriar Caesar Rahman
is on a mission to bring them back.
SHAHRIAR CAESAR RAHMAN: We realized
if we want to prevent extinction of the species from Bangladesh,
we must take drastic efforts.
- Rahman runs a conservation and breeding center for four
critically endangered species of turtle
and tortoise in an effort to help restore
their populations in the wild.
SHAHRIAR CAESAR RAHMAN: Unfortunately,
most of the species are threatened with extinction.
The major conservation challenges
are hunting for food, and pet trade,
and the destruction of their freshwater
ecosystem and forest habitat.
- On the front line is the Chittagong Hill Tracts,
a remote region on the Bangladeshi
border with India and Myanmar--
considered a biodiversity hotspot,
but one that is threatened by poaching, logging,
and agricultural development.
Rahman first visited in 2011, and working with the Indigenous
Mro community, he and his team trained former hunters
as parabiologists, or citizen scientists that
collect data and monitor species to help protect local wildlife.
SHAHRIAR CAESAR RAHMAN: We're empowering
them to be the guardian of the ecosystem
that they have been protecting for hundreds of years.
Those people become the ears and eyes for conservation,
and eventually when species are released back in the wild,
these are the individuals who will
be monitoring them every day.
- While there, Rahman learned that a few Asian giant
tortoises still existed in the region,
and the idea for the breeding center was born.
These juveniles have been bred from specimens
rescued from hunters by Rahman's team of biologists,
like Passing Mro.
PASSING MRO: [non-english speech]
INTERPRETER: In the past, our family hunted.
But today, we don't hunt the tortoises.
We make people understand not to hunt them,
as they are on the verge of extinction.
I feel very happy to work on it.
If we don't, the tortoises will have vanished from the world.
- The captive-bred, critically endangered Asian giant
tortoises, which are bred here in our center for the first
time in Bangladesh-- we'll be releasing
these individuals back in the wild end of this year.
- His hopes for the future of the species in Bangladesh--
slow and steady wins the race.
[music playing]
CARL AZUZ: Thanks to a really creative idea on TikTok,
New York City's Empire State Building is virtually talking
trash about other skyscrapers.
- It is so bad I want to give you a zero,
but that's not possible.
So I give you a one.
CARL AZUZ: Why is this happening?
Well, an Empire State marketing executive said they wanted
to humanize the building.
So they hired some folks to attract social media
followers by giving it a pair of critical eyes
and a very big mouth.
(RAPPING) What builders may build,
empire tries to take down.
No sticks, no stones, just insolence abounds.
It sounds and resounds, the heap of trouble
down from ground level may only get higher,
because others may rise and fall,
but only one's an empire does it aspire to inspire
copycats as it lashes out.
It's all about a talking bout of towering trash.
I'm Carl Azuz.
We've got only nice things to say in our daily shout out,
and today's goes out to Lowell High School
in San Francisco, California.
[music playing]