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U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan Announces He`ll Step Down; High School Students Raise Awareness About Human Trafficking; A Young Researcher Puts Her Stamp on Ink

Aired April 12, 2018 - 04:00   ET

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

CARL AZUZ, CNN 10 ANCHOR: Hi. I`m Carl Azuz. Good to see you today.

There`s a significant change ahead for the U.S. House of Representatives and that`s the first story we`re explaining this Thursday on CNN 10.

Since 2015, Paul Ryan, a Republican from the state of Wisconsin, has led the House of Representatives as House speaker. The majority party in the

House choices its speaker. And the position is important not only for its House leadership but because it`s also in line to the presidency, behind

the president and vice president.

Speaker Ryan played a major role in the Republican tax reform bill that was signed into law last December. He`s helped roll back banking rules that

were enacted under Democratic leadership and he`s helped the Republican Party raised funding for the upcoming midterm elections this fall.

So, why did he announce yesterday that he`d leave the House at the end of his term in January?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. PAUL RYAN (R-WI), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Look, you all know me. I didn`t take this job to get the gavel in the first place. I`m not a guy

who thinks about it like that. This really was two things, I have accomplished much of what I came here to do and my kids aren`t getting any

younger, and if I stay, they`re only going to know me as a weekend dad and that`s just something I consciously can`t do. And that`s really it right

there.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AZUZ: Speaker Ryan hasn`t always seen eye to eye with President Trump though they`re both Republicans and some political analysts say Democrats

have a good chance of winning control of the House in November`s midterm elections. So, they see Speaker Ryan`s departure as a bad sign for

Republicans.

Ryan says he`s confident that Republicans will keep control of the House, that he doesn`t think the individual elections will depend on whether he

stays on as speaker. Ryan`s been in Congress since 1999. He was the Republican nominee for vice president in 2012, though he wasn`t elected.

Some Democrats joined Republicans in praising Paul Ryan`s work as House speaker.

OK. Next story today. Slavery is not a thing of the past. It may be illegal the world over, but it still goes on in several different forms.

And since 2011, CNN`s Freedom Project has worked to inform of where and how people are still being enslaved or trafficked.

To amplify the voices of survivors and to pressure governments to eliminate slavery, a group of high school students in Virginia has taken up the

cause.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATT PLOYD, TEACHER: Smithfield, Virginia, is a very rural family-based town. The sense of community is a very big part of our local culture and

identity.

My name is Matt Ployd. I`m a teacher of USVA government. That`s Smithfield High School.

Hi, everybody. Good morning. How are we doing?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I`m good.

PLOYD: My first day on this job about a year and a half ago, my new department head asked me, what do you know about human trafficking? And

have you given any thoughts of making that your project-based learning topic? And the answer was nothing and no and sure.

I jumped into it and, you know, haven`t looked back.

I like that, convinced (ph).

The Prevention Project is a nonprofit organization and they provide a curriculum for us to teach human trafficking in a very real world sense to

high school kids.

Our students are taking the information to getting and they`re taking it off the PowerPoint. They`re taking out of the textbook and they`re

addressing it in the real world. They`re making sure their congresswomen, their senators and their government officials know what they`re learning

and know what they expect for them to do about this problem. And they`ve actually pushed for events in the community to help bring awareness to the

community by how serious this is in our area.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And in every single state in America, there`s been a case of human trafficking.

PLOYD: We decided to put together a presentation to help raise awareness of human trafficking. The goal being to try to convince local lawmakers to

institute education on human trafficking and to the local curriculum across the board and all middle schools and or high schools in the county.

If this one classroom can make this big a difference and this one classroom can have this much of an impact, what can an entire school system do?

The one thing the kids said is we`re going to meet somebody and that`s really had to live with this, that`s had to deal with this.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: My name is Monica and I am a human trafficking survivor.

PLOYD: Having Monica come in has inspired the kids and made it real. Now, it`s not something you read about or see in a movie. It`s somebody who`s

flesh and blood standing right in front of you. And I thought it was important for them to see firsthand and hear a story and not be able to

turn the other way.

BREIGH CAMPBELL, STUDENT: When Monica came and spoke to us, that`s when I got the idea of writing Monica -- monologues to show what the different

views are.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Effort every piece of my body.

CAMPBELL: I decided to take her story and to put into words from my point of view of what it would be like if I was in her shoes.

ELISE BROWN, STUDENT: Monica was a part of my inspiration. I don`t want this happening to anyone else. It needs to stop. Things need to change

and we can`t just be that person that sits and watch. We need to do something about it. We want better. We want change.

ABBY CONYERS, STUDENT: I have found such passion in this problem that I don`t want to take that onto my college career and to be able to make a

change not only in my community here, but future communities that I`m going to be a part of.

JADA HEAD, STUDENT: I wrote a song I call the sale of your sister.

Just being chosen to perform or to share my piece, it is an honor.

PLOYD: My students humble me on a day to day basis. My students tend to push things further than what I anticipate seeing them gone. They have a

drive that I couldn`t imagine before I started doing this. My students are rockstars.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AZUZ (voice-over): Ten-second trivia:

Which element, which forms more compounds than any other, is represented by an atomic number of 6?

Hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, or oxygen?

C is for carbon, an element found in everything, from petroleum to people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AZUZ: Carbon black, a form of carbon made by partially burning the element, is found in everything from car tires to makeup to printer ink.

There`s some debate over whether carbon black is harmful to humans. Some studies say it depends on the type of exposure. But concerns about it are

part of the reason why Shaima Alqassab is working on a way to make ink without carbon black.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SHAIMA ALQASSAB, INVENTOR: I am really crazy about the environment and you find this in any chemical engineer. We really strive to make this planet a

better place, using more sustainable and renewable resources to make products.

My name is Shaima Alqassab and I`m 22 years old.

From 2016, it was the innovation week in the United Arab Emirates and everyone was calling for thinking out of the box and creating new things.

As chemical engineering students, we print a lot of lectures. So we thought, how about making a small portable printer that`s eco-friendly?

We`re developing the printer and then we said, OK, how about the ink that the printer is going to use? It contains something known as carbon black

which is the pigment, gives like the black color on the paper that you print on.

We thought how about replacing that carbon black with something from nature?

This is working good for my experiment. It`s known as Chlorella.

So what we are doing is we`re replacing the carbon black with the green algae. Algae has pigment.

Here, we have we grow our algaes and we make them ready so that we can extract the pigments from the algaes and take it to the next step.

And we dry it, and then when it`s dried, we add some natural ingredients to it. We test the product, and it goes through a certain process so that

it`s, like, nice and fine, and then we add it to the ink cartridge and we test it if it`s printing or not.

And it`s having the same function. So we`re moving towards the vision of sustainability and in the UAE, and algae life is moving along with it.

We believe that the future will be written with algae.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AZUZ: A squirrel recently fell out of a tree in western New York. Why would that make news? Because she broke her winnowed leg (ph) and needed a

winnowed cast. Yes, there are casts for squirrels, as you can see in this video from the Orphaned Wildlife Center. A windstorm knocked the animal`s

nest out of a tree and when a woman saw that the baby squirrel was injured, she took her to a local vet. Doctors say she`s going to be just fine in a

couple of weeks.

Well, why rodent she`d be? She`s been whiskered away and casts in both a video and a plaster. And as long as she doesn`t get too squirrely before

she heals, she`ll have quite a tale to tell.

I`m Carl Azuz and that`s all the chattering we`ve got time for on CNN. We`ll tree you tomorrow.

END