Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Live At Daybreak

Missing in Aruba; The Outside Battle; Kidnapping Secret; Food for Life; TV War

Aired July 27, 2005 - 05:30   ET

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

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: And good morning to you, welcome to the second half-hour of DAYBREAK.
Coming up, new developments in the case of an Alabama girl who disappeared in Aruba.

And a Japanese man is hoping six-way talks in Beijing will help him find his missing mother. That's an incredible story.

But first, "Now in the News."

Overnight, police in England arrested four men in Birmingham in connection with those July 21 London bombing attempts. They also say there is no direct link between the July 7 bombers and those who undertook the July 21 attacks. One group is of east African origin, the other Pakistani.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is in Baghdad right now. He's making an unannounced visit. He's encouraging Iraqi leaders to be more aggressive with Syria and Iran in preventing Islamic radicals from entering the country.

The shuttle Discovery is orbiting Earth after a successful launch. NASA experts have been analyzing all the different camera views of the launch after some debris fell off the shuttle.

To the Forecast Center and, Chad, good morning.

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Hey, you could see that after a couple minutes after the launch it was coming -- it came off somewhere, but then it doesn't really look like -- as it flipped off, looked pretty light in intensity, but looked like it did miss the shuttle on the way down.

COSTELLO: Well we hope so.

MYERS: It's just still ironic, they had two-and-a-half years to make sure nothing fell off and something still fell off.

COSTELLO: I know, it was eerie, wasn't it?

MYERS: It was eerie.

COSTELLO: But they're still checking things out.

MYERS: I know. I know. COSTELLO: They don't know for sure.

MYERS: They're actually mounting cameras now so that they can actually take a look at everything around it, but that was planned anyway.

(WEATHER REPORT)

COSTELLO: Thank you -- Chad.

MYERS: You're welcome.

COSTELLO: Now to the long and frustrating investigation of that missing Alabama teenager in Aruba. In less than four hours, police hope to finish draining a pond near a beach where Natalee Holloway was reportedly last seen.

CNN photojournalist Bethany Chamberland is in Aruba. She's watching this go down.

Bethany, what are you seeing?

BETHANY CHAMBERLAND, CNN PHOTOJOURNALIST: Good morning, Carol.

Yes, they started draining the pond about 9:00 local time last night. And the investigators that I talked with on the scene, the fire official said that they're pumping about 3,600 gallons of water a minute. They're hoping to get up to about 4,000 gallons of water a minute. So that's about two inches an hour. And they told me that the area they are -- that's in question is about 30 inches deep. So they're expecting to hopefully have the water out by 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 local time this morning.

COSTELLO: And supposedly this is very close to where Natalee Holloway was last seen. And also, a new eyewitness has stepped forward, saying he saw the Kalpoe brothers and Joran Van Der Sloot near this area in their car. Now this is a holding pond. It doesn't always have water in it. At the time Natalee Holloway disappeared, did it have water in it?

CHAMBERLAND: No, it did not. Yes, this is kind of a catch basin that the water collected after the date when Natalee disappeared when Hurricane Emily came through. So if that's why they're trying to get rid of all the water, because if it is possible that there is a body or some evidence that is there, it would be underneath all of the water, because, as you said, it wasn't there (INAUDIBLE) days ago.

COSTELLO: Right, right, so they believe that the body was buried. So when they get all of this water out of there, they'll have to start digging, is that correct?

CHAMBERLAND: Yes, and we're looking forward to some massive dredging sometime late this morning.

COSTELLO: OK, we'll get back to you.

Bethany Chamberland, photojournalist for CNN, reporting live from Aruba this morning.

Now to the search for a missing woman here in the United States. Twenty-four-year-old Latoyia Figueroa has been missing from Philadelphia for more than a week. She's 5-months pregnant. Friends and family have been searching a park for any sign of her. She was last seen when she went to a doctor's appointment with a male friend.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRONWYN KILBY, LATOYIA FIGUEROA'S COUSIN: I'm so hopeful. I'm very hopeful, and hoping that, you know, God is shielding her right now and, you know, that we're going to find her.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Family and friends say they are positive Figueroa would not deliberately disappear, leaving behind her 7-year-old daughter.

Let's talk about the weather. You heard Chad say it, it's hot, hot, hot. It is just miserable for much of the nation. The best advice is to stay inside. But what if you can't? What if your job takes you right into this brutal heat?

Our Kimberly Osias introduces us to a couple of people and one animal who have to be outside.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHAEL STROMAN, BICYCLE COURIER: Some people think, you know, I'm out of my mind or I'm Superman or I'm crazy. But I've got to -- it's my job, you know.

KIMBERLY OSIAS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Michael Stroman's job is to ferry papers, letters and small packages all over Washington. He logs upwards of 150 miles a day, at a pretty good clip, tough for us to keep up in our air-conditioned car, much less navigating the treacherous D.C. streets.

STROMAN: It's dangerous, isn't it? Almost got run over by a cab driver.

OSIAS: But today Michael is fighting more obstacles than those behind the wheel.

STROMAN: Even the heat gets to me sometimes. Sometimes, like I'll go underneath a tree and rest for about 5, 10 minutes. The heat is definitely a challenge.

OSIAS: With temperatures hitting 102 in D.C., the challenge wasn't limited to people.

(on camera): How's he been doing with the heat?

JACQUELINE ANDERSON-PARKER, U.S. PARK POLICE: They're not real happy with it, I mean, just like us. OSIAS (voice-over): Jackie (ph) Anderson-Parker has been patrolling the National Mall on horseback for the past two decades. Today, she's concerned about her partner, Pumpkin (ph).

ANDERSON-PARKER: You just have to kind of evaluate your animal, evaluate yourself and just be safe.

Come on.

OSIAS: Today, being safe for the pair means limiting outdoor exposure and taking a couple of showers. Pumpkin's had two so far today.

(on camera): That's got to feel good.

ANDERSON-PARKER: Absolutely.

OSIAS (voice-over): Some weren't so lucky. In Phoenix, 24 heat- related deaths. In Las Vegas, two. In Missouri, three deaths may be heat-related. In the Carolina southlands, heat advisories. And to the north, New Jersey, Delaware, Philadelphia all remain under excessive heat warnings.

STROMAN: Sure is hot out here.

OSIAS: Michael Stroman watched a woman pass out from the heat, but he'll keep on pedaling.

STROMAN: So I know what I got to do what I got to do.

OSIAS (on camera): Well, clearly that's a job not everyone can do. Simply being outside in the heat is tough enough, much less exercising in it. But good news, some relief for the northeast on Thursday and for the southeast on Friday.

Kimberly Osias, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: Is there new evidence of a true fountain of youth? We'll tell you what some people are doing to stay young.

And later, we'll look at a new TV show that's bringing the Iraq war closer to home. And, no, they're not eating in a restaurant. There it is. That's the new TV show we're going to talk about.

But first, here's a look at what else is making news this Wednesday.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: Day two of nuclear talks in China now under way. All sides of the six-party negotiations are looking for progress in efforts to get North Korea to scrap its nuclear weapons program. Envoys from the U.S. and North Korea have met one-on-one twice in the past two days, and that is a departure from Washington's previous refusal to have direct contact with the North.

One thing North Korea doesn't want to talk about is the abduction of Japanese citizens decades ago. But one young man is praying that North Korea will talk about it. His mother simply vanished one day, and now there are clues that she may have been abducted by North Korea.

Atika Shubert joins us live from Tokyo to put a face on this very sensitive issue.

Good morning.

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol.

While the talks are going on focusing on nuclear issues, here in Japan, there's a lot of public anger over these abductions, systematic abductions of Japanese citizens by North Korea. And one of them in particular is this very strange and ultimately tragic story that involves North Korean spies, a terrorist attack, and, as you mentioned before, a young boy who grew up never knowing his mother.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For more than 20 years of his life, Koichiro Iizuka did not know that he was adopted. Did not know that Shigeo Iizuka, the man he thought was his father, is in fact his uncle. He did not know that his mother, Yaeko Taguchi, vanished in 1978 when he was only a year old. This photo, he says, is the only evidence he has that they are related.

Her disappearance would have gone unnoticed but for the 1987 bombing of a Korean Airlines flight killing all 115 passengers onboard.

Kim Huen-He (ph) was one of two North Korean agents who confessed to carrying out the attack, posing as a Japanese tourist. In her confession to police, she claimed to have learned the language from a young Japanese woman that she identified as Yaeko Taguchi.

The case baffled police. Why would a young Japanese mother abandon her family to help plot a North Korean terrorist attack? Police questioned Shigeo Iizuka for weeks, but he resolved to keep it hidden from the little boy he now considered his son.

The media, at the time, treated her like a criminal, he says. What if Koichiro found out? We did not watch the news or read the papers, and of course we never talked about it.

The family kept the secret for more than a decade until Koichiro, at the age of 21, discovered that his birth certificate labeled him as adopted. The truth was finally out, but it did not explain why did Taguchi leave.

That was finally answered in 2002 when North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il admitted that Pyongyang had ordered the abduction of at least 13 Japanese citizens in order to train North Korean spies, among them Yaeko Taguchi.

(on camera): The story of Yaeko Taguchi is one that North Korea's government may wish to forget. This bizarre tale of Cold War espionage lurks on the sidelines of ongoing nuclear talks still waiting for resolution.

(voice-over): North Korea says she died in a car accident shortly before the Korean air bombing. But Koichiro doesn't believe this and wants Pyongyang to return her.

North Korea tells me to give up because my mother is dead. But we can't get any straight answers and all signs point to her still being alive, he says. If I could see her, I would like to call her mother for the first time. That's what I want from the bottom of my heart.

As North Korea's nuclear talks drag on, Koichiro waits for an answer.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

And there are at least a dozen more stories like that, Carol, possibly more.

Now Japan has tried to bring this issue up at the ongoing six- party talks but has been criticized by other countries there at the talks, saying that it's a distraction from the nuclear issue. But as you can imagine, the Japanese government is getting a lot of public pressure here to get some answers from North Korea.

COSTELLO: And I hope that guy gets some. What a terrible story.

Atika Shubert, thank you.

Your news, money, weather and sports. It's 5:46 Eastern. Here's what's all new this morning.

Overnight in England, the break in the case of the attempted bombings in London last Thursday. Police have now arrested four men in Birmingham. A taser was used to subdue one of those suspects.

Also, a new development in the search for missing Alabama teen Natalee Holloway, a pond in Aruba is being drained right now. When the task is complete, about three hours from now, investigators will look to see if her body is buried underneath.

In money news, another cigarette lawsuit has been filed against tobacco giant RJ Reynolds. State of Vermont disputes the company's claim that its Eclipse cigarettes are less harmful than regular ones. Eight other states and the District of Columbia have joined the suit.

In culture, the Rolling Stones lead singer, Mick Jagger, is 62 years old. And what better way to celebrate than to announce the release of a new album. It's called "The Bigger Bang." And it's the Stones' first studio work in nearly a decade. It goes on sale on September 6. In sports, Sammy Sosa keeps climbing the all-time home run list. The Oriels outfielder hit number 586 last night. That ties Frank Robinson for the fifth place all-time. But Sosa is still 74 homers behind Willie Mays for fourth place.

MYERS: Wow!

COSTELLO: Chad.

MYERS: Good morning. Good morning, everybody.

(WEATHER REPORT)

COSTELLO: Hey, don't go away, it's e-mail time.

MYERS: I have them.

COSTELLO: You have them?

MYERS: Right here. You know what, it turns out that people don't like censorship much.

COSTELLO: No, they don't, no matter what. No matter you know if you agree with it or not, they don't like it being yanked from a newspaper just because.

MYERS: That's right.

Jeff (ph) in Garden Grove, California, the newspaper comic strip should run. Freedom of speech and it is not profanity. I can't believe we're even having this conversation. Do you remember some of the newspaper comic strips during the Clinton scandal? And if the president used the term, it seems like fair game to me. Where is Will Rogers when you need him? American needs a sense of humor.

COSTELLO: Hey, let's pause -- exactly, get a sense of humor. Let's explain the story for those viewers just joining in,...

MYERS: Right, go ahead.

COSTELLO: ... because we don't want them to be left out.

Some newspapers across the country are pulling the "Doonesbury" strip because it has the president depicted in the comic calling out to Karl Rove and the president says "hey, Turd Blossom." And apparently that is a real nickname the president has for Karl Rove. But some newspapers say people don't know that, it's in bad taste, so out it goes.

OK, go on.

MYERS: So because they don't know it...

COSTELLO: They're too stupid.

MYERS: Papers should definitely publish... COSTELLO: I mean that's what they're intimating, aren't they?

MYERS: Sarah (ph) in Long Island -- I'm not even going to go anymore. Sarah in Long Island says papers should definitely publish the "Turd Blossom" nickname. It's much better than traitor. Also, much better than jailbird.

"Doonesbury" should be allowed to express its observations of our times without censorship.

And that's all the time I have for a round, but I have a couple more for a little bit later -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Yes, we got a lot of them. So we'll be reading more in the minutes to come.

MYERS: All right.

COSTELLO: We're going to take a break. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: Checking our "Health Headlines" this Wednesday morning.

Canada is now warning Viagra users about the dangers of sudden vision loss when taking the drug. The warning also applies to erectile dysfunction drugs Cialis and Levitra. Patients are warned to get immediate medical attention if they experience any change in vision.

If you have even mild blood pressure, listen up. People with prehypertension, which is blood pressure at the high end of normal, are at an increased risk of having a heart attack. That's even if you're right at 120 over 80 or higher.

If any of you are looking for that fountain of youth, for some that search ends up in the plastic surgeon's office, while others turn to diet.

CNN medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen introduces us to someone who hopes to stay younger because of the way he eats.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KENTON MULLINS, CALORIE COUNTER: I'd like a papaya salad.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Kenton Mullins is 5'8," but weighs only 120 pounds.

MULLINS: Yes, that sounds good.

COHEN: That's because he eats only 1,800 calories a day.

MULLINS: Looks great.

COHEN: Down from 4,000 a day a few years ago. He's hoping it will help him live to 90, 100 or even longer.

MULLINS: It was a very deliberate decision that I made to begin calorie restriction. It's backed by very reputable extensive research.

COHEN: Like the research with these monkeys. Skinny monkeys, like the one on the right, live longer, healthier lives.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They've actually aged biologically slower. Their fur has gone gray less quickly.

COHEN: Skinny mice live longer, too. On regular diets, mice in one study lived 36 months. When they ate 25 percent fewer calories, they lived 42 months. On 65 percent fewer calories, they lived 55 months.

One theory why is that on fewer calories cells throughout the body appear to die more slowly and repair themselves more easily.

MULLINS: This whole piece of lettuce may have like four or five calories.

COHEN: Mullins counts his calories religiously. For dinner this night, he had his papaya salad, steamed vegetables and he ate only about a third of his fish. Low in calories, but high in nutrients.

MULLINS: It's not like I'm living a life of torture.

COHEN: But how many people could have that kind of willpower, could lose and keep off 45 pounds, like Mullins did?

RICHARD MILLER, RESEARCHER: For every 100 people that are able to lose some weight, 95 or 98 of them just gain the weight back.

COHEN: That's why some researches, like Richard Miller, want to come up with a pill that tricks your body into thinking it's on a very low-calorie diet, even when it's not, giving all of the benefits without any of the sacrifice.

Elizabeth Cohen, CNN, Atlanta.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: Here's what we're working on for you all new in the next hour of DAYBREAK.

A disturbing new report looks at just who is being recruited for the Iraqi police force.

And how you deal with life has a lot to do with how you handle your finances. We'll see how your personality type is affecting your bottom line. You may find out something about yourself this morning.

That's all new in the 6:00 hour.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) COSTELLO: A new TV show is causing some controversy. It's about the Iraq war. And unlike previous television series, like "MASH" and "Rat Patrol," this is the first time a series has dramatized a war that is under way. It's called "Over There."

CNN's Brooke Anderson takes a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROOKE ANDERSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): These images of war may seem real, but they're not. This is a scene from the new television series "Over There."

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're into it now, huh?

ANDERSON: Locations in the California desert double for Iraq. The drama, which debuts Wednesday on FX, also depicts life on the home front. We screened the first three episodes with Lisa Stehle, whose husband served in Iraq.

(on camera): Is it hard for you to watch this?

LISA STEHLE, MILITARY WIFE: No, I mean it's not hard to watch because I've put it into a mode of it's just another show.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shut up and stay alive, Tim (ph), OK?

STEHLE: I was afraid that the show would sensationalize war. I thought that it would put this war in my living room. The war did not come into my living room. It's a TV show.

ANDERSON (voice-over): Co-creator and executive producer Steven Bochco was initially reluctant to make this potentially controversial program.

STEVEN BOCHCO, EXEC. PROD., "OVER THERE": I think whatever political perceptions one might have about the show speak more to, you know, the mindset of the viewer watching.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Twos (ph), I can't do this.

ANDERSON: On the day I stopped by the set north of Los Angeles, the action involved a dangerous search mission.

(on camera): Why do people need to see this? Why do you think they do?

MARK-PAUL GOSSELAAR, ACTOR: Why not show it? I think that it's the way that they're filming this and the way that it's being shown, I think that it's going to be eye opening. They're either going to hate it or love it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's go.

ANDERSON (voice-over): Lisa Stehle, who's husband expects to return to Iraq, isn't sure she'll keep watching. STEHLE: I just don't think that it's the most appropriate things for some of our families to see.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've made it through our first week, anyways, which not everybody thought was going to happen, let me tell you. Just that right there is a victory.

ANDERSON: Brooke Anderson, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: And the next hour of DAYBREAK starts in just a minute.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com