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CNN Live At Daybreak

New York Subway Threat; Cancer Vaccine; Wined up Cars; IAEA & ElBaradei Win Nobel Prize

Aired October 07, 2005 - 05:30   ET

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


ANNOUNCER: From the Time Warner Center in New York, this is DAYBREAK with Carol Costello and Chad Myers.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: And good morning to you. Thank you for waking up with us. Welcome to the second half-hour of DAYBREAK.

Coming up in the next 30 minutes, fill her up with Bordeaux. Is French wine the answer to the world's fuel crisis? We'll find out just ahead.

And just listen to these words, cancer vaccine 100 percent effective. Is it possible to stop a disease that kills thousands of women every year? That story still to come.

But first, "Now in the News."

Just about 30 minutes ago, we got word that the International Atomic Energy Agency and its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, are this year's winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. ElBaradei and his U.N. agency are credited with working to stop the spread of nuclear weapons in Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

New York City Police are keeping a closer eye on the subway this morning. That's because the city received word from the FBI on a possible threat to the transit system. We'll have a live report from Penn Station in just a few minutes.

It may not look like it, but firefighters in Corona, California have this wildfire nearly under control now. Broke out yesterday and destroyed about 50 acres. A larger fire in nearby Riverside County is also mostly under control after scorching about 6,400 acres.

The Sugar Bowl is moving east from New Orleans to Atlanta. The official announcement is scheduled for later this morning. Moving the January 2 game became necessary because, you know, there is some damage to the Louisiana Superdome.

To the Forecast Center and, Chad, good morning.

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Guess that makes sense.

COSTELLO: Yes.

MYERS: I would have liked it in some place where there actually was sugar, you know. But, well, I mean,...

COSTELLO: There are peaches,...

MYERS: ... it's coming to Atlanta.

COSTELLO: ... which have natural sugar in them.

MYERS: I know. Well, I guess you're right. There you go. Peach jam.

Good morning, Carol.

(WEATHER REPORT)

COSTELLO: OK, we'll be ready.

MYERS: All right.

COSTELLO: Thank you -- Chad.

MYERS: You're welcome.

COSTELLO: Time for a "CNN Security Watch" now.

In New York, they're on the lookout for possible baby carriage bombs. That's part of the warning the city received from the FBI about a possible subway attack.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COMM. RAY KELLY, NEW YORK CITY POLICE: The New York City Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have received information which indicates that the city's subway system may be the target of a terrorist attack in the coming days.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: City officials say they are prepared and already have extra security in place. To prove that, Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he'll be riding the subway to work this morning.

For more on the threat, we turn to CNN's Alina Cho. She's at New York's Penn Station.

Do you see an increased security presence there -- Alina?

ALINA CHO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: To be perfectly honest with you, Carol, no we have not. And the commuters have not really been arriving at the stations just yet. But remember, four-and-a-half- million people ride the New York City subways each and every workday, so it's about to get very, very busy here.

Now some debate this morning, Carol, about just how credible this threat is. A Homeland Security official tells CNN that this is a specific, but not credible threat, while New York City officials will tell you this is significant because it is the first specific threat against the New York subways. And in these situations, city officials say they can never be too careful. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, NEW YORK: It was more specific as to target. It was more specific as to timing. And some of the sources had more information that would lead one to believe that it was not the kind of thing that appears in the intelligence community every day.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHO: The threat apparently involved bombs possibly hidden in baby carriages and the attack was to be carried out over the next few days. Law enforcement officials tell CNN that 15 to 20 people were already in the United States to carry out this attack, but so far there have been no arrests in New York.

Now all of this, of course, means ramped up security in the subways. Baby carriages, briefcases, luggage, things of that nature, will be searched here. But remember, this is not a new procedure in New York. City officials, you may recall, decided to institute this bag search system after the London bombings in July.

There will, of course, also be more manpower, both uniformed and undercover officers. And, Carol, as you mentioned, New York City's mayor says he has seen the information, he will still ride the subway this morning -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Alina Cho reporting live from Penn Station in New York.

Stay tuned to CNN day and night for the most reliable news about your security.

A verbal assault on former President Bill Clinton from his former FBI director. This was 1993 when President Clinton appointed Louis Freeh FBI director. But this is now. Freeh unloads both barrels on Clinton in his new book, "My FBI." Freeh denounces Clinton over the scandals that marred his presidency.

The book cites Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers. Freeh's words in this excerpt, "The problem was with Bill Clinton -- the scandals and the rumored scandals, the incubating ones and the dying ones never ended. Whatever moral compass the president was consulting was leading him in the wrong direction. His closets were full of skeletons just waiting to burst out."

A Clinton spokesman calls Freeh's account a total work of fiction.

Still to come on DAYBREAK, the mystery has been solved in Canada. We'll tell you what illness caused 16 deaths this week.

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) COSTELLO: Some "Health Headlines" this morning.

A mystery is solved in Canada. Health officials say the illness that killed 16 residents of a Toronto nursing home was Legionnaire's Disease. In all, 84 residents, employees and visitors to the nursing home were affected. At least 30 people were hospitalized. Legionnaire's Disease is a bacterial illness related to pneumonia. Toronto officials say there is no risk of the disease spreading.

The top U.S. health officials say the world is woefully unprepared for a global outbreak of Bird Flu. It's already taken lives in Asia. With that backdrop, President Bush meets with vaccine makers at the White House today. The spread of the disease has broad implications.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE JOHANNS, AGRICULTURE SECRETARY: Outbreaks of Avian Influenza have led to human suffering and death, as well as severe economic consequences.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Bird Flu has killed at least 60 people in Asia. So far, only one U.S. drugmaker is ready to mass-produce a vaccine that's shown promise to protect against it.

Cervical cancer kills about 4,000 women every year in the United States. Now a drugmaker says an experimental vaccine to prevent the most common forms of cervical cancer has proved 100 percent effective.

More now from CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A few years ago, Rose Dennis, a 53-year-old healthy woman, went in for a routine pap smear, one of the most common procedures done in the world. As she felt fine, she really thought nothing of it, until she got a life-altering call from her doctor. She had cervical cancer.

ROSE DENNIS, CERVICAL CANCER SURVIVOR: During that time, it was -- I don't want to really remember it. It was just horrible.

GUPTA: Dennis is one of thousands of women in this country to suffer from cervical cancer, which is actually caused by a virus called Human Papillomavirus, or HPV. It is often transmitted sexually.

Now, this cancer is curable if treated early. But now there may be a way to prevent the disease from ever occurring in the first place: a vaccine. It wasn't easy to develop such a vaccine, as there are more than 70 different types of HPV. But researchers honed in on two of them, numbers 16 and 18, because those are the most dangerous types. DR. KEVIN AULT, EMORY UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOL: In this particular vaccine, there are four types of Human Papillomavirus that are covered. They're probably the four most common types. Sixteen and 18 are responsible for about 70 percent of cervical cancers.

GUPTA: Best news of all, the vaccine prevented 100 percent of those two strains.

AULT: We don't think of most vaccines as being 100 percent effective, so I think that's good news overall. And certainly a pleasant surprise for those of us who have been doing this research for a number of years.

GUPTA: The vaccine is called Gardasil. And Merck and Company, Inc., the manufacturer, says it plans to apply for a license before the end of the year. Now, if approved, this vaccine may become extremely common, recommended to all women in their teenage years before they become sexually active.

Rose Dennis had no such option. She had to endure a hysterectomy, chemotherapy and radiation to become cancer free. For her, and possibly thousands of others, a vaccine would make all the difference.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: Drugmaker Merck hopes to win FDA approval and put the vaccine on the market next year.

Your news, money, weather and sports. It's 5:45 Eastern. Here's what's all new this morning.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be shared by the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency and its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei. The announcement was made just moments ago from Oslo, Norway. They won the prize for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes.

New York is on heightened alert this morning. City officials say the FBI warns that terrorists made a specific threat against New York's subway system, and that was supposed to happen in the coming days.

In money news, Delta Air Lines gets a break. A bankruptcy judge approves the nearly $2 billion loan package for the ailing airline. On the news, Delta shares rose 6 cents to 85 cents a share.

In culture, the Prince is coming. England's Price Charles and wife, Camilla, have a November 2 dinner date at the White House. The Royal couple will also visit New York and San Francisco.

In sports, Super Bowl XLIV will be played in Miami. The 2010 championship game was originally slated for New York, but the city's failure to agree on a new stadium canceled those plans. Miami beat out Atlanta and Houston -- Chad.

MYERS: Good morning, Carol.

(WEATHER REPORT)

COSTELLO: Thank you, Chad.

That's a look at the latest headlines for you this morning.

Still to come on DAYBREAK, as the price of gas keeps rising, consider this, the next time you go to the pump you could be filling up with Merlot. We'll explain next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: This next story may give new meaning to the phrase drunk driving. It seems some French wine is now being used to start Land Rovers instead of hangovers. And, yes, we're talking about wine as fuel for your car.

Joining me from London to explain what, to some, may be a disturbing trend is wine expert Richard Halstead.

Good morning -- Richard.

RICHARD HALSTEAD, WINE INTELLIGENCE LTD.: Good morning -- Carol.

COSTELLO: You know I guess I didn't realize there was a wine glut. How bad is it?

HALSTEAD: Well, what it boils down to is that we're producing too much wine in the world and not drinking enough of it. Last year, we made about 27 billion liters. We only drank about 24 billion liters. So that leaves three billion liters that doesn't have a home.

COSTELLO: And some pretty good wine is going for 70 cents a bottle, if you -- you know, on the wholesale market that is.

HALSTEAD: That's correct. It's -- the crisis is probably at its worst in France right now. There are a number of regions that have been overproducing for quite some time. And the problem is not just that they're overproducing, but the demand for their wine is falling away, both at home and in overseas markets, like the U.K. and the United States.

COSTELLO: So they have all of this extra wine and they're struggling to find something to do with it, so they're turning some of it into ethanol?

HALSTEAD: That's correct, yes. So what do you do with wine that you can't actually put into bottles and put on people's tables? Well the answer is you either sit on it and hope the market comes back. You either -- or you pour it down the drain, which some people have been doing. Or you send it to the distillery and turn it into alcohol, which can be used for a number of things, including an additive to petrol.

COSTELLO: That's right, because the ethanol is sold to oil refineries and then they use it as an additive that they mix into the gasoline. And some of that could actually hit the United States, because France exports fuel to the United States.

HALSTEAD: That's correct. And it's a rather ironic thought that the fact that Americans are drinking slightly less French wine than they used to is meaning that they may be drinking -- using more of it in their gas tanks.

COSTELLO: So do winemakers make much money when they turn their wine into ethanol?

HALSTEAD: As you might expect, no. It's much better to sell wine as wine than to sell it as a product that then gets put eventually into a petrol tank. I think that the -- it's important to remember that when winemakers do take this step, and it is really their sort of the last option, they normally get some help from the government. And in the European countries' case, from the E.U., which offers grants to essentially do what they call emergency distillations or crisis distillations, which allows French farmers or Italian farmers to get some money back from the wine that they would normally be able to sell for a bit more.

COSTELLO: You know I want to get into what kinds of wine we're talking about. We have a map of France and the wine regions affected. One of the regions affected is the Rhone Valley. And of course that's where Chateuneuf Du-Pape is made.

HALSTEAD: That's correct.

COSTELLO: And that's a great wine. That wine is not selling?

HALSTEAD: Well, I mean...

COSTELLO: And some of that wine is being turned into ethanol?

HALSTEAD: Yes. The truth is, yes. I mean some of the nicest wine regions that you can possibly name, Theron (ph), Bordeaux and certainly some of the southwestern French regions in the Languedoc and so on, are experiencing this problem.

In fact, I was just reading yesterday that Bordeaux alone will probably have to distill one -- I think it's one billion liters of wine this year. So that's one billion liters of fine Bordeaux, well, you know, it's fine, but it's possibly not fine enough to be sold at the prices that we would normally expect to pay. So that's where it ends up.

COSTELLO: OK, so maybe the fallout from all of this is that when French wine hits the U.S. market, like, shouldn't we be seeing extraordinarily low prices for fine French wine?

HALSTEAD: Well, yes and no. I mean at the very top end, the stuff that graces the tables of you know the fine restaurant and also the nicer homes in the U.S. will probably stay about the same price because it's -- there's always more demand than there is supply. But the fact is at the lower end there is more supply than demand out there. And, yes, we should probably see some falling in prices at that sort of ordinary table wine level, or what we would call ordinary table wine, which you know may retail for $7 or $8 a bottle, it might -- you might see it for maybe a dollar less.

COSTELLO: Richard Halstead, thank you for joining us this morning live from London.

HALSTEAD: Thank you.

COSTELLO: We've been talking all morning about the Nobel Peace Prize going to Mohamed ElBaradei and the IAEA. Its spokesperson is on the phone right now, Melissa Fleming. She's in Vienna.

Good morning -- Melissa.

MELISSA FLEMING, INTL. ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY: Good morning -- Carol.

COSTELLO: And congratulations.

FLEMING: Thank you. Thank you. It really is a proud day for us here in Vienna. We're all kind of walking around stunned but with big smiles on our face.

COSTELLO: I bet. Did it come as a total surprise?

FLEMING: In fact, not total. There was some press speculation, but only press speculation before. We were -- we've been nominated for the last three years, so you know everybody was a little bit hopeful, but no one really believed, until we heard the announcement, that we would really get this prize.

I mean this is, for us, the ultimate recognition, the ultimate award. And we're just not only extremely proud to be recipients of it as a recognition of our work, but we think it will really do so much to strengthen our hand for our future work.

COSTELLO: Tell me more about that. Let's get into that, because I know that you have many challenges ahead with the countries of North Korea and also Iran in making sure that they use their nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

FLEMING: Well, sure, you know we need to be taken seriously when we go in these countries. Countries need to cooperate with us. They need to open their doors. Many times they have to be asked to go beyond their legal obligations. So they, you know, just for the sake of proving that they, as they say, do not have nuclear weapons, they need to open up more doors. I think this Nobel Prize will give the IAEA even more credibility and also, let's say, moral authority to, you know, demand more cooperation.

COSTELLO: You know there was a rift at one time, especially in the lead up to the Iraq war, between the United States and the IAEA. Is that rift gone now? FLEMING: Well I think it is gone. I think -- and it never really was that damaging, let's say. The U.S. has been the biggest supporter of the IAEA throughout its history. It's certainly the largest financial contributor and in-kind contributor. It also contributes with, you know, information, with assistance in many ways. So right now I can say we have excellent relations and cooperation with this very important member state, the United States.

COSTELLO: Well, congratulations once again. Melissa Fleming from the IAEA joining us live this morning from Vienna.

The next hour of DAYBREAK starts in two minutes.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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