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American Morning

Egypt Explosions; Show of Support; Al Qaeda In Iraq; Remembering Chernobyl; Ghost Ship

Aired April 26, 2006 - 07:30   ET

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

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: First, though, some breaking news we're following out of Egypt this morning, two explosions outside of a base that houses multinational peacekeeping forces in the Sinai peninsula.
Let's get right to CNN's Ben Wedeman. He's on the phone from Dahab in Egypt.

Ben, what's the latest on this investigation now?

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN CAIRO BUREAU CHIEF: Well, the information at this point is getting a bit confusing. I am told by the Egyptian Interior Ministry that the multinational peacekeeping force were injured in these dual blasts. One of them -- or rather both of them occurring outside of the Embuda (ph) base that belongs to the multinational force. Apparently two of their vehicles were targeted by one man.

And shortly afterwards, when Egyptian security forces showed up, another man riding a bicycle came up and threw another explosive device. That police say that that man was killed. But the multinational force on -- for their part became that none of their members are injured in this attack. So this particular detail is still not clear.

Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: Not a real surprise there I think at this point. It's so early on in this investigation, Ben. Of course we're going to be able to sort it out as the morning goes on.

Let's turn and talk a little bit about the triple bombing that happened on Monday in Dahab in Egypt. There now have been some kinds of arrests, right? What can you tell us about that?

WEDEMAN: As I spoke earlier today with the senior Egyptian official who said that 10 people are being held for questioning. No one has yet been charged. In addition to that, they're questioning around 60 relatives of the victims. In this case, most of them, if not all of them, Bedouins. In addition to that, they are questioning people in the hospital, in Sharm el-Sheikh, both Egyptians and foreigners who were wounded in the attack.

Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: Ben Wedeman joining us by phone from Dahab in Egypt for the latest now on what is now five bombing over the last several days.

Thanks, Ben.

Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld both in Baghdad right now. Sometime today we're told the secretaries of state and defense will hold a news conference. We'll be there, of course. Their visit not announced in advance and designed to shore up the new prime minister. Jawad al-Maliki stepped into the fray after some tough political maneuvering in the Iraqi parliament. CNN Correspondent Ryan Chilcote live now from Baghdad with more on this surprise visit.

Hello, Ryan.

RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Miles. Well Secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld are expected to meet with the prime minister designate, Iraq's new prime minister, shortly. They are also expected to encourage him to build a unity cabinet. A cabinet that not only includes members of his own Shiite sect, but also the other sects and ethnic groups here in Iraq. They're also going to be encouraging him to do that as quickly as possible.

Basically the United States believes that the quicker that progress can be made here on the political front in Iraq, the quicker Iraq has some kind of political stability, the quicker that the United States can begin to reduce the number of troops it has here.

Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Let's talk about the al Zarqawi tape, Ryan. Such a brazen tape. Not even masked, out there in the desert, shooting weapons, showing missiles off. What's the reaction to that there?

CHILCOTE: Well it really depends on who you talk to. I think the majority of Iraqis despise Zarqawi. He is someone that they view as an outsider. Remember, he was born in the country of Jordan. They believe that he came here to Iraq really with his own agenda, bent on destroying the country, dividing the country and an individual who's willing to use terrorism and killing innocent Iraqi civilians in the process of doing it.

There is, however, a segment of the Iraqi population that appears to be willing to listen to Mr. Zarqawi. In particular, of course, among the insurgents. And that is who Zarqawi was probably trying to target with this message. In the message he shows that he's strong, he's well, he's healthy and he encourages them to keep up their resistance against the U.S. troops who he calls Zionist occupier.

Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Ryan Chilcote in Baghdad, thank you.

Soledad. S. O'BRIEN: Happening in America this morning, more than 20 postal workers are recovering after quite a scare in Alabama. Many of those workers complained of their throats burning and difficulty breathing when they noticed a foul smelling, yellow liquid leaking from a package. Hazmat teams were called in to decontaminate. It turns out what was coming out was actually just a commonly used garlic flavored fishing lure dye. Yuck.

In Pennsylvania, a surrogate mom says she's going to appeal a superior court ruling that has awarded the triplets that she delivered to their biological father. The father had contracted the woman, paid her $20,000 to carry the babies. She says the parents failed to even visit the babies in the hospital for several days.

The border patrol has lost an important part of its enforcement arsenal. An unmanned predator spy drone crashed early on Tuesday morning. It happened near the Arizona-Mexico border. The border patrol's only UAB has been watching the border since September. It's credited with catching nearly 2,000 people trying to cross the border illegally.

And "Lost" actress Michelle Rodriguez, there she is in court. She's going to find herself in jail now in Hawaii for a couple of days. The actress from the hit show "Lost," of course, refused to do community service as a sentence for an earlier drunk driving arrest. Instead she's going to spend the first of five days in jail today and she'll pay a fine too. "Lost" is filmed in Hawaii.

And take a look at this lovely young lady. This is Kim Oliver. She is the national teacher of the year. She has only 15 students in her Maryland kindergarten class, but they're from nearly every continent. From Vietnamese, and Latino, and African, an African- American and Haitian students in there. Today she's going to be at the White House because she's getting a big congratulations and thank you from President Bush.

Thirty-five minutes past the hour. Time to check on the weather with Chad.

Good morning, Chad.

(WEATHER REPORT)

M. O'BRIEN: For the last 27 years, the Drake Relays, that's a popular track and field event at Drake University in Des Moines holds a beautiful bulldog contest. And I know there's a bulldog out there this morning, Buster Atkins (ph) is watching this. And, Buster, this is some -- you're better looking. Anyway, he saw the competition, the cop and the law man and the firefighter, but there's the winner, Hannah, getting the crown and a cape too boot, or to paw. And Hannah apparently, as beautiful as she is, she has a shoe fetish. She's kind of an Amel Demarcos (ph) dog. Not to wear, though, to chew.

ANDY SERWER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And just imagine.

M. O'BRIEN: Just imagine. SERWER: Yes.

M. O'BRIEN: She's a pretty one.

Andy Serwer, how do you follow a dog act? That's your mission this morning.

S. O'BRIEN: A big, old, (INAUDIBLE) bulldog.

SERWER: Well, let me tell you something, if you look like me, it's not that hard.

We're going to do some business news coming up. The high price of gasoline. Are Americans buying vehicles other than SUVs starting to change yet? We'll check it out.

Plus, forget about cars, what about boating this summer? How about the high price of boating fuel. We'll get to that in a second coming up on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

M. O'BRIEN: Somber ceremonies today marking the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. People in Ukraine remembering that day. How could they forget. And the tough weeks, months and years that followed. The area around that site is still almost completely deserted. CNN's Senior International Correspondent Matthew Chance went to Chernobyl for a very sobering, eerie look around.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT, (voice over): Welcome to the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a contaminated landscape in the shadow of its reactor. Twenty years have passed, but this monster of 20th century science gone wrong still casts a radioactive shadow. The acute danger may have passed, but background radiation is still many times higher than normal. It could be centuries before being here is completely safe. We limited our trip to a few hours.

Time to explore a notorious disaster zone in the city of Prip'yat, population zero. Built in the 1970s to house Chernobyl workers, its 50,000 residents were evacuated in the days after the disaster struck.

It really is quite unsettling being here at the center of the world's worst nuclear accident. This is the main square of Prip'yat. You can see this whole town completely abandoned. This is the palace of culture from the old Soviet Union. Every good Soviet town had one.

Over there, a restaurant, which obviously dominated this main square. And beyond that you can see an old Soviet apartment building. The people here were given just a few hours to gather what belongings they could to get out shortly after the accident back in 1986. They were told they'd be gone for just three days, but, of course, they've never have been able to come back. Sudden tragedy is written in every building. We found this abandoned classroom, books still on desks, lessons of two decades ago still scribbled on the blackboard. And the children of Prip'yat never got to ride on their Ferris wheel. The city's amusement park was never opened. Now it's a devils playground of radiation hot spots.

But Chernobyl is more than a dead monument. It's hard to imagine, but 20 years of isolation has turned the area into Europe's biggest wilderness. A radioactive lost world where wild animals appear to be thriving.

MARY MYCIO, AUTHOR, WORMWOOD FOREST": These might be linx tracks. And if they are, that's actually very exciting because linx are very, very rare. They have a huge range.

CHANCE: But while animals may live with Chernobyl's legacy, surely people should not. It's scattered across tiny villages in the exclusion zone. A few hundred like Marina Urpan have come back. Born and bred in Chernobyl, she's now nearly 80 years old. Her and her husband refuses to leave.

MARINA URPAN, CHERNOBYL ZONE RESIDENT, (through translator): It's my mother land. I was born here and I should die here. This climate is better for our health. Most people here have bad backs, leg pains. Maybe that's something that will happen in our old age anyway, but we don't know for sure. How can we know?

CHANCE: It is the question many are still asking of Chernobyl. Twenty years on, its victims, its consequences, remain far from understood.

Matthew Chance, CNN, Chernobyl.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

M. O'BRIEN: Matthew, a simply fascinating piece. Were you concerned about your personal safety?

CHANCE: No, I wasn't, Miles, because the kind of background radiation levels that you get exposed to when you're in Chernobyl are perhaps equivalent to what you get on a Trans Atlantic flight. They're not that high. They are several times higher than average. But if you're just there for a couple of hours, like we were, it really doesn't have any discernible impact on your health. If you live there, however, as some of those people did, and those animals do, then the long term consequences could be very serious indeed.

M. O'BRIEN: So you could conceivably repopulate that area or will they ever have people live there again?

CHANCE: Well, because it's so dangerous to be there for long periods of time, what scientists in Ukraine say is that it will be hundreds of years, perhaps as many as 900 years, before those background radiation levels return to normal, acceptable levels. But what the Ukrainian government is trying to do is utilize this vast area of land, perhaps half a million acres of land around the Chernobyl reactor that's been out of use for the past 20 years, they've introduced a number of projects to not just reintroduce some more endangered species there from across Europe, you saw some of them in that report, but also to try and grow things on the land, perhaps biofuel. Plants that could be used to fuel cars in the future. That's a thing that's still being discussed now in the Ukraine.

M. O'BRIEN: I'm sure there's some scientists who would love to study a lot of that as well.

Let's -- the bottom line here. I've never really gotten a good handle, maybe you have, on the number of people, the casualties, the number of people sick, the number of people dead. Has there really ever been an accounting?

CHANCE: Well, that's a good question. And this has emerged as a major controversy as we look at the long term health consequences of Chernobyl. The United Nations a few months ago in September, in fact, finished what was, I think, perhaps the most far-reaching survey into the health consequences of Chernobyl. It had some very surprising results, saying that it had only linked the deaths of 50 people directly with what happened at Chernobyl and they were mainly the firefighters who battled the radioactive blaze. They say that about 9,000 people could eventually die of cancer related illnesses. But that's a figure that's hotly disputed by other scientists and by environmental groups like Greenpeace that say the actual total could be closer to 100,000. So it is a very hot, political issue now, Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Hot, so to speak. And those 50 firefighters, truly, truly heroic individuals when you learn about what they did to try to stop that fire.

Matthew Chance, great piece, great job, thank you.

We've been talking about high gas prices all morning, all week, all month. Andy Serwer . . .

S. O'BRIEN: It's kind of a theme of Andy Serwer's reporting today.

SERWER: Yes, it really is topic A, unfortunately. And, of course, we talk about the ripple effect and how it's impacting the rest of the economy. Big questions out there about how high gas prices are affecting buying patterns by consumers of vehicles, automobiles, cars, and trucks.

This morning some executives and employees of Chrysler saying that American are still buying SUVs. That it would take $3 to $4 gasoline to stick for say six months to a year before consumers really start changing their buying patterns. Others point out, though, that SUV sales, major SUV sales, were down 13 percent last year and they expect them to be down 2 to 3 percent this year.

So it's a mixed picture out there. You have to imagine, though, it really is about how long gas prices stay high. Because if they stay high for a while, people will change, I think. M. O'BRIEN: Yes, me -- when you start doing the math on the cost of gas and you do all that, sometimes it's worth hanging on to it at least at these levels.

SERWER: That's right.

And let's talk about a guzzler of another sort. Water-based guzzlers. We're talking about power boats. Of course, people getting their boats ready for the summer season and they are going to be paying a lot more to fill up those tanks. Fuel for boats costs more and that's because of environmental regulations and tighter supplies. We're looking at $3.80 a gallon to $4.40 a gallon for motorboat fuel. And a lot of these big babies have 100-gallon tanks. So you're talking about $400 to fill up. Of course boat stands for -- break out another thousand. That's what they say about boating if you're in that business. So love those.

M. O'BRIEN: A hole in the water into which you pour money, right?

S. O'BRIEN: I think you're going to see people cutting way back on that kind of stuff . . .

SERWER: A little bit on that.

S. O'BRIEN: Because I think there's more room for that, you know, to . . .

SERWER: Badminton instead in the summer.

S. O'BRIEN: Absolutely.

SERWER: Yes.

S. O'BRIEN: Maybe.

SERWER: Maybe.

S. O'BRIEN: Thank you, Andy.

SERWER: You're welcome.

S. O'BRIEN: Much more ahead on AMERICAN MORNING. A short break. We're back in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: In sleepy Mystic, Connecticut, something strange is going on. There are reports that an historic whaling ship may be haunted. Visitors to the tourist attraction have reported seeing ghosts and that's prompted an investigation of sorts. We sent AMERICAN MORNING's Alina Cho to Mystic to do a little investigating of her own.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ALINA CHO, CNN CORRESPONDENT, (voice over): It is the picture of serenity, but there may be more than the Charles W. Morgan that meets the eye.

RENEE BLAIS, PARANORMAL RESEARCH GROUP: I talked to 10 people total. There are about five that I spoke to in here.

CHO: Renee Blais is not talking about real people but ghost. A volunteer with the Paranormal Research Group, Blais calls herself a sensitive because she says she can sense when spirits are among us.

BLAIS: There are a few in here, though.

CHO: You can feel them?

BLAIS: Yes.

CHO: And -- OK, you're freaking me out. How can you . . .

This is a serious matter for Blaze and others investigating reports the 165-year-old whaling ship may be haunted.

Several visitors reported seeing a man dressed in 19th century clothing. They say he nodded at them but didn't say a word. When it visitors returned to the top deck, they asked staff members what the man in costume was doing down there. They were told it couldn't be, nobody was there.

MICHAEL O'FARRELL, MYSTIC SEAPORT: And then we'll get another report after they got back . . .

CHO: Michael O'Farrell works at Mystic Seaports where the Charles Morgan is the number one tourist attraction.

O'FARRELL: So the first thing we looked at was, well, what day was it, where was our role player. Every day we have at least one character in costume in 1876. It was determined that that wouldn't have been the case based on timing and whether it was not -- it was a male or a female.

CHO: Yet one visitor sent an e-mail saying, "sitting on a large coil of rope was a rather tall man smoking a long stemmed pipe." Not possible. Smoking is not allowed on board the Morgan, the last wooden whale ship in the world. In its 80 years of service, the ship made 37 voyages with more than 1,000 seamen. Could some still be lingering? Seaport workers called in Andrew Laird and his ghost-busting equipment to find out.

ANDREW LAIRD, R.I. PARANORMAL RESEARCH GROUP: This is a hot spot. This is still hot.

CHO: Laird says most of the time there's a logical explanation for ghost sighting. The Charles Morgan, he says, is different. In his 20 years of work, Laird says he's only seen two ghosts, and one of them was on this ship.

But is there any case for alarm?

LAIRD: No. No. I mean, people are too hung up in the Hollywood thing. Nothing scares people more than the unknown.

CHO: There are skeptics, but those at Mystic Seaport say regardless the mystery surrounding the Morgan will only attract more visitors. Others say seeing is believing. That sometimes those on the other side want to be among those still here.

Alina Cho, CNN, Mystic, Connecticut.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

Andrew Laird and his research group are going to be back on the Morgan in June. They're planning to use some high-tech equipment to get a better reading of just who might be stowed away on the ship.

AMERICAN MORNING continues right after this short break.

M. O'BRIEN: I'm scared, Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: It's all right. It's going to be OK.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: An unannounced arrival in Iraq for two Bush administration heavyweights. Secretaries Rumsfeld and Rice are there right now to show support for Iraq's new government.

M. O'BRIEN: The face of terror in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issues a brazen, heavily armed video diatribe and he has a message for President Bush. We'll tell you about that.

BOB FRANKEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I'm Bob Franken in suburban Washington D.C. at a mass transit stop. People taking advantage of a service that's not as widely available as many would like. That's coming up.

S. O'BRIEN: And a couple with children are told they're not a family and they have to move. We'll tell you why just ahead

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