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Super Bowl Delay; NY Mother Killed in Turkey; New Television Show Based on Dr. Sanjay Gupta's Book

Aired February 04, 2013 - 14:00   ET

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


BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Changing in their tactics.

And in just minutes, I'll speak live with the Super Bowl's MVP. Boy, do I have a lot to ask of Joe Flacco, from the blackout, to his big announcement after the game.

The news is now.

Hi, everyone. Good to be with you here on this Monday. I'm Brooke Baldwin live in New York.

And we begin with some of the hottest stories in a flash. "Rapid Fire." Roll it.

Sorry, market watchers. Just take a look with me as the Dow is down 127 points as we are, oh, just about two hours away from that closing bell. Taking a big step back today in its quest for the record books after getting pretty close to that record high, what was that, just Friday. Remember on Friday, actually closed above the 14,000 mark for the first time in more than five years.

Now to this one. No surprise here. President Obama and Texas Governor Rick Perry don't agree. This time it is about the Boy Scouts banning gay people from leadership roles in the organization.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. RICK PERRY (R), TEXAS: Scouting is about teaching a substantial amount of life lessons. Sexuality is not one of them. It never has been. It doesn't need to be.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: That was Governor Perry just yesterday. On that very same day, I want you to listen to what President Obama said during his sit- down interview with CBS.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Scouts are a great institution that are promoting young people and exposing them to, you know, opportunities and leadership that, you know, will serve people for the rest of their lives. And I think that nobody should be barred for that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: The Boy Scouts board is expected to vote on the ban this week. A decision, we're told, could come as early as today.

First, some gratitude and then Secretary of State John Kerry getting down to business here on day one in the office. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN KERRY, SECRETARY OF STATE: What other job can you have where you get up every day and advance the cause of nation and also keep faith with the ideals of your country on which it is founded, and most critically, meet our obligations to our fellow travelers on this planet? That's as good as it gets. And I'm proud to be part of it with you. So now, let's get to work. Thank you very, very much.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Kerry clearly following his own advice this weekend. Not long after his confirmation, the new top diplomat talked to leaders in Japan and in the Middle East.

And now to this story. It's pretty tough stuff to look at here. But you can see this is the aftermath here. Crews trying to get bodies inside this wrecked tour bus. This is southern California. So far, eight people are known dead. But that number is expected to rise. Listen here with me to the highway patrol describing this crash site.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARIO LOPEZ, CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL: It's a -- it's a terrible scene. A horrific scene. There's multiple victims, you know. There's personal belongings, personal property at the scene.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: That bus was returning from Mexico when it crashed last night.

Elections in Cuba brought out one voter who has not been seen in public for months and months.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FIDEL CASTRO, FORMER CUBAN LEADER: (SPEAKING IN SPANISH)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Fidel Castro, the country's retired leader, at a polling place there in Havana. His last public outing in October was brief. But yesterday, the 86-year-old spent more than an hour talking to members of the press, talking to voters in Cuba. Castro says he gets daily reports about the health of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

And the story of Malala Yousufzai really it continues to astound. The teen activist from Pakistan is now walking. Look at this with me. There she is. Walking. She's got the orange shoes on there. We'll take a look again. Last October, you know the story, those Taliban gunmen shot her in the head at point blank range because she publicly advocated educating girls. Listen to how well she is healing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MALALA YOUSUFZAI, PAKISTANI TEEN ACTIVIST: Today you can see that I'm alive. I can speak. I can see you. I can see everyone. And today I can speak and I'm getting better day by day. It's just because of the prayers of people. Because all the people, men, women, children, all of them, all of them have prayed for me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Incredible. Her British doctors say Malala will not need any more surgeries.

Cheez-Its and a Hot Wheels car. Those are the items Alabama investigators say a kidnapper has requested for his five-year-old captive. It is now been one week since Jimmy Lee Dykes allegedly shot a school bus driver to death and took this little boy, holding him in this underground bunker at his home. A memorial for 66-year-old Charles Poland was held yesterday, paying tribute to his actions last week onboard that bus that helped save so many other children. It's still not known, one week later, what the kidnapper's motive is. The Alabama hostage suspect in that bunker is said to be a survivalist.

And coming up tonight on "AC 360," Anderson is taking an inside look at the survivalist moment. "AC 360" tonight, 8:00 p.m. Eastern, only here on CNN.

The family of Muhammad Ali fighting back against the rumors the boxing legend is near death. Look at this picture with me. Loved ones tweeted out actually several photos showing the Olympian rooting for the Baltimore Ravens last night. They discount British tabloid reports that Ali could, quote, "die within days." The statement attributed to Ali's brother, Rahman, who also said the former champ no longer recognizes him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (singing): Oh, it make me feel like I've been locked out of heaven.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: The Grammys today announcing that Bruno Mars will join Rihanna and Sting for a performance together this weekend. Bruno Mars and Rihanna are both nominees. But get this. We are also getting word that Beyonce and Prince will join the awards show as presenters.

Let's talk about that Super Bowl game, shall we? The game itself. The MVP. The power outage that stopped everyone in their tracks, right, for some 35 minutes. We were going to be talking here with Ravens QB Joe Flacco around this time. He's running a little late, we're told. Running a little behind schedule. Hey, busy guy. He's the MVP. We're allowing him to run late for us today. We're going to speak with him a little later this hour. So, stay right here with me. Joe Flacco joining me live.

But first, let's just focus on this blackout in the Superdome from last night. We are hearing now that the game could have been delayed even longer than it was. Joe Carter is standing by for me in New Orleans.

And, Joe, what happened? Do we know?

JOE CARTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, we're trying to unravel this mystery book. There are a lot of people leaving town right now, but that question still remains, what happened, who's responsible? But CNN's Rachel Nichols (ph) talked to a Baltimore Ravens official after the game last night and they said that the delay could have lasted a lot longer than 35 minutes. And that's because there's wireless communication that occurs between the coaches on the field for the Baltimore Ravens and coaches in the press box. And when the power went down, so did their wireless communication.

Now, San Francisco has all their coaches on the sidelines, so Baltimore felt like they were at a disadvantage, that they weren't able to communicate to the coaches that are up in the press box. So they said, well, we're going to have to bring those coaches down, which would have taken 15 to 20 minutes. Just as they were about to do that, power was restored.

So at this point there's really two players in this whole story. You've got Entergy, which is the company that provides the power to the Superdome. And then you've got SMG, which is the company that runs the Superdome. And they both released a statement last night basically saying that a piece of equipment that's designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system, which then triggered an automatic shutdown. That forced the backup system to kick in. Auxiliary power.

And that's why we didn't see a complete blackout during the game last night. There was some lights on. Obviously the elevator stopped working, the escalator stopped working, credit card machines stopped working for fans. We had no wireless communication with our headsets that were listening to the play by play. The radio communication for us went down. Cell phones went down.

But it eventually was restored. Obviously 35 minutes into it. The players, the coaches, both teams were affected by it. But the mayor releasing a statement late last night saying that this is an unfortunate situation. That it should not take away from what's been a superb week for New Orleans, the city that was mostly once under water, now hosting the biggest sporting event of the year. Talked to a lot of fans last night, Brooke, right after that delay and they said this does not affect how they feel about Super Bowl week. That they had a great experience. And this was just an unfortunate incident.

Roger Goodell also (INAUDIBLE) NFL looking at having New Orleans host another Super Bowl. And I know the city's aiming towards 2018 to do that to coincide with the 300 year anniversary of the city. Brooke.

BALDWIN: Well, there's this whole other story line really also today, though, that's percolating, Joe Carter, about how, you know, CBS sort of dropped the ball, according to this one sports columnist on "The New York Daily News." We're going to talk about that a little later in the hour with several voices we're bringing on, whether or not they failed to report what was happening as they awaited on the sidelines.

Joe Carter for me in New Orleans, thank you.

And I just want to play some sound. This is Commissioner Roger Goodell. And this is what he is saying here about this blackout.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROGER GOODELL, NFL COMMISSIONER: There's no indication at all that this was caused by the halftime show. Absolutely none. So I know that's been out there to say that Beyonce's halftime show had something to do with it. That is not the case from anything we have at this point.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: In addition to the power outage, check out cnn.com for the five Super Bowl moments people are talking about. Cnn.com for that.

A mother from New York, what was supposed to be on the trip of a lifetime, found dead in Turkey. Now, new developments in this mystery include a big clue involving nail scrapings.

Plus, President Obama expected to address the nation any minute on gun control. Find out why he's chosen Minneapolis to pitch his plan.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: It is a husband's worst nightmare. His wife, a mother of two, a budding photographer from New York, heads to Turkey for a trip of a lifetime. But one week later, her body is found near Istanbul's ancient stone walls. Sarai Sierra was killed with a blow to the head. Here's what we're being told by Turkish police.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HUSEYIN CAPKIN, ISTANBUL POLICE DIRECTOR (through translator): The investigation is ongoing. The medical examiner's report is not complete yet. However, it has been determined she was killed with a blow to the head. For us to get concrete details of the case, we need more time to investigate. It's not right to say anything about the ongoing interrogation of the detained people. She was a tourist traveling alone. There is no indication that she was an agent or a courier.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: These are the last known images of Sierra. Security cameras caught her on the night of January 20th walking alone inside a shopping mall here in Istanbul. When her husband Steven sat down for an interview with CNN last week, he was already fearing the worst.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEVEN SIERRA, SARAI SIERRA'S HUSBAND: You're hoping that she's OK, wherever she's at. That she's not hurting. That she's not cold. That she's being fed. That she's not consumed with fear.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: CNN International's Hala Gorani joining me now.

And so, Hala, if we're hearing that she died because of a blow to the head, there's also new information coming out as far as perhaps she was fighting off an attacker.

HALA GORANI, CNN INTERNATIONAL: Right. And police now are doing everything they can, certainly because as far as they're concerned, this is very bad publicity for Istanbul to have American tourists fly there for a photography holiday and turn up dead behind ancient walls in Istanbul. But also because this is unusual. You don't have actually that many murders in Istanbul every year. It's a city, as I was speaking to our Ivan Watson from Istanbul, with about the size of New York. And you have four times fewer murders every year. So this is something that is getting even Turks to talk about the dangers of going out on photography expeditions or traveling alone as a woman certainly or as a foreigner.

You mentioned there that there were surveillance images of Sierra there that were taken at a shopping mall in Istanbul, grainy sort of black and white images. Well, the police have spent hours looking through all the CCTV footage, the closed-circuit television footage, to try to figure out what, really, what her last known movements were in Istanbul. And there was also an interesting lead that may not have ended up becoming anything, in the end, because Sarai Sierra was active on Instagram. And there were reports that she had met somebody, a Turk, on Instagram, and that they had established a location to meet a day before her family lost touch with her, somebody by the name of Talan (ph), according to this "New York Times" report.

But he was questioned and eventually released. And nine people, Brooke, are still detained in this case. They're not arrested, they are detained for questioning. And police really want to...

BALDWIN: Right.

GORANI: Try to figure out what connection any of them might have to the murder of this young lady.

BALDWIN: So, Hala, we know her parents have recently spoken.

Let's listen to that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's something we're going to do together as a family and the father. We'll be speaking to them. And it's something that, it's going to be hard. And he's going to -- we're going to talk about that when he comes back.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Her parents there also flanked by Congressman Michael Graham, representing Staten Island, where they're from.

GORANI: Yes.

BALDWIN: I know that he's been in touch with the State Department here and with Turkey, as they have been trying to find this mother of two.

Just tragic all the way around.

GORANI: Right. And, also, we heard from the mother there that the children of Sierra haven't been told because they want to make sure that they break this to them gently. So this is going to be the big question. She was missing a week before she was found. She was killed with a blow to the head, according to police in Turkey.

Who is responsible?

Nine people still detained. We'll continue to follow the investigation.

BALDWIN: Hala Gorani, thank you so much for me.

And now, medical drama. We are taking you inside the operating room, where mistakes happen and doctors are held accountable. Coming up next, a look at TNT's new prime time series, "Monday Mornings," with the man behind the novel, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Have you ever wondered what happens when something in the hospital goes wrong?

A lot of people think a mistake happens and then the story just ends there.

Not so fast. TNT's new prime time medical drama, called "Monday Mornings," pulls back the curtain on these errors and is holding the doctors responsible. This show is based upon a book written by CNN's very own Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

He is also a writer, also an executive producer, with David E. Kelley.

And here is a preview.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Welcome to Chelsea General.

This is the emergency room. And that's a trauma center.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get out of my way.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Clear.

GUPTA: A place like this can get get multiple traumas at once. This is the sort of place where they all end up. Multiple trauma bays. Lots of action in this area. But you remember this, when Dr. Tyler Wilson comes in with the entire team of Chelsea General doctors to make it all happen. That's what this hospital is all about.

So it's a shooting day here at Chelsea General. And it's a single level set, as you might imagine. There's ways that we can make it multiple levels. For example, an elevator over here that goes straight through. So you go through that elevator and you're suddenly on a different floor.

Are they -- are these real (INAUDIBLE)?

You can actually...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They could be.

GUPTA: OK. Anything could be real.

So I'm going to go to my favorite place at Chelsea General, the operating room.

This is an operating room that you're about to see where we can actually perform surgery. We wanted the entire room to be real, so nothing in here is out of place. Nothing doesn't belong. This is what a real operating room looks like.

This is a microscope that we use to perform surgery that the surgeons will -- the operator will be able to move this microscope all around, focus in on different parts of the head.

If I had to do surgery because someone needed it on the set, I could do it right here in this room.

But Chelsea General is like any other hospital and sometimes complications occur. When they do, people are held accountable here, in Room 311.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right. Let's get started, shall we?

GUPTA: This is the room that very few people know about and even fewer people get to see. It's Room 311. Our characters, you know, often sit in the same seats. For example, you have Ty and Tina who will usually sit over here. You'll have Gato Villenueva (ph), he's a big presence. He's usually in the back of the room. This is the place over here that you really never want to be, I mean, if you can avoid it. There is literally this walk where the doctors hear for the first time that they're the ones that are going to be in the hot seat and they come to this podium over here.

You see, it's a glass podium and people can see their body language. The only person who really sits in the same seat every time is Dr. Harding, who, he's the boss. He's the only person who can see the entire room. He can read everyone's expressions. And that was really critically important.

The ultimate goal of 311 is to make sure that we learn from mistakes. This is how medicine and science moves forward. The worst thing of all would be that a mistake occurs and no one learns from it. Room 311 makes sure that doesn't happen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Sanjay...

GUPTA: That looked pretty good.

BALDWIN: -- I'm so excited for you.

GUPTA: It's kind of wild to see it like that, huh?

BALDWIN: It's totally wild. And I love how like what you all didn't see, which was when we first started seeing the piece, Sanjay. It's like don't worry, don't worry, I'm not in in it. I'm not in -- I'm not in the show.

Just in talking, you said it took you 10 years, pretty much, a labor of love, to write the book. And now here you have a TV show.

GUPTA: Yes. I mean when I first started writing, I just wanted to write a book originally about how doctors learn.

BALDWIN: Yes.

GUPTA: I've always been fascinated by this. And a big way that doctors learn, people like to sort of joke about the fact that they call it a practice of medicine. But everything is the practice, really. Unless you're perfect at it, you're still, to some extent, practicing. And in medicine, that's really true. And you have to learn from mistakes. You have to learn from your mistakes. You have to from other's mistakes. And these meetings that took -- that take place in hospitals, those are real meetings.

And they were some of the most indelible things, Brooke, I've ever experienced, because, you know, doctors holding each other accountable, candid conversations, no holds barred. It's not supposed to be replacing the lawyers or the administrators. This is peer review. You know, it would be like as if that -- as if at CNN, every week we had a meeting where we just said here, Brooke, here's what I think you did right, here's what I think you did wrong. It's not personal, but it's powerful, very powerful.

BALDWIN: Congratulations, doc.

GUPTA: Thank you. BALDWIN: When do we set the DVR?

GUPTA: Tonight, 10:00 p.m., "Monday Mornings" is on Monday nights, 10:00 p.m..

BALDWIN: Of course, "Monday Mornings" on Monday nights.

Sanjay Gupta, thank you very much.

GUPTA: Thank you.

BALDWIN: We appreciate it, the run around behind the set there.

And now to this, just 48 hours after the White House released this photo, President Obama is getting ready to address the nation, in a matter of minutes here, about gun control. And his decision to do it in Minneapolis was no accident.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: The bottom of the hour. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

Right now, President Obama is following through on his promise to take his thoughts, take the national conversation on gun control, straight to the American people.

What he's doing today is he's meeting with local leaders and police in Minneapolis. It's a city known for taking initiatives on the gun control issue. And he is expected to make a statement here just minutes from now. These are live pictures as we await the president, who will be first introduced by the chief of police there in Minneapolis. So stay tuned for that.

But first, the gun conversation certainly resonating all around the country. Last night, we were watching, before the Super Bowl here.

Look at these little boys and girls, along with Jennifer Hudson, singing America the beautiful ahead of the big game.

Take a listen.

(singing)