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CNN Live Saturday
Identity Theft Victim Speaks Out; Cervical Cancer Vaccine Creates Controversy; Classroom Robots May Be Able to Help Ill Children Attend Class
Aired June 10, 2006 - 16:32 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Here's what's happening right now.
Apparent suicides at Guantanamo Bay. Three detainees found dead in their cells. Two are from Saudi Arabia, one from Yemen. The military says it's investigating.
Southern Command has scheduled a briefing in the next hour. CNN will bring that to you live.
More questions surrounding the death of one of the world's most notorious terrorists. In Iraq, United States officials conduct an autopsy today on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. An Iraqi man says he watched U.S. troops beat a gravely stricken Zarqawi after the deadly airstrike on Wednesday. The military says it's looking into those allegations.
More than a dozen Iraqis died today in bombings and armed assaults. It was the worse day of violence since al-Zarqawi's death.
We hear about identity theft almost every day, but the true extent of the crime and its costs are often hard to measure.
CNN's Casey Wian introduces us to one woman who was a victim dozens of times over. Her story first aired earlier this week on "LOU DOBBS TONIGHT".
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CASEY WIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Audra Schmierer has been a stay-at-home mom for six years. Now that her son is in school, she wants to return to work. So she applied to a temp agency.
AUDRA SCHMIERER, ID THEFT VICTIM: They called me three or for hours later and said, "Mrs. Schmierer, I don't understand why you're applying. You already work here."
WIAN: At a big tech company, a similar experience.
SCHMIERER: There's my driver's license, my passport, my Social Security card. I gave them everything. And she said, "Well, really, how can you actually prove you are you? What if those people have the same documentation you do?"
WIAN: Schmierer has discovered more than 200 illegal aliens throughout the United States are doing jobs Americans supposedly won't do by using her Social Security number. They work in fast-food chains, cosmetic companies, even receive dividends from Microsoft.
SCHMIERER: I started to gather all this information and really found out how extreme the situation was. It's scary.
WIAN: Her ordeal began last year with a bill from the IRS for nearly $16,000 in back taxes for a job in Texas. She lives in Dublin, California.
SCHMIERER: My husband was actually quite upset. He asked me when I had ever been to Texas.
WIAN: She tracked down the illegal alien whose phony tax return triggered the IRS bill. He told her he bought her Social Security number and a fake green card at this Texas flea market.
SCHMIERER: I don't under how illegal aliens can come across here and commit a felony -- identity theft is a felony -- and be excused from that felony to continue living their life when I cannot live my life.
WIAN: By January, Schmierer faced a $1 million IRS bill. She was temporarily detained by Customs, returning from a foreign business trip with her husband. And her Social Security account now shows a zero balance, erasing 14 years of work before her marriage.
SCHMIERER: Social Security right now sends me to IRS. IRS sends me to Social Security. Every now and then, they'll send me to the FTC, whom I have a case with.
No one wants to do anything about it. Right now, I have nowhere to go.
WIAN: Schmierer spends several hours a day trying to clear her name. The IRS has cancelled her bill, but Social Security won't give her a new number. She says all 35 employers she's contacted have refused to take action against the workers using her number.
SCHMIERER: It's cheap labor, and they don't care.
WIAN: Neither do most senators. John Ensign brought Schmierer's case to their attention, and they still approved Social Security benefits for illegal aliens using stolen identifies.
SEN. JOHN ENSIGN (R), NEVADA: The crime of identity theft and Social Security fraud are not victimless crimes. The victims of these crimes are American citizens and legal immigrants.
WIAN: Casey Wian, CNN, Dublin, California.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WHITFIELD: New Zealand has deported a Yemeni national to Saudi Arabia. He had suspected dies with the 9/11 hijackers. Raed Rahamad Abdullah Ali (ph) had flight training with the hijacker who flew a plane into the Pentagon. Ali was taking more flight lessons in Auckland before he was arrested and deported last month. CNN is committed to providing the most reliable coverage of news that affects your security. Stay tuned to CNN for the latest information day and night.
Apparent suicides at Guantanamo bay? We continue to monitor this developing story. Three detainees found dead at the prison in Cuba.
In the next hour, a briefing from U.S. Southern Command in Miami. We'll carry that live.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WHITFIELD: And we continue to watch the latest developments regarding tropical depression number one of the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season. It is brushing past the western coast of Cuba.
The depression is on the cusp of becoming a tropical storm. If so, it will be called Alberto, should its wind speeds intensify to 39 miles an hour or more.
CNN meteorologist Jacqui Jeras can fill in the blanks there. I'm only giving you a taste of the information. Jacqui's got the rest.
JACQUI JERAS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: That's right.
(WEATHER REPORT)
WHITFIELD: Well, coming up on CNN LIVE SATURDAY, preventing cancer. What a new vaccine means for thousands of women. I'll talk live with Dr. Bill about the importance of this new treatment, next. New vaccine, that is.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DAVID KIRKPATRICK, SENIOR EDITOR, "FORTUNE": Marissa Mayer runs the search business at Google from a product standpoint that individuals see when they go to Google and do things. Marissa is a relentlessly upbeat and optimistic person who is capable of handling massive amounts of information. She manages quite a large team, and she works with them through every electronic method that you might imagine.
MARISSA MAYER, V.P. OF SEARCH PRODUCTS, GOOGLE: There's entire days I'll spend at home where for 10, 12 hours I'll sit down and just plow through my backlog of e-mail to try and get on top of all that information. I do a lot of the two-screen experience, where I'll have my laptop on my lap while I'm watching TV.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WHITFIELD: Well, you're looking at what some are calling the biggest medical advancement since penicillin. It's a vaccine called Gardasil, and it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration Thursday as a preventative for cervical cancer. The disease strikes almost 10,000 American women annually and it kills 3,700 women in the U.S. every year, according to the American Cancer Society.
Gardasil protects against four strains of the sexually transmitted HPV virus that can cause cervical cancer.
Dr. Bill Lloyd joins us with more on Gardasil and what it could mean for women around the world.
Good to see you.
DR. BILL LLOYD, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS MEDICAL CENTER: Hi, Fredricka. It's awfully hard to overestimate the importance of this story, and like you said, this could be the health breakthrough of 2006.
WHITFIELD: Well, is this the first time we've even heard of a vaccine that could be a preventative for cancer?
LLOYD: It will prevent cancer, and it's the first one that's been publicly marketed. What it actually does, as you mentioned, it protects you from acquiring the HPV virus. And four of those strains of HPV virus -- there's over a hundred of them -- but four particular strains can cause problems in women, two of which that can lead to cervical cancer. So by protecting yourself from HPV infection, you protect yourself from cervical cancer.
WHITFIELD: And so this is why it is controversial in part, because you're talking about vaccinating girls as young as 11 or 12. The idea is to vaccinate them before they are sexually active. And I guess the worry is, among a lot of people, that you're sending a mixed message to these young people to introduce them to the idea of what can happen if you have sex, but if you get a shot, maybe it won't happen.
LLOYD: I don't think it's morally defensible to deny women the opportunity to protect themselves from a disfiguring cancerous disease. And like you said, one out of three die from it.
You know, Fredricka, if you were given an opportunity to receive an HIV vaccine, you'd take it, and you'd make sure all your children took it as well. Well, the same thing here applies here. And many conservative groups have come out and said, in fact, it's OK that we support the use of this vaccine.
And, you know, there are many innocent, monogamous women who have contracted HPV from their partners. So it's a universal problem, and now for once we have a vaccine that can protect women from the HPV vaccine.
WHITFIELD: So if you can be as young as 11 or 12 to get this vaccine, what perhaps might cancel you out for getting the vaccine altogether?
LLOYD: Well, you know, it's going to be very expensive. It's about $100 a shot, and you need three shots to complete the series. That's one reason why it's important that young women get the vaccinations.
Teenagers are all over the place. And it's hard to get them to come back for dental appointments, let alone an immunization. So school age is a perfect time to identify these young girls and get them immunized from this.
The bigger problem, I think, is going to be finances, because it's going to be state governments that are going to be obligated to pay for the vaccination for people without insurance. And so states already have a very difficult time with the current immunization program. Adding a vaccine that works out to over $300 per student may break the bank.
WHITFIELD: All right. It is expensive.
Dr. Bill Lloyd, thanks so much.
LLOYD: We'll talk again soon.
WHITFIELD: All right. More of CNN LIVE SATURDAY coming up at the top of the hour, beginning with the press conference that we're all waiting for out of Miami.
Carol Lin here.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: That's right. We've been tracking the details of this.
Southern Command has put it together very hastily. It looks like it's not going to be live. It's going to be as live on phone, because that's as quickly as they could get it together.
WHITFIELD: Teleconference.
LIN: Yes, a teleconference, basically, with reporters. But we're going to hopefully hear more details about what happened to these three Guantanamo detainees who presumably committed suicide, how that happened, what are the questions around the circumstances there.
So we're going to be carrying that live as it happens at 5:00.
And then at 6:00, Fred, I had no idea that 40 percent of companies surveyed actually hire somebody to read employee e-mails. All right?
WHITFIELD: How interesting.
LIN: There are certain buzzwords that -- that trigger it. So we're going to try to give some of that information, and how far you can go in your e-mail before you get fired. What are they looking for?
WHITFIELD: Don't get to comfortable at your workplace computer.
LIN: You bet. It doesn't even have to be any kind of previous investigation.
WHITFIELD: Right.
LIN: It's just they have someone reading e-mails.
WHITFIELD: All right. We'll be watching.
LIN: OK.
WHITFIELD: Thanks a lot, Carol.
Still ahead this hour, virtual attendance? We'll show you how students how can't make it to school can still keep up with the rest of the class.
You're watching CNN, the most trusted name in news.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WHITFIELD: Mention technology in the classroom and most people think of computers, right? Well, now there's a high-tech tool that's much more sophisticated than your average desktop. Robots are helping children with serious illnesses attend school from their hospital beds.
CNN Senior Correspondent Allan Chernoff reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Marquita, do you see the three words?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
ALLAN CHERNOFF, CNN SR. CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Fourteen-year-old Marquita McCray may look like she's stuck in a hospital room, but she's actually attending a history class.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you have any questions, Marquita?
MARQUITA MCCRAY, 9TH GRADER: No.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.
CHERNOFF: Marquita suffers from a degenerative muscle disorder, one that forces her into prolonged hospital stays. On this day, at the Blythedale Children's Hospital in Valhalla, New York, Marquita is attached to a ventilator. But now through the help of robot technology, even that's not an excuse to skip class.
MCCRAY: Would it have something to do with religion?
CHERNOFF: Just two robots with tiny cameras, video monitors, microphones and speakers connect special-needs children like Marquita to their classrooms. The technology, developed by Canadian company Telerobotics, is called Telepresence.
JIM DESIMONE, BLYTHEDALE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL: It's the only technology around to connect a child that's stuck in bed, that's isolated, has no socialization, and now can now go to school and be part of what they should be.
CHERNOFF: And that federally funded technology is currently being used in seven children's hospitals throughout the country.
MCCRAY: For volume, up, and you press this button for volume down.
CHERNOFF: The student controls the robot, zooming in or out, or even panning the robot's head around the classroom. If the student has a question, all that's required is raising the robot's hand.
BOB LANGERFELD, TEACHER: You almost forget that robot is there and she's a real student. The kids kind of participate with her in that way as if she's sitting in the classroom.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, I still think it's her. I don't even think it's the robot.
CHERNOFF: When the history class finishes, off to math she goes.
MCCRAY: You're rolling down a hallway. You feel like you are actually rolling. So, like, when they hit a bump, it actually feels like you hit a bump.
CHERNOFF: Marquita says there are other advantages to using her robot double.
MCCRAY: I can break and the teachers can't scream at you for, like, not breaking or nothing, because you can't hear them when you are on break.
CHERNOFF: But when she's not on break, Marquita is either in class or out socializing with the help of the robot.
MCCRAY: On lunch break I'll go to the library, and I'll talk to kids in the library.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What is the denominator, Marquita? Can you look at the board?
CHERNOFF: For Marquita, the common denominator is her computerized companion.
Allan Chernoff, CNN, Valhalla, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WHITFIELD: That is some remarkable technology.
From the CNN global headquarters in Atlanta, I'm Fredricka Whitfield. Carol Lin is coming up next.
We're awaiting a briefing on the apparent Guantanamo suicides. We'll bring that you to as it happens.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LIN: Three Guantanamo detainees apparently commit suicide. We have a live report. You are going to hear from the head commander down at Guantanamo Bay.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are reports of thousands of women being transported to Germany for sex during the World Cup.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LIN: That's the State Department talking about soccer, sex and human trafficking. The seamier side of the World Cup.
And...
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have an obligation to one day either kill or capture bin Laden for the purpose of justice to the American people, and indeed to the entire world for the misery that this man has inflicted.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
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