Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Deadly Tornadoes; Filing Deadline; White House Secrets Revealed; CNN Hero Maggie Doyne; "The Wonder List" Season Finale This Sunday. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired April 10, 2015 - 08:30   ET

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

[08:30:40] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: We have dramatic pictures to show you following an outbreak of tornadoes in the Midwest. More than a dozen twisters touching down, most in Illinois, where at least one person is dead. Businesses, homes, histories reduced to rubble. This morning, rescue crews still looking through debris to see if anyone remains trapped.

Let's get to CNN's Ryan Young. He's live for us from Rochelle, Illinois.

Ryan, tell us what the scene is around you.

RYAN YOUNG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This had to be so scary for the numerous people who were out here. In fact, if you just look right here, this was a restaurant that had people on the inside, 12 people on the inside of this restaurant when that tornado started. And, in fact, they had to shelter in there. We're told somebody was trapped in a bathroom for over a half hour. But you have to think about, one person died, eight other people were injured. You can see the power of this storm because it tossed this tractor trailer like it was nothing.

We see images like this all over. In fact, when we stopped at a gas station, we talked to a man who said he saw that large cloud moving through the area and it really scared him. He talked about his neighbor's cows being moved to another yard. So you can understand, people will say they've never seen a tornado come through this area like this. And now that light is up, we are going to - we'll obviously drive around and see the other damage that's around this area. But so far, so many people surprised that only one person was killed. But you can understand for the families here, they're really trying to deal with all the pain and damage that's been left behind.

Michaela.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, Ryan, they'll need a lot of support getting back on their feet. But, again, stuff can be replaced, people can't be. All right, thanks for that report.

Time for the five things to know for your new day.

At number one, obviously, the deadly tornadoes hitting the Midwest. Most notably, Illinois. The system now moving east, posing concerns about flights in and out of the northeast today. Newly released police dash cam footage shows the moments leading up to

Walter Scott's fatal shooting. The footage from fired Officer Michael Slager's patrol car does not show Slager opening fire.

Hillary Clinton set to officially roll out her presidential campaign Sunday. CNN has learned she'll declare with a video on social media, followed by travel to early caucus in primary states.

President Obama, meanwhile, set to meet with Cuban leader Raul Castro today. They'll meet at a summit in Panama. The first interaction between the two since the countries agreed to renew diplomatic relations.

At 3:00 a.m. Apple began taking preorders for its new smart watch. Apple says online interest already points to a sellout. The Apple watch officially hit store shelves, though, on April 24th. Price range, $349 all the way to $17,000. Ouch.

For more on the five things to know, be sure to visit newdaycnn.com for the latest.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: All right, it is time for CNN Money now, "Your Money." Chief business correspondent Christine Romans is in our money center.

Christine.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: You have five days left to file your taxes. The average refund received so far, just over $2,800 and 67 percent of taxpayers have already filed. If you haven't, don't panic and file right away for a six-month extension.

If you're rushing to get it done, avoid these three common mistakes. Number one, don't forget to sign your return. An unsigned return is like an unsigned check, not valid. Number two, get the Social Security Numbers right. Taxpayers usually know their own but they often get it wrong for children and other family members. And finally, get the deductions right. Many people mistakenly claim deductions or credits they don't qualify for and miss out on ones they do. Pay extra attention to these, the earned income tax credit, the child independent care credit and the standard deduction.

CAMEROTA: OK, Christine.

Well, it's the most famous house in the country. Now a new book revealing some juicy details about the famous residents of the White House, from Kennedy, to Clinton, to Nixon, even Obama. We have a sneak peek of what's inside "The Residence," straight ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:38:11] PEREIRA: From exploring the juiciest White House secrets, to exposing some of the most private moments of our nation's first families, a new book, "The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House," has it all, from the Kennedys to the Obamas. Author Kate Andersen Brower got the scoop on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from the enormous staff of maids, cooks, florists, butlers, all of them who have worked there, and Kate joins us now.

Good to see you, Kate. Congratulations on the book.

KATE ANDERSEN BROWER, AUTHOR, "THE RESIDENCE: INSIDE THE PRIVATE WORLD OF THE WHITE HOUSE": Thank you for having me.

PEREIRA: Well, I understand you were sort of inspired by binge watching "Downton Abby." I do the same thing myself. But I'm really curious how you were able to get them to open up. These people take pride in their position and there's a great deal of digression.

BROWER: Exactly, and a lot of them told me what goes on inside the White House stays in the White House. So it took me a year and a half to report this book. And often I would go to people's houses. They were kind enough to invite me to, you know, have lunch in some cases at their homes. And then I would get close to one staffer who knew they could trust me, who would then put in a good word for me with their friends.

PEREIRA: Ah.

BROWER: So it took time and -- but, yes, they're incredibly discrete. In fact, some of them will say that they work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because a lot of people don't know where that is. You know, they don't brag about their jobs.

CAMEROTA: And yet, Kate, you were able to get them to share with you some really juicy details, including one moment at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

BROWER: Right.

CAMEROTA: The staff shared with you that they came to believe that in the bedroom there had been a moment where Hillary Clinton had somehow clocked Bill Clinton because there was evidence of some sort of fight?

BROWER: Right. And one staffer told me that they were called up to their bedroom and they found this blood on the bed and the president said he had ran into the door in the middle of the night, but they all thought - the rumor was, back stairs was that he - you know, she clocked him with a book. And a lot of the housekeepers, especially the women who worked at the White House, thought that, you know, he deserved it. Hillary Clinton had him sleeping on the sofa in the sitting room attached to their bedroom and the women on staff were really cheering for her.

[08:40:16] But there are also really heartwarming stories in the book, too, about Hillary Clinton, during particularly stressful times during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, asking for a piece of her favorite mocha cake and calling the pastry chef. Also her asking for some time alone by the pool that I think are very relatable, human moments. And I think it's important to see these people as human beings, too.

CUOMO: Your job was to get them to dish because the rest of us want to hear it, or most of us anyway. And yet at the same time, did it kind of confirm to you that, wow, you can't trust anybody and no wonder people in positions of power are so paranoid about who's around them?

BROWER: Well, most of the stories in the book are positive and even the negative stories were told - painted in a very positive light. And most of this is on the record. But, yes, I mean, there really are, in a sense, the Clintons felt under siege in the White House. One usher told me that they were the most paranoid first family he ever worked with. And in some cases, I guess they really don't have any privacy because this is their inner sanctum, the second and third floor of the White House.

PEREIRA: Sure.

BROWER: But another story that I think is really great is about Michelle Obama. And she had asked the florists to label all the flowers in the arrangements so that she and her daughters could learn the different names. And I just think that that's really fascinating. She asked one of the butlers to speak French to her daughters so they could help - help them learn because he was from Haiti and he spoke fluently. So these are very real people.

PEREIRA: Well, and they're very real people and they're very real children have been raised in 1600 Pennsylvania. And it's interesting to look through the book and hear stories and see them, some of the pictures that are really compelling, seeing some of the staff with these kids. I mean, as you mention, this is a really intimate relationship they're having with the children and the first lady and the president and the staff members.

BROWER: Uh-huh. Amy Carter, in particular, had a really funny relationship with the pastry chef where she would ask him to help make her cookies because she had promised to bring cookies into her friends at school the next day. And so she always wanted to do it herself and she would - he would start the oven for her up in the residence and she would be out roller skating, and she'd forget all about it. I mean she was very young. And suddenly smoke would be billowing out of the kitchen.

PEREIRA: Uh-oh.

BROWER: And the Secret Service would be rushing around. And she also actually in the residence elevator wrote her name in the elevator shaft. I mean there are all sorts of really -

CUOMO: Graffiti. It's a federal crime.

BROWER: Right.

CUOMO: Did anything ever come of it?

Which family did they say was the best? Like when you look at all the different things, who'd seem the most beloved?

BROWER: Hands down, President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush. I mean they would play horseshoes with the staff in the spring and summer. The president was so beloved among the staffers, Republican or Democrat. I mean these staffers don't have any - they're not partisan in any way. But one funny story is that he asked for some bug spray one weekend afternoon when he was playing horseshoe with other staffers. And staffers sprayed him with industrial strength pesticide. And he had to be decontaminated in the - the shower. He turned bright red. And because he was, they say, so nice, he just kind of brushed it off and said, let's just go back.

CUOMO: Also a federal crime.

BROWER: Right. But he didn't fire anybody.

PEREIRA: There are so - there are so many great stories and great photographs. You've done a great job in this book and I'm sure people are going to want to pick it up and read them for themselves. Amy - or Kate Andersen Brower. I called you Amy because I was talking about Amy Carter.

CAMEROTA: I know.

PEREIRA: Thank you so much for that.

BROWER: Thank you.

PEREIRA: And those of you at home, I'm sure you're curious about it. You can send us your questions or your thoughts about the book. Tweet us or go onto our FaceBook page, facebook.com/newday.

CUOMO: All right, so 10 years ago, even when a wide-eyed teenager backpacked into war torn rural Nepal, she made a remarkable decision, trading in her life in New Jersey for one in the shadows of the Himalayas. Her name is Maggie Doyne. She built a home and then a school and now she's just 28 years old and, listen to this, she's a full-time mom for nearly 50 and educates hundreds more. That's why she's this week's CNN Hero.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MAGGIE DOYNE, CNN HERO: Most 28-year-old girls my age have a very different reality. After high school, I decided to travel around the world with my backpack. In Nepal for the first time I really saw the effects of civil war and children and women suffering, and it changed me. That was the beginning.

I called up my parents and I asked them to wire me over my $5,000 of baby-sitting money.

It's time to get up. Good morning.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Good morning.

DOYNE: We started with a home and then we built a school. We select children who without us would not be able to go to school. A lot of them are begging on the streets.

[08:45:03] You got it.

We have created one of the top performance schools in the entire region for 350 children. And 50 of those kids live in our home. When you walk in the front gates of Kopila Valley, you don't see suffering, you see healthy, laughing, thriving kids.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CUOMO: 28 years of age, gave up her normal life to do something extraordinary. There are heroes all around us, and you can nominate someone deserving by going to CNNheros.com. Do it right now.

CAMEROTA: That's a great story.

Climate change remains a divisive issue. CNN's Bill Weir was on a mission to the Florida Everglades to see the evidence for himself. What he found, he says, shocked him. Stay tuned for Bill Weir to talk about "The Wonder List."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL WEIR, CNN HOST, "THE WONDER LIST" (voice-over): Shore birds, a place known as Snake Bite.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WEIR (voice-over): Behold, the exuberance of a glacier climbing rookie.

[08:50:00] WEIR (on camera): Amazing!

WEIR (voice-over): But providing thrills to goof balls and Gore-Tex is far from the most important rule of glaciers, like the Bossons. These Alps are the water tower of Europe.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: That's CNN's Bill Weir taking on the French Alps in the two- part finale of the CNN original series "The Wonder List." Bill weir joins us now.

WEIR: Hello, friends.

CAMEROTA: That was you yodeling?

WEIR: That was me yodeling. Riccola!

(LAUGHTER)

It was incredible. Incredible.

CAMEROTA: What did you see there?

WEIR: I spent a little time growing up in the Rocky Mountains. I thought those were the most beautiful mountains, but oh, please, the Alps. Now I get it. Now I get the fuss. I went there to try to understand disappearing glaciers through the eyes of people who know their ice, long-time ski guys, climbing guys, these really rugged, best mountaineers in the world. They wonder if they're the last generation who are going too climb that Bossons glacier. That thing has retreated nearly a mile since the first men climbed it a couple hundred years ago. It's going away at an alarming rate and I wanted to understand also the mindset of folks who don't think that's a big deal.

CUOMO: I've got to tell you, I may be biased because we've known each other for a long time and I've benefited from your storytelling for a long time, but it seems to me that you've taken things that you knew about before here - but the experience -

WEIR: Are you saying I was sandbagging? I was holding back?

CUOMO: No. The experience that you went to and seeing and feeling has enhanced your storytelling in a way where it's really coming through --

WEIR: I appreciate that.

CUOMO: -- the urgency and relevance of this.

WEIR: That's what happens when you hang out with field biologists in the Everglades or glaciologists in the Alps and you see that their work, which goes on in sort of humble anonymity for so long and you realize how passionate they are about these things and I just wanted the series to remind us to fall in love with the planet we have right now and realize that a lot of little decisions of 7 billion people can add up to changes that may make these places go away.

PEREIRA: And the fact that you connect the dots, right? That was the part that I found really profound. Did you get a sense from talking to the people in each of these places that not only is there the concern, but there's something that can be done?

WEIR: Yes. There's hope.

PEREIRA: That gives me hope.

WEIR: There's hope in every one of these hours, you know, but we did tigers and going away in India. Saving tigers is going to be a trivial, naive little diversion if sea levels rise a foot in the next 50 years. So this is the -- that's why we kind of finished with the big bang. Climate change is the massive global problem that everybody needs to buy into and start rowing in the same direction to address, but then we finish up in the Everglades which is the site of the biggest wildlife restoration project in history. People realize, yeah, if you drain a swamp in order to create strip malls and golf courses, you're going to pay a price sometime. We need that swamp for Florida to survive. The drinking waters is under the Everglades. It sustains all the life in Florida Bay and around the Keys, billion dollar fishing industries. That was the sort of totem, the Everglades, for that when we do realize the error of our ways we can turn it around. The same Army Corps of engineers that ripped it apart in the '50s is now putting it back together. It's expensive. It would be cheaper just to leave these places, you know, and try to figure out how to develop and maintain them at the same time.

CAMEROTA: Obviously climate change continues to be a divisive issue. You talked to skeptics and did they open your mind to what their perspective is?

WEIR: What opened my mind, I went to this Heartland Institute conference in Vegas, this big libertarian think tank, and a lot of people dismiss their claims as they're in the pockets of big oil or big coal. And a couple of the big rock stars of the skeptic movement I talked to say "We don't get a dime." They are true believers.

CAMEROTA: They think it's cyclical. They don't think that it's manmade, yes?

WEIR: Exactly. Or that it's not that no great harm will come. We can burn every bit of coal, every drop of oil on the planet and it wouldn't matter.

CUOMO: Sway you?

WEIR: No. Because you have NASA and NOAA and the academies of science in every country that knows how to fire a rocket and Google, Apple, Coke, Pepsi, Pentagon, the pope all agree that this is happening and we need to be talking about it. It's this small group of real hard- lined deniers that their voice seems to be amplified because half of the U.S. Senate is taking their talking points.

PEREIRA: Last but not least, we also get to see you climbing. Was this the most physically testing that you've done?

WEIR: It was, it was.

PEREIRA: That was for real.

WEIR: I got in way over my skis. I met this Frenchman named Sebastien. He's like, what's your experience? I'm like yeah, you know, I've climbed some ice. Then when we get up there and you realize how weak your left arm is compared to your right as you're trying to hit a hammer into a wall of ice and you can't feel your feet and I just dropped your ice screw and I can't say that because I'm on camera.

CAMEROTA: You were taking a little snow nap there where we just saw you?

WEIR: That was me passing out.

CAMEROTA: That's great. Well it's great stuff.

PEREIRA: You're a wonder.

CAMEROTA: It's great to have you on. You can watch the two-part season finale of "The Wonder List" this Sunday starting at 9:00 p.m. on CNN.

PEREIRA: You should frame that photo right there.

(LAUGHTER)

[08:55:00] CAMEROTA: That is great.

PEREIRA: Oh, man.

WEIR: You don't realize the ground is just a foot below.

(LAUGHTER)

PEREIRA: All perception.

CUOMO: Still counts. More please. More please. Great to have you.

(CROSSTALK)

PEREIRA: Appreciate it.

CUOMO: What Bill is doing is the good stuff, but we have more for you this morning as well. There are thousands of cops out there right now doing things every day to make lives better for someone else. Wait until you hear what one of them did and why it is "The Good Stuff."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

CUOMO: Imagine Dragons.

(CROSSTALK)

CUOMO: Thank you. Time "For The Good Stuff." Charnee Merritt from Ohio. Alright, so she has her son Israel, rare form of cancer, can't be treated effectively where they live, so they come to New York City and stay at the Ronald McDonald House, and that's just a great place to begin with. They check in and Charnee fell prey to a city snafu, which is parking in the wrong place, and her car got towed. So Charnee doesn't know what's going on, she's not from the city. She calls a local police precinct for help. Officer P.J. Conley takes the call and he hears her situation. He's so moved, he says, you know what, let me call the impound. I don't know if you've ever dealt with the impound, but when all you get from them is forget about it, it's our car, see you later, they wouldn't even give it to him. So guess what he did? He paid the 185 bucks impound fee out of his pocket, paid for the cab to the impound, too.

CAMEROTA: Oh my gosh.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARNEE MERRITT, SON ISRAEL HAS RARE FORM OF CANCER: Especially in lieu of things that we've seen recently, there are still good police officers out here that are serving the community. We just thank God for people like him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[09:00:01] CAMEROTA: So do we. We love that officer.

PEREIRA: We really do.

CAMEROTA: That's great, Chris. Thanks for showing us that.

PEREIRA: And with that, we wrap up NEW DAY and hand it over to Carol Costello for "NEWSROOM."

Good morning, Miss Carol.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: A nice, happy end to your show. Thanks so much. Have a great weekend.

CAMEROTA: You, too.

COSTELLO: NEWSROOM starts now.