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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin

Climate Change Talks Begin in Paris; Colorado Civilian Victims Identified; Ben Carson Visits Refugee Camp in Jordan; Donald Trump Sticks to 9/11 Muslim Claim; Threat of Imminent Kabul Embassy Attack. Aired 5:30-6a ET

Aired November 30, 2015 - 05:30   ET

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

[05:31:08] CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Protests erupting on the streets of Paris happening as president Obama meets with world leaders on how to stop global warming. Will there be any real breakthroughs? We are live.

ALISON KOSIK, CNN ANCHOR: New information about the man accused in the deadly shooting spree at a Colorado Planned Parenthood, as he gets ready to face a judge.

Welcome back to EARLY START. I'm Alison Kosik.

ROMANS: So nice to see you this morning, Alison. I'm Christine Romans. John Berman has the morning off. It is 31 minutes past the hour.

Let's start in Paris where chaos on the streets there ahead of potentially historic climate talks begin there today. Police arrests hundreds following a battle that included protesters throwing shoes, throwing bottles, even throwing candles police say came from the Paris attack memorial. Officers responding with teargas.

President Obama arriving Sunday in Paris for those talks. He visited the memorial at the Bataclan Theater with French President Francois Hollande, laying a single flower there.

As the climate summit begins this morning, global warming leaders observing a moment of silence, just moments ago, a moment of silence honoring the 130 people who died in the Paris attacks.

And now on to the business of hammering out a deal to limit greenhouse gasses. Nearly 150 world leaders in town for two weeks of intense negotiations and a possible deal President Obama hopes will cement his legacy.

CNN's Phil Black is in Paris with the president.

Phil, what's the latest this morning?

PHIL BLACK, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: So just a few moments, Christine, the French president, Francois Hollande, gave his opening address to the assembled leaders and dignitaries here, trying to give them a pep talk, I guess, explain to them what's at stake. There is no doubt the shadow of terrorism hangs over this event. And Hollande said that he's not asking to leaders here to choose between the fight against terrorism and the fight against climate change. He says they are both immense challenges. And world leaders should strive to deliver to their children a world that is fundamentally free of both.

The climate change, the view here, is clearly the greater challenge long term. What's at stake here, Hollande said, was the future of life. The very future of the planet itself. So that's the significance. That's the context within which these negotiations are taking place.

What we're going to be hearing over the coming hours, addresses from the assembled leaders. There's 147 heads of state here. Many other national leaders, heads of government as well. And they're going to state their intentions, declare what they are prepared to contribute to lower global greenhouse gas emissions. And then over the coming two weeks, their ministers, their negotiators will thrash out an arrangement that will hopefully, from their view, end in an agreement that is strong, robust, that points the direction of the planet on a low-carbon future.

Now on the sense, we already know the end result. We know that it's not going to hit the preferred goal. That is reducing greenhouse gasses to the point where global emissions do not cause temperature rises beyond two degrees Celsius or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That's not going to get there. But what they hope is for the first time they're going to get pretty close and build a framework that can be built upon, improved upon in the future. And really, as I said, set the direction for the planet to try and ultimately prevent the very worst extremes and consequences of climate change.

There is a degree of hope here, but it is somber, too. And I guess that is because of the fact that this city, only two weeks ago, was hit by those terror attack and there is a hope here, I think, that that will motivate the assembled leaders to try and work harder to come up with a strong agreement at the end of all of this -- Christine.

ROMANS: A degree of hope. Not two degrees of hope. A degree of hope, pun intended, I guess.

Phil Black, thank you for that this morning.

KOSIK: We're getting new information about what motivated a shooting spree at a Colorado Springs' Planned Parenthood -- clinic. An attack that killed three and wounded nine others. Suspect Robert Lewis Dear is set to have his first court appearance this afternoon via video link.

[05:35:14] We're also learning more about two of the victims in the deadly attack. Ke'arre Stewart was an Iraq war veteran with two daughters. Jennifer Markovsky had a boy and a girl. She was a K-Mart employee originally from Hawaii. And Police Officer Garrett Swasey also died in the attack.

For more on this, let's go to CNN's Dan Simon in Colorado Springs. DAN SIMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Christine and Alison, a law enforcement

source tells CNN that just after he surrendered the suspect in this case, 57-year-old Robert Dear, made a reference to, quote, "baby parts." So that's further fueling this notion that is anti-abortion views was the motivating factor behind the attack at the Planned Parenthood. But authorities say at this point it is too early to reach a conclusion.

As for the suspect's background, a portrait is emerging that he was a loner. He certainly lived in isolation in the middle of Colorado. Before that he lived in North Carolina in a very small cabin. In terms of a criminal background, we know that he had some brushes with law enforcement, but had never been convicted. In 1997, for instance, his wife at the time accused him of domestic assault. But he was never charged.

And because there is no sort of criminal violent past associated with the suspect, that's why people like the mayor in this town say it's very hard for law enforcement to keep tabs on someone like him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN SUTHERS, COLORADO SPRINGS MAYOR: We've had examples of this in the past. This guy is kind of shaping up to be a -- like a Ted Kaczynski type character. Perhaps not quite the loner, but it's very difficult for law enforcement to deal with individuals like this who don't commit serious crimes and get themselves on the radar that way. Unless a threat is posed beforehand that they can respond to.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIMON: Well, as authorities work to come up with a firm motive, we know that the suspect actually gave up inside the Planned Parenthood. This was after nearly six hours and also after an armored police vehicle known as a Bearcat rammed into the building. The suspect apparently thought he was cornered. He dropped his weapon and gave up -- Christine and Alison.

ROMANS: All right, Dan Simon, thanks for that.

Time now for an EARLY START on your money. European stocks are higher making up for earlier losses. U.S. stock futures barely moving so far.

A big week for retailers. A big day for retailer. Cyber Monday expected to break records. Sales likely to top $3 billion for the very first time this year. You know, Cyber Monday is growing in importance as the importance of Black Friday shrinks. A lot of people going online. They're staying away from the stores. They're going online to do their shopping for the holidays this year.

Amazon releasing a new video showing its drone delivery plans. This video features TV host Jeremy Clarkson and imagines a family in the near future receiving a replacement soccer shoe via drone to replace the one the bulldog, the family bulldog chewed up. The timeline 30 minutes -- 30 minutes to replace a soccer shoe. The video is the first in years showing new flight footage and drone design. Amazon looking for public support as it tries to overcome regulatory hurdles.

KOSIK: Can you imagine how difficult it's going -- I guess how difficult, but it's going to be so strange getting -- growing accustomed to these things, you know, coming over your house.

(CROSSTALK)

ROMANS: That is exactly what Amazon is trying to show.

KOSIK: Yes.

ROMANS: They're trying to get people sort of accustomed to the fact that there will be highways, if they would like them to be, highways in the skies.

KOSIK: Yes.

All right. Ben Carson showing what he learned while visiting a Syrian refugee camp. What he is saying about the crisis next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:42:53] ROMANS: It's back to the campaign grind for the men and women who would be president following a Thanksgiving holiday weekend. One Republican hopeful Ben Carson, he's been brushing up on his foreign policy, learning firsthand about the plight of Syrian refugees. He took a visit to a refugee camp in Jordan.

Joining us to go over the latest political buzz, CNN Politics reporter Eric Bradner.

Good morning. The imagery of Carson at that camp and a Carson doing interviews from Jordan obviously meant to brush up his foreign policy credentials. How did he do?

ERIC BRADNER, CNN POLITICS DIGITAL REPORTER: Well, he badly needed to do that. It was a big problem for his campaign. And he seems to have done well. He did a series of interviews from Jordan that got a lot of attention and he's also come with sort of policy proposal which is spending more on aiding refugees in Jordan, in these camps in the Middle East rather than allowing them into the United States, which is interesting because it appeals to two segments of the Republican base. Both the national security folks who are really concerned about letting these refugees into the United States and the religious conservatives who are worried about the fate of these refugees, what happens to them.

So he badly needed to sort of display some knowledge of foreign policy and show that he was taking steps to shore up a problematic are for his campaign. And he has done that. Now --

ROMANS: And Eric, let's listen to him in his own words, how he threaded that needle. Let's listen to how he threaded the needle of that policy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) CARSON: The thing that I really learned here in listening to the refugees themselves is their intense desire to return to their own country and be repatriated. There are so many people who think that the ideal for everybody is to come to America and to be settled here. But that is not the ideal for everybody.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: Now if you're advising Ben Carson, that is the image of him there on the ground, some would say, you know, it's a field trip in foreign policy. Others are saying he is looking like, you know, he's presidential, whereas Donald Trump, you know, gets his foreign policy from watching the Sunday shows and, you know, reading a tweet.

[05:45:06] BRADNER: Right. I mean, this is a presidential primary in which serious expertise about a broader range of policy areas is not something that voters appear to be valuing that much. Donald Trump is sort of channeling the anger of the big portion of the Republican electorate. Ben Carson is tapping into social conservatives. You know, he's got a little bit of time and he's got a little bit of room to grow on this.

It's not like he's running against a field of people deep in foreign policy experience. So he's definitely acknowledging a problematic area and he's definitely working on it.

KOSIK: Was that a jab at the voters that I heard there? Expertise doesn't seem to be a priority -- anyway.

BRADNER: No, no, no.

(LAUGHTER)

KOSIK: Let's move on to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, not candidates that we talk about probably often enough but they are moving up in the polls. And now we're seeing Ted Cruz really escalating his attacks on Marco Rubio, aren't we?

BRADNER: Yes. Absolutely. So Ted Cruz is running an impressive campaign. He's someone who's known as sort of a rabble rouser on Capitol Hill, ginning up a lot of intra-party problems for Republican leaders. Yet on the campaign trail next to Donald Trump, he looks very level headed. Right? He looks like someone who's really hesitant to attack other Republicans on the debate stage.

And so -- but now as the field sort of narrows it's looking like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are two of the elected officials in the field who have a lot of staying power who are going to be real players in Iowa. And they're going to have to compete at some point. They're going to start to butt heads. And you're starting to see that happening.

Now the question is whether they're really competing for the same set of voters. Rubio appeals more to establishment Republicans, more moderate Republicans. And Cruz appeals more to a -- a more conservative base. A lot of people who -- you know, his hope has been that a lot of people who like Donald Trump will also like him. So they are going to have to butt heads at some point. But it's not clear how many voters are truly undecided at this point between Cruz and Rubio. So that's what we'll watch play out.

ROMANS: Trump still the top of all of those polls. Spent the second weekend in a row doubling down on these comments about thousands of Muslims tailgating and celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center. You know, that's been fact-checked to death and found to be wrong.

But an interesting other story that you've been following is this sort of movement by the Trump campaign to try to coalesce support of black pastors around Donald Trump? And that's not going to happen. What's going on there?

BRADNER: Right. So last week, Trump's campaign built this big event for today that would be a meeting followed by the endorsement of hundreds of black pastors for Trump's campaign. That would have been really big. Sort of helping him get out of some racial controversies. But it turns out the Trump campaign was really overselling that. They backed off now, saying it's just going to be a private meeting and there's going to be no sort of formal endorsement event, no press conference. They called that off.

And the reason they've had to do this is because a lot of the black pastors who were invited said wait a minute, we're not planning to endorse him. We were invited to this meeting. We were thinking about going but that doesn't mean we're supporting his campaign. And so something that could have been a nice moment for Trump looks like it was oversold and now it's sort of biting him. So --

KOSIK: Interesting distinction there, Eric. We got to go but thank you so much for coming on today. We will talk to you soon.

BRADNER: Thank you.

ROMANS: His piece on CNN Politics is fantastic so I encourage everybody to jump on there at CNN.com and read his politics piece. Thanks, Eric.

BRADNER: Thanks.

ROMANS: All right. Roads crumbling, airports jammed. Our infrastructure failing. Hillary Clinton's plan to fix this big problem next.

[05:49:05]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KOSIK: Welcome back. We're following breaking news from Afghanistan. U.S. officials citing credible reports of an imminent terror attack in Kabul City. The reports say it could happen in the next 48 hours. According to an embassy statement, there are no additional details regarding the targets, timing or method of the planned attack. Embassy officials are strongly urging American citizens to exercise extreme caution if they're moving around the city.

For the latest on this, let's bring in reporter Sune Engel Rasmussen. He joins us from Kabul.

So the security situation there always a tenuous thing. What is different about this warning?

SUNE ENGEL RASMUSSEN, REPORTER: The difference about this message from the U.S. embassy is that it is so specific in the timeframe. It's the possible attack and it is so imminent as it seems to be a very pressing -- a matter of pressing information that they received.

As you said, the security situation in Afghanistan and in Kabul is always tenuous. And in fact most American citizens in Kabul, either work for the embassy or they work for the military or they work as contractors. So they're already -- don't move around the city very much. So this is unlikely a impact their daily life, I imagine. But still the fact that they seem to think it's necessary that this kind of warning is significant.

KOSIK: How many U.S. citizens are in Kabul?

RASMUSSEN: I don't have the exact number but there's almost 11,000 soldiers and there's probably 10,000, 20,000 American contractors, and then there's people working for the U.N. There's some people working for NGOs, for different consultancy firms and then there's a couple of journalists. So it's in the tens of thousands but I can't say specifically how many.

KOSIK: But these types of threats are not unique, I'm assuming. Even the U.S. embassy has told its employees, its personnel, to not travel by roads because it makes them too vulnerable and instead to travel by helicopter. So I would imagine that as unnerving as this warning is, it's not necessarily unique?

RASMUSSEN: No, I mean, the threat level has been high the entire year, at least since spring, in Kabul. And the Taliban and others insurgency groups, we should add we don't know who is behind the supposed attack or who is claiming it. But insurgency groups have been known to conduct so-called spectacular attacks in Kabul. They gather a lot of international headlines, kill a dozen or more people in a hotel or restaurant or some facility. They haven't had a lot of success attacking embassies as they did -- the besiege the American embassy a few years back. But in general, it will be hotels, restaurants, that type of some establishment that's the target of an attack like this. We don't know what the target is here in this particular case. But it is true, a threat level is always high in Kabul.

KOSIK: All right. Sune Engel Rasmussen, thanks so much. And be safe.

ROMANS: All right. Let's get an EARLY START on your money this Monday morning. U.S. stock futures up a bit before the bell. Today expect to be a big day for retailers. This is of course what used to be a made-up holiday Cyber Monday. Now it turns out it's a real thing. Online sales predicted to top about $3 billion for the first time. It's a big spike especially considering, you know, that this is something that retailers invented to get you to spend more money after Black Friday.

KOSIK: And it's working.

ROMANS: It's working, though, because, you know, Black Friday's importance is sort of shrinking. I mean, still a lot of spending but, you know, more shoppers are going online or they're shopping all month instead of just on that day after Thanksgiving.

Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail promising to fix America's failing infrastructure. She was in Boston yesterday with union support, surrounded by union leaders. Clinton says as president she would increase federal investment in infrastructure by $275 billion over the next five years. That would include a $25 billion national infrastructure bank. That would be a bank that will use government dollars to attract private investment for infrastructure projects. Clinton said the spending would be paid for with business tax reform. Her plan includes universal broadband by 2020 and more focus on a clean energy grid.

KOSIK: Sounds like some good plans.

President Obama in Paris as world leaders meet to fight climate change. "NEW DAY" starts now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Protests breaking out as world leaders convene in Paris. Historic negotiations over how to fight climate change.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Republicans have threatened to starve the president of the money he needs to execute the U.S. part of this deal.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You can see all the gunshots. And my god, it terrified me.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It looks like a classic case of domestic terrorism.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is somebody would certainly have anti- abortion and anti-government views.

JOHN SUTHERS, COLORADO SPRINGS MAYOR: We don't have any confirmation from any of the investigation yet as to what the precise motive was.

ALISON KOSIK, CNN ANCHOR: The Chicago police officer charged in the fatal shooting of a black teenager will face a judge today.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This officer went overboard.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is not a murder case. We feel that we're going to be very successful in defending this case.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY. CUOMO: Good morning. Welcome to your new day. It is Monday,

November 30th, 6:00 in the East. Alison and Mica are in New York and we are in Paris.

The authorities here are very much on edge. There is a frenzy of police activity continuing in the hopes of getting a handle on the spider web of radical jihadists that are in and around Paris. Nevertheless, 147 heads of state arrive for today's commencement of the 21st conference of the parties on climate change. The Cup 21. As some say holding the U.N. event is a show of strength. Others see it as a real risk.

Now to be unprecedented there is unprecedented security in the wake of the terror attacks here. The French have never, had more force in effect than they do this morning. That being said things are not completely locked down. Thousands demonstrating at the Place de la Republique despite a ban on protests, led to violent -- you saw a violent conflicts there right on your screen right now. That's what happened between police and these protesters despite all the security and prohibitions, hundreds were arrested right at the memorial for the attacks of the victims.

Now right now leaders from major countries, including France and the U.S., are going to be presenting their visions for cutting carbon emissions, but and security is on everyone's mind.

We have CNN senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta beginning our coverage at the Paris climate change conference.

Jim, it's good to have you. The U.S. and China seen as leading the way here. News comes of a meeting between the leaders as we get ready to hear from the president in a few minutes here. What do you know?