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Questions, Concerns Mounting Over Missing Explosives; Ballot Battle
Aired October 29, 2004 - 13:32 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Taking a look at stories now in the news. President Bush makes his case for four more years this hour in New Hampshire. The president's campaigning in the Granite State and in Ohio, two states that he won in 2000. Live pictures right now. And joining Bush later today in Ohio will be California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In about 30 minutes, Senator John Kerry plans to rally supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida. Hours ago, he told voters in Orlando that he is the best man to keep America safe from terrorists. Kerry is making three stops in the all-important state of Florida today. We'll have live reports from both campaigns next hour.
And Chief Justice William Rehnquist is out of Bethesda Naval Hospital. Rehnquist was released from Bethesda today, days after undergoing surgery related to thyroid cancer. He's expected to return to the Supreme Court bench Monday.
Questions and concerns are mounting over those missing explosives in Iraq. Days ago we learned 360 tons of high grade explosives vanished from the Al Qa Qaa umilitary compound in Iraq. Still unclear as to whether they were taken before the U.S. invasion or after. Earlier, the head of the nuclear watchdog agency spoke exclusively with CNN on that matter.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MOHAMED ELBARADEI, IAEA DIRECTOR GENERAL: This has been a public issue. I mean, we have reported that to the Security Council in 2003, that these explosives exist in that site.
So this has always been a public issue, as where explosives these exists and the quantity of these explosives. As I said, it's a matter now, it's not who's to blame, it's a matter that if we can retrieve these explosions and take precautionary measures. It is important for us to protect the Iraqi people, to protect the multinational force, and hopefully that these explosive will not fall into the wrong hands.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIPS: Well, are there any indications of who could have taken those explosives? And does the newly released videotape that appears to show some of those weapons in Iraq after the U.S. invasion give us an idea of what happened to them?
Here to try and help answer some of those questions, in New York, our military intelligence analyst, Ken Robinson.
Ken, you saw the press conference. It got pretty, I guess, volatile, you could say. What's your analysis of what took place?
KEN ROBINSON, CNN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, with the press conference, I think our Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr said it best, that there are many questions to be answered. But most of those questions are knowable. And if both the executive branch and the campaign takes a breath for a minute there are ways to -- for us to be able to dissect this and find out what happened.
PHILLIPS: Let's talk about the blue force tracker, because there's a lot of back and forth on dates, when the military was at that location, and what happened, if anything happened at all, when they were not there, when this news crew got there. When it comes down to, it f we had access to this blue force tracker, that would answer all those questions.
ROBINSON: We were embedded with the military during the war for the invasion, and one of the things we observed was blue force tracker. And blue force tracker, remember, this is one of the first digital wars. So, soldiers on the battlefield, their units transpond and ping off of a military global-positioning satellite, and it records where they are throughout the battlefield. It was one of the lessons learned from the first Gulf War, where we couldn't precisely fix and determine unit locations.
And so, yes, blue force tracker is out There. It's one way in which they can determine exactly when units were at specific locations, and know it with certainty.
PHILLIPS: So can we get access to that, or is it up to the military?
ROBINSON: It's up to the United States military and the Pentagon to release it and go through Central Command and for the units in combat at the time, but the information is archived.
Another way to understand what units missions were is to look at the tasking and operations orders at the time as they were moving forward and what their specific tasks were. Those are spelled out in great detail for a unit, and the unit of the 101st that was closing in on Baghdad, it's primary focus was getting to Baghdad. It's mission as an infantry unit would not have been to destroy weapons or munitions that it finds on the battlefield. One of the lessons learned from the First Gulf War were mistakes that were made by the 82nd Airborne where it destroyed a chemical weapons dump that it did not realize was chemical, and it released sarin gas on the battlefield and it created a plume that covered about 100,000 soldiers. And so from that, they learned don't destroy dumps as you go, make sure explosive-ordinance disposal and the proper personnel can evaluate specifically what's at each site.
PHILLIPS: And we know, too, a lot of EOD did take care of a lot of explosives. I want to quickly get you to respond to something, though, Ken, because we've been -- the story, as you know, has been developing as the days continue. I want to listen to a quick soundbite from the news conference and then get to you respond to this, because I have some questions about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAJOR AUSTIN PEARSON, U.S. ARMY: I did not see any IAEA seals at the locations we went into. I was not looking for that. My mission specifically was to go in there and to prevent the exposure of U.S. forces and to minimize that by taking out what was easily accessible and putting it back and bringing it into our captured ammunition- holding area.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIPS: All right, so, Ken, here's what is interesting, and let's try to put it in layman's terms -- the IAEA seals. OK, he is saying that he didn't see those at the locations that he went into, that his mission was to just make the area safe for other soldiers, yet the reporter, Dean Staley, who was there at Al Qa Qaa, said we have videotape of those seals, we've had weapons inspectors look at the videotape; they believe they are sealed. So how does this pan out, and why is it important to bring up the issues of the seals?
ROBINSON: Well, a couple of complex issues with this. One of the challenges is, is that both people could be totally speaking the truth. Remember, these sites are enormously large, and so, two different people landing -- let's do it this way, if you and I both land in the state of South Carolina and we go to a specific city in that state, say Charleston, but you're on the urban side of town and I'm on the coast, we're each going to describe two totally different experiences. These sites, if you look at them on satellite imagery, are monsters. Now these seals were done by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and they were done to identify HMX and RDX, two very highly volatile explosives that could be used in a nuclear weapons program.
Now Some soldiers had cut some of those seals off when they arrived on those sites simply to look and see what was in those bunkers. And one of the things that these soldiers don't carry with them when they open up a bunker are locks to relock those bunkers, because these are infantry soldiers who are fighting their way north.
And so one of the things that, again, is knowable, is that if they came across weapons or if they came across things that they felt were reportable, they would report those through their chain of command and they would be logged and identified. So there should be log reports that identify when soldiers were there, what they observed, and then that should have been passed up the chain of command all the way up through CENTCOM.
PHILLIPS: So, between -- a final question. Blue force tracker, between that and between the logbooks, that could answer everything. ROBINSON: Well, that plus satellite imagery. One of the things that we did during the first Gulf War was retrospective satellite imagery. And when we did that, guess what we found? We found a lot of sites where you could see Iraqis moving weapons away from storage bunkers and hiding them in the sand. If past performance is future behavior, that may have occurred during this war. So all of those things could potentially have occurred at the same time, as well as looting. There was enormous amounts of looting that occurred during this time period. And the lawlessness of that, because there were not enough solders to complete phase four, there's a potential that looting could have contributed to it, and maybe some of the ammunition that's being used against forces today is from that stockpile.
PHILLIPS: Military intelligence analyst Ken Robinson, thanks for your insight today.
ROBINSON: Thank you, Kyra.
PHILLIPS: Well, it's four days until Election Day, but a lot of attention is turning to the day after. Missing ballots and concerns over paperless voting machines are resurrecting images of manual recounts and contentious court battles.
CNN's Brian Todd explains.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Still a few days out, and already we're seeing dozens of legal battles and other disputes over election ballot minutia that can make your head spin. Problems abound in several states. In Florida they're again going through some big headaches. Absentee ballots not getting to some voters or not coming back in time. Concerns over electronic voting machines, not generating paper records that would need to be checked in a post-election recount. Problems again cropping up in the state's most populous counties.
DAVID CARDWELL, ELECTIONS LAWYER: The curse of the Bambino was erased last night. I think we got the curse of Broward and hopefully we'll get over it.
TODD: But Florida is not alone this time. One of your better examples of this confusion, ballot battles in the Buckeye State.
KEN BLACKWELL (R), OHIO SECRETARY OF STATE: In Ohio the ground rules are set.
TODD: The Ohio secretary of state, a Republican, has just won a legal fight over so-called provisional ballots. These are ballots enabling people to vote even if a bureaucratic mistake has prevented their name from showing up on a registry. The secretary of state wanted these ballots to be cast and counted only in a given voter's home precinct. Democrats felt that hurt low income and younger voters who they say tend to move more often. The Democratic position that voters with provisional ballots should be able to vote and have their ballots counted anywhere in their home county was rejected by a federal appeals court.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The objective there is to make it as easy to vote for all legal registered voters, but to also protect against widespread voter fraud.
TODD: After the fiasco in 2000, Congress tried to help, passing the Help America Vote Act. That law mandated provisional ballots and called for upgrades like electronic voting, but many people close to the process are now saying that law has created more problems than it solved.
Brian Todd, CNN, Washington
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIPS: Feeling uninformed on the issues or how the election is playing out in your state? Well, CNN, your election 2004 headquarters has everything you need to know on our Web site, CNN.com.
Our technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg is here to show us what's available to you online.
Show and tell, Daniel.
DANIEL SIEBERG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Kyra. You can think of me as the cyber-ambassador for CNN.com, and I'm going to run through what's available right now, and then give you a sneak preview of what you can find Monday.
First of all, where to find it, CNN.com/election. In the main page right here, really they're focusing on the so-called showdown, battleground, swing states, however you want to refer to them, and they're sort of all across the country here. And if you want to know more about one particular state, you can actually zoom in on that state, in this case, Florida. You can find out everything from where the polls are to how much money has been spent there by each candidate, and just a whole raft of information about each of them.
Now from there, we can go to another site there. This is the poll tracker. Polls just seem to be coming out every five minutes. So if you want to try to narrow it down, there's actually something on this page called CNN's Poll of Polls, where CNN takes an average of some of the national polls. And right now, you can see right over here, you've got Bush and Kerry right now, with President Bush about 49 percent, Senator Kerry, 46 percent. Again, that's an average of the national polls that are out there.
Now, these candidates are certainly winging their way left, right and center, all across the country. You can see them here, sort of a spaghetti pattern of where they're going in a mad dash to try and to reach out to as many voters as they can. And you can actually track that online.
Now the Electoral College gets a lot of talk, some of it negative, some of it positive. Here is where the Electoral College rating comes into play. And in fact, you can see which states may be in Senator Kerry's pockets and which one may be for President Bush, and which ones are still in play.
Now if you don't understand the Electoral College, full disclosure, I'm a Canadian and it's a little tough for me, and a lot of people in the country still trying to figure it out. There is an Electoral College explainer.
And at this point, people are still interested in the issues. This is where you can find out more about the issues. You can find out specifically whether it relates to defense, civil rights, homeland security, all sorts of things, from health care to taxes and so on. Lots of stuff.
So now, the sneak preview, what's going to be available on Monday, what you can see here is a page available for you to tailor your election results. You can do something here which is really interesting. You can go over here -- you'll be able to do this on Monday. You can put in your zip code, right there, and get election results just for your neighborhood. OK, that's going to help you sort of narrow it down with all this information that's out there, as well you can follow 20 different races. So you can focus on a Senate race, or on a House race, of course the presidential race as well. Basically, you can tailor it to, Kyra, to what you want to know.
So much information out there, so this is going to help to sort of whittle it down. It's a bit like drinking from a firehose these days with all the information that's out there. So that's going to do it from the virtual U.N. over here.
PHILLIPS: That would be pretty painful.
All right, Daniel, thank you so much, Mr. Ambassador.
Well, are you still waiting to get that flu vaccine? After the break, news that the U.S. may have a shot, another five million dose.
Plus, when it comes to looking younger, the eyes have it. We'll take a closer look at a popular surgical procedure.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIPS: News across America now: The Lori Hacking murder case is headed to trial. Her husband, Mark, pleaded not guilty this morning to charges that he killed Lori last July, dumping her body in a trash bin. That trial is set for April.
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and his former associate producer are both expressing relief now that they've agreed to drop lawsuits against each other. Thirty-three-year-old Andrea Mackris had accused O'Reilly of sexual harassment. He and Fox News accused Mackris of extortion. As part of the deal, they exonerate each other of wrongdoing.
There may be some relief in the flu shot shortage. The federal government is looking to buy another five million doses from drugmakers in Canada and Germany. Inspectors will check out the factories next week to make sure the vaccines are safe for us. Well, from fighting the flu to fighting gravity, shows like "Extreme Makeover" and "The Swan" have glamorized cosmetic surgery.
CNN medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen looks at one procedure and whether all this talk about going under the knife is good for us any way.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Forty-five- year-old Laura Coco wasn't quite ready for a facelift, but she was ready for an eyelift.
LAURA COCO, PATIENT: I felt it was time. I was getting to a point where'd I'd look in the mirror and I'm like I look tired, even though I wasn't.
DR. Z. PAUL LORENC, PLASTIC SURGEON: Open your eyes. Look at your nose.
COHEN: Tightening up sagging skin above and below the eyes is now one of the most popular cosmetic surgeries. Eyelifts are being marketed as a pick-me-up for body and soul that's less invasive than doing the whole face.
LORENC: I think the eyes are the window of the soul. And it's true, (AUDIO GAP). When you meet someone, when you shake their hand, you look at their eyes.
COHEN: In addition to the eyelift, Laura plastic surgeon, Dr. Paul Lorenc, did laser resurfacing under her eyes to help get rid of wrinkles. The procedures took an hour-and-a-half in Dr. Lorenc's office. And then, Laura spent another hour in the office recovering, and then she went home. She visited the doctor four days later.
LORENC: You're still a little swollen...
COHEN: Right.
LORENC: ... which is normal on day four.
COHEN: The pink under her eyes is from the laser. Some wonder why are people in their 40s, or even younger, having plastic surgery?
LYNNE LUCIANO, SOCIAL HISTORIAN: And if we're targeting people to start worrying in their 20s about their faces and their frown lines, where is this going to go in 10 or 20 years? Where does it stop?
COHEN: Laura doesn't know when her plastic surgery will stop and says she's considering other procedures for the future.
COCO: I'm not looking to change myself, just take a few years off.
COHEN: And she hopes that a bit of scalpel work around her eyes was a step in that direction.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COHEN: It takes about six weeks to recover physically from an eyelift, it might take a little longer to recover financially. The surgeon's fees alone are about $2,500. That doesn't even count having to pay the anesthesiologist, having to pay the hospital or the clinic, so we're talking several thousand dollars here.
PHILLIPS: Expensive. All right, I have got to ask you about the risks.
COHEN: Right. Of course, and you want to know that because all of these shows that you were talking about earlier, it makes look as if -- sometimes it makes it look as if there are really not so many risks involved. But in fact there are.
For example, with an eyelift procedure, there is a risk of infection, there is a risk of bruising underneath the skin that's called a hematoma. There is also another -- other kinds of risks that you have to be careful of. For example, in the laser that we showed under her eyes, there can be burning if it's not done properly. So the risks aren't huge. It's probably not going to happen to you, but you never know if you're going to be one of the unlucky ones.
PHILLIPS: All right. On your big medical weekend show this weekend what are you talking about?
COHEN: That's right, we're talking about plastic surgery.
PHILLIPS: There you go.
COHEN: More of this. We will be talking actually about plastic surgery done on the body. We will be talking about liposuction, and tummy tucks, making breasts bigger, making them smaller. That's 8:30 in the morning on Saturday and Sunday, that's Eastern time.
PHILLIPS: All right. Thank you so much.
COHEN: Thanks.
PHILLIPS: Well, coming up on LIVE FROM, you have got to have Faith. The story of a cool-headed canine and her hotline to help.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIPS: Well, it was just a matter of time before reality TV became a serious object of study. The University of North Carolina at Charlotte plans to offer a class in "American Idol." Students have to watch it twice a week, come up with their own way to rate the contestants. And the instructor hopes to use the show to teach various musical styles, like Motown and Broadway. The final project is a paper about who students think the winner should be.
Well, a dog in Washington State is being hailed a hero. Faith is a service dog, trained to snap into act if something happens to her owner. Boy did she ever. Leana Beasley fell out of her wheelchair and was unconscious on the floor when Faith speed dialed 911 on the phone with her nose and barked until the dispatcher sent help. When medics arrived, Faith unlocked the door.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LEANA BEASLEY, FAITH'S OWNER: She's more than just a friend. She's a lifeline for me.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIPS: Coming up in the second hour of LIVE FROM, if astronauts were on a mission and one of them got sick what would they do? Just ahead, Dr. Sanjay Gupta looks at how NASA is teaching astronauts to operate hundreds of miles above Earth. LIVE FROM's hour of power right after this.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired October 29, 2004 - 13:32 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Taking a look at stories now in the news. President Bush makes his case for four more years this hour in New Hampshire. The president's campaigning in the Granite State and in Ohio, two states that he won in 2000. Live pictures right now. And joining Bush later today in Ohio will be California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In about 30 minutes, Senator John Kerry plans to rally supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida. Hours ago, he told voters in Orlando that he is the best man to keep America safe from terrorists. Kerry is making three stops in the all-important state of Florida today. We'll have live reports from both campaigns next hour.
And Chief Justice William Rehnquist is out of Bethesda Naval Hospital. Rehnquist was released from Bethesda today, days after undergoing surgery related to thyroid cancer. He's expected to return to the Supreme Court bench Monday.
Questions and concerns are mounting over those missing explosives in Iraq. Days ago we learned 360 tons of high grade explosives vanished from the Al Qa Qaa umilitary compound in Iraq. Still unclear as to whether they were taken before the U.S. invasion or after. Earlier, the head of the nuclear watchdog agency spoke exclusively with CNN on that matter.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MOHAMED ELBARADEI, IAEA DIRECTOR GENERAL: This has been a public issue. I mean, we have reported that to the Security Council in 2003, that these explosives exist in that site.
So this has always been a public issue, as where explosives these exists and the quantity of these explosives. As I said, it's a matter now, it's not who's to blame, it's a matter that if we can retrieve these explosions and take precautionary measures. It is important for us to protect the Iraqi people, to protect the multinational force, and hopefully that these explosive will not fall into the wrong hands.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIPS: Well, are there any indications of who could have taken those explosives? And does the newly released videotape that appears to show some of those weapons in Iraq after the U.S. invasion give us an idea of what happened to them?
Here to try and help answer some of those questions, in New York, our military intelligence analyst, Ken Robinson.
Ken, you saw the press conference. It got pretty, I guess, volatile, you could say. What's your analysis of what took place?
KEN ROBINSON, CNN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, with the press conference, I think our Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr said it best, that there are many questions to be answered. But most of those questions are knowable. And if both the executive branch and the campaign takes a breath for a minute there are ways to -- for us to be able to dissect this and find out what happened.
PHILLIPS: Let's talk about the blue force tracker, because there's a lot of back and forth on dates, when the military was at that location, and what happened, if anything happened at all, when they were not there, when this news crew got there. When it comes down to, it f we had access to this blue force tracker, that would answer all those questions.
ROBINSON: We were embedded with the military during the war for the invasion, and one of the things we observed was blue force tracker. And blue force tracker, remember, this is one of the first digital wars. So, soldiers on the battlefield, their units transpond and ping off of a military global-positioning satellite, and it records where they are throughout the battlefield. It was one of the lessons learned from the first Gulf War, where we couldn't precisely fix and determine unit locations.
And so, yes, blue force tracker is out There. It's one way in which they can determine exactly when units were at specific locations, and know it with certainty.
PHILLIPS: So can we get access to that, or is it up to the military?
ROBINSON: It's up to the United States military and the Pentagon to release it and go through Central Command and for the units in combat at the time, but the information is archived.
Another way to understand what units missions were is to look at the tasking and operations orders at the time as they were moving forward and what their specific tasks were. Those are spelled out in great detail for a unit, and the unit of the 101st that was closing in on Baghdad, it's primary focus was getting to Baghdad. It's mission as an infantry unit would not have been to destroy weapons or munitions that it finds on the battlefield. One of the lessons learned from the First Gulf War were mistakes that were made by the 82nd Airborne where it destroyed a chemical weapons dump that it did not realize was chemical, and it released sarin gas on the battlefield and it created a plume that covered about 100,000 soldiers. And so from that, they learned don't destroy dumps as you go, make sure explosive-ordinance disposal and the proper personnel can evaluate specifically what's at each site.
PHILLIPS: And we know, too, a lot of EOD did take care of a lot of explosives. I want to quickly get you to respond to something, though, Ken, because we've been -- the story, as you know, has been developing as the days continue. I want to listen to a quick soundbite from the news conference and then get to you respond to this, because I have some questions about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAJOR AUSTIN PEARSON, U.S. ARMY: I did not see any IAEA seals at the locations we went into. I was not looking for that. My mission specifically was to go in there and to prevent the exposure of U.S. forces and to minimize that by taking out what was easily accessible and putting it back and bringing it into our captured ammunition- holding area.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIPS: All right, so, Ken, here's what is interesting, and let's try to put it in layman's terms -- the IAEA seals. OK, he is saying that he didn't see those at the locations that he went into, that his mission was to just make the area safe for other soldiers, yet the reporter, Dean Staley, who was there at Al Qa Qaa, said we have videotape of those seals, we've had weapons inspectors look at the videotape; they believe they are sealed. So how does this pan out, and why is it important to bring up the issues of the seals?
ROBINSON: Well, a couple of complex issues with this. One of the challenges is, is that both people could be totally speaking the truth. Remember, these sites are enormously large, and so, two different people landing -- let's do it this way, if you and I both land in the state of South Carolina and we go to a specific city in that state, say Charleston, but you're on the urban side of town and I'm on the coast, we're each going to describe two totally different experiences. These sites, if you look at them on satellite imagery, are monsters. Now these seals were done by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and they were done to identify HMX and RDX, two very highly volatile explosives that could be used in a nuclear weapons program.
Now Some soldiers had cut some of those seals off when they arrived on those sites simply to look and see what was in those bunkers. And one of the things that these soldiers don't carry with them when they open up a bunker are locks to relock those bunkers, because these are infantry soldiers who are fighting their way north.
And so one of the things that, again, is knowable, is that if they came across weapons or if they came across things that they felt were reportable, they would report those through their chain of command and they would be logged and identified. So there should be log reports that identify when soldiers were there, what they observed, and then that should have been passed up the chain of command all the way up through CENTCOM.
PHILLIPS: So, between -- a final question. Blue force tracker, between that and between the logbooks, that could answer everything. ROBINSON: Well, that plus satellite imagery. One of the things that we did during the first Gulf War was retrospective satellite imagery. And when we did that, guess what we found? We found a lot of sites where you could see Iraqis moving weapons away from storage bunkers and hiding them in the sand. If past performance is future behavior, that may have occurred during this war. So all of those things could potentially have occurred at the same time, as well as looting. There was enormous amounts of looting that occurred during this time period. And the lawlessness of that, because there were not enough solders to complete phase four, there's a potential that looting could have contributed to it, and maybe some of the ammunition that's being used against forces today is from that stockpile.
PHILLIPS: Military intelligence analyst Ken Robinson, thanks for your insight today.
ROBINSON: Thank you, Kyra.
PHILLIPS: Well, it's four days until Election Day, but a lot of attention is turning to the day after. Missing ballots and concerns over paperless voting machines are resurrecting images of manual recounts and contentious court battles.
CNN's Brian Todd explains.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Still a few days out, and already we're seeing dozens of legal battles and other disputes over election ballot minutia that can make your head spin. Problems abound in several states. In Florida they're again going through some big headaches. Absentee ballots not getting to some voters or not coming back in time. Concerns over electronic voting machines, not generating paper records that would need to be checked in a post-election recount. Problems again cropping up in the state's most populous counties.
DAVID CARDWELL, ELECTIONS LAWYER: The curse of the Bambino was erased last night. I think we got the curse of Broward and hopefully we'll get over it.
TODD: But Florida is not alone this time. One of your better examples of this confusion, ballot battles in the Buckeye State.
KEN BLACKWELL (R), OHIO SECRETARY OF STATE: In Ohio the ground rules are set.
TODD: The Ohio secretary of state, a Republican, has just won a legal fight over so-called provisional ballots. These are ballots enabling people to vote even if a bureaucratic mistake has prevented their name from showing up on a registry. The secretary of state wanted these ballots to be cast and counted only in a given voter's home precinct. Democrats felt that hurt low income and younger voters who they say tend to move more often. The Democratic position that voters with provisional ballots should be able to vote and have their ballots counted anywhere in their home county was rejected by a federal appeals court.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The objective there is to make it as easy to vote for all legal registered voters, but to also protect against widespread voter fraud.
TODD: After the fiasco in 2000, Congress tried to help, passing the Help America Vote Act. That law mandated provisional ballots and called for upgrades like electronic voting, but many people close to the process are now saying that law has created more problems than it solved.
Brian Todd, CNN, Washington
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIPS: Feeling uninformed on the issues or how the election is playing out in your state? Well, CNN, your election 2004 headquarters has everything you need to know on our Web site, CNN.com.
Our technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg is here to show us what's available to you online.
Show and tell, Daniel.
DANIEL SIEBERG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Kyra. You can think of me as the cyber-ambassador for CNN.com, and I'm going to run through what's available right now, and then give you a sneak preview of what you can find Monday.
First of all, where to find it, CNN.com/election. In the main page right here, really they're focusing on the so-called showdown, battleground, swing states, however you want to refer to them, and they're sort of all across the country here. And if you want to know more about one particular state, you can actually zoom in on that state, in this case, Florida. You can find out everything from where the polls are to how much money has been spent there by each candidate, and just a whole raft of information about each of them.
Now from there, we can go to another site there. This is the poll tracker. Polls just seem to be coming out every five minutes. So if you want to try to narrow it down, there's actually something on this page called CNN's Poll of Polls, where CNN takes an average of some of the national polls. And right now, you can see right over here, you've got Bush and Kerry right now, with President Bush about 49 percent, Senator Kerry, 46 percent. Again, that's an average of the national polls that are out there.
Now, these candidates are certainly winging their way left, right and center, all across the country. You can see them here, sort of a spaghetti pattern of where they're going in a mad dash to try and to reach out to as many voters as they can. And you can actually track that online.
Now the Electoral College gets a lot of talk, some of it negative, some of it positive. Here is where the Electoral College rating comes into play. And in fact, you can see which states may be in Senator Kerry's pockets and which one may be for President Bush, and which ones are still in play.
Now if you don't understand the Electoral College, full disclosure, I'm a Canadian and it's a little tough for me, and a lot of people in the country still trying to figure it out. There is an Electoral College explainer.
And at this point, people are still interested in the issues. This is where you can find out more about the issues. You can find out specifically whether it relates to defense, civil rights, homeland security, all sorts of things, from health care to taxes and so on. Lots of stuff.
So now, the sneak preview, what's going to be available on Monday, what you can see here is a page available for you to tailor your election results. You can do something here which is really interesting. You can go over here -- you'll be able to do this on Monday. You can put in your zip code, right there, and get election results just for your neighborhood. OK, that's going to help you sort of narrow it down with all this information that's out there, as well you can follow 20 different races. So you can focus on a Senate race, or on a House race, of course the presidential race as well. Basically, you can tailor it to, Kyra, to what you want to know.
So much information out there, so this is going to help to sort of whittle it down. It's a bit like drinking from a firehose these days with all the information that's out there. So that's going to do it from the virtual U.N. over here.
PHILLIPS: That would be pretty painful.
All right, Daniel, thank you so much, Mr. Ambassador.
Well, are you still waiting to get that flu vaccine? After the break, news that the U.S. may have a shot, another five million dose.
Plus, when it comes to looking younger, the eyes have it. We'll take a closer look at a popular surgical procedure.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIPS: News across America now: The Lori Hacking murder case is headed to trial. Her husband, Mark, pleaded not guilty this morning to charges that he killed Lori last July, dumping her body in a trash bin. That trial is set for April.
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and his former associate producer are both expressing relief now that they've agreed to drop lawsuits against each other. Thirty-three-year-old Andrea Mackris had accused O'Reilly of sexual harassment. He and Fox News accused Mackris of extortion. As part of the deal, they exonerate each other of wrongdoing.
There may be some relief in the flu shot shortage. The federal government is looking to buy another five million doses from drugmakers in Canada and Germany. Inspectors will check out the factories next week to make sure the vaccines are safe for us. Well, from fighting the flu to fighting gravity, shows like "Extreme Makeover" and "The Swan" have glamorized cosmetic surgery.
CNN medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen looks at one procedure and whether all this talk about going under the knife is good for us any way.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Forty-five- year-old Laura Coco wasn't quite ready for a facelift, but she was ready for an eyelift.
LAURA COCO, PATIENT: I felt it was time. I was getting to a point where'd I'd look in the mirror and I'm like I look tired, even though I wasn't.
DR. Z. PAUL LORENC, PLASTIC SURGEON: Open your eyes. Look at your nose.
COHEN: Tightening up sagging skin above and below the eyes is now one of the most popular cosmetic surgeries. Eyelifts are being marketed as a pick-me-up for body and soul that's less invasive than doing the whole face.
LORENC: I think the eyes are the window of the soul. And it's true, (AUDIO GAP). When you meet someone, when you shake their hand, you look at their eyes.
COHEN: In addition to the eyelift, Laura plastic surgeon, Dr. Paul Lorenc, did laser resurfacing under her eyes to help get rid of wrinkles. The procedures took an hour-and-a-half in Dr. Lorenc's office. And then, Laura spent another hour in the office recovering, and then she went home. She visited the doctor four days later.
LORENC: You're still a little swollen...
COHEN: Right.
LORENC: ... which is normal on day four.
COHEN: The pink under her eyes is from the laser. Some wonder why are people in their 40s, or even younger, having plastic surgery?
LYNNE LUCIANO, SOCIAL HISTORIAN: And if we're targeting people to start worrying in their 20s about their faces and their frown lines, where is this going to go in 10 or 20 years? Where does it stop?
COHEN: Laura doesn't know when her plastic surgery will stop and says she's considering other procedures for the future.
COCO: I'm not looking to change myself, just take a few years off.
COHEN: And she hopes that a bit of scalpel work around her eyes was a step in that direction.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COHEN: It takes about six weeks to recover physically from an eyelift, it might take a little longer to recover financially. The surgeon's fees alone are about $2,500. That doesn't even count having to pay the anesthesiologist, having to pay the hospital or the clinic, so we're talking several thousand dollars here.
PHILLIPS: Expensive. All right, I have got to ask you about the risks.
COHEN: Right. Of course, and you want to know that because all of these shows that you were talking about earlier, it makes look as if -- sometimes it makes it look as if there are really not so many risks involved. But in fact there are.
For example, with an eyelift procedure, there is a risk of infection, there is a risk of bruising underneath the skin that's called a hematoma. There is also another -- other kinds of risks that you have to be careful of. For example, in the laser that we showed under her eyes, there can be burning if it's not done properly. So the risks aren't huge. It's probably not going to happen to you, but you never know if you're going to be one of the unlucky ones.
PHILLIPS: All right. On your big medical weekend show this weekend what are you talking about?
COHEN: That's right, we're talking about plastic surgery.
PHILLIPS: There you go.
COHEN: More of this. We will be talking actually about plastic surgery done on the body. We will be talking about liposuction, and tummy tucks, making breasts bigger, making them smaller. That's 8:30 in the morning on Saturday and Sunday, that's Eastern time.
PHILLIPS: All right. Thank you so much.
COHEN: Thanks.
PHILLIPS: Well, coming up on LIVE FROM, you have got to have Faith. The story of a cool-headed canine and her hotline to help.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIPS: Well, it was just a matter of time before reality TV became a serious object of study. The University of North Carolina at Charlotte plans to offer a class in "American Idol." Students have to watch it twice a week, come up with their own way to rate the contestants. And the instructor hopes to use the show to teach various musical styles, like Motown and Broadway. The final project is a paper about who students think the winner should be.
Well, a dog in Washington State is being hailed a hero. Faith is a service dog, trained to snap into act if something happens to her owner. Boy did she ever. Leana Beasley fell out of her wheelchair and was unconscious on the floor when Faith speed dialed 911 on the phone with her nose and barked until the dispatcher sent help. When medics arrived, Faith unlocked the door.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LEANA BEASLEY, FAITH'S OWNER: She's more than just a friend. She's a lifeline for me.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIPS: Coming up in the second hour of LIVE FROM, if astronauts were on a mission and one of them got sick what would they do? Just ahead, Dr. Sanjay Gupta looks at how NASA is teaching astronauts to operate hundreds of miles above Earth. LIVE FROM's hour of power right after this.
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