Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Front Lines as Ukrainians Survive Hell; NASA Hits Asteroid with Spacecraft; Study on Frozen Embryos and High Blood Pressure; Buzz Bissinger is Interviewed about his New Book. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired September 27, 2022 - 06:30   ET

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

[06:30:00]

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR: On the battlefield and Ukrainian officials are saying that actually in Kherson, one of those areas, it's now impossible for Ukrainians to flee.

We've seen, though, other areas too where this fear of escalation and the continued shelling means Ukrainians, now after six months of enduring war, are now leaving.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALSH (voice over): When the blasts pause, in rare quite in Toretsk, there are few blessings to count, and most are bitter.

One is here, a familiar scene of private worlds torn open by a Russian rocket two days earlier. But a place that might persuade you to believe in miracles. Nineteen people were trapped up here when rubble blocked the stairs, but somehow not one of them was even injured. A fire brigade ladder getting them all out. Not even survivors like Natalia know how.

NATALIA, TORETSK RESIDENT (through translator): A noise. I blinked twice and couldn't see. The balcony door flew open and trash blew in. I'm terrified of flames and I realized we're on the seventh floor and it's collapsing. Then someone screamed, don't come out as there's no way. It's a miracle. I can't call it anything else.

WALSH: As Putin's fake referenda just a few miles away threatened yet worse here. Just now shelling has finally become too much for some.

NINA, TORETSK RESIDENT (through translator): I am so much trouble.

WALSH: Rescuers are evacuating Nina, 73, after six months living alone without water or help.

NINA: God let it finish fast before I die.

WALSH: We're told she's the last person to leave her block.

NINA: It's painful to leave but it is also good. I've never been so scared. I am strong but I do not have strength for this. WALSH: Two days ago, a rocket hit her building. Yet also magically she was unscathed, and just sat here under the gaping hole. The lonely agony of the struggle before this moment lying around. The pictures of life left of her a-student daughter who died of meningitis, age 40. Of the choices of what to leave and what to take. Of how hard just eating, washing and drinking has been. Winter will rip through here. And this may be the last time the lights go out on this home.

She's taken to the courtyard where dozens of similar agonies are gathered, waiting for the evacuation bus. Even after six months' hell, faces that know still worse is coming and that are baffled by the heaviest question, why?

NINA: I don't want to be rude or smart, but I just want to ask, why did you (Russians) come to us? Who asked you? Or are we that silly that you wanted to liberate us? I think we will come home soon. Home will wait for everyone of us. It will wait.

WALSH: Elena is leaving, she does not know where to, with her three children.

ELENA, TORETSK RESIDENT (through translator): It is very scary. It is hard. The most scary moment was when my kids nearly died.

MYKHAILO, TORETSK RESIDENT: A house on my street blew up in front of me. There were fragments all over the courtyard.

WALSH: Then the guns pick up again.

WALSH (on camera): Even in leaving, there's a sense of urgency because artillery firing from near where we are, well, that's been responded to by the Russians. And a shell landed over here. So, they're trying to get people on the bus as fast as they can to get them out of here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Come on, come on faster! No time to relax!

WALSH (voice over): Dozens of lives with everything left behind them and nothing certain ahead.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WALSH: The fear, the anxiety here in Ukraine is mounting. It's totally clear as these referenda, forced as they are, edge towards the end and Russia continually starts threatening that it will protect, with all means at its disposal, territory that it formerly recognizes as itself. That's, obviously, air raids. It's occupied by force here. But we're into a very dangerous few days ahead here as to whether Russia has anything left in its arsenal or make good on these threats.

[06:35:06]

Back to you.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, fear about what Russia might do.

Nick Paton Walsh in Kramatorsk, thank you so much for your reporting.

So, for the first time, NASA successfully slam as spacecraft into an asteroid. The technology that might some day save civilization, next.

And a chess champion accusing his rival of cheating. Details of the allegations ahead.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: And the price tag of President Biden's college debt relief plan revealed. We'll break it down, ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Three, two, one.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, my gosh.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, wow.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) visual confirmation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: NASA making history Monday night with humanity's first planetary defense test. The goal was to deliberately slam a spacecraft into an asteroid in an effort to change its orbit, and they succeeded.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ELENA ADAMS, DART MISSION SYSTEMS ENGINEER: It is absolutely wonderful to do something this amazing. And we are so excited to be done. You know, we've worked on this mission for at least seven years now and it's been a work of over 1,000 people that have put their heart and soul into it. So, to see it so beautifully concluded today was just an incredible feeling.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Joining us now is NASA astrophysicist Michelle Thaller.

We said they succeeded, Michelle. We're really going to know if they succeeded if they were able to nudge this an appropriate amount. So, when are we going to know that?

MICHELLE THALLER, NASA ASTROPHYSICIST: Well, that's right. It's going to take us probably a couple days, maybe a couple weeks to find out exactly what the change in the asteroid's orbit was. We know we hit it. That was so exciting and so wonderful.

So now the question is, did we nudge it enough so that if a similar asteroid was a threat to earth, we would actually just put on the right course to miss the earth as opposed to hit.

KEILAR: Did you see how people were nerding out on this last night?

THALLER: Oh, yes.

KEILAR: This really captured the popular imagination.

THALLER: Well, so this is a tiny little object in the sky. And here we are, barreling toward it at 14,000 miles an hour. In the last six minutes, you see it go from a little dot to this, you know, amazing collection of rocks. And then, boom, I mean, that's fun.

KEILAR: It's totally fun. And it also brings us back to one of our favorite movies of the show, which is "Armageddon," Which was a little different. They sort of belew up the asteroid, which was bigger, and they sent it in two different directions around earth, which now maybe this was the way to go here.

But I wonder, when you're looking at something like this, I mean what are the chances of actually scaling it to get rid of an asteroid that could really do damage to the land (ph).

THALLER: Well, this is the surprising thing. Even a very massive asteroid, if we even just had a spacecraft kind of fly alongside it, the gravity of the spacecraft alone, a tiny, tiny little tug, if we do this early enough, you know, years before it hits earth, all we need to do is change it just a little bit, and that becomes a large miss - you know, after millions of miles of this tiny, tiny little change.

So, even an asteroid that maybe is kilometers across, yes, we could change the orbit a tiny bit a long time in the future, and that means we'd be safe.

KEILAR: If you change it a little bit, and it's far enough out, how far enough out, how much notice do we get? Because you'll remember in the movie there was not much notice.

THALLER: That's right.

KEILAR: I suspect that's not the case in real life.

THALLER: In the movie it was the size of Texas and we didn't see it coming. That's a little bit far-fetched.

KEILAR: Ridiculous.

THALLER: Yes, that's right. And we have - we have scans that actually look at the entire sky looking for asteroids all the time. Now the problem is, I mean, it could happen that one comes in that we hadn't detected. It's unlikely, but it's possible. So the longer in advance we have, you know, years, months, that would be the time scale. If it's coming at us, we only have a couple of days that I don't think we could get out there in time. No.

KEILAR: What an exciting thing that they did here. And seven years in the making.

THALLER: Yes.

KEILAR: So cool. Michelle, thanks for talking with us about it.

THALLER: Thank you very much.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHEN COLBERT, HOST, "THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT": A NASA spacecraft deliberately hit an asteroid head on at 15,000 miles per hour. This is to see whether space rocks can be deflected away from earth. Now, before you start having panic sex with strangers on the sidewalk, I hope it's not because of this asteroid.

JAMES CORDEN, HOST, "THE LATE LATE SHOW WITH JAMES CORDEN": And, get ready. Here it comes. Here it comes. Here's the impact. Now, it's underwhelming, isn't it. It's actually quite (INAUDIBLE). There's (INAUDIBLE). It looked a lot cooler when Bruce Willis was doing it with Aerosmith blaring in the background.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Aerosmith helps everything, to be sure. But we're talking about extinction level events here. It does make some sense to prepare for that, if you can.

KEILAR: Completely. Did you see that NASA actually tweeted, don't want to miss a thing. They paid - here was a homage to Aerosmith yesterday when they tweeted it out so that you could go back to the video and take a look at it. So even they know a little bit of Aerosmith makes it even better.

BERMAN: Maybe they should just play Aerosmith at the asteroid and that in and of itself could do it.

KEILAR: Yes. I mean Michelle told us, it doesn't take much. I think maybe some of the - the music could just push it off its axis. We'll see.

So, a new study compares pregnancies using fresh embryos versus frozen ones. Which expectant mothers could be at risk and why?

BERMAN: And a wonderful new book reveals the untold story of World War II Marine regiments dominated by college football stars who had their own sort of bowl game before the Battle of Okinawa. The story of the mosquito bowl, ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:48:51]

KEILAR: A new study finds that using frozen embryos could be linked to increased risk of high blood pressure during pregnancy. CNN health reporter Jacqueline Howard joins us now with more on this.

This is pretty interesting. Tell us about this. Tell us why.

JACQUELINE HOWARD, CNN HEALTH REPORTER: It is interesting, Brianna. This study found that when frozen embryos are used, like you said, there does appear to be this increased risk of pregnancy complications related to high blood pressure, like preeclampsia and other hypertensive disorders.

And when you think about the why, some people might automatically think, well, older women tend to use frozen embryos. Could this be associated with age? But the researchers adjusted the data to account for age and other factors, and they still found an increased risk.

So, here's what they did. They looked at more than 4 million pregnancies in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and they found the unadjusted risk of hypertensive disorders in pregnancy was 7.4 percent after frozen embryo transfer. It was lower at 5.9 percent after fresh embryo transfer, and then 4.3 percent after natural conception.

Now, when they adjusted the data, again they still found this increased risk.

[06:50:03]

In fact, Brianna, it appeared to be even more significant.

Now, I did speak with experts about the why question, and some say that this could be related to the medications used during frozen embryo IVF to mimic ovulation. But, again, the main takeaway here, while we think about the why, for the everyday person, talk to your doctor about the best options for you when it comes to IVF. For every woman it's different. For some, frozen embryos still offer a benefit.

Brianna.

KEILAR: Yes, Jacqueline, thank you so much.

So, more on our special coverage, Hurricane Ian making landfall in Cuba a short time ago here as it continues on a collision course with Florida.

BERMAN: And new footage of Roger Stone, obtained by CNN, showing the Trump ally threatening violence, or talking about violence, before the 2020 election even took place.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:55:06]

BERMAN: On Christmas Eve 1944, dozens of Marines faced off in a football game on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal (ph). The game included an incredible roster of some of the top former college stars in the country. Not long after, many of them would die in one of the war's biggest battles in Okinawa. The incredible story is the subject of "The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II." The author is Pulitzer Prize winning award journalist Buzz Bissinger. He joins me now. His previous bestselling books include, of course, "Fright Night Lights." And, Buzz, this is just a wonderful, heartbreaking book. A real book about a real war here and a real game that took place with some of the world's biggest football players.

BUZZ BISSINGER, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING JOURNALIST: Well, that's why I got into it. And I honestly don't know how I found it. But the idea of a football game, as close as you can get to the real thing, on the island of Guadalcanal, in the middle of the Pacific, on Christmas Eve of 1944. You know, they built goal posts. They had programs. It was broadcast on the radio to parts of the Pacific. It blew my mind. And then you have these two regiments stocked with great football players. I mean great football - three all-Americans, seven captains, including Notre Dame.

So, the more I read about it, and then 15 of the 65 die four months later in Okinawa. It was just a great story. The greatest story never told.

BERMAN: The greatest story never told.

And, of course, you know, the college game, as big if not bigger than the pro game at that time.

BISSINGER: Yes.

BERMAN: So some of these players were household names.

BISSINGER: Yes.

BERMAN: And they weren't there, you know, as part of some glamor tour. They were there as Marines to fight and die.

BISSINGER: They were there as Marines and they wanted combat. They joined the Marine Corps. It wasn't like they were drafted. There was no draft at that time. You know, they wanted action. So, many of them joined an officer training program. You got an extra year of football and then you were going to boot camp at Paris Island. They - they wanted combat.

BERMAN: The other thing is that college football then was different. We're not talking about the SEC necessarily, Georgia, Alabama, you're talking about Brown University.

BISSINGER: Brown, right.

BERMAN: You know, Wisconsin, Notre Dame, some schools people know.

BISSINGER: Right.

BERMAN: Perdue. Just a lot of schools, but really a true melting pot for whites, I should say.

BISSINGER: Yes, I mean totally. You know, totally, it was a - it was a true melting pot. You had players from coast to coast. You had Brown. You had Cornell. You - Wisconsin, Perdue, as you said. You had California. You had Montana State. You know, a really tablo (ph) of America, which was another thing that appealed to me.

And you're also right, college football was huge. The pros was considered, you know, kind of in the background. And believe it or not, college coaches at that time said, don't go to the pros, get an education, get a job. Forget they're a bunch of thugs.

BERMAN: Yes, going to play pro bowl will keep you from making money.

BISSINGER: Exactly.

BERMAN: Will keep you from having a career, imagine that.

BISSINGER: I know. It's true.

BERMAN: At this point.

And when I said this is about real war here, you know, you don't gloss over the horror of this.

BISSINGER: I don't. And I don't want to put people off. You have to show what war is. War is death. War is death. And I felt - I wanted the reader to see and feel and hear as much as possible just how horrifying combat is and what these men did because I think it makes it an uplifting book.

Even in the tragedy of death, I think you will love these men and you will see, they died for us. They died for the legacy of us as Americans. I truly believe that.

BERMAN: And in the writing of this you learned your father was a Marine in Okinawa, right?

BISSINGER: Yes.

BERMAN: He may have bene at this game.

BISSINGER: My father was a Marine in Okinawa. I get little choked up because he's been gone for 20 years. I didn't know what he did. And in researching the book in the beginning, so, I might as well look it up. And I get the muster roles. His name is my name. And there he is, Harry G. Bissinger, on the line, a rifeman at Okinawa in one of the regiments I'm writing about. And, you know, he hit the trifecta. He loved to drink beer, he loved to gamble and he loved football. So the - it blows my mind the odds that he was there.

BERMAN: Buzz Bissinger, the book, "The Mosquito Bowl." It is wonderful.

BISSINGER: Well, thank you.

BERMAN: Love reading everything you do. This one really, it breaks your heart. So, thanks for being with us.

BISSINGER: Well, thank you.

BERMAN: All right, NEW DAY continues right now. KEILAR: Hurricane Ian making landfall in western Cuba just a short time ago as it continues on a collision course with Florida.

It is Tuesday, September 27th and I'm Brianna Keilar with John Berman.

Ian slamming Cuba with 125 mile per hour winds, threatening a path of destruction across the island. Officials across Florida sounding the alarm along Florida's west coast in particular. People are being urged to get out of harm's way.

[07:00:02]

Tampa's mayor telling residents, if you can leave, just leave now. Officials say the Tampa region could see the storm of a lifetime.