Tense in Fallujah; NASCAR Nation
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: From the front lines in Fallujah, there is a tenuous cease-fire in place. U.S. troops on watch and on edge. It is Monday, April 26. This is DAYBREAK. And good morning to you, welcome to the second half-hour of DAYBREAK. From CNN's Global Headquarters in Atlanta, I'm Carol Costello. Let me bring you up to date now. Another huge explosion this morning in Baghdad, these are new pictures we are showing you. They show four humvees and a building set on fire. Witnesses report an unknown number of casualties. This is Memorial Day in Israel. The Jewish state is paying homage to the thousands of soldiers and civilians killed in wars. Michael Jackson and his lead attorneys are parting ways. Benjamin Brafman says he and Mark Geragos are stepping down from Jackson's defense team over what he calls complicated issues. Now to Chad for a first look at the -- actually, a third look at...</s>CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: A second, a third.</s>COSTELLO: Third.</s>MYERS: Good morning, Carol, a first one for this half-hour.</s>COSTELLO: One more day, that is the word out of Iraq this morning. The U.S.-led coalition has extended the deadline for insurgents in Fallujah to turn in their heavy weapons. That deadline comes tomorrow. An extremely shaky cease-fire now in effect, but we do have reports of gunfire there this morning. Coalition officials also warn that a dangerous situation is developing in Najaf. They say weapons are being stockpiled at holy places around the city. And Australian Prime Minister John Howard paid a visit to his nation's troops in Iraq on Sunday. He laid a wreath and pinned a medal on one soldier. Australia has 850 troops in Iraq. And the Iraqi Governing Council has adopted a new flag. Take a look. Emblems on the flag represent peace, Islam and Iraq's Kurdish population. CNN's Karl Penhaul is reporting for the U.S. TV pool in Fallujah. He tells us that despite the extended cease-fire, there are regular exchanges of gunfire in a city that remains on edge.</s>KARL PENHAUL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): U.S. Marines peer out of a sandbag window in a Fallujah schoolhouse. A volley of bullets from another Marine machine gun nest echo out of a</s>CPL. OWEN CAMPBELL, U.S. MARINE CORPS: Apparently the insurgents didn't get the memo on that one.</s>PENHAUL: Insurgent positions are less than 200 yards from this schoolhouse, where part of Echo Company's hunkering down. Overnight, Iraqi fighters set up a position, what Marines believe could be used to fire a rocket propelled grenades or RPGs. The Marines have no luck trying to demolish the position with gunfire.</s>CAMPBELL: And they've been firing RPGs at us this morning. So we're trying to take it out at the 240, but that didn't exactly work. So we'll try a rocket in a few minutes here.</s>PENHAUL: Insurgents opened fire as the Marine team runs out and crouches down, just out of our sight to fire the rocket. Their comrades back in the schoolhouse are covering them. A second rocket. Both miss the target. Back in the schoolhouse...</s>LANCE CPL. JESSE BELTRAN, U.S. MARINE CORPS: Makes me pretty mad actually. I don't like missing a shot, especially two in a row.</s>PENHAUL: He's frustrated at missing his shot. Many of his colleagues are frustrated that under the cease-fire terms, they cannot launch an all out assault on the guerillas.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, that's what we pretty much want to do. We want to take care of it. We want to finish it.</s>PENHAUL (on camera): It's early evening now. And insurgent sniper fire from a few hundred yards that way usually picks up about this time. Marine commanders have ordered the insurgents to lay down their weapons. If not, the decisive battle for Fallujah will begin. Karl Penhaul, U.S. networks pool, Fallujah, Iraq.</s>COSTELLO: New pictures coming into CNN this morning from Baghdad with word of possible American and Iraqi casualties. We showed you some of the pictures just briefly already this morning. We want to show you more and explain to you what you're seeing. Our senior international editor David Clinch is here to walk us through.</s>DAVID CLINCH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL EDITOR: Yes, morning, Carol. Well really a dramatic event, but unfortunately, yet not too many facts. But we have been able to establish now with an enormous amount of video coming in and also some eyewitness accounts, a sequence of events here. At least four U.S. humvees pull up outside a building in northeastern Baghdad. At some point briefly after that, a huge explosion, either in the building or next to the building, damages all four humvees, blows away the side of that building. Immediately thereafter, U.S. troops are seen evacuating casualties. We see them taking casualties to helicopters and flying them away. It's not clear weather those were American casualties, although we are led to believe there may have been some. We're waiting for confirmation. We're also waiting to find out exactly what caused that explosion. Jim Clancy was saying earlier some reports chemicals might have been stored in the building. It has all the appearances of an average Baghdad building. We don't know yet whether that is the case.</s>COSTELLO: Do we know what the troops were doing there, U.S. troops?</s>CLINCH: We do not know that yet. It's -- you can see even from the way they are arrayed here, the four humvees, they were outside the building but facing away from the building from what we can see. And then as well as the explosion, the building then fell on the humvees. Well the building also fell on a number of Iraqis we then see later. You see here the Americans taking their casualties away, or again, we believe possibly American casualties. We're waiting for confirmation on that. We then get a sequence of video later where Iraqis are pulling injured people from the building itself, including some young children. So both American and Iraqis, we're waiting for confirmation on who was injured.</s>COSTELLO: And you know whenever you hear the word chemicals and Iraq in the same sentence,...</s>CLINCH: Right.</s>COSTELLO: ... you always wonder. So what exactly were these chemicals, do we know?</s>CLINCH: Right. We don't -- well first of all, we do not know that there were chemicals. There are some eyewitnesses that report that chemicals were stored in the building. Chemicals apparently stored in some buildings, warehouses and perhaps even homes in this area. But from what we can gather, not necessarily under suspicious circumstances in...</s>COSTELLO: Well it seems strange that chemicals would be stored in a home.</s>CLINCH: Well it may be -- it's an industrial area is what we're told. But again, whether those chemicals were what caused the explosion, what kind of chemicals, all of those questions. And as you say, it's such a sensitive issue, we're not going to leap to any conclusions at this point. The immediate thing that also leaps to mind though, as you see here, the tanks that turned up in the area, immediately U.S. tanks. You see the crowd here. In the sequence of video, as soon as the tanks go away, this crowd immediately runs to the humvees that have been damaged, starts dancing on them, celebrating, throwing pieces of the humvee away. Then the tanks come back, the crowd scatters again. So a very dangerous security situation.</s>COSTELLO: Do we usually see much of that celebratory stuff in Baghdad?</s>CLINCH: We saw it -- we saw it in Sadr City in the Shiite part of Baghdad before. This is not -- it's not part of Sadr City, it's not too far away, but it's not the same location. But I think Jim Clancy was pointing out that at this point following many you see the stoning of the buildings of the -- of the vehicles here. At this point, almost all attacks on U.S. vehicles in Baghdad are followed by sequences like this. So it may be just sort of a habit at this point.</s>COSTELLO: Yes, you can see he's holding up a, I don't know.</s>CLINCH: Apparently a U.S. -- part of a U.S. uniform. Again, very few details, but obviously quite a large event. The information flow is quite slow in Baghdad at the moment, and we're working with the military to get some more details.</s>COSTELLO: Well hopefully you'll have more for us in a little bit.</s>CLINCH: All right.</s>COSTELLO: Thank you -- David.</s>CLINCH: OK.</s>COSTELLO: The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign will release 10 new ads today, all of them criticizing John Kerry's record on national defense. The ads, one national and nine airing in local markets, targets Kerry's votes against certain weapon systems. The president will be back out speaking to voters today, addressing a community college convention and attending a campaign luncheon in Minnesota. In his speech, Bush will call for making high- speed Internet access -- high-speed Internet access, I should say, more affordable. Kerry is launching a three-day bus tour he calls "Jobs First Express" on the road to a stronger economy. The trip will take him through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Michigan. Used to be that soccer moms were a voting block politicians fought over, but they have been replaced by NASCAR nation. As CNN's senior political analyst Bill Schneider found out, NASCAR isn't just for rednecks anymore. 042500CN.V01 Bill Schneider, CNN, Talledega, Alabama.</s>COSTELLO: He looks so funny in that outfit every time I see him.</s>MYERS: He sure does. Can't even tell it's him with that hat on.</s>COSTELLO: And it's Budweiser. Who would have thought Bill Schneider? NASCAR nation was certainly not united at the end of yesterday's race in Talledega, a controversial decision giving Jeff Gordon the victory prompted Dale Earnhardt Jr. fan, but I'm not going to say that part, because you know why they threw the bottles and cans on the...</s>MYERS: I don't -- I don't -- I don't think that's right. I think there was -- there was an awful lot of ugliness after the race yesterday. They were throwing cans, throwing bottles, throwing pop bottles onto the track. And Jeff Gordon happened to be the winner of that race. Jeff Gordon looked like he was ahead of Dale when the yellow light came on, blah, blah, blah. The reason why they were so upset is because there were four laps of yellow and they didn't get it going back to green again. That's 10 miles of yellow flag. That's like 20 laps in Martinsville. They couldn't get the race restarted.</s>COSTELLO: You're kidding?</s>MYERS: And the fans were not -- it was a great race, and then the fans got to see nothing at the end because of the yellow flag.</s>COSTELLO: Well isn't that a problem with NASCAR, and how is it going to fix that if it ever happens again?</s>MYERS: I know better than to go there.</s>COSTELLO: All right then. Like father like son and like brother, the NFL's No. 1 draft pick proves that football is really all in the family. Later, why Eli Manning was booed when the pick was initially announced. And ahead, a look back on the life of a woman who revolutionized the cosmetics industry. This is DAYBREAK for Monday, April 26.