Good morning. Welcome to early start. Im christine romans. Im john berman. Its friday, may 23rd, 4 00 a. M. In the east. Breaking overnight, word of another frightening near collision at one of the nations busiest airports. The faa is now investigating how two United Airlines jets came within a few hundred feet of each other. That is very close. After both took off from houstons bush intercontinental airport. This happened two weeks ago. An air Traffic Controller told one plane to turn right, directly into the path of the other. They were about 0. 9 miles apart and seconds away from colliding when the controller realized the error and told the planes to turn again, avoiding disaster. This is the fourth near collision weve learned about just this week. All right, embattled va secretary Eric Shinseki is fighting to keep his job, vowing to fix delays in care that may be costing veterans their lives. It would be an uphill battle for the beleaguered exgeneral because now some highprofile democrats are demanding he step down. Chief Congressional Correspondent dana bash. Reporter christina and john, va secretary Eric Shinseki was summoned to a closeddoor meeting on capitol hill yesterday afternoon, not to meet with a republican, but a frustrated democrat. And afterwards, shinseki told reporters that he has not offered the president his resignation. He said you guys know me better than that, but his remaining support is tenuous. Do you still think that he should be at the helm . I have not called for general shinseki to resign, although i have to admit, im getting a little bit closer. The reports that continue to come are appalling. These are men and women who served our country, and weve not just let them down, weve let them die reporter congress is stepping up its investigation of the va, but three va officials scheduled to attend a House Veterans AffairsCommittee Meeting yesterday morning didnt show up. And later in the afternoon, the va general counsel scrapped a meeting with the committee chairman, jeff miller, after miller demanded it be open to the press. We waited all day long. We called nine times for them to tell us whether or not they were going to come, and he never came. Reporter all of this while the president s point person on va troubles, rob nabors, traveled to phoenix, the va office where problems first surfaced, to interview the interim director, even as congressional investigators warn the problems know about now may just be the tip of the iceberg. Christine and john . Thanks so much, dana bash. 5 contained, not what you want to hear when a wildfire is closing in on your home. That is the situation this morning near sedona in arizona. Over 7,000 acres have already burned and hundreds of homes and businesses are in harms way. Lets get the latest from ana cabre cabrera. Reporter john and christine, its the extremely dry conditions that have firefighters really concerned. Its these pine needles, these dry pine needles that are blanketing the forest floor, providing a kindling of sorts for this fire thats now burning thousands of acres. You can see that huge plume of smoke thats been blowing to the north. The winds have been a huge xfactor for firefighters as they work to try to contain this fire thats burning in very steep, rugged and treacherous terrain. So, firefighters have been relying a lot on the air support in some of those areas, dropping fire retardant to protect the homes that are on the northeast flank. Still, 300 homes that are threatened right now. There are hundreds of fire crews that have arrived from six different states to help in this fire battle. At least 20 hot shot crews that are also joining in this firefight. Right now its a race to keep this fire away from the homes as it continues to spread with Mother Nature not lending any reprieve so far. John, christine . Wow. All right. Another day of dangerous weather on tap for much of the country, severe thunderstorms and the threat of flash flooding facing millions of people, from wyoming to texas and all the way east to oklahoma. Lightning and the possibility of wildfires also expected to be a problem in many of those droughtstricken states. That is crazy look at that call your insurance adjuster. Indeed going to be a lot of dented cars there, a lot of insurance claims in central and eastern pennsylvania. Now, this is tennis ballsized hail, as opposed to golf ball or baseball. I think the writers put that in just for me. Tennis ballsized hail shattering car windshields, breaking windows in buildings all over the town of reading. Emergency management officials tell us theres a lot more damage. Luckily, no serious injuries. Virginia battered thursday by hail, high winds, driving rains, tornado warnings late in the day sending people scrambling to find shelter in richmond. A lot of damage throughout the state. Trees down, streets and highways flooded and more than 20,000 homes without power. Severe damage being reported in upstate new york. Thunderstorms packing ferocious winds and hail ripping through albany, schenectady and montgomery counties. Look at that. Many homes in the region just devastated with trees and power lines down just all over the place. It was devastation in kent county, delaware. Look at this home flattened by a possible tornado. Several structure collapses are being reported in the area. Roads closed, powers out in about 4,000 homes. The good news is, no serious injuries reported. Wow, just a lot going on overnight into the morning. Lets get a look at the forecast. Chad myers has that for us. John and christine, good morning. Had an ugly afternoon yesterday, although its better today in the northeast. We have High Pressure pushing some of that moisture away, pushing the humidity away, the heat away, and the potential for storms away, too. 90 in atlanta, 96 if you get all the way down south in south texas, down around brownsville. 88 in new orleans, 89 in tampa and 91 down in miami. For tomorrow, things look wet again across parts of the plains. This is your saturday afternoon in the heat of the day. Thats why the showers pop up here. There wont be as many showers in the morning. Then 72 for new york, 76 for d. C. And 86 in atlanta. For your memorial day weekend, not too bad. We go to 72, 76 and 82 for new york city. Now, believe it or not, chicagos actually going to be warmer, and even san antonio 87, 85, 86, and orlando pleasant there, a couple of showers in the afternoon, as always. D. C. , a few miles farther south than new york but significantly warmer, five degrees warmer every single day. St. Louis all the way to 88 for your monday and pretty decent beach weather down across parts of the southeast. Atlanta, youll see a shower or two on monday. Thats it. John, christine, back to you. Have a great day. All right, you know, and chad, we need it. We need it. It was such a brutal week in chicago. Up here, terrible, southeast, terrible. We deserve it. Were entitled. Im going to enjoy it. Oh, wait, im working on monday. President obama set to officially nominate two new members of the cabinet. Shaun donovan would take over as director of management and budget, replacing Sylvia Matthews burwell, on track to become the next secretary of health and human services. And julio castro would replace donovan at hud. The announcement is set for this afternoon at the white house. As the white house prepares to release a key memo justifying its killing of u. S. Citizens overseas, there is word this morning that some in the pentagon want permission to speak more publicly about the u. S. Drone program. The wall street journal says some top defense officials plan to present chuck hagel with a proposal that would let them publicly defend drone strikes. The administration in the past has kept most of the details secret for fear of giving too much information to potential targets. What if terrorists tried to take over a u. S. Nuclear missile sillo . Turns out, Armed Security forces of a wing in montana were put through a drill last summer simulating exactly that kind of attack. As pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr tells us, it didnt go well. Reporter john, christine, it was last summer at an air force nuclear base in montana when a security group, a small team of air force Security Experts failed an inspection. It was an exercise, training about what to do if terrorists took over a Nuclear Missile silo and tried to get to a Nuclear Weapon on the base. They failed that exercise. Now a report has emerged about exactly what happened. I want to read you a couple of examples of what they are talking about. The report says that the personnel failed to take all lawful actions necessary to immediately regain control of Nuclear Weapons. And as a result of that, the test found that the air force team may not have been able to prevent theft, damage, sabotage, destruction or even detonation of a Nuclear Weapon. Now, the team went through retraining and they did pass, but this comes at a time when the Nuclear Force has been plagued by some disciplinary problems, morale problems. Look, the majority of the personnel do perform their jobs very well, but they do have these problems. This is a very highpressure environment. The Nuclear Force has to be perfect. Thats what the air force says. Its not an environment where they can tolerate any mistakes. John, christine . Wow, thats something. Yeah. Thanks to barbara for that. No room for error, no room for any wiggle room when youre talking about Nuclear Weapons. Thats right. More layoffs at hewlettpackard, announcing plans to cut 11,000 to 16,000 jobs. Ouch thats in addition to the 34,000 layoffs already in the works. Hp says cuts would be across the board and save an additional 1 billion per year. The companys had difficulty as consumers shift away from pcs to mobile devices. Christine, i thought i read they were having a better time under new leadership. Ill tell you, one of the reasons you have a better time is because you restructure and cut a lot of jobs and you change your strategy, and thats all part of that, cutting jobs. Sometimes whats good for a company is not good for the employees. I guess its a matter of perspective. Absolutely. More perspective, mcdonalds ceo responding to two days of protests over low worker pay at the companys annual meeting in illinois. On wednesday, Police Arrested more than 100 people state police with riot gear in oak brook, illinois, as the protesters forced mcdonalds to close one of the headquarters building. The ceo says we respect the fact they want to challenge us relative to wages. We pay fair and competitive wages and provide Job Opportunities and training for those entering the workforce. You know, the average pay of somebody in the fastfood industry is about 9. 09 an hour, well below the 10. 10 the president wants, but what those workers want, they want 15 an hour. They want 15 an hour, and a lot of people think these are young workers, you know. You hear a lot that these are young workers, these are stepping stone jobs. The average age of the worker is 29, and a third of them, a third of them have some college. So, its not the fastfood worker job that we grew up with. Its a different kind of environment. Well hear more on mcdonalds coming up tomorrow on your money, 2 00 p. M. Eastern here on cnn. Time for an early start on your money. Stocks in europe lower this morning. S p futures, theyre flat just one day after the index flirted with another record high. Gm is the big money story again today. The ceo, mary barra, having private meetings on capitol hill with lawmakers. Heres what she has said publicly. Weve moved from a cost culture after the bankruptcy to a customer culture. Behind closed doors, shes been promising lawmakers constant communication, saying theyd receive a copy of gms internal investigation in early july. She says she will testify at future hearings. Barra became ceo just one month before the first massive recall was announced, and so far, you know, a lot of observers say she has done everything right. Shes appointed an internal investigation. She has put in a safety czar. Recalls may continue through the summer. According to barclays, gm hired 30 investigators to comb through data and find possible issues. That means maybe even more recalls. Right. Youre going to see even more. Another really interesting twist to that gm story, theyre rg trouble finding the parts. Very few vehicles have actually been fixed yet because they have a rush of people who are going to need parts. Some cases, they dont have the parts. You dont build your Business Plan around the idea of recalling tens of millions of vehicles. Absolutely. So, if you ever doubted that we live in a very connected world, take a look at this. That is the earth covered with dots to represent 50,000 images sent in as part of nasas global selfie campaign. People in 113 countries took part, posting images to social media of themselves and their pets, because thats important to nasa. Nasa says the goal of this was to get a better look at the people on planet earth, and apparently, their pets, and to mark last months earth day. Pets are people, too, berman. Pets are people, too. Send us pictures of your pets here at early start. We love seeing furry animals in the morning. He loves cats, i love dogs. I hate cats. No, i dont hate cats, thats going to cause no. I just dont know what cats do, but thats a whole other issue. Berman editorializing on the feline species. All right, before you go shopping for the memorial day cookout, listen up. New warnings about dangerous contamination in your food details next. All right, this morning, new worries over food that could make you sick. The cdc is investigating an outbreak of e. Coli linked to raw clover sprouts. Some ten people in idaho and Washington State are believed to have come down with e. Coli infections after eating these sprouts. Theyre linked to an idaho producer, evergreen fresh sprouts, and there are listeria contamination worries connected with walnuts sold by sherman produce in missouri and illinois, and some hummus and dip sold nationwide at trader joes and target stores. No illnesses have been reported from those products, but all have been recalled. Yeah, this memorial day picnics getting smaller and smaller. You know, burgers and hummus and sprouts. In some cases, these are things that you think are healthy, you know . Thats the thing about sprouts in general, you think its healthy, but when something is raw, theres a higher chance of thats why i eat only poptarts. All right, a bizarre twist in the case of a california woman found alive ten years after she was allegedly kidnapped and held captive by her mothers livein boyfriend. The victim was 15 years old when she says she was drugged and abducted, then systematically beaten, raped and kept locked in a garage to keep her from escaping. The suspect, 41yearold isidro garcia, allegedly forced her to marry him and fathered a child with her. Now his lawyers insist that garcia never hit the victim, never prevented her from leaving, and the claims of abuse are being made up those are his words because the couple is splitting up. Any couple thats going through divorce has problems. Every couple going through a divorce may say things, and oftentimes say things that simply arent true because they want to get the goat of the other spouse. It appears thats probably what happened in this case. This is a victim who was kidnapped at 15 years old and convinced that she had no one to turn to. She was told her family wasnt looking for her. She was told that he was her only ally. And so, over the course of many, many years, maybe her freedoms did increase, but she was still mentally his captive. Theres the rub. I mean, if she was taken at 15, theres no possible legal justification for what happened there. Its below the age of consent, so no matter what happened, laws were broken. The victim tells a los angeles tv station she feels blessed to be back in the arms of her family. Wow. All right, Dallas Mavericks owner mark cuban apologizing for some of what he said in an interview revealing his own prejudices in light of the Donald Sterling scandal. After cuban said if he sees a black kid in a hoodie late at night, hell cross to the other side of the street. He took to twitter to say he regretted using those words. In hindsight, i should have used different examples. I didnt consider the Trayvon Martin family and i apologize for that. He also said if he saw a white guy tatted up, hell cross the street. Yeah, and shaved head, hed cross the street. He was saying you cant pretend you dont have conceptions, misconceptions about people and hes struggled with that and tries to teach his children about that, but thats not what everyones talking about. Theyre talking about his bold examples. And it was in the context of a twominute example about we need to talk about race and do more to understand our prejudices. So, the context there very, very important, even if the words, that one sentence, may be very insensitive. Coming up for us, pope francis preparing for an historic trip to the holy land, already making waves with some of his plans. Were live after the break. Ago, wow, how is there no way to tell the good from the bad . So we gave people the power of the review. And now angies list is revolutionizing local service again. You can easily buy and Schedule Services from toprated providers. Conveniently stay up to date on progress. And effortlessly turn your photos into finished projects with our snapfix app. Visit angieslist. 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