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NTSB to Examine Cracked Windscreen of Diverted Flight; Trump Ramps Up Pressure on China, Threatens to Eradicate Hamas; Amazon Says Cloud Services Recovering After Global Disruptions; Trump Says He'll Slap Tariffs on Colombia as Feud Intensifies; U.S. Strikes Another Alleged Drug Boat in the Caribbean; Senate Prepares for 11th Vote to End Government Shutdown. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired October 20, 2025 - 14:00   ET

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

[14:00:00]

PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: The good news is these windshields are very strong, but usually a windshield break in a commercial airliner does not prompt an NTSB investigation like this. So some people are wondering if it was space junk or a piece of hail, or maybe a part of another airplane. We will see. I have a lot of water to pour on the space junk --

(LAUGH)

MUNTEAN: -- theory. The NTSB looking closely at the weather radar at the time to see if there was any sort of strange weather at the time of this accident that could have precipitated the windshield to crack.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Yeah, not a lot up there at 36,000 feet.

MUNTEAN: No doubt.

SANCHEZ: Yeah. Pete Muntean, thanks so much for the reporting. A new hour of "CNN News Central" starts right now.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": President Trump talks up a potential trade deal with China with his next tariff hike set to take effect in less than two weeks. But today, he says a deal with President Xi is going to be very exciting. Plus, lingering lag, the widespread disruption of internet service impacting airlines to the apps on your phone, and what Amazon is doing to fix it. And health officials from cities across the country come together to call out "false claims" by the federal government over vaccines. We're following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to "CNN News Central."

SANCHEZ: We are following some new developments from the White House. Right now, President Trump is hosting Australia's prime minister, but as the two leaders were taking questions just a short time ago, the president took new aim at China and Hamas. His latest threats coming at a time when his feud with Colombia is also escalating. Let's get right to CNN's Alayna Treene, who's at the White House for us. Alayna, really a mixed bag of new foreign policy warnings the president has put out.

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Oh, absolutely. He went everywhere from Ukraine to China to talking about Hamas and of course, Australia, with the prime minister seated next to him. I'm going to start with Ukraine though, because he was asked a series of questions about that phone call he had with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week. One of the things he was pressed on was whether or not during that phone call he told Putin to stop and kind of cease on its -- on their attacks on civilian targets.

The president essentially said that, yes, he did tell him that, though he went on and argued that most of the people who are dying in the war between Russia and Ukraine are the soldiers. But he also said, he was asked about whether or not he believes Ukraine could still win the war, something that he had said earlier this year. He essentially said, look, could they? Yes, he said, I don't think that they will. That's a direct quote from him. But he said that they could. So again, kind of tempering expectations from what we've heard him say previously.

Now jumping to Hamas, of course, that's one of the key, issues that everyone is watching right now, is whether the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is actually going to hold. Vice President J.D. Vance is headed to the region this week, alongside Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. The president, said that he -- said essentially that he believes that the ceasefire is not only in the Trump administration's hands, but in the hands of others, noting the 59 other countries who played a role in some of these negotiations. And he said that when it comes to Hamas, if they continue their violent attacks, he said, "We're going to eradicate them if we have to."

He was asked specifically, who is we? Because that has been a question, we've heard many people in the Trump administration argue there will not be U.S. boots on the ground in the Middle East. He said, it doesn't necessarily have to be the United States. It likely would -- it won't be the United States. But he went on to say that there's a lot of countries who have been calling him up, offering to go in and try to deal with Hamas. He said he could tell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, give him the go ahead to go in and try and deal with Hamas, or as he said, eradicate them. So, very escalatory language there as we're waiting to see whether or not they're able to keep the ceasefire agreement intact.

And then quickly, I'm just going to go to China. I mean, obviously one of the biggest foreign policy things we're looking ahead to is the president's trip to Asia. He's expected to leave at the end of this week. And during that trip, when he's in South -- when he's in South Korea, he's expected to sit down with Chinese President Xi Jinping, their first face-to-face meeting of the president's second term. He said that he had a very -- he has a very good relationship with China, of course, that comes despite them threatening their deal on rare earths and other, and the escalating trade war and tariffs between the two countries.

He said that he's hoping that by the time he finishes that meeting in South Korea, they will have a very good trade deal in place. And he also argued -- this question of Taiwan came up, of course, that's a big concern of the Australians and whether or not the China -- the Chinese might try to attack in the region. He said he did not believe that is an issue at the moment. So, a lot of ground covered during that meeting, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Alayna Treene, live for us at the White House, thank you so much. Brianna?

KEILAR: Right now, Amazon says it has a plan in place to fix the internet connectivity issues that are causing online outages around the world, and that the plan does appear to be working. The outage is impacting websites and apps for everything from banking services and airlines to social networks, online shopping and entertainment sites.

[14:05:00]

You see them here, gaming platforms as well. Everything, millions of people rely on these things. They rely on Amazon Web Services. It is the number one cloud service provider in the world. We're joined now by Sarah Fischer, CNN Media Analyst and Media Correspondent for Axios. OK, this is one of those crazy things. It's like the hub of the wheel and everything is just flying out of control. Tell us about how this is having its tentacles in everything.

SARAH FISCHER, CNN MEDIA ANALYST AND MEDIA CORRESPONDENT FOR AXIOS: So when it comes to cloud serving providers, Brianna, there's three major ones. There's Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. And Amazon is by far the biggest. It's not just consumer apps like Snapchat and gaming services, it's also the backend of enterprise functions that you and I need to rely on to get our lives going.

Think about it, United and Delta both said that they were impacted by this. The U.K. banking system said that they were impacted by this. So it's not just fun and games, it's also the backend services that rely on these serve -- the cloud computing servers to be able to do things like payments, healthcare, tech, communications infrastructure. It shows you how dependent we become on such few number of consolidated players.

KEILAR: Let's -- and let's talk about if you're going through your day.

FISCHER: Yes.

KEILAR: Right here, you do your Wordle in the morning. Nope?

FISCHER: Nope.

KEILAR: Your kids want to watch Disney+, nope. Maybe you're banking, nope. I mean, the messaging apps, streaming services and so on.

FISCHER: Very disruptive. And what's been very frustrating for consumers is that Amazon did come out and communicate early that they identified the root cause of this outage, which by the way we should note, it does appear to be an Amazon-related issue. It's not an external actor like someone doing a distributed denial of service attack. This is an Amazon problem. But for the consumer that you mentioned, you might have some services that pop back up and then some that are still not working. That's what's very frustrating.

A lot of Amazon's communications, by the way, are to their service providers. They're not to the consumer directly. So it's up to the consumer to watch CNN or read the news to figure out what's going on here. One thing I can advise them, clear your cache. That's probably the best way to get a website up and running if the server's been resolved, but you are not seeing it work on your phone or computer.

KEILAR: Oh, that's very important news you can use. OK. Elon Musk is trying to use this.

FISCHER: Of course.

KEILAR: Right? He's posting, he's kind of gloating on his platform X, formerly (ph) Twitter, these memes of making fun of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon Founder, because X wasn't affected. But we should mention, he is posting these things without irony, right?

FISCHER: Yeah. I mean, X has gone down a million times. It's been the subject and Elon Musk has said it in the past that he thinks it's been the subject of DDoS attacks. It's had its own technical outages and issues all the time. When it comes to the internet, Brianna, no one is safe from this. Almost every company that relies on any sort of cloud computing software is going to face some sort of outage at some time.

And it kind of is a funny thing because it reminds you of the power of traditional medium, right? Fixed broadband that plugs into your wall tends to be more reliable when it comes to things like outages. Same thing when we talk about cable and broadcast, that tends to be more reliable a lot of times than internet streaming simply because you're not hooked up to a cloud.

KEILAR: Yeah. So, what can be done and do you see there being any government intervention or any regulating of this?

FISCHER: No, because these types of instances that are so rare, to be honest, we typically have a big one every year. And notably, these companies are pretty transparent about what happened. Where I do think you're going to continue to have government intervention is when you have those intentional external attacks from foreign governments.

That's where our national security arm steps up and tries to figure out is this a cyber threat? From a technological perspective, the markets will force these companies to get their act together themselves. Amazon does not want its own services and its clients to be unhappy and its stock to drop.

KEILAR: Yeah, certainly not. Sarah, great to have you take us through this. Really appreciate it, Sarah Fisher.

FISCHER: Thank you.

KEILAR: Still to come. The Senate has another chance to end the government shutdown here in the next hour. But House Speaker Johnson says Senators will continue to play games, so outlook not so great as the eight-ball might say. Plus, President Trump is feuding with another South American country, why he imposed new tariffs for Colombia. And then millions of protestors taking to the streets across America over this past weekend. But did the No Kings message really get through, we'll have that and much more coming up on "CNN News Central."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:14:15]

SANCHEZ: President Trump today vowing to impose new tariffs against Colombia as he escalates a growing feud with that country's President, Gustavo Petro. Trump already announced that he's cutting off all aid to the South American nation, citing drug production, also calling Petro an illegal drug leader. We're also seeing new video of a strike the U.S. conducted on a suspected Colombian drug boat that the Pentagon says killed three people on Friday. This is the seventh time the U.S. military is attacked a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean.

We're joined now by Elise Labott. She's a Foreign Affairs Journalist and the Host of Cosmopolitics on Substack. Elise, great to see you as always.

ELISE LABOTT, FOREIGN AFFAIRS JOURNALIST: Good to be with you.

SANCHEZ: How do these promised financial punishments impact Colombia's efforts at fighting drug trafficking? Are they potentially actually an impediment?

[14:15:00]

LABOTT: Well, a lot of that aid was going towards --

SANCHEZ: Right.

LABOTT: -- as you know, from your years of covering the region, the U.S. and Colombia have really been partners in a lot of this drug interdiction, drug eradication. I will say, President Petro hasn't exactly been all that cooperative in the war on drugs. The question is, Colombia is really, as you know, one of the U.S. kind of foundational partners in the region. Brazil, now Argentina, the president says are more economic partners, but Colombia is really the security partner in the region.

And also, one thing I haven't heard a lot about, Boris, is the U.S. has a Free Trade Agreement with Colombia. There's all this talk about ending aid and tariffs and such. The U.S. has had an agreement with Colombia since 2012. Why is that? Because Colombia has been a partner in the war on drugs. The Colombia also lost a lot of aid when the U.S. shut down USAID. So they've been losing a lot of aid. I don't think this is necessarily going to help, but to be fair, it's not exactly as President Petro has been tough on the war on drugs in Colombia. He hasn't.

SANCHEZ: Tell us more about that, and him specifically, because for decades the U.S. and Colombia have been partners fighting narco traffickers --

LABOTT: Right.

SANCHEZ: -- FARC, et cetera. I wonder how Petro's view of the world also, as a self-avowed socialist, compares to Trump's efforts to crack down on an ideology that he sees as evil, especially in the southern hemisphere.

LABOTT: Well, he's very close to Venezuela and they have a lot of border issues and gangs are operating in both countries. But it's interesting that Tren de Aragua is not necessarily operating in Colombia under the guise of the government. They've actually held some of the leaders there and they've detained them. They are fighting that gang. And some of the gangs the U.S. is hitting and blaming Colombia for, like the ELN, they're fighting President Pedro.

So, it's all being conflated in this larger war of the U.S. against Venezuela and that larger issue of President Maduro and whether there is regime change in the country and whether the U.S. is seeking --

SANCHEZ: Right.

LABOTT: -- regime change. And people that you talk to and analysts and even U.S. current and former officials, if you look at getting rid of Maduro, then some of those other leaders in the region are very vulnerable. In Cuba --

SANCHEZ: No doubt.

LABOTT: -- in Nicaragua, in Colombia. And so, it seems to me and to people that are my sources, this is part of a larger U.S. view of how to go against the region. And the drug issue is a problem, but a lot of these boats are coming from maybe Venezuela to Trinidad to Colombia -- they're not necessarily drugs bound for the United States. So the whole issue of immigration, narco terrorism, and regime change are all kind of being conflated. And it's really hard to sort through what the real US end game is.

SANCHEZ: That's an interesting point in part because the DEA, clearly through their research, has shown that statistically way more drugs actually come through the Pacific --

LABOTT: Right.

SANCHEZ: -- than through the Caribbean.

LABOTT: Right.

SANCHEZ: They go up from Colombia --

LABOTT: Right.

SANCHEZ: -- through Central America --

LABOTT: Right.

SANCHEZ: -- up to Mexico. There's also little to no fentanyl.

LABOTT: It's coming from Mexico.

SANCHEZ: Coming from --

LABOTT: It's mostly coming from Mexico.

SANCHEZ: Right.

LABOTT: Marijuana and cocaine is coming from Colombia and Venezuela. But experts say that that's mostly going to Europe or Asia or West Africa. It's not necessarily bound for the United States. Those routes, the Trinidad route isn't necessarily bound for the United States.

SANCHEZ: Right.

LABOTT: Again, Colombia has really increased cocaine production, drug production over the last few years. The question is, is this part of the narco terrorism really that's a threat to the United States? Or is this part of this larger issue of President Trump's disaffection with those leaders in the region?

SANCHEZ: It's also notable that Venezuela is the target, in part because they provide easy access to energy for the regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, et cetera. What happens if the U.S. is successful and Maduro decides I'm out?

LABOTT: Right. They're trying to make it so -- I read one quote in the media about, we're trying to make it so uncomfortable for him --

SANCHEZ: Right.

LABOTT: -- that he just leaves.

SANCHEZ: Yeah. To be clear, Trump hasn't said --

LABOTT: He hasn't said --

SANCHEZ: -- we want regime change, but the administration has said, we just want to make his life unbearable.

LABOTT: He's implying it.

SANCHEZ: Right.

LABOTT: You know, it's like the emperor wears no clothes, the open secret in the room. I would say, if you have Maduro leave, then Cuba isn't getting its oil. And then maybe that regime falls and then you have Nicaragua and then you have Colombia.

[14:20:00]

Then you can start to set up more of a democratic, U.S.-friendly architecture in the Western Hemisphere, and that's a legacy for President Trump. That's very enticing. SANCHEZ: Yeah.

LABOTT: And it helps us businesses, it helps the U.S. oil -- and the oil market. It's all a much more friendlier atmosphere towards the U.S. in the region. The thing is, you don't really see this kind of strategy being talked about or being very methodically planned. You can see the kind of end game here, but this war and the questions about the league --

SANCHEZ: The legality.

LABOTT: -- on the drugs and the questions about the legality and the targets, right? Are these fishermen and the boats? Yes, there could be drugs on them and there most likely are, like that sub the other day. Those subs are used for drugs. But, is that the real threat to the United States or does the US see this larger leftist governments that are in cahoots and very anti-U.S. mentality, is that what the real threat Is?

SANCHEZ: Elise Labott, great to get your perspective. Thanks for joining us.

LABOTT: Good to be with you.

SANCHEZ: Still to come this afternoon, new details about a tense face-to-face meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelenskyy of Ukraine. What this could mean for the next round of peace negotiations. And we have startling new revelations from Jeffrey Epstein accuser, Virginia Giuffre about Prince Andrew. That and much more coming your way in just moments.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[]14:26:06]

KEILAR: We're now in Day 20 of the government shutdown and the Senate is reconvening here in the next hour and their 11th vote to fund The government is expected to take place later today. Once again, it is not expected to pass despite more and more government workers being furloughed. Senate staffers were told they're no longer getting paid as the standoff between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill approaches four weeks.

CNN's Manu Raju is live for us on Capitol Hill. Manu, the House has not been in session this whole time. Any sense that that could change?

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Potentially, but it's still unclear. At the moment, the Speaker of the House plans to keep the House out of session. Really, he says he'd give the House 48 hours to come back into session if it needs to act. And they should have been in session this week according to the schedule. But the goal ultimately for the Speaker here is to pressure Senate Democrats to accept the bill that passed the House last month that would reopen the government up until November 21st. But so far, just three Senate Democrats have voted to advance the bill and we expect it to fail for the 11th time tonight. They need eight Democrats to vote for it in the Senate. Why? Because Democrats are attempting to attach strings to that bill. They want an extension of those expiring subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. Those are set to expire at year's end. They say that it must be dealt with immediately to avoid people's premiums from increasing during open enrollment season.

But the Speaker says absolutely no way they'll negotiate any of that until the government is reopened and the standoff will only persist. We are now in the third longest shutdown in the history of the United States. This is the longest partial government -- full government shutdown in history. The other two that have been longer were partial government shutdowns. So, the pain will be felt including to those furloughed federal workers.

Now the question is, will they get paid? The Senate plans to take up a bill this week, a Republican bill to pay the federal furloughed workers. It's unclear the scope of it, exactly how many furloughed workers will ultimately be paid under that bill. But I asked the Speaker what he would -- would he bring the House back into session if that Senate bill passes? He told me yes, he would. The House would come back for the first time since September 19th in order to take up that bill if it indeed passes the Senate.

But that is still an open question. There's some disagreements about that language. It needs 60 votes in the Senate to pass and the Speaker himself was skeptical of that. But he said if it did pass, Brianna, that the House could come back in a session as soon as this week.

KEILAR: All right. If the House comes back, will Arizona Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva be sworn in, Manu?

RAJU: It would seem that way because the Speaker has set this up saying that if -- when the House comes back to normal legislative session, he would swear her into the seat that she won several weeks ago. He has the ability to do that as soon as tomorrow in what's known as a pro forma session. Those are these regular sessions they're having in the United States House, a gave in, gave out session where no business is conducted.

He has said that typically that should not happen that way, although he did swear in two Florida Republicans earlier this year in similar pro forma sessions. He says this situation is different and he has deflected questions about the about him trying to do this or he has rejected questions, as I say, of him trying to do this to deny Democrats an additional seat here. But if the House is back, he almost certainly will have to swear her in. Brianna?

KEILAR: All right, we'll be looking for that. Manu Raju, live for us on the Hill. Thank you.

And still to come, what's next after Millions took part in the No Kings protests over the weekend. Ahead, how lawmakers are responding to the widespread demonstrations. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)