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Recovery Efforts Underway for Michigan Woman Whose Husband Says Fell Overboard on Boat Trip in Bahamas; Daughter of Woman Missing at Sea in Bahamas Calls for Full Investigation; Artemis II Crew Returning to Earth After Lunar Flyby; Iran Calls for Human Chains Around Power Plants Amid Trump Threats; Vance Makes Trip to Hungary Amid Iran Negotiations; Oil Prices Spike on Heels of U.S. Strikes on Kharg Island. Aired 2-2:30p ET
Aired April 07, 2026 - 14:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[14:00:00]
BRYNN GINGRAS, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: -- All of this, of course, going -- this information going to police. The daughter asking a lot of questions, basically giving us a statement saying that she has been privy to very little information at this point. She's telling CNN that her sole concern is to find out what happened to my mother, make sure full and complete investigation is performed into her disappearance.
The U.S. State Department has told CNN that they are aware of this woman missing, but they -- and they are offering any help that they can to Bahamian authorities, but at this point, very little information is out there. Brianna?
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": All right, Brynn, thank you so much for that. And minutes from now, we will actually be speaking to Lynette Hooker's daughter to talk about the recovery efforts for her mother.
A new hour of "CNN News Central" starts right now.
BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": The clock keeps ticking, President Trump issuing a stark new threat toward Iran if they do not strike a deal with the U.S. and open the Strait of Hormuz before 8 p.m. tonight.
Plus, supply shock, oil prices surging as the war triggers a historic disruption of the global supply, what all of this means for you and your wallet.
And heading home, we're set to hear soon from the Artemis II crew as they debrief NASA on their historic lunar flyby. We're following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to "CNN News Central."
President Trump is raising the stakes by threatening Iran's very existence as a civilization if it doesn't reopen the Strait of Hormuz and agree to a deal with the United States by 8 p.m. Eastern tonight. The president posting online, quote, "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will."
Iran just responded, a government spokesperson saying, quote, "Threatening a civilization is more than anything, a sign of ignorance of the history of a nation that has repeatedly overcome crises and continues to stand." Ahead of the deadline, the U.S. has gone after Iran's Kharg Island, which handles 90 percent of its oil exports. Sources say that overnight, the U.S. struck military targets there, but that no oil facilities were hit.
Let's go live to CNN's Jeremy Diamond in Tel Aviv for us. Jeremy, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu said today that Israel is now targeting Iran's bridges and some railway systems as well.
JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN JERUSALEM CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, that's right. We've seen a number of Israeli strikes today inside of Iran targeting various infrastructure targets, including railways, bridges and highways that the Israeli military claims Iran is using to transport some of its military materials, such as ballistic missile launchers, ammo and other equipment.
We can't independently verify those claims from the Israeli military. But what we certainly have seen inside of Iran have been those strikes, the effect of those strikes, as well as strikes by the Israeli military against another petrochemical facility today that the Israeli military said was being used for ballistic missile production using a key element known as nitric acid.
The Iranians have responded by urging Iranians to go out into the streets, to go surround some of these infrastructure targets. We saw footage from today of Iranian regime supporters forming a human chain around a power plant. All of that seems to be intended to try and deter President Trump from carrying out his threat to strike Iran's infrastructure targets at 8 p.m. Eastern time should Iran not agree to a deal, a ceasefire deal and a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
And indeed, right now, you know, we are at a very perilous moment in this region where the prospect of severe regional escalation very much seems in the offing if that deadline comes and goes without an agreement. And what we've heard from the Iranians and the Americans so far is no indication of any kind of breakthrough in these negotiations thus far.
The Iranians are indicating that they're still open to talking, but condemning President Trump's comments about destroying Iranian civilization. Those comments from President Trump and his broader threats to target Iranians, Iran's civilian infrastructure is also coming under fire from human rights organizations, including the United Nations Human Rights Chief and the International Red Cross, which warned that these types of threats would represent violations of international law and if carried out, could amount to war crimes carried out by the United States.
So we are now six hours away from that deadline. And this entire region is on pins and needles because we know that should the United States escalate, Iran also has ways of escalating, not only with its ballistic missile fire towards us here in Israel, but also striking targets in the Gulf that they have hit previously, but perhaps not to the extent that they could.
We know the Iranians could do some real, real damage to oil infrastructure, to desalination infrastructure, and to civilian targets in the region. That's perhaps why we're already seeing the United States Embassy in Bahrain warning civilians and its embassy staff to shelter in place. Boris?
[14:05:00]
SANCHEZ: Jeremy Diamond, live for us in Tel Aviv, thank you. Brianna?
KEILAR: Happening now, Vice President, J.D. Vance is in Hungary days before the country's parliamentary elections. Vance offering support for Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, who has close ties to both President Trump and Russian President, Vladimir Putin. But Orban's party is currently trailing in the polls, so Vance's visit comes at a critical moment.
He'll be in Hungary when President Trump's deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz expires tonight. Here's what Vance said about new attacks on Iran this morning ahead of that deadline.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
J.D. VANCE, (R) VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: So the president's deadline has been followed by us and everybody else and he said very clearly, we're not going to strike energy and infrastructure targets until the Iranians either make a proposal that we can get behind or don't make a proposal, but he's given them until Tuesday at 8 o'clock, so I don't think the news in Kharg Island is -- it represents a change in strategy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: President Trump briefly called in during Vance's speech. He offered his support for Orban, calling him a fantastic man, but he did not mention tonight's deadline. With less than six hours to go until President Trump's deadline, energy prices keep soaring. The average price of -- today for a gallon of gas is at $4.14 and the U.S. price for crude peaking at $116 a barrel today. That's more than double what it was at the start of the year.
Analysts think that markets were reacting to U.S. strikes on Kharg Island. Let's talk about this now with Brendan Greeley. He's a Contributing Editor at the Financial Times. He's also the author of the book releasing next month called "The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money." All right, Brendan, how are markets and oil traders watching this deadline that is quickly approaching tonight?
BRENDAN GREELEY, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, FINANCIAL TIMES: Well, Brianna, I think we have to split those two up. When we look at markets, just equity markets in the United States, all that's happened so far today is that they're down about half a percentage point. That's just a normal Tuesday. I really do think that in particular, stock traders in the United States and investors have gotten used to the idea that Trump can backtrack his way out of pretty much any problem.
The challenge right now is increasingly, there are things happening in Iran that are not up to him, that he can't control, that he can't back out of. He pays very close attention to the S&P 500 and the price of stocks in the United States, and it's unlikely that he will be able to extract himself cleanly from what's happening right now in the way that I think investors expect.
If you look at the oil markets, one of the important things to remember is what's going on in the United States is profoundly different from what's going on in the rest of the world. So the oil coming out of the Strait of Hormuz is priced in a different way and tends to go to Europe and to Asia. And so we're seeing oil prices in Asia are skyrocketing, not just for jet fuel but for gasoline. And you're getting things like the Australian prime minister actually urged Australians to think about rationing gas, think about driving less.
This is happening in Japan; this is happening in the Philippines. So what's happening in Asia is actually much more severe than what's happening in the United States. Now, Donald Trump pays very close attention also to the price of gas at the pump. It has risen. We're about $4.14 today according to AAA national average. But one of the things that's happening is, in order for the price of oil to actually come through to the price of gas at the pump, oil companies need to make a decision to raise that.
And so far, they've actually shown some restraint in looking at the price of oil and making a decision on what they're actually going to charge at the pump. So I think there's a lot of things left to happen at the price of gas in the United States.
KEILAR: And Iran's parliament, when you're speaking of things that the U.S. can't control, the parliament approved this plan to impose tolls on ships passing through the Strait. We don't know how this is going to end up, but the president says the Strait needs to be open. He even retorted yesterday that the U.S. should impose tolls on the Strait instead of Iran. What could any tolls long-term mean for global oil markets?
GREELEY: I think that they're going to raise the global price of oil in a way that we don't have control over. So we price oil in America, barrels of crude in WTI. We sort of have our own market for it. Generally, the market for American crude tracks the market for global crude.
If they start charging tolls, which incidentally, so far they already are charging tolls, they're charging them in Chinese yuan. They're not charging those tolls in dollars. It's either in crypto or in yuan, which is fascinating because throughout the rest of the global markets, oil is priced in dollars.
But if they do, that will raise the price of what we think of as Brent crude. This is sort of the global price of oil. It's very difficult to imagine that the price of oil in the United States doesn't follow. Oil producers in America could be part of a separate market that's just priced here. They don't want to be.
It's going to be very difficult for them to accept that there's a separate price of oil for U.S. produced oil than there is for the world. Very hard to extract ourselves from the global market for the price of gas.
[14:10:00]
KEILAR: And we just got the New York Fed's latest surveys of consumer expectations. And what it shows is that in March, Americans' inflation expectations for the coming year went up from three percent to 3.4 percent. Basically, Americans expect costs to get worse, right? A monthly increase that big has only happened a few times since the survey started in 2013. What could just the expectation of rising prices mean for the overall health of the economy?
GREELEY: Yeah, I think that's been fascinating to watch. The Federal Reserve, when it pays attention to inflation, it actually strips out the price of gas and the price of food because it wants to look at underlying trends. People don't think about inflation that way. People think about the cost of a gallon of milk and the cost of a gallon of gas. That's really how we all compute inflation.
And when the price of gas goes up, as it has, it changes human expectations for inflation. The problem is, no matter what happens over the next month or over the next two months, once people start to expect that inflation is going to rise, there's the very real possibility that that expectation becomes what we call unanchored, meaning it's no longer stuck to 3 percent or to 2 percent. It starts to rise, and then it becomes very difficult to control.
One of the other things to watch, Brianna, is that consumer-facing companies thus far haven't raised their prices because of what's going on in the Middle East. But we do know that the cost of transport for just basic staples for your household has gone up a lot. That should feed into the final price.
The cost of packaging and plastic that goes into the basic stuff that you get delivered to your home has gone up as well. But so far, we haven't seen consumer prices go up, and that's because, like everybody else, like stock investors, like oil companies, consumer-facing companies are sitting around waiting to find out, is this actually going to happen? They don't know yet either, and they haven't raised their prices yet.
KEILAR: Yeah. Is this temporary? As it becomes clear it may not be, that's when we're going to see them act, and we'll see how that affects our bottom line. Brendan Greeley, we will continue this conversation, I have no doubt. Thanks for being with us.
And still to come, the new head of Homeland Security is in North Carolina right now. Markwayne Mullin touring parts of the state that are still reeling years later from devastating storms.
And then dazzling new images coming in from the far side of the moon, look at that, after the Artemis II crew's historic flyby. Beautiful. What is on tap for the astronauts today? We have that and much more coming up on "CNN News Central."
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:17:21]
SANCHEZ: The Artemis II crew is now heading home from their record- setting trip into deep space and they're gifting planet Earth with some special souvenirs, breathtaking photos from the space capsules loop around the far side of the moon. The flyby took seven hours to complete. NASA says today will be much quieter than yesterday.
Right now, the crew is just moments away from a call with the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. CNN National Correspondent, Randi Kaye is at Houston Space Center in Texas for us. Randi, walk us through what we're anticipating with this upcoming call.
RANDI KAYE, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, we know that they are going to have this call. We're not sure exactly how that all works. But they are going to talk with the astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
And they have officially left the lunar sphere of influence, which means now the Earth's gravitational pull is stronger than the moon's for Artemis II. So it's slowly pulling those astronauts home. But we have these amazing photos, apparently, during the flyby, they took something like 10,000 images.
So we're just watching them come in. And we're so eager to see more and more of them. But if you just look at a few more that we have here today, there is one where you can see the Earth dipping behind the lunar horizon, which is incredible.
This one shows, of course, the texture of the moon. But there's the Earth dipping behind the lunar horizon, which is spectacular. Then there's also the total solar eclipse that they were able to see that you're seeing there. And even to the right of your screen, there's those tiny little specks. Those are actually planets, those white little specks there.
And you know, it's amazing because Victor Glover, the pilot, he was sort of suggesting that they didn't think they got such a great picture of the eclipse. And it was certainly spectacular. And there's another one of the Earth. But there is one photo where you can really see this deep texture of the craters in the moon.
And some of those craters were caused by lava flow and meteors. And we spoke with Dr. Nicky Fox here, who's one of the top science officials at the Johnson Space Center here in Houston. And she talked us through what we're seeing in this photo.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KAYE: What would have caused some of this? Is that meteors or --?
DR. NICOLA FOX, ASSOCIATE ADMINISTRATOR, NASA SCIENCE MISSION DIRECTORATE: A lot of this is, yes, if they're on the far side of the moon, a lot of it is micro-meteors. A lot of these craters are very, very old. Some of the craters are, you know, four billion years old.
And I think, you know, Christina asked for the age of one of the craters yesterday, and they described it as quite a new one because it was only 3.8 billion years old.
(LAUGH)
FOX: And so, you know, a lot of these craters have been there longer than some of the rocks and things that we have on Earth.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[14:20:00]
KAYE: And pilot Victor Glover, when looking at the moon, and you could see some of those dark craters in that photo, in that texture, he was talking about how they look like black holes, how you could just drop through them and come out the other side of the moon. Like, that's how amazing it was for them to see that.
So we have those photos coming in. We have the call with the International Space Station. And then also, later this afternoon, the Artemis crew will brief the lunar scientists here at Johnson Space Center. So we're eager to hear a little bit more about what they have to say. Boris?
SANCHEZ: A lot still to look forward to as they make their way back to Earth. Randi Kaye, thank you so much for the update.
Still ahead, what we're learning about the search for an American woman missing at sea in the Bahamas. Her daughter is going to join us in just moments.
And FEMA is pledging more money to North Carolina, where some communities are still reeling from the devastation from hurricanes that tore through that state. The new HHS Secretary was on the ground there today. We'll bring you an update in just moments.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:25:42]
KEILAR: Officials in the Bahamas say the search for a Michigan woman missing at sea has now turned into a recovery operation. Authorities say 55-year-old Lynette Hooker and her husband Brian, who are seen here in an old photo, hit rough weather during a boat trip on Saturday night. They say the husband told investigators the two were headed back to their yacht when she bounced out of their small dinghy along with the boat's engine key.
According to police, Brian told them she was swept away by strong currents. And without the key, the boat lost power, forcing him to paddle the boat back to shore. Brian told officials that he last saw his wife swimming towards shore. CNN has tried to reach out to the husband.
Lynette's daughter, Karli Aylesworth, is with us now to talk about this. Karli, I am so sorry for what you are enduring right now. You have spoken publicly, saying that you have been privy to very little information. What have you found out from local authorities in the Bahamas and from U.S. officials?
KARLI AYLESWORTH, DAUGHTER OF WOMAN MISSING AT SEA: I just heard that they found the flotation device that was thrown to them or to her when she was swimming away from the boat. That's all I've heard so far.
KEILAR: And who is telling you this?
AYLESWORTH: I got a call from my stepdad about it, but I didn't answer. He just left a voicemail. So I tried calling the Bahamian police, but they did not answer. So I had my lawyer contact them, to see if he could push anything along.
KEILAR: So your stepdad has called you, have you been able -- it sounds like you haven't, but have you been able to connect with him and speak to him? Have you tried to?
AYLESWORTH: I don't really want to at the moment until I know more information. But he's the one that told me that she was missing.
KEILAR: He told you in person or he told you in a message?
AYLESWORTH: He called me.
KEILAR: And why and why don't you want to speak to him until you learn more?
AYLESWORTH: It just doesn't add up why she was swimming away from the boat or why she had the keys. Sorry, I Have known past issues between them have not been good, so it's just weird that this is happening now, like kind of like, OK, you said this was going to probably happen and now it's happening. So --
KEILAR: So you have a -- you have a lot of concerns and I am certainly hearing your concerns and I'm hearing your representations. I do want to be clear, we don't have documentation that supports those representations, but I am certainly hearing what you're saying there. How long have your mother and Brian been married?
AYLESWORTH: 25 years-ish.
KEILAR: 25 years, and they would document, right, they're sailing. They have this yacht. We know it's called "The Soulmate." Can you tell us a little bit about just your mom's experience level sailing, Brian's experience level sailing, and sort of what that was like for her sailing with him and documenting her travels. How has that been for her?
AYLESWORTH: She loved documenting and taking videos. She had a 360 camera she loved using. They have been sailing for over 10 years. They started with this little sailboat with only two people could fit on it to a big over 50-foot size sailboat, and they would sail Lake Michigan all the time, and now they're sailing the ocean.
KEILAR: And she loved doing this. How long have they been gone in this particular trip?
AYLESWORTH: They've been in the Bahamas for about a month.
KEILAR: And did you -- would you be in contact with her regularly? When's the last time you talked to your mom before she disappeared?
AYLESWORTH: I haven't talked to her since Friday. We didn't used to talk a lot.
KEILAR: You used to talk a lot. So how often -- before Friday, how often would you be in contact? --
