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Trump, Zelenskyy to Tackle Tomahawk Missiles at the White House; Netanyahu Warns Hamas as Aid in Gaza Now Flowing; Violence Erupted as Thousands Flock to the Funeral of Former Kenyan P.M. Raila Odinga. Aired 3-4a ET

Aired October 17, 2025 - 03:00   ET

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

[03:00:00]

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KIM BRUNHUBER, CNN ANCHOR: Hello and welcome to all of you watching us around the world. I'm Kim Brunhuber. This is "CNN Newsroom."

Tomahawk missiles are high on the agenda when Presidents Trump and Zelenskyy meet at the White House today. We'll have details on how it could impact the next round of talks between the U.S. and Russia.

Plus, aid is flowing into Gaza, but Israel's Prime Minister has a warning for Hamas over the return of the bodies of several hostages.

And the U.S. carries out another airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean, but this time there may have been survivors.

UNKNOWN (voice-over): Live from Atlanta, this is "CNN Newsroom" with Kim Brunhuber.

BRUNHUBER: Less than two months after their last summit in Alaska, the U.S. President has announced plans to meet again with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump says the meeting will take place in Budapest, Hungary within two weeks or so and will focus on ending the war. Here he is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: We're going to be meeting in Hungary, Viktor Orban is going to be hosting. And it's really something that's time.

Last week, over 7000 people were killed. That's ridiculous. And you know, it doesn't affect our country, we're not losing people, we're not losing, Bobby, we're not losing Americans.

But they're losing Russians, Ukrainians, mostly soldiers. For the most part, soldiers. And we think we're going to get, we hope we're going to get it stopped.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BRUNHUBER: President Trump will welcome Ukraine's President to the White House later today. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is hoping to secure a pledge for Tomahawk cruise missiles capable of striking targets deep inside Russian territory. We get more now from CNN's senior White House correspondent, Kristen Holmes.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke on the phone for two and a half hours, according to officials familiar with that call.

And we now know that they were going to set up another meeting in Budapest, Hungary. This is what President Trump said after his phone call with the Russian President.

"President Putin and I will then meet in an agreed-upon location, Budapest, Hungary, to see if we can bring this inglorious war between Russia and Ukraine to an end. President Zelenskyy and I will be meeting tomorrow in the Oval Office, where we will discuss my conversation with President Putin and much more. I believe great progress was made in today's telephone conversation."

So of course, as we know, this conversation came the day before President Trump was set to meet with the Ukrainian President. We know one of the things that they were going to be discussing was potentially the United States giving Ukraine long-range Tomahawk missiles so they could fire into Russia, something President Trump has publicly mused about and really threatened to do, particularly as this war has drug out.

I asked President Trump specifically if Putin during this call asked him not to give Zelenskyy these Tomahawk missiles. He wouldn't answer the question directly, just said, wouldn't you ask that?

So still, obviously, it seems as though Ukraine is not getting those missiles tomorrow. But we will be, of course, waiting to see what exactly they do talk about.

One other thing to note here is that this is a very different outcome from this phone call than what we thought we were going to get, particularly because of what we saw in Alaska. After Alaska, this meeting, we saw President Trump say that the next steps were to have a meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin that never happened.

And I was told by White House officials at the time that Trump wanted to kind of disengage. They thought it was important for these two leaders to meet together before he stepped in again. However, the time has dragged out, and many people believe this was somewhat of a stalling mechanism on behalf of Putin.

So now we are in a new place in which the two men are going to be meeting again. I asked why he believed that this would yield a different result, a second meeting, he said that Alaska kind of served as the first round, and then they thought they could get somewhere this second round. But it still maintains that there has been no real action against Russia from this White House that includes whether it be sanctions or specific sanctions or this idea of giving specific weapons to Ukraine, like the Tomahawk missiles.

That has not happened with Russia, and every time we have heard President Trump say over and over again that he's frustrated with Putin, he has always stopped short of actually taking those actions against Putin. We'll see what comes out of the meeting with Zelenskyy and Trump at the White House tomorrow.

Kristen Holmes, CNN, the White House.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

[03:05:04]

BRUNHUBER: I spoke earlier with Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, and I asked him how the Trump-Putin phone call affected the move in Ukraine overnight. Here he is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OLEKSIY GONCHARENKO, UKRAINIAN PARLIAMENT MEMBER: We see that President Trump is actively involved and he is actively working on establishing peace in Ukraine, and that is great. Now his hands are free after the success in the Middle East, and I hope that this success will lead him to next success, stopping the war in Ukraine.

Also, we see that Trump understood what language works with Putin, when now he speaks much more tough about Russia, and when he speaks about possible delivery to Ukraine of Tomahawks, missiles, when he speaks about India stopping buying Russian oil, and India is more than one third of Russian oil export, so it's super important for Russia. All of this really works, and I think all of this made Putin to call to Trump, and all of this made Putin to agree for the new meeting, and it's definitely this new meeting will be super important, and I think that if Trump will go out from this meeting without agreement and without Putin agrees to stop the war, that will be humiliation for Trump.

So now we have a really new hope.

BRUNHUBER: I'm interested that you say hope, because certainly there were some fears expressed that Putin always seems to be able to talk President Trump down from acting. It seems like every time Trump gets tough on Putin, they have a phone call and suddenly he seems to soften. So are you not worried at all that that pattern will mean that Ukraine won't get the weapons you need to turn this war around?

GONCHARENKO: You know, we need to stop the war, we need to end this war as soon as possible. Yes, the best thing would be just to completely defeat Russia.

Unfortunately, for the moment, we are not on the edge of this. We need to stop this war, and it can't be made without speaking with Putin. So it's clear that Ukraine can't speak with Putin, Putin will not listen to us, and Putin just wants to take Ukraine, not to speak with us. So it's only Trump and Chinese leader, so it's only American leader and Chinese leader who can really make Putin to stop the war. I think that China is not interested in this. So United States of America is our main hope.

And that's why, yes, we have concerns. And yes, this meeting can go different ways. But still, it gives us a chance, it gives us a hope.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRUNHUBER: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is warning Hamas that there'll be a price to pay if it doesn't return the remains of deceased hostages in Gaza. On Thursday, he marked the anniversary of the October 7th attack on Israel under the Hebrew calendar.

Sources say that in a separate meeting with top security officials, he said he knows how many remains Hamas currently holds. He said Israel will, quote, "act accordingly if they're not returned."

Now Hamas is yet to return 19 sets of remains. A source told CNN Israel believes the group has access to at least six more bodies, but Hamas says that it can't reach any of them without getting special equipment.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu is coming under pressure to use humanitarian aid as leverage to get those remains back. An ultra-Orthodox lawmaker called on him Thursday to halt the peace deal with Hamas, including the flow of aid until all deceased hostages are returned.

Now, when it comes to aid deliveries, Israel says it's now living up to its side of the bargain. Jeremy Diamond has this report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN JERUSALEM CORRESPONDENT: Well, U.S. and Israeli officials now tell me that Israel is allowing the quantities of aid into Gaza that are required under this ceasefire agreement, despite this dispute over the number of remains of deceased hostages that Hamas is releasing.

We had been told on Wednesday that Israel was only allowing half the number of aid trucks required into Gaza, just 300 of the 600 required, as a retaliation for Hamas releasing too few bodies of these deceased hostages. But it turns out that Israel on Wednesday actually allowed some 700 trucks of aid into Gaza, according to internal numbers from COGAT obtained by CNN. COGAT is this Israeli authority that coordinates the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip.

And so what we're seeing is that there's a difference between some of the public rhetoric that is coming out about this ceasefire agreement and the disputes that are happening, and the reality that is actually happening on the ground. That doesn't mean that this ceasefire agreement doesn't remain fragile and quite tenuous.

[03:10:01] There's no question that there are some real disagreements here over the number of bodies that Hamas has released from the Gaza Strip. In fact, Israeli officials have submitted information to the United States about the remains of other deceased hostages that they believe Hamas knows about, despite the fact that Hamas has said that they have released all of the remains of deceased hostages that they know about or that they can access.

It seems that it's clear that one of the issues here is Hamas' ability to actually access those remains of deceased hostages in Gaza. And that's why senior U.S. advisers have told us that they actually believe that Hamas is complying with this ceasefire agreement right now, and that conditions on the ground are making it harder for them to release additional bodies. There are Turkish and Egyptian teams that are going to be working in Gaza to try and retrieve some of those additional bodies, which appear to be under the rubble of buildings struck by the Israeli military over the course of this war.

And this is not just an issue for the remains of those deceased hostages, it's also an issue about the bodies of Palestinian civilians, thousands of which are estimated to also be under the rubble in Gaza and it underscores the very long road ahead for Gaza's recovery and for us to really get a sense of the true death toll of this two-year-long war.

Now, as it relates to those aid quantities, even as Israel is stepping up the amount of aid getting into Gaza, there's no question that the needs are enormous, everything from food to shelter to medicine. And it will take weeks, very likely, for the situation in Gaza to stabilize and many hundreds, thousands even, of aid trucks to enter before that happens.

Jeremy Diamond, CNN, Tel Aviv.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BRUNHUBER: Sources tell CNN that the U.S. military has carried out another strike on a boat in the Caribbean. There are believed to be crew members who survived, but their status isn't clear. At least six separate strikes have been conducted on boats in the Caribbean, but this is the first time there are reported survivors.

The White House has said the strikes are part of an effort to combat drug trafficking. All this comes as the admiral responsible for U.S. forces in the Caribbean says he's retiring. Admiral Alvin Halsey has been on the job less than a year, sources say tensions have been growing between Halsey and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over strikes in the Caribbean.

Meanwhile, tensions keep escalating between the U.S. and Venezuela after President Donald Trump authorized the CIA to operate inside the South American country. The Trump administration says drug trafficking is part of the reason the agency was given that authorization. It's not clear whether operatives would have authority to remove President Nicolas Maduro.

CNN's Nick Paton Walsh has more.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The white heat here, distant from the president of peace image Trump seeks, the latest of five lethal strikes on tiny boats the White House has claimed are run by Venezuelan drug traffickers, building a narrative up to this strident presidential finding for CIA clandestine operations on land in Venezuela.

TRUMP: We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea.

REPORTER: Does the CIA have authority to take out Maduro?

TRUMP: Oh, I don't want to answer a question like that. That's a ridiculous question for me to be given. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn't it be a ridiculous question for me to answer?

PATON WALSH (voice-over): The gloves off with President Nicolas Maduro, a focus of the ire of Trump's first term defiant and now 12 years in power.

No to regime change, he said, which reminds us so much of the endless failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and so on. No to CIA orchestrated coup d'etat.

Trump tried softer pressure in 2019 when Juan Guaido led opposition protests that culminated in a failed insurrection and greater repression. After 2024's election, also widely condemned as fraudulent, Maduro launched a tougher crackdown, dozens were killed and more than 2000 opposition supporters arrested. In his second term, Trump is now using force, doubling the reward for information leading to the arrest of Maduro, who they accuse of running a drug trafficking empire to $50 million.

PAM BONDI, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: He is one of the largest narco traffickers in the world and a threat to our national security.

PATON WALSH (voice-over): The call for change backed by Maria Corina Machado, the opposition leader who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize that Trump had his eyes on, but who went into hiding after the 2024 vote. She says the opposition won.

MARIA CORINA MACHADO, VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION LEADER: Maduro has turned our country into a real threat to the national security of the United States and the hemisphere and we're going to turn Venezuela from that criminal hub into an energy hub that brings prosperity and security to our people first and foremost, but also to the rest of the people of the West.

[03:15:00]

PATON WALSH (voice-over): Maduro has denied claims he's linked to drugs and said he'll call a state of emergency if needed. His officials have said Trump wants regime change to seize Venezuela's oil and recall the CIA's sordid history of meddling in Cuba and Nicaragua and how badly that went. Yet Trump appears convinced something this time will be different.

Nick Paton Walsh, CNN, London.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BRUNHUBER: All right, we want to take you now live to Nairobi where Kenyans are bidding farewell to former Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The longtime pro-democracy leader died on Wednesday at the age of 80. His state funeral is being held at a stadium in the Kenyan capital and another public viewing will be held Saturday in the western county of Kisumu, close to his rural home.

We'll have a live report from the stadium coming up later this hour.

Another one of President Trump's political enemies has been indicted. When we come back, what happened to John Bolton's relationship with the president and why he's now facing charges?

And the United States looks to an Asian ally to build up and repair the American Navy's fleet of ships. Coming up, South Korea's role in U.S. shipbuilding. Those stories and more coming up, please do stay with us.

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[03:20:00]

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BRUNHUBER: President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, could turn himself into authorities as soon as today. He's now the third high-profile Trump critic to be indicted in less than a month. Bolton's facing criminal charges over his handling of classified information.

President Trump said he didn't know about the indictment when reporters asked for his reaction. Here he is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: He's a bad guy. Yes, he's a bad guy. It's too bad, but it's the way it goes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRUNHUBER: Bolton issued a statement slamming the President, saying, quote, "These charges are not just about his focus on me or my diaries, but his intensive effort to intimidate his opponents to ensure that he alone determines what is said about his conduct."

CNN's Katelyn Polantz has more from Washington.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Longtime government official John Bolton, he's the latest person indicted by the Justice Department in the administration of Donald Trump. Bolton was a national security adviser in the first Trump presidency, and what he's accused of here is a large collection of documents that he should not have been sharing. Prosecutors say that there are 18 different times where he had shared classified information or kept it in an unsecured way, largely in emails, which he had been writing up to himself as diary entries or notes of his time in the Trump White House in 2018 and 2019 as national security adviser.

Not only was he keeping those in an AOL account, he was also sharing them with two family members and prosecutors say that that email account was hacked by a foreign government, Iran, which then would have put the information that John Bolton had after his service in the Trump administration even more at risk.

Now, John Bolton does say that he would like to fight this, and he believes that this is weaponization of the Justice Department by Donald Trump against his enemies. And his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, the defense lawyer, says "The underlying facts in this case were investigated and resolved years ago. These charges stem from portions of Ambassador Bolton's personal diaries over his 45-year career, records that are unclassified, shared only with his immediate family and known to the FBI as far back as 2021."

At this point in time, the federal grand jury has returned the indictment after that lengthy, years-long investigation, and the court now will take a look at it. John Bolton is expected in court on Friday.

Back to you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BRUNHUBER: The U.S. government shutdown is now in its 17th day, and it's likely to extend into next week as senators are leaving Washington with no further votes planned for Friday or over the weekend. The House of Representatives remains out of session. According to a source familiar with the matter, Senate Republican leaders may shift their strategy and force a vote next week on a bill to pay federal workers affected by the shutdown.

Well, now to the political crisis in France. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu made it through two no-confidence votes in Parliament on Thursday. He won key support from the Socialist Party after he promised to put the French President's controversial pension reform on hold until after the 2027 presidential election.

Pension reform has been one of Emmanuel Macron's main policy goals, and suspending it comes as France struggles with a debt crisis. The Prime Minister still faces weeks of tough negotiations in Parliament over passing a more trimmed budget for next year, and he could still be brought down at any point.

Alright, still ahead, the pressing threat of climate change led to a historic agreement, we'll take a look at the results of the Paris Climate Accords 10 years later. Stay with us.

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[03:25:00]

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BRUNHUBER: Welcome back to all of you watching us around the world, I'm Kim Brunhuber, this is "CNN Newsroom." Let's check today's top stories.

Donald Trump will meet today with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House. On Thursday, the U.S. President announced he would meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Budapest, Hungary, within two weeks or so to discuss the war in Ukraine.

Israel's Prime Minister says his country will quote, "act accordingly" if Hamas doesn't return the bodies of deceased hostages from Gaza.

[03:30:00]

Israeli officials say Benjamin Netanyahu made the statement during a meeting with top security leaders on Thursday. Hamas says it cannot easily recover the bodies of the remaining 19 deceased hostages.

A federal grand jury has indicted President Trump's former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he was charged with 18 counts of transmitting and retaining national defense information. Bolton has denied any wrongdoing and claims the charges are politically motivated.

Well, it's been 10 years since leaders of 190 countries signed the Paris Climate Accords, which promised to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. Now, evidence at the time indicated that nature and humanity's ability to adapt to global warming would drop significantly if Earth's temperature remained above 1.5 degrees.

Scientists with Climate Central and World Weather Attribution have now put together a study to determine the success of these accords, and the results are mixed. The research indicates that projected warming this century has dropped from a whopping 4 degrees Celsius to about 2.6 degrees, so long as current emissions reduction pledges are fully implemented.

But they also found that the world now experiences, on average, 11 more hot days per year, and that extreme heatwaves have already become more likely since 2015. Scientists argue that the costs of not taking action to stop global warming are rising faster than humans are able to adapt to, and they're calling on countries involved in the Paris Climate Accords to do more to slow the changing climate.

I'm going to go live now to San Francisco, and Kristina Dahl, Vice President for Science at Climate Central. Good to see you again. Thank you so much for being here with us so early. So Kristina, a lot in there, mixed progress, as I said. So let's start

with this.

Your report says we've already gained 11 extra hot days per year since the Paris Agreement was signed. I mean, on the surface, that might not sound so bad. Why does that matter?

KRISTINA DAHL, VICE PRESIDENT FOR SCIENCE AT CLIMATE CENTRAL: Yes, it matters quite a lot. So the way that we defined a hot day in this analysis was looking at days that are hotter than 90 percent of all of the days in a given location. So those are the top 10 percent hottest days, and the reason we chose that temperature was that that's when we start to see heat-related deaths rise in a given location.

And so each day that we spend above that threshold is a day that's dangerous to our health and to our lives. So an additional 11 days on average across the planet is quite a lot, and it also masks the fact that many places are experiencing more than that 11 days, though there are some that are experiencing fewer. So each of those days of extreme heat is really meaningful to our bodies and to our ecosystems.

BRUNHUBER: Yes. So it's not just uncomfortable, they could be dangerous, even deadly. When we're talking about heat waves, do we know that they're actually the result of climate change?

DAHL: We do, yes. So there's a growing field called attribution science, in which scientists try to quantify, put numbers to, the amount that climate change is contributing to specific heat waves or to a trend in the amount of heat we're experiencing. So with this analysis, we were able to really quantify how much climate change has contributed to some really recent impactful heat waves, and we're able to look at how that might change into the future.

BRUNHUBER: All right. So your report suggests that the Paris Agreement could help the world avoid 57 hot days per year if countries follow through on their emission-cutting plans, but we have to say that is a huge if, right?

DAHL: It's a really big if, yes. So one of the successes of the Paris Agreement so far is that the amount of warming we can expect as a planet this century has dropped because of the pledges that countries have made to reduce their emissions, but they haven't dropped nearly enough.

So by the end of the century, we'd expect about two and a half degrees Celsius of warming, which is still very far above that two degrees C threshold that the Paris Agreement set, and the 1.5 degrees C aspirational goal that the agreement set. But even getting to 2.5 degrees Celsius is going to require countries to actually follow through on their pledges that they have made to reduce emissions.

And right now, many countries are off track, and they're not slated to hit those targets in their emissions reductions.

[03:35:00] So we both need for countries to step up and pledge to reduce emissions even faster, but we need them to also step up and meet the commitments that they have already made.

BRUNHUBER: Yes, absolutely. And on the flip side, you and I live here in the U.S., President Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Agreement again. What does America stepping back mean for the future of extreme heat globally?

And I guess I want to fast forward towards COP, the next conference that we're having without the U.S. taking the lead at the table here. What's that going to mean for another conference that you've outlined the stakes?

They're just so high right now without the U.S. leading there. What's that going to mean?

BRUNHUBER: Yes, well, the reality is that in this international stage, the U.S. has not been the most reliable actor over the last several decades. And so, while it's a shame that the U.S. is pulling out and won't be having a delegation at COP next month, the reality is that the world is moving on with or without the U.S. participation.

In terms of the U.S. emissions as part of the global whole, while we're one of the largest emitters, we still are only about 15 or 20 percent on an annual basis right now, even though we're the largest emitter historically. But it does mean that city and state level pledges within the U.S. to reduce emissions, when you combine those with other countries' actions, the countries that are taking action and moving forward on this rapidly, there's still a lot that can be done.

We still see many countries making new pledges to reduce emissions. We still see solar and wind energy prices coming way down and being built out at a scale that was really unfathomable even 10 years ago when the Paris Agreement was signed.

So even though the U.S.'s actions right now aren't aligned with the climate future that would keep us all safe, we do see a lot of action on the global stage, even without the U.S. being a leader.

BRUNHUBER: Yes, COP 30 in Brazil, less than a month away. We'll see what, if anything, is agreed to, and as your report shows how important not just those pledges are, but living up to them. Kristina Dahl in San Francisco, thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

DAHL: Thanks, Kim.

BRUNHUBER: Across Africa, the transport sector is facing ambitious plans to make the industry greener and more sustainable. One start-up in Tunisia is taking up that challenge with help from the power of the sun. "Connecting Africa's" Eleni Giokos reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ELENI GIOKOS, "CONNECTING AFRICA" HOST (voice-over): On the streets of Tunis, there's a new kid on the block when it comes to mobility. This two-seat plug-in electric vehicle fitted with solar panels is aiming to win the hearts and minds of Africans across the continent.

On the floor of the Bako Motors factory, engineers are busy building a range of solar-powered electric vehicles, from a compact car to cargo vans for last-mile delivery.

KHALED HABAIEB, COO, BAKO MOTORS (through translator): The Bee is a passenger vehicle, it is limited to 45 kilometers per hour, which makes it suitable for daily use. The Bee van is designed for logistics, last-mile delivery.

GIOKOS (voice-over): When fully charged, the Bee car has up to 120 kilometers in range. With a price tag starting at just over $6,000, it's addressing the challenge of affordability.

Fitted with a battery, it can be charged at home or on the road. But its solar panels are what Bako Motors believes gives it a unique advantage.

BOUBAKER SIALA, CEO, BAKO MOTORS: Solar cells provide us more than 50 percent of the new daily needs. For example, the Bee van, for commercial use, you can have free energy of about 50 kilometers daily. 50 kilometers per day, it means 17,000 kilometers per year, it's huge.

GIOKOS (voice-over): Bako Motors has big expansion plans. It has just broken ground on a second, larger factory in Tunisia. Expected to open at the end of next year, the company says it will manufacture up to 8000 vehicles per year for export to Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

SIALA: The addressable market in Africa is about one million vehicles per year. What we are targeting, it's maybe 5 to 10 percent of this market, it means maybe 50,000 vehicles in Africa.

[03:40:05]

We believe that the electric mobility transition will come in the next five, ten years in Africa.

GIOKOS (voice-over): And as another Bee car rolls off the production line, the company is betting that its future will be powered by the sun.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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[03:45:01]

BRUNHUBER: All right, welcome back. Let's take a look at some of today's business headlines.

The Trump family says their crypto investments have nothing to do with government steps to ease restrictions on the industry. Experts say the family's crypto investments have massively increased their wealth, but Eric Trump told CNN he and his father don't discuss crypto investments.

The U.S. budget deficit dipped slightly in the 2025 fiscal year. The Treasury Department says it shrank by $41 billion, settling at $1.775 trillion. Higher tariffs brought in nearly $200 billion in revenue, a key part of President Trump's economic agenda.

Investors on Wall Street are hoping for a Friday rebound. All three major indices fell on Thursday amid concerns about credit market turmoil and regional banks' exposure to bad loans. The Dow and S&P were down around two-thirds of a percent, the Nasdaq lost 0.5 percent.

China is blaming Washington for creating something of a global panic over Beijing's new rare earth restrictions. That's after Beijing announced sanctions against subsidiaries of South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean, alleging it's involved in a U.S. investigation. Hanwha is one of the South Korean firms helping the U.S. play catch-up with China on the high seas, as Mike Valerio reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MIKE VALERIO, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): From the moment you step inside this cathedral of cranes, the planet's biggest shipbuilding complex operated by H.D. Hyundai Heavy Industries in Ulsan, South Korea, and on nearby Geoje Island, a harbor where giants are born, run by Hanwha Ocean, you get the feeling you're in a city of ships.

VALERIO: We're here at the world's largest shipyard, and it is wild. Colossal ships everywhere.

VALERIO (voice-over): This single site builds about 10 times as many large commercial ocean vessels as the United States builds in a single year.

And South Korea's President Lee Jae-myung says his country can help, quote, "Make American Shipbuilding Great Again." President Trump has taken notice.

TRUMP: They build them very well in South Korea. They're also thinking about coming to our country with some shipyards to start us on the process of building ships again.

VALERIO: What we're looking at right now are about 20 vessels that are under construction all at the same time. Hyundai tells us this year it's expected to deliver 50 ships, all from this colossal facility in Ulsan, South Korea.

VALERIO (voice-over): Why it matters, China now builds warships at a pace the U.S. cannot match. It has a navy that's larger, backed by a network of sprawling shipyards. The U.S. has just four public shipyards left, down from 11 after World War II.

Shipyards back in the U.S. are jammed. Too few docks, too little capacity. So now, the U.S. Navy is sending some of its ships here to South Korea for essential repairs.

VALERIO: What's the most difficult part of all of this?

JEON YU-SU, GENERAL MANAGER, HANHWA OCEAN: Propeller.

VALERIO: Propeller.

JEON: Propulsion system.

VALERIO (voice-over): This is the third Navy cargo ship Hanwha's repaired, the USNS Charles Drew. H.D. Hyundai just started work on another Navy ship a few weeks ago. Danny Beeler is the principal engineer on the Charles Drew.

DANNY BEELER, PRINCIPAL PORT ENGINEER, USNS CHARLES DREW: Me as the person that's worried about all the maintenance on the ship and fixing things, I can get a lot more done in a shorter time period in a shipyard like this as opposed to one back home.

VALERIO (voice-over): The before and after difference, rust to renewal. It's work to keep the U.S. fleet running overseas.

Analysts say South Korean shipbuilders are known for finishing on time and on budget. One of their secrets? Components from nearby supply chains.

LEE JIN, VICE PRESIDENT, H.D. HYUNDAI HEAVY INDUSTRIES: Here in Korea, we can get that in one day or one hour, maximum one week.

JEON (through translator): Hanwha Ocean also has a supply chain established within 50 kilometers of the shipyard, which enables us to get necessary material or manpower from our established relations with companies to quickly repair a ship.

VALERIO (voice-over): A next step in the partnership could be South Korea building, not just repairing, U.S. Navy ships. But U.S. law would need to change. Foreign companies are barred from constructing American warships.

The Navy secretary says he is open to a change.

JOHN PHELAN, U.S. NAVY SECRETARY: In the short run, I have got to get holes in the water. And so that means all options are open. So we have to look at foreign and domestic.

VALERIO (voice-over): Hanwha already runs a shipyard in Philadelphia and wants to grow. Hyundai, too, is looking for a bigger U.S. foothold.

The question now, could parts of America's warships be built here in South Korea as the U.S. tries to revive a once mighty shipbuilding industry with South Korean help?

VALERIO: What about construction of U.S. Navy ships? Is that the goal?

JEON: Yes.

VALERIO: Yes. VALERIO (voice-over): Mike Valerio, CNN, Ulsan and Geoje, South Korea.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BRUNHUBER: Drawings by the French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renard will be spotlighted this weekend for the first time in more than a century.

[03:50:05]

The traveling exhibition called Renoir Drawings goes on display today at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. The exhibit features more than a hundred delicate works, drawings in pencil, pen, ink, and watercolor, as opposed to his legendary paintings. Renard was one of the leaders of the impressionist school founded in 1874.

This will be the first major Renoir exhibit to open since 1921, the display in New York closes in February and then it moves to Paris in March.

All right, stay with us here on CNN. We'll be right back.

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BRUNHUBER: Kenyans are saying farewell to former Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The longtime opposition leader died on Wednesday at the age of 80, his state funeral is taking place at a stadium in Nairobi. On Thursday, local media said four people died at the venue when police fired tear gas at a group of mourners amid a crowd rush.

CNN's Larry Madowo is covering this live from the Kenyan capital. So, Larry, things, at least when we spoke last, seemed more calm than yesterday, which saw things turn deadly. So take us through what's happening there and what you're seeing now.

LARRY MADOWO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Kim, it's a much calmer day today. This is the state funeral for Raila Odinga. He was the Prime Minister of Kenya 2008 to 2013 and has not even held public office in the last 12 years, but still remains the most consequential political leader in the country.

That is why he's getting this state funeral full military honors. He is one of the most recognizable African political figures. That's maybe a lot of you might be wondering, why is an opposition leader in Kenya getting this much attention?

But he has been in politics for most of the last three decades, and the last four Kenyan presidents beat him in elections but ended up having to work with his party. That's the kind of influence this man had.

Many of the people who've come out here for his funeral service say that they just called him Baba, meaning dad in Swahili, and President Ruto eulogized him as a father of democracy in Kenya. He sacrificed so much going to detention several times in the fight for multi-party democracy, helping usher in a new constitution in 2010, and being one of the most significant figures in the political life of Kenya in this region for a long time.

This is an abbreviated service because his family says he wanted to be buried within 72 hours, so they have this event tomorrow, a viewing tomorrow in the western part of the country, and a burial on Sunday. That's all in this quick abbreviated service. That's unusual for an African of his stature, such as the man that he was.

[03:55:08]

We saw some chaos, some violence yesterday at the Kasarani Stadium, that's the largest in the city, when crowds overwhelmed security services they fired in the air, leading to these four deaths, according to local media.

There's been criticism of the heavy-handed police use of force there, which is something that was very characteristic of so much of his public life, many demonstrations that sometimes ended up with people getting killed, and he spoke against that very strongly, so weird that at the end of his life, something like this happens again, but so far, there's a lot of very in-charge crowds here, people celebrating him, holding pictures of him, holding the Kenyan flag, and celebrating the life of a man who was so instrumental in Kenyan life over the last 30 years, Kim.

BRUNHUBER: Yes, such a huge figure, as you say, let's hope things stay peaceful. Larry Madowo in Nairobi, thank you so much.

Well, it is the end of an era. Ace Frehley, original lead guitarist and founding member of the rock band Kiss, has died. According to his agent, he died Thursday at his home in New Jersey, surrounded by his family and friends after a recent fall. Frehley was best known for his thrilling guitar skills and his elaborate makeup.

He and his Kiss bandmates sold tens of millions of albums in the 1970s, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. Frehley was 74 years old.

All right, thank you so much for joining me here on "CNN Newsroom." I am Kim Brunhuber in Atlanta. "Amanpour" is coming up for you next, then please do stay tuned for "Early Start," that is with Bryan Abel, and that starts at 5:00 a.m. in New York, and that's 10:00 a.m. in London. Thanks again.

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