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CNN Headlines: Migrant Children Facing Immigration Court Without Lawyers; Trump To Meet With Top AI Executives Today; Princess Diana's Brother Accuses King Charles Of Being "Elated" After Her Death. Aired 5:30-6a ET

Aired September 29, 2026 - 05:30   ET

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

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[05:30:05]

BRAD SMITH, CNN ANCHOR: It is half past the hour. Let's hit the refresh button on our top stories.

President Trump will be hosting a meeting with several AI leaders at the White House today. House Speaker Mike Johnson is also expected to attend. And the meeting comes as some industry leaders have been calling to slow down the pace of artificial intelligence development and increase regulation of their industry.

And for the first time since her triple murder case ended in a mistrial, Lindsay Clancy is back in court today. Clancy's attorney is expected to push for motions aimed at avoiding a second trial after jurors deadlocked 11-1. Prosecutors have not yet said whether they'll seek a retrial, but today's hearing could offer the first clues about what is next. Clancy admits that she killed her three children in 2023 but argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and did not have criminal responsibility for their deaths.

And closing arguments are set to begin this morning in the Caleb Flynn murder trial. The prosecution rested its case yesterday before the defense did the same without calling a single witness. Forty-year-old Caleb Flynn is accused of killing his wife Ashley and staging the scene to look like an intruder was responsible.

Prosecutors called 40 witnesses over seven days of testimony, building their case around Flynn's affair and challenging his claim that an intruder killed his wife. But one key piece of evidence was never found -- the gun used to kill Ashley Flynn. From the start, prosecutors insisted they don't need the murder weapon to win a conviction. The defense countered that its absence leaves a major hole in the state's case and raises questions about whether prosecutors can prove Flynn is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PATRICK MULLIGAN, FLYNN DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Is there a reason why gunshot residue testing was not done as one of the first priorities when you arrived on scene? DETECTIVE SGT. MIKE MORGAN, TIPP CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT: It was not done because we believe that with his timing -- that he stated he only took four to six seconds to get in the bedroom -- the gunshot residue would be there present on his body and we didn't want to rush to judgment and take him into custody that night.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: Prosecutors told much of their case through Caleb Flynn's own words with his text messages read aloud to the court.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SAMANTHA REEB, ANALYST, OHIO BUREAU OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION: : February 10 through June 12, Caleb sends Alleigha several messages about wanting Ashley to die. In one message, he states, "If I could literally kill her and not go to hell, I would do it in a heartbeat."

Between June 19 and June -- and July 16, Caleb and Alleigha message about wanting Ashley to die or disappear. August 22 of 2025, Caleb messages Alleigha about killing Ashley. In one of the messages he states, I was up till 4:00 a.m. last night crying and literally trying to think of ways to kill her and not go to jail."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: Flynn has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.

We've got some new details this morning out of Mississippi. A $5 million bond was set yesterday for Eric Clark. He's one of three men accused of killing a woman and hanging her from a tree. The 45-year- old is facing murder charges in the death of Tasia Fortune.

Investigators say Clark, along with two others, picked Fortune up from a home in Jackson last month. And according to police testimony, the group was allegedly trying to make some quick money. A witness claims the three men returned to the area without Fortune. Investigators allege Clark had the victim's purse along with a pocket full of drugs and money.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRISTY SPIVEY, TASIA FORTUNE'S MOTHER: And I don't believe my daughter would take the drugs. I believe that was pinned on her. She may have been with someone, but if she had known that was going to happen, she wouldn't have been with them. And they got to her before they got to the one that actually did it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: Authorities believe that Fortune was killed over a drug dispute and was dead before her body was staged from the tree. They have not released her actual cause of death.

A top Republican is breaking with President Trump. The majority leader of the Senate telling CNN Trump should not be using taxpayer dollars to fund political ads airing across the country.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN THUNE (R-SD): I like the message, but it shouldn't be paid for with taxpayer dollars.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: The White House is defending the ads, saying that they are like public service announcements, saying, "The announcements are very clearly not campaign ads." President Trump is not on the ballot, and there is no call to action but there are growing questions over whether they are even legal.

[05:35:05]

Here's former special counsel at the Department of Defense Ryan Goodman on the matter.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RYAN GOODMAN, FORMER SPECIAL COUNSEL, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: I just want to read one of the lines from one of the videos. It says in reference to President Trump, "He is the toughest, most resilient person I've ever met, and nothing was going to stop him." That is the textbook definition of self-aggrandizement and glorification of an individual executive official. And there's -- it could not be clearer. It says, "No part of any appropriation can be used for this purpose."

Last point, punctuation mark. There's a separate federal statute, the Anti-Deficiency Act. It says if executive officials use public funds that have not been appropriated, it's a crime.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: We should note that the latest ad is nearly identical to the majority of a video that Trump posted on Truth Social in January 2024 during his third presidential campaign.

The FBI is said to be operating under the assumption that hackers successfully sold data on all current FBI employees in a massive data breach. That includes home addresses and other personal information. Thousands of former employees are also potentially affected.

And this started a week ago when a hacker group claimed it broke into an online portal where that info is stored. The hackers demanded that the FBI change an advisory it had issued about the group because it was offended by what it said.

Now to a disturbing development in the handling of undocumented children in the U.S. Dozens are now attending deportation hearings in immigration courtrooms, but without an attorney to represent them. Some are as young as two years old.

CNN's Priscilla Alvarez reports with more.

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PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Migrant children are increasingly going through immigration court alone, the place where an immigration judge will decide if they stay in the United States or they're removed.

That was the case in a Texas immigration courtroom today, where 25 children appeared before an immigration judge, many without attorneys. That included an 8-year-old, a 9-year-old, a 13-year-old from Honduras who was ordered deported. Again, he did not have an attorney and during his back-and-forth with the immigration judge, he said, "I have no one. I have nothing" as he burst into tears talking there about Honduras, his home country.

Now there was also a 3-year old who played with the mic. His attorney beamed in remotely.

Now in some of these sketches that you'll see here, there are adults that are sitting with the children. Well, those are caseworkers They are there to supervise the children, not to provide them legal representation.

And it is becoming more challenging for children to get legal representation after the Trump administration allowed a contract for legal service providers to lapse. That was a contract that subcontracted to 100 legal service providers around the country. And the administration has since struck another contract. However, multiple sources I spoke with say that is not enough.

There is a large population -- hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children who need help in the courtroom as well as through the immigration process. And these are children who cross the U.S.-Mexico border alone or were brought into custody after a family member or guardian was detained by ICE.

Now these are children that are in shelters that are operated by the Department of Health and Human Services. And in a statement, an HHS spokesperson said, "Under the Trump administration, ORR remains committed to ensuring that every unaccompanied illegal alien child has legal representation in the immigration court."

But as was the case in Texas, there are still multiple children, very young children, who are continuing to go through this process and face deportation on their own.

Priscilla Alvarez, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SMITH: Thank you, Priscilla, for breaking that all down for us.

Next up on CNN HEADLINE EXPRESS, CNN talks to the brother of Princess Diana after he made damaging claims about how King Charles reacted to her death in a new book that's out.

Plus, the biggest AI and tech leaders in Washington to meet with President Trump about how to handle regulating what some say is already out of control. We'll talk to an expert about reigning in AI. That's coming up next.

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[05:43:50]

SMITH: We return back to our top story, as in a matter of hours, President Trump will be hosting a meeting at the White House with the leaders of top AI companies. The meeting comes as the government has been facing growing calls to impose guardrails on the rapid development of artificial intelligence. President Trump has downplayed such concerns.

And joining me now to discuss this further is Lance Ulanoff, who is the editor-at-large with TechRadar. Lance, it's good to see you here.

What are your thoughts about this meeting as Trump has been very much full steam ahead while some of the biggest leaders in tech themselves have been saying we need these guardrails? What comes from this meeting?

LANCE ULANOFF, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, TECHRADAR: Yeah -- well, hopefully, it looks like they want a middle ground, and I think Speaker Mike Johnson might be in there as well and they're looking to try and figure out how they can thread the needle here. Because even in the AI community, even in the industry, there is a split, obviously.

One of the most important players, Jensen Huang, who is the CEO and founder of NVIDIA, you know, doesn't want regulation and just introduced a tool that can provide sort of oversight to the system and development of AI without any regulation introduction.

[05:45:07]

But, of course, then you have Dario Amodei on the other side saying we need slow down. We need to have some sort of regulation, even if it is self-regulation. We need third parties inside our companies to watch over what we do.

And then of course you have, you know, the White House, which is saying no regulation at all. So it's all -- let's -- I think they want to get on the same page. But, you know, again, the White House is really interested in staying ahead of China in this race, and I think that will be their primary sort of attack on the discussion.

SMITH: Lance, where do you believe in aggregates some of the concerns that we've been hearing from tech leaders are coming from right now? Is it on the products that we have at our fingertips that we common consumers use every day, or is it something larger -- a larger driving force that they're seeing?

ULANOFF: Oh yeah, it's more. It's more the larger driving force. I mean, I'm less concerned and most people are less concerned about ChatGPT and Claude than they are the foundational models that all of these companies are developing and testing right now. Every time we hear a story about something happening, it's while they are testing the models.

You know, in the big Hugging Face incident in which like 700 agents basically joined together and kind of hopped out of the sandbox and went and attacked Huggy Face mainly to try and solve a problem.

And that is -- and what we're learning is that's not the only incident. That has happened repeatedly over the summer. In fact, it's happened so often that open AI has kind of pulled back on their IPO and it's just pulled back on releasing some of the models. So that is the bigger concern, you know.

There's this idea of recursive self-improvement where these systems now can build themselves and get better and better. And there's a feeling, I think in the industry even, that they're starting to not understand how these systems are working and building themselves. They've even starting to have their own language as they talk to each other.

SMITH: What do you think materially needs to be done to mitigate the potential damage that AI could possibly do?

ULANOFF: We really do need to have some global regulations. We do need to have China on the same page. You know, when the chairman visited Trump, I think he said that they want to keep, you know, AI under human control. And in order to do that, everyone has to be on the same page, you know.

When you're talking about technology, for better or worse, there really aren't borders. So every time like a state tries to make a regulation or even a country tries to make their own regulation, if everybody isn't doing the same thing, then the development and the ability of AI to sort of hop over fences and do things across borders is going to continue. So having global agreement and regulation is going to become critical. And I think that maybe that'll be one of the things that they'll start to discuss or realize during this meeting today.

SMITH: Yeah, and it's even led to some of the AI summits that we've seen take place in other parts of the world.

Lance Ulanoff, thank you so much for taking the time here with us.

Let's go around the globe to see what else is making headlines today.

Five men suspected in an alleged U.K. terror plot have been released on bail. They were arrested Sunday near an air base used by U.S. bombers during the Iran conflict. Police originally held them on suspicion of possessing explosives and on terror allegations.

And now President Trump is criticizing the decision to release them.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I'm surprised that they released them. I wouldn't have done that. Look, they've been very good. They're working with us very closely. We know everything about them. We would not have released them.

REPORTER: So you said might be -- Iran might be. Can you elaborate on that?

TRUMP: Well, I don't know. I'd rather not. I mean, I know the answer. I can be very specific, but I'd rather not say it. But I would not have released them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: British counterterrorism officials say that releasing the men doesn't mean that the investigation is over. They say all five will face strict restrictions on their movements.

All right. Hurricane Polo officially made landfall along the coast of Mexico's Baja California Sur. The hardest hit areas could see up to a foot of rain. Polo is expected to remain a hurricane and make another landfall in mainland Mexico today, bringing heavy rain and gusty winds.

And Prince Harry going above and beyond for charity and making good on a promise to a 102-year-old woman, a World War II veteran. Excuse me, a World War II veteran, 102-years-old -- my goodness. The prince traveled to Canada over the weekend where he took to the sky to raise money for veterans. And Harry had made a pledge last fall to Ed Marshall that they would parachute out of a plane together. After a medical evaluation. Marshall was not approved for the jump, but his grandson went in his place with Marshall cheering them on from the plane. What a visual. That's perhaps what was distracting me earlier.

[05:50:00]

Well, Princess Diana's brother has made several explosive claims about King Charles in his new memoir. Charles Spencer accuses the royal of being "elated" after his sister's tragic death.

He spoke to CNN's Kaitlan Collins about that moment. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: In the book, you talk about what it was like after her death and you're pretty unsparing in your writing about King Charles. And you said that -- you described him as "giddily elated" the night after her death and said that he sounded like a lottery winner.

CHARLES SPENCER, PRINCESS DIANA'S BROTHER: Yes. So I've only ever had two telephone conversations with the then-Prince Charles. And the first was one of a huge range of people calling me out of their own shock the day Diana died -- the morning after she was declared dead. And his tone was different. And people say, well, what do you think? I don't know what he was thinking, but it was just jarringly different to everyone else's tone on that day.

COLLINS: In terms of you -- he didn't seem sad to you? SPENCER: No -- well, he was -- he seemed more upbeat than I would have expected. He was relaying to me how he had told William and Harry earlier that morning about their mother's death. It just -- it just seemed different.

COLLINS: I mean, the images from her funeral still to this day are striking to look at and to see her two sons there. And you write about that moment that you did not believe that they should be part of the funeral procession and then Prince Charles argued that they should. And the two of you are going back and forth on it. And you said that Prince Charles said, "Rest assured, we'll forget her soon enough."

SPENCER: Yes.

COLLINS: He really said that to you?

SPENCER: He genuinely said that. I call it those five words. And I told people at the time about it close to me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: Buckingham Palace has pushed back against Spencer's claims in an unusually strong statement that attributed a reaction directly to the king. The palace suggested that Spencer's judgment had been hampered by his grief. We'll continue to track any developments there for you.

Still to come on CNN HEADLINE EXPRESS, you got to check this out. Some scary moments for roller coaster riders when an electrical glitch leaves them stranded in a vertical position. Yikes.

Plus, this school bus veers off a road and crashes into -- crashes into some trees, my goodness, and winds up dangling over a river. Details on this harrowing scene straight ahead. Keep it right here.

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[05:56:50]

SMITH: In today's Money Express, a new delay for the Boeing 737 Max.

Maribel Aber joins us from the NASDAQ MarketSite with that and the rest of your top Money Express headlines. Hey, Maribel.

MARIBEL ABER, CNN CORRESPONDENT, MONEY MATTERS: Hey, Brad.

So the FAA is delaying a certification of Boeing 737 Max 10 aircraft after a software glitch raised safety concerns. The federal agency didn't outline a specific flight safety issue but says it won't approve the jet model until it's satisfied there are no problems. It's the latest setback for Boeing's Max 10, which has already seen years of other production delays. Boeing stock closed down nearly seven percent Monday on that news.

Adobe is forecasting a record holiday shopping season with U.S. consumers expected to spend more than $275 billion, up 6.7 percent over last year. Cyber Monday is projected to top $15 billion in online sales, while Black Friday is expected to reach nearly $13 billion. And AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites is also expected to surge 130 percent year over year. The full holiday shopping breakdown can be found on adobe.com.

Hey, did you know it's National Coffee Day and there are piping hot deals and freebies being served. Dunkin' Rewards members can get a free medium hot or iced coffee with any purchase through the Dunkin' app today. It's also teaming up with LL Bean on a limited edition merch, including a branded sweater and mini drink tote. Starbucks is using the day to launch its new iced espresso, the Aerocano. Check with your favorite coffee shop today to see what other deals are brewing today.

Hey Brad, that free java calling you?

SMITH: Yes, it is indeed right now. My coffee order gets less and less intense, perhaps by the day's progression.

Maribel Aber, thank you so much.

Let's get a check in on some of the other stories making news across the country.

We start in Texas. That's where a ride in Austin -- it actually left people stuck in a vertical tilt position for nearly nine minutes -- my nightmare. The next day, the same ride stopped again for almost two minutes. Now, everyone was okay. The theme park called these unplanned stops, and it says it's all part of the ride's safety system that will stop the ride if there's an issue.

All right, take a look at this out of Massachusetts. A school bus was inches away from falling into a river after the driver veered off the road. Officials say it took hours for crews to stabilize the bus and move it back onto the road. Now, thankfully, no students were on board. The driver is okay. Authorities are investigating.

And in Tennessee, a trooper puts himself in harm's way to stop a wrong-way highway driver. CNN's Jeremy Roth has this incredible video.

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JEREMY ROTH, CNN PRODUCER-WRITER (voiceover): Take a look at the moment a Tennessee state trooper was forced to collide with an elderly driver going the wrong direction on an interstate. The state patrol said the trooper had little room or time to react but managed to swerve at the last second to avoid a direct hit, which would have been more serious. As it stands, the patrol says both the trooper and the driver are expected to fully recover from the incident.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

[06:00:00]

SMITH: All right. Protecting and serving and some quick thinking there, making sure that those drivers were also getting to their destination, avoiding that wrong-way driver.

Well, that does it for CNN HEADLINE EXPRESS. I'm Brad Smith. "CNN THIS MORNING WITH AUDIE CORNISH" starts right now.