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Trump's Top General Looking for Off-Ramp from Iran War; Thai Teen Kills Five Teachers in School Shooting; Russia Hits Back after Ukraine's Strikes on Wildberries; Amanda Knox Comedy Show Faces Backlash; AI Creates Viruses from Scratch; Mosquitoes Changing Tactics to Survive. Aired 3-3:30a ET

Aired August 08, 2026 - 03:00   ET

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

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BEN HUNTE, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Hello. Wherever you are in the world, you are now in the CNN NEWSROOM with me, Ben Hunte in Atlanta. And it is so good to have you with me.

Coming up on the show, sources say Trump's top general is telling the president's advisers the U.S. needs to find an off-ramp in the Iran war.

And is Putin about to test NATO?

New intelligence says the Russian president may try to test Article V with an attempt to push the alliance into war.

Plus, scientists use artificial intelligence to create viruses never seen before in nature, while the rest of us are left asking what could possibly go wrong.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Live from Atlanta, this is CNN NEWSROOM with Ben Hunte.

HUNTE: Welcome.

The top U.S. general, whose job is to fight the war of Iran, says the U.S. needs to find a way out. General Dan Caine, who's the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is looking for an off-ramp in the conflict as U.S. military options remain limited.

Three sources familiar with the matter say Caine has privately made clear to other Trump cabinet members and top advisers over the last few weeks that military options on the table to escalate the conflict could backfire and that airpower alone is unlikely to achieve President Trump's stated objectives for this war.

Now this is highly significant that Trump's most senior general is privately arguing there is no easy military solution to end a war that the president chose to enter. Meanwhile, Iran is showing off some of the U.S. and Israeli aircraft

it brought down during the nearly six-month war. State-run media shared these images, saying they're of the remains of a U.S. Air Force F-15 fighter jet, plus several drones and what appear to be the engines of a commando Special Operations aircraft.

Beth Sanner is a former U.S. Deputy Director of National Intelligence and she tells CNN reports of General Caine looking for an off-ramp suggest the U.S. is at a crossroads for military options in Iran.

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BETH SANNER, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST, FORMER DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: I think it's an accurate portrayal of the conundrum that they're in. And I think that the president actually probably feels that way some of the time, too, but then he's ready to escalate.

And I think what General Caine is really clearly articulating in this reporting is that there is no military solution alone to this problem and, therefore, given all the expenditures of munitions, et cetera, we need to find a way out. But finding that way out is the big challenge.

Because you can't just keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, right?

That's the definition of insanity, as they say.

So I think that this is what the military folks are saying right now. And so, crossroads, yes. We have a crossroads in terms of a decision to make. But I think that it means that the military approach to this war has reached the point of no further progress can be made.

And so I call that, you know, it's a dead end for this military approach. So we have to figure out how do we switch gears. And I think the primary problem there is that Iran is playing hardball and they seem to have a higher risk tolerance than we do.

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HUNTE: The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed a NATO-style mutual defense pact in Mecca on Friday as the Iran war looms over the region. The agreement says that an attack against any of them will be regarded as an attack on all of them.

That means Turkiye and Pakistan could now potentially be drawn into the U.S. war with Iran. That's if Saudi Arabia comes under attack. Pakistan and Turkiye each share a border with Iran and both have strong reasons to prevent the conflict from spiraling.

The pact gives Saudi Arabia a powerful new layer of protection amid doubts over whether the U.S. can still be relied upon to protect its allies. Riyadh's relations with the United Arab Emirates have also frayed. This all comes as Israel expands its military reach across the region. People in Thailand are in mourning a day after the country's deadliest school shooting in recent years. Police say the 14-year old suspected shooter stormed the school, where he was also a student, and opened fire on Friday.

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Five teachers were killed and 30 other people were injured. The boy then shot himself and died later.

Police say the shooter allegedly killed his grandparents in the home that he shared with them before he went to the school. Thailand's prime minister says stress related to schoolwork may have been a motive in the shooting. Let's keep talking about it. CNN's Gage Goulding is live for us in Hong Kong.

You are now learning more about the teachers killed in the shooting.

What's new, Gage?

GAGE GOULDING, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Hey, Ben. This is according to the actual school itself and local Thai media reports here, identifying the five teachers that were killed in this attack that happened early Friday morning, painting a little bit of a timeline there.

You know, authorities saying that this 14-year old, just a young boy, opened fire, killing his grandparents around 4 am at their home about 90 minutes north of central Bangkok, got on a bus with a gun and rounds of ammunition and got to the school, where he then started shooting again around 9:30.

I want to show you this picture here. Those are the five teachers that have been identified as the victims in this situation. And the school also releasing a statement just a little bit ago, talking about those teachers and the incident itself.

And I'm going to read off my notes here. The school saying that they would like to share their deepest condolences over the shooting incident at the school and extend its support to the families of those who lost their lives and those affected.

They went on to share some other, more sentimental notes as well, including sharing those with everyone that had to face this tragic incident. Remember, this is, you know, five teachers, educators with about 3,000 or so students in the student body there, according to information provided by the district with last year numbers.

So I mean, there is a large number of folks here, Ben, that were impacted by this, that knew these teachers, including one of our own producers based in the area. Their son went to this school. Fortunately, he was not there Friday during the shooting.

But you know, we're told that, you know, he -- one of these teachers he lost was one of his favorite teachers. So there's a profound impact, including that we're understanding the Thai leaders are now bringing in mental and emotional support staff, roughly about 60 of those staff members, Ben, to help those students.

HUNTE: It is absolutely awful. So, so bad. We know that Thai leaders say that school stress may be a motive here.

But what do the teen's parents say?

GOULDING: Yes, you know -- and you said it earlier on that, you know, this young teen, 14 years old, he did live with his grandparents. We're not necessarily sure why that was the case.

But, you know, his father speaking with CNN saying that his son was guilty, that he did do this. He hurt those people.

Here's the thing, though, is he doesn't understand why. That's what he's telling us. He's also telling us that he has not seen his son's face since this whole situation transpired. And I'm sure those are details that we're going to be looking to get throughout the day, Ben.

HUNTE: (INAUDIBLE). Thank you so much for your reporting. Gage Goulding, appreciate it.

New video coming in to CNN shows massive fires after Russian strikes in and around Kyiv in recent hours. Ukraine says at least three people were killed and that's including one child. Three others were also wounded.

The fires broke out at multiple locations and the footage shows firefighters scrambling to contain large blazes. Russia has been ramping up its strikes as Ukraine faces a chronic shortage of U.S. Patriot missile interceptors.

U.S. intelligence believes that Russian president Vladimir Putin could try to test NATO's resolve in the years ahead. Three sources familiar with intelligence reports say U.S. officials believe he could launch a limited hostile action against a NATO country.

It could range from a cyber attack to a small scale incursion without necessarily crossing the threshold for a full response. The goal would be to test NATO's commitment to Article V, which says an attack on one member is an attack on all. One source says the most likely targets would be Baltic countries or Poland.

As the fighting in Ukraine grinds on, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is bolstering ties with a longtime Russian ally. He arrived in Serbia on Friday for talks on economic cooperation and security issues. Officials say the two countries will also discuss their bids to join the European Union.

The visit will likely strain Serbia's relations with Russia, which is its main energy supplier.

Ukrainian drones have been zeroing in on Russia's top online retailer in recent weeks, as Kyiv tries to bring the hostilities closer to home for Russia. As Fred Pleitgen reports, Moscow is responding with what appears to be a tit-for-tat approach.

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FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice- over): Russian drones allegedly hitting a warehouse in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, as well as a railway facility Moscow claims is linked to Ukraine's military.

Russia's army is drastically expanding drone strike on Ukraine's logistics and infrastructure. In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin trying to regain battlefield momentum shaking up his general staff. For the first time ever, appointing a coordinator for drone warfare.

Everybody knows well that we decided to create a new branch of the armed forces, the unmanned systems forces, he says. The goal was to find a person who had proven himself in the best possible way in this role.

Putin also ramping up missile strikes. A recent nighttime aerial blitz targeting Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, killing 17 people and destroying several warehouses.

Ukraine's President saying a shortage of U.S. made Patriot interceptors, exacerbated by extensive U.S. Patriot use during President Trump's war against Iran, has seriously weakened Ukraine's ability to defend against ballistic missiles.

Since the beginning of 2026, Zelenskyy said at a meeting with his General Staff, Ukraine started receiving just a third of the anti- ballistic missiles.

Russia's expanded air campaign comes just as Ukraine believed it was turning the tide in the 4.5 year war. Near daily, Ukrainian long distance drone attacks against Russian energy sites and Russia's largest online retailer have taken a toll, Moscow acknowledges.

Russian law severely restricts media from showing the aftermath of Ukrainian drone strikes but these are some of the places where Kyiv's drones have hit energy sites and warehouses in just the past five days.

PLEITGEN: The war certainly feels a lot closer to home for many Russians these days. A lot of them, quite frankly, are concerned about their safety amid the ongoing Ukrainian drone attacks. But there is also big fear about the state of this country's economy and whether it could sustain long-term damage.

PLEITGEN (voice-over): Thousands of small Russian businesses use online retailer Wildberries for sales. And those sales have often dipped so dramatically, some pickup points are shutting down, one owner says.

In order to break even, we need to make 250,000 rubles in profits but now we don't do it, he says. The last month has been entirely loss making. But so far, the Kremlin is showing no sign of changing course, instead, vowing to continue what it still called its special military operation in Ukraine -- Fred Pleitgen, CNN, Moscow.

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HUNTE: People hit the streets of Argentina in protests while also celebrating one of their most beloved saints.

Hundreds of Argentines marched outside of the government house in Buenos Aires on Friday. They walked from a shrine to the patron saint of bread and work. The group demonstrated against president Javier Milei's land and property reforms.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Behind the speeches about fiscal balance and markets, millions of working women and men suffer every day from a reality marked by wage losses, uncertainty, unemployment and fear of the future.

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HUNTE: In Sri Lanka, police fired tear gas after prison inmates attempted to break through parts of the facility. Officials say three prisoners were killed and dozens more were injured. Sri Lanka's prison system is under criticism for overcrowding. More than 41,000 inmates are held in facilities designed for about 11,000.

Officials say they plan to extend superior court judges' terms on the bench to try to reduce a backlog of more than 1 million court cases.

Amanda Knox, that's the American student convicted and later acquitted of her roommate's murder in Italy, is facing a new wave of backlash. She is set to perform a stand-up comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival.

But now the family of her murdered roommate, Meredith Kercher, are calling for it to be canceled. CNN's Ivana Scatola has more from Scotland.

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IVANA SCATOLA, CNN SUPERVISING PRODUCER: Amanda Knox is now doing standup comedy about the murder case that made her famous. The American woman who spent years in prison before being acquitted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher is performing here at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

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AMANDA KNOX, AUTHOR AND COMEDIAN: I'm not the first person to invent using comedy to talk about traumatic and difficult material.

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SCATOLA: The show, which is called "Cartwheel," is sold out for all 11 days of its run. It's billed as, "a woman approaching 40, juggling motherhood and finally getting around to being furious about the whole wrongful imprisonment thing, especially when half the world is telling her to get over it while the other half still thinks she's guilty."

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The show sparked backlash particularly for Meredith Kercher's sister, who told the BBC the case shouldn't be turned into a comedy.

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STEPHANIE KERCHER, MEREDITH KERCHER'S SISTER: I think in this case, it's a position where it's not a generic topic. It's targeting an individual traumatic case and an individual person and family. And I feel very strongly that Meredith wouldn't agree with that.

Our family's pain is immense. I can't explain to you how much pain our family have been through. And also, we're talking two decades later now.

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SCATOLA: There's also a petition online to cancel the show, which has received at least 9,000 signatures. Kercher was found stabbed to death in the apartment she shared with Knox in Perugia, Italy in 2007.

Knox and her then boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted of Kercher's murder and sexual assault and spent nearly four years in prison before being released by the appeals court in Perugia in 2011. Italy's highest court acquitted them in 2015.

Another man, Rudy Hermann Guede, was later convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was released in 2021 after serving most of his 16-year prison sentence.

Knox has defended the show saying it's really about motherhood and how one day she'll have to explain everything that happened to her in Italy to her daughter. She also says the show honors Meredith Kutch's memory.

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KNOX: I would hope that people will honestly engage with my work and recognize, like, the deep heart and sensitivity that I bring to it.

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SCATOLA: The venue hosting the show, Gilded Balloon, told CNN that as fringe venue, it provides a platform for a wide range of voices, in line with the festival's long standing commitment to freedom of expression.

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HUNTE: Well, it could be a breakthrough for medical research and the fight against diseases. AI has now created completely new viruses. A look at the potential for good and evil ahead.

Plus, humans have been killing mosquitoes for thousands of years but now everyone's least favorite insects are learning new tricks to dodge our swats. See you in a moment.

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HUNTE: Welcome back.

Scientists have now created new viruses from scratch using artificial intelligence. It could set the stage for medical advancements that will save some lives. Hadas Gold looks at whether there's any reason to fear what could be done with the technology, though.

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HADAS GOLD, CNN AI CORRESPONDENT: These scientists from Stanford University and the Arc Institute, they created their own AI model called Evo, that's trained on DNA sequences.

They trained it to recognize patterns of DNA that exist in nature and then to use that data to write recipes for entirely new viruses.

This is exactly the type of job that AI is best suited for. It's really good at looking at tons and tons of data, learning about it, figuring out the patterns that exist there and then creating new patterns.

And so through this, they were able to create 16 new viruses out of hundreds and thousands that they actually created but 16 new viruses that actually work, that have never existed before in nature.

One of those viruses actually, they found, was evolutionarily related to the viruses they were working at, meaning that potentially in millions of years, nature would have eventually created that virus.

So in a way, they sped up nature by millions of years and created this new virus. And this program does this so much faster than scientists would normally be able to do by hand. So there's good things and bad things that can come out of this.

Good is, of course, medical advancements. These scientists were specifically studying E. coli and these types of pathogens that could help combat E. coli, especially as certain things become more resistant to antibiotics. We need to find new ways to combat these sorts of diseases and bacteria that we have out there.

Of course, the potential bad is that you don't want bad actors to get their hands on these tools and what they could create. You don't want bad actors to create new viruses.

Now scientists do say that this isn't something you really need to worry about, because it is much easier just to take an existing virus that already exists out there in nature. And, you know, if you wanted to create a bioweapon, just spread that virus around or modify an existing virus.

So they say that the idea of bad actors creating wholly new viruses that never existed before, that's something to not really worry about right now. But, of course, just like with anything with AI, there's very good things that can come out of it and sometimes bad things.

But if you are interested in creating your own new viruses, you can do so because the scientists have made Evo, this AI model, open source, free of charge. Anyone can go download it and design new genomes themselves -- Hadas Gold, CNN, New York.

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HUNTE: And now to two dogs unlike any others on Earth. Bailey, the beagle, and his brother, Alfie, have been genetically engineered to not produce dander. That's the irritating condition where dead skin flakes off animals trigger watery eyes, runny noses and sneezing in humans.

The company that figured it all out is led by a man with bad dog allergies. He always wanted a puppy of his own and he says Bailey is now like a member of his family. Alfie went to a home in Florida.

There's new information about everyone's not-so-favorite insect. Researchers at Virginia Tech University in the U.S. say some mosquitoes are changing tactics in order to survive. That could make them harder to control and make the diseases they carry even tougher to stop, Meg Tirrell explains what it will take to stay ahead of them.

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MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: So it turns out mosquitoes are a lot smarter than we've been giving them credit for.

CLEMENT VINAUGER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, VIRGINIA TECH: There's also that -- that notion of mosquitoes adapting their behavior in response to the things

we do.

After many, many years of using the bed nets, mosquitoes started shifting the time at which they look for the humans to bite. So we saw rebounds in

malaria transmission for that. So there's a lot of elasticity in their behavior.

TIRRELL: And they were also really gross. Whoa, eww.

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I really don't like bugs.

We've come down to the labs of a scientist here at Virginia Tech who's been studying the brains and behavior of the world's deadliest animal. Let's go check it out.

VINAUGER: And then when they bite you, they actually inject some saliva in your bloodstream. And that saliva might contain some pathogens.

TIRRELL: They, of course, cause hundreds of thousands of deaths every year from malaria, spreading viruses like dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya,

Zika. We're also off to an early and ominous West Nile virus season here in the United States. So the news is not good when it comes to mosquitoes.

VINAUGER: For the past 150 years, we've had tools to fight back. We had insecticides. The problem is that they've started developing some

resistance.

TIRRELL: They also will remember people who try to swat at them and potentially avoid them in the future.

So they get whacked, swatted.

VINAUGER: Yes, yes. Exactly.

TIRRELL: They don't like it.

VINAUGER: And we have a publication showing that they actually can learn, you know, mechanical perturbations like that that we make swats.

TIRRELL: They're doing work here to try to get ahead of the bugs once again. They're doing this in some really incredibly fascinating ways.

VINAUGER: So we can sample people's body odor and using a technique that separates those, you know, hundreds of chemicals into individual ones.

And then the machine is going to separate all the chemicals from the blend and send them to the mosquito one at a time.

And if we recall from the antenna of the mosquito, you can tell which one is detected by the mosquito.

TIRRELL: What could we do with that information?

VINAUGER: So different things. You know, once you understand how they smell us, you can either use that information to create baits and lures to

attract them toward traps. Or you can start thinking about engineering some repellents.

TIRRELL: All of this, the researchers tell us, will help us better understand how to protect ourselves against a threat that's only growing in

its geographic distribution as climates warm.

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HUNTE: And that's all I've got for you. Thanks for joining me on the team. I'm Ben Hunte in Atlanta. I will see you at the same time tomorrow. "CONNECTING AFRICA" is next. 'Bye.