Trump: We Can End The Opioid Epidemic; America's Opioid Crisis; Trump Releases Some, But Not All, JFK Assassination Records; Harassment Scandal
CURNOW: Hello, I'm Robyn Curnow at the CNN Center, you are watching News Stream and these are your world headlines.</s>CURNOW: A Senate is getting ready to vote on plans to take direct control of Catalonia while in Barcelona, independence protest says they are enforce. And the Catalan parliament is debating a draft motion to declare an independent state. Australia's deputy prime minister has been removed from parliament. Barnaby Joyce is one of five politicians ruled ineligible because of a law barring citizens from foreign countries from serving. Joyce says he didn't know. He held New Zealand citizenship and a sense renounced it. And U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis says Washington does not want war with North Korea and is committed to a diplomatic solution. He made the comments during a visit to the Koreans demilitarized zone, he says what the U.S. is a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons. And Myanmar has given the United Nations the go-ahead to resume flood operations in northern Rakhine state. That's according to Reuters news agency. Aid distribution to the Rohingya has been suspended for the two months. The U.N. has accused Myanmar's military of ethnic cleansing in the area.</s>CURNOW: U.S. President Donald Trump has declared a public health emergency to deal with America's opioid epidemic. But Democrats say the announcement like substance because it doesn't resolute and more money to combat the crisis. Republican lawmakers countered saying it redirects federal resources and nuisance regulations.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: As Americans, we cannot allow this to continue. This is a time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction, never been this way. We can be the generation that ends the opioid epidemic. We can do it.</s>CURNOW: And President Trump also said he'll address another drug problem when he travels to Asia next week. Fentanyl is a drug traffic in the U.S. and most of it comes from China as Matt Rivers now reports.</s>MATT RIVERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, when Donald Trump makes his first visit here to China starting on November 8th, one of the topics that he says will be on the agenda is Fentanyl. At an event in Washington D.C. on Thursday, the president said that China supplies the deadly drug to the United States that he wants Chinese President Xi Jinping to do something about it. For those of you who don't know Fentanyl, it's an incredibly potent opioid. It's some 25 to 50 times more powerful than heroin. If someone hundred times more powerful than morphine and because of that, it is led to many in overdose death in the United States during this ongoing opioid epidemic. And the present is right when he says that China supplies the drug to the U.S. The U.S. government believes that China is the number one supplier of Fentanyl to the United States and the reason for that is because China historically has had very lax regulations and its chemical industry. You have underground labs across the country with people cheaply producing these synthetic drugs, advertising them online and then shipping them to buyers across the world including the United States. And for its part, the Chinese government says it knows it has a problem. At a regularly scheduled Ministry of Foreign Affairs press briefing, a spokesperson responded to the president by saying that China is willing to increase bilateral cooperation on the issue through things like joint investigations and pointed to more tangible steps that the government has taken like back in March of this year, they actually banned four different kinds of fentanyl that up until that point had been legal to both produce and sell. They are now banned. And so that's what China says it's doing. But experts that we spoken do say despite all of that, it is really difficult to enforce these new laws and that large quantities of fentanyl are still being produced in China and shipped to the United States. For our own research earlier today, I went online to some of those drug market places where these drugs had traditionally been bought and sold. And I saw many in advertisement with Chinese labs advertising that they can ship fentanyl quickly and cheaply right now to the United States. Matt Rivers, CNN, Beijing.</s>ROBYN CURNOW, CNN HOST AND CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Matt. Drug deaths in America are rising faster than ever. There were more than 59,000 drug overdose deaths in the last in the U.S., according to the centers for disease control and The New York Times. That's up nearly 20 percent over after 2015 and indications are the problem continues to get worse this year. Just a reminder that we do have extensive coverage on America's opioid crisis on our website. Find out more on cnn.com/health. In 1963, America and the world watched in disbelief as President John F. Kennedy, the world's most powerful and protected man was killed. There have been so much speculations since it can be hard to tell where the facts end and the conspiracy theories begin. And that may have to remain the case for now. Thousands of documents have at last been made public, but President Trump is keeping some of those files private. Brianna Keilar is in Washington. Brianna, hi there. There was a lot of publicity coming from the president. He said it was going to be a big reveal. Was it as big as he has promoted?</s>BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: No, because there were at this point in time thousands of records that are still to be re- reviewed. That's the word coming from senior administration officials and maybe will get them at a later time. But the president did just tweet trying to explain all of this especially after he as you mentioned really publicized that these documents would be coming out. He said, "JFK files are being carefully released. In the end, there will be great transparency. It is my hope to get just about everything to the public." So, what we have so far, there is a lot, and it's very interesting, even if it is disappointingly incomplete.</s>KEILAR (voice-over): For decades, conspiracy theories have questioned whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy in Dallas nearly 54 years ago. In a newly released memo, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover expressed concern that Americans wouldn't believe he was the lone gunman. "The thing I am concerned about and so is Deputy Attorney Mr. Katzenbach, is something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin." The declassified document shedding new light on Oswald's contacts with Russian and Cuba. One document reveals that CIA intercepted a call Oswald made to KGB officer at the Russian Embassy in Mexico, less than two months before Oswald shot Kennedy. The memo's author says Oswald spoke in broken Russian. The FBI documenting a separate conversation about Oswald between two Cubans. One man saying, "Oswald must have been a good shot." A Cuban intelligence officer replying, "oh, he was quite good." As why he said that, the officer replied, "I knew him."</s>PHILIP SHENON, AUTHOR: The CIA and the FBI in particular had a lot of information before the assassination to suggest that this man, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a danger.</s>KEILAR (voice-over): Another suspenseful cliffhanger, whether Oswald worked for the CIA. In a 1975 deposition, Richard Helms, the deputy CIA director under Kennedy, was asked if Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or an agent before the documents suddenly ends without an answer. Even Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, is said to have entertained another theory to explain the assassination. According to Helms, Johnson claimed that Kennedy was killed as payback to the assassination of Vietnam's president and this was just justice, even though Helms said there was no evidence of this claim in agency records. But a memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the White House three years after Kennedy was killed details reaction inside the Soviet Union including conspiracy theories of their own, namely that Johnson himself was behind Kennedy's death. The source say the USSR believe there was some well organized conspiracy on the part of the ultraright in the United States to affect the coup. The documents also reveal the FBI received a direct warning, before Oswald's own murder during a jail transfer just days after Kennedy's assassination. A day before Oswald was killed, Hoover says the FBI office in Dallas received a phone call from a man talking in a calm voice and saying he was a member of a committee organized to kill Oswald, and share that information with the Dallas police chief, who "assured us adequate protection would be given." However, this was not done. Oswald's killer, Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, maintained he acted alone and denied making the call. And more may be coming, a White House official telling CNN the president was unhappy with the level of redactions requested by intelligence agencies, saying they not meeting the spirit of the law. Trump writing in a memo, "I have no choice today but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation's security.</s>KEILAR: But here is what is head scratching about this, Robyn. Intelligence agencies had 25 years to comply with the 1992 law that governs the release of these documents and yet they missed the deadline and they were sending request for redactions even late yesterday, so really at the 11th hour, and President Trump has now given them 180 more days to about six months to go back, look at the reasons for requesting information be withheld so that more documents may yet see the light. It does seem that is going to happen based on what the president has tweeted, Robyn.</s>CURNOW: This one is not over, is it? Will it ever be over?</s>KEILAR: No, it will never be over.</s>CURNOW: Brianna Keilar, thank you very much for joining us. One of the first woman to publicly accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment isn't finished speaking out. In her first television interview since she went public, actress Ashley Judd says it has been a tremendously moving couple of weeks. She told ABC's Diane Sawyer how she tricked Weinstein into letting her go when he confronted her years ago, but that the experience still haunts her.</s>ASHLEY JUDD, ACTRESS: And finally, I just said, when I win an Oscar in one of your movies, OK? And he like, yes, when you get nominated. I said no, when I win an Oscar. And I just fled, which I think, you know, am I proud of that? I'm of two minds. The part that shames myself says no. The part of me that understands the way shame works says that was absolutely brilliant. Good job, kid, you got out of there. Well done.</s>CURNOW: Well done indeed. Meanwhile, Harvey Weinstein has filed a lawsuit against the company he co-founded which has already fired him. He's asking the studio to turn over all of his company e-mail and his personnel file, saying he will be able to help the company defend itself against harassment claims. Well, the Weinstein Company has allowed him to access to its code of conduct. Donald Trump and Melania Trump are known for their public displays of affection. It is absolute claims but at least quite the opposite. On Thursday, they seem to be warming up to each other.