Drug cartel gunmen kill 9 US citizens in an ambush in Mexico
MEXICO CITY — Drug cartel gunmen ambushed three SUVs along a dirt road, slaughtering six children and three women — all U.S. citizens living in northern Mexico — in a grisly attack that left one vehicle a burned-out, bullet-riddled hulk, authorities said Tuesday.
The dead included 8-month-old twins. Eight youngsters were found alive after escaping from the vehicles and hiding in the brush. But at least five had gunshot wounds or other injuries and were being treated in the U.S., where they were listed as stable, officials and relatives said.
One woman was killed after she apparently jumped out of her vehicle and waved her hands to show she wasn’t a threat, according to family members and prosecutors.
Mexican Security Secretary Alfonso Durazo said the gunmen may have mistaken the group’s large SUVs for those of rival gangs.
The bloodshed took place Monday in a remote, mountainous area in northern Mexico where the Sinaloa cartel has been engaged in a turf war. The victims had set out to visit relatives in Mexico; one woman was headed to the airport in Phoenix to meet her husband.
Bringing the world’s buried wetlands back from the dead
HINDOLVESTON, England — The ghosts are all around the gently rolling farmlands of eastern England. But you have to know where to look.
These are not the kind of phantoms that scare or haunt — they are ghost ponds. Through the years, landowners buried them, filling in wetlands so they had more land for planting crops and other needs, or let ponds fade away with neglect. Along with those ponds, they erased entire ecosystems — and contributed to the decline of wetlands worldwide.
The result: an array of environmental calamities, ranging from rising floods to species hurtling toward extinction.
There are some who are trying to reclaim these lost waterbodies. In the wetlands of eastern England, a motley team of farmers, university researchers and conservationists is digging into the region’s barley and wheat fields to turn back the clock. They seek out patches of muddy earth that hint at lost ponds lurking beneath.
Using chain saws, an excavator and plenty of sweat, the team takes just a few hours to resurrect one dying pond near Hindolveston, a thousand-year-old village not far from the North Sea. They fell trees and shrubs, then start digging until reaching their goal: an ancient pond bottom that once supported insects, aquatic plants and the birds and animals that fed on them.
ABC says interview with Epstein accuser wasn’t ready to air
NEW YORK — ABC News faced questions Tuesday about its reluctance to air a sensitive story of alleged sexual misconduct after a leaked video emerged of reporter Amy Robach complaining about how her bosses handled an interview with a Jeffrey Epstein accuser.
The conservative web site Project Veritas released video of Robach venting that “every day I get more and more pissed” that her 2015 interview with Virginia Giuffre never made the air. Robach made her remarks late in August while sitting in a Times Square studio with a microphone but not on the air.
ABC said Tuesday that the interview didn’t meet its standards because it lacked sufficient corroborating evidence. Robach, co-anchor of ABC’s “20/20” newsmagazine, said the leaked video caught her “in a private moment of frustration.”
The episode was remindful of Ronan Farrow’s accusations that NBC News discouraged his reporting on Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s misconduct. Farrow then took his Pulitzer Prize-winning story to the New Yorker magazine.
ABC sought to minimize the comparison, saying it has pursued and aired other stories about Epstein, the New York financier who died Aug. 10 while in police custody on sex trafficking charges.
