CBS News
Nurse and 8-year-old girl dead after troops shot at suspected cartel vehicles near Mexico-U.S. border, residents say
Human rights activists and relatives in the violent Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas, blamed the army and National Guard troops in the deaths of a nurse and an 8-year-old girl.
The relatives said over the weekend that the victims were apparently caught in the crossfire of gun battles with suspected drug cartel vehicles being pursued by military patrols. Nuevo Laredo has long been dominated by the ruthless Northeast Cartel, an offshoot of the old Zetas gang.
The Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee, an activist group, said in a statement late Sunday that another civilian was killed during another military car chase in the city. The National Guard is a military-trained and led force overseen by the Defense Department.
Civilian prosecutors in the border state of Tamaulipas – where Nuevo Laredo is located – refused to confirm or deny the three separate incidents that occurred Friday and Saturday. Federal prosecutors and the Defense Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The shooting deaths, if confirmed, would mark the second time in two weeks that Mexican military forces have killed civilians. It would also bring to three the number of children or adolescents killed in incidents involving military forces: an 11-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy were among six migrants killed, apparently by soldiers, on Oct. 1 in the southern state of Chiapas.
The first incident in Nuevo Laredo happened late Friday when a nurse, her husband and son found themselves on a roadway where soldiers were pursuing suspects’ vehicles.
The dead woman’s husband, Víctor Carrillo Martínez, told local press that “there was a confrontation” and his wife died “in the crossfire.”
At that moment, he said soldiers passed the family’s vehicle, but did nothing to aid them. “They went as if nothing had happened,” Carrillo Martínez said.
The Rights Committee said the 46-year-old nurse received a bullet wound to the head. Her husband said health care personnel told him “they were large caliber bullets used by soldiers.”
A day later, on Saturday, an eight-year-old girl and her grandmother were driving to a stationery store when they were caught in the middle of a pursuit in which soldiers or National Guard officers were chasing suspects.
The grandmother told reporters that a military vehicle was pursuing an SUV; her car got jammed in between the two and the military opened fire.
“When I looked, the car was covered in blood,” the grandmother recalled. “I looked at the girl and I said, ‘she’s bleeding out’.”
“I screamed, screamed at the soldiers, but because they didn’t want to stop, they didn’t help me,” she said.
The grandmother described them as soldiers, but her daughter said they were National Guard officers.
The confusion is understandable; the National Guard was created in 2019 under putative civilian command, but they have largely been recruited from military ranks and given military training. In September, control of the force was handed over to the military, and they usually wear military uniforms.
The commission said that, in a third case, a young man’s tortured body was found in a truck that the army and National Guard had been pursuing; it said no weapons were found in the vehicle.
“Nobody wants to touch the military”
Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office Sept. 30, gave the military an unprecedentedly wide role in public life and law enforcement; he created the militarized Guard and used the combined military forces as the country’s main law enforcement agencies, supplanting police.
But critics say the military is not trained to do civilian law enforcement work.
The army has been implicated in previous killings in Nuevo Laredo, where shootouts in the streets are not uncommon. In 2023, the Defense Department said 16 soldiers would be tried on military charges related to the killing of five men in Nuevo Laredo that year.
The May 18, 2023 killing of five men was caught on security camera footage so graphic that even López Obrador described it as an apparent “execution.”
JASIEL RUBIO / REUTERS
The head of the rights committee, Raymundo Ramos, said “the armed forces continue to have very large powers, very strong and above any civilian authority.”
“It appears nobody wants to touch the military in this country,” Ramos said.
In November 2022, gunfire in Nuevo Laredo forced the cancellation of school classes and an advisory from the U.S. Consulate to shelter in place. Earlier that year, the U.S. authorized the departure of families and some personnel at the consulate after drug cartel gunmen fired at the consulate building.
The first shootings under newly inaugurated President Claudia Sheinbaum occurred on Oct. 1 – Sheinbaum’s first day in office – near the city of Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala. The area is often used by migrant smugglers, but warring drug cartels also operate in the region.
Soldiers claimed they heard “detonations” and opened fire on a truck carrying migrants from Egypt, Nepal, Cuba, India, Pakistan and El Salvador. Six migrants were killed and ten were wounded.
Sheinbaum has pledged to stick with her predecessor’s “hugs not bullets” strategy of using social policy to tackle crime at its roots.
“The war on drugs will not return,” the leftist president told a news conference this month, referring to the U.S.-backed offensive launched in 2006.
AFP contributed to this report.
Sydney — Hundreds of mysterious black tar-like balls have washed up on two popular Sydney area beaches, prompting lifeguards to close the strands to swimmers.
“Mysterious, black, ball-shaped debris” began appearing on Coogee Beach in the Randwick area on Tuesday afternoon, the local mayor said, leaving flummoxed Australian authorities scrambling to find out what they might be and where they came from.
Hundreds of golf-to-baseball-sized spheres could be seen littering the coast, which is usually thronged with Sydneysiders and tourists.
SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty
Instead, a few seagulls wandered among the spheres, pecking and examining.
The balls were also spotted at nearby Gordon’s Bay, an aquatic reserve popular for snorkeling and fishing, which was also closed.
“At this stage, it is unknown what the material is,” Mayor Dylan Parker of Randwick city said in a social media post. “However, they may be ‘tar balls’ which are formed when oil comes in to contact with debris and water, typically the result of oil spills or seepage.”
The balls on Sydney’s picturesque shores aren’t the only unidentified objects to appear on beaches lately. Officials in Canada confirmed to CBS News on Tuesday that they were investigating blobs of a white “mystery substance” that have washed up since September on beaches in the far northeast Newfoundland and Labrador province.
Canada’s environmental agency told CBS News’ Ahmad Mukhtar that samples of the hundreds of white blobs littering beaches had been taken, but that both the substance and its origins remained a mystery.
Legendary Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance sank more than a century ago and its wreck lay undiscovered at the bottom of the Weddell Sea until March 2022.
Now, the team behind its discovery has joined forces with an Oscar-winning film crew for a new National Geographic documentary showcasing how they located the storied vessel’s last resting place.
“Endurance” features thousands of 3D scans shot by a 4K camera deployed to a depth of nearly 10,000 feet. It premiered at the London Film Festival last weekend before its release in cinemas and then on Disney+.
The never-before-seen footage captures everything from a flare gun and man’s boot to dinnerware used by the crew and identifiable parts of the vessel.
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
“We were absolutely blown away,” Mensun Bound, the 2022 discovery team’s director of exploration, told AFP. “We didn’t expect to see the ship’s wheel — the most emblematic part of the ship — just standing there, upright.”
History broadcaster Dan Snow, an executive producer on “Endurance”, called finding it in such a “stunning state” an “astonishing achievement”.
“No one’s ever found a wooden shipwreck 3,000 metres down in one of the most remote places on earth underneath the ice,” he said.
“It’s important because it is connected with this story of Shackleton and the 1914-16 expedition, which is one of the greatest stories ever told — a story of leadership and survival like nothing else.”
The flare gun that was discovered was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, as the ship was lost to the ice, the BBC reported.
“Hurley gets this flare gun, and he fires the flare gun into the air with a massive detonator as a tribute to the ship,” expedition leader John Shears said. “And then in the diary, he talks about putting it down on the deck. And there we are. We come back over 100 years later, and there’s that flare gun, incredible.”
Anglo-Irish explorer Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was meant to make the first land crossing of the frozen continent.
But its three-masted timber sailing ship Endurance fell victim to the treacherous Weddell Sea, becoming ensnared in pack ice in January 1915. It was progressively crushed and sank 10 months later.
Shackleton, who died in 1922, described the site of the sinking as “the worst portion of the worst sea in the world.”
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
He cemented his status as a legend of exploration by leading an epic escape for himself and his 27 companions, on foot over the ice and then in boats to the British overseas territory of South Georgia, some 870 miles east of the Falklands.
“I do believe of all the great survival stories I’ve ever heard of, this one takes the cake because it involves so many people,” said Jimmy Chin, who directed and produced the new film jointly with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
The husband-and-wife team behind Oscar-winning movie “Free Solo” saw the expedition organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust as a chance to “bring the story to a new generation.”
“The ultimate polar challenge”
The documentary alternates between accounts of the original and the 2022 missions, as the modern-day explorers conduct dozens of fruitless deep-sea dives using a state-of-the-art submersible as a deadline nears to leave before winter sets in.
A trailer for the film shows footage from the original 1914 expedition combined with video from the modern-day search.
Bound recounted the various challenges the latter-day team faced, including technology, research and climate, with one thing reminiscent of what Shackleton’s men confronted.
“Ice, ice and ice,” he said, adding that the documentary clearly highlights “the brutality” of the conditions they faced.
“This is probably the most difficult project I’ve ever been involved in… it wasn’t called the unreachable Endurance for nothing, was it?”
Shears also said there was a “real parallel” between the two endeavors and that like Shackleton he was drawn to “the ultimate polar challenge.”
“More people have been into space orbit than have ever walked on the surface sea ice where the Endurance sank,” said Shears, who previously led an unsuccessful attempt to find the wreck in 2019.
Chin and Vasarhelyi said combining the two stories was challenging but they were complementary.
“The two stories, even though they’re separated by 110 years, speak to each other,” said Vasarhelyi.
“They both chronicle this fundamental human condition of the audacity to dream big… have ambition, coupled with the diligence, determination, the grit and the ingenuity to see it through.”
To tell the original story, they opted to use AI to capture Shackleton and six crew members’ diary entries in their own voices, based on other recordings.
The filmmakers also used restored and colorized photographs and film expedition footage taken by Frank Hurley.
But audiences must wait until the closing stages of the documentary to see the new imagery of Endurance — a choice Vaserhelyi admitted felt “terrible” but necessary.
“This was a great story with a great payoff, but you have to earn it, right?” she explained.
“What’s nice is that the film really plays as this introduction… and it builds to this amazing moment.”
Delta Air Lines wants to elevate its passenger experience even before the plane leaves the ground.
The airline, which next year will celebrate it centennial anniversary, on Tuesday announced it is embarking on a “nose to tail” redesign of its interior cabins. The refresh includes new seat fabrics and materials, mood lighting throughout the plane, and memory-foam cushioning in some cabins.
The interior facelift comes as the carrier, which was badly hit by the global CrowdStrike outage in July, reported a third-quarter earnings decline of 26%.
The refresh is the result of extensive research on “customers’ changing expectations and lifestyles,” Delta said in its announcement, which emphasized the company’s dedication to “elevate the travel experience.” With passenger complaints surging in 2023, even low-cost carriers like Southwest Airlines are looking to provide consumers with a more premium flight experience.
“As we embark on our next century of flying, this refreshed cabin interior infuses utility with beauty to create an atmosphere that feels fresh, elevated and timeless while reflecting our customers’ evolving tastes and expectations,” Mauricio Parise, vice president of customer experience design at Delta, said in a statement.
Here’s a look at what Delta passengers can expect from the revamp.
Sleeker seating
Delta
Delta Comfort+ and main cabin passengers will enjoy seats made of engineered leather with updated colors and red accent stripes. On wide-body planes, Delta Comfort+ and main cabin seating will have the added luxury of memory-foam cushioning.
Delta
Premium passengers in the Delta One cabin will find seats upholstered in soft, breathable fabric seats made of a wool and nylon blend, according to the airline.
Despite differences in fabrics and materials among the different seating section, the redesign is meant to bring a premium look and feel for all cabins, making “everything consistent,” according to a promotional video, so that “no matter what, it looks brand new.”
Enhanced lighting
Delta’s new cabins will also feature what the company describes as “enhanced lighting programs” throughout the plane. “Every flight is different, so we’ve focused on creating warm, calming and atmospheric lighting options that create an environment for customers to rest and relax, or stay productive as they wish,” Parise said.
That include different lighting moods for different phases of the flight. For example, during boarding, “We’ve focused on the ‘moment of deceleration’ — warm and inviting lighting that makes the cabin appear spacious and open,” according to Delta.
Delta
At mealtimes: “We queue hues that feel like you’re at a candlelit dinner – making meals more natural and inviting.”
Sleeptime: “As the lights dim for sleep, we borrow from the sunset and slowly remove blue light while bringing in warm amber tones which are reminiscent of a sunset glow.”
Wake time: “When it’s time to wake up, the cabin slowly brightens into morning and daylight.”
Improved bathrooms
As part of the refresh, restrooms will feature bright walls and calming blue cabinets. New smooth flooring with specks of color will ensure “improved cleanliness and safe traction,” according to Delta.
Delta
The new cabin design will debut later this fall on narrow-body Boeing 757 aircraft flying domestic and short international routes, according to Delta. Renovated cabins on wide-body Airbus A35 aircraft will follow in 2025, with the rest of the airline’s fleet to follow over “the next few years.”