4 relatives, including 3 Americans, shot in Mexico; 3 adults dead, child in critical condition
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(DURANGO, Mexico) — Four family members, including three Americans, were shot in an attack in Durango, Mexico, that left three of the four relatives dead, officials said.
The three adults were all killed: two brothers who are U.S. citizens, Vicente Peña Rodríguez and Antonio Fernández Rodríguez, and their relative, who is a local resident, Jorge Eduardo Vargas Aguirre, the Durango Attorney General’s Office said.
Vicente Peña Rodríguez’s son, a minor, survived, and is in critical condition, the attorney general’s office said.
The attack unfolded on Friday night as the family was traveling in a GMC Yukon with an Illinois license plate, officials said. The SUV was found on the side of the Francisco Zarco highway.
Authorities are investigating whether robbery was a motive, according to the attorney general’s office.
(WASHINGTON) — America First Policy Institute, a think tank aligned with former President Donald Trump, is presumed by federal authorities to have been attacked by Chinese hackers, sources familiar with the matter have told ABC News.
AFPI’s Chief Communications Officer Marc Lotter told ABC News in a statement that “it is not surprising” that “hostile foreign actors” would target AFPI, noting it’s a leading Trump-aligned policy group.
“As the leading policy group in the America First movement, it is not surprising that hostile foreign actors would attempt to infiltrate our IT,” Lotter wrote. “The tactics, techniques, and procedures of the threat actor are similar to that of nation-state sponsored activities we have seen, allowing us to remediate and respond quickly.”
“Like the America First movement itself, AFPI will not creep at the speed of government but act at the speed of business with the world’s leading cyber experts to even further enhance our already robust security,” he continued.
Politico first reported the alleged hack.
AFPI is a policy advisory think tank group that houses hundreds of former Trump administration officials, including AFPI board chairwoman Linda McMahon, who has been named co-chair of the Trump Transition Team.
The reports of APFI’s being targeted by foreign actors come on the heels of alleged Iranian hacking of the Trump campaign.
The Justice Department unsealed an indictment last month that charged three Iranians over their alleged involvement in the hack of emails from former President Donald Trump’s campaign.
The indictment charged the men with a series of crimes ranging from computer hacking charges, material support to a foreign terrorist organization, identity theft and aiding and abetting.
Prosecutors say the three men were all employed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and engaged in a “wide-ranging hacking campaign” that used spear-phishing and other digital hacking techniques to compromise targets that included current and former U.S. government officials, members of the media, NGOs and “individuals associated with U.S. political campaigns.”
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LONDON — Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 22 of 28 Russian drones in Moscow’s latest overnight barrage, though acknowledged “several hits on critical infrastructure facilities” in the west of the country.
The air force said it also shot down three Russian Kh-59/69 cruise missiles fired at the central city of Kryvyi Rih.
Only three drones were unaccounted from the latest wave, the air force wrote on Telegram, one having been lost in flight due to jamming and two having left Ukrainian airspace.
The force reported “several hits” on targets in the western Ternopil and Rivne regions.
Oleksandr Koval, the head of the Rivne military administration, said on Telegram that the Russian attack targeted “an energy infrastructure facility.”
“All appropriate services are working at the scene,” Koval said, adding there were no reported casualties.
In Ternopil, military administration head Vyacheslav Nehoda said a drone hit an industrial facility causing a fire. “The fire was localized” and put out, Nehoda wrote in a Facebook update.
There were no casualties, Nehoda added, but “there were again problems with electricity supply for some subscribers.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry reported the overnight downing of one Ukrainian drone over the Bryansk region and one over the Belgorod region.
Russia’s long-range strike campaign appears set to continue through the winter in a bid to collapse Ukraine’s energy grid and exacerbate the war’s strain on the national economy.
President-elect Donald Trump’s November election victory has revived talk of peace negotiations after nearly three years of full-scale war. Both Moscow and Kyiv are maneuvering for leverage ahead of any potential negotiations.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hinted at the necessity for talks this week, telling Kyodo News that his nation must find “diplomatic solutions” to liberate territory occupied by Moscow since 2014, acknowledging that Kyiv’s “army lacks the strength to do that.”
But Zelenskyy suggested any talks — and any concessions — must be twinned with guaranteed protection from Western partners. An “invitation for Ukraine to join NATO is a necessary thing for our survival,” the president said following talks with European Union leaders in Kyiv on Sunday.
While diplomatic positioning continues, Zelenskyy is pushing allies to provide more weapons — particularly air defenses. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Kyiv on Monday, pledging another $680 million worth of arms for Ukraine.
The U.S. also announced a fresh tranche of military aid on Monday valued at $750 million. The State Department said the “urgently needed” weapons included Stinger air defense missiles, HIMARS ammunition, artillery ammunition and a variety of anti-tank weapons.
(LONDON) — Scientists have pinpointed a time frame in which Neanderthals began “mixing” with modern humans, based on the DNA of early inhabitants of Europe.
Analysis of the oldest-known genomes from early modern humans who lived in Europe indicates that the mixing occurred more recently than previous estimates, according to a paper published in Nature on Thursday.
The mixing likely occurred between 45,000 and 49,000 years ago — meaning the two genetically distinct groups overlapped on the European continent for at least 5,000 years, according to the paper.
Radiocarbon dating of bone fragments from Ranis, Germany, were shown to have 2.9% Neanderthal ancestry, which the authors believe occurred from a single mixing event common among all non-African individuals.
The mixing event likely occurred about 80 generations before those individuals lived, the researchers said.
The group from Ranis also represents the oldest-known family units, Arev Sumer, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and co-author of the paper, said during a news conference on Wednesday. Six individuals from the group were found to have a close kinship, including a mother and daughter.
The findings imply that the ancestors of all currently sequenced non-African early humans lived in a common population during this time, stretching from modern Great Britain to Poland, Johannes Krause, a biochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and co-author of the study, said during the news conference.
“This was rather surprising, because modern humans had just left Africa a few thousand years earlier and had reached this northern part of Europe where climatic conditions were rather cold — much colder than today,” Krause said. “It was the middle of the Ice Age.”
Groups of early humans previously studied in Europe showed very few cases of mixing between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, according to the paper.
The groups were represented by individuals from the Bacho Kiro region in Bulgaria and a woman named Zlaty kun from Czechia — believed to be part of the earliest population to diverge from the “Out-of-Africa” lineage, a small group of Homo sapiens that left the African continent about 80,000 years ago.
Within those two groups, the individuals from Bulgaria only suggest two mixing events with Neanderthals, while Zlaty kun’s lineage only suggests one mixing event, according to the paper.
Zlaty kun was found to have a fifth- or sixth-degree genetic relationship with two Ranis individuals, Sumer said, adding that the Ranis group was part of a small population that left no descendants among present-day people.
Neanderthals are believed to have become extinct about 40,000 years ago, Krause said.
The findings offer researchers a much more precise window of time in which the mixing occurred, as well as more insights into the demographics of early modern humans and the earliest Out-of-Africa migrations, according to the paper.
More research is needed to explore the events following the Out-of-Africa migration and the earliest movements of modern humans across Europe and Asia, Sumer said.
