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By Samantha Waldenberg, CNN (CNN) — The US military carried out a strike Thursday on a suspected drug boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four people on board, according to a social media post from US Southern Command. “Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the post says. Alongside the post is a 21-second-long video showing the boat being struck. Thursday’s strike comes as the Pentagon is facing bipartisan criticism over a September attack on an alleged drug vessel in which the military fired follow-up strikes, killing surviving crew members. At least 87 people have now been killed in strikes on 23 suspected drug boats as part of a campaign, dubbed Operation Southern Spear, that the Trump administration has said is aimed at curtailing narcotics trafficking. US Navy Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley briefed leaders on Capitol Hill Thursday about that September incident in what is the most significant congressional scrutiny of the president’s military campaign in the Caribbean so far. Top House and Senate lawmakers emerged from the briefing, which included video of the incident, divided along party lines. A top Democrat called video of the incident that was shared as part of the briefing “one of the most troubling things” he has seen as a lawmaker. But the panel chairman, Republican Rep. Rick Crawford of Arkansas, said that he thought the second strike was justified. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, also a Republican from Arkansas, echoed that sentiment. It is unclear whether members of the public will get the opportunity to judge for themselves. Trump on Wednesday said his administration would “certainly” release video of the follow-up strike, but it had yet to do so as of Thursday evening – even as officials made public video of the more recent strike. Most Republicans have signaled support for the overall campaign, which a broad range of outside legal experts have argued is likely unlawful. But the September 2 strike has drawn bipartisan scrutiny as a potential war crime — including, most consequentially, a vow from the Senate Armed Services Committee to conduct oversight. Trump has indicated that the US is preparing to further escalate its offensive against alleged drug traffickers, repeatedly saying in recent days the military will soon begin striking targets inside Venezuela. “We’re going to start doing those strikes on land, too,” he said during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday. “We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live, and we’re going to start that very soon.” This story has been updated with additional details. The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved. The post US strikes another boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four, amid escalating questions about its counter-drug offensive appeared first on KRDO.

By Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky, CNN (CNN) — The two men killed as they floated holding onto their capsized boat in a secondary strike against a suspected drug vessel in early September did not appear to have radio or other communications devices, the top military official overseeing the strike told lawmakers on Thursday, according to two sources with direct knowledge of his congressional briefings. As far back as September, defense officials have been quietly pushing back on criticism that killing the two survivors amounted to a war crime by arguing, in part, that they were legitimate targets because they appeared to be radioing for help or backup — reinforcements that, if they had received it, could have theoretically allowed them to continue to traffic the drugs aboard their sinking ship. Defense officials made that claim in at least one briefing in September for congressional staff, according to a source familiar with the session, and several media outlets cited officials repeating that justification in the last week. But Thursday, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley acknowledged that the two survivors of the military’s initial strike were in no position to make a distress call in his briefings to lawmakers. Bradley was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the strike and was the top military officer directing the attack. The initial hit on the vessel, believed to be carrying cocaine, killed nine people immediately and split the boat in half, capsizing it and sending a massive smoke plume into the sky, the sources who viewed the video as part of the briefings said. Part of the surveillance video was a zoomed-in, higher-definition view of the two survivors clinging to a still-floating, capsized portion, they said. For a little under an hour — 41 minutes, according to a separate US official — Bradley and the rest of the US military command center discussed what to do as they watched the men struggle to overturn what was left of their boat, the sources said. Ultimately, Bradley told lawmakers, he ordered a second strike to destroy the remains of the vessel, killing the two survivors, on the grounds that it appeared that part of the vessel remained afloat because it still held cocaine, according to one of the sources. The survivors could hypothetically have floated to safety, been rescued, and carried on with trafficking the drugs, the logic went. The other source with direct knowledge of the briefing called that rationale “f**king insane.” The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, and Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who were also briefed, the military used a total of four missiles to sink the boat: two missiles in the initial strike, according to Coons, and two in the second strike. It was the most detailed account of the September 2 strike to date — yet it came no closer to creating a consensus view. It is considered a war crime to kill shipwrecked people, which the Pentagon’s law of war manual defines as people “in need of assistance and care” who “must refrain from any hostile act.” Although most Republicans have signaled support for President Donald Trump’s broader military campaign in the Caribbean, the secondary strike on September 2 has drawn bipartisan scrutiny — including, most consequentially, a vow from the Senate Armed Services Committee to conduct oversight. But after Thursday’s round-robin of closed-door briefings by Bradley, what had been poised to be the most significant congressional scrutiny of the campaign to date appeared to fracture along party lines. Interpretations of the video differed wildly: Cotton said he “saw two survivors trying to flip a boat, loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight.” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, called it “one of the most troubling…

Por Samantha Waldenberg, CNN Las Fuerzas Armadas de Estados Unidos realizaron este jueves un ataque contra un presunto barco de drogas en el Pacífico oriental, matando a cuatro personas a bordo, según una publicación en redes sociales del Comando Sur de EE.UU. “Southern Spear realizó un ataque letal contra una embarcación en aguas internacionales operada por una organización designada como terrorista. La inteligencia confirmó que la embarcación transportaba drogas ilícitas y transitaba por una ruta conocida de narcotráfico en el Pacífico oriental. Cuatro hombres vinculados al narcotráfico y terrorismo que iban a bordo murieron”, dice la publicación. Junto a la publicación se muestra un video de 21 segundos en el que se observa el ataque al barco. El ataque de este jueves ocurre mientras el Pentágono enfrenta críticas bipartidistas por un ataque en septiembre contra una presunta embarcación de narcotráfico, en el que las Fuerzas Armadas realizaron ataques adicionales y mataron a los tripulantes sobrevivientes. El almirante de la Marina de Estados Unidos Frank “Mitch” Bradley informó a líderes del Congreso este jueves sobre ese incidente. Noticia en desarrollo… The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved. The post EE.UU. ataca otro barco en el Pacífico y mata a cuatro, mientras aumentan los cuestionamientos sobre su ofensiva antidrogas appeared first on KRDO.

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN (CNN) — A high-traffic “dinosaur freeway” may have once stretched across a shoreline in what is now Bolivia. Traveling along this busy route were theropods — three-toed, bipedal meat-eating dinosaurs, which left behind thousands of fossil footprints. Paleontologists have now described their tracks for the first time, offering a rare glimpse into dinosaurs’ movements through their habitat. Scientists recently counted 16,600 theropod tracks — more than any other trackway site — at the Carreras Pampas tracksite in Bolivia’s Torotoro National Park. There the theropods stamped their feet into the soft, deep mud between 101 million and 66 million years ago, toward the end of the Cretaceous period. This study is the first scientific survey of the footprint-covered areas, which extend roughly 80,570 square feet (7,485 square meters). Some tracks were isolated, but many formed trackways, or multiple impressions left by the same animal, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. “Everywhere you look on that rock layer at the site, there are dinosaur tracks,” said study coauthor Dr. Jeremy McLarty, an associate professor of biology and director of the Dinosaur Science Museum and Research Center at Southwestern Adventist University in Texas. Most of the tracks were traveling north-northwest or southeast, McLarty told CNN. They were likely made over a relatively short time span, indicating that this area was a popular thoroughfare for theropods and could have been part of a larger dinosaur freeway that spans Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. Print shapes and the distance between the footprints revealed how the animals were moving; some strolled at a leisurely pace, while others sprinted through the muddy shoreline, and more than 1,300 tracks preserved evidence of swimming in shallow water, the researchers reported. Several trackways included drag marks from the theropods’ tails, and varying lengths and widths of the footprints suggested that the dinosaurs ranged greatly in size: from a hip height of about 26 inches (65 centimeters) to more than 49 inches (125 centimeters). Several hundred additional tracks at the site were made by birds that shared the shoreline with the dinosaurs. ‘Incredible implications’ Identifying thousands of individual prints and describing the different gaits “has incredible implications for reconstructing these ancient environments and how dinosaurs and birds used them,” said paleontologist Sally Hurst, who was not involved in the new study. Hurst is an adjunct fellow in the School of Natural Sciences at Macquarie University in Australia. The tracks are preserved at varying depths in what was previously soft, deep mud, “which can often end up recording a lot about how these animals moved their feet,” Dr. Peter Falkingham, a professor of paleobiology at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, told CNN in an email. “It’s the deeper tracks that preserve more of the foot’s motion, which is what I’m interested in, and they have quite long trackways of such tracks,” said Falkingham, who studies dinosaur trackways but was not involved in the new research. For example, swimming tracks “look distinctly different from the normal walking tracks,” McLarty said. When a theropod was buoyed up by water, its middle toe pressed more deeply into the mud, and the other two toes and heel left a much lighter impression behind. “Tracks are a record of soft tissues, of movements, and of the environments the dinosaurs were actually living in,” Falkingham added. This site, with its abundant tracks of different-size animals moving in various ways, “really brings these lost ecosystems to life in a way the bones don’t.” Leaving an impression Since the 1980s, Carreras Pampas has been known for its dinosaur tracks, but the scope and number had never been studied in detail, McLarty said. His team’s work raises new questions about this preserved slice of South American Cretaceous life, such as why nearly all…

A Ford F-150 buyer faces pushback after sharing he unknowingly purchased a damaged demo truck, refused a full refund from the dealership, and instead demanded a higher-priced replacement at no additional cost. The dispute surfaced in a detailed account posted on Reddit, where the buyer explained that he purchased a 2025 Ford F-150 on November 9, 2025, under the belief that it was a new vehicle. Meanwhile, the truck — a demo unit that the dealership had driven for staff use and test drives before selling at a discount — already had approximately 3,400 miles on it. According to the buyer, the paperwork labeled the truck as “new,” and the disclosure forms presented at the time of purchase didn’t mention damage. Several weeks later, though, he discovered signs of prior repair work on the front left fender. He described wrench marks on the mounting bolts, paint overspray on the window glass, yellow insulation foam protruding between body panels, and what he called clear evidence of “poor bodywork/repair.” The dealership’s offer Sold a "New" 2025 F-150 (Demo) with undisclosed body repairs. Dealer agreed to unwind but refuses to price match a replacement. Walk away or push harder? byu/Wearenotstrangr inaskcarsales Concerned that the Ford dealership sold him a previously damaged vehicle presented as new, he returned to the dealership and confronted them. According to his post, the staff did not accuse him of causing the damage. Once the manager examined the vehicle, he wrote that they acknowledged they could not explain the condition and immediately offered to “unwind” the deal by providing a full refund. However, the buyer stated that he did not want a refund; he needed a truck. He asked the dealership to move him into the only similar F-150 XLT on the lot, a silver model equipped at a higher trim level. That truck carried an MSRP roughly $5,000 higher than the one he purchased, and he argued the dealership should waive the difference as an act of goodwill since they had allegedly sold him a repaired vehicle as new. The dealership, however, declined. According to his account, they reiterated that he could either receive a full refund or pay the $5,000 difference to acquire the replacement truck. “Very unreasonable” That demand for a no-cost upgrade immediately caused a wave of criticism from commenters. One compared his expectation to buying a base-model BMW M4 and then insisting on a free upgrade to the competition package after discovering an issue. “It is very unreasonable,” the commenter wrote, adding that the logic behind expecting such an upgrade was unclear. The commenter called a $5,000 concession unrealistic. The dealership offered to take the truck back outright, which they called “crazy,” given that many dealers instead attempt to redirect customers into trade-ins that create negative equity. Another Reddit user emphasized that dealers discount demo units for a reason and that the buyer misunderstood what that meant. “OP: you bought a discounted demo unit. You got, essentially, an open box item with a full new factory warranty. You were not happy with what that means,” they wrote. The commenter stressed that the dealership did more than required by offering a full refund and effectively allowing him to drive the truck for five weeks at no cost. “You’re not ‘out’ anything, you got a free truck for 5 weeks,” they added. The same commenter argued that if the buyer wants the benefits of a fully new vehicle, he must be prepared to pay the current market price. “There’s a reason for the price difference,” they wrote. The dealership’s offer to unwind the sale is viewed by many in the thread as highly favorable to the buyer. While he continues to consider whether to accept the refund or negotiate further, the prevailing reaction online is that demanding a free $5,000 upgrade is unlikely to succeed — and that taking the buyback and shopping elsewhere may be his most practical option.