60 Minutes
For greater than 5 many years, 60 Minutes has lined all of it—from headline information to quiet human tales—match neatly in a single hour. Now within the digital age, we’ve extra time and use novel approaches to report the information.
Syria was dwelling to one of many first civilizations on earth; in the present day, the nation is choosing up the items from the ruins of humanity’s oldest sin. Half a century of dictatorship between Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez. Half one million lives misplaced in a civil battle beneath the youthful Assad’s hand.
Now that he is gone, Syria is looking toward its future. But earlier than the nation can plan what’s to return, its folks need the world to be reminded of what has taken place.
In May, Norah O’Donnell sat down with Pope Francis for a historic interview. The head of the Catholic Church for greater than a decade, Francis had beforehand by no means spoken at size with an English-language American broadcast community, and he spoke to 60 Minutes in his native Spanish.
In a wide-ranging dialog lasting greater than an hour, O’Donnell spoke with the pontiff about quite a few matters, together with the battle in Gaza. There is one Catholic church within the Gaza Strip, the Holy Family Church, and the pontiff instructed O’Donnell he calls there each night at 7 p.m. and speaks with the priest, Father Youssef Asaad.
Because his extra progressive method has created a division with traditionalists, O’Donnell requested Francis how he noticed his legacy.
“Church is the legacy, the Church not solely by the pope, however by you, by each Christian, by everybody…” he answered. “We all depart a legacy, and establishments depart a legacy. It’s a ravishing development. I get on the bandwagon of the Church’s legacy for everyone.”
In February, 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi reported on the challenges humanitarian support staff are dealing with inside Gaza as they attempt to ship meals, medication and well being care to Palestinians caught within the crossfire between Israel and Hamas.
“I do not suppose I’ve been this near the sound of missile strikes…with a hospital shaking whereas I’m attempting to function,” Dr. Nareen Ahmed, American physician and medical director of MedGlobal, instructed 60 Minutes.
Alfonsi and producer Ashley Velie have been reporting on Gaza for the reason that first Israel-Hamas battle in 2006. One stark distinction this time is the dearth of entry: Israel has barred journalists from coming into Gaza independently. While they had been in a position to communicate with Hamas management in 2006, for this story, Alfonsi and Velie needed to depend on support staff who documented their harsh actuality.
“This is uncommon,” Alfonsi mentioned. “There is a longstanding precedent of permitting journalists into the battle zones.”
In his bid for a second time period within the White House, President-elect Donald Trump made immigration a defining subject within the 2024 presidential race.
“The Republican platform guarantees to launch the most important deportation operation within the historical past of our nation,” he mentioned on the Republican National Convention this previous July, as his crowd of supporters held indicators bearing the phrase “mass deportation now!”
Trump has pledged to expel numerous migrants since at the very least 2015, when he was first operating for commander in chief. In the final 9 years, one factor has often come up when Trump mentions eradicating en masse the migrants who’ve crossed the border illegally: the identify of one other former president.
“You look again within the Fifties, you look again on the Eisenhower administration, check out what they did, and it labored,” Trump instructed 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley in 2015.
What the U.S. authorities did beneath Dwight D. Eisenhower was a large military-style sweep. U.S. Border Patrol brokers carried out raids to spherical up Mexican laborers from farms and ranches, then transported them deported deep into Mexico. Historians say this system tore households aside, violated civil rights — and at occasions, even turned lethal.
Moreover, those that have studied the Eisenhower administration’s method say this short-term show-of-force didn’t cease the issue.
For the season premiere of 60 Minutes, correspondent Cecilia Vega and a producing group supposed to report on tensions between China and the Philippines within the South China Sea. They didn’t count on to finish up in the midst of a world incident themselves, seeing China’s intimidation ways first-hand.
The plan was for the 60 Minutes group to accompany the Philippine Coast Guard on a routine mission to resupply its ships and stations aboard the Cape Engaño. While aboard the ship, the group was woken up at 4 a.m. by a loud bang, adopted by an alarm. A Chinese ship had rammed the Cape Engaño, the Philippine crew knowledgeable them, telling them to placed on life jackets and keep put inside their cabins.
Once again on deck, the 60 Minutes crew noticed the three-and-a-half-foot gap torn into the Cape Engaño’s hull. As daylight dawned, in addition they noticed what number of Chinese ships surrounded the Philippine ship, bows pointed at it. During the standoff, the crew aboard the Cape Engaño was unable to entry web or cell service, and the Filipinos mentioned it was possible as a result of the Chinese had been jamming their communications.
“It was scary. I imply, there isn’t any different option to describe it,” 60 Minutes producer Andy Court mentioned. “And I do not suppose something you placed on tv will precisely convey what it is like.”
This fall, 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim reported on the current success of the WNBA, the highest league of American girls’s basketball. Legions of recent WNBA followers are filling up arenas and tuning into video games. Attendance is up 48% throughout the league and TV rankings have surged 153% from final season.
One factor has pushed this enhance in viewership: rookie WNBA participant Caitlin Clark. Millions watched Clark’s efficiency within the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament earlier this 12 months and had been amazed by what has now turn out to be her signature shot: a three-pointer from simply inside mid-court, close to the house group brand, also called the “brand 3.”
Now a participant on the Indiana Fever, Clark took 60 Minutes to a Fever apply courtroom and confirmed Wertheim all of the completely different components that come collectively for this crowd-dazzling shot.
In New York City, there was a quarter-century-long effort to reclaim the lifeless.
On September eleventh, 2001, the our bodies of almost 2,800 folks had been buried at floor zero, decreased to nameless fragments in a grave made from concrete and metal. Most folks know of the seen bravery in decrease Manhattan that day, the the Aristocracy of the primary responders operating up the steps whereas everybody else was coming down. Less well-known was one other group of first responders, whose tireless effort to determine the victims has been quietly ongoing since.
Today, new know-how helps the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner preserve a promise to do no matter it takes, so long as it takes, to put names to the remains.
Ukraine has a landmine crisis.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion started two years in the past, Ukraine has turn out to be one of the crucial mined international locations on the planet. These hidden weapons are crippling the nation’s agricultural financial system and maiming — even killing — its civilians. Since 2022, landmines and explosive remnants of battle have contributed to greater than 1,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine. The HALO Trust, a nonprofit group targeted on ridding warzones of landmines, estimates the variety of mines in Ukraine in the intervening time to be within the hundreds of thousands.
“We should do not forget that the battle continues to be ongoing and is prone to for the foreseeable future,” mentioned Pete Smith, the Ukraine program supervisor for the HALO Trust. “So, many of those minefields should not really in attain of us at this second in time. But when Ukraine is ready to get better its territories, clearly a concerted effort goes to be wanted over generations.”
U.S. officers in Vietnam had been injured in a Havana Syndrome type assault forward of Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2021 trip to Hanoi. Now, new proof suggests Russia might have been concerned — and that it might have been the Vietnamese themselves who got know-how that might have induced the accidents.
At the time, the U.S. embassy in Hanoi introduced {that a} attainable “anomalous well being incident,” the federal authorities’s time period for so-called Havana Syndrome assaults, was slowing Harris’s arrival in Vietnam. 60 Minutes has discovered that 11 folks reported being struck in separate incidents earlier than Harris entered the nation: two individuals who had been officers on the American embassy in Hanoi, and 9 individuals who had been a part of a Defense Department advance group making ready for Harris’s go to.
“Once you admit that this occurred, it’s a Pandora[‘s] field,” mentioned Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist who at the moment leads investigative work for The Insider. “It requires you to confront the truth that you’ve your arch enemy performing in opposition to your personal folks, your personal intelligence staff, in your territory, and that is nothing apart from a declaration of battle.”
In May, Anderson Cooper reported on a photo album acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that turned out to be the non-public scrapbook of a high-ranking SS officer, Karl Höcker. Höcker labored on the infamous Auschwitz focus camp.
A play that has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, “Here There Are Blueberries,” is now telling the story of the historians and archivists who uncovered the identities of the folks within the haunting images. The play’s title comes from a sequence of photographs within the album— younger secretaries who labored beneath Karl Höcker are seen consuming blueberries.
They had been referred to as ‘Helferinnen,’ or ‘helpers,’ and so they weren’t simply younger girls who bought drafted and despatched there. These had been younger girls who, historians say, had grown up with Nazi ideology and knew full effectively what was transpiring at Auschwitz.
“Part of the communication that they needed to do was speaking the arrivals of trains, how many individuals had been chosen for work, and the way many individuals had been chosen to be gassed,” mentioned Rebecca Erbelding, a historian on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who in 2007 had acquired the picture album within the mail. “And in order that they had been sending these messages again to Berlin. So they completely [knew].”
In the final 12 months, hackers from world wide have teamed as much as assault tech firms, motels, casinos, and hospitals within the United States, taking their information hostage by encrypting it and demanding ransom for the keys to unlock it.
Jon DiMaggio, a former analyst who labored for the National Security Agency, now investigates ransomware as chief safety strategist for the cybersecurity agency Analyst1.
DiMaggio mentioned he has spent years growing relationships with ransomware hackers on the darkish internet and labored his means as much as the management of the ransomware gang LockBit.
“I noticed these guys are touchable…I can faux to be another person and exit and truly discuss to them and extract data,” he instructed 60 Minutes.
