CNN, KOLD, NBC, FBI, @FBIDIRECTORKASH, PIMA COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

By Danya Gainor, Chelsea Bailey, CNN

(CNN) — The search for missing 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie, mother of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, has stretched into nearly a third, anguished week, with mounting pressure on investigators and a family grappling with uncertainty.

Guthrie was last seen on January 31, before she was apparently kidnapped, disappearing from her secluded home in Arizona’s Catalina Foothills without her phone or critical medications.

The long days since she vanished have been marked by disturbing twists: purported ransom notes demanding millions of dollars, an intensive investigation, emotional video pleas from Guthrie’s children begging for the return of their mother and officials releasing video of an armed, masked person tampering with the doorbell camera at Guthrie’s home.

Here is a timeline of key events in the case:

January 31

Nancy Guthrie joins her family for dinner and game night Saturday evening, Ubering to her older daughter Annie’s nearby home around 5:32 p.m. Hours later, family members drop her back home. Guthrie’s garage door opens at approximately 9:48 p.m. and closes at 9:50 p.m.

“It is that time we assume that Nancy’s home and probably going to bed,” Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said at a news conference a few days after her disappearance.

February 1

Guthrie’s doorbell camera is disconnected at 1:47 a.m. and about 25 minutes later, surveillance camera software detects movement. At 2:28 a.m., data from Guthrie’s pacemaker app shows the device was disconnected from her phone.

More than nine hours later, at 11:56 a.m., the family realizes she’s missing when checking on her at home. A person close to the family told CNN Guthrie typically spends her Sundays watching virtual church services with friends at a nearby home. When she did not arrive Sunday morning, her friends alerted the Guthrie family.

Relatives call 911 at 12:03 p.m. to report her missing, and Pima County Sheriff’s Department patrols arrive by 12:15 p.m.

Investigators scour the scene, finding blood on the front porch which is later confirmed to be Guthrie’s.

“There’s still more items that have been submitted. We just haven’t got them back yet,” the sheriff would later say on February 5. “In the meantime, we’re not just sitting on our haunches waiting. We do have a number of leads coming in.”

February 3

On the third day of the search for Guthrie, several media outlets, including TMZ and CNN affiliates KGUN and KOLD, receive purported ransom letters demanding millions of dollars in bitcoin for her return. Read more

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By Alex Leeds Matthews, CNN

(CNN) — Competitions at the Winter Olympics are defined by extremes: extreme air, extreme speed and extreme temperatures.

On sliding tracks, athletes in luge, bobsled and skeleton break highway speed limits. In the halfpipe and big air competitions, snowboarders hit huge jumps, completing dizzying numbers of spins while airborne. They complete these feats often at elevations of more than mile high, where air is thinner, and at temperatures below freezing.

These charts show just how extreme the Winter Olympics can get.

Speed

In the summer, Olympic sprinters and swimmers try to push the limits of the human body alone on land and in water.

But in winter sports, athletes test those limits even further with the aid of gravity or vehicles such as skis and bobsleds to reach or exceed highway speeds.

The Vancouver 2010 Olympics saw some of the fastest-moving Olympians at the Whistler Sliding Centre — one of the fastest tracks in the world for bobsled, luge and skeleton.

The maximum speed reached on that course during the Olympics was by Austrian Manuel Pfister, who exceeded 95 mph (more than 150 km/h) during a luge training run. The next day, Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili fatally crashed on the course, a tragic reminder of the sport’s danger.

The most recent Winter Games at Beijing in 2022 had the fastest alpine skiing race in Olympic history, where gold medalist Beat Feuz of Switzerland won gold cruising at an average speed of 68.7 mph (more than 110 km/h). On that same course, Norwegian Adrian Smiseth Sejersted hit the fastest maximum speed: 86.8 mph (about 140 km/h).

Jumps

While alpine skiers race downhill, the jumpers turn their skis into wings, remaining airborne for distances of more than 100 meters, or nearly 330 feet – almost as long as an NFL football field. The men’s large hill record is more than 160 yards, set when Austrian Gregor Schlierenzauer jumped 146.5 meters in Vancouver.

The focus of snowboarding halfpipe and big-air competitions is often the tricks and landings. But the amplitude of the jumps are equally impressive. In Beijing, Japanese snowboarder Kaishu Hirano set the world record for halfpipe air: 7.41 m, or nearly 24.5 feet.

Two-time snowboard halfpipe gold medalist and 2026 silver medalist Chloe Kim has also gotten big air in the event: During the American’s third run of the 2022 halfpipe final, she exceeded 4.1 m, with a jump of 13.5 feet.

Elevation and temperature

The Winter Olympics are usually held in mountainous areas for easy access to ski events. While some host cities, such as Sochi and Vancouver, are close to local mean sea level, the venues for alpine skiing are typically higher.

This year, men’s skiing events will be held at Stelvio Ski Centre in Bormio, roughly 1,500 meters (almost a mile) above sea level. The feels-like temperature at the Stelvio venue has averaged just over 20 degrees F, below freezing for the first week of the Games, while the city of Milan has

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By Jacopo Prisco, Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — As he took his final steps before leaving the moon, Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan had some poignant closing words: “We leave as we came, and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

It was December 14, 1972, and Cernan knew his footprints would be the last to impress the lunar soil for a while, because the planned Apollo missions that were supposed to follow — 18, 19 and 20 — had long since been canceled. But he probably wouldn’t have guessed that, over 50 years later, his speech would stand as the last words spoken by a human on the moon.

Artemis II, which NASA is preparing to launch as soon as March after recent testing delays, will perform a lunar fly-by rather than a landing. Still, the mission will mark humanity’s first journey to the vicinity of the moon since Apollo 17.

So why has it taken so long for astronauts to go back?

“The short answer to that question is political will,” said Teasel Muir-Harmony, a historian of science and technology and the curator of the Apollo Collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. “It takes a whole lot of political will to send humans to the moon. These are extremely complex, really costly, major national investments. It has to be a priority over a sustained period of time.”

In the years since the Apollo program ended due to budget cuts, there have been a number of other federal initiatives to send humans to the moon again, Muir-Harmony added. “But what’s happened is that as presidential administrations changed, space priorities for these large-scale programs also changed. And so we just haven’t seen the sustained political will to follow through with a program that will take many years, significant funding and lots of resources in general.”

Les Johnson, a former NASA chief technologist who worked at the agency for over three decades, agreed that rapidly changing political objectives have been a key factor: “Every four to eight years, NASA has its human spaceflight goals and objectives completely, totally, radically altered,” he said.

“When I joined NASA in 1990, we were directed to go back to the moon by then President George H.W. Bush. But when President Clinton took office in 1993, he canceled that. He said, we’re going to make the space station happen — don’t do anything associated with going back to the moon,” Johnson said. “We did that for eight years, and then in 2001 we got George W. Bush, and he said, cancel all this other stuff and let’s focus on going back to the moon. So we did, and a project called Constellation was born, which survived the two terms of the second Bush presidency.”

The cycle continued with Barack Obama moving NASA’s priorities more toward sampling asteroids, and President Donald Trump coming in and shifting back to lunar goals. Then, after 2020, Joe Biden broke up the pattern.

“He was the first president in my career at NASA who did not change everything,” Johnson said of Biden. “He said, I really didn’t like a lot of what Trump did, but I think going back to the moon is a good idea. Let’s just keep going.” Now, in Trump’s second term, his administration has recently doubled down on returning astronauts to the lunar surface — intent on outpacing China in the new space race.

Political hurdles aside, however, moon missions also present a remarkable technical challenge. Earth’s natural satellite is roughly a quarter of a million miles (over 400,000 kilometers) away, and over half of all lunar landing attempts have ended in failure. The Artemis program —