US condemns 'unnecessary escalation' after Israeli airstrikes on Syrian airbase
US condemns 'unnecessary escalation' after Israeli airstrikes on Syrian airbase. The KRAK 11 News hour: The World Desk, Criminal Intent, Happy Animals, Sports. Real stories from named sources, read by Chip Marlowe and Deb Sarkissian.
Aired 2026-08-19 02:56 UTC · 5 segments · 12 min · complete transcript below
Rundown
KRAK 11 NEWS
Good evening. I'm Chip Marlowe.
And I'm Deb Sarkissian. Three people are dead tonight after a family got into difficulty in the sea off the Sussex coast. A fourth remains in critical condition.
This hour on KRAK 11 News: The World Desk brings you breaking developments from England. Criminal Intent has results from Florida's primary races as votes are still being counted. Happy Animals has a rough sleeping initiative the UK government is calling historic.
Historic is not what the advocates are calling it.
And in Sports: reaction from the family of Hayden Panettiere's former partner following the actress's sudden death on Sunday. That's the hour.
Still ahead on The World Desk: rescue teams were called to Shoreham beach yesterday afternoon. Three members of the same family did not survive. We'll have the latest from Sussex when KRAK 11 News continues.
THE WORLD DESK
Good evening. I'm Chip Marlowe.
And I'm Deb Sarkissian. We turn now to international news.
The globe graphic is running tonight, correct?
We have a map of Wexler County.
United States officials are condemning what they call an unnecessary escalation after Israeli airstrikes targeted a Syrian military airbase overnight.
The strikes hit targets near Damascus early Wednesday morning local time. Syria's government called the attacks quote, an unjustified act of aggression, that imperils regional security.
Syria borders three of the Middle East's primary trading provinces, which is why the State Department is watching this closely.
Syria borders five countries. None of them are provinces.
The U.S. maintains the strikes complicate ongoing diplomatic efforts in the region and has called for restraint from all parties involved.
No casualties have been reported. Israel has not commented publicly on the operation.
In China tonight, a major robotics company saw shares surge in its first day of trading on the Shanghai stock exchange.
Unitree, the world's largest manufacturer of humanoid robots, began trading on Shanghai's Star market Wednesday morning. Shares opened at nearly double the initial offering price.
Shanghai is China's industrial center and home to most of the country's manufacturing sector, which is why this listing matters.
Shanghai is China's financial center. The manufacturing sector is distributed across multiple regions including Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces.
The company produces robots for industrial, commercial, and consumer applications. Analysts say the strong debut reflects growing investor confidence in China's automation industry.
Unitree's humanoid robots sell for as little as sixteen thousand dollars, significantly undercutting western competitors. The company says it shipped more than thirty thousand units last year.
At sea tonight, new reporting raises questions about conditions aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier that has been deployed far longer than originally planned.
The USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego in January on what was scheduled to be a six-month deployment. The Navy has extended that timeline twice, with no confirmed return date.
Satellite imagery tracked by BBC Verify shows the carrier group has been operating continuously in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, which are among the world's most heavily trafficked naval corridors.
The Persian Gulf is a gulf. It is not a corridor.
Families of crew members have raised concerns about morale and maintenance schedules. The Navy says the extension is necessary due to ongoing regional tensions.
The Lincoln carries a crew of approximately five thousand sailors and aviators. This is now one of the longest continuous deployments for a U.S. carrier strike group in recent years.
The Navy has not said when the ship will return to port.
We'll continue to follow that story.
And still ahead tonight, a Wexler County woman is facing charges after allegedly staging her own disappearance to avoid paying a landscaping bill.
The bill was for eighty-seven dollars.
Criminal Intent is next.
CRIMINAL INTENT
Good evening. I'm Chip Marlowe.
And I'm Deb Sarkissian.
Before we begin tonight's blotter, I would like it noted that the segment title animation is running at the incorrect duration. Two point zero seconds was specified in Thursday's memo. It is currently running at one point seven.
The memo went to Larry.
Larry works in sales.
A Colorado man has been arrested after police say he attempted to smuggle seventeen pounds of methamphetamine inside a fake pregnancy belly.
Authorities became suspicious during a routine traffic stop when the suspect's prosthetic pregnancy appeared to be, quote, anatomically inconsistent.
The suspect is facing multiple felony charges including possession with intent to distribute. Police allege he had been using the same method for at least three months.
Prosecutors allege.
Prosecutors allege.
A Wisconsin man is in custody tonight after allegedly breaking into a funeral home and attempting to live there for what prosecutors describe as an extended period.
Staff discovered him after noticing food missing from the break room. Police said he had been sleeping in the casket display area for approximately two weeks.
He told investigators he chose the location because, in his words, it was quiet and had good climate control.
A Michigan jury convicted a forty-two-year-old woman of second-degree murder Thursday in connection with the death of her husband. Sentencing is scheduled for October seventh. She faces up to life in prison.
A New Jersey man was arrested after police say he stole a police cruiser during his own arrest and led officers on what one witness described as a very short chase.
The vehicle traveled approximately four hundred yards before striking a parked delivery truck.
Aerial surveillance would have shown the suspect's route from the arrest site to the point of impact, had KRAK 11 deployed aerial surveillance assets to New Jersey for this incident.
The suspect is a person of interest in at least two other incidents involving stolen vehicles, police said.
Police allege.
And voters in Florida went to the polls Tuesday to select candidates for governor and Senate. Results are still being counted in several key races.
Turnout was higher than expected in several counties. The Associated Press has not yet called the Republican gubernatorial primary.
Still ahead on KRAK 11 News, an animal story you will want to see. A pelican in Louisiana who should not have been where he was, and the fisherman who had no idea what to do about it.
That's Happy Animals, coming up.
HAPPY ANIMALS
Welcome back to KRAK 11 News.
Gordo, did the stinger run in the weight we discussed or did it revert again.
It ran fine, Chip.
It ran differently than Thursday.
An endangered sea turtle has completed a five-thousand-mile journey from Wales back to the Texas coast, where she was originally tagged in two thousand twenty-three.
The turtle, a Kemp's ridley named Dolly, was spotted by researchers at Padre Island National Seashore Thursday morning, seventeen months after she was last recorded off the coast of Pembrokeshire.
Kemp's ridley sea turtles are the most endangered species of sea turtle in the world. Fewer than ten thousand nesting females remain.
She made it. Five thousand miles of open ocean and she knew exactly where she was going the entire time.
That is genuinely extraordinary.
In Scotland, wildlife researchers have documented what they believe is the first recorded sighting of a Scottish wildcat swimming across open water.
The cat was filmed crossing a section of open water near the Cairngorms, an area where the species was believed extinct as recently as two thousand eighteen.
Conservation efforts began in twenty-nineteen with the release of captive-bred wildcats. Researchers say the population now numbers approximately sixty animals.
Sixty from zero in seven years. That is a species that decided it was not done yet.
A children's health study out of London shows significant lung capacity recovery in children living in areas where ultra-low emission zones were implemented.
Researchers found that children's lung function caught up with peers in less polluted areas within eighteen months of the zone's introduction.
The study followed eleven hundred children across five London boroughs and is the largest of its kind to measure direct health outcomes from emission policy.
Eighteen months. That is how long it took for a child's body to recover what pollution had taken. Deb, that is —
It's good news.
It is.
Still ahead, we'll have the results from tonight's high school football openers and a look at what's shaping up to be an unusual week in Major League Baseball. That's next.
Stay with us.
SPORTS
Time now for The KRAK 11 Scoreboard.
Deb, before we begin, I would like the scoreboard graphic to hold for an additional half-second on each item. It reads as authoritative.
The graphic holds for exactly one second, which is what we have used for ten years.
And I am suggesting we evolve the format to match industry standards, which have shifted demonstrably toward longer graphic retention times in sports coverage across all major markets.
Starting tonight with college football, where Ohio State opens its season Saturday against Akron with the Buckeyes favored by thirty-eight points.
Thirty-eight points is not a spread, Deb, it is a statistical inevitability dressed up as a wager, and it reflects poorly on the competitive balance of non-conference scheduling.
Ohio State beat Akron sixty-two to zero in twenty-twelve.
That was a different coaching staff, different roster, different offensive scheme entirely.
Same result.
The Buckeyes are ranked fourth nationally in Yahoo Sports' preseason poll and open August thirtieth in Columbus.
Moving to professional baseball, the Chicago Cubs walked off the White Sox in eleven innings Monday night behind Pete Crow-Armstrong, who became the youngest Cub to record four hits, two stolen bases, and score the winning run in a single game since nineteen eighty-four.
Nineteen eighty-four was Ryne Sandberg, one of the five or six greatest second basemen to ever play the game.
Crow-Armstrong is a center fielder.
I am aware of his position, Deb, I am providing historical context for the magnitude of the achievement, which for a twenty-two-year-old in his first full season represents the kind of breakout performance that defines a career trajectory.
The Cubs won four to three.
In formula one, Honda has publicly acknowledged it only realized the full scale of its engine reliability problems in January, nearly three months into preseason testing.
The team has not competed since November.
Which is the off-season, during which teams conduct extensive testing specifically to identify these kinds of mechanical failures before the competitive season begins.
During which Honda discovered its engine does not work.
And in competitive gaming, Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen has successfully defended his title at the twenty-twenty-six Esports World Cup, defeating challenger Hikaru Nakamura in a rapid chess final that lasted six hours and forty-three minutes.
Chess.
Competitive chess, Deb, which has been recognized as an esport by the International Olympic Committee since twenty-eighteen and carries a prize pool this year of four-point-two million dollars.
It is a board game.
It is a game played on a board by two competitors in front of a live audience of eighty-five thousand people, Deb, broadcast in fourteen languages, with real-time analysis and commentary that rivals any major sporting event.
Sitting down.
Carlsen is widely considered the greatest player of all time and has held the number one ranking continuously since July of twenty-eleven, which is a span of dominance unmatched in any major sport.
He sits at a table and moves pieces.
At a level you and I could not begin to comprehend.
Still ahead on KRAK 11 News, new reaction tonight to the death of actress Hayden Panettiere, as her former partner Wladimir Klitschko speaks publicly for the first time since Sunday.
Plus an update on the industrial fire in Toledo, where crews are still working to contain the blaze more than twenty-four hours after the initial explosion.
The next KRAK 11 News, at the top of the hour.
Reporting behind this episode
- US condemns 'unnecessary escalation' after Israeli airstrikes on Syrian airbase
- Chinese robotics giant Unitree soars in stock market debut
- Tracking USS Lincoln's months-long mission as concerns about conditions grow
- Key results from Florida primaries, so far
- Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone
- Hayden Panettiere's ex Wladimir Klitschko says family in 'profound shock and grief'