(PARIS) — Riots erupted for a fourth night across France over the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Nahel M., who was laid to rest on Saturday.
More than 1,300 people were arrested overnight throughout the country, according to the French Ministry of the Interior, as cars and buildings were set ablaze and stores looted. The damage was widespread, from Paris to Marseille and Lyon, with about 2,500 fires set, officials said.
Dozens of police officers and firefighters were injured overnight, as some 45,000 police officers were deployed in France to quell potential violence, officials said. It’s unclear how many protesters were injured.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told reporters that 45,000 police and gendarmes will again be mobilized Saturday evening.
The violent unrest in France kicked off after the teen was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic check in the northwestern Paris suburb Nanterre on Tuesday morning.
Lawyers for the victim’s family, who have roots in Algeria, identified him as Nahel M. A funeral for Nahel was held on Saturday in Nanterre. Mourners gathered at a mosque and on the street outside the cemetery to pay their respects.
Amid the unrest, the French government canceled large-scale events around the country on Friday. French President Emmanuel Macron appealed to parents to keep their children at home, noting that many of the protesters are young people.
On Saturday, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s office said Macron called to postpone what would have been the first state visit by a French president to Germany in nearly two dozen years, The Associated Press reported.
The officer who shot and killed the teen has been detained on suspicion of voluntary homicide amid an ongoing investigation into the incident, according to the local prosecutor’s office.
Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache said Thursday that the officer did not meet the requirements to discharge his weapon and will remain in custody awaiting trial.
France’s Inspectorate General of the National Police, which investigates allegations of police misconduct, is also conducting a probe into the fatal shooting.
Nahel’s family’s lawyers told ABC News they filed complaints against the officer accused of pulling the trigger and another officer who was at the scene.
Macron and Darmanin have both repeatedly called for “calm” as authorities investigate the teen’s death.
France’s national football team – including international star Kylian Mbappé — has also called for an end to the violence. “Many of us are from working-class neighborhoods, we too share this feeling of pain and sadness” over the killing of Nahel, the team said in a statement.
ABC News’ Morgan Winsor contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — As Canada and the U.S. continue to feel the lasting effects of the ongoing wildfires raging in the Great White North, environmental experts are pushing for long-term changes that they say can mitigate the damage from future blazes.
And with climate change making these once unprecedented wildfire events commonplace, those experts said governments on both sides of the border need to act fast.
“It has been an issue because we don’t have a strong federal government and it’s left us in this mess right now, Robert Gray, a wildland fire ecologist based in British Columbia, told ABC News.
Gray, who has studied wildfires in both the U.S. and Canada, said that higher temperatures, and dryer conditions have left the land in the eastern Canadian wilderness more susceptible to larger wildfires.
Even one lightning strike on a tree or brush could be detrimental as there is much more wood to keep the fire burning for a long time.
“These fires are reburning past fires that have been not that old,” he said. “The trees fall down and then it’s basically available to burn again.”
As for the current situation, some experts said the terrain and severity of the fire make it difficult to put out quickly.
“Because of the size of the fires, the weather is going to be the only thing now that’s going put them out. That means major rain, and in some areas, possibly snowfall,” Gray said.
John Gradek, a faculty lecturer and the coordinator of McGill University’s aviation management program, told ABC News that Canada doesn’t have a unified government entity that manages the country’s forests and handles disasters that take place in multiple provinces.
Those responsibilities lie with each province’s government, and because of that, he said there is not a coordinated effort between Quebec and Ontario with the current situation.
But even without that national oversight, Gradek said that emergency response teams can start to implement mitigation techniques that have been proven to curb forest fires.
For example, in locations such as British Columbia, California and Colorado, which have had more experience with major wildfires, forestry teams will do controlled fires to clear the underbrush at the beginning of the season, Gradek said.
“In the wildlands of the Quebec forests there is no prescribed program to clean up the forest floor,” he said.
Gradek said that government groups can also plan before the warmer months by deploying fire retardant substances from the air to lessen the chance of a spread once wildfire season starts.
Negar Elhami-Khorasani, an associate professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering at the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, told ABC News that at the very least local and federal governments should come up with policies and strategies that provide fair warning about the dangers of the wildfires.
Similar to hurricane plans near coastal cities, Elhami-Khorasani said it wouldn’t take too much time or resources to warn residents who live and work near wildfire-prone areas in Canada about dangers during wildfire season.
“Prior to the event, completing a risk evaluation and creating tools to predict what can happen can guide mitigation actions,” she added.
Gray emphasized that increased wildfires are a multinational problem throughout North America, and both the U.S. and Canada need to prioritize wildfire mitigation in all areas of the country as he predicted that this summer’s events will become more common.
“There is a political will to do this, and there is an outcry in the U.S. that is raising the word on the impact,” he said.
(LONDON) — Canada’s wildfire season is now the worst ever recorded as the country has exceeded the largest area ever burned in a year, totaling more than 19.5 million acres so far.
There are at least 500 active fires burning around the country, 257 of which are classified as “out of control”, according to Canada Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).
The scale of the environmental catastrophe is unparalleled in the country’s recorded history. In Quebec alone, 3.6 million acres have burnt in the wildfires so far. The average annual area that has burned in the past 10 years is 24,359 acres, meaning that the areas burned just in the last two months are approximately 147 times larger than an average year.
One fire, in the western province of British Columbia, is the largest the province has ever seen. The Donnie Creek fire now covers an area larger than the size of Rhode Island.
Rains have so far failed to provide relief for the ferocious fires as Canadian officials say heavy rains in Quebec have missed areas where wildfires are most active.
According to the report Canadian government, climate change is already affecting the frequency, duration and intensity of extreme weather and climate-related events in Canada.
The report adds that June has already brought above-normal temperatures across the northern Prairies in Canada as well as northern Ontario and northern Quebec. Throughout the summer, higher temperatures are expected to persist and experts say the extreme warmth at high latitudes is a clear connection to climate change.
The sheer number and size of the fires is only part of the reason why they have created such a problem for the country, with one key reason being the geographic spread. In a normal year, provinces might be able to help each other by sending resources to badly affected regions, but this year there are fires in nearly every single province which has caused a huge problem when it comes to figuring out the resourcing of fire fighting equipment.
The Canadian army has been mobilized in several provinces as international crews have arrived to help — most notably South African teams in Alberta and French teams in Quebec. The White House announced earlier this month that over 600 U.S. firefighters and support personnel have been deployed to help fight the fires.
South Korean teams are also expected to arrive in Quebec next week but the geographic scope of the fires still means resources that would usually be able to target one place have to now be spread unevenly.
(NEW YORK) — The State Department released a declassified version of its long-anticipated report Friday examining the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, unveiling the harshest critique of any of the administration’s efforts to examine its own handling of the crisis to date.
“The decisions of both President Trump and President Biden to end the U.S. military mission posed significant challenges for the [State] Department as it sought to maintain a robust diplomatic and assistance presence in Kabul and provide continued support to the Afghan government and people,” the report states.
The White House released portions of its broad review in April, drawing in part from the State Department’s probe, which was completed in March of 2022.
But that initial summary painted the Biden administration in far more glowing terms, asserting that the president “undertook a deliberate, intensive, rigorous, and inclusive decision-making process” but was constrained by his predecessor.
Biden did not specifically address the report’s findings when he was asked Friday.
“No, no. All the evidence is coming back together. Remember what I said about Afghanistan? I said Al-Qaeda would not be there. I said it wouldn’t be there. I said we’d get help from the Taliban. What’s happening now? What’s going on? Read your press. I was right,” Biden said.
The State Department’s review finds that some of the choices made by Biden “compounded the difficulties” diplomats faced in Afghanistan, such as the speed at which the military withdrew and handing over Bagram Air Base to the Afghan government in July of 2021, leaving Hamid Karzai International Airport as the sole evacuation route.
That airport later became the setting for some of the darkest, most frantic moments of the exit, including a terror attack that claimed the lives of 13 American servicemembers and scores of Afghans desperate to flee as Kabul fell to the Taliban.
While the White House previously said that Biden directed government agencies to prepare for “all contingencies,” the State Department inquiry found disorganization in the highest level of government, saying it was “unclear who in the department had the lead” on evacuation efforts.
The review also claims that senior officials failed to make critical decisions about which at-risk Afghan nationals would be airlifted before Afghanistan fell into turmoil.
Even as the Taliban amassed power and drew closer to Kabul, the report says that American officials failed to act with appropriate urgency and instead “seemed to rely on received assurances” from Afghanistan’s then-president that the country’s forces “would concentrate on the defense of Kabul and believed that they could hold the Taliban at bay for some time.”
Though estimates for how long Afghanistan’s military could retain control varied, the State Department review claims U.S. officials did not sufficiently plan for a worst-case scenario and failed to take decisive action once it became clear that scenario was a reality.
“We’ve already internalized many of these painful lessons and applied them in subsequent crises, most notably in how we managed the Russian invasion in Ukraine and in some of the aspects of our response to the crisis in Sudan a couple of months ago,” a senior official said.
Like the previous release from the White House, this report makes no mention of a message sent by dozens of diplomats from the U.S. embassy in Kabul in July 2021 that warned the country could collapse and urged the Secretary of State to speed up evacuation efforts.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have been urging the State Department to widely share its findings since the report was transmitted to select members of Congress in April, but it’s unclear whether the version released on Friday will satisfy conservatives. Only a quarter of the 80-page report was made public.
(PARIS) — Widespread rioting continued in the streets of France for a third night amid anger over the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Nael M.
Protesters erected barricades, set buildings and cars ablaze, threw fireworks at riot police and ransacked stores. Police stations, schools and town halls were among the buildings targeted. Riot police used tear gas, water cannons and non-lethal dispersion grenades to fend off violent groups.
A total of 875 people were arrested, 3,880 fires were started, 2,000 vehicles were burned and 492 buildings were damaged nationwide on Thursday night as curfews were in place in multiple cities, according to the French Ministry of the Interior. About half of the arrests were reportedly made in the Paris region alone.
“Last night, our police, gendarmes and firefighters courageously faced rare violence,” Darmanin said in a Twitter post on Friday morning.
Among those arrested were 14 people who allegedly broke into a flagship Nike store at the Chatelet station in the heart of Paris, according to an official in the Paris Prefecture Office.
Some 40,000 law enforcement officers had been deployed across France on Thursday evening to quell potential violence, including about 5,000 in the capital and its inner suburbs. Nearly 250 of those officers were injured overnight, according to the interior minister.
Protests over the teenager’s death also took place in Belgium’s capital on Thursday night, with some rioters allegedly attacking officers in Brussels, a spokesperson for the Belgian Federal Police told ABC News. A least eight people were arrested there, the police spokesperson said.
Dozens of police officers were deployed in the city center of Brussels on Thursday night and two subway stations were shuttered.
The violent unrest in France kicked off after a 17-year-old driver was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic check in the northwestern Paris suburb Nanterre on Tuesday morning. The officer has been detained on suspicion of voluntary homicide amid an ongoing investigation into the incident, according to the local prosecutor’s office.
Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache said Thursday that the officer did not meet the requirements to discharge his weapon and will remain in custody awaiting trial.
France’s Inspectorate General of the National Police, which investigates allegations of police misconduct, is also conducting a probe into the fatal shooting.
Lawyers for the victim’s family identified him as 17-year-old Nael M. and said they intend to file complaints against the officer accused of pulling the trigger and another officer who was at the scene. A funeral for Nael is set to be held in Nanterre on Saturday.
While tensions have remained highest in the Paris suburbs, almost every region of France has been hit with unrest since Tuesday. As a result, the southern port city of Marseille has banned all public demonstrations.
French President Emmanuel Macron and the interior minister have both repeatedly called for “calm” as authorities investigate the teen’s death.
(NEW YORK) — Weeks into Ukraine’s counteroffensive, political turmoil in Russia has raised new questions in the war and what it means for Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
In a fleeting but shocking show of rebellion against Russia’s top military brass, forces with the Russian paramilitary organization Wagner Group left the front line in Ukraine and claimed control of military facilities in Rostov-on-Don, a key Russian city near the Ukrainian border, late last week.
They then marched toward Moscow before the mercenary leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, ordered them to halt on Saturday and return to their field camps in Ukraine, saying he wanted to avoid shedding Russian blood.
The 24-hour mutiny marked the most significant challenge to Russian President Putin’s authority in his more than 20 years of rule. In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia appeared to be suffering “full-scale weakness.”
Amid the brief drama, though, little has changed on the 600-mile front in southern and eastern Ukraine, as Ukrainian forces look for breakthroughs in what “continues to be a very long hard, difficult and bloody fight,” according to retired U.S. Marine Corps Col. Steve Ganyard, an ABC News contributor.
“It’s important to take what was going on with Prigozhin and with Putin and put that into a Russia context, because that’s something that’s going on behind the scenes in Russia,” Ganyard said. “As of now, it’s not going to have any significant effect on the battlefield. The battlefield remains what it was.”
Counteroffensive a ‘long, hard slog’
Ukraine’s probing operations followed a stagnant period during the winter, when the Russians had months to build up three lines of defense, with layers of minefields, tank traps and trenches, according to Ganyard.
“The Ukrainians haven’t even gotten through the first line of defense anywhere along the front lines,” he said.
Whether Ukraine has the equipment and manpower to make a major breakthrough against those fortified defenses will be pivotal in the direction of the war — and its possible end, Ganyard said.
“The world really hasn’t seen a fight like this, hasn’t seen a war like this, for almost 100 years. It’s very reminiscent of the Western Front in World War I, where you had trenches and progress was measured in hundreds of feet per day,” he said.
“Even today, where there’s some quote-unquote breakthroughs going on, we’ve seen the Ukrainians making advances of less than a mile per day,” he continued. “So it’s a long, hard slog. It’s gonna be very bloody, it’s gonna take a lot of men, material, and a lot of people are gonna get hurt along the way.”
As Ukrainian forces advance, they’re looking for weaknesses and lightly manned places along the long front line; it could take weeks or months to make a potentially “catastrophic breakthrough” that could signal success for the Ukrainians, according to Ganyard.
The static battlefield during the winter has given Ukraine time to train soldiers with new equipment from the U.S. and NATO — “theoretically it’s a better military than it was, say, 12 or 14 months ago” — though in some ways, Russia has an advantage being on the defensive and protected behind the multiple layers of trenches, Ganyard said.
Ukraine also may be at a disadvantage in terms of manpower and lack the 3-to-1 advantage of an attacker over a defender that is a “general truism in war,” he said.
“If things go badly for the Ukrainians, where they continue to lose men and machines at a rate that they can’t replace, then we are looking at another few months where we may end up in stalemate,” Ganyard said. “So it’s really going to depend on how well the Russians defend, whether the Ukrainians can find a breakthrough, and whether the Ukrainians have the means and the will to continue a fight even when they are at a sort of parity in a very defensive position with the Russians.”
The Institute for the Study of War said at the onset of Ukraine’s counteroffensive that the attack will likely vary in size and intensity over “many weeks,” with the initial phase likely to be the “most difficult and slowest” and resulting in the greatest Ukrainian losses as they go up against the prepared defense.
“Militaries have long identified the penetration phase of a mechanized offensive as the most dangerous and costly,” it said. “The success or failure of this phase may not be apparent for some time.”
Zelenskyy admitted in an interview with the BBC last week that progress has been “slower than desired.”
“Some people believe this is a Hollywood movie and expect results now. It’s not,” Zelenskyy said.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a news conference in Brussels last week that Ukraine is in the “early stages” of its offensive operations and that it would be “premature” to estimate how long the counteroffensive could last given that “there are several hundred thousand Russian troops dug in and prepared positions all along the front line.”
“This is a very difficult fight. It is a very violent fight. And it will likely take a considerable amount of time at high cost,” he said.
Potential impact of Wagner rebellion
Then there’s the question of the Wagner Group and Prigozhin, whose march toward Moscow represented the “most significant challenge to the Russian state in recent times,” the U.K. Ministry of Defense said on Saturday.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters this week that it’s “too soon to tell” what the impact of the Wagner rebellion could be on the ground in Ukraine.
Prigozhin had clashed for months with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, over the conduct of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Prior to the rebellion, Prigozhin, once a close ally of Putin, accused the Russian military of deliberately shelling his fighters in Ukraine.
After Prigozhin ordered his soldiers to halt their march on Moscow, the Kremlin announced it had made a deal that the mercenary leader will move to the neighboring country of Belarus and receive amnesty, along with his mercenaries, who were also invited to join the Russian army instead. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed to help broker the deal.
In his first public remarks following the march to Moscow, Prigozhin referred to the Wagner Group as the “most experienced and combat-ready unit in Russia, and possibly in the world.”
Taking Prigozhin and any Wagner troops off the battlefield could be to Ukraine’s advantage, Ganyard said.
“The most important thing that comes out of all of this with a disillusion or whatever happens to the Wagner troops, is that they get taken off the battlefield. It’s the only thing that’s good for the Ukrainian fight,” Ganyard said. “The Wagner troops were among the most effective and among the most capable on the battlefield.”
“But right now the defensive fight the Russians are able to put up with their multiple layers of defenses are going to be very, very tough for the Ukrainians to break through,” he added.
The Institute for the Study of War said in a recent assessment that the “ongoing Putin-Lukashenko-Prigozhin powerplay is not yet over and will continue to have short-term and long-term consequences that may benefit Ukraine,” including by potentially tying up heavy weapon and tanks for internal security “that could otherwise be used in Ukraine.”
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told ABC News that he believes “without a doubt” that the brief armed rebellion marks “the beginning of the end” of the war in Ukraine.
“The problem is this ‘end’ can last for quite some time and we have to understand that,” Podolyak said during an interview in Kyiv on Saturday.
“Russia has accumulated a lot of internal problems, but they are not ready to accept defeat because it would put an end to two decades of its domination in global processes,” he added. “It would mean the end of Russia’s ambitions, because I always said that the end of war must not mean just a victory for Ukraine. It should bring about reformatting Russia itself.”
Putin’s war effort might also suffer if front-line soldiers fighting in Ukraine learn of the armed rebellion.
“How do you motivate these guys who don’t want to be the last guy to die for a losing cause?” a senior U.S. official said Tuesday.
Ganyard noted that the Wagner Group revolt was a mutiny by a mercenary force — not one by regular Russian troops.
“So we don’t know how the regular Russian troops might have felt about this, if they even heard about it,” he said. “This is very different from something, say, if the Russian military itself had mutiny.”
Milley noted that Russian leadership “is not necessarily coherent,” and Russian troop morale is not high — “many of them don’t even know why they’re there.”
Ganyard said that while Ukraine may not have a 3-to-1 advantage, they do have “moral superiority” — which has been a key factor since Russia launched its invasion in February 2022.
“They are convinced that their cause is just. That is not the case on the Russian side,” Ganyard said. “Napoleon said that ‘[in war] the moral is to the physical as 3 is to 1.’ In other words, saying that whoever has the righteous, just cause has a 3-to-1 advantage over the other side.”
“The Ukrainians clearly feel that they’re trying to take back their country, that the Russians are in the wrong here, that the Russians were the attackers,” he continued. “And so the Ukrainians do have the kind of morale, the kind of support, the kind of esprit that is important to be able to continue these hard slog, bloody kinds of conflicts.”
If a stalemate persists, taking a toll on men and machines on both sides, that could lead to some sort of negotiated settlement, Ganyard said. However, neither Zelenskyy nor Putin can afford that politically at this time, he said.
“In many ways this is like two punch-drunk fighters in the eighth round of a prize fight,” he said. “Both want to continue fighting. Neither has the stamina or the strength left to fight the fight that they were able to fight before.”
(PARIS) — Widespread rioting continued in the streets of France for a third night amid anger over the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Nael M.
Protesters erected barricades, set buildings and cars ablaze, threw fireworks at riot police and ransacked stores. Police stations, schools and town halls were among the buildings targeted. Riot police used tear gas, water cannons and non-lethal dispersion grenades to fend off violent groups.
A total of 667 people were arrested nationwide on Thursday night as curfews were in place in multiple cities, according to French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin. About half of the arrests were reportedly made in the Paris region alone.
“Last night, our police, gendarmes and firefighters courageously faced rare violence,” Darmanin said in a Twitter post on Friday morning.
Among those arrested were 14 people who allegedly broke into a flagship Nike store at the Chatelet station in the heart of Paris, according to an official in the Paris Prefecture Office.
Some 40,000 law enforcement officers had been deployed across France on Thursday evening to quell potential violence, including about 5,000 in the capital and its inner suburbs. Nearly 250 of those officers were injured overnight, according to the interior minister.
Protests over the teenager’s death also took place in Belgium’s capital on Thursday night, with some rioters allegedly attacking officers in Brussels, a spokesperson for the Belgian Federal Police told ABC News. A least eight people were arrested there, the police spokesperson said.
Dozens of police officers were deployed in the city center of Brussels on Thursday night and two subway stations were shuttered.
The violent unrest in France kicked off after a 17-year-old driver was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic check in the northwestern Paris suburb Nanterre on Tuesday morning. The officer has been detained on suspicion of voluntary homicide amid an ongoing investigation into the incident, according to the local prosecutor’s office.
Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache said Thursday that the officer did not meet the requirements to discharge his weapon and will remain in custody awaiting trial.
France’s Inspectorate General of the National Police, which investigates allegations of police misconduct, is also conducting a probe into the fatal shooting.
Lawyers for the victim’s family identified him as 17-year-old Nael M. and said they intend to file complaints against the officer accused of pulling the trigger and another officer who was at the scene.
While tensions have remained highest in the Paris suburbs, almost every region of France has been hit with unrest since Tuesday.
French President Emmanuel Macron and the interior minister have both repeatedly called for “calm” as authorities investigate the teen’s death.
ABC News’ Tom Soufi Burridge and Aicha El Hammar Castano contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — A University of California, Berkeley graduate student was killed in Mexico, ABC News has learned.
Gabriel Trujillo, a botanist who was a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Integrative Biology, was killed in the Mexican state of Sonora last week while doing field research, according to a statement from UC Berkeley obtained by San Francisco ABC station KGO on Friday.
The university, located in Northern California, said it received confirmation of Trujillo’s death on June 23.
“Local police authorities are investigating,” UC Berkeley said in the statement. “This is heartbreaking news and campus officials have reached out to his family to offer support and assistance.”
Sonora is located in northwestern Mexico, sharing the U.S.-Mexico border primarily with Arizona.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(PHOENIX) — An Arizona woman is fighting for her life after contracting fungal meningitis following a plastic surgery procedure at a private clinic in Matamoros, Mexico.
Alondra Lomas is one of nine confirmed cases of the life-threatening infection in an outbreak the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is tied to cosmetic surgery clinics in the Mexican city that borders Brownsville, Texas. So far, at least seven women have died – one in Mexico and six Americans, according to the CDC.
The fatalities, Lomas says, include another woman she says she befriended in Mexico and who had plastic surgery at the same clinic just two hours after her own procedure.
When asked what her greatest fear is, an emotional Lomas told “Impact x Nightline” from her hospital room, “Death. And I only say that because I have not seen one lady leave. I have not seen no girl go home yet.”
The latest “Impact” episode, “If Looks Could Kill,” explores the medical tourism industry in Mexico, the destination for some patients who travel from the U.S. seeking less expensive medical care, including elective cosmetic surgery. Mexico was the second most popular destination for medical tourism around the world in 2020, according to Patients Beyond Borders. Thailand was the No. 1 most popular destination.
Lomas, a mother of two, sought out plastic surgery, specifically liposuction and a so-called Brazilian butt lift, after she says two C-section births left her with sagging skin on her stomach area.
The surgeon she chose, Dr. Luis Manuel Rivera de Anda, offered a variety of cosmetic surgeries at what seemed like bargain prices, Lomas said. At first, Lomas says she was nervous and scared, but then started to feel happy at the prospect of being able to “get the body that [she] wants.”
Lomas flew to Brownsville, Texas, then crossed the border to Matamoros. Dr. Rivera worked out of Clinica K-3, Lomas said. Like many Mexican clinics, surgery there is done using epidurals for anesthesia.
After the procedure, Lomas says she began to experience headaches and back pain while home in Arizona until it finally got so bad that she couldn’t walk. Lomas immediately reached out to the surgical coordinator and doctor, but she says they didn’t have any real answers. Throughout April, the symptoms would come and go.
Lomas said she began to experience worsening symptoms, including fatigue and hallucinations. On May 7, she went to St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Phoenix, where she was diagnosed with fungal meningitis.
“The doctors told me that if I didn’t go in time, I could have died within 24 hours because this is a fatal infection,” Lomas said.
Meningitis occurs when an infection causes inflammation in the protective membranes that surround the brain and spinal cord. Most of the time, the infection is viral or bacterial. Fungal meningitis is much more rare. Symptoms like backaches, headaches and sensitivity to light usually appear gradually, making it harder to diagnose.
Getting treatment as early as possible is critical to survival, according to Dr. Tom Chiller, who runs the fungal disease branch of the CDC.
By May 11, the CDC had enough cases in the U.S. to notify Mexican officials about the outbreak, linking them to cosmetic surgery in Matamoros. They identified two private clinics – Riverside Surgical Center and Clinica K-3, where Lomas had her surgery.
“The strongest hypothesis right now is that a batch of these drugs used for anesthesia, either epidural or spinal anesthesia, were contaminated,” Dr. Vicente Joel Hernandez Navarro, state secretary of health for Tamaulipas, Mexico, told “Impact.”
Both Clinica K-3 and Riverside have been shut down, Navarro said, adding that 10 other clinics are being investigated and currently closed for failing to comply with health requirements.
Both clinics linked to the outbreak, along with Dr. Rivera, did not respond to a request for comment.
The CDC has issued an alert, telling anyone who had procedures under epidural anesthesia at the two clinics between Jan. 1 and May 13 of this year to go to their local emergency room and get tested for meningitis. The CDC is tracking about 200 people they know had surgery in Matamoros and could be at risk.
This isn’t the first time Mexico has dealt with an outbreak. Just six months ago, there were 80 confirmed cases of fungal meningitis linked to a medical center in the Mexican state of Durango, the New York Times reported. Thirty-nine women died.
The issue isn’t limited to Mexico. In 2012, dozens died after 14,000 people were exposed to tainted steroid injections in the U.S, according to the CDC.
After more than a month in the hospital, Lomas said her treatment didn’t appear to be working, so doctors performed brain surgery to create a port that delivers the anti-fungal medication directly to the infection. It appears the surgery worked, she says, but she’s not out of the woods yet.
“So I try to, you know, stay positive, because I need to be there for my children, you know? I don’t wanna have another party in the hospital because my son’s birthday is in August. I wanna be able to go home and be present,” Lomas said.
“Impact x Nightline” is now streaming on Hulu. The episode was produced by ABC News’ Knez Walker, Stephanie Fasano, Zach Fannin, Caroline Pahl, Jaclyn Skurie, Anne Laurent, Tara Guaimano and Candace Smith Chekwa.
(PARIS) — Widespread protests continued for a third night over the fatal police shooting of a teenager in a Paris suburb.
More than 100 people have been arrested across the country so far, as curfews are in place in multiple cities, according to French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.
Fourteen people were arrested after allegedly breaking into a flagship Nike store in Chatelet, in the heart of Paris, according to an official in the Paris Prefecture Office.
Some 40,000 law enforcement officers were deployed nationwide on Thursday to quell potential violence, including about 5,000 in the capital and its inner suburbs, according to Darmanin.
Riots are also taking place in Brussels, Belgium, in response to the teen’s killing, with some protesters allegedly attacking police, federal police told ABC News. Eight people have been arrested so far, police said.
Dozens of police officers are currently deployed in the city center of Brussels, and two subway stations have been closed.
The unrest comes after a 17-year-old driver was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic check in Nanterre on Tuesday morning. The officer was detained on suspicion of manslaughter amid an ongoing investigation into the incident, according to the local prosecutor’s office.
The Nanterre prosecutor said Thursday that the officer did not meet the requirements to discharge his weapon and will remain in custody awaiting trial.
The shooting sparked violent protests, with police stations, schools and town halls “set on fire or attacked,” Darmanin said. More than 150 people were arrested around the country stemming from Wednesday night’s protests, according to Darmanin, who condemned the “night of unbearable violence.”
Lawyers for the victim’s family identified him as 17-year-old Nael M. and said they intend to file complaints against the officer who fired the lethal shot and another officer who was at the scene.
France’s Inspectorate General of the National Police, which investigates allegations of police misconduct, is also conducting a probe into the fatal shooting.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Darmanin have both called for “calm” as authorities investigate the teen’s death.
ABC News’ Aicha El Hammar Castano, Anna Rabemanantsoa and Morgan Winsor contributed to this report.
