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A 9-year-old Canadian girl whose father had reported she had been kidnapped in upstate New York was found dead Sunday afternoon, with investigators saying she had not been abducted and they were now questioning inconsistencies in her dad’s story, according to authorities.

The body of the girl, identified by the Warren County Sheriff’s Office as Melina Galanis Frattolin, was discovered in Ticonderoga, New York, near the New York-Vermont border, about 15 miles from Lake George, where her father initially claimed she had been kidnapped on Saturday by a man driving a white van.

The report from the father led the New York State Police to issue an Amber Alert earlier on Sunday. A massive search was launched, involving State Police K-9 and aviation units, New York State Park Rangers, the Essex and Warren County sheriff’s offices, the New York State Department of Conservation, and the Ticonderoga Police Department.

“As the case progressed, law enforcement identified inconsistencies in the father’s account of events and the timeline he provided,” according to a statement from the State Police.

The investigation was ongoing Sunday afternoon as State Police took over the investigation from the Warren County Sheriff’s Office.

There was no immediate comment from the State Police on whether Melina’s father, who police identified as 45-year-old Luciano Frattolin, also of Canada, had been arrested in his daughter’s death.

State police did not disclose how Melina died.

“At this time, there is no indication that an abduction occurred, and there is no threat to the public,” the State Police said in its statement.

Luciano Frattolin called 911 in Warren County late Saturday night, claiming his daughter had been abducted by a stranger, according to police. The father claimed the girl was kidnapped around 9:40 p.m. at a rest stop off Interstate 87 near Lake George, where he allegedly claimed they pulled over to use the restroom, according to police radio dispatches provided by Broadcastify.

The father told police his daughter was wearing light colored shorts, a blue-and-white striped shirt and white Adidas sneakers, police said.

“The child was taken under circumstances that lead police to believe that they are in imminent danger of serious bodily harm and/or death,” authorities said in an initial statement that accompanied the Amber Alert.

Ukraine’s security agency said Sunday it tracked down and killed Russian agents suspected of shooting one of its senior officers to death in the Ukrainian capital.

The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, said in a statement that the suspected Russian agents were killed in the Kyiv region after they offered resistance to arrest. A video released by the agency showed two bodies lying on the ground.

The agency said earlier that a man and a woman were suspected to be involved in Thursday’s assassination of Ivan Voronych, an SBU colonel, in a bold daylight attack that was caught on surveillance cameras.

Media reports claimed that Voronych was involved in covert operations in Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine and reportedly helped organize Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region last year.

Ukrainian media posted what appeared to be security camera footage showing a man walking through a parking lot with bags being attacked by another man who ran towards the victim.

The suspect fired five times at the victim with a silenced pistol, Ukrainska Pravda reported, citing SBU sources. The SBU said the alleged assassins were given the coordinates of a hiding place where they found a pistol with a suppressor, according to the Reuters news agency.

The team that killed Voronych had spent time getting to know his daily schedule and routes, the SBU statement said.

Police in Kyiv previously released video from the crime scene and said that “criminal investigation officers, dog handlers and other services are working at the scene.”

Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continued to rage on. After a series of massive attacks across Ukraine involving hundreds of exploding drones, Russia launched 60 drones overnight, Ukraine’s air force said. It said 20 of them were shot down and 20 others were jammed.

The Ukrainian authorities reported that four civilians were killed and 13 others injured in Russian attacks on the Donetsk and Kherson regions since Saturday.

High-profile Russians previously targeted

Moscow has accused Kyiv of orchestrating a spate of high-profile killings of Russian military officials or pro-Kremlin commentators since the Kremlin launched its invasion in February 2022.

In April, an explosive device ripped through a parked car near Moscow, killing a senior Russian general. Images from the scene posted on social media showed a blaze that gutted a car.

That attack came four months after another Russian general was killed along with his deputy in an explosion in Moscow.

The blast appeared to be similar to previous attacks on Russians linked to Moscow’s military offensive in Ukraine.

Kyiv has in some cases claimed responsibility for previous attacks.

Last year, Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian military’s chemical weapons unit, was killed by a bomb planted in a scooter in Moscow in December. Ukrainian security sources told CBS News the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) killed Kirillov in a special operation.

After Kirillov’s killing, Putin made a rare admission of failings by his powerful security agencies, saying: “We must not allow such very serious blunders to happen.”

In December 2023, Illia Kiva, a former pro-Moscow Ukrainian lawmaker who fled to Russia, was shot and killed near Moscow. The Ukrainian military intelligence lauded the killing, warning that other “traitors of Ukraine” would share the same fate.

Other attacks include the August 2022 car bombing of nationalist Darya Dugina and an explosion in a Saint Petersburg cafe in April 2023 that killed high-profile military correspondent Maxim Fomin, known as Vladlen Tatarsky. A Russian woman, who said she presented the figurine on orders of a contact in Ukraine, was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison.

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump will be visiting Britain’s King Charles III later this fall, Buckingham Palace announced Sunday.

Charles invited the pair for the official visit from Sept. 17-19, the palace said in a statement. The king will host the Trumps at Windsor Castle, the palace said. No further information was released.

Mr. Trump likely will not address Parliament like French President Emmanuel Macron did last week, since Parliament will not be in session from Sept. 16 until Oct. 13 due to party conferences, according to Sky News.

Mr. Trump and the first lady were hosted by the late Queen Elizabeth II in 2019. That visit was marked by widespread protests, and London Mayor Sadiq Khan slammed Mr. Trump in a video message ahead of his arrival.

The announcement of Mr. Trump’s trip comes as he has threatened to annex Canada, which shares King Charles as the head of state, as the 51st American state. In an address before Canada’s Parliament in May, Charles called it a “critical moment” for Canada.

“Today, Canada faces another critical moment,” Charles said, adding that “Democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, self-determination and freedom are values which Canadians hold dear, and ones which the government is determined to protect.”

Mr. Trump has also been attempting to navigate diplomacy as he has slapped tariffs worldwide. In May, Mr. Trump hailed a deal with Britain as a “maxed out deal” that would serve as a template for deals for other nations, but the deal leaves the 10% baseline tariff in place.

Russia’s Minister of Transport reportedly killed himself just hours after being fired by President Vladimir Putin, according to the country’s state-run news agency, which cited the national Investigative Committee. A second senior Transport Ministry official reportedly died soon after, for reasons which remain unclear.

Roman Starovoy fatally shot himself Monday in his car in Odintsovo, a city west of Moscow, according to a statement from the committee that was reported by Russia’s TASS news agency.

“The circumstances of the incident are being established,” TASS cited the Investigative Committee as saying. “The main hypothesis is suicide.”

Forbes Russia reported that Starovoy, 53, died “presumably overnight between Saturday and Sunday,” citing an anonymous source close to state investigators. It was not possible to explain the discrepancy between the times of death reported by Forbes and the official Russian media.

Putin had dismissed Starovoy just hours earlier, according to a decree published by the Kremlin. No official reason was given, but ongoing Ukranian drone attacks on Russia caused chaos for air traffic in the country over the weekend, prompting the cancellation of hundreds of flights and stranding passengers.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed to have intercepted at least 120 drones over 10 different regions of the country between Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Officials in Ukraine, meanwhile, said Monday that at least 11 civilians were killed and more than 80 others injured, including seven children, in Russian drone attacks. Russia has intensified its missile and drone strikes, including many that hit civilian areas, in recent days.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday that over the past week alone, Russia had launched about 1,270 drones, 39 missiles and nearly 1,000 glide bombs at Ukraine.

Starovoy became Russia’s Transport Minister in 2024, before which he was the governor of the Kursk region on the border with Ukraine.

Another official reportedly “stood up sharply… and fell dead”

Soon after Starovoy’s death was reported by Russian media, a lower-ranking official whose job fell within the remit of the Transport Ministry, 42-year-old Andrei Korneichuk, was said to have died suddenly during a meeting.

At his office in eastern Moscow, Korneichuk, who was the deputy head of the Federal Road Agency’s Land Fund Department, “stood up sharply during a meeting and fell dead,” according to the SHOT news outlet, which is said to be close to the military.

“The medics could not help him,” SHOT added. The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta said at least two other Russian government-linked news outlets had reported the same basic details.

The preliminary cause of death was determined to be cardiac arrest, according to the media outlets cited by the Gazeta.

The two deaths come just days after that of the vice-president of Russian state oil company Transneft.

The body of Andrei Badalov, 62, was found “beneath the window of a house” in western Moscow on Friday, TASS cited law enforcement officials as saying. The state news agency said he had written a farewell message to his wife.

The cases are just the latest in a string of high-profile, powerful Russians dying suddenly, often in apparent falls from windows or other incidents.

For paleontologist Ben Kligman, the question was: Is this fragile jawbone a pterosaur or not?

Other researchers also had questions about the fossil, unearthed along with thousands of others during a decades-long archaeological dig at a remote bone bed in the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Some thought the bone could’ve been a mammal, Kligman told CBS News.

Now, their new research offers insight into North America’s oldest known flying reptile that Kligman and other paleontologists say was the size of a “small seagull.”

The Smithsonian-led paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, details the new pterosaur fossil discovery along with several others, providing insight into the late Triassic period.

Kligman remembers looking at the jawbone under a microscope at the Smithsonian — where he is a Peter Buck postdoctoral fellow and where the fossil had been sent — and running through his “Rolodex” of Triassic jaw anatomy, thinking about what species could have a similar jaw. He wanted to solve the mystery of where the delicate jawbone belonged.

Through the process of elimination, and thinking of the features pterosaurs have that no other animal has, Kligman said he and other researchers were able to conclude that, “Oh yeah, this is definitely a pterosaur — therefore, this is a very important discovery.”

The team named the pterosaur the Eotephradactylus mcintireae, which means “ash-winged dawn goddess.” The species name references its discoverer, Suzanne McIntire, who volunteered in the Smithsonian’s FossiLab for 18 years.

McIntire discovered the pterosaur fossil, which had been brought to the museum from the Petrified Forest National Park along with 1,200 other individual fossils, including bones, teeth, fish scales and coprolites, or fossilized excrement.

Volunteers painstakingly clean each fossil, flag ones of interest and perform other fossil conservation tasks. McIntire unearthed the jawbone and noticed the teeth were still in the bone, making it easier to identify.

The winged reptile — a close cousin of dinosaurs and the first animals after insects to evolve powered flight — would’ve been small enough to comfortably perch on a person’s shoulder.

“It could’ve sat on your shoulder, like a small seagull,” Kligman said of the species.

Researchers were able to date the fossil back to 209.2 million years ago — an unusually precise date, Kligman said, because of the level of volcanic ash where the fossil was found. The finding helps fill in a gap in the fossil record that predates the end-Triassic extinction, he said. Very few pterosaur fossils exist, Kligman said. After their extinction, their fragile bones preserved poorly, so pterosaur fossils are frequently incomplete. They also did not live close to places where fossils tend to form.

“It helps us understand what a pterosaur was and how they became what they would become,” Kligman said.

Along with the pterosaur, the study also detailed other findings, including one of the world’s oldest turtle fossils, giant amphibians and armored crocodile relatives, which lived alongside evolutionary upstarts like frogs, turtles and pterosaurs.