welcome to our viewers in the united states and around the world, i m christine romans. secretary of state antony blinken meeting face-to-face right now with chinese president xi jinping in beijing. the high stakes one-on-one is part of blinken s efforts to meet with china s top diplomat. an effort to lower the temperature amid rising tensions between the u.s. and china. cnn s kylie atwood in beijing this morning. just the fact that their meeting is a huge meeting, kylie, we learned 90 minutes ago their meeting was a go. what do we know about it? reporter: that s right, it s here in beijing, the secretary of state who is the first cabinet member to visit china from biden administration in 2 1/2 years. sitting down with president xi, we don t know much about the meeting because it s so ongoing. here s what we do know, there have been a number of hours that the secretary has engaged with chinese officials over the course of the last days in beijing. spending more than five ho
All im thinking is, is shannon really gone . We interviewed her roommates, boyfriends, everybody is a suspect. Then a phone rings. Right. He says ive kidnapped her, i have her. And we ran his criminal history. Thats when all the bells went off. He pulls in, asked me to get in the car. I feel the cold blade against my neck. He carries me to the basement of his home. It was jawdropping just chilling they started digging and they found womens clothing. It was just escalating escalating there were so many victims, arent there . There were. There still are. Until this guy is no longer in existence. I will carry this fight hello, and welcome to dateline Shannon Melendi dreamed big. At 15, she wanted to become a Supreme Court justice. In college, she scored a prestigious internship at former president jimmy carters foundation. Then, suddenly she vanished detectives had a suspect in their sights. But it would take years, and the revelation of another teenagers horrific tale, to unravel the mys
This is the church where pastor mackenzie had a huge following in his sermons. he amplified his message online. he preached a doomsday prophesy for at least a decade, calling on the faithful to reject modern society, pull children from school, avoid hospitals. he demanded total devotion. you must deny yourself. you must reject yourself. you much reach a point of ending your life, he says, for the sake of jesus. his anti-government stance got him arrested and detained but never prosecuted. in 2019, the church was closed down. they said the pastor started his forest community. we found a former cult member. in melendi. we agreed to hide her identity for her own safety. she escaped the forest last year. why did you move your whole home and all of your children and move into the forest? reporter: the pastor used to
Father looked worried. he just handed me a copy of the local section of the miami herald. it says, miami family is flying up to atlanta to search for their daughter, shannon melendi. it was surreal. by the time anne read those words, the melendis were already in atlanta, feeling dazed and desperate. and we were like, what s going on? what was going on? a question that would consume law enforcement and the melendi family for over a decade. what had happened to shannon? police float the idea she might have skipped town. coming up we kept telling them, you don t know her. she would never run away. she never ran away from anything. and then, some of shannon s acquaintances draw the interest of investigators. i did feel under the pressure at points.