(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner next weekend in Washington, the association announced Wednesday on Twitter, the first time a sitting president has attended since 2016.
The event was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and former President Donald Trump snubbed the dinners during his presidency.
In April 2019, Trump told reporters on his way to California that he was skipping for a third year “because the dinner is so boring and so negative that we’re going to hold a very positive rally.”
Typically held the last Saturday in April, the annual gala returns after two years next Saturday, April 30, at the Washington Hilton. Comedian Trevor Noah is set to host.
Some theorize that the 2011 Correspondents’ Dinner may have pushed Trump to run for president — as well as pushed his disdain for the dinners — after then-President Barack Obama made him the target of his jokes for five full minutes. Trump, present in the room, was listening but not smiling.
“No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” Obama said at the time. “And that’s because he can finally get back to the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
This year’s gala is expected to draw hundreds of power players to Washington and follows the Washington Gridiron Club dinner earlier this month that resulted in at least 80 COVID cases, including some administration officials and members of Congress.
It coincides with concerns over a rise of the BA.2 variant, particularly as the Biden administration’s transportation mask mandate was struck down this week.
All attendees will have to show proof of a negative test the day of the event, and there is a vaccine requirement.
“This year’s dinner will be the WHCA’s first since 2019 and offer the first opportunity since 2016 for the press and the president to share a few laughs for a good cause,” the association said in a press release.
Held for the first time in 1921, the event is intended to honor the First Amendment and raise money for journalism programs.
(NEW YORK) — A preliminary report released Wednesday found no abnormalities before last month’s China Eastern Airlines plane crash that killed all 132 people on board, the Chinese Civil Aviation Administration said.
“There was no abnormality in the radio communication and control command between the crew and the air traffic control department before deviating from the cruise altitude,” the report said, before the Boeing 737-800 suddenly nosedived into the ground from 30,000 feet in the air.
At a briefing on the report Wednesday, Chinese aviation officials said that their investigation has not found a cause and the crash continues to be a mystery to investigators who will continue an in-depth investigation with the help of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and other international groups.
The report said that cabin crew and other maintenance personnel had met all requirements and the plane had certified airworthy and was up to date on inspections.
It also detailed that there was no dangerous weather forecast in the area of the crash and there were no declared dangerous goods on the aircraft.
The “black boxes” — the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder — that can tell exactly what was going on aboard the aircraft were badly damaged in the crash, authorities said, and investigators are still trying to recover data from them to determine what happened.
According to the report, the plane took off at 1:16 p.m. local time and cruised at an altitude of nearly 29,000 feet until around 2:20 p.m. when regional radar found that the aircraft began to “deviate” from that altitude. Radar then recorded the aircraft at around 11,000 feet traveling at 117 degrees.
Local air traffic control called the crew, but did not receive a reply. Shortly after, the radar signal of the plane disappeared.
The crash site in a mountainous area in Teng County, Wuzhou, Guangxi left a crater nearly 500 square feet large and 10 feet deep. Wreckage from the plane has been searched and collected by investigators.
ABC News’ Gio Benitez and Mark Osborne contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department has announced nearly two dozen arrests of alleged fraudsters who prosecutors say have engaged in elaborate and brazen schemes to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic, raking in nearly $150 million in illicit proceeds so far.
In a TV network exclusive, officials told ABC News the enforcement action includes criminal charges against 21 individuals in nine federal districts across the country for their alleged participation in COVID-19 fraud schemes.
The charges, brought against individuals ranging from medical business owners and executives to physicians and marketers, also involve multiple alleged manufacturers of fake COVID-19 vaccination cards.
Losses from the alleged schemes top $149 million and counting, according to the Justice Department. Officials say the DOJ has so far seized more than $8 million in cash from the coordinated takedown.
“This COVID-19 health care fraud enforcement action involves extraordinary efforts to prosecute some of the largest and most wide-ranging pandemic frauds detected to date,” Director for COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Kevin Chambers said in a statement. “The scale and complexity of the schemes prosecuted today illustrates the success of our unprecedented interagency effort to quickly investigate and prosecute those who abuse our critical health care programs.”
Behind the scenes, federal officials say they have quietly persevered to “root out” fraudsters in action and hold them accountable, leveraging an interagency approach.
“Today’s enforcement action reinforces our commitment to using all available tools to hold accountable medical professionals, corporate executives, and others who have placed greed above care during an unprecedented public health emergency,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement.
The alleged fraud varies widely, from accusations of exorbitant billing for sham telemedicine encounters, to COVID-19 testing allegedly used as bait to bundle with other unrelated and unnecessary testing services for the submission of false claims, to the large-scale manufacture of forged vaccination records. The Justice Department has charged individuals across eight states — California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Washington, Maryland, Tennessee and Utah — in connection with the schemes over the past week.
In one such alleged scheme in California, two owners of a clinical laboratory, Imran Shams and Lourdes Navarro, have been charged with a health care fraud, kickback and money-laundering scheme aimed at defrauding Medicare of over $214 million for laboratory tests, including more than $125 million in false and fraudulent claims during the pandemic for COVID-19 and respiratory pathogen tests. No pleas have yet been entered in the case.
In two separate cases, one in Maryland and one in New York, owners of medical clinics allegedly obtained confidential information from patients seeking drive-through COVID-19 testing, submitting fraudulent claims for lengthy office visits that investigators say did not, in fact, occur.
According to the indictment, the profits from these false claims were then allegedly laundered through shell corporations in the U.S., transferred abroad, and used to buy real estate and other luxury items.
In another case, investigators allege that a postal worker in New Jersey made “thousands of dollars” on sales of more than 400 fake COVID-19 vaccination cards, and enabled others to resell and redistribute the cards she made — which she produced using a printer and ink at the postal office where she worked, according to an indictment unsealed Tuesday. The defendant, Lisa Hammell, allegedly sought to hide their electronic payment transactions by describing them as items like “movie tickets” or “dinner and drinks.”
Hammell, who was arrested Tuesday and does not currently have an attorney listed on her court docket, allegedly messaged an unidentified individual on March 27, 2021, showing off two fake cards she printed.
Through “deceit, craft, trickery, and dishonest means,” investigators say those they have now brought charges against “knowingly and intentionally” conspired to defraud the United States by impairing federal health authorities’ efforts to get shots in arms and beat back the spread of COVID-19. No further pleas have yet been entered.
In another unsealed indictment, investigators allege a Colorado man and unnamed co-conspirators made “hundreds” of fake vaccine records earning “thousands of dollars” from the scheme, selling fraudulent cards to “hundreds of individuals in at least a dozen states,” according to the indictment.
The man, Robert Van Camp, allegedly sold cards to at least four undercover law enforcement officers for between $120 and $175 per card, and claimed that he had sold fake cards to three unnamed Olympians and their coach.
“I’ve got people that are going to the Olympics in Tokyo, three Olympians and their coach in Tokyo, Amsterdam, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Honduras,” Van Camp told an undercover agent, according to the indictment.
Van Camp took care to customize the cards, according to a criminal affidavit, asking one undercover agent if they preferred any particular dates for when they purportedly got their shots — explaining if they were flying soon, airlines preferred the second dose to be administered at least a couple weeks before the flight. He allegedly asked if any of the individuals getting the fake cards were married, offering to make a partner’s card “look different from one another, so that the cards would not look like they came off an assembly line when they travelled together,” the filing said.
“My cards are f—ing worldwide,” Van Camp told one undercover agent, according to the affidavit. “I mean, these things are gold.”
He boasted he had a “hookup on the real, real ‘V’ card,” that he had “done it for about 700 of my customers.”
As of Wednesday morning Van Camp has not entered a plea or retained an attorney in his case.
ABC News first reported last year on the burgeoning market for counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards, which had set off alarm bells for federal health officials, who warned the demand for fake proof of immunity was on the rise, threatening the nation’s hard-fought gains against the virus.
The illicit industry for forged cards hit its stride just as new vaccine requirements were put in place at the federal, state and local levels, and in both the public and private sectors — requiring proof of inoculation in order to work at a hospital, teach or attend school, work out at the gym, or eat inside a restaurant — yet some Americans held back, with some railing against the mandates.
For enterprising fraudsters, that hesitance posed a ripe opportunity.
One unnamed individual listed in the indictment allegedly privately messaged Hammell last summer: “Good morning, random question … can you get me a vaccine card? My mom works for [a hospital] and they are forcing everyone to get the vaccine and she definitely is adamantly against it.”
“I can as long as no one knows where it came from,” Hammell allegedly responded, according to the indictment.
Earlier this month, a naturopathic doctor in California who was arrested last year for allegedly scheming to sell fake COVID-19 immunizations and vaccination cards pleaded guilty — and is allegedly linked to the larger string of arrests announced by federal authorities Wednesday.
“The attempt to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic by targeting beneficiaries and stealing from federal health care programs is unconscionable,” Inspector General Christi Grimm of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a statement Wednesday. “HHS-OIG is proud to work alongside our law enforcement partners at the federal and state level to ensure that bad actors who perpetrate egregious and harmful crimes are held accountable.”
Appraising fraudsters’ exploitation of the pandemic relief system this spring, top federal oversight officials warned members of Congress that the COVID-19 pandemic had created a “perfect storm” for fraudulent compensation claims, with a lack of proper oversight pairing with an unprecedented cash infusion to incentivize criminals amid a global crisis.
Criminal COVID-19 schemes have been an ongoing and thorny issue for the government to pursue, with the pandemic creating an avenue for fraudsters to supercharge their schemes. So far, the Justice Department has filed criminal charges against more than 1,000 defendants, opening more than 240 civil investigations into more than 1,800 individuals and entities, “together involving billions of dollars in suspected fraud,” OMB deputy director for management Jason Miller estimated in March.
But officials note that the current figures likely reflect only a fraction of the funds that experts believe may have been defrauded over the pandemic’s two plus years.
The ultimate amount of COVID-19 fraud will be “very large,” Justice Department Inspector General and Chair of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee Michael Horowitz testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in March, adding that agencies would jointly use “all of our tools — criminal, civil administrative suspension and debarment, forfeiture, to try and recover the funds that have been stolen.”
“We’re doing that and we’re making every effort,” Horowitz said.
(NEW YORK) — Russia’s military issued another warning to Ukrainian forces in a Mariupol steel plant on Wednesday, telling them to lay down their arms and leave, according to Russian state media.
Russia claimed a ceasefire would begin at the Azovstal steel plant at 2 p.m. Moscow time to allow Ukrainian fighters to safely leave. Ukrainian forces rejected a similar offer on Tuesday.
The Mariupol city council claimed Tuesday that there are at least 1,000 civilians seeking shelter in the plant, mostly women with children and the elderly. Ukrainian authorities have not confirmed the number of Ukrainian marines and Azov fighters at site.
A Russian official, Dmitry Polyansky, accused Ukrainian troops of using civilians at the plant as human shields.
“One month into the siege of Azovstal plant, those same radicals and neo-Nazis suddenly declared that allegedly there had been civilians inside the plant all that time, even though until yesterday, they had never uttered a word about it,” Polyansky told the U.N. Security Council during a session on Ukraine on Tuesday.
In a video posted online, Serhiy Voyna, the commander of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade and commander for Ukraine’s marines in Mariupol, made an appeal to world leaders, asking for an extraction from the plant to the territory of a third-party state.
“This could be the last appeal of our lives. We are probably facing our last days, if not hours. The enemy is outnumbering us 10 to 1. They have advantage in the air, in artillery, in their forces on land, in equipment and in tanks,” Voyna said.
Voyna spoke to the Washington Post via satellite phone on Tuesday, and said his forces would not make the same mistake made by others and trust Russian guarantees of safe passage, only to see them open fire.
Voyna said more than 500 Mariupol military battalion soldiers are wounded.
“We are only defending one object, the Azovstal plant where, in addition to military personnel, there are also civilians who have fallen victim to this war. We appeal and plead to all world leaders to help us. We ask them to use the procedure of ‘extraction’ and take us to the territory of a third-party state,” Voyna said.
(SAINT-DENIS, France) — French President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, his far-right rival in the presidential elections, will face off in the highly anticipated televised debate Wednesday, which could prove crucial in swaying voters ahead of the final round of voting this weekend.
Macron and Le Pen took the top two spots in the preliminary round of voting earlier this month, just as they did in 2017. The debate of that year proved disastrous for Le Pen, who struggled under questioning. Macron ultimately won a sweeping victory in 2017, winning 66% of the vote.
This campaign cycle has been notably different, however. The war in Ukraine has dominated the headlines, Le Pen has sought to soften her National Rally party’s image and ease voters’ concerns about a far-right president, while Macron has been a notably absent figure on the campaign trail.
Polling in France has shown an upswing in Le Pen’s popularity and decline in Macron’s, though the French president retains a narrow lead in most reported opinion polls.
Le Pen has faced criticism in France for a softer approach to Russia and past support for President Vladimir Putin. While she has said she is in favor of the broad package of sanctions announced by the French government, she has publicly opposed restrictions on oil and gas imports from Russia, citing concerns about the rising cost of living in France that has become a critical issue in the campaign.
Le Pen was previously banned from entering Ukraine in 2017, when she spoke out in favor of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
While Le Pen has pledged if elected to take France out of NATO’s integrated command, she said she would not intend to leave the organization altogether, nor renounce Article 5, which refers to the “mutual protection between members of the Atlantic Alliance.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an interview with French television channel BFMTV aired Wednesday, went as far as to urge Le Pen to reconsider her position on Russia.
“If the candidate were to understand that she was wrong, our relationship could change,” Zelenskyy said. While ensuring not “to have the right to influence” the French electoral campaign, Zelenskyy recognized that “obviously, I have relations with Emmanuel Macron and I would not want to lose them.”
The final outcome of the election may well be decided by matters closer to home, however, with Macron’s team touting his experience in power at a time of stability, while Le Pen’s campaign has targeted the incumbent for, they say, being out of touch with ordinary people.
The far-right candidate focused her campaign on purchasing power, a topic expected to be one of the main factors in deciding the outcome of the election. Le Pen’s project, however, still centers on the fight against immigration. The National Rally candidate has presented several flagship proposals, including a bill to drastically limit immigration, the abolition of the right of soil, and restricting the routes for people to claim asylum in France.
“Fear is the only argument that the current president has to try and stay in power at all cost,” Le Pen said in a new clip posted by her campaign Tuesday.
Much will depend on which candidate the supporters of far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon turn to in the final round. Mélenchon secured 22% of the first round of voting in third place, and while he publicly told his supporters not to vote for Le Pen, her populist vision may prove more enticing to a base dissatisfied with Macron, a centrist with a background in the financial sector.
The debate, airing at 8 p.m. local time (3 p.m. EST), is the first and only time voters will have a chance to see the candidates face off.
ABC News’ Ibtissem Guenfoud contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — An alleged “intruder” at the Peruvian Embassy in Washington, D.C., was shot and killed by Secret Service Wednesday morning, according to authorities.
The suspect was found smashing windows of the Peruvian ambassador’s residence, D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee told reporters.
The ambassador’s relatives were inside and called the police just after 8 a.m., Contee said.
The suspect was shot “following a confrontation” in the backyard of the residence, the Secret Service said. Contee said the suspect allegedly pulled a metal stake on police. Officers used lethal force when Tasers didn’t work, he said.
Contee said a motive remains under investigation, adding that it’s unclear if the suspect knew it was an ambassador’s residence.
The Peruvian ambassador’s residence was damaged by the break-in but the ambassador, his family and staff, along with Secret Service agents, are all safe, the embassy said in a statement.
Two officers are being evaluated for injuries, Contee said.
ABC News’ Conor Finnegan contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Prince Harry is a self-described “proud papa” speaking out about a new milestone hit by Lilibet, the 10-month-old daughter he shares with his wife, Duchess Meghan.
While attending the Invictus Games in the Netherlands, Harry revealed that Lili, as she is known, is learning how to walk.
“Her current priorities are trying to keep up with her brother; she took her first step just a few days ago!” Prince Harry, 37, told People magazine. “Proud papa, here.”
Lili’s brother is Archie, who will turn 3 next month.
While Lili and Archie did not attend this year’s Invictus Games with their parents, Harry said he “can’t wait” for them to attend in the years ahead. The Invictus Games are a Paralympic-style competition for wounded service members that Harry, a military veteran, launched eight years ago.
“I showed Archie a video of wheelchair basketball and rugby from the Invictus Games in Sydney, and he absolutely loved it,” Harry told People.
“I showed him how some were missing legs and explained that some had invisible injuries, too,” he said. “Not because he asked, but because I wanted to tell him. Kids understand so much, and to see it through his eyes was amazing because it’s so unfiltered and honest.”
Harry and Meghan’s attendance at the Invictus Games in the Netherlands marked the couple’s first public appearance together in Europe since they stepped down from their senior royal role two years ago.
Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, arrived in the Netherlands after making a quick stop in the United Kingdom to visit Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth.
The visit was the first time the couple saw the queen together in-person since moving in 2020 to California, where they now live with Archie and Lili, who is named after the queen.
Alex Chan Tsz Yuk/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” into neighboring Ukraine began on Feb. 24, with Russian forces invading from Belarus, to the north, and Russia, to the east. Ukrainian troops have offered “stiff resistance,” according to U.S. officials.
Russian forces have since retreated from northern Ukraine, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction. The United States and many European countries accused Russia of committing war crimes after graphic images emerged of dead civilians in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv. The Russian military has now launched a full-scale ground offensive in eastern Ukraine’s disputed Donbas region, as it attempts to capture the strategic port city of Mariupol and secure a coastal corridor to the Moscow-annexed Crimean Peninsula.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Apr 20, 7:55 am
Russia again calls for surrender at Mariupol steel plant
Russia’s military issued another ultimatum on Wednesday, calling for Ukrainian forces to lay down their arms and leave a Mariupol steel plant, according to Russian state media.
Moscow claimed that Ukrainian troops and civilians would be allowed to leave the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works plant without harm during a cease-fire beginning at 2 p.m. local time.
Ukrainian forces at the besieged plant rejected a similar offer on Tuesday.
More than 1,000 civilians are sheltering on the grounds of the sprawling industrial plant, the Mariupol City Council said on Monday.
A Russian official, Dmitry Polyansky, on Tuesday accused Ukrainian troops of using civilians at the plant as human shields.
“One month into the siege of Azovstal plant, those same radicals and neo-Nazis suddenly declared that allegedly there had been civilians inside the plant all that time, even though until yesterday, they had never uttered a word about it,” Polyansky told the U.N. Security Council during a session on Ukraine on Tuesday.
Apr 19, 11:40 pm
Russia could be making probing attacks ahead of larger assault in Donbas: US official
As Ukrainian forces brace for a full-scale assault in the eastern part of the country, a U.S. official said the increased pace of operations from Russian forces in the past 24 hours could be probing attacks or the beginning of the main battle for the Donbas.
The defense official said the Russian offensive to seize southeastern Ukraine will likely involve a frontal assault from inside Russia and a double envelopment, or encircling, of Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. Russian forces will come south from Izyum and troops in the Berdyansk area will move north to encircle Ukrainian forces in the Joint Forces Operations area in the Donbas.
But the U.S. defense official said Ukraine has the advantage in the region since they have prepared a defense for years, including digging trenches, preparing anti-armor traps and ambush locations and more.
The U.S. and other countries have now provided close to 70,000 anti-tank weapons to Ukraine as well as 30,000 anti-aircraft missiles and 7,000 launchers to fire them, according to the defense official.
As for stopping the shipments of those weapons, the U.S. believes Russia will target the paths and roads in western Ukraine being used to ship Western military aid into Ukraine even though it has not done so yet. Still, it’s believed with the amount of weaponry being delivered to Ukrainian forces, it will be impossible to stop it all.
(NEW YORK) — Spend enough time online, and you’re sure to run into scammers who try to steal your money by asking you to confirm your credit card information or sign up for fake PC protection plans. Now, online scams have reached the lucrative world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) — and a group of tech sleuths are fighting back.
Financial crime specialist and crypto expert Nik Horniacek fell for his first NFT scam in December. Excited about a popular NFT venture that was launching in February, he clicked on a social media link that he thought would lead him to the project site, but instead drained all his cryptocurrency.
Today, Horniacek is the cofounder of Rug Pull Finder, a private intelligence company that investigates NFT projects — and to date has exposed nearly 200 scams totaling over $1.3 billion, according to the organization. Horniacek is one of many online crypto sleuths that track NFTs as celebrities, companies, political candidates and members of the public embrace the latest cryptocurrency phenomenon.
NFTs are digital assets that cannot be replicated and can be used to represent real-world items. Like collectible artwork and rare baseball cards, the value of an NFT derives from it being unique. The digital tokens are stored in a digital wallet through a decentralized public ledger known as a blockchain, and can be held as digital memorabilia, or sold and traded for investment purposes.
As the popularity of NFTs continues to soar, scams like the one Horniacek fell for and other types of illicit activity involving non-fungible tokens are only expected to rise, law enforcement officials and crypto experts told ABC News.
Investments in NFTs skyrocketed last year, with digital token marketplaces and collections growing from $106 million in 2020 to $44.2 billion in 2021, according to a report by analytics firm Chainanalysis.
But the Chainanalysis report also found that “as is the case with any technology, NFTs offer the potential for abuse.” Among the types of illicit NFT activity the group identified were the use of money laundering to hide assets, and the use of “wash trading” to artificially increase NFTs’ value.
According to the report, last year sellers made $8.9 million from the sale of NFTs “to unsuspecting buyers who believe the NFT they’re purchasing has been growing in value.”
As a result of illicit activity, federal agencies are expanding their crime fighting efforts into crypto crime and digital assets. In February, the U.S. Secret Service launched a cryptocurrency awareness hub and the Department of Justice announced the first director of its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.
A DOJ official told ABC News that while scams and fraud have been around for many years, they have been “turbocharged” by the growth of cryptocurrency and the popularity of digital assets like NFTs.
In March, the DOJ brought its first NFT case when it charged two defendants with executing a million-dollar fraud scheme after they promised investors the benefits of an NFT collection called Frosties, then allegedly shut down the website and transferred away all the money they received from the sale of the tokens. According to the complaint, the defendants were preparing to launch a second set of NFTs that was anticipated to generate approximately $1.5 million in cryptocurrency proceeds.
An attorney for one of the defendants, Ethan Nguyen, told ABC News that Nguyen pleaded not guilty and has been released on bond. The attorney said that Nguyen “looks forward to addressing the charges responsibly in court.”
The attorney for the other defendant, Andre Llacuna, did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
“The rise and popularity of various cryptocurrencies have changed the landscape of buying and selling investments, leading to ample opportunities for new fraud schemes,” said U.S. Postal Inspection Service Inspector-in-Charge Daniel Brubaker in a press release about the case. “These assets may seem like a good deal or a way to become wealthy, but in many cases, as in this situation, only lead to the loss of your money.”
Another reason that digital assets like NFTs make for dangerous scams is that there’s no entity regulating transactions — so funds can be instantly moved across borders, without any monitoring, a law enforcement official told ABC News.
Like Horniacek, crypto sleuth ZachXB — who prefers to go by his social media handle — has turned exposing NFT scammers into a full-time job. With almost 200,000 followers on Twitter, ZachXB says he’s uncovered more than 100 NFT scams.
ZachXB said that many NFT scams occur when the offering looks “too good to be true.” Because digital tokens often come with real-life perks like exclusive access to events, people often fall prey to projects that promise those kind of special amenities, ZachXB said.
“I hate seeing all those people lose their money, and others get rich by harming others,” ZachXB told ABC News. “The space is really intimidating and there’s so much to learn. But it’s also amazing.”
Horniacek told ABC News that he wants to help create a positive environment where digital tokens can grow and evolve.
“I asked myself, how can I positively impact the space so that we can continue to move the space forward for the benefit of everybody?” said Horniacek.
“The technology is truly revolutionary,” he said. “I think we’re going to see a lot more innovation over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, and that is my biggest motivation.”
(NEW YORK) — As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, environmental experts and activists are warning of a ripple effect of problems, including long-lasting damage to the war-ravaged country’s urban, agricultural and industrial areas.
Nearly two months into its invasion, Russia has begun its long-feared offensive in eastern Ukraine along the 300-mile front near Donbas, a region with a 200-year history of coal mining and heavy industry.
The past seven weeks have been mired by death, displacement and the demolition of a country’s landscape that will take years to repair, experts told ABC News. In addition to the direct impact on Ukrainians, consequences of the war will be felt socially, economically and environmentally.
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raises a host of unique and potentially profound environmental concerns for not only the people of Ukraine, but the wider region, including much of Europe,” Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, told ABC News. “Those human impacts of the war take on a lot of forms and a lot of dimensions, and many of them last long after long after the hostilities have ceased.”
While there were catastrophic environmental consequences during World War I and II, conflicts during recent history provide a more detailed blueprint for the sheer amount of greenhouse gases emitted during modern wars.
As a result of the global War on Terror that began in 2001, 1.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases were released, the equivalent to the annual emissions of 257 million passenger cars — more than twice the current number of cars on the road in the U.S., according to a 2019 report released by Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs.
In addition to the hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and sulfur dioxide emitted from military vehicles, and other heavy machinery, heavy deforestation occurred in Afghanistan as a result of illegal logging, especially by warlords, which then destroyed wildlife habitat, according to the report.
“We now understand the environmental dimensions of war in ways that we didn’t decades ago,” Muffett said. “This is a particularly egregious situation, because the entire world is calling for Russia to end its its invasion right now.”
Once the conflict is over, the environment in Ukraine is going to be the local government’s “No. 1 priority,” Doug Weir, research and policy director of The Conflict and Environment Observatory, told ABC News.
These are the areas of most environmental concern, according to experts:
Industrial regions
Ukraine is a heavily industrialized country, especially in its eastern regions. It contains a large number of mines and refineries of chemical plants that produce substances such as ammonia and urea, Muffett said.
Assessing the damage from attacks on industrial sites and new nuclear facilities will be among the Ukrainian government’s priorities, Weir said.
In addition, there are “serious concerns” about the forced closure of several coal mines, which are now flooding with acid mine drainage without the proper methods to pump out the water, Weir said. Those toxins are then seeping into the groundwater aquifers
“We’ve already seen hints at how those could play out,” she said, adding that multiple refineries in Ukraine have already been hit. “One of the things that the lessons of the the invasion of Kuwait and the Iraq war is teach us is that strikes against facilities of these kinds pose profound risks for massive releases and really long-term damage.”
Agricultural fields
Researchers are estimating that millions of people could suffer from malnutrition in the years following the invasion as a result of lack of arable land.
Initial assessments show large swaths of agriculture areas affected by heavy shelling and unexploded ordinances, Weir said.
Olha Boiko, a Ukrainian climate activist and coordinator for the Climate Action Network for Eastern Europe and East Asia, said she and her fellow activists still in Ukraine are worried about the state of the agricultural fields and their suitability to grow wheat after the war, which is one of the country’s largest exports, she said.
Wildlife and natural ecosystems
The plethora of military vehicles trampling over the Ukrainian border are creating an unforgiving landscape, experts said.
In an effort to defend their country, Ukrainian military laid landmines over at least one beach near Odesa, according to the Conflict and Environment Observatory.
Boiko also alleged that Russian forces have blown up oil exporting equipment, polluted the Black Sea and filled fields with landmines, which were found as Russian forces retreated the regions surrounding Kyiv.
Fighting close to Kherson, near the southern coast of Ukraine, resulted in fires in the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve that were so large they were detectable from space and likely destroyed trees and unique habitats for birds, according to the observatory.
“There have been risks to wildlife and biodiversity we’ve seen that play out in Ukraine, with active battles in in insignificant wetlands,” Muffett said.
Urban areas
One of Russia’s military strategies has been to besieging cities by firing weapons indiscriminately into them, Weir said.
When Russian troops retreated the areas on the outskirts Kyiv after failing to take the capital, the devastation left in cities such as Bucha, Borodyanka and Irpin was immediately apparent.
Buildings were burned or completely destroyed. Burned-out cars littered the roadways. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble.
The rebuilding phase is going to be a “huge task,” Weir said.
“From an environmental point of view, there’s going to be a huge amount of work needed to properly assess these sites, locate potentially hazardous sites,” Weir said, adding that environmental remediation process for the potentially hazardous sites can be complex and expensive.
Nuclear facilities
Soon after the conflict began, Russian troops took hold of the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl power plant, raising concerns that an errant explosive could create another radioactive event at the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986.
The destroyed reactor was sealed in 2019 under a $2 billion stadium-sized metal structure, but the other three untouched reactors remain fully exposed. Within them sits a pool of 5 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel, as well as dangerous isotopes, such as uranium and plutonium. If hit, the storage facility has the potential to cause an even larger disaster than in 1986 and could prompt widespread evacuations all over Europe, Muffett said.
“The conduct of active military operations in a country with four nuclear facilities and 15 active nuclear reactors poses extraordinary risks,” Muffett said, admonishing Russia for immediately targeting Chernobyl despite “no legitimate military objectives associated with that site.”
Russian troops have cut off power to Chernobyl in ways the site was not “sustained for,” and untrained Russian servicemen disturbed radioactive soil and raised dust as they moved through the area, Muffett said.
“We’ve seen missile strikes actually put a nuclear facility on fire,” she said. “And, in the immediate hours after the fire began, firefighters were unable to reach the blaze, because they were in a live fire situation. These are these are really extraordinary risks.”
The role Russian oil plays in the conflict
The conflict in Ukraine is the latest demonstration of the “deep linkages between fossil fuels and conflict,” Muffett said. Boiko, who left Kyiv on Feb. 24, said the connection that fossil fuels play in the current war are “obvious,” because Russia is using the funds from its oil industry to fund the conflict.
“We’ve seen Putin’s regime look to weaponize its own natural gas and oil resources as a way to intimidate countries in Europe and beyond from coming to Ukraine to aid,” Muffett said. “And so, this is a fossil fueled conflict in every conceivable way.”
The environmental activists who remain in Ukraine, those who aren’t helping with the immediate humanitarian relief, are bringing attention to the fact that the E.U. and U.S. have been “very dependent” on Russia’s fossil fuels for years, Boiko said.
While the U.S. has imposed sanctions on all Russian oil and other energy sources, the European Union’s embargo only extends to coal, and not to oil and gas. About 40% of the E.U.’s gas comes from Russia, according to the observatory.
“This is exactly the leverage that has been used by Russia that is pressuring, basically, other countries to not impose sanctions to not do anything about this war to not help Ukraine,” Boiko said.
But Boiko said the conflict and the aftermath could eventually lead to positive steps in the fight against climate change, because the sanctions imposed on Russia lead to less fossil fuel consumption. She said the phasing out of fossil fuels could happen more quickly, now that a major world player in oil exports has essentially been eliminated.
“The fact that this conflict is accelerating conversations within Europe about how they free themselves from reliance on fossil oil and fossil gas is also a big step forward,” Muffett said.
