(NEW YORK) — The planet continues to experience a massive loss in forest land as the world warms and allows severe wildfires to run rampant in regions spanning the globe.
Overall, forest fires are getting worse worldwide, according to a new report released Wednesday by Global Forest Watch, a forest monitoring platform led by the World Resources Institute. The data captures stand-replacing fires, which kill all or most of the living overstory trees in a forest, and includes wildfires, escaped fires from human activities such as agriculture and hunting and intentionally set fires that result in tree cover loss.
Tree cover loss due to fires is now twice as high as it was in 2001, with forest fires destroying about 7.4 million more acres of land — an area roughly the size of Belgium — last year compared to the turn of the century, according to the researchers, who analyzed two decades of fire data from the Global Land Analysis and Discovery Lab at the University of Maryland.
Forest fires also accounted for more than 25% of all tree cover loss in that past 20 years, with 2021 ranking as the second-worst fire season on record due to unprecedented damage to boreal forests in the Northern Hemisphere, according to the report.
About 70% of all fire-related tree cover loss over the past 20 years has occurred in those boreal forests, likely due to warming temperatures in northern, high-latitude regions, the researchers said.
Nearly 23 million acres of land — an area the size of Thailand or roughly 16 soccer pitches per minute — were scorched globally last year, according to the report. The rate of tree cover loss due to fire is increasing by about 568,000 acres — roughly 4% — every year.
In tropical forests, which are moist and wet environments, stand-replacing fires were historically rare events. However, fire loss in the tropics is increasing about 5% per year, which is an annual increase of about 89,000 acres, the experts said. Almost all fires that occur in the tropics are started by people, such as escaped fires from agriculture and land cleaning.
The top five countries that experienced tree cover loss over the past 20 years were Russia, at 131 million acres; Canada, at 66.7 million acres; the U.S., at 29.7 million acres; Brazil, at 23.5 million acres; and Australia, at 15.6 million acres. Extreme weather caused a significant spike in bush fire activity in Australia from 2019 to 2020.
Climate change is likely the major driver of increasing fire activity, the researchers said. A “climate feedback loop” has occurred in which rising temperatures create drier conditions, causing more forest area to burn, which then release even more carbon into the atmosphere.
The obliteration of forests could further hinder efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate global warming.
Forests are critical to Earth’s ecology for their ability to capture and store carbon out of the atmosphere, alter the air quality and quantity of drinking water and provide habitat for the world’s land species.
But longer fire seasons and an increase in fire frequency could turn some forests into a net source of carbon emissions, releasing more carbon than they are absorbing, which poses a long-term threat to countries’ ability to uphold commitments under the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution.
The cause of increasing forest fires are complex and vary significantly by geography, the researchers said, adding that there is no “silver bullet” to reversing the trend of increasing tree cover loss due to fires.
In addition, there is no solution to bring fire activity back down from historic levels without drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions and breaking the fire-climate feedback loop, according to the analysis. Human activity in and around forests is also making them more susceptible to wildfires, especially in the tropics.
(ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine) — As Russia and Ukraine trade accusations over attacks on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, a worker there told ABC News he fears not only for the safety of his family but also the world.
“If something happens to the spent fuel storage, the consequences could be the same as Chernobyl,” the worker, who spoke to ABC News on condition of anonymity, warned during an interview in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Tuesday.
The Ukrainian man, who is an engineer at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant near the town of Enerhodar, said he plans to return to work soon out of a sense of duty to his country, despite his wife urging him to quit. He described how the Russian soldiers at the plant “are always armed and wear balaclavas.”
“If they don’t like the look of you, they can yell at you,” he said. “I’ve heard that some people were beaten.”
Shortly after invading neighboring Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russian troops stormed the Zaporizhzhia plant, on the banks of the Dnipro River in the country’s southeast. The Ukrainian workers have been left in place to keep the plant operating, as it supplies electricity across the war-torn nation.
“If everyone leaves the station, who will work there? We need to help Ukraine,” the engineer told ABC News.
However, heavy fighting around the site has fueled fears of a catastrophe, like what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine over 36 years ago.
On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl plant, about 65 miles north of Kyiv, exploded and spewed enormous amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, forcing more than 100,000 people within a 1,000-square-mile radius to evacuate. It remains the world’s worst nuclear accident.
Russian forces seized the now-defunct Chernobyl plant and the vast, surrounding radioactive area soon after launching the invasion but ceded control of the facility to Ukrainian troops when they withdrew from the area at the end of March.
Meanwhile, skirmishes between Russian and Ukrainian forces near the Zaporizhzhia plant caused a fire to break out at a training complex there in early March. On Aug. 5, shelling at the site resulted in several explosions near the electrical switchboard, causing a power shutdown, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nuclear watchdog of the United Nations.
Last week, IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi warned that the situation at the Zaporizhzhia plant has deteriorated rapidly to the point of becoming “very alarming” and the agency’s technical experts must be allowed to visit the area to address mounting safety concerns.
On Wednesday, in his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian troops must “immediately” withdraw from the Zaporizhzhia plant and nearby areas “without any conditions.”
“Any radiation incident at the Zaporizhzhia NPP can affect the countries of the European Union, Turkey, Georgia and countries from more distant regions. Everything depends solely on the direction and speed of the wind,” Zelenskyy warned. “If Russia’s actions cause a catastrophe, the consequences may also hit those who remain silent so far.”
The Ukrainian president also accused Russia of using “the cover of the plant” to launch strikes on nearby Ukrainian-controlled territories and storing troops, weapons and equipment in its facilities. Russia has denied the allegations and accused Ukrainian forces of repeatedly firing on the site.
If shelling hits the spent fuel storage at the Zaporizhzhia plant, the engineer told ABC News “it might be like another Chernobyl,” as radioactive material will leak and contaminate the environment.
“Every day, the Russians come closer and closer to the unit, shellings are closer and closer,” he said. “There is no order or stability.”
ABC News’ Morgan Winsor contributed to this report.
(GENEVA) — The World Health Organization renamed the two known clades, or lineages, of the monkeypox virus Monday.
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the lineages will be referred to going forward using Roman numerals.
“The clade formerly known as the Congo Basin or Central African clade will now be referred to as clade I, while the West African clade will be called clade II,” he said during a news conference.
Subsequent lineages will be named using Roman numerals for the clade and lowercase letters will be used for the subclade.
The WHO has been in talks to rename the virus itself due to concerns about stigmatization.
The decision Monday comes as an outbreak of monkeypox spreads around the world with more than 35,000 cases reported to the global health agency.
In the United States, there are more than 12,600 cases across 49 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The majority of cases in the current outbreak have been reported during intimate contact among men who have sex with men, a group that includes people who identify as gay, bisexual, transgender and nonbinary.
However, the CDC has warned that anybody is at risk of monkeypox infection if they have skin-to-skin contact with a monkeypox patient or make contact with an infected person’s lesions.
At least eight cases among children in six states and D.C. have been reported as well as one case among a pregnant woman.
To avoid infection, the CDC recommends limiting the number of sex partners, avoiding spaces with intimate sexual contact with multiple partners, using condoms and gloves during sexual contact and being fully clothed when attending events such as festivals and concerts.
Last week, researchers from Sorbonne University and Bichat-Claude Bernard University Hospital in France published a case report of a dog that developed monkeypox after being exposed to its owners, which were diagnosed with the disease.
The CDC has since updated its website to state dogs can be infected by humans. It’s unknown if other pets, such as cats, hamsters, gerbils and guinea pigs, can be infected.
(NEW YORK) — Former President Donald Trump isn’t the first White House veteran to claim — in the midst of a criminal probe looking at their handling of government secrets — that the president can declassify almost anything he wants, whenever he wants, and however he wants.
“If the president says to talk about [a] document, it is then a declassified document,” the former chief of staff to then-Vice President Dick Cheney, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, told a federal grand jury in 2004. “There’s no … process, according to counsel, that has to be gone through.”
At the time, federal investigators were looking into the leak of the identity of a covert CIA operative — but they were also interested in learning more about how parts of a classified document summarizing Iraq’s purported efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction in Africa had also become public.
Libby admitted to investigators that he “showed” portions of the Iraq document to a New York Times reporter, but he insisted that then-President George W. Bush “had already declassified” those portions by granting permission for Libby to share them with the press.
When transcripts of Libby’s testimony were later released, it sparked a public debate over how presidents can — and should — wield their declassification authority.
“When the president determines that classified information can be made public … can that supplant the declassification process?” a reporter asked White House spokesperson Scott McClellan on April 7, 2006. “Is it de facto declassified, by that determination?”
“The president is authorized to declassify information as he chooses,” McClellan responded, without offering additional details.
A rigorous review
Nearly two decades later, after FBI agents last week executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and removed several sets of classified documents, there is still little clarification on what a president must do — if anything — before a government secret he wants to release is no longer deemed classified.
For most government employees who seek to have information declassified, their requests must go through a rigorous review process that can span the entire U.S. intelligence community, in order to ensure that sources, methods and other national security interests are protected. “[But] there’s no formal process that a president is required to follow when declassifying information,” Brian Greer, a former CIA attorney who specialized in classification issues, told ABC News.
Nevertheless, Greer noted, “there has to be evidence that a declassification order occurred.” And in Trump’s case, “the Trump team has yet to produce any credible evidence,” he said.
In January, National Archives officials retrieved 15 boxes of records that had been improperly taken to Mar-a-Lago when Trump left the White House last year — then, two months ago, federal agents visited Mar-a-Lago to retrieve additional materials that they believed Trump had failed to turn over. Shortly after that visit, an attorney for Trump signed a statement saying that all classified documents at Mar-a-Lago had been turned over to federal investigators, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. But authorities believed Trump continued to possess classified documents, leading to last week’s raid.
It’s unclear exactly what records were recovered from Trump’s residence last week, but court documents filed by the Justice Department indicate that it is investigating, among other things, potential violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime to disclose sensitive national security information that could harm the United States — even if it’s not classified.
After the raid, Trump’s team issued a statement to one media outlet claiming that, while still in office, Trump had issued “a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.” On social media, Trump himself insisted that the documents at Mar-a-Lago were “all declassified.”
“The president is the ultimate classifier and de-classifier — but he can’t just wave a magic wand, and he can’t do it in secret,” said Douglas London, a 34-year CIA veteran and author of the “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.”
“So if [Trump] and his allies are defending his handling of these documents by claiming that they’re no longer classified, they need to show the paper trail,” London said.
‘Nothing short of laughable’
Jeh Johnson, who served as the Defense Department’s top lawyer before becoming Homeland Security secretary under the Obama administration, agreed in a piece he published for Lawfare.
“[P]art and parcel of any act of declassification is communicating that act to all others who possess the same information, across all federal agencies,” Johnson wrote. “This point holds true regardless of whether the information exists in a document, an email, a power point presentation, and even in a government official’s mental awareness. Otherwise, what would be the point of a legitimate declassification?”
Accordingly, Johnson said, the Trump team’s claim of a “standing order” that all documents taken to Trump’s residence were therefore “declassified” is “nothing short of laughable.”
In Libby’s case, no information was publicly released confirming that Bush had given Libby permission to share classified information with a reporter — but at the time, the Bush administration was looking to release the information more broadly, and had initiated an inter-agency review to declassify it.
Amid growing questions over the unfolding war in Iraq, Bush and his allies wanted to bolster their previous claims that Iraq’s regime had looked to acquire weapons of mass destruction in Africa. Those claims had come under intense scrutiny at the time after the former ambassador sent to investigate Iraq’s alleged efforts, Joe Wilson, publicly disclosed that he found no evidence to support the Bush administration’s claims and accused U.S. officials of exaggerating intelligence.
“And so the vice president thought we should get some of these facts out to the press,” Libby testified to the grand jury. “But before it could be done, the document [summarizing the intelligence community’s conclusions] had to be declassified.”
Libby said Vice President Cheney “then undertook to get permission from the president to talk about this to a reporter. He got the permission. Told me to go off and talk to the reporter.”
‘In the public interest’
Ten days after Libby’s meeting with the New York Times reporter, the U.S. government publicly released the document, known as a National Intelligence Estimate.
“What do you say to critics who argue that the president’s decision to disclose this information, to effectively declassify it … [was] a political use of intelligence information?” a reporter asked McClellan, the White House spokesperson, after the document was released.
“It was in the public interest that this information be provided,” McClellan insisted.
Libby was ultimately charged — and convicted — of something else: lying to the grand jury and federal investigators about his role in leaking the identity of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, who was a covert CIA operative. Libby was sentenced to more than two years in federal prison, but his sentence was commuted by Bush in 2007, before Bush left office.
He was then fully pardoned by Trump in 2018.
ABC News’ Alex Mallin and Will Steakin contributed to this report.
(MANCHESTER, N.H.) — Former Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday he’d consider testifying before the House Jan. 6 committee if asked, in some of his most specific comments yet on the prospect.
Appearing at a “Politics & Eggs” breakfast in Manchester, New Hampshire, where presidential hopefuls often speak since the state holds the nation’s first primary, Pence was asked if he’d be “agreeable” if the committee were to call on him to testify.
“If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it,” Pence responded.
“But you’ve heard me mention the Constitution a few times this morning. In the Constitution there are three co-equal branches of government, and any invitation that would be directed to me I’d have to reflect on the unique role I served as vice president.”
“Any formal invitation rendered to us, we’d give it due consideration. But my first obligation is to continue to uphold my oath, continue to uphold this framework of government enshrined in the Constitution, this created the greatest nation in the history of the world,” he continued.
Pence’s answer was yet another break from his former boss, Donald Trump, who has repeatedly slammed the committee’s work as politically motivated.
Committee investigators have for months been privately engaging with Pence’s lawyer about securing his potential testimony, sources have told ABC News.
Pence has largely avoided discussing the work of the Jan. 6 committee despite being cheered by the its members for resisting Trump’s demands. In June, he told Fox News Democrats were using the panel to “distract attention from their failed agenda.”
The focus of one of the committee’s hearings zeroed in on the pressure campaign on Pence, waged by Trump and his allies to attempt to get him to support their effort to overturn the election.
Members of the committee have said a subpoena for Pence’s testimony was not off the table, but have also indicated his testimony may not be necessary in filling any gaps given the committee interviewed Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short and had Pence’s former counsel Greg Jacob testify publicly.
The committee also aired a never-before-seen photograph of a phone call between Trump and Pence on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, that onlookers, including Ivanka Trump, described as “heated.”
Hours later, when the joint session of Congress resumed after the attack, Pence rejected Trump’s last-ditch demands to unilaterally reject Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
The committee also revealed that the mob came within 40 feet of the vice president, who was ushered to an underground location for hours as the violence unfolded. Jacob said in his appearance before the committee that Pence stayed in the area so as to “not to take any chance that the world would see the vice president of the United States fleeing the United States Capitol.”
Jacob also testified that Trump didn’t check on Pence at all during that time, which he said left Pence frustrated.
Pence and Trump haven’t spoken in over a year, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News in June.
The House Jan. 6 committee, made up of nine Democrats and two Republicans, held eight public hearings this summer to reveal the findings of their year-long probe into the events before, during and after the U.S. Capitol attack.
Trump, they argued, was at the center of the attack. He was well-aware of the fact that he lost the 2020 election, members said, but moved ahead anyway with a pressure campaign against federal and local officials to illegally overturn the results.
“Over the last month and a half, the Select Committee has told the story of a president who did everything in his power to overturn an election,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in the last public hearing on July 12. “He lied. He bullied. He betrayed his oath. He tried to destroy our democratic institutions. He summoned a mob to Washington.”
The committee will next reconvene in September.
ABC News’ Hannah Demissie contributed to this report.
(ROCHESTER, N.Y.) — A captain of the Rochester Fire Department who was accused of taking firefighters to a party filled with racist tropes has retired.
Following an investigation by the City of Rochester, Capt. Jeffrey Krywy was forced to leave the department by the city, Mayor Malik Evans announced Tuesday, according to ABC News Rochester affiliate WHAM.
“As of Monday, he has chosen to retire before termination proceedings begin,” Evans said in a statement to WHAM.
Last week, Jerrod Jones sued the City of Rochester and Rochester Fire Department, accusing Krywy of forcing him and two other firefighters to attend a private party on July 7.
According to the lawsuit, Jones said that when he arrived at the party, he saw a large cut-out of former President Donald Trump and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken next to Juneteenth flags.
Jones alleged that the Mary Znidarsic-Nicosia, who owned the home where the party was being held, approached him and asked if he wanted to take home the fried chicken.
He also claims that there was an entertainer at the party impersonating Democratic Monroe County Legislator Rachel Barnhart and there was a senior member of the Rochester Police officer at the party.
Nate McMurray, Jones’ lawyer, took to Twitter on Tuesday, criticizing the incident, saying that an independent investigation hasn’t happened yet.
McMurray also criticized Krywy’s retirement because he presumably retired with his full pension.
McMurray did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Jones said that he told acting Battalion Chief George Smith about the incident and Krywy’s involvement and was told it’d be looked into but was assigned to work with Krywy during his following shift, court documents show.
Jones claimed he’s suffering emotional distress, fears that he will be retaliated against by Krywy and others and is currently on leave from the RFD, according to the lawsuit.
(NEW YORK) — Award-winning restaurateur Michael Scelfo has run kitchens post-9/11 and through the 2008 economic downturn, but he said the COVID-19 pandemic and soaring inflation have brought on prolonged issues businesses are still trying to figure out.
“What’s so different this time around is it’s this sustained, evolving-downward spiral since March of 2020 when things hit the fan with COVID and the shutdown,” Scelfo told Good Morning America. “What we’re left with is the economic rubble of the aftermath.”
Restaurant owners are accustomed to dynamic changes, but even industry veterans like Scelfo said, “it feels like we’re continually taking punches and not necessarily getting the relief that we expected.”
And problems that began at the onset of the pandemic — mandated restaurant closures, safety restrictions, staffing shortages and broken supply chains — have been exacerbated by rising costs on food, fuel and materials, failed federal relief packages and inflation, experts said.
Soaring inflation hits cost of ingredients
Food prices have outpaced the overall inflation rate, which is up nearly 11% year-over-year in July, according to the latest data from Bureau of Labor Statistics. Common restaurant staple ingredients like flour — when purchased in a U.S. city — rose 22% in the last year, while eggs have increased 38%.
“It all trickles down to what the baseline cost of whatever the product is,” Scelfo said. “If you’re paying more for it on the home front, you can be assured that we’re paying more.”
Scelfo, who has not passed along increases to his guests, looks at that as a last resort.
“I don’t want to raise prices on the consumer any more than I have to because I’m sensitive to it too. And I do think there’s a limit to what you can realistically charge,” he said. “If you’re a restaurant that’s operating on thin margins, you’re really probably up against it right now — there’s kind of this feast or famine out there for restaurants who have the means to navigate this period.”
“Inflation is having a tremendous impact on everyone across the board,” Leslie Silverglide, co-founder of California casual restaurant chains Split and Mixt, told GMA. “[We’ve tried to] hold price as much as possible,” she added, and “be smarter about how we run our business.”
Food shortages, costs impact menus and availability
Brooklyn-based chef-owner Sal Lamboglia of the newly opened Italian hotspot, Cafe Spaghetti, thinks customers may relate more than ever to the challenges of rising food costs as they shift their own spending on groceries.
“So many things that we use that aren’t even specialty items — eggs, milk, cream, butter – have gone up 10, 20 30% — I’m sure every restaurant is going through this, but I also feel also for the diner,” he said. “It’s scary because I don’t know if things will make their way down again.”
And he said Lamboglia’s menu has taken a hit.
“We’ve been getting shorted on certain pastas, and certain grains and flour — I’ve had to actually change a brand of pasta,” he said. “[We] go back to the drawing board each time and say, ‘OK, how valuable is this dish with this exact pasta? Can we change the shape? Are people going to like it? And that’s what we deal with now. It’s a lot.”
Chef David Nayfeld, owner of Che Fico and Independent Restaurant Coalition (IRC) board member, told GMA that some think inflation is “just now happening.” “Our costs have been rising steadily and aggressively for nearly two years,” he said.
“We’ve decided to actually lean into quality,” Nayfeld said. “It may mean that people will dine out less,” but he believes diners will choose restaurants “based on quality.”
He also hopes the decision to spend more on employees, products and farms will ensure the support of key players who share his values to “offer a better quality of product to our guests, knowing that they’re smart enough to know the difference.”
Paying for quality labor impacts every facet of the supply chain: “If nobody is there to support and prop the supply chain up, [it] will collapse,” he said. … when we believe in product and believe in farms — we need to support them.”
New strategies to stay afloat
Jake Dickson, owner of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats — a butchery, restaurant and bar — called “huge increases in labor costs, packaging costs and meat inputs” a “triple whammy” over the last six months.
“Our labor costs per head were up 30%,” he told GMA of the overhead and “first punch” at the start of the pandemic. “And that’s pretty tough in a business where labor costs are already massive.”
Where Dickson was initially “insulated from food cost increases” and able to keep meat prices steady thanks to longstanding relationships with purveyors, he said “unfortunately, those things don’t hold right now.”
“Our farmers’ costs are now going through the roof,” he said, noting fertilizer and fuel costs have prompted higher prices.
“They don’t want to increase prices on us because they don’t want me to buy less and they know that if I raise my prices, we’ll probably sell less,” Dickson said.
Four months ago, he made a “very purposeful decision to add a beer and wine license,” opening a bar that serves as “a high margin business” to offset other new costs.
“We’ve kept either small increases or no increases in many places because the bar’s margins are so much higher,” he said, hailing it “a bulwark.”
He also strategized his labor costs.
“Now they’re pretty much flat because we made a choice to pay our employees really well then and we haven’t had to keep giving raises — we’re very competitive — now we’re just kind of figuring out all the other pieces.”
Adapting to skyrocketing expenses
In 17 years of opening restaurants across California, Texas and Arizona, Silverglide said her growing list of challenges has been unlike any other.
“We joke that it’s like Whac-A-Mole. We solve one thing, then something else pops up,” she said. “Especially as we’re looking to build out new restaurants, we’re finding it really hard to just get standard equipment — we place the orders and then as we get closer, they’re like, ‘Oh, actually, it’s gonna be another four to six months.'”
“It’s a hard place to be running a restaurant today,” Silverglide told GMA.
Lamboglia thinks restaurants can strike a balance by offsetting expensive entree lists with a section of the menu that’s affordable.
“At least giving the guests the option not to feel like, ‘Wow, I almost can’t even go out to eat because it’s just too much,” he said.
Rather than constantly revising menu prices as inflation rose to 7% this spring, Leslie Whitney, the owner of Sunset Grill in Virginia, told GMA she and her husband decided on a “temporary fix” to add an “inflation fee” of 3.5% to diners’ checks.
“As food prices were literally rising and changing every day … we had to do something to recoup some of the money loss,” she said. Although the flat fee won’t cover all their new costs, they are “simply trying to stop the bleed.”
Staffing has been one of the “lasting effects of COVID” that Whitney has grappled with.
“We can fluctuate with rising food prices, but not having appropriate staff really puts a wrench in our operations of service — we’re constantly trying to hire where we are short staffed,” she said. “Back-of-the house positions are the hardest to hire because we have high expectations and aren’t willing to cut corners in knowledge and experience.”
A push for federal funding
“The one big player here that has not done enough is the government,” Nayfeld said. “[The government] has had the ability with multiple bills to refill the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which would really do a tremendous amount – not just for now, but for a couple of years, making sure that these restaurants can stabilize.”
Scelfo, who applied and said he never received money from the bill that was part of the American Rescue Plan, added that the “RRF only funded maybe a third or half of restaurants that applied for it and they’ve still never replenished that.”
Despite the constant battering, resilience has created a resounding sense of gratitude and respect in the industry.
“To look for a positive in all this, I’ve never been more proud of our teams,” Scelfo said of the staff who continuously rises to the occasion.
“Restaurants are continuing to find a way to provide a great customer experience so that they really try to minimize the effect of what’s happening out there and make you feel like you’re escaping it … that’s why I’m trying not to pass along that cost.”
“None of that would be possible without a lot of dedicated people that continue to work in this industry and work harder than they ever had before,” Scelfo said.
(NEW YORK) — Since the monkeypox vaccine began being distributed in New York City, the rollout has been plagued with issues.
The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has cycled through several scheduling platforms in a matter of weeks, which have experienced crashes as people tried to book appointments.
Additionally, the demand for the vaccine has far outpaced the supply. Whenever the city has released a few thousand vaccine appointment slots, they have been filled up within a matter of hours, sometimes minutes, officials said.
“My general thought about the rollout is that it is a hard situation,” Dr. Dana Mazo, an infectious diseases specialist and clinical associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health, told ABC News. “The good news is that there has been a high demand, that the high-risk communities are definitely interested in the vaccine. And so that is good.”
“But when there is a limited supply, we are put in a hard situation and all of us feel the difficulties,” she added.
Shortage of vaccine doses
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in mid-July it had ordered nearly 7 million doses of the JYNNEOS vaccine, which is a two-dose vaccine approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent smallpox and monkeypox. However, they will not all be available until mid-2023.
As of Tuesday, the Biden administration has shipped more than 630,000 doses to states, according to HHS data. An additional 786,000 doses have been allocated, but it will take several weeks to distribute the doses.
So far, New York City has received more than 77,800 doses, HHS data shows, but local health officials estimate that as many as 150,000 residents may be at risk for monkeypox exposure.
Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of health policy and management at City University of New York School of Public Health, said there are only so many doses that can be sent to the city and state when other places are suffering from large outbreaks.
“New York City obviously has had the most cases, but then you’ve had a lot of cases in other places like California, Illinois, Florida, for instance,” he told ABC News. “So how then do you determine how much of those vaccines are supposed to be in New York versus the other locations?”
There have been some attempts to try to stretch out the supply. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said it is prioritizing administering first doses to get as many people as possible at least some level of protection.
“If you have received the first dose, you will be contacted about scheduling the second dose in the coming weeks,” the department states on its website. “You can wait longer than four weeks between doses.”
To increase the number of JYNNEOS doses available, the FDA authorized a new strategy to inject the vaccine intradermally, just below the first layer of skin, rather than subcutaneously, or under all the layers of skin.
This will allow one vial of vaccine to be given out as five separate doses rather than a single dose.
In theory, this should work because the supply would be quintupled and, for example, 6,000 slots being opened would now increase to 30,000 slots, experts said.
However, there are a few roadblocks. Administering vaccines intradermally is a skill that most health care workers are not trained or experienced in, although it can be taught.
It also would require patients to be told that this way of administering is under emergency use authorization rather than full FDA approval.
“The concern is whenever you do things that are off label or splitting doses you have to make sure you get the same efficacy, you get the same protection,” Lee said. “If you do split doses that basically convert the same amount of vaccine to like multiple doses for a greater number of people, we have to ask ourselves what will be the impact in terms of protection?”
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has not stated whether it intends to adopt this strategy.
Glitchy websites and slots filled within minutes
Another problem that has plagued the rollout is the multiple websites that resulted in crashes and glitches as people intend to access them.
In June, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene partnered with MedRite, a chain of urgent care centers, to operate the appointment scheduling website.
The website was scheduled to launch on July 6, but some people were able to access vaccine appointments before the launch time. Officials quickly took down the portal but, when it went back up again, it crashed.
Next, the department turned to Affiliated Physicians, a health care provider, to schedule vaccine appointments.
The website went live on July 12. Less than half an hour later, the health department tweeted the site was down due to a “high level of traffic.”
Eventually, the department switched over to VAX4NYC, the portal that was used for scheduling COVID-19 vaccines.
Dr. Amish Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, said VAX4NYC should have been used from the start.
“[The health department] should have used systems that anyone had been familiar with,” he told ABC News. “That was a tried and tested system and had been working fine rather than contracts with certain companies, where they’ve had glitches.”
He continued, “A new system that people had to learn on the fly when there was such demand, I think is not ideal when you’re trying to be as efficient as possible with a resource that was in a very limited supply.”
During a City Council oversight hearing last week looking at “failures of New York City’s technological response under critical demand,” Matt Fraser, the city’s chief technology officer, said the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene contracts with MedRite and Affiliated Physicians were drafted under the administration of former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“This vendor had been previously cleared by another administration,” he said during testimony. “Our look at this is that it’s a vendor that’s done similar work in the city for this purpose, and unfortunately, it did not work out this time.”
Questions have also arisen over MedRite’s role due to being cited for fraud in the past. In 2016, then-New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman settled with MedRite after paying for fake positive reviews on various websites.
“I would just say that this is an important question to ask: how was the trust established that they would be able to deliver in an emergency situation when they’ve already been deemed a fraudulent company?” Adalja said. “They should have articulated the rationale. ‘This is why we use it, and we know we’re going to use it, or they should have said that upfront’ They should be transparent about their decision-making process.”
(NEW YORK) — Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., is projected to have lost her primary on Tuesday to Donald Trump-backed Harriet Hageman, ABC News reports, after Cheney built her political profile — and her campaign — around criticizing the former president as an existential threat to American democracy.
Cheney’s defeat was largely expected, given the partisan makeup of her seat and polling that showed her trailing Hageman. Trump won Wyoming in the last presidential election with some 70% of the vote. Still, Cheney’s defeat marks Trump’s biggest win in his revenge tour against intraparty detractors and a warning sign for other anti-Trump Republicans thinking of crossing him.
“Tonight, Harriet Hageman has received the most votes in this primary. She won. I called her to concede the race. This primary election is over,” Cheney said in a speech Tuesday night from a ranch in Jackson, contrasting that call with Trump, who still refuses to concede the 2020 race.
The choice between Cheney and Hageman, both of whom staked out conservative policy platforms, played out largely along national themes and loyalty to Trump.
Cheney focused on criticizing Trump over his role in last year’s deadly Capitol insurrection, casting her reelection bid as a fight to maintain the GOP’s principles.
Hageman, meanwhile, echoed Trump’s unfounded election fraud claims and berated Cheney — whom Hageman had previously advised — as a lawmaker more focused on toppling the de facto GOP leader.
Cheney boasts a famous last name and significantly out-raised Hageman. But over time it became clear that the three-term lawmaker was the underdog as polls showed Wyoming Republicans increasingly favoring her opponent.
In a sign of Cheney’s tenuous footing with members of her own party, her campaign started an outreach effort to voters to explain how they could change their party registration the day of the primary to vote for her — though operatives said there was little hope there were enough Democrats to change Cheney’s fate.
“Two years ago, I won this primary with 73% of the vote. I could easily have done the same again. The path was clear,” Cheney said in her speech Tuesday. “But it would have required that I go along with President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election. It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic — that was a path I could not and would not take.”
“No House seat, no office in this land, is more important than the principles that we are all sworn to protect,” she said. “And I well understood the potential political consequences of abiding by my duty.”
Hageman now is expected to coast in the general election — against projected Democratic opponent Lynnette Grey Bull — in one of the country’s reddest states and be a staunch Trump ally in the House.
“Absolutely the election was rigged. It was rigged to make sure that President Trump could not get reelected,” she said at a campaign event earlier this month indicating her ideological alignment with Trump. “What happened in 2020 is a travesty.”
Hageman on Tuesday touted her win over Cheney, describing it as returning Wyoming’s House seat to the people.
“I will be accountable to the voters and citizens of Wyoming because I am one of you and, just like you, I am sick and tired of having no voice in the U.S. House of Representatives,” she said. “Today we have succeeded at what we set out to do — we have reclaimed Wyoming’s lone congressional seat for Wyoming.”
“Assume that if we put you in power, you will be accountable to us and you will do what is in our best interest. And if you don’t, we will fire you,” she said.
Cheney’s defeat marks a bookend to a meteoric rise and swift fall for an erstwhile GOP star.
She was first elected in 2016 and became the No. 3 Republican in the House in late 2018, a climb that fueled rumors she had an eye on the speakership one day.
However, after last year’s insurrection, she became the highest-ranking House Republican to back impeaching Trump and ultimately became the vice chair of the special committee investigating the Capitol riot.
Her consistent condemnations of Trump infuriated both other House Republicans who accused her of derailing their messaging strategy and some voters in Wyoming who viewed Cheney as an absentee representative more focused on the former president than state issues.
Beyond her tough primary challenge, she also lost her leadership spot in the House and was censured by the Republican National Committee and the Wyoming Republican Party.
Still, Cheney refused to modulate her messaging — given, she said, the danger Trump represented — and indicated that she would continue her focus on combating election conspiracies even after her expected loss.
“Like many candidates across this country, my opponents in Wyoming have said that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. No one who understands our nation’s laws — no one with an honest, honorable, genuine commitment to our Constitution — would say that. It is a cancer that threatens our great Republic,” she said in her closing ad. “If we do not condemn these lies, if we do not hold those responsible to account, we will be excusing this conduct and it will become a feature of all elections. America will never be the same.”
All eyes now will be on what Cheney plans to do after leaving the House, with her hinting that “now the real work begins.”
Speculation has bubbled that Cheney is eyeing a presidential bid in 2024 to challenge Trump, should he run again in two years, a theory that gained more ground in her concession speech in which she noted Abraham Lincoln’s own failed House and Senate bids before he won the presidency.
“Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history,” she said.
Regardless of what form her advocacy takes, Cheney indicated that she will still hold candidates’ feet to the fire over unproven claims of election fraud.
“Today, as we meet here, there are Republican candidates for governor who do deny the outcome of the 2020 election and who may refuse to certify future elections if they oppose the results,” she said in her concession speech. “We have candidates for secretary of state who may refuse to report the actual results of the popular vote in future elections. And we have candidates for Congress, including here in Wyoming, who refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and suggest that states decertify the result.”
“No American should support election deniers for any position of genuine responsibility where their refusal to follow the rule of law will corrupt our future,” she said.
Cheney’s loss marks the end of a largely successful campaign by Trump to expel his impeachment-backers from the GOP, arguing they were not true Republicans.
Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump last year, four decided to not seek reelection. Of the six who did, four have now lost their primaries. Only two of the 10 have advanced to the general election.
“Liz Cheney should be ashamed of herself, the way she acted, and her spiteful, sanctimonious words and actions towards others,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform. “Now she can finally disappear into the depths of political oblivion where, I am sure, she will be much happier than she is right now.”
ABC News’ Miles Cohen, Lalee Ibssa, Allison Pecorin and Brittany Shepherd contributed to this report.
(SEOUL, South Korea) — North Korea fired two cruise missiles on Wednesday as South Korea’s president marked his 100th day in office.
Pyongyang has test-fired its missile system 19 times this year alone, including the latest launch of two cruise missiles Wednesday morning, as intelligence in the U.S. and South Korea has confirmed that North Korea is prepared to conduct its seventh nuclear test.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Wednesday at a press conference that if North Korea expresses a “steady will” to denuclearize, an “audacious” economic booster program could be on offer from the South but said that talks between the two Koreas will not take place unless it is to establish a substantive and long-lasting peace.
Unlike the previous pro-North government, Yoon’s new administration has taken a more aggressive approach to North Korea’s military provocations in the past 100 days.
When North Korea fired eight ballistic missiles from four different regions in the country, South Korea and the U.S. joint forces fired eight surface-to-surface missiles as a countermeasure the following day.
The joint forces are now gearing up for the 10-days-long Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military exercise which is set to begin next Monday.
Public sentiment in South Korea has broadly indicated that, with no end in sight regarding the easing of tensions between the two nations, it might make sense for South to go nuclear itself.
“Those who assert that South Korea should develop its own nuclear weapons point out the unequal, threatening fact that North Korea has it and South Korea does not,” Kim Hyung-suk, president of the Council on Diplomacy for Korean Unification, told ABC News. “But it’s only an instantaneous idea. There are numerous restraints to actualize a South Korea-made nuclear weapons program.”
According to a public opinion poll report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 71% out of 1,500 people surveyed said that they are in favor of South Korea developing its own nuclear weapon while just 26% percent were against the idea.
Asked by ABC News whether he agrees with such sentiments, Yoon said he remains committed to the Non-Proliferation Treaty which he referred to as an “essential prerequisite for lasting world peace.”
Yoon, however, is currently facing strong disapproval ratings in South Korea due to domestic political conflicts within his own party, a majority opposition in the National Assembly, and several scandals coming from within his own cabinet. Yoon apologized to South Korean’s on Wednesday for these issues and pledged to “listen” to the people with “modesty.”
