(NEW YORK) — Traffic deaths for the first quarter of this year were the highest since 2002, according to early estimates from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The agency estimates 9,560 people died from motor vehicle crashes during the first quarter of this year — up 7% from the same time in 2021.
Traffic-related deaths have been on the rise since the onset of the pandemic. In 2019, NHTSA reported 36,355 people died on U.S. roads — a number that grew to 38,824 in 2020 and 42,915 in 2021, despite less cars on the road.
“The overall numbers are still moving in the wrong direction,” said NHTSA administrator Steve Cliff.
“We’re talking about three years in a row of traffic deaths, not just being up but being up significantly,” Jonathan Adkins, executive director of the non-profit Governor’s Highway Safety Association said in an interview with ABC News.
Adkins said the surge is due to multiple factors — including less traffic enforcement on roads and prevalence of dangerous behaviors among drivers.
“States are telling me all across the country that speeds are up, drivers are just continuing to speed,” Adkins said. “We really need to bring some of the same attention to speeding that was brought to drunk driving and distracted driving. If we were to get drivers to slow down even a little bit, that make a big difference.”
Cliff said states should “double down” on traffic safety, saying, “Through the bipartisan infrastructure law, there are more resources than ever for research, interventions and effective messaging and programs that can reverse the deadly trend and save lives.”
(WASHINGTON) — Rep. Liz Cheney is looking to turn her landslide loss in Wyoming’s Republican primary Tuesday night into a nationwide crusade to keep Donald Trump out of the White House — one she said Wednesday could include her running for president herself.
Despite her six-year tenure in Congress now headed to a close, Cheney said her political work isn’t done yet and is previewing what’s to come next — including a potential run for the presidency and an organization aimed at taking down Trump in 2024.
Cheney’s first hint at a presidential campaign came in her concession speech, in which she invoked President Abraham Lincoln as an example of patriotism and a champion of the Republican Party.
“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all,” she told her supporters on Tuesday night. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he saved our Union and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”
Cheney, once a rising Republican star, was soundly defeated by Trump-backed Harriet Hageman. Cheney said Tuesday she could have won another term but only if she accepted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
As vice-chair of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Cheney has become one of the party’s most outspoken critics of the former president.
“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,” she said as she addressed her supporters on Tuesday night.
Cheney made a more direct indication she’s thinking about running for the White House on Wednesday morning.
“I’m not going to make any announcements here this morning, but it is something that I am thinking about and I’ll make a decision in the coming months,” Cheney told NBC’s “Today” program on Wednesday.
In the meantime, her focus will be on stopping Trump.
“In coming weeks, Liz will be launching an organization to educate the American people about the ongoing threat to our Republic, and to mobilize a unified effort to oppose any Donald Trump campaign for president,” Cheney spokesperson Jeremy Adler told ABC News.
The news of the anti-Trump group was first reported by Politico.
Trump has yet to formally announce a campaign but has repeatedly hinted at a comeback since the day he left office. Most recently, he told Fox News at CPAC that the “the time is coming” for a formal announcement.
Trump took a victory lap as Cheney was defeated on Tuesday night, calling Hageman’s win “great and very decisive.”
“This is a wonderful result for America, and a complete rebuke of the Unselect Committee of political Hacks and Thugs,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “Liz Cheney should be ashamed of herself, the way she acted, and her spiteful, sanctimonious words and actions towards others. 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.”
His criticism of Cheney continued in another post on Wednesday.
“The Fake News Media is claiming that Liz Cheney has such a ‘wonderful and bright’ political future. Maybe they didn’t notice that she lost by nearly 40 points? She’s too angry and sick to succeed in the future, but who knows!” he wrote on the conservative social media site.
ABC News’ Will Steakin contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Wyoming’s Republican voters got one step closer to picking their secretary of state on Tuesday in a primary matchup of candidates with opposing views on the 2020 election.
ABC News reports that state Rep. Chuck Gray is projected to win the Republican nomination for secretary of state.
Gray, who is endorsed by Donald Trump, claimed the 2020 race was “illegitimate.” He faced state Sen. Tara Nethercott, who has said that she believes the 2020 election was secure; and geologist Mark Armstrong.
Gray also supported the former president after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, tweeting: “This is political persecution!”
There were no listed Democrats on Tuesday seeking the party’s nomination to be secretary of state, though voters could submit write-ins.
The winner of November’s general election will succeed Ed Buchanan, who is retiring and has himself defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
While Wyoming is not a competitive state at the presidential level, the race marks another example of election deniers running for a position that would involve overseeing elections.
The secretary of state is also first in line to the governorship, since Wyoming does not have a lieutenant governor.
(WASHINGTON) –The Inflation Reduction Act, a $739 billion measure signed into law by President Joe Biden on Tuesday, levies a 15% minimum tax on large corporations and marks the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history. Meanwhile, the law will reduce the federal deficit by $305 billion over roughly the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
More immediately, however, the legislation will impact everyday Americans’ wallets.
The law, which passed the House and Senate with support from Democrats in party-line votes, empowers a federal agency to negotiate with health insurers over the prices for prescription drugs under Medicare, for instance, which should bring down the cost of some drugs for seniors.
Further, the measure puts a ceiling on out-of-pocket costs at $2,000 beginning in 2025 for people enrolled in Medicare Part D, the prescription drug plan for seniors.
Beyond health care, the Inflation Reduction Act carries a host of tax credits and discounts on everything from electric cars to solar energy.
Americans can determine the financial benefits available to them under the law with help from a savings calculator created by Rewiring America, a nonprofit that aims to achieve energy efficiency through the electrification of “everything in our communities.” After entering personal information about the location, size, and income of a given household, the calculator will share all of the savings accessible through the measure.
(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.
