(ORLANDO, Fla.) — Two people have been shot and killed, including an Orlando news employee and 9-year-old girl, and multiple people were injured Wednesday in Pine Hills, Florida, police said.
According to Orange County Sheriff John Mina, the mother of the 9-year-old and another member of the Spectrum News 13 crew were also shot in the same area and are in critical condition.
The mother and child were shot in their nearby home. Mina said it was unclear why they were targeted.
The news crew was on the scene reporting on a 20-year-old woman shot and killed in the area this morning when they were shot at, police said.
Police arrested suspect Keith Melvin Moses, 19, in connection to the shootings. Moses was allegedly arrested while armed with a firearm that authorities believe will link him to the shootings, according to the sheriff.
According to Mina, Moses has a lengthy criminal history and is expected to be charged with each murder.
“I want to acknowledge what a horrible day this has been for our community and our media partners,” Mina said.
The victims were taken to the same regional hospital that cared for victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, according to ABC News Orlando affiliate WFTV.
(NEW YORK) — A new World Health Organization report found that maternal mortality rates have either increased or remained the same in nearly all regions of the world in the past five years.
“In 2020, we estimate that 287,000 women died globally from a maternal cause, and that’s equivalent to almost 800 deaths a day, or a death every 2 minutes,” said Dr. Jenny Cresswell, an epidemiologist and author of the WHO report, during a press briefing on Tuesday.
Experts say this trend is a stark reversal from previous significant progress in reducing maternal deaths between 2000 and 2015, revealing a major setback for global maternal health and highlighting disparities in healthcare access.
In the United States, maternal mortality rates increased by 75 percent over the past 20 years — from roughly 12 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 21 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020. The U.S. is one of the eight countries and territories the report flagged as having a significant percentage increase in maternal mortality rates. The list also includes Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Greece, and the Dominican Republic.
The report revealed large inequities between regions of the world. Maternal deaths continue to be largely concentrated in the lowest income areas of the world and the countries most affected by conflict. The highest maternal mortality was reported in Sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated 545 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births. Globally, an estimated 7 out of 10 maternal deaths take place in this region.
“Maternal mortality is a key indicator of how a health system is functioning,” said Dr. Lale Say of the Department of Reproductive Health and Research at WHO.
WHO experts say maternal deaths increase when women have less access to quality healthcare services, particularly around the time of delivery. Leading causes of maternal death include severe bleeding, high blood pressure, infection, and complications from unsafe abortion. With modern clinical knowledge and technology, the majority of maternal deaths are preventable. However, solutions may not be accessible or implemented in low resource settings, putting some groups at higher risk.
“No woman should die in childbirth. I think that’s a human right that should apply in every country, and that’s what every government should aim to ensure,” said Dr. Anshu Banerjee, Director for the Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Ageing at WHO.
“An investment in women is an investment in the future of communities and countries,” said Say.
Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
The Joe Perry Project is getting back on the road.
The Aerosmith guitarist’s solo band has announced a spring U.S. tour, running from April 15 in Mashantucket, Connecticut, to April 26 in Los Angeles, California.
For the full list of dates and all ticket info, visit JoePerry.com.
The Joe Perry Project first began after Perry left Aerosmith in 1979, and went on to release three records. When Perry rejoined the “Dream On” outfit in 1984, the JPP went on hiatus and eventually reformed in 2009.
Perry also has touring plans with The Hollywood Vampires, which also features Alice Cooper and actor Johnny Depp. The group launches a European trek in June.
Aerosmith, meanwhile, hasn’t performed live since last year, when they were forced to cancel the remaining dates on their Las Vegas residency due to health issues affecting frontman Steven Tyler.
(EAST PALESTINE, Ohio) — After a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, more than two weeks ago, residents and health officials have expressed concern about the state of water in the area.
Homeowners in East Palestine have complained of symptoms that some in the town believe are tied to the release of chemicals from the derailed train cars.
The incident has also sparked environmental concerns. An estimated 3,500 fish — such as minnows, darters and sculpin — have died in creeks and rivers around the area, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
While many officials have said the town’s water supply appears to be free of harmful levels of contamination, Kuldeep Singh, an assistant professor of earth sciences at Kent State University, told ABC News that long-term testing needs to be done to ensure the water supply is safe.
Singh said locations that previously showed clear results may not produce the same results two or three weeks down the road.
“What happens today is only a diagnostic of that space and time,” he said. “What may not happen in one location might be another location, what may not be in one particular location in time could be in another location in time.”
Cleaning up derailment site
According to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, most contaminants did not enter local waterways but are rather “pooling at the derailment site in puddles and ditches.”
So far, Norfolk Southern said it has removed more than 1.5 million gallons of contaminated water from the site, with the company telling ABC News that 400,000 gallons of contaminated water were collected on Tuesday alone.
Neither Norfolk Southern nor the Environmental Protection Agency revealed which contaminants were found in the water, or the levels of contaminants found.
Several of the train cars were carrying dangerous materials on board, including vinyl chloride, ethyl acrylate and isobutylene, are considered to be very toxic — possibly carcinogenic — and could be unsafe for both residents and the environment.
“These are hazardous chemicals and have potential health impacts if they contaminate our air and water,” Miranda Leppla, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law, told ABC News. “And so, it’s really important that we make sure that the cleanup efforts are really looking at this on a long-term basis.”
The risk is not just to humans. ODNR said the deaths of the fish in nearby creeks and rivers likely occurred from the immediate release of contaminants following the crash, although the agency does not believe there is currently any risk to aquatic life.
Testing water wells
According to the EPA’s latest update Sunday, results from sampling municipal well water don’t show quality concerns. The Columbiana County Health District has so far sampled 52 private water wells.
On a trip to East Palestine Tuesday, Gov. DeWine and EPA Administrator Michael Regan drank tap water while visiting a woman’s home to prove the water is safe to drink, although some residents are encouraged to use bottled water until their well water testing results return.
Singh said it’s possible the public supply wells are never contaminated because the aquifers — which are the water-bearing rocks that transmit water to wells — are deep underground and separated by hundreds of feet of sedimentary rock.
However, private water wells might be contaminated because their aquifers are shallower.
However, he added that to detect whether or not the private wells are contaminated, inspectors cannot examine them at random.
“If it’s random testing, you might be testing in a direction where you would never go, for example, but if nothing shows up in their well, does not mean contaminants are not there and that’s what my point is,” Singh said. “Random testing does not ensure that they are not contaminated. It has to be mapped from the site where contamination started, and then move outwards.”
Sampling groundwater
About a week after the accident, Norfolk Southern submitted an action plan to the Ohio Protection Agency saying it will install a number of monitoring wells to test groundwater.
“If you think about it, anything that spills, with simple gravity, would go into the soil and percolate down to the groundwater,” Singh said. “That part is not visible. Often, our choices and fears are dictated by the visible components, not the invisible.”
No reports have been released stating groundwater is contaminated but, if it is, it could feed to streams and rivers.
Additionally, because so much of groundwater is deep below the surface, “the effects of that contamination may take a longer time to appear,” Leppla said.
Unlike cleaning soil, which is much easier because it can be picked up and moved, groundwater takes longer to be decontaminated.
“Groundwater is the most important being that is the most pristine freshwater abundant available to us,” Singh said. “And once contaminated, may take forever. For example, cleanup, of…groundwater contamination might take 10 years. That takes a lot of costs on taxpayers.”
ABC News’ Sasha Pezenik contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — More than 8 million refugees from Ukraine have been recorded across Europe as of Tuesday, nearly one year since Russia invaded, according to the U.N. refugee agency.
Poland has seen the largest numbers of Ukrainian refugees, estimated to be around 1.5 million, followed by other European countries like the Czech Republic and Slovakia, due to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Celina Kretkowska-Adamowicz, director of program operations for Save the Children in Poland, told ABC News that, as of now, “the biggest need is financial support.”
Save the Children has been operating in Poland since February 2022, when Ukraine was first invaded, Kretkowska-Adamowicz said.
Though people are still crossing the border from Ukraine to Poland, “now, the situation is more stable, the movement of people is also more stable, and the needs are more longer-term,” she said.
Kretkowska-Adamowicz said “child protection, education and the provision of emergency assistance through cash voucher[s]” are among some of those longer-term needs that Save the Children has been helping with.
Some refugees have also attempted to move back to Ukraine, Kretkowska-Adamowicz said.
“But then after a while, they find out that they are not able to live like this,” she said, “and then they decide to go back to Poland.”
Of the more than 17,000 people surveyed by the U.N. from October 2022 to February that have been displaced because of the war in Ukraine, 24% said they have visited home at least once since they initially left.
Some of the top reasons listed included visiting relatives and obtaining documents.
“Many people from Poland go to Ukraine for a short period of time, for example, to see their family or to attend to some formal issues,” Kretkowska-Adamowicz said.
Others, however, do the opposite, Kretkowska-Adamowicz said.
“There are many cases of people who are crossing to Poland, for example, just to do shopping on the Polish side and then they come back to Ukraine,” she said.
As more refugees are settling in host countries, education and mental health have become more prominent issues, she added.
“Access to inclusive and equal education is difficult,” Kretkowska-Adamowicz said. “We are seeing as well, now, increasing issues related to mental health.”
(WASHINGTON) — A divide in Congress over the debt ceiling threatens to plunge the U.S. economy into disarray, drawing attention to a looming question: How has the nation’s debt ballooned to $31.4 trillion and what can be done to shrink it?
In fact, economists expect the U.S. debt to grow significantly. In a report last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected the federal debt will grow nearly $20 trillion by the end of 2033.
A group of Republican lawmakers has indicated it would not raise the debt limit unless Democrats agree to significant spending cuts; the Biden administration, however, has said it will not take part in policy negotiations conditioned upon the periodic borrowing hike.
Since yearly spending by the federal government exceeds tax revenue, the U.S. has accrued tens of trillions of dollars in debt, almost all of it in the last two decades under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
In order to reverse that trend and achieve an annual surplus, the U.S. would need to either impose a dramatic tax increase or spending cut, or a combination of the two, amounting to a monumental shift in U.S. fiscal policy, experts told ABC News.
Short of that, the U.S. could still make significant but less transformative policy changes in an effort to achieve annual fiscal balance, in which the costs incurred by the government equal the amount of money it raises, allowing the country to stop adding to its debt, they added.
“The car is going off the cliff,” Kent Smetters, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business who formerly worked at the Congressional Budget Office, told ABC News. “There are pretty big changes needed going forward.”
To be sure, experts differ over the risks posed by the nation’s growing debt. Some economists dismiss concerns about the rising debt as overblown, while others acknowledge that the debt threatens U.S. fiscal health but say the problem should not concern policymakers during lean economic periods.
The last budget surplus for the federal government occurred in 2001. Every year since then, the U.S. has spent more money than it has brought in, deepening the nation’s financial hole. Last fiscal year, interest payments on the nation’s debt amounted to $395.5 billion, or 6.8% of federal spending, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
The trend has resulted from a combination of tax cuts and spending increases overseen by both major parties, experts said.
In the wake of fiscal crises such as the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 outbreak, the federal government spent trillions to stimulate economic growth and support people who had lost their jobs or faced other financial setbacks. Meanwhile the War on Terror, including wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will ultimately cost the federal government more than $8 trillion, according to a study released by researchers at Brown University in 2021.
Rather than raise taxes to pay for those expenses, the U.S. imposed tax cuts, including two measures signed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 and later made permanent in partial form by President Barack Obama. Between 2001 and 2018, those tax cuts added roughly $5.6 trillion to the federal debt, the liberal think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found.
The ballooning debt is “absolutely bipartisan,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington, told ABC News. “There is a lot of finger pointing but they may as well all point the fingers at themselves.”
Achieving annual surpluses, in which the U.S. spends less money than it brings in through taxes and other means, would demand “one of the most dramatic policy shifts that we’ve ever had,” MacGuineas said.
In all, the federal government would need savings of between $10 billion and $20 billion over the next decade to start delivering annual surpluses, MacGuineas said. “We haven’t seen savings of that magnitude in decades, perhaps ever,” she added.
Pursuing a more modest goal, the U.S. could aim to achieve fiscal balance, reaching a point at which its annual expenses equal the amount that it brings in, experts said.
To reach balance within a decade, all spending would need to be slashed by about one-quarter and the necessary cuts would grow to 85% if defense, veterans, Social Security and Medicare spending were considered off limits, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington said.
A budget model at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that achieving fiscal balance would require the federal government to hike tax revenues by over 40% or cut expenditures by 30%, or some combination of the two.
Smetters, of the Wharton School, said fiscal balance is akin to a credit card holder who succeeds in meeting his or her monthly payments, even if the level of debt remains unchanged.
“Without balance, the government at some point will fail to be able to make its full interest payments on the debt,” Smetters said. “It doesn’t get us down to zero debt. It just gets us to a level of balance where everything is sustainable.”
The debt will likely grow before Congress addresses it, McGuineas said, citing what she described as a gridlocked political environment in Washington, D.C.
“Long-term compromise and tradeoffs have been cast aside in this dangerously polarized moment,” she said. “It’s precarious in this country right now.”
US Environmental Protection Agency / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — National union officials say years of cost-cutting and staff reductions within the freight rail industry have led to an increase in the rate of derailments and fostered an increasingly unsafe environment for workers and the public. They urge a strengthening of protection for whistleblowers, among other steps.
Their comments preceded a Feb. 19 letter from Transportation Secretary Peter Buttigieg in which he accused rail companies of spending millions on lobbying efforts to oppose safety regulations rather than support rail safety.
Both union officials did not directly connect what they say is the degradation of safety measures, to the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio – where toxic chemicals were released into the air and water sources, forcing nearly 2,000 residents to evacuate their homes and leaving lingering environmental concerns. However, their letter demanding increased federal oversight was directly prompted by the incident, renewing their stance in the long-simmering debate about the increased focus on profit at the expense of public safety.
In a letter reviewed by ABC News from the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department dated Feb. 9 and in interviews with two officials, union leaders called for increased federal oversight of the largest freight railroads, which they allege have “cut corners” and initiated practices that “pose real threats to workers and public safety.”
While the number of incidents, fatalities, and derailments nationwide appear to have trended downward due to an overall decrease in miles traveled by freight rail during the pandemic, the rate of incidents per mile for the country’s largest freight railroads has increased over the last decade, according to data from the Federal Railroad Administration.
The nation’s seven Class 1 railroads – the largest freight rail companies including BNSF, Canadian National Railway, Canadian Pacific, CSX Transportation, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific – suffered two derailments for every million miles traveled in 2022, compared to the 1.71 derailments per million miles in 2013. Across 398 million miles traveled, 2022 saw a total of 818 derailments.
According to FRA data about Class 1 railroads, 447 train cars containing hazmat materials – dangerous goods such as petroleum and chemical products – were damaged or derailed in 2022.
Since 2013, 5,462 hazmat cars have been damaged or derailed, with 135 instances of cars releasing hazmat material. The Federal Railroad Administration notes on their website that rail transportation is “recognized to be the safest method of moving large quantities of chemicals over long distances,” especially compared to highway transport.
In an earnings call slide presentation dated Jan. 25, Norfolk Southern executives noted that its FRA train accident rate had increased from 2019 to 2022, though the railroad’s personal injury rate declined in the same period.
“We know all too well the deadly consequences of freight train derailments,” Greg Regan, president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department, wrote in his letter to the Federal Railroad Administration. “If there is no meaningful change in the industry, we fear that these safety incidents will unfortunately keep happening.”
In the letter, Regan urged the FRA to mandate that freight railroads use the agency’s close call reporting system to improve its federal oversight of the company. The FRA’s confidential close call reporting system is currently a voluntary program that allows employees to report near-miss incidents on a confidential basis to an independent third party. None of the Class 1 freight railroads participate in the program; however, Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and 17 other railroads are among those who do participate in the programs.
In a statement Tuesday, the Department of Transportation called on both Norfolk Southern and the entire freight rail industry to join the confidential close call reporting system so that employees could “report unsafe events and conditions without fear of negative consequences….”
The program employs the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as a third party which maintains and analyzes close call incidents and other unsafe events. According to Regan, the program would allow employees to report risk and safety issues to the third party with legal protections against employer reprimand or retaliation.
“The whole point of…this program is to try to identify risks before there is a disaster,” Regan said in an interview with ABC News.
The American Association of Railroads, which represents the Class 1 railroads, described mandating the program as “wrongheaded,” noting in a statement to ABC News that preexisting reporting mechanisms are sufficient while “bureaucratic processes” would slow reporting.
When asked about the request on Feb. 15, a White House official said President Joe Biden supports whistleblower protections. However, the official would not comment on the specific close call reporting system or speculate on if it would have prevented the incident.
In a statement to ABC News, FRA Administrator Bose said that the reporting system “is an incredible tool to report unsafe events and conditions, and if more railroads participate, the potential safety benefits would be even greater.”
A spokesperson for the AFL CIO’s Transportation Trades Department said in a statement that if the FRA feels that it is unable to mandate the program through its safety jurisdiction, they would encourage Congress to give the agency the authority to do so.
Lauding the relatively low cost of the program, Regan said he believes that fixing the problems flagged by the reporting system “is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper than what the cleanup bill is going to be in Ohio right now.”
A deterioration in safety culture
“We’ve just seen a deterioration of safety culture in general throughout the industry,” Regan said in an interview with ABC News, commenting on the changing business model of the largest freight railroads over the last decade.
Regan said that the widespread adoption of precision-scheduled railroading in the 2010s led to the loss of 45,000 jobs since 2015.
A report from the Government Accountability Office described precision-scheduled railroading as a broad set of changes to increase efficiency and reduce costs, including reducing staff and assets and lengthening trains. Between 2011 and 2021, the seven largest freight railways reduced staff by 28%, according to the GAO. According to Regan, the impact of this cost-cutting is less time, energy, and people devoted to conducting necessary safety checks.
Regan said that five years ago, a worker would spend an average of two minutes inspecting a car; today, he says they are down to 30 to 45 seconds.
“They are applying for waivers on like brake inspections and automated track inspections, and all these things on a near-weekly basis these days, and we are constantly filing in opposition,” Regan said.
Regan said that years of employee cuts and stringent leave policies might make an employee afraid to report a potential issue and called for strengthened protection against retaliation.
“I’m sure most members do not feel comfortable reporting something that they thought was a risk or a safety problem because they don’t have that protection built into the law that says, you can report this and your employer cannot punish you or give you any sort of reprimand,” Regan said.
In an interview with ABC News, Jared Cassity, an official with the SMART Union Transportation Division and former local union representative, similarly expressed concern that lack of a confidential means of reporting close call incidents could deter employees from coming forward. He pointed, for example, to situations when an employee’s own conduct may have led to a close-call situation.
“If I break a rule, so to speak, that may result in a close call, there is no mechanism for me to report that is free from discipline,” Cassity said. “So it’s more advantageous for me to hopefully not break the rule, or if I do, not report it in the hopes that they won’t catch me.”
Cassity also suggested that the FRA may be unaware of the total number of derailments because they rely on self-reporting from the railroads. He compared the degree of self-reporting between the freight railways and the FRA to the relationship between Boeing and the Federal Aviation Association, the former of which paid over $2.5 billion after concealing information about their 737 MAX airplane.
When asked about the East Palestine derailment, Regan said the industry is lucky the incident was not worse or happened sooner.
“I think we are frankly fortunate we haven’t had a situation like this where there is an acute risk to public health because of a derailment,” he said.
”There is no downside.”
Regan and Cassity said that imposing a confidential close call reporting system would be a low-cost solution to improve accountability and transparency by allowing employees to report incidents without fear of retaliation or reprimand. Cassity said incidents more likely to be reported include speeding, encroaching on a train ahead, work limits, or coupling cars at too high a speed.
“There is no downside,” Cassity said.
Regan compared the FRA system to the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a confidential reporting system the FAA has used to analyze close call incidents in aviation. Regan said following the East Palestine derailment, the freight rail industry could look to the commercial airlines as a model for reducing incidents in the future.
ABC News reached out to the seven Class 1 railroads for comment. Some railroads like Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific pointed towards their current reporting systems as sufficient. A spokesperson for Norfolk Southern rebutted the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department’s allegation of decreased safety and noted that Norfolk Southern has seen a declining injury rate and mainline train accident rate.
Speaking on behalf of the broader freight rail industry, a spokesperson for the AAR wrote in a statement that “allowing employees a protected, streamlined way to report potential safety issues is essential.” However, rather than adopting a third-party system, they wrote that the internal procedures for confidential feedback are sufficient.
“It has become clear that the goal of encouraging swift, actionable feedback ends up bogged down in bureaucratic processes and resource intensive reporting” under the third-party system, the spokesperson wrote.
A spokesperson for the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department said the current industry-run systems lack the necessary protections from retaliation to be effective.
While the National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the incident, Cassity and Regan believe a more robust reporting policy would help railroad workers and the public.
“I think that the folks of East Palestine would see a difference in that the employees now have skin in the game to make sure that what’s actually occurring on the railroad is what’s being reported, and our agencies will be able to act in accordance,” Cassity said.
ABC News’ Karen Travers, Alex Presha, and Mark Nichols contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden told ABC News anchor David Muir in a new interview that it was a “big mistake” for Russian President Vladimir Putin to temporarily suspend Russia’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the two countries.
“It’s a big mistake to do that. Not very responsible. But I don’t read into that that he’s thinking of using nuclear weapons or anything like that,” Biden told Muir in Poland on Wednesday, before the president flew back to Washington.
Biden said he was “not sure what else he [Putin] was able to say in his speech at the moment, but I think it’s a mistake and I’m confident we’ll be able to work it out.”
Putin declared on Tuesday that Russia was suspending its participation in the New START treaty, first signed in 2010 and extended in 2021, which implements caps on the number of nuclear weapons deployed by each country and inspections of nuclear sites.
The Russian leader said that he was temporarily suspending participation in the agreement over support by the U.S. and other NATO allies for Ukraine, which has been fending off Moscow’s brutal invasion for about a year.
“They want to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on us and try to get to our nuclear facilities at the same time,” Putin said in a speech Tuesday, repeating a phrase American officials have used to describe their desired result in Ukraine.
Putin insisted that Russia was not withdrawing from the pact altogether, and the Russian Foreign Ministry said the nuclear weapons cap would still be respected. But the decision nonetheless dismayed Washington, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday calling it “deeply unfortunate and irresponsible.”
“I think it matters that we continue to act responsibly in this area,” Blinken told reporters. “It’s also something the rest of the world expects of us.”
Biden this week made a surprise visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, before rallying support among allies in Poland to keep up aid to the war-torn country.
“Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased; they must be opposed. Autocrats only understand one word, ‘No!'” Biden said in Warsaw. “‘No, no, no. You will not take my country. No, you will not take my freedom. No, you will not take my future.'”
Prime Video announced Wednesday that My Spy, the hit action comedy that starred Dave Bautista as a tough-as-nails CIA agent who finds himself a very unlikely bodyguard of a young smart-aleck (Chloe Coleman), is getting a sequel.
My Spy: The EternalCity will reunite Dune‘s Bautista and Coleman’s Sophie. Now a high schooler, Sophie tasks Bautista’s JJ to chaperone a school choir trip to Italy.
According to the streamer, the pair “unwittingly end up pawns in an international terrorist plot targeting CIA Chief, David Kim (a returning Ken Jeong), and his son,” who is Sophie’s best friend.
Prime Video also announced that Mom‘s Anna Faris, The Office‘s Craig Robinson, and The Suicide Squad‘s Flula Borg are on board this time around; Kristen Schaal will return as JJ’s fangirl/tech expert Bobbi.
(WASHINGTON) — From soy to macadamia, a variety of plant-based milk alternatives have begun filling shelves in recent years.
Now, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has caught up with the trend, issuing new guidance for plant-based labels.
On Wednesday, the FDA shared its proposed draft for naming conventions and guidelines on how these products are marketed and sold.
Although the guidance is not final, the FDA suggests that any non-milk product that uses the word “milk” — i.e. nut milk, soy milk — should add a voluntary nutrient statement to convey how the product’s nutritional value compares to that of regular milk, based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service criteria.
For example, according to the draft guidance, the label could read: “Contains lower amounts of vitamin D and calcium than milk.”
FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf, M.D., said the guidance was developed “to help address the significant increase in plant-based milk alternative products” that have become available over the last 10 years.
He added that the recommendations “should lead to providing consumers with clear labeling to give them the information they need to make informed nutrition and purchasing decisions on the products they buy for themselves and their families.”
Regular dairy milk serves as an important source of vitamins and nutrients for many people. The FDA’s proposal aims to raise consumer awareness that non-dairy milks may not contain the same nutritional value as regular milk.
Back in 2018, the agency requested public feedback on plant-based milk alternatives that used terms like “milk,” “cultured milk,” “yogurt” and “cheese” in their labeling, to better understand “how consumers use these plant-based products and how they understand terms such as, for example, ‘milk’ or ‘yogurt’ when included in the names of plant-based products.”
The agency ultimately received more than 13,000 comments on the request and determined that while consumers “generally understand that [plant-based milk alternatives] do not contain milk,” many are not aware of the nutritional differences between milk and plant-based alternatives, such as whether plant-based products contain calcium.
Plant-based alternatives are not included as part of the dairy group in the USDA and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines.
ABC News’ Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.
