Show: On The Town Station: KNCO File: 8:31.mp3 Air date: 2026-08-31 Source: OpenAI whisper-1 · shrunk from 27.4 MB to 5.5 MB --- transcript --- Taking care of business and working overtime And KNCO's time, 11.36, 78 degrees. Good morning, I'm Tom Fitzsimmons and from The Town today we're actually going to go to ABC News. Doing some work here on some of our programming with some changes coming up. And yeah, just kind of making things, kind of getting prepared to doing some kind of background work. But they get caught up with ABC's features called Start Here, where they take daily looks at important things in the news. And probably something that's very tragic in everybody's mind, what's happening in Nepal. Usually when a natural disaster strikes, you get lots of reports of people missing. And then that number starts to go down. People find their loved ones, those who fled the scene come back home. Hospital admissions get reported. In Nepal, though, the number of missing keeps rising. That's how devastating last week's flooding became. Looking at everything, it's like there is no world. What is left? It's like I am dead. The extent of this disaster is really just starting to be understood. And ABC's foreign correspondent, Brit Klena, is there on the ground talking to survivors. Brit, first off, why are these numbers continuing to rise and how many missing are we talking about now? Yeah, these numbers are moving very fast. And they keep climbing because crews, quite frankly, are still pulling bodies out of mud and debris that's feet deep in places. And some victims were swept so far downstream, Brad, that they've turned up as far away as India. In Nepal, so far the confirmed death toll stands at at least 734, plus another 16 across the border in Tibet. So at the moment, we're looking at least 750 in total. As for missing, it looks like there are more than 3,000. Crews, though, still haven't made contact with workers trapped inside a flooded hydro power tunnel. So honestly, that number could keep moving again. Unbelievable. And part of the terrifying reality of this is that if you were close enough to get a good look at this flood, chances were you weren't going to make it. Right. So, I mean, you have been finding survivors, though. Have we gotten a better sense of what this all was like to experience? Well, the accounts coming in now are chilling. I spoke to one American survivor who described it as a serpent coming towards them. She said it sucked everyone in and everything in its path. It just came like a row. It sucked a bunch of buses, SUVs, people, the base camp, everything, took it in, turned it, turned it all upside down and dumped it into the ground. It was horrifying. And she said she managed to escape with her husband within seconds, just running for her life, avoiding death. But among the gloom, I also spoke to a principal at a school who described how he successfully managed to evacuate 900 of his students who were inside the building at the time. That one remaining part is that. That bit of concrete there, that's all that's left of the school. Also, hundreds of others who were on their way to the school, he managed to get them to turn around. You're a hero. Not a hero, but I have done my duties. It is remarkable how quickly he was able to mobilize when he found out from his friends upstream that a flood had enveloped their village. So, potentially, some of the students, their parents may have died. Yeah. But inside, when I left at the last two or three of my colleagues and I, at that time, none of the students were remaining inside the school. OK, so you got everyone out. That's the main thing. Yeah, everyone out. He became very emotional as we both looked onto that school, which had now been reduced to a vast area of mud and debris. Nothing, Brad, was left of that school anymore. Miraculously, it looks like those students survived, although two staff members are still missing. I'm wondering about the rescue zones. I guess I'm wondering what one of these areas looks like. When you show up, they're so remote. And at this point, I feel like the topography, like the actual landmass of the area would have changed. Buildings are all over the place. I mean, what's it like there at this point? Yeah, when you turn up at these sites, it is eerie. It's horrific. And it's hard to overstate how much the landscape itself has changed. Huge chunks of the river banks just simply washed away. And along those banks where there would be rows of houses, now nothing, just sludge, mud that had been reduced to now a kind of wet concrete texture. And that's what makes the rescue so hard as well, having to pull people out of those vast areas after they had been sucked under by this flood. Well, and with that in mind, I mean, the sad reality is that some of the people they're pulling out of that mud are bodies, right? And now the number of these bodies are growing and we hear that they want to bury them. But at the same time, people still don't know whether those are their loved ones or whether their loved ones are alive or dead. So how are they handling unification and burials all happening around the country here? Yeah. And it's it's incredibly heartbreaking. Nepal's morgues are overwhelmed. So in Chitwan District, they've started burying unidentified victims in temporary mass graves. You know, roughly 100 buried this weekend alone. But before burial, forensic teams must photograph every body, take fingerprints, DNA samples and assign an ID number. So it's a huge task considering how many have died already. Medical teams take DNA samples from every victim prior to the burial so that families can match records later and will be allowed to assume for necessary rituals. Just that huge task of, you know, bringing those bodies to the families as well. Wow. Just getting like whatever clues you can about the person that you're burying. By the way, here at home, I mean, smaller scale, but the Grand Canyon over the weekend having a massive flash flood. A lot of people airlifted out of the area. And as I'm saying this, more than a dozen people still unaccounted for in Arizona there. So already our team on the scene trying to get a sense of the latest there. But in the meantime, a brick planet from Kathmandu in Nepal. Thank you. Thanks, Brad. Have you seen how outdated our window treatments are? Yeah, we definitely need to do something about that. What are you thinking? I was checking out budget blinds of Grass Valley. They've got so many options. Blinds, shades, shutters, you name it. Sounds good. I wonder if they offer cordless options for safety. They do. They're all about keeping it safe, especially for younger kids and pets. That's important. 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It's about 18,000 pounds, which NASA likes to say is the mass of a T-Rex. When it's fully deployed, it will be 42 feet long and over 14 feet wide. So basically, it's the size of a tour bus. That's Matthew Glasser, who leads ABC science coverage. He says we've had other space telescopes before, the Hubble, the James Webb launched just a few years ago, but none of them are quite like this one. If you think about the Hubble, it would take a century to do what this new telescope could do in about a month. As of today, this telescope is making its way out of Earth's orbit. In 99 days ago, it'll wind up about a million miles away, positioned to use Earth as like a planet-sized sunshade. Is it a better telescope because it's got bigger lenses? You can tell I know a lot about telescopes, Matthew. It's an infrared telescope, but the telescope part itself is largely the same in terms of sensor sensitivity and imaging. What makes the big difference is this field of view. A field of view, meaning this can get an image of a part of the sky that shows you 100 times more context, 100 times more of the universe than Hubble ever did. And with all that extra data, scientists will see a lot more stuff. They're hoping they can make new discoveries about how the universe is not just expanding, but expanding faster. About dark matter, the stuff that makes up a huge chunk of the universe, despite us never being able to see it. And this will be able to see these tiny little specks next to all those stars. Those are exoplanets revolving around their own suns, many of them never discovered before. It's going to probably find close to 100,000 new exoplanets. And some of those potentially could support life. Theoretically, some of them could have life. Matthew says every day this telescope will be capable of sending home more than a terabyte of data, a thousand gigabytes beamed from a million miles away. All that, NASA says, will be quickly shared with the scientific community. So once it's processed, it's going out. You can look at it. Students can look at it. Teachers can look at it. There's so much there that an astronomy student in a university could potentially find a new planet. A professor at a university could potentially unlock a mystery that we haven't known. Even if you're not one of those researchers, even if you're not sure what the images are telling us, even if you don't care, this is the rare government project that finished nine months early and under budget, a fact NASA is very proud of. Well, there's also the human story, the person this telescope was named after. She was called the mother of Hubble. Nancy Grace Roman was born in 1925, the daughter of a geophysicist. At 11, she started an astronomy club at school. She became a researcher and was eventually asked to work at this new space program at a place called NASA. 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You are fighting now. Let me turn back. Oil prices have risen, and what's even more unnerving to businesses is there's no reason to think this will end anytime soon. So then, Friday morning, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh comes to the mic. You remember Kevin Warsh, right? He's basically President Trump's hand-picked choice to lead the Federal Reserve, where Trump basically tried to run Jerome Powell out of town. Trump's chief complaint about Powell was he never seemed to want to juice the US economy by cutting interest rates. So you'd expect that Warsh, as Trump's favored replacement, would be fine cutting interest rates. Well, Friday morning, Warsh seems to signal that instead he might raise them. Inflation, he says, is just getting too high. Inflation is running above our 2% target. So the Fed's predominant focus right now should be on prices. Stocks went down. Mortgage rates could be going even further up. The price of a gallon of gas is at a record high for this time of year. And like I said, there is no peace deal in sight. So by Friday night, President Trump had a new economic message. If we can't get more oil out of the Middle East right now, he said, we'll at least be getting more from Venezuela. In a landmark deal, he said, the US has reached an agreement with the government of Venezuela. This is a country that the US military raided in January, exfiltrated their leader, Nicolas Maduro. We built Venezuela oil industry with American talent, drive and skill. And the socialist regime stole it from us during those previous administrations. Under this deal, though, the US will be entitled to a huge amount of Venezuela's chief export. ABC's national correspondent, Stephen Portnoy, starts us off today. Stephen, can you tell us exactly what's in this new oil agreement? Seems big. Yeah, this is a really, really big deal. When you look at the numbers here, I mean, the president announced it in a social media post on Friday night. Sixty five billion barrels of Venezuela's proven oil reserves. What that equates to is more than the total amount of extractable oil that we have in the United States under all of our soil and all of our seas. That's about 40 billion. This is 65 billion. And the president, the way he described it on Friday night was that the US would be controlling the majority of that output. It's really, really remarkable. I spoke to some experts over the weekend. And, Brad, they say that this really could be a pretty sizable shakeup in the way oil is sold on the global market, certainly in the Western Hemisphere, compared to, let's just say, the Middle East. And how unusual is that, Stephen? Because, for instance, the US, I believe, is still the largest oil producer on the planet. I know we would never give up that much of our oil to anyone else, let alone to one country. So is this like the result of just a different government there, the whole Maduro situation or what? Well, look, this comes eight months after the president oversaw the ouster of Nicolas Maduro. He's been trying to achieve a long term agreement with the government of the interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, who put out a statement over the weekend in which she said that the benefits of this deal are impossible to ignore. In return, Venezuela receives production, jobs, investment in infrastructure, increased revenue for the government and productive linkages for a domestic industry. The benefits are endless. She talks about the idea that this would be great for her country in terms of an infusion of foreign capital, the necessary investments that would be required to upgrade the aging oil infrastructure of Venezuela after decades of neglect under Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. And the way it's described by a US official, the United States government would go into essentially business with a private oil company in Venezuela and the US government would take majority control of the 65 billion barrel amount of oil. And it's really to sell it or do whatever they want with it. Well, right. And so the president over the weekend was talking about using some Venezuelan oil to replenish the strategic petroleum reserve, which he's tapped over recent months to offset the increased price of gasoline during the Iran war. What's important to understand, though, Brad, is that this is not going to happen anytime soon. Well, this is my question is, does this mean that prices go down at the pump? Not immediately. You know, it's very possible that five, six, seven years from now, this could fundamentally change the balance of the global oil market. But it's going to take a lot of time. There's nothing in this agreement that's going to lower the price of gasoline in the next five days, five weeks or five months. But five years from now, you might have a different landscape. I spoke to one expert over the weekend, Tom Closer. He's an energy analyst at Gulf Oil. It will make a difference eventually, you know, given some sort of stable government and stable utilities and infrastructure there, which are kind of things that you can't necessarily count on. We also heard from gas buddies, Patrick Dahan. While there's the potential promise from the president of lower gas prices, it may be potentially years, if not longer, before any of that gets realized. Here's the thing. Crude oil in Venezuela is described as very heavy and thick. It has to be refined and diluted in order to turn into gasoline or jet fuel or any other kind of oil that we use in the marketplace. It's not easy to do that. And the infrastructure in Venezuela that exists now needs to be substantially updated. That's going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. If you're operating in Texas in the Permian Basin, it's six or seven months to bring some oil to market. In Venezuela, probably can't do it in six or seven years. And it's going to require great sums of money. American oil companies are going to have to get on board. For them to be enticed to do this, they're going to need some substantial guarantees from the government of Venezuela, which right now is being run by an interim president. And that interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, over the weekend, was confronted with the fears that people in her country have. That she's essentially signing away rights to their valuable natural resources to American imperialists. I was going to say, a country that has nationalized its oil reserves in the past, being like no company, no foreign entity can ever get their hands on this. It's ours. And the reason that Delcy Rodriguez is confronting these fears is because this whole idea of socialism in Latin America and the nationalized oil sector in particular in Venezuela sort of stems from the 20th century practice of Western powers coming in and taking the oil. So the idea of Delcy Rodriguez having to say in a statement over the weekend that Venezuela will retain the ownership and the sovereignty is significant. But there is something that must be absolutely clear. Venezuela retains ownership and sovereignty over its resources. Look, there are a lot of questions about this. When it comes to the overall impact on what it means to Americans today, it's much more of a thing in the future than it is now. But this is what I'm trying to figure out. It sounds like you're saying multiple things can be true, right? Like, yes, it can be true that this would be a huge deal for American interests in the long term, right? Yes, it can also be true that you won't see an immediate impact, but hey, more to come. It can still also be true that this is all because of long, painstaking negotiations that took eight or nine months to do. In good faith with the Venezuelan government, it just happens to be being announced now. And yet, could it also be true, Stephen, that the timing of this might be related to the U.S. midterm elections, what, barely two months away today? There really shouldn't be any doubt, Brad, that what's driving this is the president looking at the electoral calendar. He's looking at frustration. He's looking at the inflation figures that you mentioned. So is Kevin Warsh. He's been urging the Federal Reserve since he returned to office to lower interest rates. And now there's the prospect that the Fed may actually have to raise interest rates to keep inflation in check. So I think the president is reaching for a broad vision here. But the idea of an immediate benefit to the American people is hard to see. It's also possible, by the way, that this could go off the rails a bunch of different ways before it becomes reality. We still haven't seen the text of this deal or anything like that at this point. This is just President Trump. All right. Stephen Portnoy in Washington. Thank you. You bet, Brad. --- end of transcript ---