Amish group brings volunteers to help rebuild Chimney Rock
But a group of Amish people has been a mainstay in the rebuilding effort. The group has been working with Spokes of Hope, which has had over 2,000 volunteers come through since the flood.
Chimney Rock Mayor Peter O'Leary had predicted that downtown Chimney Rock would open in time for Memorial Day weekend, but now realizes that was too ambitious.
SPECIAL SECTION >> Hurricane Helene stories
Local businesses say they've appreciated the support of volunteers. They've also been leaning on one another throughout the rebuilding process.
'You know, you can't help but think what's next. But, you know, we're all still here. We've got each other, we've still got our community, and as long as you stick together, there's nothing stronger than that,' said Kristen Sottile with the Broad River Inn.
Some of the Amish were spotted helping build a new foundation for the Broad River Inn. While the town has a ways to go before fully reopening, O'Leary says he hopes some businesses will be able to reopen this summer.
(VIDEO: 'Monumental': Campground celebrates post-Helene reopening)
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New York Post
4 hours ago
- New York Post
Post's beloved City Desk supervisor Myron Rushetzky dead at 73: ‘Part of the fabric of The Post'
Myron Rushetzky — The Post's beloved meticulous, sometimes maddening newsroom support-staff supervisor who churned out generations of ace copy kids — died peacefully Friday in the city he loved. Rushetzky, 73, was known as the gatekeeper of the City Desk — answering phones and announcing callers in his thick Brooklyn accent — over a career that spanned a mind-boggling 40 years. 'He loved The Post,'' said Susan Mulcahy, who started as a copy girl under Rushetzky at the paper in 1978 and went on to work for its famous Page Six gossip gang. 3 Myron Rushetzky has died at the age of 73. New York Post Mulcahy, who recently co-wrote the book 'Paper of Wreckage'' about The Post, which was dedicated to Rushetzky, said he 'was an important contact to make in the City Room because he knew everyone and everybody. 'When you went away on a trip, he'd always demand you bring him back a shirt,'' she recalled. He kept a list that 'on one side [had] people he loaned money to — and a number of people still owe him money,'' Mulcahy said. 'On the other side of the list are all the people who brought him T-shirts. I think I brought him three or four shirts over the years.' Stephen Lynch, editor of The Post's print edition, said, 'Myron mentored an entire generation of Post reporters. 'He would take a 'runner,' help them, mold them, cajole them — then would advocate fiercely for them to be given full-time jobs,'' Lynch said of Rushetzky's former underlings — who include now-New York Times White House Correspondent Maggie Haberman. 'Nothing made him prouder than watching one of his team graduate to the News Desk, and nothing made the paper better.' 3 Rushetzky worked at The Post for 40 years before retiring in 2013. NY Post Brian Zak Post Deputy News Copy Chief Milton Goldstein started out as a copy kid along with Rushetzky in 1973 — and was by his side when he died at Manhattan's New York University Langone of the glandular cancer adenocarcinoma. 'I sat down, and I'm sharpening pencils, and Myron comes up to me and introduces himself, and 52 years later, here we are,'' Goldstein said. 'Did you know he had a degree in civil engineering from the City College of New York?' the longtime Postie said. He said Rushetzky was inspired to go to school for engineering because he grew up in Bath Beach, Brooklyn — watching as Robert Moses built the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge nearby. Rushetzky was also a sports lover and became the editor of the section for his college newspaper, the Campus, Goldstein said. 3 Susan Mulcahy, a copy girl under Rushetzky in 1978, co-wrote a book titled 'Paper of Wreckage'' which was dedicated to him, saying he 'was an important contact to make in the City Room because he knew everyone and everybody.'' NY Post Brian Zak 'He never got a job with an engineering firm,'' Goldstein said. 'He fell in love with newspapers.'' Rushetzky kept his copy-kid crew in close check at The Post — sometimes rubbing editors the wrong way when they wanted to poach them to run on a story while he tried to run the City Desk phone. But that was only to a point — he also loved to see them succeed, former coworkers said. Rushetzky was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year but did not want to make a big deal about it and have it widely shared, Mulcahy said. Goldstein noted that former Post Editor Ken Chandler and ex-Managing Editor Joe Robinowitz visited Rushetzky on Tuesday, three days before he died — 'and it made Myron's day, that they cared enough about a desk assistant. 'Myron was part of the fabric of The Post,'' Goldstein said. He also was the heart of 'Post Nation,'' a tremendously long list of former and current outlet employees whom he kept together with an e-mail chain — and birthday cards every year, including to their kids. The tributes to its leader poured in Friday, with one calling Rushetzsky 'a true Post legend.'' 'Hopefully, Post Nation will survive, but without Myron, it will not be the same,'' Mulcahy wrote in an e-mail to the masses. As for Rushetzky, he already wrote his epitaph long ago — signing off with the quote from Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory on every e-mail: 'I should confess, I have always felt a little sorry for people who didn't work for newspapers.''

Business Insider
12 hours ago
- Business Insider
Sam Altman hopes AGI will allow people to have more kids in the future
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says having a kid has been "amazing" and thinks everyone else should have one, too. He also says AGI could maybe help with that. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a still theoretical version of AI that reasons as well as humans. Achieving AGI is the ultimate goal of many of the leading AI companies and is what's largely driving the AI talent wars. Meanwhile, the world's population growth is slowing down. In the United States, Gen Z and millennials are delaying having children or not having children at all to focus on their financial stability. Some prominent futurists, including Altman, say that's a cause for concern. He said this trend is a "real problem" during an episode of "People by WTF" with Nikhil Kamath on Thursday. Altman, who had his first child earlier this year, said he hopes that building families and creating community "will become far more important in a post-AGI world." He said he thinks this will be possible because AGI will allow for a world "where people have more abundance, more time, more resources, and potential, and ability." As AI progresses and becomes a more useful tool, he says society will grow richer and there will be more social support. "I think it's pretty clear that family and community are two of the things that make us the happiest, and I hope we will turn back to that," Altman said. When Kamath asked about Altman's own experience with fatherhood, the CEO said he strongly recommends having children. "It felt like the most important and meaningful and fulfilling thing I could imagine doing," he said. Altman has described himself as "extremely kid-pilled" and said that in the first weeks of being a dad, he was "constantly" asking ChatGPT questions. Using AI is a skill that he says he plans to pass down to his children. "My kids will never be smarter than AI," Altman said on an episode of The OpenAI Podcast in June. "They will grow up vastly more capable than we grew up, and able to do things that we cannot imagine, and they'll be really good at using AI." Altman isn't the only prominent CEO in the AI industry who's passionate about procreation. Elon Musk, the founder of Grok-maker xAI, among other companies, has fathered over 10 known children. Musk has said he's "doing his best to help the underpopulation crisis." "A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far," Musk said in an X post in 2022.


CNBC
19 hours ago
- CNBC
Summer travel isn't as easy as it used to be for airlines
Making money in the summer is not as easy as it used to be for airlines. Airlines have drawn down their schedules in August for a variety of reasons. Some travelers are opting to fly earlier, in June or even May, as schools let out sooner than they used to. Demand for flights to Europe has also been moving from the sweltering, crowded summer to the fall, airline executives have said, especially for travelers with more flexibility, like retirees. Carriers still make the bulk of their money in the second and third quarters. But as travel demand has shifted, and in some cases customers have become altogether unpredictable, making the third quarter less of a shoo-in moneymaker for airlines. Airline planners have been forced to get more surgical with schedules in August as leisure demand tapers off from the late spring and summer peaks. Labor and other costs have jumped after the pandemic, so getting the mix of flights right is essential. Carriers across the industry have been taking flights off the schedule after an overhang of too much capacity pushed down fares this summer. But the capacity cuts are set to further drive up airfares, which rose 0.7% in July from last year, and a seasonally adjusted 4% jump from June to July, according to the latest U.S. inflation read. U.S. airlines' domestic capacity is down 6% in August from July, according to aviation data firm Cirium. The same period last year, they cut domestic capacity just over 4% compared with just a 0.6% downsize between the months in 2023, Cirium said. From July to August in 2019, airlines cut 1.7% of capacity. Carriers that bet on a blockbuster year were left disappointed earlier in 2025 when consumers weighed President Donald Trump's on-again, off-again tariffs and economic uncertainty. To attract more customers, many airlines slashed prices, even for flights in the summer peaks in late June and July. Demand has improved, airline executives said on earnings calls in recent months, but carriers including Delta, American, United and Southwest last month lowered their 2025 profit forecasts compared with their sunnier outlooks at the start of the year. Further complicating matters, some travelers have been also waiting until the last minute to book flights. "It really was, I would say, middle of May, when we started seeing Memorial Day bookings pick up," JetBlue Airways President Marty St. George told investors last month. "We had a fantastic Memorial Day, much better than forecast, and that really carried into June. But it does have the feeling of people just waited a long time to make the final decisions." Now, some airlines are already thinking about how to tackle ever-changing travel patterns next year. "Schools are going back earlier and earlier but what you also see is schools are getting out earlier and earlier," Brian Znotins, American Airlines' vice president of network planning and schedule, told CNBC. Public schools in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, returned on Aug. 5, and Atlanta public schools resumed Aug. 4. In 2023, more than half of the country's public school students went back to classrooms by mid-August, according to the Pew Research Center. Southwest, with its Texas roots, ended its summer schedule on Aug. 5 this year, compared with Aug. 15 in 2023. American, for its part, is shifting some peak flying next year. "We're moving our whole summer schedule change to the week before Memorial Day," Znotins said. "That's just in response to schools letting out in the spring." Those plans include additions of a host of long-haul international flights. "We are a year-round airline," he continued. Znotins said the carrier has to not just make sure there are enough seats for peak periods, but know when to cut back in lighter quarters, like the first three months of the year. "For a network planner, the harder schedules to build are the ones where there's lower demand because you can't just count on demand coming to your flights," Znotins said. "When demand is lower, you need to find ways to attract customers to your flights with a good quality schedule and product changes." American said its schedule by seats in August was on par with July in 2019, but that this year it was 6% lower in August from July. American forecast last month it could lose an adjusted 10 cents to 60 cents a share in the third quarter, below what analysts are expecting. CEO Robert Isom said on an earnings call that "July has been tough," though the carrier says trends have improved. The capacity cuts, coupled with more encouraging booking patterns lately, are fueling optimism about a better supply and demand balance in the coming weeks. "The mistake some airlines make, you tend to try to build a church for Easter Sunday: You build your capacity foundation for those peak periods and then you have way too many [employees]," said Raymond James airline analyst Savanthi Syth. She said it was unusual to see airlines across the board pruning their summer schedules before even the peak period ended, but she is upbeat about demand, and fares, going forward. "Time has passed and people are getting a little more certainty on what their future looks like and they're more willing to spend," she said.