(NEW YORK) — In response to the invasion of Ukraine, the West has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia, nearly crippling its economy and isolating it from all but a few allies.
President Joe Biden and other government officials have said sanctions from the U.S. and its allies will make Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, pariahs on the world stage.
However, one expert who spoke with ABC News says that casting Russia out of the international community, making it a pariah state, may not be so easy.
“Russia is a member of the UN security council, it has veto power there. It is just a major actor on the world stage in so many ways. So isolating Russia, shaming it, making it a pariah is a huge challenge,” said Daniel Hamilton, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute.
Yet, “Russia has not done too well with allies,” Hamilton also said.
“Today, it’s real allies are … sort of also pariah states. It’s Assad’s Syria, it’s Venezuela, it’s Cuba and that’s about it. Others tolerate Russia. They figure out ways to deal with it, in the former Soviet space. But they’re not really allies,” Hamilton said.
China has also kept a relationship with Russia, which Hamilton called “pro-Russian neutrality,” with China falling short of giving Russia its full support, he said
An analysis of American policymakers found that the U.S. punishes pariah states committing one of five acts: the development of weapons of mass destruction, involvement in terrorism, posing a military threat, challenging international norms and, most recently, cyberthreats.
The U.S. currently designates Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria as state sponsors of terrorism, according to the Department of State.
Russia’s gross domestic product, a metric used to gauge the size of an economy by quantifying all the goods and services it produced, will be hard hit, according to Andrew Lohsen, a fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Russian GDP, by their own estimates, is expected to to fall by between eight and 12%. This is the sharpest contraction since 1994,” said Lohsen.
“Other former finance officials in Russia put that number close to 30%,” Lohsen said.
Lohsen also told ABC News the way Russia has conducted its war warrants a strong response from the international community.
“I think the images of civilians with their hands tied behind their back or shot execution style is an indication that Russia simply cannot be treated the way it has before, that this is a war crime,” Lohsen said.
“The way that Russia has fought this war in a way that is so obviously meant to terrorize and inflict pain and suffering on civilian noncombatants,” Lohsen added.
Putin considers Ukraine not as a sovereign country, but rather, a lost tribe of Russia, Hamilton said.
“He really is determined to either cripple it or to absorb it, if possible. He’s having some trouble doing that,” Hamilton said.
As it moves to isolate Russia, the U.S. is softening relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia, despite Biden’s campaign promise to make Saudi Arabia a pariah for its killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
While the U.S. has been able to cut out Russian oil, the European Union still relies on Russia for 25% of it’s oil and 40% of its natural gas.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Wednesday’s sports events:
INTERLEAGUE
Houston 2, NY Mets 0
Milwaukee 5, Tampa Bay 3
Detroit 3, San Francisco 2
AMERICAN LEAGUE
NY Yankees 5, Oakland 3
Kansas City 2, Texas 1
Seattle 9, Baltimore 3
Cleveland 7, Minnesota 6
Boston 6, Toronto 5
LA Angels 4, Chicago White Sox 1
NATIONAL LEAGUE
Pittsburgh 8, Washington 7
San Diego 4, Arizona 0
Atlanta 4, Philadelphia 1
Miami ,4 St. Louis 3
Chicago Cubs 8, Cincinnati 3
LA Dodgers 8, Colorado 4
WOMEN’S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Chicago 91, Connecticut 83
Seattle 88, Las Vegas 78
Phoenix 99, Indiana 78
MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER
New York City FC 4, Cincinnati 4 (TIE)
Columbus 2, Toronto FC 1
Chicago 1, Philadelphia 0
CF Montral 2, Seattle 1
Los Angeles FC 3, FC Dallas 1
Portland 2, Houston 1
Minnesota 3, LA Galaxy 2
(COLUMBUS) — A 14-year-old tiger has died from health complications after contracting COVID-19 at an Ohio zoo, officials said.
Jupiter, a 14-year-old Amur tiger, passed away on Sunday after officials at the Columbus Zoo confirmed that he had developed pneumonia which was caused by the COVID-19 virus.
“On Wednesday, June 22, Jupiter was reported by his care team to be acting ill. (He was not interested in eating, and was reluctant to stand, move or interact with keepers.),” the zoo wrote in a statement on social media. “When this continued into the next day, Jupiter was anesthetized for examination and treatment. Initial exams suggested an infection, and treatment was started.”
To complicate matters, Jupiter had been dealing with long-term treatment of some chronic underlying illnesses, said the Columbus Zoo, and this made him more susceptible to the COVID-19 virus.
“Unfortunately, Jupiter did not improve with this treatment and remained reluctant to move and eat,” officials continued. “The following day, he was given additional treatments and had more diagnostic testing.”
Jupiter passed away on Sunday and is the first animal at the Columbus Zoo to succumb to COVID-19, the zoo said.
“Jupiter’s care team remembers him as a big and impressive tiger who loved fish, sleeping in the habitat’s cave, playing with cardboard boxes, and interacting with another favorite item — a 75-pound firehouse “plus sign” that was heavy for keepers to move but something he carried around like it weighed nothing,” said the Columbus Zoo. “His care team also fondly remembers the trust they built with Jupiter over time through training and how he was always very friendly with the female tigers, Mara and Natasha.”
Jupiter was born on July 9, 2007, at the Moscow Zoo in Russia but eventually ended up at the Columbus Zoo on March 19, 2015, after spending the first half of his life at the Zoo Dvur Kralove in the north of the Czech Republic.
Jupiter leaves quite a legacy and sired nine cubs during his life — six of which were born at the Columbus Zoo — which officials say has contributed to the future of Jupiter’s endangered species.
Employees at the Columbus Zoo require their staff working with cats, great apes, otters and wolverines — among other species — to wear masks whenever they come within six feet of the animal as a precautionary measure.
Said the zoo: “Jupiter will be greatly missed…Please keep our Asia Quest team in your thoughts.”
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Republican Rep. Liz Cheney told This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl in an exclusive interview that she has full faith and confidence in the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, the 26-year-old former Trump White House aide who delivered explosive testimony about the Capitol riot during a highly publicized hearing this week.
“As you know, there’s an active campaign underway to destroy her credibility. Do you have any doubt at all in anything that she said to you?” Karl asked Cheney.
“I am absolutely confident in her credibility. I’m confident in her testimony,” Cheney told Karl in a wide-ranging interview set to air in full on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday.
“I think that what Cassidy Hutchinson did was an unbelievable example of bravery and of courage and patriotism in the face of real pressure,” said Cheney, who is vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee.
The witness, Hutchinson, a former top adviser to then-President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, spent some two hours divulging extraordinary details about what she said went on behind the scenes leading up to, during and after the attack.
Hutchinson sat for multiple closed-door transcribed interviews with the committee during its year-long inquiry but on Tuesday, she spoke publicly for the first time during the committee’s sixth publicized hearing.
She described in detail how she was told about Trump’s desire to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6 after he spoke at a rally near the White House — and how Trump became furious when he was told it wasn’t safe or advisable for him to be there.
Republicans loyal to Trump, including Trump himself, immediately sought to discredit her testimony.
Trump on Tuesday dismissed Hutchinson’s testimony, posting on social media that “I hardly know who this person … is, other than I heard very negative things about her (a total phony and ‘leaker’).”
“She is bad news!” he added.
“We have real confidence as a committee that she testified honestly, and in her credibility, and I think the world saw that — she testified under oath, and her credibility is there for the world to judge,” Cheney said in her interview with Karl.
“She’s an incredibly brave young woman,” Cheney added. “The committee is not going to stand by and watch her character be assassinated by anonymous sources and by men who are claiming executive privilege.”
On Wednesday, Hutchinson’s lawyers released a new statement amid pushback on her testimony.
“Ms. Hutchinson stands by all of the testimony she provided yesterday, under oath, to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,” Hutchinson’s counsel, Jody Hunt and William Jordan, said in the statement to ABC News.
Citizen of the Planet/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The industry that overwhelmingly uses the most water resources in the West does so for good reason: to provide sustenance for the rest of the country.
Globally, the agriculture sector uses 70% of all freshwater withdrawals. In California, that number is ever higher — at 80% of the state’s public water supply — and farmers are being forced to transform the way they cultivate crops as megadrought that has been plaguing the region for decades intensifies.
California is the nation’s fruit and vegetable basket and grows hundreds of commodities. But about a third of that water is used to grow just three crops: almonds, pistachios and walnuts — industries that amounted to about $9.5 billion in exports in 2020 — nearly half of the state’s total, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Almonds, which use about 1.1 gallons of water to grow just one nut, according to Pennsylvania State University, and account for about 10% of the state’s water use alone, Arohi Sharma, deputy director of regenerative agriculture for the National Resource Defense Council, a nonprofit, told ABC News.
As a warming planet threatens to worsen drought and heat conditions in the West, farmers may be called to grow the crops that will be most resilient in the changing climate, Sharma said. That could include lessening the amount of land and water dedicated to “thirsty nut orchards,” she said.
Planting nut trees at the height of the drought
Tree nuts are an extremely valuable crop, with growers making a “pretty penny” by selling them, Sharma said. Out of California’s $20.8 billion in in agriculture exports in 2020, three of the five most common exports were almonds, pistachios and walnuts, data from the California Department of Food and Agriculture shows.
In addition, the almonds are shelf-stable for about two years, Richard Waycott, president and CEO of the Almond Board of California, told ABC News in an email.
Using figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Sharma calculated that during the height of the last drought, between 2012 and 2017, farmers planted more than half a million acres of new nut trees. Sharma believes the additional plantings were a result in the rise in value of the commodity, combined with the lack of legislation in California that bars farmers from planting drought-intolerant food crops.
“And without limits or caps on water use, growers will take whatever water they save to simply plant new nut orchards,” Sharma said, adding that it will ultimately be government oversight and the implementation of new policies to force the agriculture industry to conserve water.
Those almonds, pistachios and walnut groves have now grown to more than 2 million acres of land in California — out of the state’s 43 million acres used for farming — creating a “disconnect” between the availability of water and the number of acres that are being planted with “these water thirsty, drought intolerant crops,” she said. California almonds had two record shipments in 2020 and 2021, with “steady, significant growth in the years before,” Waycott said.
California, with its Mediterranean climate, is one of the five places on Earth where almonds “can grow at any scale,” Waycott said. The almond industry has been working for decades on making the industry as sustainable as possible, he added, including the development of micro-irrigation now used on 85% of almond orchards in the state, compared to pre-1982 practices that involved flooding the fields or using large sprinklers.
Almond farmers in California have since reduced the amount of water needed to grow each almond by 33% and is committed to another 20% reduction by 2025, Waycott said.
“While almond farmers have made strides on irrigation efficiency, further improvements are underway,” Waycott said.
Reducing water while sustaining crop output
The challenge will be to reduce some of the agricultural land devoted to these crops and make the farms sustainable so they may continue providing jobs and food for the rest of the country, Pablo Ortiz, climate and waters scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ABC News. In California’s Central Valley, the low-flow drip irrigation technology that was implemented by farmers there did not save water in the end because they instead used the conserved water to cultivate more crops, Ortiz said.
“So, this deployment of technologies needs to be contained by some other policies that would allow you to actually reduce water usage,” he said, instead of using conserved water for other purposes.
The agriculture industry is one of the many sectors in California that are suffering from an antiquated water sector, experts say.
The infrastructure and business models, many implemented in the 1900s, were not created with the forecast of climate change or water shortages. The system of water rights, or legal rights to extract and use a quantity of water from a natural source based on where the property is located, as well as policies such as the California State Water Project and the Central Valley Water Project, which collect water from rivers and redistribute it to cities through a network of aqueducts provide an advantage to some, Sharma said.
“And now we’re facing the repercussions of these very old inequitable water rights systems and water infrastructure,” Sharma said.
The upshot is that farmers, especially longtime landholders are prioritized over other water customers, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Decentralizing water a potential solution
Robert Bartrop, head of global business development for SOURCE Water, a company that builds custom solutions for water needs, told ABC News he envisions a future in which the water industry decentralizes, in a way similar to the telecommunications and energy industries. In that case, investments would be made to redesign the grids to more efficiently distribute water.
In order to prepare for a future with less water, California, and the West as a whole, will also need to transform its water usage in a way that invests and supports its agriculture industry, Sharma said.
Part of this entails ending the practice of massive single crop farming, which depletes the soil of nutrients, Sharma added.
Instead of growing one or two crops over thousands of acres, farmers are starting to grow a variety in 20-acre tracts to protect the health of the soil and prevent erosion, which will make it so farmers, including those who are reliant on the cultivation of tree nuts, are less reliant on one income stream as well, she added.
Farmers will also need to adapt new regenerative solutions, such as building soil health as a drought resiliency tool so that it can hold onto more water despite being watered less, Sharma said, describing regenerative agriculture as a “holistic approach to land management.”
“We need to start diversifying what’s grown on the property as a way to regenerate ecosystems, as a way to fight drought and pest pressures that are coming as a result of climate change,” she said.
The source of the water is important too, Bartrop said. Farmers will need to be more efficient with using recycled wastewater, or gray water, for their irrigation needs, as there is currently too many resources wasted on making water used to irrigate crops and feed livestock potable, he added.
Groundwater, which the agricultural industry in California has been depleting over the past century, is not the solution, Ortiz said.
“With water scarcity and climate change, it’s important to know this isn’t an emergency event,” Bartrop said of current drought conditions and the threat of water scarcity.
Luke Combs says that he’s struggled with his weight his whole life, but he thinks about those struggles differently now that he’s a dad.
“Having a kid has messed up my head on this thing in the best way,” Luke says during a new interview on Zane Lowe’s Apple Music 1. “I want to be around … I’m fine right now, my cholesterol and my blood pressure is fine because I’m a younger guy, but by the time I’m 45, it’s not going to be because of the shape that I’m in.”
And while genetics are part of the reason for Luke’s weight struggles, he says that’s not the whole picture. “When I go play golf I can hit a good golf shot — I’ve done it a bunch of times — I can’t do it consistently,” he continues. “And my relationship with food has been the same thing. I know what to do and how to do it and why to do it and when to do it.”
Luke and his wife, Nicole, welcomed their first child — a baby boy named Tex Lawrence — on Father’s Day, June 19.
It’s Cole Swindell’s birthday today, and he’s celebrating with a new ‘90s-inspired single.
“She Had Me at Heads Carolina” is a fun and flirty dance-a-long track following a guy who walks into karaoke night at a bar and is immediately transfixed by the girl singing a ‘90s country classic into the mic.
The song’s lyrics and melody heavily reference “Heads Carolina, Tails California,” Jo Dee Messina’s country hit from 1996, and Cole says the throwback makes the song feel familiar, even to fans who haven’t heard his new single before.
“We’ve played it live a few times, and obviously, people think they know it when it gets to that chorus,” he explains. “I mean, they’re screaming this song, because it’s such a big hit from the ‘90s, but when it gets to that line about south Georgia, it kind of throws them off.”
That part of the chorus — where Cole sings “Heads Carolina, tails California / Maybe she’d fall for a boy from south Georgia” — is where his version’s lyrics depart from the original. Still, the melody continues to hearken back to Jo Dee’s song, and Cole says he’d like to incorporate the ‘90s hitmaker into more aspects of the new song.
“I hope somebody I get to sing it — whether I do something, I want her to be involved, because we wouldn’t have the song without the writers and without her making it what it is,” he says.
“She Had Me at Heads Carolina” comes off Cole’s newest album, Stereotype.
Fans who saw “Weird Al” Yankovic‘s show in Seattle this week took a trip back to the ’90s when The Presidents of the United States of America frontman Chris Ballew made a surprise appearance.
Ballew took the stage to join Yankovic for a rendition of the PUSA hit “Peaches.” In addition to hearing Al sing the immortal line “Peaches come from a can/They were put there by a man,” the crowd was also treated to the two artists jumping in unison for a song-ending high kick.
You can watch official footage of the performance streaming now on YouTube.
You may recall that Yankovic previously put his own spin on the PUSA song “Lump,” turning it into the Forrest Gump-referencing “Gump.” However, Al’s been taking a break from his parody songs on his ongoing Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity tour, which features a set of almost entirely original material.
While Al is certainly a fan of “Peaches,” the same can’t be said for Larry David. You may recall that the song was included in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm last year, during which David’s character called it “idiotic.”
Ballew, however, was honored, writing in an Instagram post, “I am complete now that I have received Larry David’s scorn.”
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the release the Alice Cooper group’s fifth studio album, School’s Out, which featured the hit title track — widely regarded as the shock rockers’ signature song.
School’s Out reached #2 on the Billboard 200, Alice Cooper’s second-highest-charting album on the tally after 1973 chart-topping Billion Dollar Babies. The album’s popularity was propelled by the song “School’s Out,” which was the sole single issued from the record.
“School’s Out,” which peaked at #7 on the Billboard Hot 100, was the highest-charting single of the Alice Cooper group’s career, although Cooper’s 1989 solo hit “Poison” also reached that spot on the Hot 100.
The album cover features a photo of wooden school desktop with the names or initials of Alice Cooper’s five members — Cooper, bassist Dennis Dunaway, drummer Neal Smith and guitarists Michael Bruce and Glen Buxton — carved into it. The original vinyl album’s packaging also featured the LP wrapped in a pair of paper panties.
The song “School’s Out” celebrates the joy that children and teens feel when the school year ends, while also expressing youthful rebellion against oppressive authority. The tune has appeared in several films over the years, including Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Scream and Dazed and Confused.
In the new film Rise, streaming exclusively on Disney+, brothers and newcomers Uche and Ral Agada play Giannis and Thanasis Antetokounmpo in the true story about the inspirational family that changed the world of professional basketball.
Uche knew the basics – that the Antetokounmpos immigrated from Nigeria to Greece and that Giannis eventually found success in the NBA draft – but there was still a lot he had to learn about the family.
“I knew that they had humble beginnings. I didn’t understand the extent of how hard it was, how difficult it was to survive,” Uche told ABC Audio.
Ral echoed his brother’s sentiment. “We went where they grew up and I saw that they lived in a one-bedroom apartment with four 6-foot-plus boys,” he said. “It just made me extremely grateful for what I have.”
There was much for them to be grateful for, especially the opportunity for the brothers to act alongside each other, telling a story about brotherhood and family.
“These guys, they all root for each other, they are happy for each other and all push each other. And I think it’s the same for Ral and I,” Uche said.
He added, “We both want to see each other improve and get better. I definitely think that’s something that we all have in common.”
Rise had its Greek premiere this week, which was held at the Sepolia Basketball Court in Athens. The Antetokounmpo family and the Agada brothers were all in attendance.
