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Tag: world
Katie Ledecky breaks Michael Phelps’ record for most individual world titles
Olympic champion Katie Ledecky on Saturday broke Michael Phelps’ record for most individual world swimming titles.
At the World Aquatic Championships in Fukoka, Japan, Ledecky collected her 16th world title by winning the 800-meter freestyle, her favorite distance, with a time of 8:08.87. It marked her sixth consecutive time winning that distance — the longest ever streak in a single event in the championships’ history.
Ledecky had tied Phelps’ record on Tuesday when she won in the 1,500-meter freestyle — her fifth victory in that specific race.
Ian MacNicol / Getty Images
“I know Michael, I know how many events he swam at meets like this,” Ledecky said in a poolside interview. “It’s an honor to even be in that same sentence.”
While she recognized the magnanimity of beating Phelps’ record, Ledecky calmly took in her record-breaking victory, giving credit to her competitors for pushing her to perform at such a high level.
“I’ve never even dreamt of even coming to meets like this, so to be here and to have been to a bunch of world championships is amazing,” Ledecky said poolside. “It is always a battle, it is always a great race. So I know I have to bring my best every single time.”
The 26-year-old said the 800-meter race is her favorite because she has worked the hardest at it over the years.
“It’s just the one that I hold closest to me given that the 1,500 was only added to the Olympics in 2021. I think it’s the one I’ve focused on the most,” she said.
Ledecky beat out silver medallist Li Bingjie of China by almost 4.5 seconds. Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus came in third.
The Maryland native is the most decorated female swimmer of all time with six individual Olympic gold medals along, with her 16 individual world titles. The World Aquatics Championships are held every two years.
Ledecky began her Olympic career at age 15, picking up her first gold medal in the 800-meter freestyle in the 2012 London Olympics.
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World Cup athletes and colleagues remember the legacy of Grant Wahl: “He was there from the beginning”
As the U.S. women’s team advances through the World Cup, some are mourning the absence of one of the soccer’s most prominent voices. Grant Wahl, the leading soccer journalist in the United States, died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm while covering the men’s World Cup in Qatar in Dec. 2022.
Now, his family and the athletes he covered are taking a look back at his legacy.
“Before we got on the map, and on the world map … Grant was there,” said Briana Scurry, the goalkeeper of 1999 U.S. Women’s National Team. “He was there from the beginning, and there’s not a lot of people who can say that.”
Wahl was present when the team won the World Cup in 1999, the second-ever time they’d done so. He covered the momentous occasion for Sports Illustrated. At the end of the year, Wahl wrote a cover story for the magazine lauding the team as Sports Illustrated’s “Sportswomen of the Year.” Scurry remembered Wahl as a writer who got to the core of the athletes he covered.
JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images
“He was really like, the guy who wanted to get that story and wanted to know that person. Not just that footballer, that person,” she said.
In the decades that followed, Wahl became a fixture at major soccer tournaments. Colleagues say that he helped propel interest in women’s sports, and inspired other journalists, including The Athletic’s Meg Linehan.
“There was no one just covering women’s soccer only,” Linehan said. “And one of the things that Grant really did was treat it with the exact same respect as the men’s game. He also, I think, really just encouraged a lot of us to want to compete with him.”
Wahl was also an outspoken advocate for equal pay for female athletes, going as far as once directly asking the president of U.S. Soccer if the women’s team deserved to be paid equally to the men’s team. In 2022, shortly before his death, the female players reached an agreement with U.S. Soccer.
“Grant was a feminist, including in sports,” said his widow, CBS News medical contributor Dr. Celine Gounder.
Wahl was attracted to the sport because of how it brought people together and represented things like “local culture (and) local politics,” Gounder said.
His interest in equality extended to other aspects of the sport. While covering the World Cup in Qatar, just days before his death, Wahl was critical of the nation’s government, and was even denied entry to a match and detained by authorities for wearing a Pride shirt.
Getty Images
Gounder said that she hopes people remember the barriers Wahl, who was 49 at the time of his death, helped break.
“I think the fact that people appreciate soccer, women’s soccer, the way they do in the United States right now and even around the world – so much of that is because of Grant,” Gounder said. “So much of that is because of how Grant advocated for covering soccer, for covering women’s soccer in particular. And the fact that the sport has the respect that it now has, the following that it now has, is really a testament to Grant’s work.”
Nancy Chen
Opinion: Russia is deploying a new weapon in Ukraine: world hunger
In the next stage of Vladimir Putin’s bloody attempt to conquer Ukraine, grain is his strategic weapon of choice. In pulling out of a crucial deal that allowed the export of grain from Ukraine through the Black Sea and attacking the port of Odessa in recent days, he is setting the stage for a global food crisis.
The consequences will be dire for low-income countries, which are particularly vulnerable to rising grain prices on global commodity markets. If Putin is allowed to pursue this strategy, the likely effect will be economic disruption, increased poverty and more disaster-driven migration around the world.
For centuries, Ukraine was referred to as the “breadbasket of Europe.” Since regaining its independence in 1991, Ukraine improved its agricultural efficiency and in 2021-22 was exporting between 3 and 6 million metric tons of grain (corn, wheat and barley) per month. Before the full-scale invasion in early 2022, much of this export was by ship through the Black Sea. This route was initially blocked by Russian forces, but in July 2022, all sides agreed to allow Ukrainian grain exports to resume.
Read more:Why allowing Ukraine to ship grain during Russia’s war matters to the world
Now, unfortunately, Russia is again blocking that grain export corridor.
Earlier this month, Russian forces destroyed a grain terminal in the port of Odessa, wiping out storage facilities holding enough grain to feed nearly 300,000 people for a whole year. Russia has since blocked the movement of more than two dozen ships that were already loaded with enough Ukrainian grain to feed millions. Russia is not strong enough to conquer Ukraine, but it has enough missiles to close trade in the Black Sea.
Higher grain prices will tend to increase inflation in the U.S., the European Union and other rich countries. But in lower-income countries, the potential impact on food prices and supplies will be sufficient to put perhaps 500 million people at significantly increased risk of hunger (the World Food Program estimated that 345 million people would face food insecurity in 2023, when the Black Sea grain corridor agreement was still in place). Hunger means increased risk of childhood and adult diseases in the poorest countries. And worsening social conditions will create more migration pressures in part of the world.
Read more:Russia comes under pressure at U.N. to avoid global food crisis and revive Ukrainian grain shipments
The Russian international propaganda machine is already hard at work, trying to divert blame for the coming crisis. The leadership in some poorer countries has been credulous enough to think that Putin is still their friend — as seen in the Russia-Africa summit held in St. Petersburg this week. A more realistic interpretation is that Putin and his colleagues want to create chaos and will do anything to strengthen their hand against Ukraine and the Western democracies that support Ukraine.
The U.S., the G7 and the European Union need to prevent food shortages and to keep food prices at a reasonable level. But it is hard to boost agricultural output and exports on short notice — this year’s harvest is already planted in the northern hemisphere. At this point, there is no way to replace Ukrainian exports by sea; there is not enough rail and other land infrastructure in place or that can be built.
Read more:Russia attacks Ukrainian port of Odesa and calls it payback for a strike on bridge to Crimea
The only way to reopen the Black Sea corridor is through a diplomatic agreement with Russia. Pressure from Turkey can help and did help in 2022. But Russia will ignore the West, unless Putin feels that he may be losing support among developing countries. The U.S. and Ukraine’s other allies need a high-level diplomatic initiative, persuading low-income countries to push Russia to allow Ukraine’s grain exports.
If high-income countries provide more money (loans or grants) to low-income countries to buy food, that will just drive up the price of food and wouldn’t solve the problem of a supply shortage.
The world is in a precarious state. Many of the poorest countries are already unable to feed themselves and remain ill-prepared to deal with climate change and extreme weather events. Global poverty has declined in recent decades, but according to the World Bank at least half a billion people still live in extreme poverty.
Putin’s strategy is to hold tens of millions of people hostage by using food as a weapon of war — both in weakening Ukraine’s shattered economy and threatening the global grain markets — to exact an even higher price for Ukraine’s refusal to capitulate. The governments of poorer countries need to demand that Ukrainian grain be allowed to flow freely. The Black Sea corridor must be reopened and kept open as a top priority for all parties working to defeat Putin.
Simon Johnson is a professor at MIT Sloan and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Oleg Ustenko is economic advisor to President Zelensky of Ukraine.
If it’s in the news right now, the L.A. Times’ Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
3 moms make history on U.S. Women’s World Cup team
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Russia has not offered UN World Food Programme free grain
By Michelle Nichols
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Russia has not offered the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) any free grain, WFP deputy chief Carl Skau said on Friday, nearly two weeks after Moscow quit a deal that allowed the safe Black Sea export of Ukraine grain.
Ukrainian grain is a primary U.N. food aid source.
“We have not been in talks about any free grain so far,” Skau told reporters. “We have not been approached for any such discussion.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday told African leaders at a summit in St Petersburg that Moscow is able to replace Ukrainian grain exports to Africa and that he would gift tens of thousands of tons of grain to six countries within months.
Ukraine, along with Russia, is one of the world’s biggest exporters of grain and any interruption could drive up food prices around the globe.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Thursday that a “handful of donations” won’t correct the dramatic impact of the end of the Black Sea grain deal.
Under the Black Sea export pact, the WFP purchased and shipped 725,000 tonnes of grain to Afghanistan, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen over the past year. The pact has allowed WFP so far to procure 80% of its wheat grain purchases this year from Ukraine, up from 50% in 2021 and 2022.
Overall, nearly 33 million tonnes of grain were exported by Ukraine under the deal, which aimed to combat a global food crisis worsened by Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“For our operations the impact will be that we have to look elsewhere, which potentially can be more costly and certainly will have longer lead ways,” Skau said. “One of the reasons why Ukraine has been such an important source for us is the proximity to many of our operations.”
Global wheat prices have spiked about 9% since Russia on July 17 quit the pact, which was brokered by the U.N. and Turkey in July 2022, and began targeting Ukrainian ports and grain infrastructure on the Black Sea and Danube River. Prices are still about half the record high hit in early March 2022.
“In terms of our procurement we always buy where it’s cheapest and fastest to get to our beneficiaries, and so that’s the principle that will guide us,” Skau said.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Leslie Adler)
Millions of Shiite Muslims across the world commemorate the mourning day of Ashoura
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Millions of Shiite Muslims in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and around the world on Friday commemorated Ashoura, a remembrance of the 7th-century martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, that gave birth to their faith.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban cut mobile phone services in key cities holding commemorations for fear of militants targeting Shiites, whom Sunni extremists consider heretics. Security forces in neighboring Pakistan as well stood on high alert as the commemorations there have seen attacks in the past.
Not all Shiites, however, were to mark the day Friday. Both Iraq and Lebanon planned their remembrances for Saturday, which will see a major suburb of Beirut shut down and the faithful descend on the Iraqi city of Karbala, where Hussein is entombed in a gold-domed shrine.
Shiites represent over 10% of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims and view Hussein as the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Hussein’s death in battle at the hands of Sunnis at Karbala, south of Baghdad, ingrained a deep rift in Islam and continues to this day to play a key role in shaping Shiite identity.
Over 1,340 years after Hussein’s martyrdom, Baghdad, Tehran, Islamabad and other major capitals in the Middle East were adorned with symbols of Shiite piety and repentance: red flags for Hussein’s blood, symbolic black funeral tents and black dress for mourning, processions of men and boys expressing fervor in the ritual of chest-beating and self-flagellation with chains.
In Iran, where its theocratic government views itself as the protector of Shiites worldwide, the story of Hussein’s martyrdom takes on political connotations amid its tensions with the West over its advancing nuclear program.
Iranian state television aired images of commemorations across the Islamic Republic, tying the event to criticizing the West, Israel and the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020. Anchor Wesam Bahrani on Iran’s state-run English-language broadcaster Press TV referred to America as the “biggest opponent of Islam” and criticized Muslim countries allied with the U.S.
Men wore black, rhythmically beating their chests in mourning or using flails to strike their backs. Some wore red headbands, as black and red banners bore Hussein’s name. Some sprayed water over the mourners in the intense heat.
The commemoration in Iran also comes as Tehran prepares for the one-year anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini. Her death launched protests nationwide in Iran that reportedly saw more than 500 protesters killed and some 20,000 others detained. Authorities have begun stepping up their enforcement of mandatory hijab, or headscarf, laws for women in recent weeks.
In Pakistan, authorities stepped up security as an Interior Ministry alert warned “terrorists” could target Ashoura processions in major cities. The main Ashoura processions will be held in the eastern city of Lahore in the Punjab province, where thousands of police officers have been deployed. Processions also will be held in Karachi and elsewhere.
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Associated Press writers Munir Ahmed in Islamabad and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.