[clock ticking]
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CARL AZUZ: We have made it to Friday, awesome.
I'm Carl Azuz.
I'm your anchor here at CNN 10, and we start today in
the European nation of Belgium.
At a news conference yesterday at the NATO headquarters
in Brussels, US President Joe Biden
said America had sent $2 billion worth of military equipment
to help Ukrainian forces fight Russia.
He announced the US would spend more than a billion dollars
on humanitarian aid for Ukrainian civilians
and hundreds of millions on pro-democracy and human rights
efforts in Ukraine and other nations.
Analysts say the conflict in Ukraine
has created the worst refugee crisis in Europe
since World War II.
The United Nations estimates that 3 1/2 million Ukrainians
have left their country, mostly for other European nations,
Though more than 270,000 are believed
to have gone into Russia.
President Biden said yesterday that America
would allow 100,000 Ukrainians to move to the United States.
The US is a member and the biggest contributor
to the NATO alliance of North American
and European countries.
And though Ukraine is not a member of that alliance,
the US President said it was standing together
in opposing Russia's invasion.
JOE BIDEN: Putin was banking on NATO being split.
My early conversation with him in December and early
January was clear to me he didn't think
we could sustain this cohesion.
NATO has never, never been more united than it is today.
Putin is getting exactly the opposite
what he intended to have as a consequence
of going into Ukraine.
CARL AZUZ: The Russian government said yesterday
that NATO's decision to support Ukraine
proves the alliance wants the conflict there to continue.
And it said the weapons that NATO
is sending to Ukraine's military are, quote,
reaping terrible results.
Meantime, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky
asked NATO for more weapons, including
tanks, defenses against air attacks, and fighter jets.
But that's one thing the US has resisted sending to Ukraine.
It's concerned that Russia would see the fighter jets as going
too far, that they'd be viewed as an American expansion
of the conflict.
At this point, there's no end in sight to it.
Extensive destruction can be seen in Ukrainian cities,
and both Ukraine and Russia have lost
thousands of troops in the war.
NATO leaders are trying to figure out
what to do if Russia changes its tactics
and uses more deadly weapons, like
chemical or nuclear weapons.
President Biden said America would respond if Russia made
a chemical attack but that how the US responds
would depend on how the weapons were used.
In the past, Russia has promised not
to make or use chemical arms.
And officials say there's no evidence they've
been used in this conflict.
10-second trivia, which of these animals
is not considered endangered, snow
leopard, slender-snouted crocodile,
basking shark, or giant otter?
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature
classifies all these animals as endangered
except the snow leopard.
The snow leopard used to be on the IUCN's red List
of endangered species, and the animal
is still considered vulnerable.
Encyclopedia Britannica says there are between 2,500
and 10,000 snow leopards left in the wild,
though other estimates put the number much lower.
Their population is reportedly decreasing, though,
and there are several possible reasons why.
One is that they may be hunted for their use in
traditional Chinese medicine.
Disease may play a factor, as might
loss of their natural habitat.
But snow leopards are also known to attack the livestock
of nearby farmers.
So a conservationist is taking action
to protect their livelihood, while also
protecting the snow leopards themselves.
SHAFQAT HUSSAIN: It is really a spectacular area of the world,
and especially in winter, it's so beautiful.
The sense of remoteness, the sense of isolation
is very acute.
And when you go further, higher up, or deeper
into the heart of the mountains, there
is a very good chance that a snow leopard might
walk right in front of me.
The first time I heard a snow leopard roar,
I still remember a long time ago.
Suddenly, I heard this roaring call.
[snow leopard roaring]
I mean, if anything, it was just sheer wildness.
My name is Shafqat Hussain.
I'm a professor of anthropology at Trinity College
in Hartford, Connecticut.
I work on a snow leopard conservation project
in northern Pakistan that has been
running for the last 20 years.
[non-english speech]
I have never seen a snow leopard in the wild.
You're dealing with an animal that is very, very elusive,
and its habitat is very difficult to study.
Many times I have told my colleagues when, you know,
we are setting up camera traps or doing surveys
that I'm sure that a snow leopard is watching
me from somewhere up there.
The snow leopards are incessant communicators.
I wonder what they would do if they had all
this new social media technology, right,
because just like we human beings,
we are always connecting.
And you can see the snow leopard, you know,
doing the same by leaving all these marks in their territory,
whether it's a spray or leaving their cheek hair, as
if these cats are trying to communicate
with other cats in this big, vast, and empty landscape.
[music playing]
We have been working in close to 25 villages
in the region of Baltistan.
95% of these people keep livestock,
and they also have small agricultural fields.
And every now and then, their livestock
gets attacked by predators, such as snow leopard.
That really brings a huge economic loss for these people.
So then they retaliate by attacking
and killing these predators.
We have set up close to 20 small microinsurance
programs, where local people get compensated for their losses.
The other strategy is to construct predator proof
corrals because that is very impactful in the long run
in reducing mortality from snow leopard attacks.
We are also implementing a conservation education program.
[non-english speech]
Unless we get the human equation side right,
it's very difficult to sustain any conservation
effort in the long run.
We think that in our area, we can claim that snow
leopard population is stable.
There's also a threat from climate change
and global warming with receding iceline.
But I think snow leopards will definitely be
around for a long, long time.
I hope that in the years to come,
snow leopard sighting will become a everyday phenomenon.
[music playing]
CARL AZUZ: Doug was thought to be a potato.
It smelled like a potato.
It tasted like a potato.
It didn't really look like a potato,
and sadly for the New Zealand couple that dug up Doug,
it's not a potato.
After finding Doug in their garden,
they thought they'd stumbled across a record sized spud.
Doug weighed 17.4 pounds.
But after extensive research and DNA analysis,
experts concluded that Doug is a tuber of a type of gourd
that might have come from a choko.
Even if they were grounded, they weren't
"potatally" disappointed.
They still had something "tuber,"
and they could always put on their "nightshades" and
"starch" looking to "spud" the roots
of another side for their "vegetable."
All they got to do at this point is to keep their eyes peeled.
All right.
I'm Carl Azuz.
Today's shoutout takes us to Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania,
where we are happy to see you, the students
of Boiling Springs High school.
We hope all Y'all have a great weekend.
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