1. Bleacher Report NBA @BR_NBA

   Pels are asking for four 1st round picks from Lakers in potential AD deal, per @wojespn https://t.co/6gTHN5RcsU

2. Not 5…Not 6

   John @Friar_Faithful

   how many draft picks do the Pelicans want from the Lakers https://t.co/9e5HftVkTg

3. Everyone Looking at Those Demands Like

   Barflaan Tedoe @The_Barftender

   Pelicans want 4 1st round picks for AD??? https://t.co/oShJV7Yblw

4. Give Us More Chaos

   Andy Liu @AndyKHLiu

   @wojespn https://t.co/XBdRK5ssAy

6. Right?

   Ahmed/NBA is scared of Bron and Rich Paul @big_business_

   Might as well ask for Schoolboy Q and Kendrick while you’re at it @PelicansNBA

7. Pels Still Want More

   Boogie Bousins @bansky

   Pelicans: we want all the things

   Lakers: ok

   Pelicans: is it possible to have a few more things as well

   Lakers: yeah. Let’s do it.

   Pelicans: what about one last thing too?

   Lakers: of course. So.. deal?

   Pelicans: https://t.co/kSZJ6tcnQU

8. Real Life Reaction

   Rico Cartier @moodycartier

   @BR_NBA @wojespn DO IT https://t.co/tFro9uTUnH

9. Even Thanos Willing to Give Up Everything

   Michael Temkin @michael_temkin

   @BR_NBA @wojespn https://t.co/mAN8P1kwWT

10. Cue the Spongebob Meme

    vic @CountOnVic

    fOuR FirSt rOuNd PiCkS

12. 

    Rational Laker Opinions @RationaLAir

    @BR_NBA @wojespn https://t.co/aY8S1CvE39

13. Live Look at the Pelicans:

    Chukii @JustChukii

    @wojespn The Pelicans front office trying to rob the Lakers lmaoo https://t.co/siBfJRGxgk

14. Guess So

    sam esfandiari @samesfandiari

    Guess you weren’t serious https://t.co/TsnassGfIw

15. That’s a Lot

    sreekar @sreekyshooter

    SOURCES: The Pelicans want Ball, Kuzma, Ingram, Rondo, Beasley, Stephenson, 4 first round picks, 4 second round picks, 3 bottles of red wine from LeBron’s cellar, 3 bottles of white, 2 letters from the HOLLYWOOD sign, and 1 of Adam Levine’s nipples

16. It’s Been Real, See You in the Summer!

    Deantre Lewis @Ch0sen_One_1

    @wojespn Welp thanks guys, talk in summer https://t.co/OzNJBCZmZw

18. Hit That Mute Button Now

    David Swander @dlswander

    “… And 4 first round picks”

    **smashes mute button** https://t.co/YXt3frdga3

19. When Lakers Saw the Counter Offer

    Aaron Green @_AaronGreen

    @BR_NBA @wojespn https://t.co/vEfMHVQCuO

20. YIKES

    Dan Favale @danfavale

    so how many first-round picks do the Pelicans actually want from the Lakers? https://t.co/FZojY9wWJX

21. No Pressure at All

    Nate Jones @JonesOnTheNBA

    You push too hard when you don’t have leverage and now you’ve introduced ego and pride to the mix. Honestly, the Pelicans aren’t a franchise that was selling tickets and getting ratings with or without Davis. There’s ZERO pressure for them to get something done.

22. Live Look at Demps and Woj

    Wells P @Wells_P

    Demps and Woj crafting tweets at 1Am https://t.co/nrxKbd92p2

24. What You Think Magic?

    Wells P @Wells_P

    https://t.co/PinEyInHw2

25. Now We’re Out

    W.M. Kelly @TheeWillKelly

    @wojespn https://t.co/MGeUuqbe5f

26. Save Those Receipts

    Daman Rangoola @damanr

    Listen man if this deal doesn’t happen he’s automatically Unibrowed Anthony Tolliver to me*

    *Will delete this as soon as he’s a Laker

27. This Is Pretty Much It

    alex @steven_lebron

    how i imagine the pelicans-lakers trade talks for AD are going: https://t.co/uGMiN4aCPC

28. I Mean…

    Sean Highkin @highkin

    When was the last time LeBron didn’t get what he wanted?

30. What Else You Need?

    Rob Perez @WorldWideWob

    @wojespn “that’s it?” https://t.co/QAdrPbfa95

31. Must’ve Been Hard

    Tyson Beck @tysonbeckdesign

    Imagine trying to trade tazos with this guy back in school https://t.co/qA3kDXp79d

32. To the Naw Naw Naw

    Chris Montano @gswchris

    ‘Pelicans want 4 first-round & second-round picks’

    Lakers fans: https://t.co/2gQFzq26On

33. What You Think Magic?

    HI MY NAME IS JARED @Irishfootball11

    PELICANS-WE LIKE YOUR OFFER BUT WE ARE GONNA NEED 4 FIRST RD PICKS

    MAGIC : https://t.co/8lLWdtRMZw

34. NSFW

    Grant Goldberg @GrantGoldberg

    Pelicans: We want all your young players and two first round picks.

    Lakers: Okay, we’re fine with that.

    Pelicans: And cap relief.

    Lakers: Consider it done.

    Pelicans: You know what, make it four first round picks.

    Lakers: https://t.co/w2ZILSZeIT

36. Magic: ‘So What Do You Want?’ Pels:

    Bus, the Art Guy @BillionBus

    Lakers argee to sending Lonzo,Kuz, Ingram, & 4 First Rounders

    Pelicans: https://t.co/QlNIu1HYu4

37. The Outside Perspective

    LOLKNBR @LOLKNBR

    https://t.co/cIOoROFAIi

38. He Might Just Have to

    Wells P @Wells_P

    Rich is shutting down AD soon come.

39. UNACCEPTABLE

    Prince Ugorji @pcugorji

    Lakers: We’ll give you Ball, Ingram,Kuzma, Rondo, Beasley , AND 2 1st round picks

    Pelicans: https://t.co/z1DPeGYwZA

40. WHAT DO THEY WANT?

    Zap. @thatkidzap

    Magic Johnson to the Pelicans after this last trade offer: #Lakers https://t.co/0hpVfx3PXS

42. Please Don’t Be Real

    sam esfandiari @samesfandiari

    When magic gives them 8 picks b/c he knows he’s walking away 3 years https://t.co/W1pgNIqQJ2

43. Pelicans Just Keep Upping the Price

    Barflaan Tedoe @The_Barftender

    They gonna ask for Dre and Snoop Dogg’s masters & publishing next https://t.co/sfteiByqdO

44. They Want Whattt???

    devon @starewaytodevon

    the pelicans want HOW MANY PICKS?????? https://t.co/A5GRMNQ6YT

45. Classic Scene

    TheRealMrTalkHeavy @BiggBrass

    Lakers: We’ll give u Lonzo, Kyle, & Rondo for Anthony Davis

    Pelicans: https://t.co/s7Ul3F7Ivc

46. Danny Ainge Is Finessing

    J @The_6ix_man

    Danny Ainge when the Pelicans call on July 1st at 12:01am https://t.co/BWU0EjtAJO

48. Quantity Over Quality

    Nola Flynt @eflynt

    Pelicans: My wife’s making me sell the Porsche.

    Lakers: Really??

    P: Yeah, I got a few guys offering market value if I wait til summer, so—

    L: Dude, I will give you 4 Hyundai’s for it. Right. Now.

    P: What? No!

    L: Fine. 6 HYUNDAI’S!

    P: HOW IS THAT BETTER?!

    L: IT’S 6 FOR 1!!!

Former Dutch boxing champion Rudi Lubbers, who lost to Muhammad Ali on points in a 12-round heavyweight fight in Jakarta four and a half decades ago, is back on his feet after taking one of the heaviest punches of his life.

The 73-year-old and his partner Ria have been living in poverty in southeastern Bulgaria for the last two months, only to receive help after his story grabbed huge attention in the Netherlands following a TV documentary shown last Sunday.

They survived the freezing conditions in a broken-down van, lacking electricity, water and sanitary facilities, while looking after stray dogs.

Ria’s health suddenly deteriorated to the point she was rushed to hospital on Friday in critical condition.

Lubbers said her condition had improved slightly but she would remain in hospital for a few more days at least.

“The most important [thing] now is that my girlfriend returns in good condition and can see the dogs again,” Lubbers told Reuters news agency just outside the dilapidated van in the countryside near the village of Kosharitsa.

Lubbers, who represented the Netherlands at the 1964 and 1968 Olympic Games before turning professional in 1970, said his fight with former world champion Ali, for which he earned $125,000, made him mentally stronger.

“I’ve learned from the fight, so I could survive here,” he said, adding that he and Ria had received food and clothes from local people as well as Bulgarian mastika, a strong anise-flavoured drink, to keep them warm in the freeze.

Many in the Netherlands were shocked to see their boxing hero in such a desperate situation to the point that more than 12,500 euro were collected following the launch a crowd-funding campaign.

Rudi’s son Marco, who hasn’t been in touch with his dad for two years, arrived in Bulgaria after watching the documentary while Dutch people, living in the Balkan country, arranged a temporary shelter for the dogs.

Lubbers worked at funfairs with Ria for several years after retiring, but became homeless after she was declared bankrupt in 1999.

They lived then in Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Portugal before arriving in Bulgaria a few years ago.

Lubbers said he had remained friends with Ali who fought him in 1973 as he prepared for a rematch with his great rival Joe Frazier.

“Years after the fight, he [Ali] came to Holland,” said Lubbers who revealed that Ali had told him something he would remember forever.

“Ali told me: ‘Rudi, you’re the only white man from whom I ever learned something’.”

Lubbers, never beaten by a Dutch opponent during his career, said he still watched boxing but was disappointed by modern techniques.

“I love boxing but boxing has changed,” said Lubbers, who has suffered from asthma all his life. “It’s more fighting now.”

Two-thirds of Himalayan glaciers – the world’s “Third Pole” – could melt by 2100 if global emissions are not sharply reduced, scientists have warned in a major new study.

Even if the most ambitious Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is achieved, one-third of the glaciers would disappear, according to the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment, which was released on Monday.

Glaciers in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region are a critical water source for some 250 million people in the mountains, as well as to 1.65 billion others in the river valleys below, the 650-page report said.

The glaciers feed 10 of the world’s most important river systems, including the Ganges, Indus, Yellow, Mekong and Irrawaddy. They also, directly or indirectly, supply billions of people with food, energy, clean air and income.

If the ice melts, the consequences could include worsened air pollution to more extreme weather.

Lower pre-monsoon river flows will disrupt urban water systems and food and energy production, the study warned.

‘Bare rocks’

Five years in the making, the report was published by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Nepal, one of eight countries on the front line.

More than 350 researchers and policy experts, 185 organisations, 210 authors, 20 editors and 125 external reviewers contributed to its completion.

“Global warming is on track to transform the frigid, glacier-covered mountain peaks … cutting across eight countries to bare rocks in a little less than a century,” Philippus Wester, of ICIMOD, said in a statement.

“This is the climate crisis you haven’t heard of.”           

The 2015 Paris Agreement vowed to cap global warming “well below” two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In December, the UN climate forum agreed on a common approach to implement the accord, but failed to deliver fresh commitments to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Voluntary pledges currently in place would see Earth heat up by more than 3C, a recipe for widespread human misery, say scientists.

The new report notes that a 1.5C increase in global temperatures would mean a rise of at least 2.1C in the Himalayas region. If emissions continue unabated, the roof of the world would warm by an unlivable 5C.

“This is a landmark piece of work,” said Jemma Wadham, a professor of glaciology at the University of Bristol in England, who did not contribute to the report.

“The discovery that a third of the Himalayan glaciers could disappear signals potentially disastrous consequences for river flows, pollution and managing natural hazards associated with extreme events for more than one billion people.”

Pollution

The Himalayan glaciers, which formed some 70m years ago, are highly sensitive to changing temperatures. Since the 1970s, they have thinned and retreated, and the area covered by snow and snowfall has shrunk, raising concerns that glacial lakes could burst and flood.

Satellite data shows that numbers of such lakes in the region grew to 4,260 in a decade from 3,350 in 1990.

“Emerging hazards – in particular glacial lake development and increasingly unstable rock and ice faces — will become a major concern,” said Duncan Quincey, an associate professor at the University of Leeds school of geography.

Air pollution from the Indo-Gangetic Plains – one of the world’s most polluted regions – also deposits black carbon and dust on the glaciers, hastening melting and changing monsoon circulation, the ICIMOD study said.

The region would require up to $4.6bn per year by 2030 to adapt to climate change, rising to as much as $7.8 billion per year by 2050, according to an estimate in the report.

“Without the ice reserve in the mountains to top up the rivers through the melt season, droughts will be harsher on those living downstream,” noted Hamish Pritchard, an expert on ice dynamics at the British Antarctic Survey, commenting on the findings. 

North Korea has maintained its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes and is looking for ways to ensure those capabilities cannot be destroyed by any military strikes, according to a confidential report by United Nations sanctions monitors.

The report to a 15-member UN Security Council sanctions committee, seen by Reuters news agency on Monday, comes ahead of a second planned summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un later this month.

The first meeting between Kim and Trump last June in Singapore produced a vaguely worded document in which the North Korean leader pledged to work towards “the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”. 

While Trump has hailed “tremendous progress” in his dealings with North Korea, the UN report found that Pyongyang “is using civilian facilities, including airports, for ballistic missile assembly and testing with the goal of effectively preventing ‘decapitation’ strikes on a smaller number of identified nuclear and missile assembly and manufacturing site”.

The report said it “found evidence of a consistent trend on the part of the DPRK to disperse its assembly, storage and testing locations”, using the abbreviation for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The North Korean mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the 317-page UN report, which was submitted to Security Council members on Friday.

In his annual New Year’s address last month, Kim renewed his commitment to denuclearisation but warned that he may have no option but to seek an alternative course if the United States does not take corresponding measures and maintains sanctions.

‘Sanctions ineffective’

The UN Security Council has tightened sanctions on North Korea since 2006 in a bid to choke funding for the country’s nuclear weapons programmes, banning exports including coal, iron, lead, textiles and seafood, as well as capping imports of crude oil and refined petroleum products.

“The country continues to defy Security Council resolutions through a massive increase in illegal ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products and coal,” the sanctions monitors found. “These violations render the latest UN sanctions ineffective.”

The monitors said they had evidence of one unprecedented prohibited petroleum product transfer of more than 57,600 barrels, worth more than $5.7m.

They said the case highlighted “new sanctions evasion techniques that defeated the due diligence efforts of the region’s leading commodity trader, as well as the US and Singaporean banks that facilitated the fuel payments and a leading UK insurer that provided protection and indemnity cover to one of the vessels involved”.

Gordon Chang, a regional analyst and author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea takes on the world, said the US needed to do more to enforce sanctions.

“The real story here is not that the North Koreans are violating sanctions, or continuing building up their arsenal,” Chang told Al Jazeera.

“The real surprise here is that the United States is not enforcing sanctions vigorously. The US has since the middle of May last year basically allowed the North Koreans – and the Russians, and the Chinese, and the South Koreans – to violate sanctions and so, of course, Kim Jong Un feels ‘why should I give up my missiles and my nukes.’”

The report accused North Korea of violating a UN arms embargo and attempting “to sell a wide range of military equipment to armed groups and governments in the Middle East and Africa”, as well as small arms and light weapons to Libya, Sudan and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The UN monitors also noted “a trend in the DPRK’s evasion of financial sanctions using cyber attacks to illegally force the transfer of funds from financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges”.

North Korea is subject to a ban on luxury goods and the monitors said they are investigating the public appearance of a relatively new Rolls-Royce Phantom in Pyongyang on October 7 last year. The car usually sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Russia and China suggested the Security Council discuss easing sanctions after Trump and Kim met for the first time. But the US and other council members have said there must be strict enforcement of sanctions until Pyongyang acts.