What Will Happen To Our Planet After All the Polar Ice Melts
Around 50 million years ago, Earth had no glaciers. Today, it is partially covered with ice, but what will happen if the polar ice caps melt? How will our world look like and what will it happen to the environment, to humans and the animals whose lives depend on ice?
Scientists already know how the melting of glaciers will change the world because the event is already taking place. While the entire ice melting should take a few thousands of years, let’s take a look into the future and see how these changes will impact the entire planet. You’ll notice some of these events are already taking place!
20. A Longer Day
ranker.com
According to Steven Dutch (University of Wisconsin-Green Bay), when the polar ice caps melt, the day will be a little longer. How longer? Well… only around 2/3 of a second.
The melting of ice caps will redistribute the water on Earth and create a moment of inertia, so the rotation of Earth will be slightly slower.
19. Massive Earthquakes
phys.org
It seems that all the ice melting on Earth will bring a slew of Biblical catastrophes. That includes massive earthquakes, explains Anthony Fordham, editor of Popular Science Australia. He likens Earth with a Ping-Pong ball that has a dent in it…
Here’s his fun and doomsday explanation.
18. Antarctica’s Volcanoes Will Also Erupt
usa-today.com
The dent in Earth is the pressure that the sheet of ice lays on top of Antarctica. When the ice is remove, Earth’s crust will pop out and cause intense earthquakes all over the world.
Not to mention that the seismic activities will also make all the active volcanoes in Antarctica erupt.
17. Civil War?
independent.co.uk
In an interview with the National Geographic in 2013, Dr. Hal Wanless from the University of Miami stated that the rising water could lead to war:
“We’re going to see civil unrest, war. You just wonder how—or if—civilization will function.”
16. Huge Cities Underwater
ranker.com
The melting of polar ice caps will lead to evacuation of large cities like Miami or London who will be underwater. This lead to a huge refugee problem. By the next century, millions of people will need to find someplace else to live since the sea levels keep on rising.
15. Viruses Waiting to Be Released
imgur.com
Biologist Elena Giorgi knows that the permafrost hides many pathogens from antique times. With the thawing and melting of polar ice caps, many viruses and bacteria will be released. Giorgi explains that researchers have already discovered a “giant” prehistoric virus they named “pithovirus.”
14. Polar Bears Will Go Extinct
nationalgeographic.com
Considering polar bears live on the Arctic ice and their lives depend on that habitat, they will soon be extinct. According to Alun Anderson, the Arctic will be open ocean by 2050 and the “killer whale living in open water will be the symbol of the Arctic, replacing a bear on ice.”
Walruses will also go extinct, since the mothers give birth on ice…
13. We’ll Have A Hot Earth
nasa.gov
Losing the ice caps will end with a hotter planet because of the albedo effect. Sunlight is reflected by ice into the atmosphere and the open water that will be at the North Pole instead of ice would absorb the sun radiation and make our planet warmer!
12. Expect Extremely Weird Weather
imgur.com
Weather will get wacky with. Winds will slow, so we’ll see some strange persistent weather, like very long periods of rain, snow storms or in the summer longer periods of heat and droughts.
11. New ‘Trans-Arctic’ Shipping Routes Will Form
taas.com
According to researchers from the Ohio State University, by 2050, “common open-water ships” will be able to cross the Arctic in the summer and bigger “ice-strengthened ships” will get “robust new routes.”
Global trade will increase, but so will vessel safety standards, environmental protections, among others, explained researchers.
10. Alaska’s Infrastructure Crumbles
discovermagazine.com
Cathleen Kelly (Center for American Progress) already reported that the permafrost is “sinking unevenly, causing highways, pipelines, railroads, runways, and other infrastructure to buckle.” With all the ice caps and glaciers melting, the infrastructure will crumble, and fixing it is very expensive!
9. Exploiting Oil In the Arctic
forbes.com
In 2015, Shell tried to exploit oil in the Arctic, but they finally gave up. They said they chose to stop it because of the “significant regulatory restrictions” from the government, but the main reason was the ice, severe winters and drifting ice. With all the ice gone, imagine how easier it would be for these companies to exploit oil…
8. Inuits Will Also Suffer
arcticjournal.ca
The Inuit people will have to adapt and change their way of life. According to the Canadian Inuit spokesman, Jose A. Kusugak, the people already are feeling the changes, and they will have to “completely reinvent what it means to be Inuit.” Researcher Dr. Lori Lambert added that they will also have to move and their traditions will be lost, since their “cultural identity depends on [the Arctic landscape].”
7. “We Are Nothing”
greenland.nordicvisitor.com
Kusugak said that no matter how Inuit’s lives will be in the future, “it will not be an uninterrupted continuation of the traditional ways.” In Qaataak, Greenland, the Inuit stated that “without the ice, we are nothing.”
6. Earth’s Continents Without Ice
nationalgeographic.com
Wondering how the maps will look if the Earth will be left with no ice? Here’s how the coastlines across some continents will look, when all the ice on land will get drained in the sea. It would raise the sea level by 216 feet and create new shorelines, new inland seas, while it will also drown many cities across the globe…
5. North America – No More Florida
nationalgeographic.com
Imagine there’s no Florida and Gulf Coast. Look at California, where San Francisco’s hills will become islands and the Central Valley will be just a giant bay.
4. Africa – Uninhabitable Regions, Now More Alexandria and Cairo
nationalgeographic.com
While Africa will keep most of its land, the extreme weather will make a huge region uninhabitable. Africa will lose Alexandria and Cairo, which will be swallowed by the Mediterranean.
3. Europe – No More London and Venice
nationalgeographic.com
Among many other lost shorelines, London and Venice will be swallowed by the sea. Netherlands will be gone, and so will most of Denmark. The Mediterranean will expand and raise the levels of the Black and Caspian Seas.
2. Asia – China and India Will Lose Massive Lands
nationalgeographic.com
Right now, that shoreline that is swallowed by the seas in China is inhabited by 600 million people. In the coastal India, 160 million people will have to find new homes and Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains will become an island.
1. Australia Gets a New Inland Sea
nationalgeographic.com
Australia will get a new sea, but most of the narrow coast will be lost. Unfortunately, most of the population lives on the coastal strip.
As you can see, some of the extreme changes from ice melting on Earth are already happening and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Let’s say the good news is the complete melting of the ice caps will happen thousands of years in the future.
Herrera Beutler says McCarthy told her Trump sided with the Capitol mob as the assault unfolded.
By Nicholas Fandos February 13, 2021
Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, Republican of Washington, at the Capitol last week. Credit…Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On the eve of a verdict in Donald J. Trump’s Senate trial, one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach him confirmed on Friday night that the top House Republican, Representative Kevin McCarthy, told her that the former president had sided with the mob during a phone call as the Jan. 6 Capitol attack unfolded.
In a statement on Friday night, Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, Republican of Washington, recounted a phone call relayed to her by Mr. McCarthy of California, the minority leader, in which Mr. Trump was said to have sided with the rioters, telling the top House Republican that members of the mob who had stormed the Capitol were “more upset about the election than you are.”
She pleaded with witnesses to step forward and share what they knew about Mr. Trump’s actions and statements as the attack was underway.
“To the patriots who were standing next to the former president as these conversations were happening, or even to the former vice president: if you have something to add here, now would be the time,” Ms. Herrera Beutler said in the statement.
Her account of the call between Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Trump, first reported by CNN, addressed a crucial question in the impeachment trial: what Mr. Trump was doing and saying privately while the Capitol was being overrun.
Ms. Herrera Beutler said that Mr. McCarthy had relayed details of his phone call with Mr. Trump to her. She has been speaking publicly about it for weeks, including during a virtual town hall on Monday with constituents, and she recounted their conversation again in the statement on Friday.
A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy did not reply to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the House impeachment managers did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The Republican leader’s response to Mr. Trump in the weeks since the attack on the Capitol has fluctuated. On the day of the House’s impeachment vote, he said Mr. Trump bore some responsibility for the attack because he had not denounced the mob, but he has since backtracked and sought to repair his relationship with the former president.
By Ms. Herrera Beutler’s account, Mr. McCarthy called Mr. Trump frantically on Jan. 6 as the Capitol was being besieged by thousands of pro-Trump supporters trying to stop Congress from counting Electoral College votes that would confirm his loss.
She said Mr. McCarthy asked him “to publicly and forcefully call off the riot.”
Mr. Trump replied by saying that antifa, not his supporters, was responsible. When Mr. McCarthy said that was not true, the former president was curt.
“Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” he said, according Ms. Herrera Beutler’s account of what Mr. McCarthy told her.
Hours after the assault began, Mr. Trump tweeted a video in which he asked those ransacking the Capitol to leave. “Go home. We love you. You’re very special,” he said.
Nicholas Fandos is congressional correspondent for The New York Times, based in Washington. He has covered Capitol Hill since 2017, chronicling two Supreme Court confirmation fights, two historic impeachments of Donald J. Trump, and countless bills in between.
Chris Baraniuk, Tech Business reporter February 12, 2021
Excess energy from windfarms could be stored as hydrogen
Last year was a record breaker for the UK’s wind power industry.
Wind generation reached its highest ever level, at 17.2GW on 18 December, while wind power achieved its biggest share of UK energy production, at 60% on 26 August.
Yet occasionally the huge offshore wind farms pump out far more electricity than the country needs – such as during the first Covid-19 lockdown last spring when demand for electricity sagged.
But what if you could use that excess power for something else?
“What we’re aiming to do is generate hydrogen directly from offshore wind,” says Stephen Matthews, Hydrogen Lead at sustainability consultancy ERM.
His firm’s project, Dolphyn, aims to fit floating wind turbines with desalination equipment to remove salt from seawater, and electrolyzers to split the resulting freshwater into oxygen and the sought-after hydrogen.
Plan of offshore hydrogen plant
The idea of using excess wind energy to make hydrogen has sparked great interest, not least because governments are looking to move towards greener energy systems within the next 30 years, under the terms of the Paris climate agreement.
Hydrogen is predicted to be an important component in these systems and may be used in vehicles or in power plants. But for that to happen, production of the gas, which produces zero greenhouse gas emissions when burned, will need to dramatically increase in the coming decades.
Mr. Matthews says his firm’s project is just getting going, with a prototype system using a floating wind turbine of roughly 10 megawatt capacity planned, but not yet built.
It’s possible that the system could be based in Scotland and the aim is to start producing hydrogen around 2024 or 2025.
But there are many other ventures in this area besides Dolphyn.
German energy company Tractebel is exploring the possibility of building a large-scale, offshore hydrogen production plant powered by nearby wind turbines; and UK-headquartered Neptune Energy is seeking to convert an oil platform into a hydrogen production station, which will pump hydrogen ashore to the Netherlands via pipes that are currently transporting natural gas.
There are plans to convert this old North Sea oil platform into a hydrogen production plant
All of the excitement around hybrid wind energy and hydrogen generation systems is partly down to climate commitments but economics are also involved.
Large-scale hydrogen electrolyzers are becoming more available while the costs of installing wind turbines has fallen “dramatically”, says James Carton, assistant professor in sustainable energy at Dublin City University.
He and others think the time is right to kick-start large-scale hydrogen electrolysis at sea, though the idea has been around for many years.
Electrolyser stacks break seawater down into hydrogen and oxygen
Oyster is yet another project in this area, and involves a consortium of companies including Danish energy firm Ørsted and British electrolyzer specialists ITM Power, among others.
In the first instance, a wind turbine will power an onshore electrolyzer that will churn out hydrogen. The device will be exposed to sea spray to simulate, to a degree, the harsh environment facing offshore equipment. ITM intends to design a system compact enough to fit into a single wind turbine.
The firm’s chief executive, Graham Cooley, points out that it is much easier to store molecules such as hydrogen than electrons in batteries.
“All the renewable energy companies… they’ve realized they’ve got a new product,” he adds. “Now they can supply renewable molecules to the gas grid and industry.”
The Oyster consortium hopes to have shown off a demonstrator of its system within 18 months.
ITM plan to build a hydrogen-producing unit that can fit into a wind turbine
Among the many potential uses for hydrogen is as a fuel for gas-burning boilers in homes. Converting the domestic gas grid to provide hydrogen, and fitting homes with boilers capable of burning it, would be a huge task.
However, it would mean that excess wind energy could in principle be used to supply this giant system, meaning very little of that energy would go to waste, says Mr. Carton, referring to the gas main pipes scattered around the UK and Ireland: “We have a big tank, it’s just a really long tank in the ground.”
For some, this is all very exciting. But there are hurdles yet to overcome. A spokesman for the wind energy industry body WindEurope says that while renewable hydrogen produced via wind-powered electrolysis is “future-proof”, a decade or so of technological development is required before these systems will have a larger impact.
Jon Gluyas, Ørsted/Ikon chair in geoenergy, carbon capture and storage at Durham University, adds that the real question is whether it is cost-effective to set up such equipment at scale. Proponents, unsurprisingly, argue it is – but with energy systems the proof is only ever in the pudding. Ultimately, Prof Gluyas says a mix of different technologies and approaches will be needed for countries like the UK to be carbon neutral.
For Mr. Carton, the vision remains tantalizing. Schemes that solve the problem of wind’s variability by using excess power to good use could be transformative, he argues: “It’ll change the way we look at renewables.”
Wind energy had a ‘banner year’ in 2020. Here’s what that means for Joe Biden’s climate plan.
Elinor Aspegren, USA TODAY February 11, 2021
The wind energy sector in the U.S. blew away records in 2020.
A study from the American Clean Power Association released this month reports that 2020 was a record year for the industry, with developers adding enough megawatts of capacity to provide power for millions of homes and inching the U.S. closer to the Biden administration’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2035.
In all, 16,913 megawatts of new wind power capacity was installed in the U.S. last year – an 85% increase over 2019. That’s the equivalent of the power generated from 11 large coal plants, and enough to serve nearly 6 million homes, Jonathan Naughton, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Wind Energy Research Center at the University of Wyoming, told USA TODAY.
Texas hosted the most activity with 13% of energy output, followed by Wyoming (10%), Oklahoma (7%), Kansas (5%) and New Mexico (4%).
“2020 was a banner year for the wind industry,” Heather Zichal, president/CEO of American Clean Power, formerly the American Wind Energy Association, said in a statement. “Despite all the challenges COVID-19 placed on our businesses, we still shattered nearly every record for capacity and growth.”
Here’s how states stack up, and how the industry’s current capacity figures into the country’s goal for carbon neutrality.
Texas: Wind power ‘driving significant economic growth’
Wind power produced up to two thirds of Texas’s energy output in 2020, according to the Energy Information Administration. In total, the Lone Star State generated about 29,407 MWs of wind power, installing 2,197 MWs in 2020 – meaning that if Texas were a country, it would rank fifth in the world for wind power capacity, some estimates say.
“Texas is the number one energy consumer in the country. Our economy and continued growth are dependent on reliable power, and how we meet this massive demand has tremendous implications,” Powering Texas writes on its website. “Renewable energy is helping Texas meet this growing demand for energy, while also providing jobs, bolstering rural economies and supporting communities all across the state.”
A vehicle drives past wind turbines on a rural road near Sweetwater, Texas, in this July 29, 2020, file photo.
Why is Texas such a windy state? It sits right in the wind belt, a swath of land blessed with an excellent wind resource. The wind resource continues straight up the middle of the country to Canada and includes Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. There’s also significant wind in portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wyoming and Montana.
It also has less restrictive zoning, taxation systems that encourage building and robust transmission lines that together have allowed it to jump ahead of the rest.
Wyoming: An improving political climate for wind energy?
Wyoming is an interesting place for wind energy – it’s the No. 1 producer for coal in the country, said Naughton.
“Wind energy is always looked at as a threat to the coal industry,” he said.
But in 2020, the state nearly doubled its wind capacity for power, adding nearly 900 MWs over the past year. That signals to Naughton that the political climate for wind power is improving in the Cowboy State.
“People are understanding that wind is likely to develop here and it produces some jobs and some tax money, and it does some good things,” he said.
Part of that is due to a tax on wind power, which brings in about $4.2 million a year, reported the Casper Star-Tribune.
But Naughton and other energy experts cautioned that people shouldn’t take the burst in Wyoming’s wind development as a trend from year to year. The Industrial Siting Council, the regulatory board charged with reviewing big wind project applications in the state, hasn’t received a new proposal for a wind project since 2019, the Star-Tribune reported.
How close is US to carbon neutrality?
Despite the wind energy industry’s gains in 2020, the U.S. remains far from carbon neutrality by 2035, a main goal in the Biden administration’s climate plan.
“We’re in the single digits still. But we’re in the high single digits,” Naughton said. Compared to 2000, when the U.S. was stuck in the sub-single digits, he added, “We’ve come an amazing way.”
Still, Naughton said the U.S. would need to accelerate its pace of installation to achieve President Joe Biden’s goal, which he described as doable with a recommitment to offshore wind energy farms and to those areas impacted by the loss of old energy outputs.
“We have a policy push to do it. And we also have an economic push to do it. So the pieces are in place,” he said. “We’ve just got to make sure it actually happens.”
Contributing: Elizabeth Weise and Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
He might be acquitted, but he won’t live down his disgraceful conduct.
By Editorial Board February 10, 2021
President Donald Trump attends rally January 6, 2021: CAROL GUZY/ZUMA PRESS
Whether a former President ought to be subject to an impeachment trial is a matter of constitutional debate. Whether it’s prudent, if acquittal appears likely, is a related question. But wherever you come down on those issues, the House impeachment managers this week are laying out a visceral case that the Capitol riot of Jan. 6 was a disgrace for which President Trump bears responsibility.
Long before November, Mr. Trump was saying that the only way he could lose the election was if it were rigged. On the night of the vote, he tweeted, “they are trying to STEAL the election.” In his speech that night, he called it “a fraud on the American public,” and said, “frankly we did win.” Is it a surprise that some of his fans took his words to heart?
Instead of bowing to dozens of court defeats, Mr. Trump escalated. He falsely claimed that Vice President Mike Pence, if only he had the courage, could reject electoral votes and stop Democrats from hijacking democracy. He called his supporters to attend a rally on Jan. 6, when Congress would do the counting. “Be there, will be wild!” Mr. Trump tweeted. His speech that day was timed to coincide with the action in the Capitol, and then he directed the crowd down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Mr. Trump’s defenders point out that he also told the audience to make their voices heard “peacefully.” And contra Rep. Eric Swalwell, who argued the incitement to attack the Capitol was “premeditated,” it’s difficult to think Mr. Trump ever envisioned what followed: that instead of merely making a boisterous display, the crowd would riot, assault the police, invade the building, send lawmakers fleeing with gas masks, trash legislative offices, and leave in its wake a dead Capitol officer.
But talk about playing with fire. Mr. Trump told an apocalyptic fable in which American democracy might end on Jan. 6, and some people who believed him acted like it. Once the riot began, Mr. Trump took hours to say anything, a delay his defenders have not satisfactorily explained. Even then he equivocated. Imagine, Rep. Joe Neguse said, if Mr. Trump “had simply gone onto TV, just logged on to Twitter and said ‘Stop the Attack,’ if he had done so with even half as much force as he said ‘Stop the Steal.’”
The impeachment managers hurt their case by blaming only Mr. Trump for earlier clashes. “Donald Trump, over many months, cultivated violence,” said Stacey Plaskett, the delegate for the Virgin Islands. But often those events were showdowns between left and right, with both seeking trouble. “When darkness fell,” the Washington Post reported after one melee, “the counter-protesters triggered more mayhem as they harassed Trump’s advocates, stealing red hats and flags and lighting them on fire.”
Yet there’s no defense for Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 and before. Mitch McConnell is reportedly telling his GOP colleagues that the decision to convict or acquit is a vote of conscience, and that’s appropriate. After the Electoral College voted on Dec. 14, Mr. Trump could have conceded defeat and touted his accomplishments.
Now his legacy will be forever stained by this violence, and by his betrayal of his supporters in refusing to tell them the truth. Whatever the result of the impeachment trial, Republicans should remember the betrayal if Mr. Trump decides to run again in 2024.
Exclusive: Dozens of former Republican officials in talks to form anti-Trump third party
By Tim Reid February 10, 2021
U.S. President Donald Trump waves as he arrives at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., January 20, 2021. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
(Reuters) – Dozens of former Republican officials, who view the party as unwilling to stand up to former President Donald Trump and his attempts to undermine U.S. democracy, are in talks to form a center-right breakaway party, four people involved in the discussions told Reuters.
The early stage discussions include former elected Republicans, former officials in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump, ex-Republican ambassadors and Republican strategists, the people involved say.
More than 120 of them held a Zoom call last Friday to discuss the breakaway group, which would run on a platform of “principled conservatism,” including adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law – ideas those involved say have been trashed by Trump.
The plan would be to run candidates in some races but also to endorse center-right candidates in others, be they Republicans, independents or Democrats, the people say.
Evan McMullin, who was chief policy director for the House Republican Conference and ran as an independent in the 2016 presidential election, told Reuters that he co-hosted the Zoom call with former officials concerned about Trump’s grip on Republicans and the nativist turn the party has taken.
Three other people confirmed to Reuters the call and the discussions for a potential splinter party, but asked not to be identified.
Among the call participants were John Mitnick, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; former Republican congressman Charlie Dent; Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff in the Homeland Security Department under Trump; and Miles Taylor, another former Trump homeland security official.
The talks highlight the wide intraparty rift over Trump’s false claims of election fraud and the deadly Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol. Most Republicans remain fiercely loyal to the former president, but others seek a new direction for the party.
The House of Representatives impeached Trump on Jan. 13 on a charge of inciting an insurrection by exhorting thousands of supporters to march on the Capitol on the day Congress was gathered to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory.
Call participants said they were particularly dismayed by the fact that more than half of the Republicans in Congress – eight senators and 139 House representatives – voted to block certification of Biden’s election victory just hours after the Capitol siege.
Most Republican senators have also indicated they will not support the conviction of Trump in this week’s Senate impeachment trial.
“Large portions of the Republican Party are radicalizing and threatening American democracy,” McMullin told Reuters. “The party needs to recommit to truth, reason and founding ideals or there clearly needs to be something new.”
‘THESE LOSERS’
Asked about the discussions for a third party, Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, said: “These losers left the Republican Party when they voted for Joe Biden.”
A representative for the Republican National Committee referred to a recent statement from Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
“If we continue to attack each other and focus on attacking on fellow Republicans, if we have disagreements within our party, then we are losing sight of 2022 (elections),” McDaniel said on Fox News last month.
“The only way we’re going to win is if we come together,” she said.
The Biden White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
McMullin said just over 40% of those on last week’s Zoom call backed the idea of a breakaway, national third party. Another option under discussion is to form a “faction” that would operate either inside the current Republican Party or outside it.
Names under consideration for a new party include the Integrity Party and the Center Right Party. If it is decided instead to form a faction, one name under discussion is the Center Right Republicans.
Members are aware that the U.S. political landscape is littered with the remains of previous failed attempts at national third parties.
“But there is a far greater hunger for a new political party out there than I have ever experienced in my lifetime,” one participant said.
Reporting by Tim Reid; Additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Peter Cooney
The World Health Organization team investigating coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged, says its uncovered new information about its possible origins.
Peter Ben Embarek who led the team in its nearly month-long visit said the virus could have taken a very long and convoluted path also involving movements across borders.
“All the work that has been done on the virus and trying to identify its origin continue to point towards natural reservoir of this virus, and similar viruses, in bat population.”
But he added it’s unlikely that the bats were in Wuhan.
He said they were also looking for Chinese blood samples that could indicate that the virus was circulating earlier than first thought.
The team of investigators did rule out the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab – which has been the subject of conspiracy theories.
“However, the findings suggest that the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely, and to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population.”
The team has also identified market vendors selling frozen animal products including farmed wild animals.
They plan to further investigate cold chain transmission
China has pushed the idea that the virus can be transmitted by frozen food and has repeatedly announced findings of coronavirus traces on imported food packaging.
Members of the team have sought to rein in expectations for the mission.
With one expert saying it would probably take years to fully understand the origins of COVID-19.
Video Transcript
– The World Health Organization team investigating coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged, says it’s uncovered new information about its possible origins. Peter Ben Embarek, who led the team in its nearly month-long visit, said the virus could have taken a very long and convoluted path, also involving movements across borders.
PETER BEN EMBAREK: All the work that has been done on the virus and trying to identify its origin continue to point towards a natural reservoir of this virus, and similar viruses, in bat population.
– But he added it’s unlikely that the bats were in Wuhan. He said they were also looking for Chinese blood samples that could indicate that the virus was circulating earlier than first thought. The team of investigators did rule out the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab, which has been the subject of conspiracy theories.
PETER BEN EMBAREK: The findings suggest that the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely, and to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population.
– The team has also identified market vendors selling frozen animal products, including farmed wild animals. They plan to further investigate cold chain transmission. China has pushed the idea that the virus can be transmitted from frozen food and has repeatedly announced findings of coronavirus traces on imported food packaging.
Members of the team have sought to rein in expectations for the mission, with one expert saying it would probably take years to fully understand the origins of COVID-19.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump made up to $640 million while working in White House, report finds
Alex Woodward
(AP)
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump reported as much as $640 million in outside income while working in the White House as advisers to Donald Trump, according to an analysis from a government watchdog group.
The couple – the son-in-law and daughter of the former president – made between $172 million and $640 million, according to financial disclosures analyzed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
While they did not take a public income while working in the administration, and they reportedly stepped away from daily operations at their companies, their extraordinary incomes have alarmed lawmakers and ethics groups chronicling concerns over the family’s allegedly rampant self-dealing and enrichment while Mr. Trump was in office.
Ivanka Trump’s ownership stake in Washington DC’s Trump Hotel – what CREW called a “locus of influence peddling in the Trump administration” – earned her more than $13 million since 2017, according to the report.
She also made up to $1 million from her namesake brand a year after she filed a disclosure with the government that its operations ceased in 2018, the report found.
The report also outlines how her applications for foreign trademarks “may have been her biggest accomplishment” while her father was in office.
Russia renewed two trademarks for Ms Trump’s business a month after her father was elected in 2016. She won preliminary approval for three Chinese trademarks after dining with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2017, the first of more than two dozen approvals for trademark registrations with foreign governments while her father was in office.
In October 2018, three months after she announced that her brand had shut down, she received 16 trademarks from the Chinese government, including for voting machines.
Mr Kushner did not divest from his stake in real estate investment platform Cadre, co-owned by his brother Joshua, despite his wife’s role in the administration’s Opportunity Zones program from which Cadre benefitted.
At the beginning of the Trump administration, Mr. Kushner’s stake in Cade was initially valued between $5 million and $25 million, according to CREW.
The couple made at least $24 million during the final year of the administration, according to recent disclosures. A list of future interests for the couple include golf courses in Bali and Dubai and hotel construction in New York City.
Mr. Kushner opened Kushner Companies BVI Limited, an off-shore holding company in the British Virgin Islands. Among its assets is New York’s Puck Building, valued at more than $25 million.
The Independent has requested comment from a representative for Mr Kushner.
Invasive Asian carp is getting a new name and a public makeover to draw more eaters
Keith Matheny, Detroit Free Press February 8, 2021
DETROIT – Care for a plate of slimehead? How about some orange roughy?
It’s the same fish, but one sounds much more palatable than the other. The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service gave the slimehead a rebranding in the late 1970s in an effort to make the underused fish more marketable.
Now, Illinois officials and their partners want to give the invasive Asian carp threatening the Great Lakes a similar makeover. The goal: To grow the fish’s image as a healthy, delicious, organic, sustainable food source — which will, in turn, get more fishermen removing more tons of the fish from Illinois rivers just outside of Lake Michigan.
Markets such as pet food, bait and fertilizer have expanded the use of invasive Asian carp in recent years. But “it’s been hard to get the human consumption part of this because of the four-letter word: carp,” said Kevin Irons, assistant chief of fisheries for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
A full-on media blitz is coming later this year to change that. The proposed new name for the fish is being kept tightly under wraps for a big rollout in June, prior to the Boston Seafood Show in mid-July. But other aspects of the “The Perfect Catch” campaign will point out that the invasive Asian carp species — silver, bighead, grass and black carp — are flaky, tasty, organic, sustainable, low in mercury and rich in protein and omega-3 fatty acids.
“To us in America, we think of carp as a bottom-feeding, muddy-tasting fish, which it is sometimes,” said Dirk Fucik, owner of Dirk’s Fish and Gourmet Shop in Chicago, who has had success with occasional serving of Asian carp to customers and is participating in the rebranding effort.
“But Asian carp is a plankton-feeder. It’s a different type of flesh — much cleaner, sweeter-tasting meat.”
Fucik called the upcoming national marketing campaign “the biggest push that we’ve seen so far with these fish.”
Asian carp were introduced in the southern U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s to control algae blooms in aquaculture facilities, farm ponds and sewage lagoons. Floods and human mismanagement helped the carp escape into the Mississippi River system, where their spread exploded.
Clint Carter (not in the photo) pulls up a fishing net that caught carps on the Illinois River in Chillicothe, Ill., Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021.
A 2019 study looking at 20 years of fish population data on the upper Mississippi River confirmed bighead, silver, grass and black carp out-compete sport fish, causing population declines for prized species such as yellow perch, bluegill, and black and white crappie.
Should Asian carp make it into the Great Lakes, many scientists believe they would cause a huge disruption to the aquatic food chain and damage, perhaps irreparably, a $7 billion annual Great Lakes fishery.
Plans are in the works for a $778 million Asian carp barrier at the Brandon Road Lock and Dam on the Des Plaines River about 27 miles southwest of Chicago in Joliet, Illinois. The barrier will include electricity, unappealing sounds for fish and gates of bubbles as deterrents.
But old-fashioned fishing of pools of carp in the river systems between the Mississippi and Lake Michigan is also proving effective in holding back the potential Great Lakes invaders.
Shawn Price, a commercial fisherman based in Fulton, Illinois, has fished the rivers for Asian carp on contract with the Illinois DNR since 2010. Then, they caught boatloads of carp, almost all 20 to 50 pounds, he said, with some up to 70 pounds or more. Now, the fish are typically 3 to 12 pounds, or even smaller, he said.
Clint Carter, center, pulls up fishing net that caught carps as Dave Buchanan takes them off the net on the Illinois River in Chillicothe, Ill., Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021.
“We almost never catch a fish over 30 pounds anymore,” he said. “That mass that was there when we started, when they said they have to do something to save the lake, we have drastically cut it to shreds.”
Back when the program started, bighead carp made up about three-quarters of the catch. Now, they are less than 10%. The difference? Fishermen catch the bighead carp more easily, so they’ve caught them in far greater numbers over the years. “The bigheads don’t jump, the silvers do,” Price said.
It’s silver carp that provide the iconic images of fish jumping out of the water en masse, potentially endangering boaters. Fishermen can have silver carp trapped in six rows of netting “and they will jump over all six of them,” he said.
‘A huge opportunity for this market to expand’
State-contracted fishermen like Price drop their loads off at the dock, with state officials setting up markets for the carp.
“A lot of the fish are used for organic fertilizer, pet treats,” he said. “They sell a fair amount for … lobster bait, crawfish bait.”
Roy Sorce’s family ran a food service distributorship in Illinois for 49 years. Last year, he converted the business to Sorce Freshwater, seeing a future in Asian carp.
“We take the fish from the fishermen and we find markets to sell them,” he said — bait and fertilizer companies, as well as pet food and for human consumption.
Roy Sorce, owner and president of Sorce Enterprise poses for a photo in his office in Peoria, Ill., Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021.
What started as 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of fish a week is now up to 80,000 pounds, with plenty of room to grow, he said. He hopes to add on-site processing of the fish in coming months.
“There’s a huge opportunity for this market to expand,” Sorce said. “We’ve already made inroads … it all has to do with education and marketing. Because of COVID, everyone is so tied up with other issues and priorities. They don’t want to deal with something new, or try something new, yet.”
In Kentucky, Asian carp have moved from the Mississippi and Ohio rivers into tributaries and in two of the state’s biggest reservoirs, Kentucky and Barkley lakes. Peoria, Illinois-based Colgan Carp Solutions has worked with fishermen there to take Asian carp for use as lobster bait in New England.
“The fishermen liked it — they said it fishes well. It’s an oily fish,” founder Brian Colgan said.
COVID-19’s impacts on tourism and restaurants have hit the lobster market hard as well, so demand dried up over 2020, he said.
“The good news is the fishermen started calling again in September and October,” he said.
In Canada, Montreal-based Wilder Harrier last year introduced an Asian carp-based dog food.
Quebec-based Wilder Harrier pet food company is now distributing a dog food using invasive Asian carp as its primary protein source.
“We want to tackle the unsustainability of our food system at large … the heavy use of animal protein in a growing human population of 10 billion people that we just cannot sustain,” company co-founder and CEO Phillippe Poirer said. “We decided to start with our pets.”
Among the company’s products are pet treats made from protein from crickets and a species of fly. Learning of the Asian carp problem just outside the Great Lakes, it seemed a fit, Poirer said.
“Trying to reduce the environmental impact of our food system includes protein sources from species that are damaging our ecosystem, such as invasive species,” he said. “Asian carp has a lot of small bones and really is not ideal as a fillet fish for human consumption. But once ground up, it’s perfect for cats and dogs. It has a great nutritional profile, and it’s very appetizing for them.”
Ah, them bones. Asian carp have many tiny pin bones throughout their fillets. They’re actually so small as to be edible, but they are a hurdle for an American market, Fucik said.
“American people do not like bones,” he said. “Chinese people will eat a fish right off its bones, but in America, people want a 4-ounce salmon fillet, skinless, boneless, that grows on a tree.”
Some higher-order filleting and meat-grinding, however, can overcome the pin bone issue, Fucik said.
The upcoming Asian carp — or whatever the fish will soon be called — marketing push will seek to connect with grocery stores, restaurants, and institutional places such as universities and food pantries. “Anybody who needs to eat proteins,” Irons said. The message: “If you try it, it’s going to be delicious.”
Product analyst Daniel Webber, center, left, and operation processor Zach McGinnis take carps off a boat and throw them in tote boxes based the species at Sorce Enterprise in Peoria, Ill., Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021.
And it’s all for a vital environmental cause. Sorce noted that the Brandon Road Lock and Dam Asian carp barrier proposed for Peoria is still about seven years or more away.
“We are a last line of defense,” he said. “If we can harvest these fish out of the Peoria pool, we can minimize the pressure going north.”
His Biz Is Shunned, She Resigned, and Everyone Is Being Sued: What Became of Trump’s Election Dead-Enders
Asawin Suebsaeng, Will Sommer February 8, 2021
Getty
A month after the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump is living comfortably at his private club in Florida. He’s been gearing up for his latest impeachment trial, he’s been deprived of many of his toys and privileges that came with the presidency, and he’s suffering from boredom. But he’s also been basking in the comfort of knowing that the Republican Party will—even today—continue to bend over backwards to please him.
But some of his most hardcore associates and advisers, who egged Trump on and helped fuel his most dangerous or destructive attempts to subvert American democracy, aren’t doing so well. In the three months since the election was called for Joe Biden, most of the lawyers and MAGA enthusiasts who decided to play a consequential role in the ex-president’s efforts to overturn the Democratic nominee’s 2020 win (efforts that led directly to the Jan. 6 mob violence), have had their jobs or businesses shredded, their personal lives shaken, or their reputations irrevocably tarnished—all while Trump’s been relaxing and playing his rounds of golf in the Sunshine State.
The ones who helped spearhead the most extreme chapters in the broader crusade to nullify the election outcome are now besieged by their own legal battles. Several of them have complained that friends aren’t talking to them anymore, or have huffed and fumed over Twitter banning them for life for spreading dangerous misinformation. Several of the Trump-allied attorneys are just trying to hold onto their law licenses, under calls for disbarment for their participation on the Team Trump efforts. Only two of these people responded to requests for comment on this story.
Much of their current ruin came as a direct result of their decisions to become major players in Trump’s failed authoritarian endeavor to cling to power. All of them have refused to admit that Trump, in fact, lost fair and square. Of this band of MAGA allies (which most prominently included people like Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Jenna Ellis, Cleta Mitchell, John Eastman, and Peter Navarro), arguably none of them has lost more in the time since the election than Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and personal friend of the ex-president’s.
When Trump was in power, Lindell served as Trump 2020’s Minnesota co-chair and as a big financial backer of several efforts to overturn Biden’s win. He was welcomed by Trump into the Oval Office in the very last days of the term to brief the then-leader of the free world on a stack of documents purporting to show evidence that China and other foreign nations somehow tipped the election to Biden. (One of the papers in that packet included a suggestion for declaring martial law to bar the Democratic president-elect from office.)
Today, as many of his former compatriots have already given up the fight, Lindell has continued to be the truest of believers in the cause, refusing to move on despite losing business left and right. Last week, Lindell texted The Daily Beast that Mattress Firm, which he described as a “big bedding company… if not the biggest,” had “quit selling MyPillow, too,” following a trend of companies swearing off the pillow mogul’s products after his post-election activity. Last month, the MyPillow creator said he’d already gotten phone calls or notices from Bed Bath & Beyond, Wayfair, and Kohl’s that they’d decided to ditch his product line and halt their business relationship with the MAGA super-fan’s company.
This month, Lindell and his pillow company also suffered a similar fate to the 45th president of the United States: Twitter had taken action against their accounts for spreading pro-Trump conspiracy theories baselessly claiming a rigged election. “They took down MyPillow’s Twitter now! Attacks keep coming,” Lindell lamented to The Daily Beast.
Lindell is still facing a possible lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, the election tech company that has sent warnings to various people in the Trump orbit and in conservative media, demanding retractions and public apologies for making widespread allegations that Dominion helped steal the 2020 election. Other Trump stalwarts who’ve been sent demand letters have backed off, immediately gone quiet, or sheepishly issued on-air correctives.
But not Lindell.
Instead, the pillow entrepreneur claims to have gone into hiding, surrounding himself with ex-Special Forces soldiers. On Friday, Lindell released “Absolute Proof,” a three-hour video premiering on the Trump-aligned One America News Network that he claims will prove the election was stolen from Trump. Lindell cast the video’s release in apocalyptic terms, claiming on a North Dakota radio show shortly before the Friday release that the “end times” await if his video doesn’t catch on with “all the marbles on the line,” and that “I’m serious, this is biblical. This is Revelations. This is Mark of the Beast stuff. This is that vaccine and all that garbage.”
Down in Georgia, Lin Wood isn’t doing that much better. During the tumultuous Trump-Biden presidential transition, Lindell financially supported Wood’s legal work as he made a name for himself with his especially groundless, violence-endorsing assertions about the election. The then-president would repeatedly phone Wood in late 2020 to get updates on his latest moves in Georgia. But Wood’s operation, working in tandem with Powell, caused rampant anxiety among conservatives on Capitol Hill, inside the Trump administration, and in the campaign. Many Republican operatives and lawmakers still, in part, blame Wood for helping to blow the GOP’s chances in this year’s Georgia runoff, costing the party control of the U.S. Senate at the dawn of the Biden era.
But in the time since he seemingly struck up a rapport with Trump, the now-former president has privately bad-mouthed Wood as a crank to close associates, according to two people who’ve heard Trump’s criticisms. Today, Wood’s Twitter account, too, has been taken away from him, and it’s not clear whether Wood will even get to remain a lawyer for much longer.
Nick Sandmann, the former Covington Catholic student whose lawsuits against media outlets had turned Wood into a star with Trump supporters, dropped Wood as his attorney. Wood recently doxxed his own son, publishing his estranged adult son’s email address online and urging his fans to contact him about the “persecution” the elder Wood faced. The Georgia state bar wants Wood to undergo a mental evaluation if he’s going to retain his license to practice law, according to Wood’s posts on social networking app Telegram, and a private lawyers club in Atlanta warned Wood he could face expulsion if he doesn’t resign his membership. Now Wood, one of the most outspoken promoters of the claim that Democrats committed voter fraud in 2020, is reportedly under investigation himself for voting in Georgia after sending an email that suggested he has another residency in South Carolina.
Among this Trumpian collective of would-be election-destroyers, Wood isn’t even the only one whose license to practice law is now under attack or scrutiny.
Powell, Wood’s partner-in-mischief, was slammed last month by Detroit officials who said they want her stripped of her Michigan law license. “This lawsuit, and the lawsuits filed in the other states, are not just damaging to our democratic experiment, they are also deeply corrosive to the judicial process itself,” attorneys for the Motor City wrote to U.S. District Judge Linda Parker.
Following the Jan. 6 riot in Washington—the day Giuliani spoke at the D.C. rally and called for “trial by combat”—the New York State Bar Association moved to expel the once-celebrated New York City mayor, and laid some of the blame for the mob violence at his door. Giuliani, who was the ringleader of Trump’s official election-challenging legal “strike force,” decried the move as a “political act.”
Around the same time, Brad Hoylman, the Democratic chairman of the New York state Senate Judiciary Committee, delivered a formal request to have Trump’s personal lawyer’s license to practice law revoked due to his “participation and role in fomenting a violent insurrectionist attack.”
And like so many in the former president’s good graces who promulgated the pro-Trump lies about the 2020 election, Powell and Giuliani are facing aggressive legal threats from voting tech companies. On Thursday, Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion suit against several Fox stars, Giuliani, and Powell. “We have no choice,” Antonio Mugica, Smartmatic’s founder, told CNN. “The disinformation campaign that was launched against us is an obliterating one. For us, this is existential, and we have to take action.”
But after Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration, Giuliani at least continued to have the ear of his client, still the Republican Party’s most popular figure, by far. According to two people familiar with the matter, Giuliani kept informally advising Trump on impeachment-trial strategy, even after it was made clear to the attorney that he wouldn’t be officially serving on the ex-president’s new legal defense for the February Senate proceedings.
Other lawyers who worked for Trump during the disastrous presidential transition weren’t so lucky, having been used and discarded by the former president’s political operation, and today left without their other jobs.
Early last month, The Washington Post first revealed that Cleta Mitchell was intimately involved with Trump’s scandalous pressure campaign to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia. She had, mostly under the radar, risen to become Team Trump’s point person in the state, and was on the now-infamous conference call between the Republican president and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Over many years, Mitchell had earned a reputation as one of the conservative legal universe’s heaviest hitters, and a top-tier campaign finance attorney for right-leaning activists and political candidates. She was a true star in the field. But when her involvement in Trump’s efforts were revealed in January, her high-powered law firm, Foley & Lardner LLP, released a statement claiming it was unaware of the extent of Mitchell’s pro-Trump activity, and said the firm was “concerned” and probing the matter. Shortly thereafter, Mitchell was out of the job.
In December, John Eastman represented Trump before the U.S. Supreme Court when few others—even longtime Trump attorneys—would do so. On the then-president’s behalf, Eastman—a Chapman University law professor who became an outrage-magnet during the 2020 election for openly questioning Sen. Kamala Harris’s citizenship and therefore eligibility to serve as Biden’s running mate—asked the Supreme Court to allow Trump to intervene in a Texas suit that sought to cancel Biden’s victory in four key states.
This legal maneuver, predictably, went nowhere fast. For his time and service, Eastman was rewarded by Trump by having his name floated as a possible member of his legal team for the second Senate trial. Eastman also got a prime speaking slot at the D.C. rally that preceded the bloody riot on Capitol Hill. However, Eastman and Giuliani were soon barred from working on the team, with several top Trump advisers fearing the pair wasn’t serious enough and that they carried too much riot-related baggage with them.
The week after the rioting, Eastman was forced to resign from Chapman, following mounting pressure on the university’s leadership. The separation was acrimonious enough that both Eastman and the university had to pledge not to sue one another. “Chapman and Dr. Eastman have agreed not to engage in legal actions of any kind, including any claim of defamation that may currently exist, as both parties move forward,” Chapman president Daniele Struppa said in a statement at the time.
As for the rest, Jenna Ellis, one of the most gung-ho of Trump’s senior legal advisers, is no longer representing the former president. Starting in early December, she and other Trumpist lawyers suffered a sharp plunge in the frequency of appearances on Fox News and Fox Business, following legal threats made by the voting-tech companies. But at least she still has her job as special counsel for the socially conservative Thomas More Society, and hasn’t lost her Twitter account of nearly 800,000 followers. Nowadays, she can be found tweeting her continued support of the former president, broadsides against the Biden administration, and her thoughts on issues such as why conservative women are definitely “hotter.”
Peter Navarro, President Trump’s top trade adviser in the White House who spent Trump’s final weeks in office compiling and promoting documents that falsely portrayed massive election fraud, is still trying to talk to his former boss—through the TV, at least. On Friday, Navarro appeared on Newsmax TV to urge Trump to once again upturn his legal team. “You get somebody like Matt Gaetz as your lead attorney instead of that stiff [Bruce Castor] you had on,” Navarro recommended… before touting his own research. “Then you use the ‘Navarro Report’ and other reports that have been put out as your exhibits A, B, C, and D.”
With the Trump presidency in his rearview mirror, multiple close associates of Navarro say they aren’t sure what his next career move will be, as he’s so inextricably tied himself to his onetime boss.
As for Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, he never got his reinstatement or re-elevation in the Trump administration that he and the ex-president had once so desired. In late November, he did, however, finally get his pardon from Trump for his role in the Robert Mueller saga. But in return, Flynn failed to deliver on the authoritarian push to keep Biden out of power, and (thankfully) didn’t have enough powerful takers for his pitch for Trump to proclaim martial law or use the U.S. military to “re-run” the election in electorally crucial states. With his professional reputation in Washington and elsewhere dramatically diminished, he now has to settle for being a folk hero to QAnon kooks.
Down in Palm Beach, Florida, where the twice-impeached 45th president of the United States is prepping with his team for the Senate trial, he’s sometimes letting his boredom with retirement show, even as he tries to project a state of contentment to the public and to his aides. Late last week, Trump’s lawyers and advisers rejected an invitation from House impeachment managers for the former commander in chief to testify. “The president will not testify in an unconstitutional proceeding,” senior Trump adviser Jason Miller flatly told The Daily Beast.
When Trump hasn’t been focusing on his upcoming trial, he’s been golfing. He’s still binging his right-wing media and cable-TV favorites, though even there he’s starting to lose close friends due to the election aftermath. On Friday, the staunchly Trumpy Fox Business announced it had canceled the show of its star, Lou Dobbs, a fervent supporter of the former president who for years also doubled as a key informal adviser to Trump. (Dobbs had been mentioned in Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit the day prior.) After the news broke, Trump voiced his support for Dobbs in an official statement, but by Saturday, Dobbs was keeping mostly tight-lipped about the ouster, texting The Daily Beast, “Sorry. No comment at this time.”
When Trump is not watching television or monitoring line-up developments, he still hasn’t bothered devoting an ounce of introspection on the massive body counts and the ravaged nation he left for others to clean up. “He doesn’t have regrets about it, none that I’ve heard,” said one Trump confidant. He’s been scribbling down potential disses and harangues at his political foes, insults that he now cannot tweet himself to the broader public. He’s dictated petulant remarks sent to the Hollywood elites at the Screen Actors Guild who don’t want him anymore.
In recent days, Trump has been phoning close associates regularly about the next impeachment trial—as well as to gossip about Biden, media, the future, and other members of the GOP. His office has also been messaging friends and high-profile allies on his behalf, inviting them to visit him at Mar-a-Lago, according to two knowledgeable sources and written communications reviewed by The Daily Beast.
Some individuals close to the ex-president say he’s started getting lonely and bored with his existence out of power, and misses being constantly surrounded by powerful sycophants and being the center of attention for the news media, U.S. politicos, and leaders abroad. But the ex-president is still living in luxury, and has been recently very confident about his continued standing and influence in the Republican Party and conservative movement.
And he’s not the only veteran of the sprawling, anti-democratic effort to be sitting pretty in early 2021.
Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne became one of the strangest characters of the last days of the Trump administration, visiting the White House in December, dressed in jeans and a hoodie, scarfing down meatballs, and bickering with Trump’s legal team and administration officials, as he, Flynn, and Powell together pitched the then-president on their democracy-thwarting schemes. But now, with Trump’s dream of overturning the 2020 election in tatters, Byrne appears to be doing comparatively okay—and is blaming just about everyone else for President Biden’s win, turning his blog into the digital burn book of the Trump post-campaign. “Almost every evening, and many early afternoons, Rudy was shit-faced,” Byrne blogged recently. “That, and his podcasts, were the only guarantees in Rudy’s life.” (Byrne declined to comment on this story, saying he wanted to finish his blog series first.)
However thoroughly Byrne was dragging Giuliani and others for their alleged behavior, the Trump attorney didn’t seem to care too much. Asked on Saturday what he thought about Byrne bashing him, Giuliani simply replied to The Daily Beast, “So have you,” without further explaining how this news outlet had “trashed” him lately.
