WASHINGTON– Rudy Giuliani’s son, Andrew, announced Friday he has tested positive for coronavirus, a day after he attended a news conference with his father and other members of President Donald Trump’s legal teamalleging baseless claims of widespread election fraud.
“This morning, I tested positive for COVID-19,” theyounger Giulianiwrote on Twitter. “I am experiencing mild symptoms, and am following all appropriate protocols, including being in quarantine and conducting contact tracing.”
Andrew Giuliani, who serves as a special assistant to the president, is the latest member of Trump’s circle to test positive for a virus that has infected more than 11.7 million Americans and killed more than 250,000.
The news conference was held in a tightly packed room at the Republican National Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill.
The list of those close to the president who have been infected includes White House…
Mogens Jensen, seen here in 2014, has stepped down as Denmark’s agriculture minister due to mishandling a cull of the Danish mink population.Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Denmark’s agriculture minister has resigned amid backlash to the government’s order to cull all of the country’s mink population.
Mogens Jensen stepped down on Wednesday. He released a statement in which he said his ministry had made a mistake in ordering the destruction of all minks in Denmark. Jensen repeated his earlier apologies, offering particular regret to the country’s mink farmers.
Last week it emerged that Denmark’s government did not have the legislation in place for such a directive, though a deal was later reached to create a retroactive legal basis for the cull.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen also apologized earlier this week and said the government had not been aware there was no legal basis for its decision. “I do not mean to disregard the law,” she said, according to The Associated Press.
Still, the cull of Denmark’s 17 million farmed mink — which are raised for their fur — continues, and must be completed by midnight Thursday.Article continues after sponsor message
The cull was ordered after a mutated version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was found to have spread among the country’s mink herd — one of the world’s largest — and then to humans. The AP reported at least 11 people were sickened by a mutated version of the virus.
Multiple mutations of the virus have been found in minks, but a variant known as C5 was the most concerning to scientists, due to its structure. Research from a Danish public health body, the Statens Serum Institut, had suggested that C5 might hinder the effectiveness of a vaccine against COVID-19.
The Danish health ministry said in a press release Thursday that no further cases of the C5 variant have been detected since Sept. 15, and that this variant is now thought to be extinct.
Francois Balloux, director of the University College London Genetics Institute, toldThe Guardian that “concerns over Cluster 5 may have been overestimated at the time,” but that doesn’t mean Denmark’s cull was wrongly conceived.
“No, the cull was not unjustified,” he said. “Mainly because of the number of mink infected with COVID-19. The mutation was not really the justification for me. It was the large mink reservoir of COVID-19. I would also mention that minks escape regularly, so you don’t want that risk of infecting the wild animal population, either.”
Meanwhile, minks in other countries have also tested positive for the coronavirus, including outbreaks on mink farms in the United States.
On Thursday, authorities in Ireland said all minks would be culled on three farms there due to coronavirus concerns, the BBC reported. Greece announced last week it had culled minks on farms where the animals had tested positive.
Sweden’s health agency said Thursday that a number of people working in the mink industry there had tested positive for the coronavirus, and it was working to analyze any connection between infected minks and infected people.
According to the AP’s Copenhagen bureau: “There are 1,139 mink farms in Denmark, employing about 6,000 people. Breeders have said the culling will put an end to the industry.”
Cortlandville, N.Y. – In honor of the five cows who were killed when a truck carrying them overturned on I-81 on Friday, PETA plans to place a billboard near the crash site proclaiming, “See the Individual. Go Vegan.”
“These gentle cows endured a terrifying death on the highway, and those who survived were presumably taken to slaughter,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s ad encourages anyone disturbed by the thought of animals suffering on the side of the road or facing the slaughterhouse knife to go vegan.”
The truck was transporting Holstein cows, the breed most often used by the dairy industry, in which workers artificially inseminate cows (rape them by inserting an arm into the rectum and a metal rod into the vagina) and tear calves away from their loving mothers within a day of birth. They ship male calves off to be slaughtered for veal, while females endure the same fate as their mothers: repeated forced pregnancies until their bodies break down and they’re slaughtered for cheap meat.
PETA notes that there have been at least 71 crashes this year involving trucks carrying animals used for food. Each person who goes vegan saves the lives of nearly 200 cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals every year and helps prevent future pandemics: Confining and killing animals for food has been linked to SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and COVID-19, and the meat industry has allowed slaughterhouse workers to face a nearly unchecked spread of the novel coronavirus.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Video and pictures from latest research mission show gas release in the Laptev and the East Siberian seas.
A team of 69 scientists from ten countries documented bubble clouds rising from a depth of around 300 metres (985ft) along a 150km (93 mile) undersea slope in the Laptev Sea, and confirmed high methane concentrations by hundreds of onboard chemical analysis. Picture: TPU
Scientists have shared the first results of a trip to the world’s largest deposit of subsea permafrost and shallow methane hydrates.
Fields of methane discharge continue to grow all along the East Siberian Arctic Ocean Shelf, with concentration of atmospheric methane above the fields reaching 16-32ppm (parts per million).
This is up to 15 times above the planetary average of 1.85ppm.
For indigenous peoples in many northern regions of the world, livelihoods often depend on access to frozen lakes in winter for hunting, fishing and travel.
In countries like the US, Canada and Russia, winter leisure activities such as skating or tobogganing on ice are also hugely popular.
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources led an effort Sunday to rescue a North Carolina hunter who went missing near Sleeping Bear Dunes during the first day of the firearm deer season, officials said.
The 75-year-old manhad been at deer camp with friends and family, hunting the same spot in Benzie County for the last 20 years, but after the group decided not to hunt due to the cold and windy conditions, theycouldn’t find him, the department said in a statement.
DNRConservation Officer Amanda McCurdy met twoBenzie County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene near Boekeloo Road in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Themissing man’s friends and familysaid he might be at one of two hunting spots
“The terrain was very difficult, thick and damp — not even navigable,” McCurdy said.
The officer requested helicopter assistance from the U.S. Coast Guard, then worked with seven…
image captionThe parrots were freed from the bottles when found in Fakfak in Indonesia’s West Papua region
Dozens of smuggled parrots stuffed in plastic bottles have been found on a ship docked in Indonesia’s eastern region of Papua.
Police said the crew discovered 64 live parrots and 10 dead birds after hearing noises coming from inside a large box.
Indonesia is home to the highest number of threatened bird species in Asia and a rampant illegal trade in birds.
Birds are sold domestically in giant avian markets or smuggled abroad.
The destination of the parrots found on Thursday morning in the port town of Fakfak was unclear, local police spokesman Dodik Junaidi told AFP news agency.
“The ship’s crew told us that they suspected there were animals inside the box as they heard strange noises,” he said on Friday.
Almost two weeks after Joe Biden was projected as the winner of the US presidential election, Donald Trump is still refusing to concede. Does he have a plan to overturn the outcome?
The president’s legal strategy to challenge the election results seems to be falling on deaf ears in courtrooms across the country. Trump’s team has yet to notch a meaningful victory, or present evidence of widespread voter fraud, after filing dozens of lawsuits.
His top lawyer, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, said on Thursday that the campaign was dropping its legal challenges in Michigan, which Biden won by more than 160,000 votes.
In Georgia, the Republican secretary of state has announced he is certifying its election tabulations, which give Biden just over a 12,000 vote lead after the state conducted a hand recount of nearly 5 million ballots.
As doors to remaining in office slam shut, the president appears to be shifting strategies for flipping the election results from a longshot legal one to a longer-shot political gambit.
A step-by-step guide to Trump’s strategy
Here’s what he may hope to do:
Block the vote-certification process in as many states as possible, either through lawsuits or by encouraging Republican officials to object
Convince Republican-controlled legislatures in states Biden narrowly won to dismiss the results of the popular vote as corrupted by widespread fraud
Have the legislature then award their state’s Electoral College votes, which are cast by “electors” on 14 December, to Trump instead of Biden
Do that in enough states – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, for instance – to pull Trump from his current total of 232 electoral votes over the winning 269-vote mark. Or, at least, pull Biden from 306 down below that mark, which would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where Trump would have an advantage
What is Trump doing to make this happen?
The first hint that Trump was applying pressure to individual states to disregard their current vote totals came following reports that he had called Republican officials who had initially refused to certify the election results from Detroit, Michigan’s largest city.
That two low-level party officials, among thousands of county canvassers across the US, would speak directly to a US president was more than just a little unusual. They ultimately reversed their decision to block the proceedings – and then, after Trump’s call, expressed regret for reversing themselves.
Those hints became clear evidence of intent when the Republican leaders in the Michigan legislature accepted a presidential invitation to visit the White House on Friday.
The news has been accompanied by reports that the president is intent on finding other ways he can pressure key state legislatures to review, and perhaps reverse, their election results.
What is typically a mere formality during normal elections – the bipartisan certification of state vote totals – has become the latest battleground in the president’s attempts to maintain power for the next four years.
Could Trump actually be successful?
It’s not impossible, but the chances are very, very slim. First of all, the president would have to overturn the results in multiple states, where Biden’s leads range from tens of thousands of votes to more than a hundred thousand. This isn’t 2000, when everything came down just to Florida.
What’s more, many of the states Trump’s legal team is targeting – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada – have Democratic governors who are not going to sit idly by while all of this takes place.
In Michigan, for instance, Governor Gretchen Whitmer could fire the current state election board and replace it with one willing to certify Biden’s victory.https://emp.bbc.com/emp/SMPj/2.36.3/iframe.htmlmedia captionWhat do Trump supporters think of a Biden presidency?
Democratic governors could respond by naming their own slate of pro-Biden electors to compete with ones a Republican legislature choose, leaving it to Congress to decide which group to acknowledge.
That doesn’t mean Biden’s supporters aren’t worried, however. While the odds of this happening are along the lines of the earth being hit by a giant meteor or someone getting struck by lightning while winning the lottery, having victory snatched away at this point would be such a cataclysmic political event that the remote prospect of such a possibility is enough to give Democrats cold sweats.
Is this strategy even legal?
Trump has spent much of his time in the White House shattering presidential norms and traditions. It appears that the last days of his term will be no different.
Just because the pressure Trump is putting on election officials and state legislatures is unprecedented or controversial, however, doesn’t necessarily mean it is illegal.https://emp.bbc.com/emp/SMPj/2.36.3/iframe.htmlmedia captionHow other incumbents left the White House after losing
In the early days of the nation, state legislatures had broad powers of how they allocated their electoral votes, and there is still no constitutional requirement that they heed the results of a popular vote. They have since circumscribed those powers by assigning their votes based on the results of popular elections, but the underpinnings of the original system still remain intact.
If the president succeeds in convincing a legislature, such as Michigan’s, to act, Democrats are sure to mount legal objections. The law, both national and in each state, is fuzzy, given that this sort of thing has seldom been subject litigation.
Could states retroactively change the laws governing how they run their elections? Perhaps. But it would be up to judges to render the final verdict.
Has anyone tried this before?
The last time a closely contested election involved a battle over electors was in 2000 between Al Gore and George W Bush. That was a fight in one state, Florida, where the difference between the candidates was just a few hundred votes. Eventually, the US Supreme Court stepped in and halted any further review – and Bush became president.
For a disputed election involving multiple states you have to go back to the 1876 race between Republican Rutherford B Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tildon.
In that episode, contested results in Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida meant no candidate was able to win a majority in the Electoral College. The deadlock threw the election to the US House of Representatives, which ultimately sided with Hayes, who like Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016, won fewer votes nationally than his defeated opponent.
What happens if Donald Trump refuses to leave office?
If the president’s longshot attempts at reversing the election results fail, at 12:01 pm on 20 January Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th US president whether Trump formally concedes or not.
At that point, the Secret Service and the US military are free to treat the former president the way they do any unauthorised individual on government property.
“It’s outrageous what he’s doing,” Biden said in a press conference on Thursday. “Incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions.”
Even if the president isn’t successful, his seeming scorched-earth strategy of contesting the election results is setting a precedent for elections to come and, according to polls, undermining the faith many Americans have in the US democratic systems and institutions.
Saskatchewan has been experiencing an upward trend in the criminal shooting of livestock this year.
Due to an abundance of reported incidents, the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation (SWF) and Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association have partnered with Sasktip to “turn in poachers” and provide a cash reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to a conviction of anyone found illegally shooting livestock.
According to a media release, SWF president Clark Schultz said: “This type of behaviour is condemned by the law-abiding hunting and firearm communities. These people are criminals.”
Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association president Kelcy Elford added: “It is not uncommon for some animals to be injured in hunting season, but these cases seem to be blatantly criminal in nature versus an accidental shooting.”
In an interview with paNOW, SWF executive director Darrell Crabbe…
Environmental groups are ratcheting up apressure campaignagainst President-elect Joe Biden’s potential cabinet picks who have ties to the fossil fuel industry as Biden names new White House staffers this week. Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond, who will serve as Biden’s director of the Office of Public Engagement, sparked immediate backlash from climate activists, including Sunrise Movement Executive Director Varshini Prakash,who calledthe pick “a betrayal.”
Richmond, a co-chair of the Biden-Harris transition team who will give up his seat to become a senior White House adviser, has been an ally of oil and gas companies and received nearly $341,000…
