Tag Archives: flushed

US

Maggie Haberman book: Flushed papers found clogging Trump WH toilet

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While President Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper, Maggie Haberman scoops in her forthcoming book, “Confidence Man.”

Why it matters: The revelation by Haberman, whose coverage as a New York Times White House correspondent was followed obsessively by Trump, adds a vivid new dimension to his lapses in preserving government documents. Axios was provided an exclusive first look at some of her reporting.

Haberman reports Trump has told people that since leaving office, he has remained in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — whose “love letters,” as Trump once called them, were among documents the National Archives retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.

Zoom out: The news of White House toilet-flushing comes as the National Archives has reportedly asked the Biden Justice Department to examine Trump’s handling of White House records, amid the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

  • The Washington Post reports that National Archives officials “suspected Trump had possibly violated laws concerning the handling of government documents.” The National Archives later retrieved 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago, The Post reported.
  • Archives officials found possible classified material in the returned boxes, The New York Times learned.

While in office, the former president blithely flouted the Presidential Records Act, which required him to preserve written communications concerning his official duties.

  • Trump routinely tore up documents and after leaving office brought substantial written materials back to Mar-a-Lago.
  • A Trump spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment about the plumbing matter.

Zoom in: Haberman’s “Confidence Man” — subtitled “The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America” — will be published Oct. 4 by Penguin Press.

  • The publisher says it traces Trump’s early life in New York and “his decades of interactions with prosecutors” — then follows him through four years in the White House, and on to his post-presidential life in Palm Beach.

The intrigue: This is the book Trump fears most. Among Trump aides, Haberman’s book has been the most discussed of the bookshelf of books from reporters who covered Trump’s campaigns and White House.

  • Several advisers were unhappy about his decision to talk to her as part of his marathon conversations with book authors at Mar-a-Lago. But they concluded he couldn’t help himself and couldn’t be stopped.

Haberman, a lifelong New Yorker, has covered Trump extensively since 2011, when she was a Politico reporter. Earlier, she got to know his Manhattan milieu as a reporter for the New York Post and Daily News.

Preorder.



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Science

Shattered ‘alphabet soup’ iceberg flushed a lot of fresh water into the ocean

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A rogue iceberg that drifted dangerously close to an Antarctic penguin population in 2020 and 2021 released billions of tons of fresh water into the ocean during its breakup.

A new study, based on satellite data, tracks the aftermath of the once-mighty iceberg A-68a, which held the title of world’s largest iceberg for more than three years before shattering into a dozen pieces. (NASA’s Earth Observatory once dubbed the various mini-bergs “alphabet soup.”)

For a while, there were worries the iceberg might threaten a penguin-filled island called South Georgia, located about 940 miles (1,500 kilometers) northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Happily, that never came to pass, but the new research shows that the iceberg flooded the region with fresh water, potentially affecting the local ecosystem and providing yet another example of the effects of global warming on the oceans.

Related: Watch this giant iceberg break off from Antarctica

The research consulted data gathered by missions including Sentinel-1 (operated by European Space Agency, or ESA), Sentinel-3 (ESA), CryoSat-2 (ESA) and ICESat-2 (NASA), as well as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument that flies aboard two NASA satellites, Aqua and Terra.

The satellite data shows that during the iceberg’s three-month melting period in late 2020 and early 2021, the former A-68a flushed into the ocean about 162 billion tons (152 billion metric tonnes) of fresh water — equivalent to 61 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to a press release from United Kingdom study participant University of Leeds.

“The berg had melted enough as it drifted to avoid damaging the sea floor around South Georgia by running aground,” the university stated. “However, a side effect of the melting was the release of a colossal 152 billion tonnes of fresh water in close proximity to the island — a disturbance that could have a profound impact on the island’s marine habitat.”

Fresh meltwater and nutrients tend to flow from melting icebergs. The freshwater flooding alters ocean circulation and the ocean ecosystem nearby the glacier fragment, the university noted.

“The next thing we want to learn is whether it had a positive or negative impact on the ecosystem around South Georgia,” Leeds lead author and Ph.D. candidate Anne Braakmann-Folgmann said in the same statement. 

She noted the iceberg moved across a common ocean “highway” known as the Drake Passage, so the fate of A68-A may help understand how icebergs in that zone influence the ocean in general.

A study based on the research was published in the forthcoming March 1 issue of Remote Sensing of Environment.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 



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World

Pet monkey fed cocaine before getting flushed down toilet

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A disturbing series of videos of animal abuse has earned one woman a lifetime ban on owning pets.

When police raided south Wales resident Vicki Holland’s home, they were looking for drugs. Instead, they found self-recorded evidence of Holland’s horrifying treatment of her pet marmoset, a native of Central and South America’s tropical forests. 

One of the videos found on Holland’s phone depicted the deranged mother of four foisting cocaine upon the primate as it cowered in a corner at her home. “Want some coke? Lick my fingers,” says Holland, 38, during the bizarre footage, reported the Guardian on Friday.

In another video, Holland laughs as she tries to flush the frightened animal down her toilet while it clung to the rim for dear life. “I need the toilet,” Holland says in the clip. “Shall I flush it?”

Vicki Holland is seen here offering the monkey cocaine.
Courtesy of RSPCA Cymru

She does, while calling the marmoset a “f–king twat” and instructing it, “Don’t attack me.”

Holland was later arrested, handed a 12-week jail term and permanently barred from owning animals after pleading guilty to three charges of abuse, the BBC reported.

The monkey was brought to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for treatment. 

The marmoset now lives at the Monkey World rescue center in Dorset, in the United Kingdom.
Courtesy of RSPCA Cymru

“An independent vet soon confirmed that the marmoset was suffering unnecessarily as a result of the way she had been treated,” said RSPCA inspector and exotics officer Sophie Daniels, according to the BBC.

“Holland was shouting, swearing, laughing and at one point in the clip, the toilet is flushed, showing the petrified animal struggling to cling onto the side of the bowl,” Daniels added.

The marmoset currently resides at the Monkey World rescue center in Dorset, in the United Kingdom.

 “Thankfully, this monkey is now getting the care they deserve after such shocking mistreatment,” said Daniels.

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