A contingent of former Republican officials are in talks to form a political party that would break away from supporters of former President TrumpDonald TrumpSchoen says Trump team will be ‘very well prepared’ after criticism Iowa Republicans seek to cut funding for schools with 1619 Project in curriculum Capitol rioter seen smoking in Rotunda arrested MORE, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
More than 120 people were on a call on the matter on Friday, including former government employees who worked under the Trump administration, the Reagan administration and both Bush White House’s as well as former GOP members of Congress.
Evan McMullin, former chief policy director for the House Republican Conference, told Reuters that he co-hosted the call with former officials who fear a large faction of the party is unwilling to stand up to Trump.
“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.”
The discussion included talk of both running candidates and supporting center-right candidates that are Republican, Democrat or independent.
Reuters reported that officials were dismayed that a significant contingent of Republicans still voted to overturn the election results hours after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Most Republican senators have said they will not support convicting Trump on a charge of inciting an insurrection after his second impeachment trial, which is currently underway.
Jason Miller, who now serves as a Trump spokesman told Reuters in a response to the call: “These losers left the Republican Party when they voted for Joe BidenJoe BidenPostal Service posts profits after surge in holiday deliveries Overnight Defense: Pentagon pushes to root out extremism in ranks | Top admiral condemns extremism after noose, hate speech discovered GOP senators send clear signal: Trump’s getting acquitted MORE.”
The former baseball superstar Alex Rodriguez is joining the SPAC craze and launching one of his own.
Rodriguez is set to lead Slam Corp., which is seeking to raise $575 million in its public debut.
Slam will seek to acquire a firm in sectors including sports, media, and wellness, a filing said.
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The former baseball superstar Alex Rodriguez is the latest high-profile name to throw his hat in the SPAC ring by launching a “blank check” company called Slam Corp., a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said.
SPACs – special-purpose acquisition companies – are investment vehicles that raise funds from investors that are then used to acquire a private company and take it public.
The filing said that Rodriguez would lead Slam as its CEO and that it would seek an acquisition within the “sports, media, entertainment, health and wellness and consumer technology sectors.”
“We will seek to acquire a multibillion-dollar asset with a leading market position in an attractive industry,” the filing said.
Unlike Billy Beane’s Redball Acquisition Corp., Slam is not seeking to acquire a professional sports team, the filing said. Redball recently failed in an attempt to take the parent company of the Boston Red Sox public.
According to the filing, Slam is seeking to raise up to $575 million with the sale of stock and warrants at $10 per share.
SPACs have been all the rage since last year as the COVID-19 pandemic upended the traditional IPO roadshow. According to data from SPAC Insider, 248 blank-check companies raised $83 billion in 2020, while 118 SPACs had raised $35 billion so far in 2021.
Even former Trump administration officials are launching one: Wilbur Ross, the former commerce secretary, is heading a new SPAC with Larry Kudlow as a director.
Slam will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SLAM once the deal is completed, the filing said.
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ROME — Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank who is largely credited with helping to save the euro, accepted a mandate from Italy’s president on Wednesday to try and form a new unity government that would guide the country out of the pandemic and through economic recovery.
“To overcome the pandemic, to complete the vaccine campaign, to offer answers to the daily problems of the citizens, to relaunch the country are the challenges we face,” Mr. Draghi said after meeting with President Sergio Mattarella for more than an hour at the Quirinal Palace.
Italy, he said, faced a “difficult moment.” And he said he had accepted Mr. Mattarella’s appeal because the emergency “requires an answer equal to the seriousness of the situation.”
Until as recently as Tuesday, the idea of Mr. Draghi replacing Giuseppe Conte as prime minister remained a pipe dream for the many Italians frustrated with a governing coalition that seemed paralyzed by ideological schisms and incompetence, especially as the coronavirus pandemic raged and economic devastation set in.
But on Tuesday evening, Mr. Mattarella summoned Mr. Draghi and appealed to “all the political forces in the Parliament” to support a “high profile government” to meet the historic moment.
He made it clear Mr. Conte’s tenure was over and the new players, potentially political leaders proposed by the parties supporting Mr. Draghi or an all-star cast of politically unaffiliated economists, judges and scientists, was ready to take the stage.
Italy’s stock market rallied on Wednesday in response to the news that Mr. Draghi had been lined up to lead the Italian government. He immediately began consultations with party leaders that will continue in the coming days in an effort to form a new Italian government.
“I am confident that from the exchange with the parties and the groups in the Parliament and from the dialogue with the social forces,” Mr. Draghi said on Wednesday, “there will emerge unity and the capacity to give a responsible answer to the president’s appeal.”
Mr. Draghi is himself no political novice. He has served in past Italian governments, was a director of Italy’s treasury and knows well the machinery of government at both the European and Italian level.
His name has been mentioned for years as a potential candidate to replace Mr. Mattarella as Italy’s head of state in 2022.But now Mr. Mattarella himself has called on Mr. Draghi, whom he has publicly praised in the past, and brought him directly into the fray.
“Now everyone of good will must heed the call of President Mattarella and support the government of Mario Draghi,” Matteo Renzi, the wily former prime minister who engineered the collapse of Mr. Conte’s government by pulling his small party’s support in Parliament. “Now is the time for sobriety.”
Party leaders on the right and left quickly expressed support for Mr. Draghi after it became clear that Mr. Mattarella would ask him to form a government.
Among them were leaders who had made great shows of their loyalty to Mr. Conte. Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Democratic Party that Mr. Renzi once led, released a statementthat on the one hand referred to the government crisis as a “disaster provoked by the irresponsible choice” of Mr. Renzi, but he then welcomed Mr. Mattarella’s decision. “We will stand ready to discuss the common good for the country.”
A government led by Mr. Draghi could emerge in two different ways. If he succeeds in finding broad parliamentary support, he could govern from a position of strength until the next scheduled elections in 2023.
If he fails to find sufficient political support, Mr. Mattarella could nevertheless make him the head of a transitional government with limited scope — probably focused on the vaccine rollout and managing more than 200 billion euros, or about $240 billion, in relief funds from Europe — before leading the country to early elections.
“We have available the extraordinary resources of the European Union,” Mr. Draghi said on Wednesday in a clear pro-European sign. “We have the chance to do a lot for our country with a careful eye to the future for young generations and to strengthen social unity.”
Mr. Mattarella explicitly said Tuesday evening that he had no interest in new elections. Neither does Mr. Renzi, who is polling at about 2 percent, or the Five Star Movement, which has the largest bloc in Parliament but would likely be decimated in elections by its nationalist opponents.
Leaders of Five Star initially expressed their opposition to Mr. Draghi, but on Wednesday, it became increasingly clear that that was far from a unified position within the party, which appeared to be breaking apart.
Even the political forces that had been clamoring for new elections had suddenly quieted down with the arrival of Mr. Draghi.
“We are a responsible party and we will not say no out of hand,” said Riccardo Molinari, a member of Parliament from the nationalist League party led by Matteo Salvini, who polls suggested would benefit most from early elections.
But Mr. Salvini also needs to protect his right flank. If he is seen as too amenable to Mr. Draghi, who is the personification of the European Union that Mr. Salvini has railed against for years, other right-wing politicians are eager to take his place.
“I don’t think that the solution to the nation’s serious health, economic and social problems is yet another government born in the palace,” Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, wrote on Twitter. “We instead think that it is definitely better to give Italians the possibility to vote.”
In one fell swoop, Mr. Mattarella’s move to bring in Mr. Draghi has the potential to reset Italian politics, which many commentators lamented was not up to the task of governing in a national emergency.
“To think that the most anti-European parliament in the history of Italy could crown Draghi as prime minister today and head of state tomorrow gives a sense of the miracle Sergio Mattarella pulled off in these years,” Claudio Cerasa, the editor of Il Foglio newspaper, wrote on Wednesday.
Patricia Yang has seen a lot of poop. In her time studying the dynamics of bodily fluids, the award-winning scientist has witnessed her share of cows dumping watery pies, rodents dropping little pellets, and elephants passing big balls of dung.
None of that would ultimately prepare her for what she was about to see.
It was 2015, and Yang had just presented on a mathematical model for bowel movements. A scientist at the conference asked if her theory worked for wombats, too. Yang had never seen wombat droppings, and when she googled for pictures, she found herself looking at some of the oddest-shaped poo she’d ever seen.
The Australian mammal’s faeces are shaped like little dark cubes, the only known prismatic poops in the world. In fact, wombats are the only animals scientists have found that can produce cubes naturally, and we had no idea how they were doing it.
Yang was immediately hooked. The mystery was an old one, but no one had done any hard investigations to find out what was really going on.
A wombat on Maria Island, Australia. (Posnov/Getty Images)
She and her lab supervisor at Georgia Tech, biomechanical engineer David Hu, decided to change that. In 2018, they finally got their hands on the intestine of a bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus).
The gut, which was carefully dissected by a scientist in Tasmania and shipped to the United States, showed a clear progression from muddy matter to a hard six-sided structure with sharp corners, almost like a ‘gruesome Christmas ornament’.
It looked as though these cubes were forming even before the wombat pooped them out. Further CT scans on a live adult wombat confirmed this animal does not have a square-shaped anus; it’s just as round as those of other animals, so how do wombats excrete cubes?
As it turns out, it’s all in the intestine. Using two new wombat dissections and mathematical models, Yang and her colleagues have now figured out how wombats actually poo prisms.
The first thing you need to know is that the wombat intestine is unusually long, up to nine metres in length. Compared to humans, it takes these metre-long creatures ten times longer to suck all the nutrition and water out of their food, sometimes up to two weeks.
As a result, wombat poos are nearly twice as dry as human poos, and this could be what helps them survive droughts in the Australian bush. This lengthy process probably also helps their poo form more concrete shapes.
Just by looking at the wombat intestine, you can clearly see the gradual transition from a “yellow-green slurry of digesta”, as the authors so bluntly put it, to a dry cube with “beveled edges and flat faces”.
Wombat intestines filled with poo hanging from top to bottom. (David Hu and Scott Carver)
Using a balloon to blow up certain parts of the intestine, researchers noticed varying levels of thickness and stiffness in some of the tissue and muscle.
Practically, this meant parts of the intestine’s circumference were contracting differently, in part due to different muscle thickness. The tight parts contracted quickly, pushing the poo harder, while the softer parts contracted more slowly, moulding corners.
Creating a simple model of the intestine, the authors found corners formed in less than 10 contraction cycles.
“With contractions occurring every couple of seconds over a time of five days, the faeces actually experience on the order of 100,000 contractions,” the team writes.
Enough of these contractions could plausibly form a series of cubes in the latter end of the wombat’s intestine when poo is most dried out. Dissections show cubes are formed only within the last 17 percent of the intestine. (In 2018, the team thought it was the last 8 percent).
It’s almost like baking a cake, Hu explains. The batter starts out wet and sloppy, drying out over time as it’s heated up in the oven. As it butts up against the edge of the cake tin, it begins to form corners and flat surfaces. Most of the solidifying happens right at the end.
Wombats, incidentally, squeeze out nearly 100 of these six-sided brownies every day.
Exactly why they do this is a whole other mystery. Wombats don’t have great eyesight and so they use their droppings to communicate with one another. As such, they like to poop on rocks, logs or other elevated places to make their message more visible.
The cube shape might therefore assist poo-stacking. Rounder faeces, after all, tend to roll away.
Wombat faeces in the field, stacked on rocks. (David Hu and Scott Carver)
But that’s just one idea. Another is that the six-sided structure of wombat poo allows for a greater surface area to increase the dispersal of the animal’s scent, which can convey social messages or reproductive status.
Other scientists think we’re reading too much into it. The cube-shaped poo is probably just a result of it being dehydrated in the gut, they argue. In zoos and wildlife parks, for instance, where wombats are well hydrated, wombat poo is much less defined.
There’s clearly a lot we still need to know about wombat poo, but Randy Ewoldt, the mechanical engineer who first brought the mystery to Yang and Hu’s attention five years ago, told ScienceAlert he’s impressed with their progress
“The authors demonstrate heroic efforts and a collaboration covering opposite sides of the globe,” Ewoldt said in an email.
“One wonders: who else could squeeze such interdisciplinary work into this multi-faceted contribution?”
