Trump’s days of reckoning CHINA: Cockroaches keep the nutrient cycle going
IN the near pitchdark, you can hear them before you see them — millions of cockroaches scuttling across stacks of wooden boards as they devour food scraps by the tonne in a novel form of urban waste disposal.
The air is warm and humid, just as cockroaches like it, to ensure the colonies keep their health and voracious appetites.
Expanding Chinese cities are generating more food waste than they can accommodate in landfills, and cockroaches could be a way to get rid of this. When they eventually die, they could provide nutritious food for livestock and, some say, cures for stomach illness and beauty treatments.
On the outskirts of Jinan, capital of eastern Shandong province, a billion cockroaches are being fed with 50 tonnes of kitchen waste a day — the equivalent in weight to seven adult elephants.
The waste arrives before daybreak at the plant run by Shandong Qiaobin Agricultural Technology Co, where it is fed through pipes to cockroaches in their cells.
Shandong Qiaobin plans to set up three more such plants next year, aiming to process a third of the kitchen waste produced by Jinan, home to about seven million people.
A nationwide ban on using food waste as pig feed, due to African swine fever outbreaks, is also spurring the growth of the cockroach industry.
‘‘Cockroaches are a biotechnological pathway for the converting and processing of kitchen waste,’’ said Liu Yusheng, president of Shandong Insect Industry Association.
Cockroaches are also a good source of protein for pigs and other livestock.
‘‘It’s like turning trash into resources,’’ Shandong Qiaobin chairwoman Li Hongyi said.
In a remote village in Sichuan, Li Bingcai (47) has similar ideas.
Li, formerly a mobile phone vendor, has invested a million yuan ($NZ211,000)) in cockroaches, which he sells to pig farms and fisheries as feed and to drug companies as medicinal ingredients.
His village has two farms. His goal is to create 20.
Elsewhere in Sichuan, a company called Gooddoctor is rearing six billion cockroaches.
‘‘The essence of cockroach is good for curing oral and peptic ulcers, skin wounds and even stomach cancer,’’ said Wen Jianguo, manager of Gooddoctor’s cockroach facility.
Researchers are also looking into using cockroach extract in beauty masks, diet pills and even hairloss treatments.
When cockroaches at Gooddoctor reach the end of their lifespan of about six months, they are blasted by steam, washed and dried before being sent to a huge nutrientextraction tank.
Asked about the chance of them escaping, Wen said that would be worthy of a disaster movie but he had taken precautions.
‘‘We have a moat filled with water and fish,’’ he said. ‘‘If the cockroaches escape, they will fall into the moat and the fish will eat them all.’’
James Trusty, a former chief of the Justice Department’s organised crime section and a partner at Ifrah Law, said persuading loyalists to turn on compatriots was key to any complex investigation.
The Mafia had the omerta code of silence but Trump’s orbit was ‘‘much softer’’, he said.
‘‘We’re talking about businessmen and lawyers and folks who have families, and aren’t exactly hardcore when it comes to facing jail time.’’
Perhaps the most pressing threat is the investigation, led by the US attorney’s office in Manhattan, of what prosecutors say was an illegal scheme to pay $280,000 to two women shortly before the 2016 election to buy their silence about alleged affairs with Trump years earlier.
Cohen paid Stormy Daniels, a porn star, and was reimbursed by the Trump Organisation. American Media Inc, publisher of the National Enquirer, paid Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, for the rights to her story and then never ran it.
Prosecutors say Trump directed both payments, which were illegal because they were intended to influence the election and functioned as campaign contributions that were not disclosed.
Trump once denied knowing about the payments but he abandoned that as evidence showed otherwise. He now argues that whatever Cohen did, ‘‘he did on his own’’.
Some of Trump’s Republican allies have begun to publicly admit concerns about whether Trump violated the law.
‘‘Am I concerned that the president might be involved in a crime? Of course,’’ Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, told reporters.
There are more signs of trouble ahead. Trump was embarrassed after a combative Oval Office meeting on live TV last week with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, who both challenged him to his face.
With White House chief of staff John F. Kelly leaving at the end of the year, Trump has struggled to find a replacement.
After Nick Ayers, a top aide to Vicepresident Mike Pence, turned him down, several others reportedly under consideration, including Representative Mark Meadows (North Carolina), treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, New York Yankees president Randy Levine and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, also said no thanks.
On Friday, Trump resorted to naming an acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, now his budget director, only temporarily solving the embarrassing problem.
But neither Trump’s tweets nor White House aides have clarified how long Mulvaney will stay on.
While his difficulty filling the job highlights the president’s isolation and the chaos of the White House, Schwartz said Trump almost certainly would not agree.
‘‘He doesn’t feel the ordinary human emotions most of us do,’’ he said. ‘‘For example, he’s free of shame because he has no conscience, nor any selfawareness. So while his behaviour certainly suggests he feels increasing fear and isolation, he would be the last one to know it.’’ — TNS