In this file photo taken on June 27, 2018 FBI agent Peter P. Strzok (C) arrives for a full committee meeting on "Deposition of Peter P. Strzok "at the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Like any caring lover, Peter Strzok was there with reassurances when girlfriend Lisa Page confessed deep fears about the future under a Donald Trump presidency in a late-night text message in August 2016. (AFP / Mandel Ngan) Updated 30 sec ago AFP July 12, 2018 04:21 44 Lisa Page and Peter Strzok are major figures in a Republican effort to discredit the FBI and protect Trump from allegations that his campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign During 2016, Page and Strzok were having an affair while they were both involved in the politically charged investigation of Hillary Clinton for misuse of classified materials on her private email ser WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump attacked a former FBI lawyer on Wednesday after she failed to testify on allegations of anti-Trump bias in the FBI’s investigation of him. Lisa Page — whose affair with FBI agent Peter Strzok has led Trump to dub the pair the “FBI lovers” — was threatened with contempt of Congress charges after she failed to honor a subpoena to appear before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees Wednesday over her role in politically sensitive probes of Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. Page and Strzok are major figures in a Republican effort to discredit the FBI and protect Trump from allegations that his campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign and that he tried to obstruct the investigation into those allegations. During 2016, Page and Strzok were having an affair while they were both involved in the politically charged investigation of Clinton, Trump’s Democratic election rival, for misuse of classified materials on her private email server. “Lisa Page today defied a House of Representatives issued Subpoena to testify before Congress! Wow, but is anybody really surprised!” Trump tweeted late Wednesday. “Together with her lover, FBI Agent Peter Strzok, she worked on the Rigged Witch Hunt, perhaps the most tainted and corrupt case EVER!“ Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte said Page had “no excuse” for not appearing, and threatened to have her charged with contempt if she did not show up to testify by Friday. In a letter to her lawyer Amy Jeffress, Goodlatte said she had a choice of appearing publicly along with Strzok in a hearing on Thursday, or accepting to be deposed privately on Friday at 10:00 am. “After months of trying to secure her appearance, the committees scheduled her deposition for July 11, 2018. Despite proper service of your client with a subpoena directing her to appear, she did not,” he said. “The Judiciary Committee intends to initiate contempt proceedings on Friday, July 13, 2018, at 10:30 am.” Earlier he said Page appears to have “something to hide” by not appearing. Jeffress said in a statement prior to the contempt threat that Page could not appear without first having access to FBI documents that the committees already possessed, and that they had ignored her efforts to find a later date for the deposition. “Through her actions and words, Lisa has made it abundantly clear that she will cooperate with this investigation. All she is asking is to be treated as other witnesses have under the committees’ own rules,” Jeffress said. The two committees’ “bullying tactics here are unnecessary,” she added. Text messages between the two that investigators found on Page’s work cell phone included numerous derogatory references to Trump. After the Clinton probe ended and Trump won the election, both Strzok and Page joined, for a short time, the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign, as well as possible obstruction of justice. Aiming to discredit the probe, Trump and supporters in Congress have charged that Mueller’s team is stacked with Democrats and that the FBI has been opposed to him. FBI director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein have rejected suggestions of bias against Trump, and have assured Congress that Mueller is conducting his probe appropriately. In tweets, Trump has branded the couple the “FBI lovers” and said their bias was at the heart of Mueller’s “Witch Hunt.” Strzok was questioned for 11 hours over his role and alleged bias in a closed hearing of the two committees two weeks ago. He is scheduled to appear again in a public hearing Thursday morning. Among those charged in the Mueller probe are 13 Russians and Trump’s former campaign chief Paul Manafort. Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to investigators. Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling Updated 6 min 40 sec ago AFP July 12, 2018 05:29 60 Since 1992, 72 percent of the world"s plastic waste has ended up in China and Hong Kong, according to a study in the journal Science Advances. Since January, China has closed its borders to most paper and plastic waste in line with a new environmental policy pushed by Beijing, which no longer wants to be the world’s trash can. WASHINGTON: For months, a major recycling facility for the greater Baltimore-Washington area has been facing a big problem: it has to pay to get rid of huge amounts of paper and plastic it would normally sell to China. Beijing is no longer buying, claiming the recycled materials are “contaminated.” For sure, the 900 tons of trash dumped at all hours of the day and night, five days a week, on the conveyor belts at the plant in Elkridge, Maryland — an hour’s drive from the US capital — are not clean. Amid the nerve-shattering din and clouds of brown dust, dozens of workers in gloves and masks — most of them women — nimbly pluck a diverse array of objects from the piles that could count as “contaminants.” That could be anything from clothes to cables to tree branches to the bane of all recyclers: plastic bags, which are not supposed to go in recycling bins because they snarl up the machinery. “We’ve had to slow our machinery, and hire more people” to clean up the waste, says Michael Taylor, the head of recycling operations for Waste Management, the company that runs the plant. At the end of the sorting line is the end product — huge bales of compacted waste containing paper, cardboard or plastics. These have been bought up for decades by businesses, most of them based in China, which clean them up, crush them and transform them into raw materials for industrial plants. Last year, China bought up more than half of the scrap materials exported by the United States. Globally, since 1992, 72 percent of plastic waste has ended up in China and Hong Kong, according to a study in the journal Science Advances. But since January, China has closed its borders to most paper and plastic waste in line with a new environmental policy pushed by Beijing, which no longer wants to be the world’s trash can, or even its recycle bin. For other waste products such as cardboard and metal, China has set a contamination level of 0.5 percent — a threshold too low for most current US technology to handle. US waste handlers say they expect China will close its doors to all recycled materials by 2020 — an impossibly short deadline. “There is no single and frankly, probably not even a group of countries, that can take in the volume that China used to take,” warns Adina Renee Adler of the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Sending to landfills The Waste Management facility in Elkridge manages to sell its plastic bottles to a buyer in South Carolina and ships its cardboard abroad. But its haul of mixed paper and mixed plastics is effectively worthless, and the plant pays subcontractors to haul it away. Other US recycling plants have broken a major taboo and no longer bother sorting plastic and paper, and instead simply send it straight to landfills. “Nobody wants to say it out loud, because nobody likes the fact that they’re having to do it,” said Bill Caesar, the head of waste company WCA in Houston. Waste Management and Republic Services, another industry heavyweight, have admitted doing it under limited circumstances, while some small towns, particularly in Florida, have simply stopped collecting recyclable waste. Other scrap importer countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam or India are incapable of absorbing the tens of millions of tons that China had previously taken. And few American industries possess the ability to treat the waste. “The biggest issue here is that China just gave very little time for the industry to transition,” said Adler. Darrell Smith, president of the National Waste and Recycling Association, added: “Eventually we will have such a large backup that more and more will have to start being diverted to landfills if we don’t find new markets and new uses for the recycled materials.” Educating the public The messy problem is starting to get punted down the line to cities and towns during the renegotiation of municipal contracts. That is compounded by the fact that many cities already have ambitious recycling targets: Washington wants to see 80 percent of household waste recycled, up from the current 23 percent. The US capital already pays $75 a ton for recycling, compared to $46 for waste that is burned to generate electricity. “There was a time a few years ago when it was cheaper to recycle. It’s just not the case anymore,” said Christopher Shorter, director of public works for the city of Washington. “It will be more and more expensive for us to recycle,” he said. To avoid mounting costs, according to Shorter, the city wants to “better educate our residents about what should and should not be recycled” — especially about not putting plastic bags in the blue recycling bin. And to further reduce the amount of waste being recycled or burned, Washington is considering offering a third trash can to residents for organic waste, and building a facility to compost it. And the city is thinking of making residents pay based on the weight of the waste they produce. In Houston, WCA’s Caesar has a warning for Americans: “They’re going to have to start paying more for the privilege of recycling.”