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Donald Trump pressured his vice president to go along with an illegal plot to overturn the 2020 US election and whipped up a mob that put his deputy’s life in danger when he refused, congressional investigators and former administration aides said Thursday.

The House committee probing last year’s attack on the US Capitol detailed how the former president berated Mike Pence for not going along with the scheme both knew to be unlawful — even after being told violence had erupted as Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden’s victory.

At its third public hearing into the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the panel detailed a “relentless” pressure campaign by Trump on Pence — as cornerstone of a criminal conspiracy to keep the defeated president in power.

“Donald Trump wanted Mike Pence to do something no other vice president has ever done: the former president wanted Pence to reject the votes and either declare Trump the winner or send the votes back to the states to be counted again,” panel chairman Bennie Thompson said.

“Mike Pence said no. He resisted the pressure. He knew it was illegal. He knew it was wrong.”

Trump’s lawyer John Eastman was the architect of the “nonsensical” plot, said committee vice-chair Liz Cheney, pushing the scheme aggressively despite knowing it to be unlawful.

The committee showed testimony from Pence’s general counsel Greg Jacob saying Eastman admitted in front of Trump two days before the riot that his plan would violate federal law.

– ‘In danger’ –

A desperate Trump had turned to Pence for help after dozens of legal challenges against the election were dismissed in courts across the land.

The defeated president used rally speeches and Twitter to exert intense pressure on his deputy to abuse his position as president of the Senate and reject the election results.

Members of Trump’s family were in the Oval Office on January 6 when Trump had a “heated” phone call with Pence, according to first daughter Ivanka Trump’s deposition, aired at the hearing.

She said Trump took “a different tone” than she’d heard him use before.

Nicholas Luna, a former assistant to Trump, recalled in his own deposition: “I remember hearing the word ‘wimp.'”

During his “Stop the Steal” rally later that day, Trump referenced Pence numerous times as he told his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.”

Trump’s original speech didn’t mention Pence but he ad-libbed to berate his vice president in a move Democratic committee member Pete Aguilar said helped incite the insurrection and the threats against Pence.

But Pence resisted, releasing a letter to Congress saying the vice president had no “unilateral authority” to overturn election counts.

Aguilar said an informant from the neofascist Proud Boys told the FBI the group would have killed Pence given the opportunity.

The California congressman said the mob storming the Capitol came within 40 feet (12 meters) of Pence and to “make no mistake about the fact that the vice president’s life was in danger.”

– ‘Pretty jarring’ –

Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows told him about the violence erupting at the Capitol but the president tweeted anyway that Pence did not have the “courage” to overturn the election, aides told investigators in videotaped depositions.

Immediately after the tweet, the crowds at the Capitol surged forward, the committee said.

The mob threatened to hang Pence for failing to cooperate as they stormed the Capitol, even erecting a gallows in front of the building.

“What the former president was willing to sacrifice — potentially the vice president — in order to stay in power is pretty jarring,” Aguilar said.

The panel aired a video clip of a rioter saying he would “drag people through the streets” if Pence refused to overturn the election.

The committee also heard from retired federal judge J Michael Luttig, who testified that the United States would have been plunged into “a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis” had Pence folded under Trump’s pressure. 

Luttig, a renowned conservative legal scholar, had advised Pence at the time that his role in overseeing the ratification of the election was purely ceremonial — and that he had no power to oppose the result.

“There was no basis in the constitution or the laws of the United States at all for the theory espoused by Mr Eastman. At all. None,” Luttig said.

Trump reacted to the hearing by demanding that he receive “equal time” on the airwaves to lay out his bogus theory that the election was stolen — but opponents pointed out that he has not taken up the committee’s invitation to testify.

Polar bears face an existential threat from the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, which they rely on as platforms to hunt seals.

But in a new study, scientists have identified an isolated subpopulation of polar bears in Southeast Greenland that instead make use of freshwater ice pouring into the ocean from the region’s glaciers, suggesting this particular habitat is less susceptible than others to climate change.

Their findings, described in the journal Science on Thursday, open up the tantalizing possibility that at least some pockets of the species might be able to survive further into this century, when Arctic sea ice is expected to disappear completely during summer months.

“One of the big questions is where in the Arctic will polar bears be able to hang on, what we call ‘persist,'” first author Kristin Laidre, a polar scientist at the University of Washington and Greenland Institute of Natural Resources told AFP.

“I think that bears in a place like this can teach us a lot about where those places might be.”

Laidre and colleagues first spent two years interviewing Inuit subsistence hunters who provided input and ecological knowledge, including harvest samples for analysis.

They then began their own field work, which lasted from 2015 to 2021, in a harsh region that was long understudied because of its unpredictable weather, heavy snowfall and jagged mountains. 

– Hemmed in –

Each year, the team would spend one month in springtime, staying in the nearest settlement Kuummiit, which is a two-hour helicopter ride from where the bears live. Fuel depots had to be staged along the route in advance down the coastline, creating a hopskotch-like commute to work.

The team tagged the bears with satellite tracking devices, and collected genetic samples by either capturing bears or firing biopsy darts into their rumps.

Thought to number a few hundred individuals, “they are the most genetically isolated population of polar bears anywhere on the planet,” said co-author Beth Shapiro, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, in a statement.

“We know that this population has been living separately from other polar bear populations for at least several hundred years.”

Unlike their cousins, the Southeast Greenland polar bears were found to be homebodies, seldom straying far to hunt.

Their isolation arises from the geography: they live in a complex landscape of fjords on the very edge of their range on the southern tip of Greenland, well below the Arctic circle, with nowhere to go. 

To the west there are an enormous set of mountains and the Greenland Ice Sheet, and to the east the open water of the Denmark Strait all the way to Iceland. They also have to contend with a rapid current that flows southward along the coast.

“We see that when they get caught in this current they jump off the ice and they walk back home to their fjords,” said Laidre. The team found that some of the tracked bears accidentally caught in this situation had to trek more than a hundred miles back home.

– Climate refuges? –

While sea ice provides hunting platforms for most of the Arctic’s roughly 26,000 polar bears, the Southeast Greenland bears have access to sea ice for only four months, between February and late May. 

For the remaining eight months they rely on chunks of freshwater ice breaking off the Greenland Ice Sheet in the form of marine-terminating glaciers.

“These types of glaciers do exist in other places in the Arctic, but the combination of the fjord shapes, the high production of glacier ice and the very big reservoir of ice that is available from the Greenland Ice Sheet is what currently provides a steady supply of glacier ice,” said another co-author Twila Moon of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in a statement.

There remains much to study about the Southeast Greenland polar bears. Measurements show the adult females are a little smaller than average and they appear to have fewer cubs, but it’s hard to infer much about what that means in the absence of long term data.

Laidre is keen to not oversell the study as one of hope. Polar bears — which in addition to being iconic in their own right are also a vital resource for indigenous people — aren’t going to be saved without urgent climate action.

But this population might have a better shot, and there are similar areas with marine-terminating glaciers on other parts of Greenland’s coast as well as the island of Svalbard that might become small-scale climate refugia.

“We as a community need to look at places like this and ask ourselves, is this a place where we might be able to have some small numbers of polar bears persisting in an ice-free Arctic?” said Laidre.

Indigenous Ecuadorans used burning tires, tree trunks and stones Thursday to block access to the capital, Quito, on the fourth day of protests against high fuel prices and living costs.

Indigenous people, who make up over a million of Ecuador’s 17.7 million inhabitants, embarked on an open-ended anti-government protest Monday that has since been joined by students and other discontented groups.

“We came to claim our rights because we are paid low prices for the products we produce,” Nelson Jami, a farmer from the southern Cotopaxi province, told AFP at a blockade south of Quito.

Protests and roadblocks were registered Thursday in 15 of Ecuador’s 24 provinces, authorities said, with hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Quito alone.

Firefighters said a truck carrying demonstrators overturned in Quito Thursday, injuring 12 people.

Oil producer Ecuador has been hit by rising inflation, unemployment and poverty exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Fuel prices have risen sharply since 2020, almost doubling for diesel from $1 to $1.90 per gallon (3.8 liters) and rising from $1.75 to $2.55 for petrol.

The powerful Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), which called the protests, wants the price reduced to $1.50 for diesel and $2.10 for petrol.

Conaie is credited with helping topple three Ecuadoran presidents between 1997 and 2005.

– ‘Sabotage’ –

President Guillermo Lasso said Wednesday the government’s door was open to dialogue, “but we will not give in to violent groups that seek to impose their rules.”

Conaie leader Leonidas Iza, for his part, said the government was not making any concessions required for negotiations to begin.

Iza was arrested Tuesday on the second day of the mass protest on suspicion of “sabotage,” according to the government, prompting furious supporters to descend on the prosecutor’s office to demand he be freed.

He was released the following day on a judge’s orders pending trial on charges of “paralyzing public transport services.”

Iza risks up to three years in prison.

Conaie has reported 14 people injured since the protests began Monday, while police reported 29 arrests, eight agents injured and 11 others briefly held by demonstrators.

Ecuador’s Production Minister Julio Prado said losses as a result of the protests amounted to some $20 million by Thursday.

In 2019, Conaie-led protests resulted in 11 deaths and forced then-president Lenin Moreno to abandon plans to eliminate fuel subsidies.

Mexican trans social worker Brigitte Baltazar saw her dreams shattered when she was deported from the United States, where she had fought for 20 years for a better life.

Now she has found herself a new role — helping other migrants to legally cross the border.

Baltazar was a 14-year-old boy when she illegally entered the United States, where she labored on farms picking tomatoes, dreaming of studying medicine.

She also transitioned from male to female, but she says that in April 2021 her life “turned to waste” when she was expelled to Mexico for not being able to regularize her residence status.

Now 35, with her long hair dyed red, Baltazar, from the impoverished southern state of Guerrero, has often faced brutal discrimination and prejudice, but says she has put her experience to good use.

“I’ve been through super tough situations, so I had always said that when I had the opportunity to help other people, I would love that life,” she told AFP.

Like thousands of others who are expelled or seek asylum in the United States, she ended up in a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, just on the Mexico side of the border.

Seeing pregnant women or people overwhelmed by lack of resources and information, she started to assist in any way she could.

– Finding a role –

In a short time, the leading NGO “Al otro lado” — which provides legal and humanitarian support to migrants — asked her to join its staff.

She now works in a camp with people who seek to enter the United States on “humanitarian parole,” a status that covers emergency medical treatment or visiting a sick family member.

“We try to handle the medical cases, the most complicated ones first,” she said, explaining she draws on her empathy for others after years of suffering derogatory comments on the street, in job interviews and from officials.

She says she is moved by the plight of Haitian migrants, who are discriminated against because of the color of their skin and are often surprised that she is willing to help.

And she says she experiences a special connection with members of the LGBTI community who want to enter the United States fleeing intolerance in their countries.

She encourages them to “defend their identity tooth and nail” and to persevere, saying “we already have that warrior soul, you know, that soul that can handle anything.”

The number of people trying to reach the United States through Mexico has soared in recent years, with the surge becoming a fierce political issue across Latin America as well as in Washington.

But in the camp, where faces of fatigue and uncertainty abound, Baltazar exudes warmth while she helps migrants fill out endless paperwork.

She even finds time to bump fists with little girls, bringing out a smile and lifting spirits.

“I have work that I love and I’m passionate about, and that’s why I’m happy. I’m living in a shelter and I’m happy, thank God I have the love of many people,” she says.