RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week January 22 to January 28, 2023 Police inaction over firebombings and other attacks on pro-lifers has forced abortion opponents to take up the work of law enforcement by hiring their own private investigators, James Varney reports for RealClearInvestigations: CompassCare, whose Buffalo, New York, pregnancy clinic was firebombed, has teamed with the Thomas More Society, a libertarian legal nonprofit in Chicago, to hire the investigators. Neither group would identify the investigators hired nor give details on their numbers and duties. There have been 161 attacks aimed at pro-lifers since the leak of the Supreme Court draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade last May. The step to hire the investigators comes at a time when many, especially on the right, are warning of the politicization of justice. They point to the armed raid of ex-president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and the SWAT team arrest of Trump adviser Roger Stone – contrasting such heavy-handed tactics with police leniency toward the George Floyd rioters of 2020 and smash-and-grab retail thieves nationwide. Abortion foes accuse the Justice Department of one-sided enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. Dozens of anti-abortion activists were charged last year, chiefly for alleged offenses in previous years. Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told RealClearInvestigations that pro-life groups "have been left with no other option because of the blatant politicization of the Biden FBI and the Justice Department.” Biden, Trump and the Beltway 'Crossfire' G-Man Who Probed Russian Oligarch Hired by Him Washington Post Pence Classified Documents Fallout Axios Senator: Hunter Biden Email Looks Like Classified Info New York Post How Adam Schiff Rode the Resistance to Political Riches Washington Free Beacon Biden's Green Jobs Going to Red Districts Politico Democrat Masters of Dark Arts vs. GOP’s Biden Probes Daily Beast How Santos Wooed Investors for Alleged Ponzi Scheme Washington Post Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Many people are discussing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rejection of a pilot advanced-placement course on African-American history but few people have read the class material. This is largely because the College Board – even as it has pledged to update the course – has refused to make the curriculum public, calling it a “trade secret.” But Stanley Kurtz obtained a copy and writes that the course’s approach, especially in its final quarter, is “overwhelmingly” from the socialist left: Most of the topics in the final quarter present controversial leftist authors as if their views were authoritative, with no critical or contrasting perspectives supplied. The scarcely disguised goal is to recruit students to various leftist political causes. … The fourth quarter of the course features a topic on “The Movement for Black Lives.” The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) was started by the Marxist organizers who founded Black Lives Matter. Yet M4BL extends far beyond BLM, encompassing “over 170 Black-led organizations.” M4BL is organized around an extensive policy platform, the “Vision for Black Lives.” That platform is radical, to say the least. As you might expect, it includes planks such as defunding the police. M4BL’s platform goes further, however, by calling for the abolition of all money bail, and even all pretrial detention. To this end, the “Vision for Black Lives” endorses federal legislation by “Squad” member, Representative Ayanna Pressley. Fentanyl, the deadly synthetic narcotic that is now the leading cause of death among Americans ages 18 to 45, comes to America through a globalized supply chain that has taken years to develop. This article reports that the vast and layered criminal networks that link Chinese drug manufacturers, Mexican cartels, and a homegrown culture of addiction have flourished in part because of shortcomings in U.S. policy. According to several former agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the federal government failed to respond to repeated warnings about the coming fentanyl crisis, even as the casualties began to mount. Although fentanyl became a concern in the early 2000s, DEA investigations did not ... ... disrupt the production labs in China or Mexico, nor did they slow the growing overdose epidemic in the United States. Even with Chinese nationals turning up in Mexico, it was difficult to prove the Chinese government had any direct involvement in the fentanyl trade. According to Paul Campo, a retired DEA official with 25 years of experience (he has since founded a consulting firm, Global Financial Consultants, which focuses on anti-money-laundering securities), few in the DEA recognized how bad the fentanyl problem was becoming. “When I was working cases in the early 2000s, we did not think initially that fentanyl was much of an issue, as it was produced, transported and sold legally to the U.S. for medicinal purposes,” he explained. “Furthermore, fentanyl was mixed into heroin, making it very hard to trace at the time.” Hindsight, of course, is always 20/20 and this well-reported article does not make it entirely clear whether the DEA recognized the scope of the potential threat and failed to act aggressively enough, or if it miscalculated its impact. Two of America's largest liberal nonprofits, the Bill and Melinda Gates and the Ford foundations, funneled $39 million to China in 2021 – money that in some cases went to Chinese government agencies and universities that conduct military research: The Gates Foundation, according to its latest IRS disclosure, sent nearly $30 million to Chinese organizations in 2021, including $2.5 million to the communist nation's National Health Commission and $1.4 million to its Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. The Ford Foundation, meanwhile, sent $9.3 million to China in 2021 – recipients included three public universities that are overseen by the Chinese government's defense industry agency. … While both foundations appear committed to continue funding Chinese projects, many U.S. researchers are reevaluating their work in the communist nation over fears of aiding China's military. American and German scientists, for example, partnered with researchers at China's Peking University to release a 2020 study on robotic fish. Such robots can be used militarily as underwater unmanned vehicles, Newsweek reported last week, and two of the study's co-authors work with the Chinese research facility tasked with developing hypersonic weapons. The Gates and Ford Foundations combined to send Peking University more than $1.7 million in 2021, tax filings show. A rash of recent wind turbine malfunctions are occurring across the U.S. and Europe, ranging from failures of key components to full collapses. Some industry veterans say they’re happening more often, even if the events are occurring at only a small fraction of installed machines. This article opens with an account of a remarkable failure in Oklahoma: On a calm, sunny day last June, Mike Willey was feeding his cattle when he got a call from the local sheriff’s dispatcher. A motorist had reported that one of the huge turbines at a nearby wind farm had collapsed in dramatic fashion. Willey, chief of the volunteer fire department in Ames, 90 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, set out to survey the scene. The steel tower, which once stood hundreds of feet tall, was buckled in half, and the turbine blades, whose rotation took the machine higher than the Statue of Liberty, were splayed across the wheat field below. The turbine, made by General Electric Co., had been in operation less than a year. “It fell pretty much right on top of itself,” Willey says. This article reports that the race to add production lines for ever-bigger turbines is cited as a major culprit by people in the industry. “Rapid innovation strains manufacturing and the broader supply chain,” GE CEO Larry Culp said on an earnings call in October. “It takes time to stabilize production and quality on these new products.” Violence among children has s oared across the country since 2020, a stark reversal of a decades-long decline in juvenile crime. In the U.S., homicides committed by juveniles acting alone rose 30% in 2020 from a year earlier, while those committed by multiple juveniles increased 66%. The number of killings committed by children under 14 was the highest in two decades, according to the most recent federal data. One consequence is a mounting toll of young victims. The number of juveniles killing other juveniles was the highest it has been in more than two decades, the 2020 federal data show. … In New York City, police said 124 juveniles committed shootings during 2022, up from 62 in 2020 and 48 in 2019. … Last year, a total of 117 juveniles were arrested for shootings in Philadelphia, up from 43 in 2019, according to police. Although the spike has many causes, this article reports that some prosecutors and law enforcement leaders argue that the shift away from a more punitive approach for juveniles toward intervention programs and rehabilitation has gone too far and corrections are needed. Raise the Age laws passed in most states in recent years that ended the automatic prosecution of 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. In June 2016, when cryptocurrency was an emerging buzzword and investors were scrambling to cash in, Ruja Ignatova called herself the “Cryptoqueen” and touted her company, OneCoin, as a lucrative rival to Bitcoin in the growing cryptocurrency market. Sixteen months later, Ignatova boarded a plane in Sofia, Bulgaria, and vanished. She hasn’t been seen since. Authorities say OneCoin was a pyramid scheme that defrauded people out of more than $4 billion as Ignatova convinced investors in the US and around the globe to throw fistfuls of cash at her company. Federal prosecutors describe OneCoin as one of the largest international fraud schemes ever perpetrated. This article describes Ignatova’s humble origins in Germany, her education at Oxford University and early job at McKinsey & Company. “Clients trusted her and related to her rise from humble beginnings and fierce desire to be rich.” Crypto offered her the perfect channel to realize her dreams -- by bilking investors. In a separate article, the New York Times reports on a young woman with a checkered past who nevertheless convinced JPMorgan Chase to pay $175 million to acquire a college financial planning company she started called Frank in September 2021. Then last month, the biggest bank in the country did something extraordinary: It said it had been conned. Coronavirus Investigations A Project Veritas undercover video suggests that Pfizer may be engaging in "direct evolution” – a scientific approach similar to the “gain-of-function” research that some theorize is what created COVID-19 in a Chinese lab. Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations is recorded saying, “One of the things we're exploring is like, why don't we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create -- preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we're gonna do that though, there's a risk of like, as you could imagine -- no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses. … From what I’ve heard is they [Pfizer scientists] are optimizing it [COVID mutation process], but they’re going slow because everyone is very cautious -- obviously they don’t want to accelerate it too much. I think they are also just trying to do it as an exploratory thing because you obviously don’t want to advertise that you are figuring out future mutations.” Walker appears to know such work would be controversial when he says, “Don’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell anyone. The way it [the experiment] would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect serial samples from them.” |