RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week February 24 to March 2, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Julie Kelly examines anomalies surrounding the pipe bombs placed outside the Washington headquarters of both major parties on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol siege – including perhaps the greatest mystery of all: why official Washington has lost interest in this alleged act of domestic terrorism. She asks: Why did the Secret Service detail assigned to Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris fail to find the easily discoverable device before her visit to the DNC that day? And why did they take so long to reveal the visit itself? If the threat was so grave, why does video show authorities allowing children to cross the street toward the bombs after they were discovered? Why was the bomb at RNC headquarters discovered by a Democratic party donor and government contractor with ties to the FBI? Why did law enforcement repeatedly describe the bombs as highly dangerous, while also saying they couldn’t have denotated on their own because of their cheap kitchen timers? Why did the FBI’s geofence warrant to obtain phone data from Google omit January 5 – the day the pipe bombs were allegedly planted? Why was the FBI honcho who ran the investigation into a kidnap plot against Michigan’s Governor -- suspected as entrapment -- brought in to lead the stalled investigation? Casting a national dragnet, authorities have tracked down and prosecuted more than 1,300 Jan. 6 defendants – almost all of whom were unarmed, including 62 individuals so far this year. And yet the perpetrator of what could have been the only deadly attack by a civilian that day appears to have vanished without a trace. Waste of the Day by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Nebraska Blows a Pile on Doomed Airline, RCI A Bad Case of Wayward Medicaid Cash, RCI Va. Taxpayers' Big Assist to New Stadium, RCI Taxpayers Pick Up Senate Dining Tab, RCI U.S. Sends $1.2B to Hamas-Tied Agency, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Hunter Biden Admits Joe Was 'Big Guy’ in China Deal, New York Post Hunter: I Wasn't Sober Sending 'Sitting Here' With Dad Threat, Daily Mail Hunter Biden's Full House Deposition, Fox News Judges in Trump-Related Cases Face Wave of Threats, Reuters DOJ Rearrests Ex-FBI Biden-'Bribe' Informer Freed by Judge, Politico Dem Operative Behind Fake Biden Robocalls, NBC News Key Figure in Fake Electors Plot Hid Secret Twitter Account., CNN Feds Are Using 'Bidenbucks' to Shape 2024 Election, Federalist The Christian Oil Billionaire Who Upended Texas Politics, WSJ Other Noteworthy Articles and Series While the influx of migrants to big cities has received wide attention, this article describes its impacts on the small town of Whitewater, Wisconsin (population 15,000). The town is showing hospitality to the newcomers, even as its civic structures are being stretched to breaking: Greater Whitewater Committee president Jeffrey Knight is quick to point out that migrants have caused New York's population to grow by 2 percent, while Whitewater's population has grown by almost 10 percent in two years, almost entirely due to the southern border crisis. That would translate into more than 1.5 million new arrivals in New York. "I don't have a problem with immigration," Knight told the Washington Free Beacon. "The concern is about resources." Like Knight, all Whitewater residents who spoke to the Free Beacon prided themselves on their hospitality and did not express prejudice toward the town's growing foreign population. But those who live here say they feel the strain migration has placed on their town: schools rushing to hire English as a second language (ESL) teachers, emergency services overwhelmed with unintelligible calls reporting domestic violence, and health providers faced with a flurry of uninsured patients. Responding to the influx of migrants has put the town in a $400,000 budget hole, a town official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Free Beacon. "I haven't seen anyone who isn't welcoming, but you have to have blinders on to not see that there have been problems," said Michael Smith, who has lived in Whitewater for more than a decade. "Everything is relatively overwhelmed right now." The article reports that no one knows what brought the migrants to Whitewater. It is not a sanctuary city, and no red-state governor is shipping busloads of migrants to Whitewater's doorstep. That Wisconsin is one of a handful of states that will likely decide the next president is just happenstance. “Some residents think the migrants were attracted by the progressive city council's pro-immigrant rhetoric. Others think the sleepy midwestern town is just a good place for illegal migrants to hide.” In a separate article, Bloomberg reports that asylum seekers are fanning out across the country. “They are flocking to cities but also to rural areas with significant work in the meat packing and agriculture industries that traditionally employ large numbers of migrants.” A civil war has been going on for years in Ethiopia’s largest and most populous region, Oromiya – home to its capital, Addis Ababa – where an insurgent group called the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) says it is fighting for self-determination for the Oromo people and greater language and cultural rights. The violence in Oromiya has displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Ethiopia’s government and human rights officials accuse the OLA of killing scores of civilians since 2019, a charge the group denies. In response, Giulia Paravicini reports for the first time, a secretive committee of senior officials has ordered extrajudicial killings and illegal detentions to crush an insurgency there: Reuters interviewed more than 30 federal and local officials, judges, lawyers and victims of abuses by authorities. The agency also reviewed documents drafted by local political and judicial authorities. These interviews and documents for the first time shed light on the workings of the Koree Nageenyaa – Security Committee in the Oromo language - which began operating in the months after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018. … The people familiar with Koree Nageenyaa's activities attributed dozens of killings to the committee's orders and hundreds of arrests. Among the killings, they said, was a massacre of 14 shepherds in Oromiya in 2021 that the government has previously blamed on OLA fighters. Cinnamon-flavored applesauce pouches sold in grocery and dollar stores last year poisoned hundreds of American children with extremely high doses of lead, leaving anxious parents to watch for signs of brain damage, developmental delays and seizures, this article reports. This is part of a larger problem in the food safety system ,which often relies on companies to police themselves. Time and again, the tainted cinnamon went untested and undiscovered, the result of an overstretched F.D.A. and a food-safety law that gives companies, at home and abroad, wide latitude on what toxins to look for and whether to test. … The Food and Drug Administration, citing Ecuadorean investigators, said a spice grinder was likely responsible for the contamination and said the quick recall of three million applesauce pouches protected the food supply. But hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The New York Times and the nonprofit health newsroom The Examination, along with interviews with government and company officials in multiple countries, show that in the weeks and months before the recall, the tainted applesauce sailed through a series of checkpoints in a food-safety system meant to protect American consumers. A new federal oversight report has found that the Office of Personnel Management, which is supposed to oversee health insurance for 8 million federal workers and their families at a cost of more than $60 billion a year, has never checked the eligibility of those on its rolls. The result is thousands of health insurance enrollment scams that cost the federal government as much as $3 billion every year. These include: [A] Department of Transportation employee [who] fraudulently enrolled his sister and niece on his federal health benefits plan. He claimed the two were his wife and stepchild. An equipment repair worker at an Army facility in Alabama [who] kept an ex-wife covered for 14 years, and was caught only when he tried to add his new wife. And at the Department of Justice, an employee added a friend and her friend’s four children, asserting they were her family members. The real gob smacker, this article reports, is that “despite prodding from the GAO, the agency has no plans to conduct an audit because it said it would be too expensive.” As Douglas Murray and others have long noted, Google has been gaming its search engine results for years to impart left-wing vision of the world. So it’s no surprise, Matt Taibbi reports, that the socially conscious engineers of Google/Alphabet’s much-ballyhooed new AI tool, Gemini, have “created an AI that apparently couldn’t or wouldn’t generate images of white faces. Commentators mocked renderings of words like “pope,” “Viking,” and “1943 German soldier,” all of which turned simple visual concepts into bizarre DEI-inspired reboots. Taibbi’s search of his own name turned up a list of phony accusations about the accuracy of his work. For example, when he followed up on a bogus Gemini claim by asking, “When was Matt Taibbi accused of inaccuracy in 2010?” the program responded: In June 2010, Matt Taibbi faced criticism for an article he wrote for Rolling Stone magazine titled “The Great California Water Heist.” The article alleged a connection between conservative donor Charles Koch and a left-wing activist group called the “Compton Pledge.” However, investigations by other journalists and fact-checkers later revealed that this connection was inaccurate…Following the controversy, Taibbi acknowledged the error and issued a correction on his personal website. Taibbi notes, that “none of this happened! Though it sounds vaguely like a headline for an article I might have written, there was never a Rolling Stone piece called “The Great California Water Heist,” and I’d never heard of the “Compton Pledge.” ” More questions produced more fake tales of error-ridden articles. One entry claimed I got in trouble for a piece called “Glenn Beck’s War on Comedy,” after suggesting “a connection between a conservative donor, Foster Friess, and a left-wing activist group, the Ruckus Society.” With each successive answer, Gemini didn’t “learn,” but instead began mixing up the fictional factoids from previous results and upping the ante, adding accusations of racism or bigotry. “The Great California Water Heist” turned into “The Great California Water Purge: How Nestle Bottled Its Way to a Billion-Dollar Empire—and Lied About It.” The “article” apparently featured this passage: Look, if Nestle wants to avoid future public-relations problems, it should probably start by hiring executives whose noses aren’t shaped like giant penises. |