$5.3M for 5 NYC Toilets RCI 
U.S. Reps' Office Cash They Don't Use RCI 
Fed's Own Office-Renovation Inflation RCI
When Mass Transit Spending Exploded RCI 
$2B in Bungled Haiti Relief RCI 

Biden, Trump and the Beltway 

Trump Indicted Wall Street Journal 
Hunter Biden Agreed to Enlist FBI to Help Chinese Partner Daily Mail 
In Proud Boys Jan. 6 Trial, FBI Informants Abound New York Times 
Schumer, Dems Look Hypocritical Widening Highways Politico 
A Billion Gretas: Biden Plans Foreign Youth Climate Vanguard Free Beacon 
DHS Heavily Redacted Disinformation Board Emails Just The News 
Voter Suppression in Pennsylvania Federalist  

Planned Parenthood Rules
Tax-Funded 'Trans' Ed  
Claremont Press 

More than 5,000 pages of documents from a Moscow-based contractor named Vulkan  detail computer programs and databases Russian intelligence agencies use  to launch cyberattacks, sow disinformation and surveil sections of the internet. This article reports that the trove offers a rare window into the secret corporate dealings of Russia’s military and spy agencies, including work for the notorious government hacking group Sandworm. U.S. officials have accused Sandworm of twice causing power blackouts in Ukraine, disrupting the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics and launching NotPetya, the most economically destructive malware in history. Quote:

Several mock-ups of a user interface for a project known as Amezit appear to depict examples of possible hacking targets, including the Foreign Ministry in Switzerland and a nuclear power plant in that nation. Another document shows a map of the United States with circles that appear to represent clusters of internet servers. … “These documents suggest that Russia sees attacks on civilian critical infrastructure and social media manipulation as one and the same mission, which is essentially an attack on the enemy’s will to fight,” said John Hultquist, the vice president for intelligence analysis at  the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, which reviewed selections of the document at the request of The Post and its partners.  

Is China Behind TikTok's
Anti-Alaska Drilling Drive?  
Federalist 

TikTok has been such a hotbed of resistance to President Biden’s support for some new oil-drilling in Alaska that NPR ran an article with the headline, “Can TikTokkers sway Biden on oil drilling?”  But there is compelling evidence, this article reports, that the campaign against the Willow Project is being orchestrated not by American environmentalists but the Chinese government, which may be seeking to sow dissent in the United States while limiting the nation’s access to energy. Evita Duffy-Alfonso reports: 

I made a spreadsheet of 64 TikTok accounts with viral videos opposing the Willow Project. As of last Friday, each of the accounts, with videos garnering anywhere from 65,000-7.6 million views, had posted exclusively anti-Willow Project content and began first posting on Feb. 28 at the earliest. None of the videos include people’s faces. All of them use AI-generated voices or trending sounds and feature many of the same videos. … So far, the “#stopwillow” TikTok hashtag has been massive, generating about 385 million views on the app. And while the opaque algorithms of social media companies make it hard to make exact comparisons, there appears to be substantially less Willow Project content and engagement on other platforms. Instagram and Facebook both have only a few thousand posts linked to the hashtag, and on YouTube, there are only about 650 videos with the hashtag. On Twitter, one of the  most popular posts  with the hashtag is from Greta Thunberg and has a reach of about 522,000. There were no apparent tweets with millions in reach, like the videos on TikTok.  

After Police Killings,
Families Kept in Dark, Grilled for Info  
Los Angeles Times 

Ian Smith knew his 15-year-old son – while high on acid and brandishing a knife – had encountered the police. What officers didn’t tell him as they discussed the incident was that Luke had been shot dead during the incident. Sedated on painkillers, this article reports, Smith answered their questions, telling them about the boy’s drug use, poor impulse control and suicidal thinking in hopes the information might mitigate his son’s culpability. “What’ll they do to him?" he said, according to a recording of the interview. “I don’t know how much time someone would do for that in juvenile hall,” a detective said. Police records show that the detective knew Luke had been killed. Quote:

The omission was not an accident, and it was not unusual. For years, law enforcement agencies across California have been trained to quickly question family members after a police killing in order to collect information that, among other things, is used to protect the involved officers and their department, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism has found. Police and prosecutors routinely incorporate the information into disparaging accounts about the people who have been killed that help justify the killings, bolster the department’s defense against civil suits and reduce the amount of money families receive in settlements and jury verdicts, according to police reports, court records and interviews with families and their attorneys. 

Doctors Increasingly Charging
for Minimal Interactions  
Atlantic 

Spurred by the reluctance of people to leave their homes during the pandemic, telehealth is booming across the country. On the plus side, this article reports, doctors are now more accessible than ever. But now many doctors are charging for phone calls and emails:

At the start of the pandemic, telehealth was lauded as the beginning of a revolution  in  medicine. Patients quickly became adept at using online portals to reach their doctors, frequently writing to them with quick questions or concerns in between visits. But when in-person visits largely resumed, this higher volume of online messaging  did not go away. In fact, it did not even seem to decrease. And though a video appointment and office visit might be interchangeable in a doctor’s daily schedule, busy physicians found themselves with little time to respond to those smaller communications. To stay above water, some doctors and health systems have started  charging for many of their responses. These in-between interactions, once considered a standard part of care, are being reframed as separate services, many of which warrant additional charges. Having an informal relationship with your doctor is now just fiction: You get the care that you pay for. 

Coronavirus Investigations 

When the COVID pandemic began, no state was better situated to address it than California. It had a relatively young population, a climate that encouraged people to spend time outdoors, a tech industry that profited from the pandemic’s surge in online traffic and top-flight medical and research institutions with some of the world’s leading experts on public health and epidemiology. But, John Tierney reports, no state inflicted so much needless suffering for so long on its children and adults; no other state infringed upon individual liberties more zealously:

California was the first to lock down and the last to end its state of emergency (at the end of February of this year). It closed not only schools and businesses but also playgrounds, parks, and beaches. A police boat in Malibu chased down a solitary surfer so that he could be arrested and handcuffed; another surfer was fined $1,000 for endangering precisely no one. Church gatherings were outlawed for nearly a year, until the Supreme Court finally overturned the ban. Other courts had to intervene to keep public schools in San Diego and Los Angeles from mandating vaccines for students. California suffered one of the nation’s worst spikes in unemployment during the pandemic, and it was one of the slowest to recover economically, despite the increased profits flowing to Silicon Valley.  

While exploring the costs of these failures, Tierney also reports on how California’s leaders, starting at the top with Gov. Gavin Newsome, corrupted language and silenced critics to justify their errors. “The state’s leaders remain unapologetic. Governor Gavin Newsom insists that his policies were guided by ‘the science and data,’ while using deceitful statistics to claim falsely that Florida’s less restrictive Covid policies were deadlier than California’s authoritarianism.”