RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week December 24 to December 30, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney examines the distinct possibility that new arrivals among the current historic flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. may have brought polio, leprosy, malaria and other rare diseases from their home countries: The Biden administration, an aggressive and vocal promoter of often mandatory COVID-19 vaccination, is offering little public comment now on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified. Neither the CDC nor the Department of Homeland Security would discuss the issue with RealClearInvestigations, although DHS has acknowledged it does not have vaccination records for the millions who have entered the U.S. since 2021. Florida’s huge increase in illegals has been tied to cases of leprosy and malaria in the Sunshine State. New York City’s Health Commissioner warned that at least half of the migrants who have poured into the city – at least 100,000 since the spring of 2022 -- had not been vaccinated from polio. Last year, New York State recorded its first polio case in the U.S. since 2013, with the victim described only as an “unvaccinated man.” Also, in 2022, poliovirus was found in the water supply of four New York counties, including Long Island, and New York City. Another positive test result was recorded in Rockland County this year, according to the state. Polio remains endemic in two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan is where President Biden’s chaotic withdrawal in 2021 resulted in 90,000 Afghans being let into the U.S. Waste of the Day by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Little-Used, $200M Small City Air Service, RCI Reno's $70K Temporary Sidewalk Poem, RCI LA Goes to the Dogs on Costly Bike Path, RCI Army on Why Kids Play King of the Hill, RCI $3 Billion for Private High-Speed Rail, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Where Joe Biden goes, questions about shady dealings seem sure to follow – even when he’s on vacation. This article reports that, like some of his predecessors, the president is enjoying a free vacation rental this holiday season thanks to rich donors. The stay in a $3 million St. Croix villa is not the first time the Bidens have enjoyed the hospitality of Bill and Connie Neville, who made their fortune in the tech industry and attended the White House state dinner for French President Emmanuel Macron. But eyebrows are being raised as the Nevilles join the long list of people trying to cash in on their relationship with the President Biden. The owners of the private ocean-side Two Palms Villa have listed it on the vacation rental site for $700 a night, bragging that it has 'hosted President Biden on his many trips to St. Croix and is ready to cater to your vacation dreams, too.' While federal ethics regulations prohibit federal employees from using their office to endorse 'any product, service or enterprise,' it is highly unlikely the president is aware his name is being used in the listing. The White House had to issue a statement early in the Biden presidency that it does not endorse the use of the president's name in commercial endeavors after his brother Frank promoted his relationship to the president in an advertisement for the law firm he advises. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Court Memos Suggests Feds Have FISA Evidence on Bidens, Just the News The Reach and Power of Clarence Thomas’s Clerks, New York Times Other Noteworthy Articles and Series More than two years after the Biden administration called on all federal agencies to create plans to bring employees who teleworked during the COVID pandemic back to the office, the vast majority of Washington, D.C.’s federal buildings are still sprawling expanses of empty, echoing hallways and offices. RCP's Susan Crabtree reports on a Government Accountability Office finding that 17 of 24 federal agencies use an estimated 25% or less of their headquarters’ office capacity. The Social Security Administration and the Housing and Urban Development offices were both at 7% occupancy; the Small Business Administration was at 9%; the Office of Personnel Management notched in at 12%; and the Transportation Department was at 14% occupancy. The General Services Administration, which manages all federal buildings, was operating at 11%, as was the Department of Agriculture: White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients has made returning to the office a priority for both the White House and the broader executive branch and sent a Cabinet-wide memo over the summer urging an end to telework. ... During an early October Senate hearing, the billions of dollars spent for empty federal office space came under fire. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, voiced deep concerns over wasted resources used to heat, cool, and maintain the underutilized buildings. “Each year, it costs billions of taxpayer dollars to operate and maintain these federal buildings, regardless of their utilization,” she said. “This is simply unacceptable.” When members of the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group mutinied last June over the war in Ukraine and threatened to march on Moscow, it seemed clear that the days were numbered for its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Two months later, his plane exploded in flight, killing him and nine others. This article reports for the first time that the assassination plan was approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oldest ally and confidant, an ex-spy named Nikolai Patrushev: Through the power of state-controlled media and his own persona, Putin has unsettled the West with his image as a determined adversary who rules Russia alone. In fact, he is kept in power by a vast bureaucracy that has proven durable through deepening hostilities with the West and rising domestic divisions over the botched invasion of Ukraine. Controlling the levers of that machine is Patrushev. He has climbed to the top by interpreting Putin’s policies and carrying out his orders. Throughout Putin’s reign, he has expanded Russia’s security services and terrorized its enemies with assassinations at home and abroad. More recently his profile has grown, backing Russia’s invasion, and his son Dmitry, a former banker, has been appointed agriculture minister and is touted by some as a potential successor to Putin. The article provides a short of profile of Patrushev, who became Putin’s ally when both men served in the Soviet-era KGB. When Boris Yeltsin later appointed Putin as Russia’s prime minister in 1999, Putin recommended Patrushev as his replacement to lead the new version of the KGB, the FSB. “As head of the spy agency, Patrushev began to reinvent the organization and referred to it … as Russia’s ‘new nobility.’ … Patrushev soon signaled that traitors to the Kremlin would suffer.” A British judge, for example, concluded that he had probably approved the murder of Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. From the Annals of Whack-A-Mole: As the U.S. focusses on stopping the flow of drugs across the southern border, large fentanyl labs are popping up in Canada. At a rural property outside Vancouver, this article reports, Canadian police in October found 2.5 million doses of fentanyl and 528 gallons of chemicals in a shipping container and a storage unit. Thousands of miles away outside Toronto, police in August found what is believed to be the largest fentanyl lab so far in Canada – hidden at a property 30 miles from the U.S. border crossing at Niagara Falls, N.Y.: The Canadian labs are a curveball for U.S. authorities whose efforts to combat fentanyl are focused on the southern border with Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has installed about $800 million worth of powerful scanning and detection equipment at land border crossings since 2019. Nearly all that technology has been deployed along the U.S. southern border, where CBP confiscated nearly 27,000 pounds of fentanyl during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the most ever. Republican lawmakers in recent months have called for U.S. military strikes in Mexico targeting fentanyl traffickers and drug labs. The spread of fentanyl production to Canada suggests traffickers there are poised to benefit if Mexican suppliers get squeezed. The lightly-patrolled U.S.-Canada border spans more than 5,500 miles – the longest international boundary between two nations in the world – and has few physical barriers. Criminals call it “pig butchering” – a type of confidence fraud in which victims are lured by scammers often impersonating young women on the internet. The scammers then spend weeks building a relationship with their victim, introducing them to cryptocurrency and encouraging them to invest on a fake platform. As they appear to earn extraordinary returns – the fattening before the kill – the marks invest greater sums before it all vanishes. This article reports that this new form of financial fraud run by Chinese crime syndicates out of war-torn Myanmar and other countries in Southeast Asia has two victims: the tens of thousands Americans who have been fleeced of their savings; and the scammers themselves, “modern-day slaves, assembled by what the UN has called one of the largest human trafficking events in Asia in recent history”: Lured to Thailand with promises of white-collar jobs, thousands of people from across the world are trafficked to criminal hubs in Myanmar where they are held against their will and forced to steal millions in cryptocurrency. The UN estimates that up to 120,000 people could be held in compounds across Myanmar, with another 100,000 people held in Cambodia and elsewhere in conditions that amount to modern slavery. … "Special economic zones, particularly in the Mekong, have become magnets for organized crime syndicates, at first for casinos, trafficking and related money laundering, and recently for online fraud,” said Jeremy Douglas, Regional representative for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Southeast Asia. “They're almost like free zones for criminals where the rule of law doesn't apply." |