RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Oct. 13 to Oct. 19, 2019

Featured Investigations

As recent headlines attest, Hong Kong democracy advocates are drawing minimal support from Western businesses like the NBA with big stakes in China. Less appreciated are the sustained jeers coming from the activists' own brethren in the West: nationalistic Chinese students studying abroad.

Times were that Chinese students would put their lives on the line for democracy, as they did in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago. But today, in a cultural sea change, students stand four-square behind their iron-fisted regime, as Richard Bernstein, a former Beijing bureau chief for the New York Times, reports for RealClearInvestigations:

• Despite good intentions, U.S. universities may not be educating a new generation of liberal-minded Chinese leaders - far from it.
• Many Chinese students today hold authoritarian views because they believe China's recent prosperity reflects its superior values.
• The Chinese government uses Chinese student groups at Western schools to monitor students and spread propaganda.
• This is occurring against a larger backdrop in which a resurgent China aggressively demands that foreign businesses - from Google to the NBA - play by its rules.

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The Trump Investigations: Top Articles

How 2 Soviet-Born Émigrés Made It Into Elite Trump Circles, Washington Post
Leftist 'Dark Money' Group Seeks to Expand Supreme Court, Breitbart
CNN Insider Undercover:Zucker'sVendetta vs. Trump, Project Veritas
Previously Unseen Trump Tax Docs: Big Inconsistencies,ProPublica
Envoy: I Warned Biden AidesAboutSon When Dad WasVeep, Washington Post
What Hunter Biden Did at Burisma (He Never Visited Ukraine), Reuters
How Trump Is Winning the Online War, New York Times

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Lying Cops Still Help Send People to Prison
USA Today
The criminal justice system requires the government to provide people accused with crimes evidence that might help in their defense. But police departments and prosecutors across the country are failing to track problem police officers, making it impossible to disclose that information to people whose freedom hinges on the integrity of law enforcement. This investigation by the USA Today Network found that:

• Thousands of people have faced criminal charges or gone to prison based in part on testimony from law enforcement officers deemed by superiors or prosecutors to have credibility problems.
• At least 300 prosecutors' offices across the nation are not taking steps necessary to comply with Supreme Court mandates. These places do not have a list tracking dishonest or otherwise untrustworthy officers. They include cities such as Chicago and Little Rock, Arkansas, and smaller communities such as Jackson County, Minnesota, and Columbia County, Pennsylvania.
• In many places that keep lists, police and prosecutors refuse to make them public, making it impossible to know whether they are following the law. 
• Others keep lists that are incomplete. USA Today identified at least 1,200 officers with proven histories of lying and other serious misconduct who had not beenflagged by prosecutors. Of those officers, 261 were specifically disciplined for dishonesty on the job.

When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested
ProPublica
The last Tuesday of the month is medical debt collection day in the small town of Coffeyville, Kansas (population 9,000). In July 90 people were summoned to the courthouse, sued over unpaid bills by the local hospital, or doctors, or an ambulance service. Some wore eye patches and bandages; others limped to their seats. Judges don't need law degrees in Kansas, and the one presiding over these hearings was a cattle rancher. Scenes like this are replayed across the country, where thousands of people are jailed each year for failing to appear in court for unpaid bills; more than half of the debt in collections stems from medical care.

Digital Dystopia: How Algorithms Punish the Poor
Guardian
All around the world, from smalltown Illinois toRochdalein England, from Perth, Australia, toDumkain northern India, governments are turning to predictive algorithms to determine who qualifies for welfare benefits. "Vast sums are being spent by governments across the industrialized and developing worlds on automating poverty," this series reports, "and in the process, turning the needs of vulnerable citizens into numbers, replacing the judgment of human caseworkers with the cold, bloodless decision-making of machines."

TurboTax's 20-Year Fight to Stop Free Tax Filing
ProPublica
Government officials have long promised a simpler, faster, cheaper tax form, often saying most Americans ought to be able to file their return on a postcard. One reason that hasn't happened: lobbying by the company behind TurboTax, the software now used by 40 million Americans. Under an agreement that commercial tax programs reached with the IRS 17 years ago, free online filing was to be made available to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS pledged not to create a government-run system. But this article reports that customers lured with the promise of "free" online filing can be pushed into paying, some more than $200.

The Teenager Who's Been Married Too Many Times to Count
BBC
Rusulwoke to findherselfalone. Her new husband had gone. The marriage had lasted just three hours. It wasn't the Iraqi teenager's first marriage. It wasn't even her second, third or fourth. In fact she's been married too many times for her to count. She isn't alone. Many young women are forced into a special type of Islamic marriage - a "zawajal-mutaa" or "pleasure marriage" - and that is simply a way of allowing religiously approved sex. "You can marry a woman for half an hour, and as soon as it's over, straight away you can marry another one," says onecleric. For poor girls likeRusulwho marry for money, the arrangements are form of paid child abuse. 

In Rush to Harvest Body Parts, Death Investigations Upended
Los Angeles Times
When an organ donor dies, time is of the essence. As a result some coroners in Los Angeles and San Diego counties have had to guess at the cause of death because body parts have already been moved and transplanted. Wrongful-death and medical malpractice lawsuits have been thwarted by early tissue harvesting. But the trade-off isn't always between determining the cause of one person's death and saving another person's life. This article reports that most of the bodies are beingharvestedforskin, bone, fat, ligaments and other tissues that are generally not used for life-threatening conditions. Those body parts fuel a booming industrial biotech market in which a half-teaspoon of ground-up human skin is priced at $434. That product is one of those used in cosmetic surgery to plump lips andposteriors,fill cellulite dimples and enhance penises.

Cannabis Tax Windfall Has Fallen Short of Expectations
Politico
Eleven states and the District of Columbia have given the green light to recreational cannabis, driven in part by dreams of easy money. They are finding instead that it's not always the cash cow they envisioned and that there are plenty of other complicated issues to confront as they try to create and manage a legal market for a product long considered taboo. California, for example, thought it might generate $1 billion a year in pot taxes; the state raised not even a third of that in fiscal 2018-19, the first full year since recreational sales began. Massachusetts had projected it would bring in $63 million in revenue for its first year of recreational pot, which ended in June, and didn't even get half of that. Other states have fared better: Colorado israisingabout what it had expectedand Nevada's bounty has exceeded projections. This article explores the intricacies of setting pot taxes.

The Dangerously Cheesy Collectible Cheetos Market
The Outline
This story may sound strange until you remember that people collect weird things - includingbackscratchers, banana labels, toe nails andfruit remains- and that they are prone to see theVirgin Maryin their pancakesandnuns in their cinnamon buns. Little wonder that there's a robust trade in uniquely shaped Cheetos. On eBay, you can find hundreds of listings for so-called "rare Cheetos." "Very rare!" listings caw. "Undeniable!" Would you like to buy a fluffy baby penguin ($849.99) or a "Flamin' Hot"-flavored Michael Jackson ($699.99)? Perhaps instead a fetus ($595), a phallus ($500), or a rock ($849.99)? There's araygun($607) if you want one, or porn star Ron Jeremy holding his member ($9,999.99). "Not to be eaten, just stored as a collectible," warns the seller of aCheetoshaped like a bald eagle sitting on a branch ($849.99).The reporter traces the origin of this phenomenon back to AndyHuot, who bought a bag of Cheetos in 2013 that included crunchy treats shaped like a perfect number seven, a Loch Ness monster, a Sasquatch, a hammerhead shark, and a T-Rex. "Once you find one, you see them everywhere," saidHuot, the man behind an Instagram account called@CheeseCurlsofInstagram.