RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Dec. 22 to Dec. 28, 2019 Abortion rights advocates hoping to make it easier to end later-term pregnancies have outsourced a potentially dangerous RU-486 drug trial to the impoverished African nation of Burkina Faso. Mark Hemingway reports for RealClearInvestigations that excessive bleeding is a common side effect of the protocol. That raises the question of why the trials are being conducted in a place with chronic shortages of transfusion blood. Hemingway reports: - Researchers report difficulty recruiting American women for similar research in the U.S.
- The FDA approves the two-drug trial in the U.S. only for early pregnancies.
- The Burkina Faso study began 2½ years ago.
- The study's local director told RCI, "Right now there are big problems of need in blood bags, but fortunately, thanks to God we did not have a case that required a transfusion."
- The trial's sponsor is a New York-based group aligned with Planned Parenthood: Gynuity Health Projects.
- Gynuity is doing other research in 10 American states on prescribing abortion drugs through telephone or Internet consultations.
- If Gynuity's trials are successful, they might make it widely possible for women seeking abortions to perform them themselves, leaving legal restrictions on abortion difficult to enforce.
- The research in Burkina Faso and the U.S. is happening as the advocates redouble efforts to counter a conservative-leaning Supreme Court and restrictive new state abortion laws.
- Past Western-sponsored population control efforts have endangered the health of women.
Comey or 'Corney'? Stalking
A Kernel of a Kerning Conspiracy The blockbuster internal FBI report on the bureau's spying abuse has grown a cornfield of conspiracy fever dreams because digital searches of its public online text saw "Comey" as "Corney," meaning ex-Director James Comey's correct last name was unsearchable. Writing with some bemusement, Eric Felten has the story for RealClearInvestigations: - It's "an intentional conspiracy to shield James Comey from key-word searches," concluded an online poster at "conspiracy reddit."
- If you searched for "Comey" in the Justice Department Inspector General's original report, your computer told you there was no such word in the document.
- But search for "Corney" and you got nearly 150 hits.
- Was this a computer "Optical Character Recognition" problem? Misinterpreting an "m" as "rn" ?
- No, says the online poster. The poster counted up the 23,851 "m's" in the report and found the only ones represented as "rn" were those in "Comey."
- But, Felten asks, what would be the point? "I rather doubt that U.S. Attorney John Durham is going to be fuzzled by a trick keyword search. "
More significant, Felten writes, is that the problem has been fixed in a revised official text. That means the Department of Justice appears to have made a change "in response to debates among those who proudly define themselves as conspiratorialists." The Trump Investigations: Top Articles House Counsel: Trump May Be Impeached Again, Politico
How an 'Urgent' Tip Became 'High Crimes', Associated Press
Misled, Spy Court Probes All Requests Using Suspect FBI Lawyer, The Hill
Durham Turns Focus to Ex-CIA Boss Brennan, New York Times
IG Report Hints Comey Was In On FBI's FISA Misconduct, Federalist
FISA Court Order Omits Key FBI Players Cited in Horowitz Report, Fox News
Intel Sources on Bullying by Trump, Loyalists, Washington Post
After FBI Fired Him, Steele Pushed Dirt Through John McCain, Breitbart
Rachel Maddow Rooted for the Steele Dossier. Then It Fell Apart. Washington Post Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Death, Sex Assault, Hunger Strikes in ICE Lockups Across U.S.
USA Today Network As is all too common these days, this fine investigation is marred by anti-Trump bias. It reports that at least 29 fatalities have occurred in the "rapidly growing network of detention centers" used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since President Trump took office in January 2017. This investigation also found more than 400 allegations of sexual assault or abuse, inadequate medical care, regular hunger strikes, frequent use of solitary confinement, more than 800 instances of physical force against detainees, and nearly 20,000 grievances filed by detainees. What it doesn't do is compare those numbers to rates during previous administrations, creating the impression that Trump is pursuing uniquely cruel policies; it does cite data stretching back to 2015 but doesn't separate out Obama and Trump numbers. It reports that the United States has a $3 billion network of 221 detention facilities. But there were 350 such centers under George W. Bush and about 200 under President Obama, so the claim that there is a "rapidly growing network of detention centers" seems alarmist. (The number of detainees has grown rapidly, continuing a trend that started during the Obama administration). It's too bad because the larger point of the article is important: These detainees are being treated like criminal prisoners even though they are awaiting a civil hearing. Georgia: Jail Doctor's Care-for-Inmates Gold Mine
Atlanta Magazine/Macon Telegraph Inmates have a right to medical care. But politicians want to keep costs down. In response many jail systems have farmed out care to private companies. This article focuses on the mixed record of one extremely successful Georgia physician, Dr. Carlo Musso. His company, CorrectHealth, now oversees care for 15,000 inmates at 40 lockukps across four states. In some ways, Musso is a pioneer, not just recognizing the dysfunction of the system, but offering an answer to a fundamental problem vexing county sheriffs: How do we provide quality care on the lowest possible budget? How a Bulgarian Poisoning Exposed the Kremlin's Killers in Europe
New York Times The first poisoning, at a rooftop restaurant in Sofia, didn't kill the arm manufacturer Emilian Gebrev and his son. So after Gebrev was released from the hospital, the assassins struck again, poisoning him and his son once more at their summer home on the Black Sea. The father and son survived once again (no word on the fate of the failed assassins). In any event, Western security and intelligence officials say the Bulgaria poisonings were a critical clue that helped expose a campaign by the Kremlin and its sprawling web of intelligence operatives to eliminate Russia's enemies abroad and destabilize the West. Russian assassins have been busy since Putin's rise. This report follows on the heels of an October article in the New York Times that revealed that a specialized group of Russian intelligence operatives — Unit 29155 — had for years been assigned to carry out killings and political disruption campaigns in Europe. Intelligence and security officials say the unit is responsible for the assassination attempt last year against Sergei V. Skripal, a Russian former spy in Britain; a failed operation in 2016 to provoke a military coup in Montenegro; and a campaign to destabilize Moldova. UAW Boss Expensed Luxe Villas, $13K in Cigars
New York Times On a single day in December 2015, Gary Jones, who resigned last month as president of the United Automobile Workers, spent more than $13,000 of the union's money at a cigar store in Arizona. The purchases, documented by a federal complaint filed against a union leader in September, were part of more than $60,000 in cigars and cigar paraphernalia that Jones and other UAW officials expensed to the union between 2014 and 2018. And the cigar purchases were in turn just a small portion of the roughly $1 million in union money that court filings say UAW officials spent on golf outings, four-figure dinners and monthslong villa rentals during regular retreats in Palm Springs, Calif., and elsewhere. The scandal comes on top of an investigation into company and union officials' improper use of millions of dollars from a joint Fiat Chrysler-UAW training center. Jones's predecessor as president, Dennis Williams, is accused of encouraging the use of Fiat Chrysler funds meant for worker education as a way to pay for the extravagant spending in Palm Springs and other places. Colleges Turn Students' Phones Into Surveillance Machines
Washington Post Short-range phone sensors and campus-wide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students from dorm to desk. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health. One company that monitors such activity says it gathers 6,000 location data points per student every day. School and company officials call location monitoring a powerful booster for student success: If they know more about where students are going, they argue, they can intervene before problems arise. But some schools go even further, using systems that calculate personalized "risk scores" based on factors such as whether the student is going to the library enough. But some educators say such prying threatens to undermine students' independence and prevents them from pursuing interests beyond the classroom because they feel they might be watched. Global Insect Populations Are Collapsing and We Don't Know Why
Wired The apocalypse is happening, this story seems to suggest: "Insects seem to be in global decline. Research in Germany suggests the number of flying insects there has fallen more than 75 per cent in the last 30 years. In February 2019, a review of 73 studies conducted since 2013 found that 40 per cent of insect species are in danger of going extinct in the next few decades. The total mass of insects worldwide is dropping by 2.5 per cent per year - a rate that means they could completely vanish within a century." Yet a researcher explains, "But the evidence - the quantitative data, the really solid evidence - is almost entirely absent." So, this article reports, researchers are trying to figure out what may be a very alarming situation. FDA Kept Death Data on Heart Devices From Public View
Kaiser Health News The Food and Drug Administration files thousands of reports of patients' deaths related to medical devices through a reporting system that keeps the safety data out of the public eye. The system is similar to a vast program exposed earlier this year by Kaiser Health Network that kept device-injury reports effectively hidden within the agency. The FDA shuttered the program after the article about it was published, and released millions of records. NYC Cyclists Recount Carnage of an Extremely Deadly Year
Gothamist Cycling deaths have nearly tripled in New York City, in large part because far more Gothamites are choosing two-wheeled transportation (including city-sponsored bike-sharing). This article puts faces to the carnage in an effort to honor the lives lost: Over the course of the last month we've learned that those killed while riding a bike were immigrants from Japan, Bangladesh and Israel; native New Yorkers and recent arrivals from Virginia, Kentucky, and Massachusetts; children and teenagers who loved video games and soccer. Grandmothers who loved to exercise, and practice yoga. A sculptor, a triathlete, a civil servant, and a rising indie wrestling star. People who cycled for work, for environmental reasons, to save on subway fare, and just to clear their heads. Can the American Casket Monopoly Be Disrupted?
The Hustle Every year, 2.8 million people die in the U.S. and around 40% of them opt to be buried — most commonly, in a casket. The wooden casket market has two big players: Batesville (a subsidiary of the even bigger Hillenbrand Inc.) and Matthews International Corporation, which control 82 percent of the market. This dominance allows them to enjoy huge markups, as caskets often retail for three to five times what it costs to build them. In recent years, much cheaper alternatives have become available. Amazon, Walmart, and Costco all sell caskets at less than half the average price of those from Batesville or Matthews. Yet, even these juggernaut corporations have struggled to chip away at the casket monopoly because, this article reports, Batesville and Matthews have strong relationships where casket buying happens: in funeral homes. |
