RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Feb. 2 to Feb. 8, 2020

Featured Investigation
Viva Virtual Vegas?
China's Offshore E-Gambling Boom
Doesn't Require Travel

With China forced to severely restrict travel to fight the coronavirus epidemic, a less-noticed aspect of its global economic influence could emerge with a winning hand: Philippine-based virtual gambling, in which mainland Chinese stay home and let their keyboard fingers do the wagering.

Writing for RealClearInvestigations and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Richard Bernstein reports:

• Gambling has taken off on China's periphery because it's illegal at home - where millions and millions of the world's most avid punters reside.
• Hence the sudden and remarkable rise of virtual (and real) casinos in the Philippines and elsewhere nearby.
• After the Philippines logged its first coronavirus death, its government severely curbed travel from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau.
• But with virtual casinos, Chinese bettors don't have to go anywhere to stream live gaming action unfolding across the South China Sea.
• The so-called POGOs - Philippine Offshore Gambling Operations - feature attractive young women onscreen working as "gambling avatars" to place punters' bets.
• POGOs have almost overnight become one of the Philippines' biggest businesses, with as many as 250,000 workers - the vast majority from China.
• There is plenty of opposition to the boom from Filipinos. "Gambling, loan-sharking, prostitution, money laundering. It's all connected to the POGOs," says one police official.
• But the Philippines' authoritarian President Rodrigo Duterte supports the POGOs -- even if Beijing itself says it doesn't.
• Big reason: $1.4 billion in licensing fees annually.

Read Full Article

Wuhan's Defiant Citizen Journalists

Citizen video journalists in epidemic-stricken Wuhan are rebelling against China's system of total information control, Bernstein also reports for RealClearInvestigations. Their video reports, some of which have gone viral, castigate their government for ineffectiveness and cruelty while claiming that the city's coronavirus crisis is far worse than the authorities will admit.

Bernstein reports:

• Undercutting rosy official reports, a man named Fang Bin has documented people cramming hospital hallways with IV bottles hanging above them, recording doctors pronouncing some of them dead.
• After he records one day, men who turn out to be police ominously show up at Fang's home. "We came to take your temperature," one of the men says.
• When Fang refuses to let them in, they break into his apartment and arrest him, but not before he manages to push the "send" button on his phone, sharing his video with the world.
• Another video, since scrubbed from the Internet, showed a man standing on a bridge shouting that he'd been sent away sick even though he risks infecting his wife and daughter.
• Then the video starts to shake and the image becomes too blurred to be made out, but the voice of the man taking the film can be heard saying, "He's jumped."

Read Full Article

Paul Sperry's Notebook: Theft Near White House
of Reporter John Solomon's Laptop
RealClearInvestigations

On the night before the Senate impeachment trial began, someone broke into veteran Washington investigative journalist John Solomon's car, which was parked near the White House, and stole his laptop, according to a D.C. Metropolitan Police Department report obtained by RealClearInvestigations. An award-winning investigative reporter, Solomon has been a political target in recent months for his articles questioning efforts to impeach President Trump. In December, House impeachment manager Adam Schiff released a report that published Solomon's phone records and cited Solomon dozens of times. "It was probably just a street criminal searching for pass codes," Solomon said. "Or it could be someone searching for my Ukraine stuff. We don't know at this point."

The Election Investigations: Top Articles

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Facial Recognition Moves Into a New Front: Schools
New York Times
Facial recognition programs are spreading across the country and being deployed in new ways in the United States, as public officials turn to the technology in the name of public safety. More than 600 law enforcement agencies started using the technology of one company, Clearview AI, in just the past year. Airports and other public venues, including Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, have adopted it as well. This article focuses on the introduction of facial recognition technology in schools. Proponents call it a crucial crime-fighting tool, to help prevent mass shootings and stop sexual predators. But opponents say the concerns about facial recognition — namely privacy, accuracy and racial bias — are even more worrisome when it comes to children.

'Supposed to Be Reparations': LA Blacks Denied Pot Licenses
The Guardian
In 2018, Los Angeles set up a program to provide cannabis licenses to African-Americans because they were allegedly targeted by the war on drugs. This article reports that the program has been plagued by delays, scandal and bureaucratic blunders, costing some intended beneficiaries hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. In order to be eligible, the city required that applicants already possessed appropriate retail spaces, which meant many last year raced to start renting storefronts and securing investors. They are now faced with uncertain timelines and no guarantee of licenses. Out of nearly 200 cannabis retailers previously approved by the city of LA to do medical dispensaries, only six are black-owned.

Oregon: Abusing Pets and Drugs, Veterinarian Left Wake of Despair
New York Times
Doctors who harm their patients face costly lawsuits and other serious consequences. There is much less accountability for veterinarians. While courts award multimillion-dollar judgments for negligence in hospitals, states treat companion animals as a form of property, and owners have little opportunity to sue for damages beyond the cost of a replacement. Unlike the extensive national records kept on doctors and nurses, there is no comparable data repository to track problematic veterinarians, and state review boards rarely put sanctioned practitioners out of business. This article focuses on the questionable practices of an Oregon veterinarian whose license was revoked and then restored. It also reports that while there is no nationwide database for the public to track veterinary discipline, state records show the rarity of serious enforcement actions. In Oregon in recent years, about 6 percent of complaints handled by the veterinary board resulted in the finding of a violation.

Texas: How Feral Pigs Took Over the U.S.
Sports Illustrated
From one point of view, wild pigs are pretty amazing. Weighing between 150 and 450 pounds, they can scale five-foot-high fences and burrow through almost anything they can get their noses under. Seen another way, they are a giant menace. They wreck ranchers' fences and free livestock and other animals, to whom they may pass on any of dozens of diseases and parasites -- if they don't eat them. Many Texans share the latter view, which is why, this article reports, they endorse the use of helicopters and AR-15s to hunt down and kill some of the 2.6 million wild pigs that call the Lone Star State home. Indeed, because they are such prodigious breeders at least two-thirds of that population - upward of 1.7 million pigs - must be killed each year simply to keep the count level.

The Toxic Legacy of California's Old Oil Wells
Los Angeles Times
Under federal, state and local laws, fossil fuel companies are required to post bonds to ensure that wells are ultimately plugged and remediated. This story reports that the decline of California's oil industry is increasing the chances that companies will go out of business, leaving the state with the cost of cleaning up the drilling sites, which could contaminate water supplies and waft fumes into people's homes. Of particular concern are about 35,000 wells sitting idle, with production suspended, half of them for more than a decade. Companies have given the state only $110 million to clean up the state's onshore oil and gas wells, while some estimate the true cost could be $6 billion.

How DC Society Got Scammed by One of Its Own
Washingtonian
It's true that Todd Hitt is a scion of the Hitt Contracting family—one of Washington's wealthiest construction dynasties. After years of puttering about, he reinvented himself in recent years as a brash and crazy-successful entrepreneur. To do this he convinced a long list of locals of things that were not true: that he was graduated from the Wharton business school; that he had a personal net worth in the billions, that when he wasn't busy with his own exploits, he was quietly helping run the family company, too. The FBI says he is shameless con man who ran a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. This article tells the story.

Liberal Women Who Pay Big to Dine and Hear How They're Racist
The Guardian
It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily go to a $2,500 dinner party in which they'd be asked, "What was a racist thing you did recently?" by two women of color, before appetizers are served. But that's exactly the point of "Race To Dinner," in which wealthy white women gather to have a "frank discussion" about race. This article reports that the program's co-founders, Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American, believe white, liberal women are the most receptive audience because they are open to changing their behavior. They don't bother with the 53% of white women who voted for Trump. White men, they feel, are similarly a lost cause. "White men are never going to change anything. If they were, they would have done it by now," Jackson says.