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RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Feb. 17 to Feb.23

Featured Investigation

Currently about 1.5 million elderly Americans with at least $50 billion in assets do not have control of their lives. Deemed incompetent by judges, their fate is determined by court-appointed guardians who are often paid generous fees to make almost all their important decisions. As Diane Dimond reports for RealClearInvestigations, this system works well in many cases, but not all by a long shot. The money involved and the wide-open nature of many state statutes - which allow not only relatives but any adult to launch competency hearings - have led to the rise of a closed and secretive industry of elderly exploitation.

Dimondbegins with thecaseof Lillie White, an 88-year-old retired educator from Palm Coast, Florida, who disappeared from her doctor's office in 2016. Frantic relatives eventually learned that White's sole granddaughter, who had been removed from her will, had convinced a court to make the retired educator, with at least $4 million in assets, a ward of the state.It took more than two years,Dimondreports, beforeLillie's anguished loved ones learned from a private investigator that she had been placed inan assisted living community, "inside a locked unit for patients with dementia, an ailment her family insists she does not have. The relatives say she was not informed when her guardian sold her cherished home in Palm Coast and liquidated other of her assets to pay the hourly fees of the guardian, a court-appointed lawyer and other experts a judge had assigned to White's case."

Lillie White's case is not unique; it illustrates problems with guardianship that have been impervious to reform for decades-and growing with the expansion of the elderly population and opportunities to prey upon them.

• Guardians typically charge from $95 to $400 an hour. They are empowered to employ any number of helpers - brushing aside relatives willing to help - from personal shoppers and dog walkers to landscapers and home health-care nurses. Allegations of abuses and cronyism are frequent.
• It is up to judges to police their appointees, but funds to monitor them are scarce, and judges are often little inclined to keep track of what guardians or attorneys are doing or spending on behalf of the ward.
• Florida has long been a magnet for retirees, but it did not establish a statewide Office of Public and Professional Guardians until 2016. To date, the office has received some 500 hotline complaints in a state with 550 registered guardians. But little action has been taken against any guardians.

Read Full Article

The Trump Investigations: Top Articles

Inside Trump's War on the Investigations Encircling Him, New York Times
FBI Lawyer Baker Wanted Hillary Charged, but Was Talked Out of It,TheHill
IRS Agent Gave Cohen Transaction Files to Stormy Daniels Lawyer, NBC 
BruceOhrSays Wife's Thumb Drive Augmented Steele Dossier,TheHill
Ex-FBI Lawyer: 2 in Cabinet Were Open to 25th Amendment Bid, Fox News
Andrew McCabe: The Full '60 Minutes' Interview, CBS News

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

AOC, Her Boyfriend, and Some Swampy Financial Doings
Medium
While Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would like to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, questions have emerged about her own finances. After Luke Thompson of Medium revealed that Ocasio-Cortez's boyfriend, Riley Roberts, has an official  house.gov  email address and office phone number, Ocasio-Cortez said this was merely so that Roberts could have access to her calendar. But now there's more: Thompson found that Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabati,had started an organization called Brand New Congress in 2017. Apparently, this organization repeatedly gave money to Roberts. Why? Thompson says: "The answer seems to be thatChakrabartiwas funneling money paid to him by AOC's campaign back to Roberts and by extension to AOC."

Even at Top Colleges, Graduation Gaps Persist for Poor Students
Wall Street Journal
This article reports that elite colleges nationwide have increased the number of low-income students they enroll in recent years, but getting those students to graduate has been more challenging. The average difference in six-year graduation rates between students who received Pell grants—federal awards for low-income families—and those who didn't at a particular school was 8.9 percentage points, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data. While ignoring mismatch theory - which suggests many students admitted to top schools under affirmative programs might have been better off at less competitive institutions - it focuses on how elite schools are failing to do enough for poor students.

Inside the Horrifying World of Sexually Abusive Nuns
New York Post
After Pope Francis recently made the bombshell admission that  some nuns were abused by priests  and even used as sex slaves, dozens of Catholics have come forward to report a tangential, and just as evil, phenomenon— sexual abuse by nuns.TheSurvivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), a St. Louis-based advocacy group, said it has heard from 35 people who claim they were physically and sexually abused by nuns.Last week, New York opened up a window for old cases with the passage of the Child Victims Act. Before the new law, New York had one of the most restrictive statutes of limitations for childhood sexual abuse. Victims now have until age 55 to file civil suits and can press for criminal charges until age 28. The old statute capped lawsuits at age 23.

I Bought a House Encumbered With Solar Panels
Bloomberg Businessweek
California's requirement that all new homes starting next year have solar panels will be expensive - with lots of upfront costs for potential down-the-line savings. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone shoulder that burden? In fact, a range of businesses - third-party systems - are doing just that. In this article, a journalist recounts her experience trying to purchase a house with third-party solar panels and suggests that they are not a very good deal for many consumers.

Big Brother's Watching: He's Your Boss, the Fitness Coach
Washington Post
Health and fitness monitors worn on employees' bodies, such as those made by Fitbit, Garmin and Apple, are an increasingly valuable source of workforce health intelligence for employers and insurance companies. This exploding volume of highly sensitive health data is raising privacyconcerns and adding a new dimension to the relationship between workers and their employers. Often the information is not covered by federal rules that protect health records from disclosure. When it's combined with data such as credit scores, employees are giving up more insights about themselves than they realize. In general, employees in such programs voluntarily sign up for digital health monitoring. They are lured by cash, reduced premiums, or reimbursements for co-payments and deductibles. But privacy and workforce specialists warn the data could be used to favor the healthiest employees while punishing or stigmatizing those who are less healthy, or who show signs of unhealthy behavior such as heavy drinking or drug use.

Napkin Tossed at Hockey Game Ties Man to '93 Murder
New York Times
A Minnesota man was eating a hot dog at a hockey game when, the authorities said, he wiped his mouth with a napkin and tossed the remains in the trash. It was the moment cold-case investigators had been waiting for. The authorities, who had used a genealogy company to identify the man as a suspect in an unsolved murder from 1993, dug the napkin out of the trash and used DNA on it to tie him to the case, court records show. It is part of a larger trendin which authoritiesare using onlinegenealogy databases - most famously in the case of the Golden State Killer - to solve cases. Genealogical sleuthing techniques havealsoled to arrests in cases in Washington State, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.But the tactic has also raised ethical concerns about using genetic information from people who might have uploaded their DNA to find information about their heritage, without knowing it could help law enforcement officials track down family members.

YouTube Monetizing Sexualized Videos of Minors
Wired
Pedophiles are driving lots of traffic - and posting creepy comments - on YouTube videos showing children doing splits or lifting up their tops to show their nipples. Some of the children in the videos, most of them girls, appear to be as young as five. Many of the videos have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views, with hundreds of comments.This articlesnotes that the machines that run much of YouTube are creating other problems: The online video giant's "if you liked that you'll like this" algorithm makes it easy to find such content and the popularity of the videos means that ads for major cosmetics and car brands are appearing alongside them. In another story, the Los Angeles Times reportsFacebook decided which users are interested in Nazis— and let advertisers target them directly.

The True Story Behind an Iconic Vietnam War Photo
New York Times Magazine
They are among the most famous photographs connected to war - the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, the sailor kissing a nurse on VJ day, the wounded marine being evacuated during the Tet offensive. Such images are also mired in mystery and mild controversy. In the same week that the man who is probably the kissing sailor in that famous Times Square photo died, this article suggests that the man identified as the wounded soldier in the Vietnam - and lionized in a bestselling book and aNewseumexhibit - may not be thewounded solider. It is not a case of nefarious deception but innocent misidentification.

China: CRISPR Twins May Have Better Brains
MIT Technology Review
Chinese twins were born last year with genetically edited brains that may improve their cognitive function and memory. A Chinese scientific team used the new editing tool CRISPR to alter a gene that has been found to make mice smarter and improve human brain recovery after stroke. News of the experiment is raising the prospect that gene editing could one day be used to create super-intelligent humans. Although the researchers have been broadly condemned - and it is far from clear what the result will be in the twins - the experiment also raises fears of an ethically challenged biotechnology arms race between the U.S. and China.

When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online
Atlantic
Social media is not just the backdrop but the landscape for many modern kids. Facebook (founded in 2004), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006) came along around the time most of today's teenagers were born; Instagram (2010) came just a little later.While many kids may not yet have accounts themselves, their parents, schools, sports teams, and organizations have been curating an online presence for them since conception; a quarter of children begin their digital lives when parents upload their prenatal sonogram scans. This article addresses the shock many children feel when they realize their private lives are public and the inability of many adults, especially parents, to stop the sharing. There's even a portmanteau for it:sharenting.