RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
July 7 to July 13, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney reports on the workings – and coverup – of what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history: the sexual victimization of public school students nationwide by teachers and other school employees. Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 public schools each year, the number who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. These would dwarf the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America. “The rate of educator sexual misconduct is ten times higher in one year’s time than in five decades of abuse by clergy,” says a victims' advocate. For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public. The shielding of abusive educators has earned an ugly nickname: “passing the trash.” That’s when miscreant teachers are allowed to find employment in other school districts. While stories involving female teachers may be more titillating and gain more media attention, about two-thirds of the predators in schools are male. Critic: “It is so goddamn egregious what they have done to protect people who do this. Lawmakers will have to break the institutional complicity that surrounds this or they’ll just be protecting the perpetrators.” Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Roach-Infested Hotel in Portland, Maine, RCI
Pandemic Tax Credit Free-For-All, RCI
NYC Security Firm Made Money Vanish, RCI
When Lobsters Made Taxpayers See Red, RCI
Biden's $230 Million Broken Gaza Pier, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway How Biden’s Inner Circle Worked to Hide Signs of Aging, Wall Street Journal
White House Physician Involved in Biden Family Business, Fox
Ex-Trump Aides Crafted 'Project 2025' Plan He Disavows, Intercept
Biden Has Prohibited Oil Drilling Across 41 Million Acres, Washington Free Beacon
Laying Bare Failures to Protect Migrant Kids, Just the News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series As a cost-saving move, Medicare Advantage – the $450-billion-a-year system in which private insurers oversee Medicare benefits for some 67 million seniors and disabled people – empowered insurance companies to add diagnoses to ones that patients’ own doctors submit. The idea was that they could catch conditions that doctors neglected to record. Instead, this article reports, private insurers have turned this approach into a cash cow, making hundreds of thousands of “questionable diagnoses” that triggered at least $50 billion in extra taxpayer-funded payments from 2018 to 2021: The insurers make new diagnoses after reviewing medical charts, sometimes using artificial intelligence, and sending nurses to visit patients in their homes. They pay doctors for access to patient records, and reward patients who agree to home visits with gift cards and other financial benefits. … Some diagnoses claimed by insurers were demonstrably false, the Journal found, because the conditions already had been cured. More than 66,000 Medicare Advantage patients were diagnosed with diabetic cataracts even though they already had gotten cataract surgery, which replaces the damaged lens of an eye with a plastic insert. This article suggests reform won’t come anytime soon. A spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees Medicare, said the agency was making changes that would continue to ensure “taxpayer dollars are appropriately spent.” Medicare Advantage “offers robust and stable options” for beneficiaries, the spokeswoman said. After Russian intelligence exploited a flaw in a Microsoft program to launch one of the most devastating cyber espionage attacks in history against U.S. government agencies – stealing intelligence from the National Nuclear Security Administration, National Institutes of Health and the Treasury Department – the Biden administration set up a new board and tasked it to figure out what happened and tell the public. But, this article reports, that probe of what’s known as the Solar Winds hack never happened: A full, public accounting of what happened in the Solar Winds case would have been devastating to Microsoft. ProPublica recently revealed that Microsoft had long known about – but refused to address – a flaw used in the hack. The tech company’s failure to act reflected a corporate culture that prioritized profit over security and left the U.S. government vulnerable, a whistleblower said. … As a result, there has been no public examination by the government of the unaddressed security issue at Microsoft that was exploited by the Russian hackers. None of the SolarWinds reports identified or interviewed the whistleblower who exposed problems inside Microsoft. This article reports that the government’s failure to review SolarWinds, and the central role that Microsoft’s weak security culture played in the attack, hindered changes that could have mitigated or prevented a subsequent attack by another adversary: the 2023 attack in which Chinese state hackers exploited an array of Microsoft security shortcomings to access the email inboxes of top federal officials. In recent months it seemed that Oakland had finally got on top of the crime wave that has gripped the city. Mayor Sheng Thao and California Gov. Gavin Newsome touted the April crime stats that showed a 33% drop from the previous year. But, this article reports, a Chronicle review of Oakland police data finds that the city overstated the improvements actually seen on the streets: More troubling, the analysis found a persistent problem in the Citywide Weekly Crime Reports published by Oakland police, which compare incomplete year-to-date figures from the current year to complete year-to-date figures from past years. … Given currently available data, it isn’t possible to know just how much the 33% figure overestimated Oakland’s overall reported crime drop. A Chronicle analysis of Oakland’s underestimates in previous years suggests that though overall crime was almost certainly down in Oakland through April, that reduction may fall to 20%, possibly less, when the data is fully updated. While acknowledging flaws in the reports, this article reports that police officials “do little to correct the record when politicians and media outlets cite the inaccurate data and trends.” New York is a tale of two cities. One is a glittering playground of vast wealth; the other is neighborhoods filled with people struggling to get by. Guess where the city is housing, feeding and educating the newly arrived migrants who now call the Big Apple home? Three of the top five most shelter-saturated ZIP codes — which cover parts of the Jamaica, Queens and East New York, Brooklyn— are among the poorest areas in New York City, with median incomes below $37,300, according to Data Commons. … None of the city’s 193 migrant shelters reviewed by The Post are located in the top five ZIPs by median income in New York City, which covers Tribeca, Battery Park City and other parts of Lower Manhattan, as well as Lincoln Square, records show. This article reports that already challenged local public schools are exhausting resources trying to educate young migrants, who are far behind in their studies compared to other students of similar ages. Requests from city council members representing these poor neighborhoods for more resources from City Hall to help handle the new arrivals are routinely ignored, leaders say. A disturbing form of discrimination is not only spreading across the land, it is also entirely legal: price discrimination. In age of algorithms, this article reports, companies filter the vast quantities they have collected on each of us through AI to figure out how much we're willing to pay for the same product or service: Not only do retailers know what you've bought and how much money you make, but often they know where you are, how your day is going, and what your mood is like, all of which can be neatly synthesized by AI neural networks to calculate how much you'd pay for a given item in a given moment. No area of commerce is too personal to be off-limits. Dating apps are harvesting our romantic lives for data, but some openly brag about doing so to increase profitability. … Your age, gender, and sexual orientation might determine what the AI decides you need to pay for love. This article reports that your phone’s battery level influences the price Uber charges. The company disputes them, but if the allegations against Uber are true it's easy to see a rationale: Those with less battery juice left are likely more desperate, and those whose phones are minutes away from dying won't hesitate to pay nearly any price to get a car before they're stranded. | 