RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
September 22 to September 28, 2024 Former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Q. Nomani went to Springfield, Ohio, looking for the cats that Donald Trump says he’s been told have been kidnapped by some of the 15,000 Haitian migrants who have settled in the small town in recent years. Instead, she reports, she found a human-trafficking empire: What began as my efforts to track down a rumor about animal cruelty has turned into an investigation that reveals a malignant system of labor exploitation involving a local businessman, George Ten, whom Haitians and local residents call “King George,” the chief executive at First Diversity Staffing Group Inc., a Springfield company that has been the tip of the spear in the alleged trafficking operation of Haitians to the town. … According to sources, the network has become so significant and, thus, drawn the attention of the area FBI field office and Ohio Attorney General Yost, with the whistleblowers revealing the inner secrets of this operation. According to sources, the FBI has binders of evidence documenting the properties owned by “King George” and the systematic transport of Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, in dilapidated, unmarked white vans from Florida and other states. The areas of investigation include the almost 50 homes that George owns in Springfield, housing the migrants in squalid conditions, under the name of a limited liability corporation. George oversees a spider’s web of at least 10 shell corporations that I’ve discovered through court records and sources say he uses them to funnel money, property and assets, including his Audi, Mercedes and Porsche cars. In a separate article, the New York Post reports that Border Patrol agents are warning that kids as young as eight are being drugged and smuggled into the U.S. by traffickers posing as their parents or family members. Authorities say it’s not clear what is happening to the children once they are smuggled into here – but many are vulnerable to being exploited for child labor and child sex trafficking. Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books Federal Lending Grossly Underestimated, RCI
Billions in Savings Left on the Table, RCI
Illinois Mayor Parties Amid Financial Trouble, RCI
AIDS Talkfest More Like a European Vacay, RCI
Cuomo's Legal Tab Saps Taxpayers for $25M, RCI Election 2024 and the Beltway Trump Cancels Rally as Biden Admin Denies Protection, Federalist
Accusations Surround Agent Leading FBI Trump Probe, Just the News
DOJ Publishes Bounty Offer From Would-Be Trump Assassin, Federalist
NY Appeals Court Doubts Huge Trump Fraud Penalty, New York Times
Walz Education Appointee Calls for Overthrow of U.S., National Review
Pelosi's Husband Sold Visa Stock Ahead of DOJ Suit, Fox Business
The Strange Saga of Kamala Harris and Kimberly Guilfoyle, NYT
Transcripts Show Trump's Call for Jan. 6 Troops Rebuffed, Just the News
Now Sober, Vance’s Mom Deals With Her Past and His Future, NY Times Other Noteworthy Articles and Series The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s chief American collaborator – EcoHealth Alliance – leveraged connections in Anthony Fauci’s inner circle to survive federal scrutiny and keep millions in public funding flowing without turning over key data, this article reports: At a congressional hearing this summer, Fauci cast EcoHealth and its president Peter Daszak – who are currently under proposed debarment by the federal government – as minor and rogue grantees. But [documents show] EcoHealth was among the first grantees that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases contacted as news of a novel coronavirus first swirled, and Daszak requested supplemental funds to respond to the crisis. In early February 2020, when NIAID began conducting weekly calls with a few experts about the novel coronavirus, Daszak was among the invitees. And at the height of pandemic confusion and controversy in the summer of 2020, EcoHealth maintained the goodwill of NIAID, which awarded EcoHealth two new grants totaling $19.8 million, weakening the leverage of other officials to obtain information from one of the U.S. government’s only sources of insight into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Questions about EcoHealth’s connection to the Wuhan lab led the Trump White House to demand an end to its existing NIAID grant and that it turn over lab notebooks and unpublished genomic data as a condition of getting its funding back. This information could have shed light on the coronavirus research in Wuhan before the pandemic: But aided by allies within NIAID, millions continued to flow to EcoHealth, and Daszak would not ask his longtime collaborators in Wuhan for information sought by the U.S. government until 20 months later, in January 2022 – two years after the pandemic began. Some of the NIAID officials who helped Daszak were key to approving his coronavirus research in Wuhan in the first place, including gain-of-function research, research that can enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a pathogen. Some of these NIAID officials had spent years championing gain-of-function research as worth the risks, congressional transcripts also show. From the Annals of Better Late Than Never, the New York Times is finally recognizing that there are at least a few bad apples among the millions of migrants who have settled in the United States during the last four years. This article focuses on the widening U.S. presence of Tren de Aragua, a brutal gang that sprang from a Venezuelan prison and developed into a feared criminal organization focused on sex trafficking, human smuggling, and the drug trade: In the nation’s heartland, police officers from Denver to Chicago have made dozens of arrests for alleged crimes linked to the group, from retail theft to murder and prostitution. And in New York City, police detectives have spent months interviewing informants – including confessed gang members – to identify gang leaders and gather information on robbery patterns and recruitment efforts. Ironically, the article reports that opportunities to profit off the influx of migrants to the U.S. are what turned gang members into migrants themselves. “They identified there’s money to be made in immigration and they’ve taken advantage of that business,” said Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan investigative journalist who published a book about Tren de Aragua. In the United States, gang members have been accused of everything from shootings to human trafficking, mostly targeting members of the Venezuelan community. In a separate article, the New York Post reports that trouble is brewing in Chicago as some warn of a coming bloodbath between newly arrived Venezuelan gang members and members of long-established gangs in the Windy City: [Former gang member Tyrone] Muhammad, 53, who’s gone straight and runs a street patrol and violence prevention program called Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change says Venezuelan criminal gangs flooding shelters and taking over apartment buildings are the last straw for the struggling African-American community. He says they are furious at seeing government money going to what they call “non-citizens.” … “When the black gangs here get fed up with the illegalities and criminal activities of these migrants or non-citizens,” [Muhammad said], “the city of Chicago is going to go up in flames and there will be nothing the National Guard or the government can do about it when the bloodshed hits the streets. It’ll be blacks against migrants.” The skies are getting a lot less friendly. This article reports that pilots, aviation industry officials, and regulators are warning that spoofed Global Positioning System signals are spreading beyond active conflict zones near Ukraine and the Middle East, confusing cockpit navigation and safety systems and taxing pilots’ attention in commercial jets carrying passengers and cargo: The attacks started affecting a large number of commercial flights about a year ago, pilots and aviation experts said. The number of flights affected daily has surged from a few dozen in February to more than 1,100 in August, according to analyses from SkAI Data Services and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Modern airliners’ heavy reliance on GPS means that fake data can cascade through cockpit systems, creating glitches that last for a few minutes or an entire flight. Pilots have reported clocks resetting to earlier times, false warnings and misdirected flight paths, according to anonymized reports shared with government and industry groups. The silver lining in this dark cloud is that aviation safety officials said that while spoofing has disrupted some flights, it hasn’t posed major safety risks. Still, even though pilots are trained on how to use non-GPS navigation systems as a backup, managing the bogus GPS signals and alerts risks dividing pilots’ attention if a more serious problem strikes. From the Annals of It’s Worse Than We Have Imagined, this article reports that more than 700 children and teenagers, including at least one fourth grader, have been arrested and accused of making violent threats against schools in at least 45 states in the three weeks since two teachers and two students were killed at Apalachee High School in Georgia. Almost 10% were 12 or younger, according to a New York Times review of news reports, law enforcement statements, and court records: The arrests come as the police and schools confront an onslaught of threats of violence, gunfire and bombings. The reports have terrified students and their parents, caused attendance to plunge and forced the temporary closure of dozens of campuses. Some schools have canceled homecoming parades, middle school dances and Friday night football games. In Georgia alone, 98 students in 56 counties were taken into custody within two weeks of the Sept. 4 attack at Apalachee High School. … In one week in September, Arizona schools received 156 percent more threats than in the same week last year. A county in the Orlando, Fla., suburbs charged 24 students in the first 28 days of school with second-degree felonies for making threats. And in Ohio, a state school safety center had already received more reports of threats this year than in all of 2023, the vast majority this month. The article reports that most of the children were arrested for posting threats on social media – not for bringing firearms to school. One quoted expert worried that detaining and locking up so many children could hurt efforts to build trust with young people and encourage them to come forward with concerns. |
