RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
November 19 to November 25, 2023 Georgia’s failure to employ enough correctional officers has left the state in crisis mode, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation has found. This article, the third in a series, reports: Massive understaffing plagues facilities that house some of the state’s most violent prisoners, and the result can be prisons awash in blood. Gangs are free to carry out increasingly brazen attacks, with beatings and stabbings now routine. Prisoners driven to suicide are left unwatched and able to accomplish their desperate acts. … the system is operating at such shocking levels of understaffing it is impossible to keep prisoners and staff safe. As of August, 70% or more of the correctional officer jobs were vacant at eight of the prisons the GDC operates. With so few staff, and with so many prisoners affiliated with gangs, almost anything can happen, especially in prisons overflowing with drugs, cellphones and weapons. Between 2020 and the end of 2022, at least 90 people were slain in Georgia’s prisons, three times the number from the previous three years. Last year alone, at least 43 state prisoners died by suicide, well above the suicide numbers for any other recent year. And this year is on track to be worse, in terms of violent deaths and suicides, the AJC has found. Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books U.S. Pension Cash for Teamsters' 3,500 Dead, RCI
A Heaping Helping of Food Stamp Fraud, RCI
U.S. Profligacy Pavilion at Japan Expo, RCI
Agency Studies Giving Itself A Raise, RCI
Elder Eviction Threat for School Parking, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Call for Probe of J6 Panel as Withheld Tapes Are Released, Fox News
Jan. 6 Defendant Pleads Case to Son Who Turned Him In, New York Times
DeSantis' Secret Chinese Backer, Miami Herald
How Democrat Donor Kept Hunter Biden Afloat, Just the News
Solar Company Accused of Scam Got $3B From Biden Admin, Free Beacon
'New Right' Group Has Secret Liberal Donors. Why?, Daily Beast
Amazon Removes 'The Plot Against the President' Film, Breitbart Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Armed bandits are exploiting the record number of people crossing the Darién Gap – a 100-kilometer stretch of jungle connecting Colombia and Panama – to kidnap and rape desperate migrants, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). This article reports that the organization said it treated 397 survivors of sexual violence this year – many of them children – once they safely reached Panama. The number far exceeds the 172 recorded in 2022, and the charity says it is the latest example of how the suffering of migrants in the Darién is becoming normalized: Among the harrowing testimonies given to MSF, migrants described being taken to tents and raped by groups of armed men in front of other migrants. “I saw many people raped. I saw them left naked and beaten,” one Venezuelan woman told MSF. “One, two or three of them grab you and rape you, and then the next one comes and rapes you again, and if you scream, they beat you.” In some cases, people who tried to defend the victims were beaten or killed, including a young boy who was shot in the head. The number of similar accounts has spiked in recent months with MSF treating 107 sexual violence cases in October alone. Three of the recent rape survivors were aged 11, 12 and 16. Earlier this year, Arab forces waged a campaign of killing and rape that expelled most of the ethnic-African Masalit tribe from the Sudanese city of El Geneina. This month, members of paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – which worked with the Sudanese army to topple the government in 2022 but is now at war with the army and its allies – returned to finish the job in the nearby district of Ardamata. Dozens of survivors of this month’s attacks, which overwhelmed Sudan’s military, spoke to Reuters. Many of them described seeing Masalit men rounded up and shot. Some said they saw people being hacked to death with axes and machetes. Hundreds were taken to a soccer field in the area, where two eyewitnesses said they saw people being executed by Arab captors. Bloated corpses lay in the streets of Ardamata for days. Homes were burned and looted: The attack on Ardamata comes after the RSF, a paramilitary force drawn mainly from Arab tribes, and allied Arab militia forces earlier this year drove hundreds of thousands of El Geneina’s former Masalit majority out of the city. In a campaign that lasted almost two months, Arab forces killed hundreds of residents of El Geneina, most of them members of the Masalit tribe. Many of the survivors fled to Chad. It’s unclear how many Masalit remain in El Geneina. In 2022, the multiethnic city had a population of 540,000, according to UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency. In the wake of this year’s fighting in Darfur, almost half a million Sudanese refugees now live in camps on the Chad side of the two nations’ border. For 35 years, this article reports, Angela Jemmott and her five brothers paid premiums on a long-term care insurance policy for their 91-year-old mother. But the policy does not cover home health aides whose assistance allows her to stay in her Sacramento bungalow, near the friends and neighbors she loves. Her family pays $4,000 a month for that. They are not alone, this article reports: The glaring gaps in access to coverage persist despite steady increases in overall payouts. Last year, insurers paid more than $13 billion to cover 345,000 long-term care claims, according to industry figures. Many policyholders and their relatives reported that their plans helped them avert financial catastrophes when they faced long-term care costs that would have otherwise eviscerated their savings. But others have been startled to learn that policies they paid into over decades will not fully cover the escalating present-day costs of home health aides, assisted-living facilities or nursing homes. And in other cases, people who are entitled to benefits confront lengthy response times to coverage requests or outright denials, according to records kept by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the organization of state regulators. The article reports that the larger problem involved the uninsured. While the federal government estimates that 70 percent of people 65 and older will need critical services before they die, only 3 to 4 percent of Americans 50 and older pay for a long-term care policy. And most older polices, such as the one Jemmotts bought in the 1980s, covered only nursing homes. Repeated government efforts to create a functioning market for long-term care insurance — or to provide public alternatives — have never taken hold. Today, most insurers have stopped selling stand-alone long-term care policies: The ones that still exist are too expensive for most people. The Dallas Morning News found alarming gaps in fentanyl testing during months of reporting this year on the synthetic opioid’s deadly impact across North Texas. Its “Deadly Fake” series found: The lack of widespread testing for fentanyl is especially concerning given that the drug is often disguised as other substances and its users aren’t always aware they’re taking it, according to many of the experts interviewed. ... The reasons for the gaps in testing are complex. They range from municipal budgetary constraints to a confusing federal regulatory environment that, until last month, didn’t permit rapid fentanyl testing in clinics or hospitals. This article suggests the newspaper is prompting action: Sixteen days after The News contacted the Food and Drug Administration to request an interview on its testing regulations and the lack of a rapid fentanyl test for clinical use, the department announced Oct. 27 that it cleared the first over-the-counter rapid fentanyl test for use in all settings. “This test is an example of the FDA’s continued commitment to authorize tools that can reduce deaths associated with overdoses,” Jeff Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a written statement. From the Annals of the Honor System, new IRS income-based guidelines for the federal electric vehicle tax credit are a "recipe for fraud," warns the head of the Tax Foundation. Staring January 1, 2024, consumers will now be able to automatically claim the tax credit (up to $7,500 for a new EV) at the point of sale on new or used EV purchases, rather than wait to claim it on their tax return, according to the latest Treasury Department guidance: Eligibility for the tax credit is based on individual or joint income, creating a situation where the IRS would have to claw back the credit if an ineligible recipient received the credit at the point of sale on a new or used EV. “This policy is a recipe for fraud, confusion, overpayments, and mistakes. And it will be very difficult for the IRS to police it and verify each transaction," Scott Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation, told Just the News. "Remember, buyers are only eligible for the credit if they earn less than $150,000 for singles and $300,000 for joint filers. Is it realistic to think that the salesman at a dealer is going to ask people to show their tax returns before purchasing the car?" Scott asked. The decision to trust before verifying comes as a similar experiment regarding COVID-19 relief has been shown to have been produced the most expensive episode of fraud in U.S. history. A contract provision known as a “stay or pay” clause – which requires employees to pay a penalty if they do not stay at their jobs for a defined period of time in order to recoup costs related to hiring and training – has long been common for certain high-paying roles or in certain specialized industries, such as for airline pilots and software engineers. This article reports that the use of the clauses has grown rapidly over the past decade, and it has seemingly exploded since the start of the pandemic, as companies try to retain workers in a tight labor market: These contract terms have been applied to bank workers, salespeople, dog groomers, police officers, aestheticians, firefighters, mechanics, nurses, federal employees, electricians, roofers, social workers, paramedics, truckers, mortgage brokers, teachers and metal polishers. Legal experts believe stay-or-pay clauses might now be in industries that employ a third of all American workers. This article reports on a nursing home worker who was told he would have pay his company $20,000 if he wanted to quit. “On top of all that, they informed him that his case would be referred to private arbitration, and if [he] lost he would be responsible for the cost of the arbitration and the legal fees of the company, not to mention the cost of his own lawyer.” |
