8 out of 10 of the Judges who run the state of New Mexico’s Elder Guardianship program have more than 1000 cases on their books.  What kind of a job can they do?  Don’t leave it to your imagination,,,hear the answer from syndicated columnist Diane Dimond who came home to Albuquerque to shake things up.  When families go to court to fight over care for an elder…follow the money…gobs of it go to the system and the people who feed off it.

In Ukraine, a few bullets still fly across the line of secession, a few people on both the government and secessionist side die, but for the most part, the frozen war in the Eastern part of the country remains frozen.  It’s the Ukrainian Government’s mandated war against institutional corruption that former US Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst and I will talk about.  He says it’s going slowly, I say it’s going South.  Will Donald Trump create the right mix of toughness and love to make Ukraine make itself better?

In Syria, where 5 years of war has left more than 400,000 people dead, and more than half the population – between 11 and 12 million Syrians -- out of their homes, the Assad government and its Russian, Iranian and Lebanese allies are winning and the rebels, including some American clients, are losing…but does that mean an end to the war is in sight?  Christopher Phillips, author of the new book THE BATTLE FOR SYRIA says, not likely.  Because the rebels’ international paymasters and suppliers aren’t ready to stop.

Everyone at the CIA, the FBI, the Congress and the

White House seem to agree…the Russians tried their best to hack their way to

undermining the 2016 Presidential election. The disagreement is over whether

their real aim was to shake voters’ confidence in the validity of the election, or

simply to elect Donald Trump President. Shane Harris of the Wall Street Journal on

what the intelligence agencies know and what they don’t, and how they learn what

they can about the growing universe of government and private hacks and hackers.

In NM, there is a process for applicant companies to justify a requested raise in rates charged the public.  But PNM seems to have ignored it.  The utility never explained why buying and Arizona nuclear plant and contracting for a lot of coal to be burned at Four Corners were good deals that will benefit customers as well as the company.  The state Public Regulation Commission over-ruled its hearing examiner and gave PNC the rate hike anyway.  Mariel Nanasi of New Energy Economy is challenging the PRC decision in court and tells us why.

Last year, the Justice Department received 10,250 proposed corporate mergers.  It approved all but 7 of them.  In the self-entitled world of Big Business this is called getting tough.  Helping these mergers alone, and getting very rich doing it, reports Pulitzer Prize winner Jesse Eisinger of Pro Publica , are a small group of academic economists, whose assurances that making big companies even bigger is going to work out for everyone are sometimes very, very wrong.

It’s the oldest trick in the book, bait a tyrant and make him discredit himself in responding.  2 cheeky pro-independence legislators in Hong Kong baited the Xi Jinping Government in Beijing and succeeded in advancing their cause with the Hong Kong public when the Chinese Government threw them out of the jobs that voters had just given them.  NY Times contributor Joseph Lian says the political tide is running against Beijing, especially as young voters come of age, but for now an authoritarian crackdown is continuing.

2 Princeton economists discovered the statistical evidence – over the past decade, White Americans, men and women, have been dying unnaturally young in the United States, especially in poor, rural and small town America.  The Washington Post has commissioned a series of articles detailing the human lives behind the numbers.  Pulitzer Prize winner Amy Ellis Nutt went to Durango, Colorado, where suicides among middle-aged White women have been surging.  The death rates are high even by the standards of the Rocky Mountain slice of America known as The Suicide Belt. 

BREXIT is headline code for the British exit from the European Union…a move of such potentially enormous significance that, when it passed in a national referendum, Prime Minister David Cameron handed in his resignation.  Now his successor Theresa May has the job of making it happen, and it’s not going to be easy.  Brits have been on a buying and borrowing spree, anticipating a big jump in inflation in 2017.  AP’s London Buro Chief Gregory Katz says the vote itself is not the last BREXIT surprise in store for the UK. 

Lt Gen Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s choice as National Security Adviser is frequently called, “the best intelligence officer of his generation.”  But what does that mean?  His revolution in how intelligence is gathered and processed changed the American war against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Gareth Porter of Truthout says Flynn’s methods raised the enemy body count, but, he reported 5 years ago in Afghanistan, many of the killed were not legitimate targets.  Drone video and cell phone intercepts can’t always tell you who is in your gunsights.