Corporate Corruption News Articles

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Samsung is warning customers about discussing personal information in front of their smart television set. The warning applies to TV viewers who control their Samsung Smart TV using its voice activation feature. When the feature is active, such TV sets "listen" to what is said and may share what they hear with Samsung or third parties, it said. Privacy campaigners said the technology smacked of the telescreens, in George Orwell's 1984, which spied on citizens. The warning came to light via a story in ... the Daily Beast which published an excerpt of a section of Samsung's privacy policy for its net-connected Smart TV sets. These record what is said when a button on a remote control is pressed. The policy explains that the TV set will be listening to people in the same room to try to spot when commands or queries are issued via the remote. It goes on to say: "If your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party." Corynne McSherry, an intellectual property lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, [said] that the third party was probably the company providing speech-to-text conversion for Samsung. She added: "If I were the customer, I might like to know who that third party was, and I'd definitely like to know whether my words were being transmitted in a secure form." The third party handling the translation from speech to text is a firm called Nuance, which specialises in voice recognition, Samsung has confirmed to the BBC.

Note: Read more about Samsung's privacy issues in this 2013 Houston Chronicle article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

California will begin making its own low-cost insulin in an effort to make the essential diabetes treatment more affordable, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Thursday. "Nothing epitomizes market failures more than the cost of insulin," the governor said in a video posted on Twitter, "Many Americans experience out-of-pocket costs anywhere from three hundred to five hundred dollars per month for this life-saving drug." With a budget of $100 million, California plans to "contract and make our own insulin at a cheaper price, close to at cost, and to make it available to all," Newsom said. It's unclear exactly how inexpensive California's insulin will be or when the low-cost drugs will be available. Insulin in the U.S. costs almost $100 per unit, on average. That's nearly four times the price in Chile, which has the second-highest prices among the 34 countries analyzed by the nonprofit Rand Corporation, at less than $25 per unit. Currently, four in five Americans in need of insulin have incurred thousands of dollars in credit card debt to pay for the medication, according to a recent survey commissioned by health care organization CharityRx. The average debt among all survey participants was $9,000. California's program will allot $50 million toward the development of cheaper insulin products and $50 million on an in-state insulin manufacturing facility, Newsom said, adding that the facility "will provide new, high-paying jobs and a stronger supply chain for the drugs."

Note: The unethical corruption of big Pharma is so clearly seen in the ridiculously inflated prices of drugs in the US compared to other countries. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma profiteering from reliable major media sources.

The prices of new drugs in the U.S. have climbed for more than a decade, a study published Tuesday finds. According to a research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the launch prices of new brand-name drugs increased by nearly 11 percent every year from 2008 through 2021. "These prices are increasing far out of proportion to other health care services," said the lead author, Dr. Benjamin Rome. Rome, and his colleagues observed price increases for all types of drugs, including cancer drugs, non-cancer drugs, pills and injections, he said. "Ultimately," he said, "all health care costs are borne by consumers – either direct out-of-pocket costs, higher premiums or taxes in the case of public health insurance." He added, "Insurance companies can also require prior authorization for expensive new drugs or not cover the drugs at all." The researchers calculated the negotiable sticker prices for new drugs on the market, or the net price. Such prices, which were adjusted for inflation, were calculated in light of rebates many drugmakers offer for the drugs. The researchers limited their scope to drugs sold by public companies; the net price averages included nearly 400 new drugs in total. Median drug prices for a year's supply increased from $2,115 in 2008 to more than $180,000 in 2021. The greatest increases were for cancer drugs and therapies used to treat rare diseases. In 2008, 9 percent of drugs cost $150,000 or more a year, compared to 47 percent in 2021.

Note: For a more detailed and eye-opening analysis, see this article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma profiteering from reliable major media sources.

An unprecedented spree of policy changes and carveouts aimed at protecting Ukrainian civilians from Facebook's censorship systems has earned praise from human rights groups. But a new open letter addressed to Facebook and its social media rivals questions why these companies seem to care far more about some attempts to resist foreign invasion than others. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook and Instagram, rapidly changed its typically strict speech rules in order to exempt a variety of posts that would have otherwise been deleted for violating the company's prohibition against hate speech and violent incitement. The rule change ... included a rare dispensation to call for the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin, use dehumanizing language against Russian soldiers, and praise the notorious Azov Battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard, previously banned from the platform due to its neo-Nazi ideology. In a statement signed by 31 civil society and human rights groups ... criticism is directed squarely at American internet titans like Facebook. "We call for ... equal and consistent application of policies to uphold the rights of users worldwide," reads the letter. "Once platforms began to take action in Ukraine, they took extraordinary steps that they have been unwilling to take elsewhere. From the Syrian conflict to the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar, other crisis situations have not received the same amount of support."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media manipulation from reliable sources.

Snopes, which has long presented itself as the internet's premier fact-checking resource, has retracted 60 articles after a BuzzFeed News investigation found that the site's co-founder plagiarized from news outlets as part of a strategy intended to scoop up web traffic. "As you can imagine, our staff are gutted and appalled by this," Vinny Green, the Snopes chief operating officer, said. He said the Snopes editorial team was conducting a review to understand just how many articles written by David Mikkelson, the site's co-founder and chief executive, featured content plagiarized from other news sites. As of Friday afternoon, the team had found 60, he said. By Friday morning, dozens of articles had been removed from the site, with pages that formerly featured those articles now showing the word "retracted" and an explanation that "some or all of its content was taken from other sources without proper attribution." Mr. Mikkelson, who owns 50 percent of Snopes Media Group, will continue to be Snopes's chief executive, but his ability to publish articles has been revoked, Mr. Green said. In a statement, Mr. Mikkelson acknowledged he had engaged in "multiple serious copyright violations of content that Snopes didn't have rights to use." From 2015 to 2019 – under the Snopes byline, his own name and another pseudonym – Mr. Mikkelson published dozens of articles that included language that appeared to have been copied directly from The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, the BBC and other news sources.

Note: There are many serious questions about the biases of Snopes and some of their unscrupulous tactics, as is covered in this Forbes article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media corruption from reliable sources.

Robert Mazur was a federal agent. He infiltrated Pablo Escobar's Colombian drug cartel for two years in the mid-1980s by pretending to be Robert Musella, a money-laundering, mob-connected businessman. "My role was to come across to the cartel as a credible money launderer," Mazur said. As an undercover operative, he was working with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a Luxembourg-based bank with branches in more than 70 countries, in order to launder the cartel's money. BCCI was known to have accounts of drug operatives, terrorists, dirty bankers and others who want to hide money. At one point, he was out at a social event in Miami with a senior bank officer at BCCI who asked him point blank, "You know who the biggest money launderer in the world is? It's the Federal Reserve, of course." That sounds like a crazy allegation, but Mazur said the banker connected the dots for him: In Colombia, it's illegal for anyone to have a U.S. dollar account. But at the state-run Bank of the Republic there is a window they call the "sinister window" or the "anonymous window." There, you can trade in as much U.S. currency as you want. The central bank exchanges it for Colombian pesos at a high rate immediately. Mazur recalls the banker asking: "What do you think happens with that cash? It gets put on pallets, they shrink-wrap it and they're sending hundreds of millions of dollars back to the Federal Reserve. Why didn't anyone ... ask where this money was coming from?"

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on financial system corruption from reliable major media sources.

The offices of the Carlyle Group are on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, midway between the White House and the Capitol building. The address reflects Carlyle's position at the very centre of the Washington establishment. For 14 years now, with almost no publicity, the company has been signing up an impressive list of former politicians - including the first President Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker; John Major; one-time World Bank treasurer Afsaneh Masheyekhi and several south-east Asian powerbrokers - and using their contacts and influence to promote the group. But since the start of the "war on terrorism", the firm - unofficially valued at $3.5bn - has ... become the thread which indirectly links American military policy in Afghanistan to the personal financial fortunes of its celebrity employees, not least the current president's father. Among the firm's multi-million-dollar investors were members of the family of Osama bin Laden. "It should be a deep cause for concern that a closely held company like Carlyle can simultaneously have directors and advisers that are doing business and making money and also advising the president of the United States," says Peter Eisner, managing director of the Center for Public Integrity. "The problem comes when private business and public policy blend together. What hat is former president Bush wearing when he tells Crown Prince Abdullah not to worry about US policy in the Middle East?"

Note: Watch a 45-minute video on this subject titled Exposed: The Carlyle Group. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

On March 21, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that U.S. shell companies and their owners can once again conceal their identities – a move critics warn could weaken national security and spur illicit financial activity that puts the American public at risk. Treasury's initial beneficial ownership information (BOI) disclosure requirement for all companies with less than 20 employees garnered bipartisan support and Trump's approval during his first administration, but it was short-lived. Officially brought into force last January 2024, and then stymied by lawsuits, the requirement passed its final legal roadblock in February 2025 – only to be shelved a month later by the administration. Now, when a U.S. citizen sets up a shell company in the U.S., they do not have to disclose their identity or the identities of the company's "beneficial owners," or the individuals who profit from the company or control its activities. American beneficial owners of foreign shell companies that register in the U.S. have been granted the same anonymity. Under the latest limited regulation, only non-American owners will be required to register with the U.S. government. U.S. shell companies have been successfully used as cover for illegal arms sales for decades. Hints of a business's true breadth and depth only emerge when a trafficker is apprehended, such as the case of Pierre Falcone who used secret accounts in Arizona to hide his proceeds from arms trafficking to Angola.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in government and in the corporate world.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday launched an online searchable database listing contaminant levels in human foods, reflecting Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s ongoing efforts to reduce chemicals in food since taking office. The FDA said if a food product has contaminants exceeding established levels, the agency may find the food to be unsafe. However, it added these levels do not represent "permissible levels of contamination". The Health Secretary has often stressed reducing chemicals in food and, in the previous week, directed the FDA to revise safety rules to help eliminate a provision allowing companies to self-affirm food ingredient safety. RFK Jr. also told food companies ... that the Trump administration wanted artificial dyes out of the food supply. The FDA said it is establishing an online database called "Chemical Contaminants Transparency Tool" to provide a list of contaminant levels called "tolerances, action levels and guidance levels" to evaluate the potential health risks of these contaminants in human foods. "Ideally there would be no contaminants in our food supply, but chemical contaminants may occur in food when they are present in the growing, storage or processing environments," said Acting FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner. The online database also provides information such as the contaminant name, commodity and contaminant level type.

Note: Read more about the growing list of toxic chemicals banned in other countries but not the US. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption and toxic chemicals.

The owner of a data brokerage business recently ... bragged about the degree to which his industry could collect and analyze data on the habits of billions of people. Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun said that ... his company [can] deliver "personalized messaging at scale" to some 91 percent of the internet's adult web users. To deliver that kind of "personalized messaging" (i.e., advertising), Publicis must gather an extraordinary amount of information on the people it serves ads to. Lena Cohen, a technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that data brokers like Publicis collect "as much information as they can" about web users. "The data broker industry is under-regulated, opaque, and dangerous, because as you saw in the video, brokers have detailed information on billions of people, but we know relatively little about them," Cohen said. "You don't know what information a data broker has on you, who they're selling it to, and what the people who buy your data are doing with it. There's a real power/knowledge asymmetry." Even when state-level privacy regulations are passed (such as the California Consumer Privacy Law), those cases are often not given enough focus or resources for the laws to be enforced effectively. "Most government agencies don't have the resources to enforce privacy laws at the scale that they're being broken," Cohen said. Cohen added that she felt online behavioral advertising–that is, advertising that is based on an individual web user's specific browsing activity–should be illegal. Banning behavioral ads would "fundamentally change the financial incentive for online actors to constantly surveil" web users and share their data with brokers, Cohen said.

Note: Read more about the disturbing world of online behavioral ads, where the data isn't just used to sell products. It's often accessed by governments, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and other actors–sometimes without warrants or oversight. This turns a commercial ad system into a covert surveillance network. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is releasing new information on a financier's ties to Jeffrey Epstein's operations, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee announced. Since 2022, the committee has been investigating billionaire financier Leon Black – who co-founded and previously led asset management firm Apollo Global Management as CEO and has made payments to Epstein. Wyden is calling on the Department of Justice, the Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to "lift the veil" on financial support for Epstein. Wyden sent a letter to the federal agencies, providing the new findings from the committee's investigation, which is looking into payments of at least $158 million from Black to Epstein for "purported tax and estate planning advice." Wyden says the investigation led to new evidence through federal government records that show funds from Black to Epstein were used to finance Epstein's sex trafficking operations. The Finance Committee also obtained a 2023 settlement agreement between Black and the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Under the $62 million settlement, Black gained immunity from criminal prosecution in the USVI for financially supporting Epstein, according to Wyden, noting the settlement acknowledges "Jeffrey Epstein used the money Black paid him to partially fund his operations." A major U.S. bank waited seven years to report Black's payments to Epstein to the Treasury Department.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial system corruption and Jeffrey Epstein's child sex and blackmail ring.

An ex-JPMorgan Chase executive testified in London court that Jeffrey Epstein knew more about what was going on at the top levels of the bank than he did. Jes Staley – who went on to become chief executive of Barclays following his stint at JPMorgan – claimed that Epstein, the convicted child sex offender and disgraced financier who died in prison in 2019, had a "remarkable ability" to gather Wall Street intel. "Mr. Epstein was also well connected within the upper levels of JPMorgan itself," Staley said during his second day in the witness box as he appealed a proposed ban and $2.3 million fine from London's financial regulatory agency. "He seemed to be aware of things relating to the bank, that I was not aware of," Staley added. Staley – who is attempting to overturn a lifetime ban that the Financial Conduct Authority announced in 2023 – acknowledged his relationship with Epstein went beyond work. In 2000, JPMorgan's then-chief executive Douglas "Sandy" Warner told Staley he should get to know Epstein, Staley claimed in his witness statement. "Sandy Warner recommended that I should become acquainted with Mr. Epstein because he was an exceptionally well connected man who could help me, in my capacity at JPM, to form business relationships with influential and other well connected individuals," he said. Staley claimed he was not the only high-level figure at JPMorgan in touch with Epstein.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial system corruption and Jeffrey Epstein's child sex and blackmail ring.

Feeding incarcerated people has become big business. The food behemoth Aramark (which also services colleges, hospitals, and sports stadiums), as well as smaller corporations like Summit Correctional Services and Trinity Services Group, have inked contracts in the last decade worth hundreds of millions of dollars in prisons and jails across the country. The industry was worth almost $3.2 billion in 2022. Cell phone images smuggled out of jails and prisons across the country reveal food that hardly looks edible, let alone nutritious. At a jail in Cleveland, staff warned administrators in 2023 that the meals served by Trinity were so disgusting, that they put staff in danger. A 2020 study by the criminal justice reform advocacy group Impact Justice found that 94% of incarcerated people surveyed said they did not receive enough food to feel full. More than 60% said they rarely or never had access to fresh vegetables. Meager portions have left desperate people eating toothpaste and toilet paper. Most states spend less than $3 per person per day on prison food – and some as little as $1.02. The Food and Drug Administration's "thrifty plan" estimates that feeding an adult man "a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet" costs about $10 per day. The major private food providers also have a stake in the booming prison commissary business, where incarcerated people can buy staples like ramen, tuna and coffee. Poor food served in the chow hall drives hungry prisoners to the commissary.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in prisons and in the food system.

US taxpayers spent an estimated $6 billion researching, developing, and implementing new blockbuster weight-loss drugs. Yet Americans are now paying pharmaceutical giants – including one in Denmark – up to eleven times more for these medicines than patients in other countries, markups that are inflating consumers' insurance premiums and risk bankrupting the country's health care system. According to data shared with the Lever by researchers at Bentley University, the federal government spent $6.2 billion from 1980 to 2024 on the discovery and development of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) molecules, as well as research on how to use GLP-1 drugs to treat diabetes, obesity, and other diseases. GLP-1, a hormone that regulates blood sugar, was the foundation of the diabetes drug Ozempic, whose 2017 approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched a wave of other GLP-1-based diabetes and weight-loss medications coming to market. More than fifteen million people nationwide currently take GLP-1-related drugs like Ozempic, bringing in more than $50 billion in sales for pharmaceutical companies in 2024 – much of which went to the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. A Senate report ... found that if half of all Medicare and Medicaid patients with obesity took Wegovy and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, it could cost the federal health care system $166 billion per year.

Note: The makers of these weight-loss drugs could be hit with over 10,000 lawsuits over severe adverse events from these drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in government and in Big Pharma.

"Food is a weapon. When you sell real weapons, you control armies. When you control food, you control society. But when you control seeds, you control life on Earth," [Indian physicist and social advocate Vandana] Shiva says in her feature-length documentary The Seeds of Vandana Shiva, referring to industrial farming as the "single biggest destructive force on the planet today." Shiva may be most renowned for her work opposing Asia's Green Revolution, a well-meaning initiative in the 1960s to increase food production in less-developed countries. However, Shiva argued that the revolution's tactics were more harmful than helpful, increasing the use of toxic pesticides and polluting fertilizers while reducing indigenous seed biodiversity. Moreover, farmers became dependent on chemical solutions, which raised their operating costs. To combat this, the [Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology] founded seed banks across India in the 1990s as part of its Nine Seeds project, teaching farmers about sustainable agriculture, which incorporates practices that improve soil and ecosystem health, protect against erosion, and reduce the need for expensive chemicals. Shiva has also authored numerous books addressing corporate plundering of poorer countries, the potential pitfalls of seed biodiversity loss related to genetically modified crops, and proposing the development of innovative solutions. "We will continue to create a new world – seed by seed, person by person," Shiva says.

Note: Read more about Vandana Shiva's courageous activism. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption.

High-level executives with the NFL's New Orleans Saints football team and the NBA's Pelicans basketball team had a deeper role than previously known in connection with a list of priests and deacons faced with credible allegations of child molestation. According to highly sensitive emails ... one top executive even described a conversation with the New Orleans district attorney at the time that allowed them to remove clergy names from the list. The initial allegations about the emails led to local and national media investigations, including by Sports Illustrated and the Associated Press, that highlighted a fierce closeness between the sports franchises and the Catholic church in New Orleans. [Senior vice president of communications for the Saints and Pelicans Greg] Bensel sought to convince media outlets to limit their scrutiny of a list that turned out to be so incomplete it eventually precipitated a joint federal and state law enforcement investigation into whether the archdiocese spent decades operating a child sex-trafficking ring whose crimes were illegally covered up. After first seeing the so-called Saints emails in 2019 through a subpoena, abuse survivors' attorneys alleged that the two franchises' top officials had a significant hand in trying to minimize what was then a public-relations nightmare for the city's archdiocese – but has since triggered a full-blown child sex-trafficking investigation aimed at the church by law enforcement. A [2019] newspaper article about a local deacon and alleged serial child molester thrust [New Orleans archbishop Gregory] Aymond into the center of the global Catholic church's clergy-abuse scandal. The article questioned how the deacon, George Brignac, had been allowed to keep reading scripture at masses ... after he'd been arrested multiple times on child molestation charges.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on sexual abuse scandals.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook has done "too much censorship" as he revealed the social network is scrapping fact-checking and restrictions on free speech as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House. The 40-year-old tech tycoon – who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago the day before Thanksgiving and gave him a pair of Meta Ray Ban sunglasses, with Meta later donating $1 million to his inaugural fund – claimed on Tuesday that the dramatic about-face was signal that the company is returning to an original focus on free speech. The stunning reversal will include moving Meta's content moderation team from deep-blue California to right-leaning Texas in order to insulate the group from cultural bias. "As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help build trust to do this work in places where there's less concern about the bias of our team," the Meta boss said. Facebook will do away with "restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse," Zuckerberg said. "What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas," he said, adding: "It's gone too far." In late July, Facebook acknowledged that it censored the image of President-elect Donald Trump raising his fist in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.

Note: Read a former senior NPR editor's nuanced take on how challenging official narratives became so politicized that "politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that should have been guiding our work." Opportunities for award winning journalism were lost on controversial issues like COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and more. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.

Mark Zuckerberg has announced he is scrapping fact-checks on Facebook, claiming the labels intended to warn against fake news have "destroyed more trust than they have created". Facebook's fact-checkers have helped debunk hundreds of fake news stories and false rumours – however, there have been several high-profile missteps. In 2020, Facebook and Twitter took action to halt the spread of an article by the New York Post based on leaked emails from a laptop belonging to Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden. As coronavirus spread around the world, suggestions that the vaccine could have been man-made were suppressed by Facebook. An opinion column in the New York Post with the headline: "Don't buy China's story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab" was labelled as "false information". In 2021, Facebook lifted its ban on claims the virus could have been "man-made". It was months later that further doubts emerged over the origins of coronavirus. In 2021, Facebook ... was accused of wrongly fact-checking a story about Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine. A British Medical Journal (BMJ) report, based on whistleblowing, alleged poor clinical practices at a contractor carrying out research for Pfizer. However, Facebook's fact-checkers added a label arguing the story was "missing context" and could "mislead people". Furious debates raged over the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of Covid-19. Facebook's fact-checkers were accused of overzealously clamping down on articles that questioned the science behind [mask] mandates.

Note: Read a former senior NPR editor's nuanced take on how challenging official narratives became so politicized that "politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that should have been guiding our work." Opportunities for award winning journalism were lost on controversial issues like COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and more. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.

In 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America's overdose crisis. Why hadn't the middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, acted sooner to address a crisis that had been building for decades? One reason, a New York Times investigation found: Drugmakers had been paying them not to. For years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments. The P.B.M.s exert extraordinary control over what drugs people can receive and at what price. The three dominant companies – Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx – oversee prescriptions for more than 200 million. The P.B.M.s are hired by insurers and employers to control their drug costs by negotiating discounts with pharmaceutical manufacturers. They often pursue their own financial interests in ways that increase costs for patients, employers and government programs, while driving independent pharmacies out of business. Regulators have accused the largest P.B.M.s of anticompetitive practices. In addition ... P.B.M.s sometimes collaborated with opioid manufacturers to persuade insurers not to restrict access to their drugs.

Note: A former DEA agent has said that Congress helped drug companies create the opioid epidemic. Read how pharmacy benefit managers inflate the price of medications behind the scenes. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Pharma corruption.

A spritz of perfume may feel like such a minor chemical exposure compared to the pollutants elsewhere in our environment – microplastics, air pollution, PFAS. But scientists and clinicians are increasingly raising alarm over a group of chemicals used in many personal care products: phthalates. Phthalates – found in popular perfumes, nail polishes and hair care products – have been linked to numerous adverse health outcomes: insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease and impaired neurodevelopment. A study published in JAMA Network Open found that higher urinary concentrations of phthalates from personal care products was linked to a 25 percent increased risk of hyperactivity problems among adolescents. Another study of the same cohort found that increased phthalate exposure was also associated with poorer performance in math. The concerns about childhood exposure to phthalates are high enough that in the United States, certain types of the chemical are banned in children's toys and items such as pacifiers and baby bottles. For Andrea Gore, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Texas at Austin ... the harms are clear enough that she advises everyone to try to reduce their exposure, especially parents starting a family and those with young children. "I recommend avoiding added fragrances altogether – in perfumes, scented lotions and shampoos, even scented detergents and antiperspirants," she said.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and toxic chemicals.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.