Corporate Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Corporate Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Jeffrey Epstein ... helped JPMorgan orchestrate an important acquisition. He introduced executives to men who would become lucrative clients, like the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and to global leaders, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. At Epstein's behest, JPMorgan set up accounts – into which he routinely transferred huge sums – for young women who turned out to be victims of his sex-trafficking operations. It wired his funds overseas. It even paid him millions of dollars. But in the summer of 2019, Epstein was arrested. Federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking. JPMorgan went into damage-control mode. It filed a report with federal regulators that retroactively flagged as suspicious some 4,700 Epstein transactions – totaling more than $1.1 billion and including hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Russian banks and young Eastern European women who were brought to the United States. Banks are required to file such reports in real time to alert law enforcement to things like money laundering, sex trafficking and drug dealing. Doing it after the fact might have provided JPMorgan with legal cover, but it did nothing to help identify Epstein's crimes as they were happening. The fallout for JPMorgan has been limited. In 2023, it paid $290 million to settle a lawsuit brought by roughly 200 of Epstein's victims and an additional $75 million to resolve related litigation brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Note: This article is also available here. According to a Guardian article, "Epstein introduced [JPMorgan] bank executives to some figures who would become clients, including the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and to global leaders, such as the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and the Emirati billionaire Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem." Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

The picture many people have of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is overwhelmingly positive. And yet there is now overwhelming evidence that governments have funded and in some cases created NGOs to demand politically-motivated, unconstitutional, and dangerously ideological censorship. Other journalists, researchers, and I have documented how government intelligence and security agencies have done this in the US, Europe, and Brazil. Those agencies work with existing or new NGOs to circumvent free speech protections, including the First Amendment, and legitimize what is politically and ideologically motivated as apolitical and non-ideological. This can accurately be described as "censorship-by-proxy." Censorship by proxy operates similarly in every nation. NGOs claiming to be independent of governments, but funded by, created by, and working with government agencies, demand censorship based on their "independent reports," "fact checks," and "analyses." Often, the NGO "fact checks" are themselves misinformation, including misrepresentations of opinions as facts. Twitter and Facebook created special "portals" for government-funded NGOs to "flag" posts they wanted censored. The NGOs, staffed with ostensibly former military and intelligence employees, sought and won mass censorship with an aim at promoting the narratives they wanted and stomping out narratives they didn't want.

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

Erb and his cousin raised money from investors, bought homes in places like the Chatham-Arch neighborhood in Indianapolis ... and rented them out. He was not the first New York finance person to profit from single-family rentals across the United States. The private equity firm Blackstone (commonly confused with BlackRock) more or less invented this buy-to-rent strategy in 2012. It's now a public company valued at more than $18 billion. The response to this development – of Wall Street buying Main Street ... has been bipartisan, populist and patriotic condemnation. Both JD Vance and Kamala Harris called for bans on these corporate landlords. Homeownership has been a primary way that middle-class families build wealth. But now private equity was outbidding aspiring homeowners, making it more expensive to buy a home and pocketing the appreciation in home values. During the Great Recession ... the U.S. had a glut of single-family homes in foreclosure. Many were auctioned off en masse, including by the federal government, which organized auctions for investors like Blackstone and even provided a $1 billion loan guarantee to encourage Blackstone to buy. This allowed private equity firms (which raise money from wealthy families, pension funds and other organizations to seek out profits, often by buying private companies) and real estate investors to efficiently and cheaply buy, say, a dozen similar homes located in the same Phoenix suburb.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial inequality and financial system corruption.

Loneliness not only affects how we feel in the moment but can leave lasting imprints on our personality, physiology, and even the way our brains process the social world. A large study of older adults [found] that persistent loneliness predicted declines in extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness–traits associated with sociability, kindness, and self-discipline. At the same time, higher levels of neuroticism predicted greater loneliness in the future, suggesting a self-reinforcing cycle. Although social media promises connection, a large-scale study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that it may actually fuel feelings of loneliness over time. Researchers found that both passive (scrolling) and active (posting and commenting) forms of social media use predicted increases in loneliness. Surprisingly, even active engagement–often believed to foster interaction–was associated with growing disconnection. Even more concerning was the feedback loop uncovered in the data: loneliness also predicted increased social media use over time, suggesting that people may turn to these platforms for relief, only to find themselves feeling even more isolated. Lonely individuals also showed greater activation in areas tied to negative emotions, such as the insula and amygdala. This pattern suggests that lonely people may be more sensitive to social threat or negativity, which could contribute to feeling misunderstood or excluded.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on mental health and Big Tech.

If you've been on social media lately, chances are you've heard about endocrine disruptors. People say they can interfere with your hormones, leading to serious health conditions. There are over 1,000 types of these chemicals, according to some estimates, and we are exposed to them daily: They can be found everywhere from your nonstick pan and canned foods to your shampoo and hair dye. The endocrine system consists of glands that secrete hormones, like estrogen, testosterone and cortisol, that then interact with targets (receptors) in the body to regulate our growth, development, reproduction, metabolism, energy balance and body weight. Chemicals that interfere with this complex communication system are called endocrine disruptors. These chemicals work in a variety of ways, including overstimulating receptors, blocking receptors so that normal hormones can't interact with them and altering hormone production or availability. Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical used in the production of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins. It belongs to the larger class of chemicals called bisphenols. The primary exposure for most people is through their diet: BPAs can leach into food or drinks from the protective, internal epoxy resin coatings of canned foods and from consumer products such as polycarbonate tableware, food storage containers and water bottles. Laboratory experiments ... have found that BPAs may cause cancer cell growth.

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

A major settlement announced this week brought an end to a lengthy battle between chemical manufacturer Monsanto and students, parents and staff of a Monroe school who were exposed to toxic PCBs for years. PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are human-made chemicals that the Environmental Protection Agency has linked to some cancers and other illnesses. They festered at Sky Valley Education Center, an alternative school in Snohomish County, where fluorescent lights and building caulking were contaminated. The preservatives were once widely relied upon for building durability, but the EPA has since banned their use. More than 200 people from Sky Valley blamed their serious illnesses on exposure to the toxicant. This week's announcement marks the largest, and only significant, PCB personal injury settlement since Monsanto was acquired by Bayer Pharmaceuticals in 2018 And it appears to be among the largest, if not the largest, PCB settlement stemming from a single site containing the pollutant. The terms of the settlement, including the dollar amount, are confidential. But in July, before the agreement, Germany-based Bayer informed its investors that it had set aside 530 million euros, or about $618 million, for Sky Valley settlements and litigation costs. Sky Valley students, staff and others ... described devastating diagnoses, including various cancers, brain damage, autoimmune diseases and miscarriages. Some, including children, reportedly died.

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

French MPs gave themselves a round of applause for approving legislation to reintroduce a banned pesticide last month. A figure rose from the public gallery to shout: "You are supporters of cancer ... and we will make it known." Fleur Breteau made it known. Her outburst and appearance – she lost her hair during chemotherapy for breast cancer – boosted a petition against the "Duplomb law" to well over 2m signatures. On Thursday, France's constitutional court struck down the government's attempt to reintroduce the pesticide acetamiprid – a neonicotinoid banned in France in 2018 but still used as an insecticide in other EU countries as well as the UK – in a judgment that took everyone by surprise. The ruling said the legislature had undermined "the right to live in a balanced and healthy environment" enshrined in France's environmental charter. For Breteau, 50, a battle is won but the struggle goes on. "The law is a symptom of a sick system that poisons us. The Duplomb law isn't the real problem. It's aggravating an already catastrophic system," she said. "We are living in a toxic world and need a revolution to break the chain of contamination in everything ... If people don't react we'll find ourselves in a world where we cannot drink water or eat food that is uncontaminated, where a slice of buttered bread or a cup of tea poisons us. It will be a silent world, without animals, without insects, without birds."

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

The transparency of donations to the World Health Organization (WHO) Foundation–an independent body that seeks funds from across industry, civil society and governments, and awards grants to the WHO – has plummeted over its first 3 years of operations, a new analysis has found. The analysis found that the majority of donors are not publicly disclosed, including some unnamed gifts as big as $11 million, which raises concerns about the potential "level of outside influence and role of commercial interests in setting WHO priorities," the researchers wrote. In 2020, the foundation was set up to solicit funds from a wider range of donors than the WHO can directly accept, including wealthy individuals and corporations. Some academics and civil society organizations are concerned that accepting donations from industry, such as businesses selling alcohol and infant formula, poses a conflict of interest. Evidence suggests that some companies use donations "as opportunities to distract or reframe product harms.., and assist wider lobbying efforts against public health regulation," wrote the authors of the new analysis. Using a scale to judge transparency in donations developed by Open Democracy, an independent international media platform, the researchers gave the WHO Foundation a D grade. This grade is for organizations that only name a minority of funders and not in a systematic way, putting it on par with some ‘dark money' think tanks.

Note: Concerns about WHO's growing dependence on opaque funding are not abstract. Past investigations show how Purdue Pharma influenced WHO opioid guidelines to expand sales globally and how Coca-Cola–linked consultants shaped WHO's aspartame reviews. Bill Gates' hundreds of millions to WHO now give him outsized influence to prioritize corporate interests under the guise of public health philanthropy, which have led to mass suicides in India, worsening environmental degradation and poverty in Africa, and increasing corporate control over the media.

As the 2025 USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans take shape, a serious disconnect threatens public health. Some advocates are calling for higher intake of animal fats and promoting so called ancestral or animal based keto diets, citing traditional wisdom and nutrient density. Diets like Keto often rely on meat and dairy from industrial production systems, where contamination with drugs and chemicals is routine. The promise of healing through meat and fat collapses when those foods carry residues of antibiotics, steroid hormones, synthetic preservatives, arsenicals, cocciodiostats, and pesticides. Many of these toxins accumulate precisely in the fats and organs being celebrated as nutrient rich. A decade ago, as policy director at the Center for Food Safety, I helped publish a report entitled "America's Secret Animal Drug Problem," identifying over 450 animal drugs and feed additives used in U.S. meat production. That number alarmed me then. Today, the Food and Drug Administration has approved nearly 700 veterinary drugs for use in food-producing animals. This figure includes not only growth promoters and antibiotics but also synthetic hormones, beta agonists, coccidiostats, and antiparasitics. Less than 1% of meat and dairy in the United States is produced in regenerative organic systems on pasture. The remaining 99% comes from animals housed in industrial facilities, fed chemically saturated GMO grains.

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

Digital technology was sold as a liberating tool that could free individuals from state power. Yet the state security apparatus always had a different view. The Prism leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed a deep and almost unconditional cooperation between Silicon Valley firms and security apparatuses of the state such as the National Security Agency (NSA). People realized that basically any message exchanged via Big Tech firms including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc. could be easily spied upon with direct backdoor access: a form of mass surveillance with few precedents ... especially in nominally democratic states. The leaks prompted outrage, but eventually most people preferred to look away. The most extreme case is the surveillance and intelligence firm Palantir. Its service is fundamentally to provide a more sophisticated version of the mass surveillance that the Snowden leaks revealed. In particular, it endeavors to support the military and police as they aim to identify and track various targets – sometimes literal human targets. Palantir is a company whose very business is to support the security state in its most brutal manifestations: in military operations that lead to massive loss of life, including of civilians, and in brutal immigration enforcement [in] the United States. Unfortunately, Palantir is but one part of a much broader military-information complex, which is becoming the axis of the new Big Tech Deep State.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the intelligence community and in Big Tech.

Amid escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric ... private prison corporations are once again expanding their grip on U.S. detention policy. In fact, today roughly 90 percent of detained immigrants are held in privately operated facilities, the highest share in history. The industry is instead preparing for explosive growth. On recent earnings calls, CoreCivic executives announced plans to triple the number of beds in their facilities within a few months. That would mean an additional $1.5 billion in revenue for the corporation, more than doubling its annual earnings. Meanwhile, growing scrutiny of immigration detention practices has led to reports of abuse, medical neglect, and deaths in custody. Privatization, with the cost-cutting practices that define it, is the structural driver of human rights violations at these facilities. Private prisons corporations are just one piece of the sprawling prison industry. The U.S. carceral system is comprised of a vast and deeply entrenched network of public-private partnerships that make billions from incarceration and detention. Commissary corporations mark-up basic hygiene items like toothpaste or tampons by 300 percent or more. Private healthcare providers routinely deny or delay treatment, contributing to suffering and preventable deaths behind bars. Private food vendors serve meals that are frequently expired or nutritionally inadequate, all in the name of cutting costs and maximizing returns.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.

Staff at a Santa Barbara county jail heard screams coming from one of the cells. A 57-year-old inmate was moaning and hyperventilating. Rather than sending her to the ER, medical staff chalked her pain up to opioid withdrawal, since they had taken a prescription opioid away upon her arrival days before, a grand jury investigation later found. They placed the inmate – referred to as CF in the grand jury's report – on mental health observation. The grand jury determined that CF's stomach had perforated days before her excruciating death. CF would have had a 90% chance of survival if she had received immediate treatment. Wellpath, one of the nation's leading health providers to prisons and jails, was the contractor responsible for healthcare at Santa Barbara county's Northern Branch jail, where CF died. The grand jury's report is the latest in over a decade of government investigations into two behemoths in the prison health industry – Wellpath and Corizon – which are both backed by private equity investors. Both Corizon and Wellpath continued to contract with jails, prisons, immigration and juvenile detention centers around the country until they faced so much liability ... that both landed in bankruptcy court over the last two years. Both companies were still operating in some form while restructuring in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and had reorganization plans confirmed in bankruptcy court this year that allowed them to ... continue their prison contracts.

Note: According to this Guardian article, "More and more people, especially the relatively poor, may live almost their entire lives in systems owned by one or another private equity firm: financiers are their landlords, their electricity providers, their ride to work, their employers, their doctors, their debt collectors." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in prisons and in the financial system.

A US senator on Wednesday released a report that detailed how private equity firms have ruined hospitals in his home state and across the country. The report from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) documented what happened when three Connecticut hospitals–Waterbury Hospital, Rockville General, and Manchester Memorial–were bought by Prospect Medical Holdings, a private equity-backed healthcare firm. Ramona, an operating room assistant at Waterbury Hospital cited in the report, explained how Prospect went to extreme lengths to avoid spending money. She explained to Murphy that Prospect at one point stopped paying vendors, which resulted in supplies eventually growing "so scarce patients were sometimes left on the operating table while staff scrambled" to find the necessary equipment. Staff members eventually started buying supplies themselves, with some even going so far as to buy food for their patients to ensure that they did not go hungry. Prospect didn't just skimp on buying supplies for the hospitals but also on maintaining the buildings themselves. A unit secretary at Waterbury Hospital named Carmen told Murphy's staff of two instances where the ceiling at the building literally fell down due to years of neglect. Murphy's report also emphasized that the story of private equity stripping hospitals for parts is not unique to his state. "The story of these three Connecticut hospitals is playing out in healthcare systems all over the country," it said.

Note: According to this Guardian article, "More and more people, especially the relatively poor, may live almost their entire lives in systems owned by one or another private equity firm: financiers are their landlords, their electricity providers, their ride to work, their employers, their doctors, their debt collectors." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and financial system corruption.

Americans working for a little known U.S.-based private military contractor have begun to come forward to media and members of Congress with charges that their work has involved using live ammunition for crowd control and other abusive measures against unarmed civilians seeking food at controversial food distribution sites run by the Global Humanitarian Fund (GHF) in Gaza. UG Solutions was hired by the GHF to secure and deliver food into Gaza. Israel put GHF in control of what used to be the UN-led aid mission. The UN, ... has called the new model an "abomination" which "provides nothing but starvation and gunfire to the people of Gaza," referring to the 1000 Gazans who have been killed near or at the GHF centers since May. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have been accused of shooting and shelling unarmed civilians. The American contractors say they have witnessed it and have been told to use live ammunition in their own crowd control efforts. UG Solutions is a mercenary group. They are not a party to the conflict in Gaza, were recruited to participate in hostilities, were not sent by the U.S. government, are not a national of a party in the conflict, are not part of a military, and are there for personal gain. Similar to Blackwater, they are primarily doing defensive operations and the U.S. State Department has helped fund the GHF but they are headquartered in the U.S. working for a foreign entity, in a combat zone, for money.

Note: Learn more about human rights abuses during wartime in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.

Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers – Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego – to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon's costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country's largest and most powerful defense contractors – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman – posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC. The very notion of a "military-industrial complex" linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address. In 2024, just five companies – Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) – claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and military corruption.

A series of corporate leaks over the past few years provides a remarkable window in the hidden engines powering social media. In January 2021, a few Facebook employees posted an article on the company's engineering blog purporting to explain the news feed algorithm that determines which of the countless posts available each user will see and the order in which they will see them. Eight months later ... a Facebook product manager turned whistleblower snuck over ten thousand pages of documents and internal messages out of Facebook headquarters. She leaked these to a handful of media outlets. Internal studies documented Instagram's harmful impact on the mental health of vulnerable teen girls. A secret whitelist program exempted VIP users from the moderation system the rest of us face. It turns out Facebook engineers have assigned a point value to each type of engagement users can perform on a post (liking, commenting, resharing, etc.). For each post you could be shown, these point values are multiplied by the probability that the algorithm thinks you'll perform that form of engagement. These multiplied pairs of numbers are added up, and the total is the post's personalized score for you. Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter all run on essentially the same simple math formula. Once we start clicking the social media equivalent of junk food, we're going to be served up a lot more of it–which makes it harder to resist. It's a vicious cycle

Note: Read our latest Substack focused on a social media platform that is harnessing technology as a listening tool for the radical purpose of bringing people together across differences. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and media manipulation.

Data brokers are required by California law to provide ways for consumers to request their data be deleted. But good luck finding them. More than 30 of the companies, which collect and sell consumers' personal information, hid their deletion instructions from Google. This creates one more obstacle for consumers who want to delete their data. Data brokers nationwide must register in California under the state's Consumer Privacy Act, which allows Californians to request that their information be removed, that it not be sold, or that they get access to it. After reviewing the websites of all 499 data brokers registered with the state, we found 35 had code to stop certain pages from showing up in searches. While those companies might be fulfilling the letter of the law by providing a page consumers can use to delete their data, it means little if those consumers can't find the page, according to Matthew Schwartz, a policy analyst. "This sounds to me like a clever work-around to make it as hard as possible for consumers to find it," Schwartz said. Some companies that hid their privacy instructions from search engines included a small link at the bottom of their homepage. Accessing it often required scrolling multiple screens, dismissing pop-ups for cookie permissions and newsletter sign-ups, then finding a link that was a fraction the size of other text on the page. So consumers still faced a serious hurdle when trying to get their information deleted.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

In Silicon Valley, AI tech giants are in a bidding war, competing to hire the best and brightest computer programmers. But a different hiring spree is underway in D.C. AI firms are on an influence-peddling spree, hiring hundreds of former government officials and retaining former members of Congress as consultants and lobbyists. The latest disclosure filings show over 500 entities lobbying on AI policy–from federal rules designed to preempt state and local safety regulations to water and energy-intensive data centers and integration into government contracting and certifications. Lawmakers are increasingly making the jump from serving constituents as elected officials to working directly as influence peddlers for AI interests. Former Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., a former lobbyist appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, left Congress last year and returned to her former profession. She is now working as a consultant to OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT. Former Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., recently registered for the first time as a lobbyist. Among his initial clients is Lazarus AI, which sells AI products to the Defense Department. The expanding reach of artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping hundreds of professions, weapons of war, and the ways we connect with one another. What's clear is that the AI firms set to benefit most from these changes are taking control of the policymaking apparatus to write the laws and regulations during the transition.

Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and Big Tech.

It's no secret that cable news networks have partisan reputations. But new research shows the divide extends beyond which party a network appears to support. Over the past decade, these networks have increasingly focused on criticizing the opposing political party, a tactic researchers say is less about informing viewers and more about "selling anger." "These networks are more interested in talking about the opposing political party rather than their own candidates. This was not the case 15, 20 years ago," said Diego Garcia, the ... co-author of the working paper. The findings show that politics dominates cable news, accounting for about 60% of all named individuals mentioned–rising to over 75% during election years. But more revealing is who gets talked about: MSNBC spends more time discussing Republicans than Democrats, while Fox News focuses more heavily on Democrats. In 2024, Fox covered Democrats 60% of the time, with MSNBC showing the reverse. Garcia speculates that cable networks began to test different kinds of content when social media became widespread in the mid-2010s, and discovered that outrage boosts viewership. "I think Fox was the first one to figure this out, and they started pushing this negative rhetoric in their news," he said. "They're actually now the No. 1 cable news channel in the U.S. by far." Fox News now commands over 60% of the cable news audience–a dramatic jump from a more evenly split landscape a decade ago.

Note: Watch our 31-min video titled, "How to Transform Media Polarization, One Echo Chamber At A Time." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on media manipulation.

Health practitioners are becoming increasingly uneasy about the medical community making widespread use of error-prone generative AI tools. In their May 2024 research paper introducing a healthcare AI model, dubbed Med-Gemini, Google researchers showed off the AI analyzing brain scans from the radiology lab for various conditions. It identified an "old left basilar ganglia infarct," referring to a purported part of the brain – "basilar ganglia" – that simply doesn't exist in the human body. Board-certified neurologist Bryan Moore flagged the issue ... highlighting that Google fixed its blog post about the AI – but failed to revise the research paper itself. The AI likely conflated the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that's associated with motor movements and habit formation, and the basilar artery, a major blood vessel at the base of the brainstem. Google blamed the incident on a simple misspelling of "basal ganglia." It's an embarrassing reveal that underlines persistent and impactful shortcomings of the tech. In Google's search results, this can lead to headaches for users during their research and fact-checking efforts. But in a hospital setting, those kinds of slip-ups could have devastating consequences. While Google's faux pas more than likely didn't result in any danger to human patients, it sets a worrying precedent, experts argue. In a medical context, AI hallucinations could easily lead to confusion and potentially even put lives at risk.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and corruption in science.

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