Government Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government 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: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing 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.

Jeffrey Edward Epstein appeared at his sentencing dressed comfortably. At the end of the 68-minute hearing, the 55-year-old silver-haired financier - accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls - was fingerprinted and handcuffed, just like any other criminal sentenced in Florida. But inmate No. W35755 would not be treated like other convicted sex offenders in the state of Florida, which has some of the strictest sex offender laws in the nation. Epstein - who had a long list of powerful, politically connected friends - didn’t go to state prison like most sex offenders in Florida. Instead, the multimillionaire was assigned to a private wing of the Palm Beach County stockade, where he was able to hire his own security detail. Even then, he didn’t spend much time in a cell. He was allowed to go to his downtown West Palm Beach office for work release, up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, records show. [Courtney] Wild, who was 14 when she met Epstein, is suing the federal government, alleging that prosecutors kept her and other victims in the dark as part of a conspiracy to give Epstein ... one of the most lenient deals for a serial child sex offender in history. That lawsuit - and an unrelated state court case scheduled for trial on Dec. 4 - could expose more about Epstein’s crimes, as well as who else was involved and whether there was any undue influence that tainted the federal case. Some of Epstein’s victims will finally have an opportunity to testify for the first time.

Note: Watch a 15-minute news video which asks hard questions around Epstein and more. The incredibly eye-opening documentary "Imperium" uses major media reporting to show a huge cover-up of child sex trafficking rings which lead to the highest level of government. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

In 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz. For Lefkowitz ... the meeting was critical. His client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls - with the help of young female recruiters - to coerce into having sex acts ... as often as three times a day. [Epstein] was also suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show. But on the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved. The deal ... shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes. Epstein and four of his [named] accomplices ... received immunity from all federal criminal charges. The deal included wording that granted immunity to "any potential co-conspirators" who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement. Now President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta, 49, oversees a massive federal agency that provides oversight of the country’s labor laws, including human trafficking. Court records reveal details of the ... role that Acosta would play in arranging the deal, which scuttled the federal probe into a possible international sex trafficking operation.

Note: Watch a 15-minute news video which asks hard questions around Epstein's pedophile ring and more. The incredibly eye-opening documentary "Imperium" uses major media reporting to show a huge cover-up of child sex trafficking rings which lead to the highest level of government. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest single cost center - the Pentagon receives two of every three federal tax dollars collected - after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however ... that a reliable audit was simply impossible. Now, a Nation investigation has uncovered an explanation for the Pentagon’s foot-dragging: For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity. DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress - representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions - knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading reports. When the DoD submits its annual budget requests to Congress, it sends along the prior year’s financial reports, which contain fabricated numbers. The fabricated numbers disguise the fact that the DoD does not always spend all of the money Congress allocates in a given year. However, instead of returning such unspent funds to the US Treasury, as the law requires, the Pentagon sometimes launders and shifts such moneys to other parts of the DoD’s budget.

Note: Other than the above article, and weak Bloomberg and Reuters articles, the major media blatantly failed to report on the Pentagon's outrageous accounting failure. CNN posted one article not about the problem, but how the Pentagon claims they are fixing the problem. This demonstrates the military-industrial complex's strangle hold over media reporting. To understand just how serious and deep this problem is, see our carefully researched article using reliable sources to show how trillions are missing and reveal rampant deception and outright lying on the part of the Pentagon.

Today the UN security council will debate a UK-drafted resolution containing a rather gentle entreaty to the warring parties in Yemen. It will ask them to take “constant care to spare civilian objects, including those necessary for food production, distribution, processing and storage”. If that sounds like the safety instructions for a new vacuum cleaner, then welcome to the world of UN resolutions. But what it actually reveals is a far darker, more shameful truth.The truth of a Saudi-led coalition, armed by Britain and the United States, which from the very start of the conflict in 2015 has sought to use starvation as a weapon of war. Their on-off blockades of any ports and airports controlled by the Houthi rebels have drastically cut supplies of food to a Yemeni population that relies on imports to eat. But far more insidiously, and in the absence of imports, the Saudi air force has systematically and deliberately destroyed the domestic means of producing and distributing food inside Yemen. Their bombs have constantly targeted agricultural land, dairy farms, food processing factories, and the markets where food is sold. these are no mistakes. These are medieval tactics with modern weapons deliberately employed by the architect of the Yemen war – Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – in an attempt to bring the rebel-held areas of the country to their knees. He could not care less about the impact on Yemen’s civilian population, any more than he cared about what happened to Jamal Khashoggi.

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

Steve Bannon’s political operation to help rightwing populists triumph in next year’s European parliamentary elections is in disarray after he conceded that his campaign efforts could be illegal in most of the countries in which he planned to intervene. The former chief strategist to Donald Trump has spent months trying to recruit European parties to his Brussels-based group, the Movement, which he promised would operate as kind of a political consultancy for like-minded parties campaigning in the bloc-wide vote in May 2019. But the Guardian has established that Bannon would be barred or prevented from doing any meaningful work in nine of the 13 countries in which he is seeking to campaign. Bannon’s intervention in European politics comes amid heightened sensitivity about foreign involvement in elections. Questions have been mounting over the scale of Russia’s influence over the 2016 US presidential campaign and the UK’s referendum to leave the EU. Bannon ... has pledged to spend millions of dollars to provide nativist and ultra-conservative European parties free access to specialised polling data, analytics, social media advice and help with candidate selection. But officials working on electoral law and independent experts in multiple countries said this kind of assistance would be ... banned in France, Spain, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Finland.

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

Laura Hughes, an Air Force veteran, says her daughter Catherine Werner is struggling with the effects of traumatic brain injury after experiencing strange sounds and sensations at her apartment in Guangzhou [China], where Werner was a foreign trade officer until being medevaced out earlier this year. She's calling on the State Department to do more to solve the mystery that has eluded investigators since U.S. diplomats and spies starting getting sick in Cuba in late 2016. Hughes is coming forward publicly because she says her daughter and the other government workers cannot. Werner is the only U.S. worker in either Cuba or China whose identity is publicly known. For Hughes, the saga started nearly a year ago when she said her daughter's health started declining: nausea, unbearable headaches, and problems with balance, vision and memory. [Then Hughes] started experiencing the sounds and sensations, too. She is concerned that the U.S. is downplaying what happened. She says rather than conducting a transparent investigation, some State Department officials have been "misinforming and they've been suppressing information. Our whole lives are uprooted. And instead of being helped by the State Department, it's an atrocity how they're taking care of this." U.S. officials [say] they're considering the possibility of an electromagnetic weapon, possibly involving microwave technology. Doctors have said many of the Havana diplomats have brain injuries that look like concussions, except with no known blow to the head. Both Hughes and her daughter remain in intensive rehabilitation.

Note: For decades, many countries have been secretly developing highly advanced weapons which, using electromagnetic waves from large distances, can destroy a person's health and even kill them. Sometimes they use them clandestinely against their own citizens who are considered dissidents. Why are the victims being kept from speaking? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of revealing news articles on nonlethal weapons from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Mind Control Information Center.

Nearly four times as many Sunni Islamic militants are operating around the world today as on Sept. 11, 2001, despite nearly two decades of American-led campaigns to combat Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, a new independent study concludes. That amounts to as many as 230,000 Salafi jihadist fighters in nearly 70 countries, with the largest numbers in Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. The report’s conclusions ... underscore the resiliency of these terrorist groups, and the policy failures by the United States and its allies in responding. The findings also highlight the continuing potency of the groups’ ideology and social-media branding in raising money and attracting new recruits as they pivot from battlefield defeats in strongholds like Iraq and Syria to direct guerrilla-style attacks there and in other hot spots. The West has largely failed to address the root causes of terrorism that perpetuate seemingly endless waves of fighters who are increasingly turning to armed drones, artificial intelligence and encrypted communications to foil the allies’ conventional military superiority, the report said. Last week, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs released its annual report, the Costs of War study, in which it calculated that the United States will have spent $5.9 trillion on activities related to the global counterterrorism campaign by October 2019.

Note: According to a top US general, wars are created and fostered to fill the coffers of the big bankers and corporations. Read an excellent essay on how the US helped to create and foster ISIS. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption and terrorism.

The Department of Homeland Security is gathering intelligence from paid undercover informants inside the migrant caravan that is now reaching the California-Mexico border as well as monitoring the text messages of migrants, according to two DHS officials. The 4,000 migrants, mainly from Honduras, have used WhatsApp text message groups as a way to organize and communicate along their journey to the California border, and DHS personnel have joined those groups to gather that information. The intelligence gathering techniques are combined with reports from DHS personnel working in Mexico. Paying informants, placing officers in the region or monitoring the communications of non-U.S. citizens is not illegal, said John Cohen, former acting undersecretary of intelligence for DHS, but it does raise some concerns about the allocation of resources. "Those resources have to come from some place. They are not being devoted to thwarting terrorist threats, mass shootings, mailed fentanyl coming into the country or cyberattacks," said Cohen. Cohen said the caravan presents a logistical and humanitarian issue, but because the vast majority of its members want to present themselves legally to claim asylum, it is not wise to devote a significant amount of intelligence resources to it. "I find it hard to believe that the highest risk facing this nation comes from this caravan," Cohen said.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

The Pentagon has failed what is being called its first-ever comprehensive audit, a senior official said on Thursday, finding U.S. Defense Department accounting discrepancies that could take years to resolve. Results of the inspection - conducted by some 1,200 auditors and examining financial accounting on a wide range of spending including on weapons systems, military personnel and property - were expected to be completed later in the day. “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters, adding that the findings showed the need for greater discipline in financial matters within the Pentagon. “It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion dollar organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial,” Shanahan added. The U.S. defense budget for the 2018 fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 was about $700 billion. He did not provide a figure detailing how much money was unaccounted for in the audit. “Some of the compliance issues are irritating to me,” Shanahan added. A 1990 federal law mandated that U.S. government agencies be audited, but the Pentagon had not faced a comprehensive audit until this one was launched in December. Defense officials and outside experts have said it may be years before the Pentagon is able to fix its accounting gaps and errors and pass an audit.

Note: Read a 2017 article documenting an investigation which found $21 Trillion missing from government coffers. Then read summaries of several major media articles showing the Pentagon's blatant lies and disregard for accounting. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Over time, the CIA upper echelon has secretly developed all kinds of policy statements and legal rationales to justify routine, widespread surveillance on U.S. soil of citizens who arent suspected of terrorism or being a spy. Newly declassified documents from 2014 ... reveal the CIA not only intercepted emails of U.S. citizens but they were emails of the most sensitive kind written to Congress and involving whistleblowers reporting alleged wrongdoing within the Intelligence Community. The disclosures, kept secret until now, are two letters of congressional notification from the Intelligence Community inspector general at the time, Charles McCullough. He stated that during routine counterintelligence monitoring of government computer systems, the CIA collected emails between congressional staff and the CIAs head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough added that he was concerned about the CIAs potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent chilling effect. The March 2014 intercepts ... happened amid whats widely referred to as the Obama administrations war on whistleblowers and mass surveillance scandals. The evidence points to bad actors targeting candidate Donald Trump and his associates in part to keep them - and us - from learning about and digging into an even bigger scandal: our Intelligence Community increasingly spying on its own citizens, journalists, members of Congress and political enemies for the better part of two decades.

Note: The above article was written by Emmy award winning investigative journalist and former news anchor for CBS and CNN Sharyl Attkisson. She has been attacked numerous times for investigating too deeply into the lives of certain politicians. Her top-selling book Stonewalled describes her fight for truth against powerful political forces. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

Authorities in Saudi Arabia have released the brother of a billionaire prince who was in detention for 11 months. Saudi Prince Khaled bin Talal is believed to have been in detention since January. The prince is the brother of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal - one of a group of royal family members and businessmen who were held in the lavish Ritz Carlton in Riyadh last year as part of an anti-corruption purge. Alwaleed, who Forbes estimated had a personal fortune of $17 billion, was released almost three months later. The group paid over $100 billion in settlements for what Saudi authorities said were corruption charges. But critics outside Saudi Arabia said the wave of arrests were part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's efforts to silence potential opposition to his leadership. Khaled's release comes as Saudi Arabia faces increased scrutiny from Western powers over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last month. Khashoggi, 59, a royal court insider-turned-critic, was killed after entering the consulate on October 2 to obtain paperwork for his upcoming marriage. Saudi officials have presented shifting stories about Khashoggi's fate, initially denying any knowledge of his death, then arguing that a group of rogue operators, many of whom belong to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's inner circle, was responsible for his killing.

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

The home-schooling movement emerged in the 1970s, when it was considered a fringe pursuit. Today, it is probably the fastest-growing form of education in the UK. The number of home-schooled children has risen by about 40% over three years, according to recent research by the BBC. Around 48,000 children were being home-educated across the UK in 2016-2017, up from about 34,000 in 2014-15. Many parents who opt to home-school their children say they are avoiding bullying, exam pressure and stress. Others have concerns about special educational needs ... or the school environment. Esmé Biggar, 17, lives [in] Scotland, with her mother, Eula Wilkin. “For some people school is really good, and it works for them because they learn in the way that school teaches,” says Biggar. “But ... it doesn’t work for everyone. And it didn’t work for me.” She started at her local primary when she was four and left when she was eight. By then, her mother was horrified by the change in her. “From being self-motivated and able to read and write, and very focused, she came out angry, distressed and completely phobic of any formal type of education,” says Wilkin. A decade on, Biggar is happy and confident. She is doing online A-levels in English literature, classical civilisation and philosophy. “The government doesn’t want to admit the reason that home-education numbers are rising,” says Chris McGovern, a retired headteacher. “It’s because schools are failing ever greater numbers of children.”

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

Floridians for a Fair Shake and 13 other groups around the country are funded and coordinated out of a single office in Washington, with the goal of battering Republicans for their health care and economic policies during the midterm elections. At the center of the effort is an opaquely named Democratic organization, the Hub Project, which is on track to spend nearly $30 million since 2017 pressuring members of Congress in their districts. The great bulk of its funding has come from so-called dark money - funds from donors who are not legally required to reveal their names. With that money, the Hub Project ... set up an array of affiliate groups around the country, many with vaguely sympathetic names like Keep Iowa Healthy, New Jersey for a Better Future and North Carolinians for a Fair Economy. The Hub Project then used them to mobilize volunteers and run advertising on policy issues against Republican members of Congress many months before the election. Several Democratic operatives involved in the group likened its role to that of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy network funded by the billionaire Koch brothers ... on a significantly smaller scale. Mr. Gerney, the group’s executive director, said in an interview that the initiative targeting several dozen congressional districts had been designed to keep the focus on the Republicans’ legislative agenda in an election heavily dominated by ... personality. He described it as a test case.

Note: Read more about the secretive political groups funded by dark money. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing elections corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Britain's spy agencies will reveal its knowledge of alleged Westminster-related child abuse at a public inquiry amid concerns it aided in an establishment cover-up. MI5, MI6 and GCHQ have given their "full cooperation" with the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, lead counsel Andrew O'Connor QC told a preliminary hearing on Tuesday. Some of the evidence the agencies will give may be heard in private due to national security reasons. All three agencies have already provided files and documents relevant to its investigation into the alleged failure to pursue and prosecute child abusers in Whitehall and parliament. Parliamentary whips have also provided documents and archives to determine its involvement in the suspected cover-up. Mr O’Connor said a number of other notorious cases linked to Westminster - including those of the late former MPs, Cyril Smith, a Liberal, and Victor Montagu and Peter Morrison, both Conservatives - will be investigated. Further allegations ... are also expected to be explored. Allegations stemming from claims that police officers were "warned off" investigating cases of child sex abuse committed by senior politicians and other establishment figures in the 1960s, 70s and 80s will be looked at. The inquiry will also examine why the high ranking diplomat Peter Hayman, who died in 1992, escaped prosecution for sending obscene material through the post. The allegations against Hayman, who is believed to have been an MI6 official, were made public under parliamentary privilege in 1981.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

The US Air Force is facing more questions as to why it spent tens of thousands of dollars over the last three years on large cups that can reheat beverages, like coffee or tea, on refueling tankers and cargo aircraft during flight. Despite being assured by Air Force Secretary Dr. Heather Wilson earlier this month that the service has "suspended its purchasing of the exorbitantly priced cups," Sen. Chuck Grassley sent a follow-up letter last week asking for further explanation as to why they were purchased in the first place. Grassley raised the issue of the cups in an October 2 letter to Wilson after reports surfaced this summer that the 60th Ariel Port Squadron at Travis Air Force Base had spent $1,280 on each cup in 2018 – a dramatic increase from the $693 per-cup price in 2016. In her response to that letter, Wilson said the Air Force has spent $326,785 on nearly 400 cups since 2016 – an average of $817. "You are right to be concerned about the high costs of spare parts, and I remain thankful to have your support in addressing this problem," Wilson told the senator in a letter dated October 17. The increasing cost of the cups was first reported ... in July as part of a report on how airmen at Travis Air Force Base are attempting to use 3D printing to develop a cost-effective way to replace the cups' plastic handles, which have a tendency to break. "Unfortunately, when dropped, the handle breaks easily leading to the expenditure of several thousand dollars to replace the cup as replacement parts are not available," the Air Force said.

Note: Read this eye-opening article to learn the many ways the government wastes your tax dollars. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

An ex-CIA technician believed to be behind one of the worst leaks in agency history says the conditions at the federal jail in lower Manhattan are so bad that he’d rather be a prisoner in North Korea. Joshua Schulte ... described the Metropolitan Correctional Center as a living hell where inmates are “dragged from their cages and beaten and maced,” forced to bathe in “s–t-filled showers,” thrown into solitary confinement for no reason and improperly barred from communicating with their lawyers. “They even refuse us pens and stamps so we can’t even write,” Schulte told a judge in a letter that he says he was only able to write after he borrowed a pen from a medical assistant. The ex-CIA software engineer has been in the MCC since last year after the feds raided his New York apartment on suspicion that he had leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks. Immediately following the raid, he was ... charged with possession of kiddie porn. It wasn’t until this year that the feds slapped Schulte with a 13-count superseding indictment for leaking classified information, including national defense information, that he believed could be used “to the injury of the United States and the advantage of a foreign nation.” The MCC has been the target of numerous complaints in recent months. Reputed mobster John “Porky” Zancocchio recently got sprung from the lockup, where he was sent for a bail violation, after his lawyer complained that the food there was hurting his client’s already failing health.

Note: Read more on the "Vault 7" CIA files Schulte is accused of leaking. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing prison system corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

We all now know the name of Arab journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but very few of us know the name of Arab journalist Tareq Ayoub. An elected president of the United States has been blamed for killing Ayoub. We rightly demand justice in the case of Khashoggi, so why not in the case of Ayoub? On the morning of April 8, 2003, less than three weeks after U.S. President George W. Bush ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq, Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayoub was on the rooftop of his network’s Baghdad bureau ... reporting live. An American A-10 Warthog attack jet appeared. “The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs thought it would land on the roof,” Maher Abdullah, the network’s Baghdad correspondent, later recalled. “We actually heard the rocket being launched. It was a direct hit.” Ayoub was killed. Fifteen minutes later, a second American warplane launched a second missile at the building. But the U.S. government, like the Saudi government in recent weeks, tried to duck responsibility. It was just a “grave mistake,” according to a State Department spokesperson. “This coalition does not target journalists,” a U.S. general told reporters. Al Jazeera’s managing director, Mohammed Jassem al-Ali, had written a letter to the Pentagon less than two months earlier ... providing U.S. officials with the exact address and coordinates of the Baghdad bureau. The U.S. military had bombed Al Jazeera’s Kabul office in November 2001, and the network’s bosses wanted to prevent a repeat of such an incident.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the manipulation of public perception.

Text of the apology speech for institutional child sexual abuse as delivered in parliament: Silenced voices. Muffled cries in the darkness. Unacknowledged tears. The never heard pleas of tortured souls bewildered by an indifference to the unthinkable theft of their innocence. Why weren’t the children of our nation loved, nurtured and protected? Why was their trust betrayed? Why did those who know cover it up? While we can’t be so vain to pretend to answers, we must be so humble to fall before those who were forsaken and beg to them our apology. Nothing we can do now will right the wrongs inflicted on our nation’s children. The steady compassionate hand of the commissioners and staff resulted in 17,000 survivors coming forward and nearly 8,000 of them recounting their abuse. We are all grateful to the survivors who gave evidence to the commission. It is because of your strength and your courage that we are gathered here today. Even after a comprehensive royal commission, which finally enabled the voices to be heard and the silence to be broken, we will all continue to struggle. We honour every survivor in this country, we love you, we hear you and we honour you. Elsewhere in this building and around Australia, there are others who are silently watching and listening to these proceedings, men and women who have never told a soul what has happened to them. To these men and women I say this apology is for you too. The crimes of ritual sexual abuse happened in schools, churches, youth groups, scout troops, orphanages, foster homes, sporting clubs, group homes, charities, and in family homes as well. As a nation, we failed them, we forsook them. That will always be our shame.

Note: The importance of the prime minister's mention of ritual sexual abuse should not be downplayed. Organized groups of powerful people, mostly men, are behind huge amounts of child abuse and trafficking. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sex abuse from reliable major media sources. Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has given a national apology to victims of child sexual abuse. It follows a five-year inquiry which found tens of thousands of children had suffered abuse in the nation's institutions over decades. "Today, we finally acknowledge and confront the lost screams of our children," he said. The inquiry, which concluded last December, heard more than 8,000 testimonies from victims about abuse in organisations such as churches, schools and sports clubs. Many survivors have criticised the government's response to the inquiry - especially its terms for a national compensation scheme. Victims are eligible for payments of up to A$150,000 (Ł80,000; $106,000) each. Some say the compensation is not enough, and onerous to obtain. Mr Morrison said the government had accepted most recommendations from the inquiry, but it was still considering the remaining proposals. Those not yet adopted include recommendations where federal and state responsibilities overlap. The most contentious is a proposal to make reporting abuse mandatory. In August, the Catholic Church formally rejected that call - meaning it will not force priests to break confession rules. In their final report, the commissioners said: "It is not a case of a few 'rotten apples'. Society's major institutions have seriously failed." They said over 15,000 people had contacted the inquiry, raising allegations against more than 4,000 institutions.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Researchers across Canada are racing to shed light on a bleak part of the country’s history: How many indigenous children died at residential schools, and where are their unmarked graves? From 1883 to 1998, nearly 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families and sent to the government-funded, church-run boarding schools in an attempt to assimilate them. Once there, they were frequently neglected and abused. What happened at the schools was akin to “cultural genocide,” concluded a 2015 report from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It also found that at least 3,200 students died at residential schools ... though the commission contended that the number was probably much higher and merited further investigation. In 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, [which include] creating a register of the missing children and mapping their graves. But nearly three years later, some say that a lack of resources and missing documents is inhibiting progress, increasing the likelihood that the relatives of missing residential-school children will die without knowing the fate of their loved ones, and that unmarked graves could be destroyed. School records were often destroyed or inconsistently kept. Officials also frequently failed to record the name and gender of students who died or the cause of death. Authorities even neglected to report the deaths to the parents.

Note: Read more about the role of these schools in Canada's "cultural genocide" of First Nation peoples. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing civil liberties news articles from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing 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.