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.

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award. The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats. That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics. All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area. It did not matter that positions once denounced as "conspiracy theories" have been recognized or embraced by many. Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools. Others argued that the virus's origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a "debunked" coronavirus "conspiracy theory." The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory "racist." Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.

Note: Read more about the Great Barrington Declaration. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and COVID corruption.

A House committee revealed Friday that the Pentagon, other US agencies and the European Union – in addition to the State Department – have funded a for-profit "fact-checking" firm that allegedly served "as a nontransparent agent of censorship campaigns." House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) wrote a letter to the firm, NewsGuard, demanding more details about the public-private collaboration that led last year to the State Department being sued by conservative outlets that were labeled more "risky" than their liberal counterparts. NewsGuard has briefed committee staff on contracts it had with the Defense Department in 2021, including the Cyber National Mission Force within US Cyber Command; the State Department and its Global Engagement Center; and the EU's Joint Research Centre. The Oversight panel in June opened its investigation into NewsGuard's apparent participation in a government-funded "censorship campaign" to allegedly discredit and even demonetize news outlets by sharing its ratings of their reliability with advertisers. "These wide-ranging connections with various government agencies are taking place as the government is rapidly expanding into the censorship sphere," the chairman wrote. "One search of government grants and contracts from 2016 through 2023 revealed that there were 538 separate grants and 36 different government contracts specifically to address ‘misinformation' and ‘disinformation.'"

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

About 468 million children ... live in areas affected by armed conflict. Verified attacks on children have tripled since 2010. Last year, global conflicts killed three times as many children as in 2022. "Killings and injuries of civilians have become a daily occurrence," U.N. human rights chief Volker TĂĽrk commented in June when he announced the 2023 figures. "Children shot at. Hospitals bombed. Heavy artillery launched on entire communities." In 2005, [the United Nations Security Council] identified – and condemned – six grave violations against children in times of war: killing or maiming; recruitment into or use by armed forces and armed groups; attacks on schools or hospitals; rape or other grave acts of sexual violence; abduction; and the denial of humanitarian access to them. Between 2005 and 2023, more than 347,000 grave violations against youngsters were verified across more than 30 conflict zones in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, according to UNICEF. Israa Al-Qahwaji, a mental health and psychosocial support coordinator for Save the Children in Gaza, shared the story of a young boy who survived an airstrike. In one therapy session, he was asked to mold something out of clay to represent a wish. With his remaining hand, he carefully shaped a house. After finishing the exercise, he turned to the counselor with a question that left Al-Qahwaji emotionally overwhelmed. "Now," the boy asked, "will you bring my dad and give me my hand back?"

Note: Learn more about human rights abuses during wartime in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.

On a chilly, early morning in January 2019, a group of animal rights activists descended upon a poultry farm in central Texas. Activists with Meat the Victims, a decentralized, global movement to abolish animal exploitation, later uploaded gruesome photos of injured and dead chicks to social media platforms. The police identified [Sarah Weldon] and issued a warrant for her arrest, along with 14 other activists. She was charged with criminal trespassing. The local police weren't the only ones paying attention. An FBI agent in Texas had been secretly monitoring the demonstration. His focus? Weapons of mass destruction. The FBI has been collaborating with the meat industry to gather information on animal rights activism, including Meat the Victims, under its directive to counter weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, according to agency records. The records also show that the bureau has explored charging activists who break into factory farms under federal criminal statutes that carry a possible sentence of up to life in prison – including for the "attempted use" of WMD – while urging meat producers to report encounters with activists to its WMD program. "This ... is textbook escalation by government actors against successful efforts by social movements that they disagree with or find subversive," said Justin Marceau, a law professor. "Framing of civil disobedience against factory farms as terrorism is a form of government repression."

Note: Animal rights activists are relentlessly prosecuted while the evidence of animal cruelty they uncover is ruthlessly suppressed. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in law enforcement and in the food system from reliable major media sources.

When Joe Biden took office ... he promised an overhaul of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Biden inherited Michael Carvajal as BOP director. Carvajal ... began as an entry-level prison guard, worked his way up into administration, became a warden, and finally made his way to BOP headquarters. Carvajal resigned in 2022 after more than 100 BOP officers were arrested for, or convicted of, serious crimes during his short tenure, including smuggling drugs and cell phones into prisons to sell to prisoners, theft from prison commissaries, committing violence against prisoners, and even one warden running a "rape club," where he and other officials, including the prison chaplain, raped female prisoners at will. Carvajal finally resigned after Congress learned of the "rape club" and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, demanded that he leave. Carvajal's problem was obvious from the beginning. He brought literally no outside expertise to the job. He had never worked anywhere in his adult life other than the BOP. There would be no bold, new programs, no new ideas for reducing recidivism, no move to train prisoners to lead productive lives. According to Peter Mosques, a criminal justice professor of John Jay College, the BOP is ... an employment agency for otherwise unemployable white men with no education and no outside job experience, many of whom washed out of the military or the local police academy.

Note: John Kiriakou is a whistleblower, former CIA counter-terrorism officer, and former senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

RTX Corporation, the weapons giant formerly (and better) known as Raytheon, agreed on Wednesday to pay almost $1 billion to resolve allegations that it defrauded the U.S. government and paid bribes to secure business with Qatar. RTX, as part of this agreement that spanned multiple investigations into its business, admitted to engaging in two separate schemes to defraud the Defense Department, which included deals for a radar system and Patriot missile systems. "The Raytheon allegations are stunning, even by the lax standards of the arms industry," [said William Hartung with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft]. "Engaging in illegal conduct on this scale suggests that, far from being an aberration, this behavior may be business as usual for the company." Raytheon has been ... embroiled in scandals and malfeasance for decades. The company pleaded guilty to "illegally trafficking in secret military budget reports" (1990); paid $4 million to settle charges that it overbilled the Pentagon (1994); paid $10 million to settle a class-action lawsuit contending that its Amana unit sold defective furnaces and water heaters (1997); paid $2.7 million to settle allegations that it improperly charged the Pentagon for expenses incurred in marketing products to foreign governments (1998); [and] agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty to resolve State Department charges that the company violated export controls (2003).

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

The United States' secretive Special Operations Command is looking for companies to help create deepfake internet users so convincing that neither humans nor computers will be able to detect they are fake. Academic and private sector researchers have been engaged in a race ... to create undetectable deepfakes. The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense's Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country's most elite, clandestine military efforts. "Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content." JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that "appear to be a unique individual that ... does not exist in the real world," with each featuring "multiple expressions" and "Government Identification quality photos." The document notes that "the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers." JSOC hopes to be able to generate "selfie video" from these fabricated humans. Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, "to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms." A joint statement by the NSA, FBI, and CISA warned [that] the global proliferation of deepfake technology [is] a "top risk" for 2023. An April paper by the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute was similarly concerned: "Experts expect the malicious use of AI, including the creation of deepfake videos to sow disinformation to polarize societies and deepen grievances, to grow over the next decade."

Note: Why is the Pentagon investing in advanced deepfake technology? Read about the Pentagon's secret army of 60,000 operatives who use fake online personas to manipulate public discourse. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and media corruption from reliable major media sources.

Under the guise of combating misinformation, the US government funds universities, ostensibly to analyze social-media trends – but in truth, to help censor the Internet. Agencies like the National Science Foundation provide taxpayer dollars to universities like Stanford and the University of Washington as part of a broader government effort to pressure social-media companies into censoring speech related to elections, public health and other matters. A lawsuit against the Biden administration in the case that became Murthy v. Missouri uncovered emails in which federal officials threatened to penalize social-media companies unless they complied with orders to banish users who posted speech contrary to the administration's priorities. Last year, a federal judge reviewing this evidence dubbed the administration's effort a de facto "Ministry of Truth." Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote that in 2021, the Biden-Harris administration "repeatedly pressured" his social-media empire to censor speech – even humor and satire. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and revealed similar evidence in the "Twitter Files," the public first learned that university misinformation research teams, funded by the government, actively participated in those censorship efforts. These academics served as a front for the government's censorship policy, essentially laundering it in the name of science. But if this is research, it is unethical research that harms the human subjects under study.

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

Stanford University hosted the first major university-sponsored conference where different viewpoints on the appropriate management of pandemics were aired and debated. For much of 2020-2022, critical debate about the wisdom and effectiveness of mandatory Covid policies ... was treated with deep hesitation at best and outright hostility at worst. Professors and students who publicly questioned the mainstream consensus were censored on social media, vilified by their colleagues, and, in the case of Covid vaccine mandates, fired by administrators. Universities failed in their mission to promote academic debate and freedom during the most significant domestic policy issue of this century. During these years, colleagues and students with critical, sceptical viewpoints and countless members of the public [asked] why institutions of higher education were not hosting reasoned debate. The pandemic taught us a valuable lesson for those interested to hear. We need more freedom of expression and academic debate during crises and emergencies, not less. Many are tired of the vapid arguments of ideologues and hungry for a return to the ... academic tradition of debate. By that standard, the Stanford Covid conference was a huge success. The panels addressed key issues regarding the evidence for Covid lockdowns, the management of information and censorship, the impact of lockdowns on the world's poor, and the contentious question of the origin of the virus. Experts who supported early school closures reasoned together with those who did not. Those who support the lab leak hypothesis argued their case with those who disagree. And they disagreed about the wisdom of social media censorship in a pandemic. In the end, the conference achieved its stated purpose: to bring serious thinkers and scientists into constructive dialogue with one another.

Note: Learn more about the Stanford conference that inspired this article. An article by The Nation about this Stanford conference is a significant example of how dissenting views get spun into divisive partisan rhetoric, contributing to the larger culture wars poisoning public discourse.

Two decades ago, Shahawar Matin Siraj started to feel uneasy about a plan to bomb a subway station in Manhattan. Osama Eldawoody, a New York City Police Department informant recruited after 9/11, had established himself as a father figure to Siraj, who was 21 when they met. But as it started to feel real, Siraj tried to back out – insisting about 18 times that he was not willing to place bombs in the station. "I have to, you know, ask my mom's permission," he had said. Siraj [was] arrested a week later ... and was sentenced in 2007 to 30 years in prison after three years of pretrial detention. Siraj is one of almost 1,000 terrorism defendants prosecuted by the U.S. since 9/11. More than 350 defendants' cases involved FBI stings with an informant or undercover agent. The fear of this kind of surveillance transformed the social fabric of Muslim communities and made them more insular. "You didn't know if the person you're talking to was an informant or undercover," says Fahd Ahmed, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving, or DRUM. (Siraj's family are members.) A 2014 Human Rights Watch report closely reviewed 27 federal prosecutions involving 77 defendants and found that in some instances, "the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act." The report also described a pattern of targeting people with mental or intellectual disabilities in these stings.

Note: Read more about the FBI's manufacture of terrorist plots. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on law enforcement corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the highest-ranking transgender official in the Biden administration ... has supported a misinformation campaign that has turned the U.S. into an international outlier in the use of the "gender-affirming" model of care, which recommends hormones and surgeries rather than psychotherapy as the first-line treatment for adolescent distress around puberty. In 2022, Levine pressured the World Association for Transgender Health to remove age minimums for gender surgeries. Since 2017, a Manhattan Institute analysis of health insurance claims has shown, that more than 5,000 teenage girls had their breasts amputated as part of a "gender-affirming" procedure designed to help them achieve a male look. These figures ... do not include procedures performed at large health care systems like Kaiser Permanente (which is currently being sued by two young women who underwent "top surgery"). These surgeries do not seem to pose a problem for those like Levine who believe the theory that "trans kids know who they are." Children who do not fit sex stereotypes and same-sex attracted adolescents are now given the idea they are "trans" and encouraged to perceive hormones and surgeries as a solution to the substantial difficulties that society imposes on gender non-conforming young people. Contrary to the slogans, these treatments are not lifesaving.

Note: For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of revealing news articles on transgender medicine.

Following Iran's missile barrage into Israel last week, carried out in retaliation for Israel's assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris called Iran a "destabilizing, dangerous force" in the Middle East, opening a new chapter in a long history of US hawkishness against Iran. This past Monday, she went even further, calling Iran the United States' "greatest adversary." It's hard to hear such statements without hearkening back to New Year's Eve, 1977, a year before the Iranian Revolution broke out. In the heat of growing civil unrest in Iran, US president Jimmy Carter attended a lavish state dinner with the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Twenty-four years earlier, during "Operation Ajax," the CIA, in collaboration with the British MI6, had orchestrated a coup that ousted the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who had won on a platform of nationalizing Iranian oil and taking it back from Western control. The coup set into motion the destruction of the country's budding democracy and would haunt Iranians for decades. The United States has worked to destabilize Iran for nearly a century. With the Democratic presidential nominee once again trotting out hawkish tirades against Iran while backing Israel's new assault on Lebanon, American officials seem to have learned nothing from history.

Note: Read more about the CIA-backed 1953 coup in Iran. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

A Department of Homeland Security inspector general's report from August reveals more than $7 billion remain in emergency funding that could be used for natural disasters – even though DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week none was available after Hurricane Helene. Mayorkas, 64, told reporters following the devastation of Helene in North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) "does not have the funds" to endure more hurricanes this fall. "We are expecting another hurricane hitting," the DHS chief said. "FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season." But DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari found in his Aug. 14 report that as of October 2022, FEMA had $8.3 billion in unliquidated funds meant to relieve declared disasters from 2012 or earlier. More than $7 billion of that "could potentially be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund," the report notes. So far, the feds have paid just $4 million to Americans hit by Helene. "It took one week for some of the county mayors in my home state to even get a phone call from FEMA, and Kamala Harris has the nerve to announce ‘a dire humanitarian situation' in another country," Sen. Marsha Blackburn [said], referencing the VP's announcement of $157 million in US aid to Lebanon. The Biden-Harris administration has shelled out $1.4 billion [to] groups helping migrants settle in the US.

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

Police departments in 15 states provided The Post with rarely seen records documenting their use of facial recognition in more than 1,000 criminal investigations over the past four years. According to the arrest reports in those cases and interviews with people who were arrested, authorities routinely failed to inform defendants about their use of the software – denying them the opportunity to contest the results of an emerging technology that is prone to error. Officers often obscured their reliance on the software in public-facing reports, saying that they identified suspects "through investigative means" or that a human source such as a witness or police officer made the initial identification. Defense lawyers and civil rights groups argue that people have a right to know about any software that identifies them as part of a criminal investigation, especially a technology that has led to false arrests. The reliability of the tool has been successfully challenged in a handful of recent court cases around the country, leading some defense lawyers to posit that police and prosecutors are intentionally trying to shield the technology from court scrutiny. Misidentification by this type of software played a role in the wrongful arrests of at least seven innocent Americans, six of whom were Black. Charges were later dismissed against all of them. Federal testing of top facial recognition software has found the programs are more likely to misidentify people of color.

Note: Read about the secret history of facial recognition. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and police corruption from reliable major media sources.

Lockdowns were instituted, they failed to stop the dying, they failed to stop the spread - that's the data: Bjornskov, 2021; Bendavid, 2021; Agarwal, 2021; Herby, 2022; Kerpen, 2023; Ioannidis, 2024. And yes, lockdowns also inflicted massive damage on children and literally killed people. Lockdowns were not caused by the virus. Human beings decided to do lockdowns. I was the ONLY health policy scholar on the White House Task Force. My interviews as Advisor to the President were pulled down: by YouTube on September 11, 2020, by Twitter blocking me on October 18, 2020. You might think the public – in a free society - should know what the Advisor to the President was saying? When you censor health policy, it's not simply ... a less-than-ideal environment for diverse views. People die. And people died from the censorship of correct health policy. Why is Censorship used? To shut someone up, yes; but more importantly, to deceive the public – to stop others from hearing, to convince a public there is a "consensus". Truth is not determined by consensus, or by numbers of people who agree, or by titles. It is discovered by debate, proven by critical analysis of evidence. Arguments are won by data and logic, not by personal attack or censoring others. THAT is why lockdowners - at Stanford and elsewhere - needed censorship and propaganda; they couldn't win on the data; they needed to delegitimize and demonize opposing views as highly dangerous, to convince the public.

Note: This was written by Scott W. Atlas, MD, who served as Advisor to the President and on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Read an insightful article by New York Magazine about the harmful effects of COVID lockdowns, highlighting how some countries achieved low death rates without resorting to lockdown measures. Former chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers published a study last year showing how non-COVID excess deaths soared as a result of lockdown policies. Prominent economists from John Hopkins University and Lund University concluded that lockdowns reduced mortalities by 0.2%. For more, explore our COVID Information Center.

Over the past several years, the US Defense Department has been gradually integrating what appear to be variants of the Freedom of Movement Control Unit (FMCU) handsets as the primary control units for a variety of advanced weapons systems. Produced since 2008 by Measurement Systems Inc. (MSI), a subsidiary of British defense contractor Ultra that specializes in human-machine interfaces, the FMCU offers a similar form factor to the standard Xbox or PlayStation controller but with a ruggedized design intended to safeguard its sensitive electronics against whatever hostile environs American service members may find themselves in. A longtime developer of joysticks used on various US naval systems and aircraft, MSI has served as a subcontractor to major defense "primes" like General Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems to provide the handheld control units for "various aircraft and vehicle programs," according to information compiled by federal contracting software GovTribe. At the moment, it's unclear how exactly many US military systems use the FMCU. When reached for comment, the Pentagon confirmed the use of the system on the NMESIS, M-SHORAD, and RADBO weapons platforms and referred WIRED to the individual service branches for additional details. The Marine Corps confirmed the handset's use with the GBOSS, while the Air Force again confirmed the same for the RADBO.

Note: The latest US Air Force recruitment tool is a video game that allows players to receive in-game medals and achievements for drone bombing Iraqis and Afghans. Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

Industry advocates have established a "private social network" to counter resistance to pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops in Africa, Europe and other parts of the world, while also denigrating organic and other alternative farming methods. In 2017, two United Nations experts called for a treaty to strictly regulate dangerous pesticides, which they said were a "global human rights concern", citing scientific research showing pesticides can cause cancers, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and other health problems. Derogatory profiles of the two UN experts, Hilal Elver and Baskut Tuncak, are hosted on an online private portal for pesticide company employees and a range of influential allies. [These] efforts were spearheaded by a "reputation management" firm ... called v-Fluence. The company then launched a platform called Bonus Eventus, named after the Roman god of agriculture whose name translates to "good outcome". Bonus Eventus is invite-only and counts more than 1,000 members. They include executives from the world's largest agrochemical companies and their lobbyists, as well as academics, government officials and high-profile policymakers. The individuals profiled in the portal include more than 500 environmental advocates, scientists, politicians and others seen as opponents of pesticides and GM crops. Many profiles include personal details such as the names of family members, phone numbers, home addresses and even house values. The profiling is part of an effort – that was financed, in part, by US taxpayer dollars – to downplay pesticide dangers, discredit opponents and undermine international policymaking. More than 30 current government officials are on the membership list, most of whom are from the US Department of Agriculture.

Note: Read about how pesticide companies dominate Google News searches. For more along these lines, explore summaries of news articles on toxic chemicals from reliable major media sources.

In America's schools, 30 million lunches are served every day. There are standards in place for things like calories, sodium, and added sugar. The USDA asserts that lunches consumed from schools are the most nutritious. We sent school lunches to the Health Research Institute, an accredited lab in Iowa, to hunt for what standards don't cover: heavy metals, pesticides, and veterinary drugs. Our tests revealed unseen, largely unregulated components increasingly connected to everything from attention deficit disorder and liver disease to hormone disruption and cancer. Samples we collected from schools in Washington DC, Virginia, and Maryland included common fare like breadsticks, pizza, potatoes, and fruit. The lab identified more than 50 pesticides in our samples, with dozens often layered into one meal. 38 different pesticides were detected in just one elementary school lunch. 23 pesticides were found in a single strawberry cup. The fungicide, carbendazim, which is banned in most European countries, Brazil and Australia because it is increasingly connected to cancer, infertility, and birth defects, was found in five of our twelve samples. Glyphosate, a widely used and controversial weed killer ... connected to cancer, diabetes, and heart problems, was detected in multiple samples, often in wheat-based products like bread. Cadmium, a known carcinogen, was detected in our samples at a level 12 times higher than the FDA's limit for bottled water.

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

A federal court in California ruled late Tuesday against the Environmental Protection Agency, ordering officials to take action over concerns about potential health risks from currently recommended levels of fluoride in the American drinking water supply. The ruling by District Court Judge Edward Chen ... deals a blow to public health groups in the growing debate about whether the benefits of continuing to add fluoride to the water supply outweighs its risks. While Chen was careful to say that his ruling "does not conclude with certainty that fluoridated water is injurious to public health," he said that evidence of its potential risk was now enough to warrant forcing the EPA to take action. "In all, there is substantial and scientifically credible evidence establishing that fluoride poses a risk to human health; it is associated with a reduction in the IQ of children and is hazardous at dosages that are far too close to fluoride levels in the drinking water of the United States," the judge wrote in his ruling. The judge's ruling cites a review by the National Institutes of Health's toxicology program finalized last month, which concluded that "higher levels" of fluoride is now linked to lowered IQ in children. Chen said he left it up to the EPA which of a number of options the agency could take in response to his ruling. They range from a warning label about fluoride's risks at current levels to taking steps towards tightening restrictions on its addition to drinking water.

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

On Sept. 24, 2007, a red, white, and blue Gulfstream II fell from the sky over the Yucatán Peninsula. From the wreckage, [Mexican commandos] removed 132 industrial trash bags, weighing around 4 tons. The bags were filled with cocaine. The Gulfstream ... had flown for the CIA's rendition program. When it went down, it belonged to a newly-formed company near Boca Raton, Florida, called Donna Blue Aircraft ... an "undercover company" of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A Rolling Stone investigation into thousands of pages of government documents, flight logs, court filings, and local news reports ... confirmed there was a secret ICE operation called Mayan Jaguar. According to classified reports, ICE bought private planes from 2004 to 2007, intending to tag them with hidden tracking beacons and, through front companies like Donna Blue, sell them to drug traffickers. ICE agents would draw "approximately 20 planes" into Operation Mayan Jaguar. ICE stopped none of them, while other governments thwarted some, without ICE. The Drug Enforcement Administration, convinced that traffickers controlled Mayan Jaguar, ordered ICE to shut it down. "ICE Headquarters advised the agents … to continue working," according to another agent's IG testimony. Operation Mayan Jaguar would be "a coordinated interagency task force developed by the intelligence community," according to an internal ICE memo. The narcotics trade was largely legal until global prohibition began in the early 20th century. Waves of drug planes and state-sponsored trafficking weren't far behind. From the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA proprietary airlines flew arms into the Golden Triangle for anti-communist guerillas, and were suspected of flying out with the guerillas' opium. It was allegedly the same deal in the Eighties, but in Central America, with cocaine. In Asia, the CIA paid Afghan heroin lords to fight the Soviets, and later to fight the Taliban. In 1998, the CIA's marquee aviation front, Southern Air Transport, declared bankruptcy a week before the CIA's inspector general implicated the company in cocaine trafficking.

Note: Our investigative Substack article explores the dark truths behind the US war on drugs that the mainstream media ignores. For more, watch our Mindful News Brief on who's really behind the war on drugs. Check out our database of concise and revealing news summaries on the war on drugs from reliable 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.