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.

The Central Intelligence Agency offered to pay off analysts in order to bury their findings that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, new whistleblower testimony to Congress alleges. A senior-level CIA officer told House committee leaders that his agency tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans, according to a letter sent Tuesday to CIA Director William Burns. Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) requested all documents, communications and pay info from the CIA's COVID Discovery Team by Sept. 26. "According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China," the House panel chairmen wrote. "The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis." "The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position," they said, noting that the analysts were "experienced officers with significant scientific expertise."

Note: Explore more revealing articles we've summarized about the COVID origin story. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

He still remembers the first gunshot. Now, 60 years later, Paul Landis, one of the Secret Service agents just feet away from President John F. Kennedy on that fateful day in Dallas, is telling his story in full for the first time. His account differs from the official version. At age 88, he said, all he wants is to tell what he saw and what he did. He will leave it to everyone else to draw conclusions. What it comes down to is a copper-jacketed 6.5-millimeter projectile. The Warren Commission decided that one of the bullets fired that day struck the president from behind, exited from the front of his throat and continued on to hit Mr. Connally, somehow managing to injure his back, chest, wrist and thigh. It seemed incredible that a single bullet could do all that, so skeptics called it the magic bullet theory. Investigators came to that conclusion partly because the bullet was found on a stretcher believed to have held Mr. Connally at Parkland Memorial Hospital. In fact, [Mr. Landis] said, he was the one who found the bullet – and he found it not in the hospital near Mr. Connally but in the presidential limousine lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting. "If what he says is true, which I tend to believe, it is likely to reopen the question of a second shooter, if not even more," [Historian James] Robenalt said. "If the bullet we know as the magic or pristine bullet stopped in President Kennedy's back, it means that the central thesis of the Warren Report, the single-bullet theory, is wrong."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of revealing news articles on the Kennedy assassination from reliable major media sources. For deeper exploration, check out our comprehensive Information Center on John F. Kennedy's assassination, which challenge mainstream narratives about his assassination and the events leading up to it.

Paul Landis was one of two Secret Service agents tasked with guarding first lady Jacqueline Kennedy on November 22, 1963–the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In a new book, The Final Witness, to be published in October, Landis claims to have seen something that afternoon that he had never publicly admitted before. Landis was approximately 15 feet away when Kennedy was mortally wounded. Landis saw and did something that he has kept secret for six decades, he says now. He claims he spotted a bullet resting on the top of the back of the seat. He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital. Then, upon entering Trauma Room No. 1 (at that stage, he was the only nonmedical person in the room besides Mrs. Kennedy, and both stayed for only a short period), he insists, he placed the bullet on a white cotton blanket on the president's stretcher. This secret, as it turns out, may upend key conclusions of the Warren Commission, the body created by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination. Landis ... never sat for an interview before the FBI and never testified before the commission. There have been endless theories surrounding the assassination, but not one of them considered that a Secret Service agent might have brought a fully intact bullet, found on top of the rear seat of the limousine, into Parkland Memorial Hospital and placed it on the president's stretcher. Not one.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of revealing news articles on the Kennedy assassination from reliable major media sources. For deeper exploration, check out our comprehensive Information Center on John F. Kennedy's assassination, which challenge mainstream narratives about his assassination and the events leading up to it.

A half-dozen or so men gathered last month [at] one of Kyiv's swankiest hotels to discuss the lucrative business of arming Ukrainian troops. The group included Ukrainian military and government officials, who are always in the market for explosive shells. The center of attention was their gregarious host, a Florida-based arms contractor named Marc Morales. And joining the group was a stout, bearded man who served both the buyers and sellers: Vladimir Koyfman, a chief sergeant in the Ukrainian military whom Mr. Morales pays to arrange meetings with his government contacts. The [Biden] administration has sent Ukraine more than $40 billion in security aid, including advanced weapons like HIMARS rockets and Patriot missiles. But the Pentagon also relies heavily on little-known arms dealers like Mr. Morales. The Pentagon has awarded his company about $1 billion in contracts, mostly for ammunition. And records show he has built a roughly $200 million side business selling to the Ukrainians directly. Mr. Morales's competitors say that he has an unfair advantage. His ties to the Pentagon. Arms brokers from around the world are competing for a limited supply of Soviet-style arms, mostly from Eastern Europe, to then sell to Ukraine. With cash pouring in from Washington, Mr. Morales can afford to pay more than his competitors do, several Eastern European arms dealers complained. He then makes good on his American contracts and buys more ammunition on his own to sell to Ukraine directly.

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

The Biden administration likely infringed upon the First Amendment when it leaned on social media companies to remove false or misleading COVID-19 content, a federal court of appeals ruled Friday – narrowing a bombshell district court order that barred several officials and agencies from communicating with the platforms. The White House, surgeon general, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI "likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content" and in doing so, "likely violated the First Amendment," the New Orleans-based Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals determined. The three-judge panel, however, adjusted the scope of US District Judge Terry Doughty's July 4 order ... removing officials from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the State Department from the injunction. The Fifth Circuit vacated nine of the 10 provisions in Doughty's order that prevented Biden administration officials from "urging, encouraging, pressuring" or "inducing" social media companies from removing content. Similarly, the appeals court determined that "following up with social-media companies" about content moderation, "requesting content reports from social-media companies" or asking platforms to "Be on The Lookout" for certain types of material does not violate individuals' First Amendment rights. 

Note: Many posts that were censored contained factual information on COVID-related issues. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and media manipulation from reliable sources.

The United States will continue in a decades long, post-9/11 state of emergency for at least another year. In a Thursday night declaration, President Joe Biden ensured the emergency will extend at least 23 years after coordinated attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Biden penned his signature to a one-year extension of President George W. Bush's Proclamation 7463, retaining broad powers over the organization of the military. The proclamation is officially titled "The National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks." Most emergencies are used to impose economic sanctions. But Proclamation 7463, along with the broad 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, gives the president the power to call up the National Guard, alter the size and shape of the military's top officers and hire or fire commissioned officers – even ordering them out of retirement if necessary. Biden has most recently cited the 2001 authorization to justify drone strikes against al-Shabab militants in Somalia in 2021. The National Emergencies Act, adopted in 1976, requires presidents to renew emergencies each year. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump also extended the 9/11 state of emergency each year of their respective tenures. Trump used it in 2017 to fill a chronic shortage in Air Force pilots. So far, Biden has declared eight new emergencies, continued 34 from his predecessors and ended three.

Note: An article by The Atlantic explores the alarming scope of president's emergency powers, stating that "the moment the president declares a "national emergency"–a decision that is entirely within his discretion–he is able to set aside many of the legal limits on his authority." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

At the heart of America's political and cultural turmoil is a crisis of trust. In the space of a generation, the people's confidence in their leaders and their most important institutions to do the right thing has collapsed. The federal government, big business, the media, education, science and medicine, technology, religious institutions, law enforcement and others have seen a precipitous decline. Since 1979 Gallup has measured trust among the public in the most important American institutions. Its latest survey ... found that across the nine key institutions Gallup has tracked consistently, the proportion of Americans who said they had "a great deal or quite a lot of confidence" averaged out at 26%. That is the lowest figure ever recorded. Some institutions have forfeited more trust than others. In 1979 Gallup found that 51% of Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers. This year the number was 18%. The biggest factor driving mistrust ... is surely the widening cultural gap between the people who have led and thrived in our major institutions and the rest of the population. The past 20 years have seen the rapid emergence of a new elite–expensively educated, versed in progressive nostrums, increasingly distant from and disdainful of the rest of America and its values. This crowd comprises much of the nation's permanent government classes, almost its entire academic establishment, most of the people who control its news and cultural output, and a good deal of its corporate elite.

Note: About half of Americans lost faith in the scientific community after this "new elite" repeatedly misled the public on issues related to the pandemic. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and media manipulation from reliable sources.

In 2023, this country's drone warfare program has entered its third decade with no end in sight. Despite the fact that the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 is approaching, policymakers have demonstrated no evidence of reflecting on the failures of drone warfare and how to stop it. Instead, the focus continues to be on simply shifting drone policy in minor ways within an ongoing violent system. Washington's war on terror has inflicted disproportionate violence on communities across the globe, while using this form of asymmetrical warfare to further expand the space between the value placed on American lives and those of Muslims. Since the war on terror was launched, the London-based watchdog group Airwars has estimated that American air strikes have killed at least 22,679 civilians and possibly up to 48,308 of them. Such killings have been carried out for the most part by desensitized killers, who have been primed towards the dehumanization of the targets of those murderous machines. In the words of critic Saleh Sharief, "The detached nature of drone warfare has anonymized and dehumanized the enemy, greatly diminishing the necessary psychological barriers of killing." While the use of drones in the war on terror began under President George W. Bush, it escalated dramatically under Obama. Then, in the Trump years, it rose yet again. Though the use of drones in Joe Biden's first year in office was lower than Trump's, what has remained consistent is the lack of ... accountability for the slaughter of civilians.

Note: A 2014 analysis found that attempts to kill 41 people with drones resulted in 1,147 deaths. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

The day after the U.S. government began routinely bombing faraway places, the lead editorial in the New York Times expressed some gratification. Nearly four weeks had passed since 9/11 ... and America had finally stepped up its "counterattack against terrorism" by launching airstrikes on al-Qaeda training camps and Taliban military targets in Afghanistan. The Project on Defense Alternatives concluded that American air strikes had killed more than 1,000 [Afghan] civilians during the last three months of 2001. By mid-spring 2002, the Guardian reported, "as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the U.S. intervention." Under the "war on terror" rubric, open-ended warfare was well underway – "as if terror were a state and not a technique," as Joan Didion wrote in 2003. "We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of September 11 to justify the reconception of America's correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war." Unlike those killed on 9/11, the Iraqi dead were routinely off the American media radar screen, as were the psychological traumas suffered by Iraqis and the decimation of their country's infrastructure. For the White House, the Pentagon, and Congress, the war on terror offered a political license to kill and displace people on a large scale in at least eight countries. The resulting carnage often included civilians. The dead and maimed had no names or faces that reached those who signed the orders and appropriated the funds.

Note: A 2021 report estimated that the War on Terror had "killed up to 929,000 people and cost over $8 trillion." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

The future of wearable technology, beyond now-standard accessories like smartwatches and fitness tracking rings, is ePANTS, according to the intelligence community. The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop "smart" clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection. Billed as the "largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles," the SMART ePANTS – Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems – program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable. There is already evidence that private industry outside of the national security community are interested in smart clothing. Meta, Facebook's parent company, is looking to hire a researcher "with broad knowledge in smart textiles and garment construction, integration of electronics into soft and flexible systems, and who can work with a team of researchers working in haptics, sensing, tracking, and materials science."

Note: Smart objects have been called a "train wreck in privacy and security." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

A federal appeals court Friday revived a lawsuit by three doctors who say the Food and Drug Administration overstepped its authority in a campaign against treating COVID-19 with the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. Ivermectin ... has been championed by some conservatives as a treatment for COVID-19. The FDA has not approved ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. Friday's ruling from a panel of three judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ... focused on various aspects of an FDA campaign against ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. The ruling acknowledged FDA's receiving reports of some people requiring hospitalization after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for livestock. But the ruling said the campaign – which at times featured the slogan "You are not a horse!" – too often left out that the drug is sometimes prescribed for humans. The doctors can proceed with their lawsuit contending that the FDA's campaign exceeded the agency's authority under federal law, the ruling said. "FDA is not a physician. It has authority to inform, announce, and apprise–but not to endorse, denounce, or advise," Judge Don Willett wrote. "The Doctors have plausibly alleged that FDA's Posts fell on the wrong side of the line between telling about and telling to." Drs. Robert L. Apter, Mary Talley Bowden and Paul E. Marik filed the lawsuit last year. All three said their reputations were harmed by the FDA campaign.

Note: Explore a comprehensive look into the benefits and uses of ivermectin, despite establishment media's concerted effort to discredit its efficacy and safety. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

The United States is gunning for war with China. By cozying up to Taiwan and arming it to the teeth, President Joe Biden is undermining the "One China" policy which has been the cornerstone of U.S.-China relations since 1979. In March, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines called China the "leading and most consequential threat to U.S. national security." More than 90 percent of the most advanced microchips in the world are manufactured in Taiwan. The chips are used to power our smartphones, train artificial intelligence systems and guide missiles. The Trump administration imposed heavy tariffs on Chinese imports to cut off China's access to the software technology and equipment required to build the advanced chips. Biden has maintained and dramatically expanded Trump's coercive economic measures and imposed a blockade on advanced semiconductors. Biden has repeatedly stated that the United States would use military force to defend Taiwan if it is attacked by China. The Biden administration has provided Taiwan with $619 million worth of high-tech arms. China has not been at war with any country since 1979. By contrast, the United States has had only 16 years of peace in its 247 years. K.J. Noh, an activist scholar who writes about the geopolitics of the Asian continent ... described South Korea as key to the U.S.'s escalating war on China. "The United States has operational control over South Korean troops," Noh said. The U.S. is also "weaponizing Taiwan into an imperial outpost for war."

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

Candid public discourse about the "war on terror" is long overdue. Hindsight offers an opportunity to take a fresh look at the official pronouncements and unheeded dissent that came soon after September 11, 2001. When the first U.S. missiles struck Afghanistan, a Gallup poll found that "90 percent of Americans approve of the United States taking such military action, while just 5 percent are opposed, and another 5 percent are unsure." A frenzy for war had taken hold, despite the fact that none of the 9/11 hijackers were Afghans. In effect, the United States proceeded, with displaced rage, to inflict collective punishment on vast numbers of Afghan people. More than 20 years later, are we ready to face up to the human toll of the war on terror? Counting only the people killed directly in U.S. wars since 2001, researchers at the Costs of War project at Brown University have estimated those deaths at between 906,000 and 937,000. The study found that at least 364,000 of them were civilians who lost their lives "in the violence of the U.S. post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere." Meanwhile, "several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars." The estimated number of people directly and indirectly killed is 4.5 million. Labeled as a war on terror, open-ended U.S. warfare remains so routine that no one asks anymore when it might end.

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

In response to a spate of coups by U.S.-trained military personnel in West Africa and the greater Sahel, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., has authored an amendment to the 2024 defense spending bill to collect information on trainees who overthrow their governments. It would require the Pentagon for the first time to inform Congress about U.S.-mentored mutineers. "The Department of Defense, up until this point, has not kept data regarding the people they train who participate in coups to overthrow democratically elected – or any – governments," said Gaetz. The Intercept has found that at least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror. At least five leaders of the Niger coup in late July received American training. They, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as governors. The Intercept identified more than 70 other African military personnel involved in coups since 2001 who might have received U.S. training or assistance, but when provided with names, State Department spokespeople either failed to respond or replied, "We do not have the ability to provide records for these historical cases." Gaetz's proposed legislation ... would require the defense secretary to submit a report listing "the number of partner countries whose military forces have participated in security cooperation training or equipping programs or received security assistance training."

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

The FBI has amassed 21.7 million DNA profiles – equivalent to about 7 percent of the U.S. population – according to Bureau data reviewed by The Intercept. The FBI aims to nearly double its current $56.7 million budget for dealing with its DNA catalog with an additional $53.1 million, according to its budget request for fiscal year 2024. "The requested resources will allow the FBI to process the rapidly increasing number of DNA samples collected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security," the appeal for an increase says. "When we're talking about rapid expansion like this, it's getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database," Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, [said]. "I think the civil liberties implications here are significant." The rapid growth of the FBI's sample load is in large part thanks to a Trump-era rule change that mandated the collection of DNA from migrants who were arrested or detained by immigration authorities. Until recently, the U.S. DNA database surpassed even that of authoritarian China, which launched an ambitious DNA collection program in 2017. That year, the BBC reported, the U.S. had about 4 percent of its population's DNA, while China had about 3 percent. While DNA has played an important role in prosecuting crimes, less than 3 percent of the profiles have assisted in cases, the Bureau's data reveals. By comparison, fingerprints collected by the FBI from current and former federal employees linked them to crimes at a rate of 12 percent each year.

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

Col. Elias Melgar Urbina, a top-ranking Honduran military official and U.S. partner in joint drug war operations, has been tied to a Honduran drug trafficker, according to a U.S. Justice Department filing, and a private security company accused of assassinating land rights activists, according to eyewitness testimony and documents obtained by The Intercept. During the trial of Geovanny Fuentes RamĂ­rez in federal district court in Manhattan, U.S. prosecutors suggested the possibility that Melgar himself had links to the drug trade. Fuentes was convicted in March 2021 of conspiring with high-ranking Honduran politicians and military officials to traffic tons of cocaine into the United States. One of Fuentes's "military contacts," according to prosecutors, was Melgar. For decades, the U.S. has supported Honduran governments whose security forces have violently repressed protest, protected select figures in the drug trade, and executed perceived criminals with so-called extermination squads. Since 2009, when a military coup greenlit by the State Department ousted former President Manuel Zelaya, the husband of current president Castro, the U.S. has supported sweeping security initiatives to militarize Honduran forces in the name of the war on drugs – even as they engaged in widespread human rights abuses. "The armed forces have been the key for turning Honduras into a narco-state," [Pro-Honduras Network head Cristián] Sánchez told The Intercept.

Note: The US government has a long history of involvement in drug trafficking. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Food and Drug Administration is now regularly approving new drugs after just one or two clinical trials – a significant departure from the more rigorous vetting process the agency was previously known for, newly published research reveals. Furthermore, the authors say, there's now less information available to the public about the results of all trials. Of the 37 drugs approved by the FDA last year, 24 (about 65%) were approved based on just one study, according to a paper published in JAMA Network Open. Only four of those 37 drugs, or about 11%, reported three or more studies before approval. Another piece of new research, published in Health Affairs Scholar, found that of the 46 new drugs approved in 2017, 19 of them (41%) were approved based on a single study – though the drugmakers conducted an average of 2.2 studies per drug, including 165 studies for the popular weight-loss drug Ozempic. The ease with which novel drugs are approved is in part the result of the 21st Century Cures Act, passed in 2016 to speed the approval of new medicines so patients could gain access to life-saving treatments. As part of that law, the FDA relaxed some standards to allow treatments for priority health conditions such as cancer to be approved with fewer supporting studies, and with less emphasis on randomized clinical trials. But in the years following the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, the FDA has faced a firestorm of criticism over the approval process for some new drugs.

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

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) V-safe website quietly stopped collecting adverse event reports with no reason or explanation. The V-safe website simply states: "Thank you for your participation. Data collection for COVID-19 vaccines concluded on June 30, 2023." If you go there today, V-safe directs users to the FDA's VAERS website for adverse event reporting, even though officials continually derided VAERS as "passive" and "unverified." VAERS and V-safe are mutually exclusive safety collection databases operated by the FDA and CDC, respectively. According to the FDA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, mRNA "vaccines" have been named the primary suspect in over 1.5 million adverse event reports, of which there are >20,000 heart attacks and >27,000 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis just in the USA alone. VAERS reports represent fewer than 1 percent of vaccine adverse events. Based on VAERS and previous V-safe findings, adverse events from mRNA shots in the USA alone could be considered a humanitarian crisis. Despite those alarming clinical findings, the CDC has concluded that collecting new safety reports is somehow no longer in the interest of America's public health. Existing data from the V-safe site showed around 6.5 million adverse events/health impacts out of 10.1 million users, with around 2 million of those people unable to conduct normal activities of daily living.

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

As flames tore through a West Maui neighborhood, car after car of fleeing residents headed for the only paved road out of town in a desperate race for safety. And car after car was turned back toward the rapidly spreading wildfire by a barricade blocking access to Highway 30. One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their four-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took a dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned. He later picked his way through the flames, smoke and rubble to pull survivors to safety. But dozens of others found themselves caught in a hellscape, their cars jammed together on a narrow road, surrounded by flames on three sides and the rocky ocean waves on the fourth. Some died in their cars, while others tried to run for safety. The road closures – some because of the fire, some because of downed power lines – contributed to making historic Lahaina the site of the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. Many of the survivors are angry, and haunted by the thought that a just few minutes of notice could have saved many lives. [Nate] Baird's neighborhood near Lahainaluna Road was filled with kids who were home alone when the flames hit, he said. "We needed like 10 more minutes, and we could have saved a lot of kids," he said, choking back tears. "If we'd just had like a 10- or 15-minute warning."

Note: Despite years of Maui wildfire warnings, Hawaii government officials and Hawaiian Electric did little to address the wildfire threat, spending more on lobbying and peddling influence with regulators and politicians than preventing the fires from happening. For further exploration, watch Robert Kennedy Jr. and former leading BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd discuss this tragic issue.

Those who disobeyed the barricaded road closures during the Maui fires survived the disaster, while many of those who heeded orders to turn around perished in their cars and homes with no way out. At least 114 people were killed in the fires earlier this month, and the FBI is estimating that up to 1,100 more are unaccounted for. Officials are facing increased scrutiny for the emergency response, including why the emergency sirens were not set off and whether closing the roads prevented people from getting to safety. In the early hours of the Maui fires, there were more than 30 power poles downed alongside the Honoapiilani Highway at the south end of Lahaina – a historic town that was decimated in the fires earlier this month. Officials closed Lahaina Bypass Road due to the fires, blocking the only way out of Lahaina to the southern part of the island. Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said during a news conference that officers never stopped people from leaving the area, but the AP report suggests that residents were discouraged from disobeying the barricade. Kim Cuevas-Reyes said that she survived with her two sons by ignoring orders to turn right onto Front Street, which has now been devastated by the fires. Instead, she turned left and drove in the wrong lane to escape the town. "The gridlock would have left us there when the firestorm came," Cuevas-Reyes [said].

Note: Despite years of Maui wildfire warnings, Hawaii government officials and Hawaiian Electric did little to address the wildfire threat, spending more on lobbying and peddling influence with regulators and politicians than preventing the fires from happening. For further exploration, watch Robert Kennedy Jr. and former leading BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd discuss this tragic issue.

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.