Government Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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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.

Martin Makary, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Vinay Prasad, the newly appointed head of the FDA's vaccine division, have unveiled a new policy in which the government will no longer recommend Covid booster shots for healthy Americans ages 64 and younger. In addition, as of today, Covid vaccine manufacturers like Moderna and Pfizer will have to conduct trials to prove that their updated vaccines offer clinical benefits such as fewer symptoms, hospitalizations, or deaths. Previously, pharmaceutical companies only had to show that their updated booster shots produced antibodies. That less rigorous standard will still apply for people 65 and older and the immunocompromised. It is well established that people 65 and older account for the vast majority of Covid deaths, while most children, in particular, show few effects from the virus. The move is one part of what is expected to be further changes in federal Covid vaccine policy. According to The Wall Street Journal, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to scrap guidelines recommending routine Covid vaccinations for pregnant women, teenagers, and children. Late last month, in an interview with Phil McGraw (popularly known as Dr. Phil), Kennedy advised parents to "do your own research" before vaccinating their newborns. Less than a quarter of Americans received boosters in recent years.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID vaccine problems.

In President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, he also cautioned Americans about the growing power of a "scientific, technological elite." "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present," warned Eisenhower. And he was right. Today, many of the people protesting the Trump administration's cuts to federal funding for scientific research are part of that scientific, technological elite. But there's a good chance that slashing federal spending will liberate science from the corrupting forces that Eisenhower warned us about. Thomas Edison's industrial lab produced huge breakthroughs in telecommunications and electrification. Alexander Graham Bell's lab produced modern telephony and sound recording, all without government money. The Wright Brothers–who ran a bicycle shop before revolutionizing aviation–launched the first successfully manned airplane flight in December 1903, beating out more experienced competitors like Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who had received a grant from the War Department for his research. Of course, government funding has led to major breakthroughs both during and after World War II. In an influential 2005 paper, Stanford University professor John Ioannidis flatly concluded that "most published research findings are false." He argued that the current peer review model encourages groupthink. "You end up with a monolithic view, and so you crush what's so important in science, which is different ideas competing in a marketplace of ideas."

Note: "Trust the science" sounds noble–until you realize that even top editors of world-renowned journals have warned that much of published medical research is unreliable, distorted by fraud, corporate influence, and conflicts of interest. For more along these lines, read about how the US government turns a blind eye to the corporations fueling America's health crisis.

Uncle Sam conducted several pointless and destructive experiments on his own people during the Cold War. The most infamous was MKUltra, the CIA's project to develop procedures for mind control using psychedelic drugs and psychological torture. During Operation Sea-Spray, the U.S. Navy secretly sprayed San Francisco with bacteria to simulate a biological attack. San Francisco was also the site of a series of radiation experiments by the U.S. Navy. A 2024 investigation by the San Francisco Public Press and The Guardian revealed that the city's U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory had exposed at least 1,073 people to radiation over 24 experiments between 1946 and 1963. The tests came during a time when the effects of nuclear radiation were a pressing concern, and were conducted without ethical safeguards. Conscripted soldiers and civilian volunteers were sent into radioactive conditions or purposely dosed with radiation without their informed consent. The lab didn't bother following up. The Radiological Defense Laboratory ... closed in 1969. In 2013, whistleblowers brought a lawsuit against a decontamination contractor for cutting corners and faking results; in January 2025, the contractor agreed to pay a $97 million settlement. Scientists [there had] developed "synthetic fallout"–dirt laced with radioactive isotopes to simulate the waste created by a nuclear war. They had test subjects practice cleaning it up, rub it on their skin, or crawl around in it.

Note: Read about the long history of humans being treated like guinea pigs in science experiments. Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

The inaugural "AI Expo for National Competitiveness" [was] hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project – better known as the "techno-economic" thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference's lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that's best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump's family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces. I ... went to a panel in Palantir's booth titled Civilian Harm Mitigation. It was led by two "privacy and civil liberties engineers" [who] described how Palantir's Gaia map tool lets users "nominate targets of interest" for "the target nomination process". It helps people choose which places get bombed. After [clicking] a few options on an interactive map, a targeted landmass lit up with bright blue blobs. These blobs ... were civilian areas like hospitals and schools. Gaia uses a large language model (something like ChatGPT) to sift through this information and simplify it. Essentially, people choosing bomb targets get a dumbed-down version of information about where children sleep and families get medical treatment. "Let's say you're operating in a place with a lot of civilian areas, like Gaza," I asked the engineers afterward. "Does Palantir prevent you from ‘nominating a target' in a civilian location?" Short answer, no.

Note: "Nominating a target" is military jargon that means identifying a person, place, or object to be attacked with bombs, drones, or other weapons. Palantir's Gaia map tool makes life-or-death decisions easier by turning human lives and civilian places into abstract data points on a screen. Read about Palantir's growing influence in law enforcement and the war machine. For more, watch our 9-min video on the militarization of Big Tech.

Americans are becoming progressively sicker with chronic diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, immune disorders, and declining fertility. Six in 10 Americans suffer from at least one chronic disease, and four in 10 have two or more. The increase in incidence of chronic diseases to epidemic levels has occurred over the last 50 years in parallel with the dramatic increase in the production and use of human-made chemicals, most made from petroleum. These chemicals are used in household products, food, and food packaging. There is either no pre-market testing or limited, inappropriate testing for safety of chemicals such as artificial flavorings, dyes, emulsifiers, thickeners, preservatives, and other additives. Exposure is ubiquitous because chemicals that make their way into our food are frequently not identified, and thus cannot realistically be avoided. The result is that unavoidable toxic chemicals are contributing to chronic diseases. Critically, the FDA today does not require corporations to even inform them of many of the chemicals being added to our food, and corporations have been allowed to staff regulatory panels that determine whether the human-made chemicals they add to food and food packaging are safe. The FDA blatantly disregarded this abuse of federal conflict-of-interest standards, which resulted in thousands of untested chemicals being designated as "Generally Recognized As Safe" (GRAS).

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

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has canceled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell sensitive information about Americans, including financial data, credit history, and Social Security numbers. The CFPB proposed the new rule in early December under former director Rohit Chopra, who said the changes were necessary to combat commercial surveillance practices that "threaten our personal safety and undermine America's national security." The agency quietly withdrew the proposal on Tuesday morning. Data brokers operate within a multibillion-dollar industry built on the collection and sale of detailed personal information–often without individuals' knowledge or consent. These companies create extensive profiles on nearly every American, including highly sensitive data such as precise location history, political affiliations, and religious beliefs. Common Defense political director Naveed Shah, an Iraq War veteran, condemned the move to spike the proposed changes, accusing Vought of putting the profits of data brokers before the safety of millions of service members. Investigations by WIRED have shown that data brokers have collected and made cheaply available information that can be used to reliably track the locations of American military and intelligence personnel overseas, including in and around sensitive installations where US nuclear weapons are reportedly stored.

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

Jay Bhattacharya is no longer on the fringe. Bhattacharya is now the director of the National Institutes of Health, one of the most powerful figures in public health and biomedical research in the U.S. and across the globe. "The first and most important thing," he says in a new interview with POLITICO Magazine, "is that dissenting voices need to be heard and allowed." He praises the pardon of Anthony Fauci even as he effectively accuses the former public health official of engaging in a Covid cover-up. He endorses the creation of an independent commission to assess the pandemic response. He rejects the continued recommendation of mRNA vaccines for healthy young people. Do you believe the U.S. – or other countries – should do more to uncover the origins of Covid-19? "Yes, but I think the Chinese need to cooperate and they have not cooperated," [said Bhattacharya]. "There's enough evidence that I've seen from the outside that suggests that there was at the very least a cover-up of dangerous experiments that were done in China with – by the way – the help of the U.S. and also Germany and the UK. There was an international effort to try to supposedly prevent pandemics by finding viruses and pathogens in the wild [and] making them more transmissible. I think that was a very, very dangerous kind of utopian research agenda. I'm convinced that research agenda led to this pandemic through a lab leak in China, in Wuhan. But that was a global effort."

Note: Watch our Mindful News Brief on the cover-up of COVID origins. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID and government corruption.

Klaus Barbie, the notorious Nazi war criminal known as the "Butcher of Lyon," managed to escape justice for decades, living under a false identity in Bolivia until his arrest in 1983. Barbie worked for Western intelligence services and adopted the alias Klaus Altmann in South America. In Bolivia, he became the chief security adviser to Roberto Suárez, one of the world's most powerful drug traffickers. Barbie's success with Suárez brought him new clients, including dictator Luis GarcĂ­a Meza, who seized power in 1980 with the backing of cocaine barons. Barbie, hailed as the ideological architect of Bolivia's "Cocaine Coup," was awarded the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Bolivian army and granted immunity for his actions. He helped Meza set up death squads and served as Bolivia's de facto intelligence chief. New revelations stem from recently declassified CIA cables from 1974, which show that agency operatives suspected Barbie of involvement in the drug trade – including possible links to Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Barbie was reportedly recruited by the CIA. His role in aiding drug cartels was allegedly part of a broader U.S. effort to prevent leftist regimes from taking power in Bolivia – as had happened in Cuba – by bolstering military dictatorships. This cooperation is believed to have allowed Barbie to evade extradition to France for years. When he was finally captured, the U.S. formally apologized to France for helping him flee.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth behind the war on drugs. For more, explore our information on Operation Paperclip, where more than 1,500 Nazis were secretly embedded in the US scientific community and intelligence establishment.

Before signing its lucrative and controversial Project Nimbus deal with Israel, Google knew it couldn't control what the nation and its military would do with the powerful cloud-computing technology, a confidential internal report obtained by The Intercept reveals. The report makes explicit the extent to which the tech giant understood the risk of providing state-of-the-art cloud and machine learning tools to a nation long accused of systemic human rights violations. Not only would Google be unable to fully monitor or prevent Israel from using its software to harm Palestinians, but the report also notes that the contract could obligate Google to stonewall criminal investigations by other nations into Israel's use of its technology. And it would require close collaboration with the Israeli security establishment – including joint drills and intelligence sharing – that was unprecedented in Google's deals with other nations. The rarely discussed question of legal culpability has grown in significance as Israel enters the third year of what has widely been acknowledged as a genocide in Gaza – with shareholders pressing the company to conduct due diligence on whether its technology contributes to human rights abuses. Google doesn't furnish weapons to the military, but it provides computing services that allow the military to function – its ultimate function being, of course, the lethal use of those weapons. Under international law, only countries, not corporations, have binding human rights obligations.

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

Across the country, state legislatures and Congress are considering laws that would give chemical manufacturers ... liability shields that protect them from lawsuits, even when their products are linked to cancer, infertility or birth defects. Georgia's Legislature recently enacted House Bill 211, limiting liability for PFAS contamination – "forever chemicals" known to damage human health. Several other states are following suit. In Washington, D.C., the 2024 House Republican farm bill draft included language that would preempt local pesticide protections and deny legal recourse to those harmed by agrichemicals. Seventy-nine members of Congress recently wrote to the administration defending the agrochemical lobby, calling pesticides "essential tools" and warning against "politically motivated attacks on sound science." But science is not on their side. When Congress created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986, it removed civil liability from pharmaceutical companies. Today, we are watching the same shield being extended to the agrochemical industry except this time it affects every American who eats food, drinks water or breathes air. This is not a question of agricultural efficiency or feeding America. This is a political maneuver to protect profit, not people. And it comes just as science is revealing new links between chemical exposure and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, endocrine disruption, chronic illness and birth defects.

Note: Our latest Substack, "The Pesticide Crisis Reveals The Dark Side of Science. We Have The Solutions to Regenerate," uncovers the widespread conspiracy to poison our food, air, and water–and the powerful remedies and solutions to this crisis. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and toxic chemicals.

In 2009, Pennsylvania's Lower Merion school district remotely activated its school-issued laptop webcams to capture 56,000 pictures of students outside of school, including in their bedrooms. After the Covid-19 pandemic closed US schools at the dawn of this decade, student surveillance technologies were conveniently repackaged as "remote learning tools" and found their way into virtually every K-12 school, thereby supercharging the growth of the $3bn EdTech surveillance industry. Products by well-known EdTech surveillance vendors such as Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly and Navigate360 review and analyze our children's digital lives, ranging from their private texts, emails, social media posts and school documents to the keywords they search and the websites they visit. In 2025, wherever a school has access to a student's data – whether it be through school accounts, school-provided computers or even private devices that utilize school-associated educational apps – they also have access to the way our children think, research and communicate. As schools normalize perpetual spying, today's kids are learning that nothing they read or write electronically is private. Big Brother is indeed watching them, and that negative repercussions may result from thoughts or behaviors the government does not endorse. Accordingly, kids are learning that the safest way to avoid revealing their private thoughts, and potentially subjecting themselves to discipline, may be to stop or sharply restrict their digital communications and to avoid researching unpopular or unconventional ideas altogether.

Note: Learn about Proctorio, an AI surveillance anti-cheating software used in schools to monitor children through webcams–conducting "desk scans," "face detection," and "gaze detection" to flag potential cheating and to spot anybody "looking away from the screen for an extended period of time." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

The US military may soon have an army of faceless suicide bombers at their disposal, as an American defense contractor has revealed their newest war-fighting drone. AeroVironment unveiled the Red Dragon in a video on their YouTube page, the first in a new line of 'one-way attack drones.' This new suicide drone can reach speeds up to 100 mph and can travel nearly 250 miles. The new drone takes just 10 minutes to set up and launch and weighs just 45 pounds. Once the small tripod the Red Dragon takes off from is set up, AeroVironment said soldiers would be able to launch up to five per minute. Since the suicide robot can choose its own target in the air, the US military may soon be taking life-and-death decisions out of the hands of humans. Once airborne, its AVACORE software architecture functions as the drone's brain, managing all its systems and enabling quick customization. Red Dragon's SPOTR-Edge perception system acts like smart eyes, using AI to find and identify targets independently. Simply put, the US military will soon have swarms of bombs with brains that don't land until they've chosen a target and crash into it. Despite Red Dragon's ability to choose a target with 'limited operator involvement,' the Department of Defense (DoD) has said it's against the military's policy to allow such a thing to happen. The DoD updated its own directives to mandate that 'autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems' always have the built-in ability to allow humans to control the device.

Note: Drones create more terrorists than they kill. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on warfare technology and Big Tech.

A former housing official who worked under President George H. W. Bush has made an astonishing claim that the U.S. government spent years funneling money into the creation of a secret underground "city" where the rich and powerful can shelter in the event of a "near-extinction event." Catherine Austin Fitts ... served as the assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Housing between 1989 and 1990. Fitts ... cited research by Michigan State University economist Mark Skidmore, who released a report in 2017 stating that he and a team of scholars had uncovered $21 trillion in "unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015." According to Fitts, who worked as an investment banker before joining Bush's administration, that money was used to fund the development of what she described as an "underground base, city infrastructure and transportation system" that has been kept hidden from the public. She [said] that she spent two years researching where the $21 trillion had gone, alleging that she uncovered evidence that there are 170 secret facilities in the U.S. alone, explaining that she and a team of investigators combed through "all the data and all the allegations on underground bases" in order to make a "guess" as to how many might exist. Additionally, Fitts alleged that several of these bases are located beneath oceans–not just underground.

Note: Read more about the groundbreaking work of Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and government waste.

A $500 million lawsuit filed Monday in Washtenaw County Circuit Court is taking aim at the Michigan Department of Corrections, alleging that prison officials subjected hundreds of incarcerated women to illegal surveillance by recording them during strip searches, while showering, and even as they used the toilet. At the heart of the case is a deeply controversial and, according to experts, unprecedented policy implemented at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility, the only women's prison in Michigan. Under the Michigan Department of Corrections policy directive, prison guards were instructed to wear activated body cameras while conducting routine strip searches, capturing video of women in states of complete undress. The suit, brought by the firm Flood Law, alleges a range of abuses, including lewd comments from prison guards during recorded searches, and long-term psychological trauma inflicted on women, many of whom are survivors of sexual violence. Attorneys for the 20 Jane Does listed on the suit and hundreds of others on retainer argued that this practice not only deprived women of their dignity, but also violated widely accepted detention standards. No other state in the country permits such recordings; many have explicit prohibitions against filming individuals during unclothed searches, recognizing the inherent risk of abuse and the acute vulnerability of the people being searched. Michigan, the attorneys said, stands alone.

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

Andre Daigle, 27, went missing on June 9, 1987, after a night of drinks and pool with friends, following which, the New Orleans resident was never seen alive again. Four days later, Andre's sister Elise, who lived out in California, went to psychic Rosemarie Kerr of Cypress with her brother's photo, whose body and killers were found 13 days later thanks to the clairvoyant. In researching the validity of psychics in police work, Euro Weekly News came across a highly surprising and unexpected 5-page US DoJ report published in 1993 entitled "Psychics and Police Work." "The usefulness of psychics in police investigations is controversial, but psychics have long been and will undoubtedly continue to be involved in unsolved criminal investigations," it reads. The Department of Justice document compares the work of psychics and detectives, saying "both base their work on intuition to some extent, and then they specifically mention one psychic who they say helped police in thousands of cases." In an August 2000 CIA document entitled "Use of Psychics in Law Enforcement," the US intelligence agency acknowledged that psychics have been helpful to police in many cases and outlined some guidelines on when and how to deal with them. "Psychics have provided information that was helpful to law enforcement, contributing to the successful resolution of cases," the CIA confirms. "Using psychics can be legitimate when traditional methods fail."

Note: Explore our resources on remote viewing programs. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on the mysterious nature of reality.

Today marks 50 years since the end of the American War in Vietnam, which killed an estimated 3.3 million Vietnamese people, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, tens of thousands of Laotians and more than 58,000 U.S. service members. But for many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian people; Vietnamese Americans; and U.S. Vietnam veterans and their descendants, the impacts of the war never ended. They continue to suffer the devastating consequences of Agent Orange, an herbicide mixture used by the U.S. military that contained dioxin, the deadliest chemical known to humankind. As a result, many people have been born with congenital anomalies – disabling changes in the formation of the spinal cord, limbs, heart, palate, and more. This remains the largest deployment of herbicidal warfare in history. In the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the Nixon administration promised to contribute $3 billion for compensation and postwar reconstruction of Vietnam. But that promise remains unfulfilled. Between 2,100,000 and 4,800,000 Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodian people, and tens of thousands of Americans were exposed to Agent Orange/dioxin during the spraying operations. Many other Vietnamese people were or continue to be exposed to Agent Orange/dioxin through contact with the environment and food that was contaminated. Many offspring of those who were exposed have congenital anomalies, developmental disabilities, and other diseases.

Note: Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently introduced The Agent Orange Relief Act of 2025 to attempt to provide relief for some of the victims of this toxic chemical. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and toxic chemicals.

In recent years, Israeli security officials have boasted of a "ChatGPT-like" arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism. It was released in full force after Hamas's bloody attack on October 7. Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians ... for social media-related offenses. Many had engaged in relatively low-level political speech, like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp. Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U.S. this year. Recent high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military's policies in Gaza. In some instances, the State Department has relied on informants, blacklists, and technology as simple as a screenshot. But the U.S. is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli authorities have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech. In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered "Catch and Revoke" initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to "overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and the erosion of civil liberties.

When a military judge threw out a defendant's confession in the Sept. 11 case this month, he gave two main reasons. The prisoner's statements, the judge ruled, were obtained through the C.I.A.'s use of torture, including beatings and sleep deprivation. But equally troubling to the judge was what happened to the prisoner in the years after his physical torture ended, when the agency held him in isolation and kept questioning him from 2003 to 2006. The defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, is accused of sending money and providing other support to some of the hijackers who carried out the terrorist attack, which killed 3,000 people. In court, Mr. Baluchi is charged as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. He is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the plot. The judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, wrote that it was easy to focus on the torture because it was "so absurdly far outside the norms of what is expected of U.S. custody preceding law enforcement questioning." "However," he added, "the three and a half years of uncharged, incommunicado detention and essentially solitary confinement – all while being continually questioned and conditioned – is just as egregious" as the physical torture. Prosecutors are preparing to appeal. But the 111-page ruling was the latest blow to the government's two-decade-old effort to hold death penalty trials at Guantánamo Bay by sweeping aside a legacy of state-sponsored torture.

Note: Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

Automakers are increasingly pushing consumers to accept monthly and annual fees to unlock preinstalled safety and performance features, from hands-free driving systems and heated seats to cameras that can automatically record accident situations. But the additional levels of internet connectivity this subscription model requires can increase drivers' exposure to government surveillance and the likelihood of being caught up in police investigations. Police records recently reviewed by WIRED show US law enforcement agencies regularly trained on how to take advantage of "connected cars," with subscription-based features drastically increasing the amount of data that can be accessed during investigations. Nearly all subscription-based car features rely on devices that come preinstalled in a vehicle, with a cellular connection necessary only to enable the automaker's recurring-revenue scheme. The ability of car companies to charge users to activate some features is effectively the only reason the car's systems need to communicate with cell towers. Companies often hook customers into adopting the services through free trial offers, and in some cases the devices are communicating with cell towers even when users decline to subscribe. In a letter sent in April 2024 ... US senators Ron Wyden and Edward Markey ... noted that a range of automakers, from Toyota, Nissan, and Subaru, among others, are willing to disclose location data to the government.

Note: Automakers can collect intimate information that includes biometric data, genetic information, health diagnosis data, and even information on people's "sexual activities" when drivers pair their smartphones to their vehicles. The automakers can then take that data and sell it or share it with vendors and insurance companies. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

Since 1999, more than 800,000 Americans have died from opioid overdoses. The latest headlines focus on fentanyl, yet the staggering toll can be traced to the widespread availability of opioid pills made possible by decades of overprescribing. Few users start with fentanyl. Experts date the start of the opioid epidemic to within three years of the approval of OxyContin in 1995. Reports from emergency departments across the US showed Purdue's pills were being crushed and injected or snorted as early as 1997. "My eyes popped open," recalls one FDA medical officer of seeing the reports. "Nobody wanted to see it for what it was. You would've had to have your head in the sand not to know that there was something wrong." By 2000, Purdue was selling $1.1 billion annually in OxyContin. Higher doses led to higher profit. Sales reps were coached accordingly. In five years, oxycodone prescribing had surged 402%, and hospital emergency room mentions of oxycodone were up 346%. By 2012, OxyContin sales were almost $3 billion annually. And many other companies were cashing in. In the preceding six years, 76 billion opioid pills had been produced and shipped across the US, as the FDA faced a national crisis of epic proportions. In the 2010s, the US, with less than 5% of the global population, was consuming 80% of the world's oxycodone. And with coordinated pharmaceutical campaigns to destigmatize opioids, brands other than Purdue's and Roxane's benefited.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. Read how Congress fueled this epidemic over DEA objections. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and Big Pharma profiteering.

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.