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.

The United States is the world leader in regime change, toppling 35 foreign heads over the past 120 years, by one reckoning. Overthrowing another country's leader is a routine enough tactic that it has its own acronym among academics: FIRC, or foreign-imposed regime change. According to a tally by Alexander Downes, an associate professor and political scientist at George Washington University ... the United States carried out nearly a third of all of about 120 forced ousters of foreign leaders around the world between 1816 and 2011. About 20 of those 35 U.S.-backed regime changes were in Central and South America or the Caribbean. In some of those countries, the United States removed and replaced leaders again and again, with the concentration of someone kicking a vending machine to get the right candy bar to drop. In 1954 alone, for example, Washington ousted three Guatemalan leaders in succession. Globally, a third of all forced regime changes by all countries led to civil wars in the targeted nation within 10 years. Experts see warning signs for any attempt at regime change in Venezuela, a petrostate where misgovernment by socialist autocrat Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez, coupled with international sanctions, have trashed the economy and created millions of refugees. The Trump administration has accused Maduro of being in league with drug traffickers, although the United States overstates Venezuela's role in drug smuggling.

Note: Learn about the 35 countries where the US has supported fascists, drug lords and terrorists.

The director of the Food and Drug Administration's vaccine division told agency staff in a memo that an internal review found that at least 10 children died "after and because of receiving" the Covid vaccine. The 3,000-word memo, obtained by NBC News, was written by Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. In it, Prasad claims that agency staff determined that "no fewer than 10" of 96 child deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, between 2021 and 2024 were "related" to Covid vaccination. He said the true numbers could be higher, accusing the agency of ignoring the safety concerns for years. "This is a profound revelation," Prasad wrote in the memo. "For the first time, the U.S. FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children." Prasad suggests that the child deaths were tied to myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle. The memo uses [characterized] Covid vaccine requirements for schools and employers as "coercive," calling past agency decisions "dishonest," and arguing that vaccine regulation "may have harmed more children than we saved." At one point, Prasad instructs staff who disagree with his conclusions to resign. He also claimed the Biden administration dismissed early safety concerns, and criticized former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky for what he described as "dishonest and manipulative" public comments.

Note: Children were never at serious risk from the COVID virus. The death of even one child from this vaccine is unacceptable. Read our comprehensive, in-depth, and nuanced investigation into COVID vaccine injuries and deaths.

The Trump administration has literally killed more than 80 suspected drug smugglers by blowing their small boats out of the water since September, but this week the president has reportedly decided to pardon one of the biggest cocaine traffickers of them all. The news that Trump is going to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was sentenced to 45 years in U.S. prison just last year came as a shocker. The White House has said repeatedly that drug traffickers are narcoterrorists who are waging war on America, justifying their killing the boats every time. Yet Hernandez was convicted of conspiring to import 500,000 kilos of cocaine into the United States. While president, Hernández received millions of dollars from trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico, and from notorious drug lords like Joaquín Guzmán Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo, who was the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and is responsible for the murder of some 34,000 people. In return, according to prosecutors, President Hernández allowed vast amounts of cocaine to pass through Honduras on its way to the United States. Hernandez was tolerated if not preferred by previous U.S. administrations from Obama through the first Trump White House, because he and his National Party were business friendly, anti-communist, and supported by the neoconservatives now gunning against Maduro.

Note: Beginning with the backing of an illegal and brutal military coup that egregiously violated human rights in 2009, the US government–under both Democratic and Republican administrations–supported Hernández for years, funneling aid to his military and police forces while turning a blind eye to his deep involvement in drug trafficking, election fraud, and human rights abuses. For more, read our Substack investigation into the dark truths behind the US War on Drugs.

The public is now well aware of the Central Intelligent Agency's misadventures in mind control throughout the 1950s and 1960s. MKUltra–the agency's top-secret and wide-ranging human experimentation program–involved 149 subprojects that made test subjects out of thousands of unsuspecting Americans, jolting them with high-voltage shocks, zapping them with radio waves, and dosing them with psychedelic drugs in a bid to develop brainwashing techniques. But humans weren't MKUltra's only non-consenting participants. Animal subjects also played a starring role. Surgeons implanted microphones into cats' ears. An elephant was allegedly injected with a massive amount of LSD. And ... scientists implanted electrodes into the brains of six dogs in an attempt to control their movement and turn them into remote-controlled assassins. The goal of that last initiative, Subproject 94 ... "was to examine the feasibility of controlling the behavior of a dog, in an open field, by means of remotely triggered electrical stimulation of the brain," according to heavily redacted documents declassified in 2002. During Operation Fantasia, in an effort to scare the Japanese into surrender, OSS scientists painted foxes with radioactive paint that glowed in the dark, hoping to recreate a Shinto portent of doom: the kitsune, a shapeshifting, supernatural fox spirit. The plan was eventually scrapped, but not before a trial run in which the OSS released 30 glowing foxes into Washington D.C.

Note: Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on mind control and microchip implants.

November 30 marks the International Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare. Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed an estimated 20 million gallons of herbicides over southern Vietnam, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, and parts of Cambodia. Nearly two-thirds was Agent Orange, later discovered to be contaminated with 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) – a potent, long-lasting dioxin. TCDD is a known human carcinogen and an endocrine disruptor, linked to cancers, reproductive disorders, and birth defects that can span generations. By the letter of the CWC, Agent Orange is not classified as a "chemical weapon." If you ask a Vietnam veteran suffering from Parkinson's, cancer, heart disease, or any of the 19 types of conditions the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) associates with Agent Orange exposure, you'll hear a very different story. To them, it was every bit a weapon designed to destroy life and health. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that over 757,000 veterans – about one in four who served – were receiving benefits linked to Agent Orange. The 2022 PACT Act broadened that circle to veterans who served in other areas where Agent Orange was used. By 2024, more than 84,000 new Vietnam-era veterans were granted compensation, many due to exposure. Fifty years after the Vietnam War ended, the toxic legacy of Agent Orange and other dioxins lingers on.

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

On August 10, 2019, Mark Epstein ... saw a breaking news story on CNN that his older brother, Jeffrey, had supposedly committed suicide while awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan. When Mark heard news about Jeffrey's death, he boarded a plane and was the one who identified his body. At first, he thought that his brother had committed suicide, as the FBI and other government agencies claimed. "I had no reason to doubt it [the suicide claim]. He was facing a long time in jail," Mark said. When he hired the renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, he expected Baden to confirm that his brother had committed suicide. However, he said that Dr. Baden instead said he couldn't call it a suicide because it "looked too much like a homicide." Fractures found in the autopsy photos under Jeffrey's neck and jaw were inconsistent with a suicide hanging. Baden said: "Going over a thousand jail hangings, suicides in the New York City state prisons over the past 40-50 years, no one had three fractures [as Epstein did]." Dr. Kristin Roman, the New York City pathologist charged with doing the autopsy, came out of the autopsy, like Dr. Baden, saying that Jeffrey's death looked more like a homicide than a suicide. The initial death certificate said, as cause of death, "pending further study." Dr. Baden and Dr. Roman's assessments did not appear in a June 2023 Department of Justice (DOJ) report.

Note: Internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Jeffrey Epstein's death–including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures. According to CBS News, nearly two years passed before investigators interviewed the two key corrections officers on duty the night Epstein died. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

Military aviation accidents are spiking. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D- Mass.) office reported this week, the rate of severe accidents per 100,000 flight hours, was a staggering 55% higher than it was in 2020. Her office said mishaps cost the military $9.4 billion, killed 90 service members and DoD civilian employees, and destroyed 89 aircraft between 2020 to 2024. The Air Force lost 47 airmen to "preventable mishaps" in 2024 alone. The U.S. continues to utilize aircraft with known safety issues or are otherwise prone to accidents, like the V-22 Osprey, whose gearbox and clutch failures can cause crashes. Dan Grazier, director of the Stimson Center's National Security Reform Program, told RS that the lack of flight crew experience is a problem. "The total number of flight hours U.S. military pilots receive has been abysmal for years. Pilots in all branches simply don't fly often enough to even maintain their flying skills, to say nothing of improving them," he said. This is often because aircraft are not ready to fly. "One of the main reasons behind the lack of flying time, is the simple fact that modern military aircraft are excessively complex machines that don't work as often as the services need them to do," Grazier told RS. He said that popular aircraft, like the F-35, often are not mission capable. "Pentagon officials can ... insist on simpler aircraft with high readiness rates as a key performance parameter."

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

The truth is out there – and late President George H.W. Bush apparently knew it – telling a federal official that an alien made contact with humans at a secretive New Mexico air base in 1964. Eric Davis, an astrophysicist who was a scientific advisor on the since-disbanded Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program ... claimed that Bush confirmed to him in a private conversation details of contact between the military and an alien creature at Holloman Air Force Base in Otero County. Bush told him that three spaceships were seen approaching the base and that an interstellar being emerged from one ship and had a face-to-face encounter with military and CIA officials, Davis said during an interview in "The Age of Disclosure," a documentary. "One of them landed on the tarmac and a non-human entity deboarded the craft that landed and interacted with uniformed Air Force and civilian CIA personnel," Davis claimed. "And when [Bush] asked for more details he was told that he did not have a need-to-know," he relayed. Davis claims in the film that alien bodies were recovered in Russia in 1988, pulled from the wreckage of a large tic-tac shaped UAP, or unidentified anomalous phenomena. Hal Puthoff, a former AATIP member, quantum physicist and longtime disclosure advocate, claimed there were several different types of ETs. "The bodies recovered are not all the same type," Puthoff said in the documentary, though he declined to detail them.

Note: In the Controlling the UFO Narrative: Government Cover-Ups and Secret Programs section of our UFO Information Center, we present a 2019 leaked memo with Dr. Eric Davis and former Director of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Admiral Thomas R. Wilson. They discuss the existence of deeply classified black budget programs dealing with non-human technology and the different departments and people involved. Our 26-minute video UFO Disclosure: Breakthrough Technology and Awakening Human Consciousness features interviews with leading experts along with well-sourced, verifiable information to help you make sense of this fascinating issue and its immense potential to transform our world.

During the Cold War, the first implants showing that we could control animal minds sparked panic. The C.I.A. had its own clandestine experimental mind-control program. People warned of brain warfare. Those fears [are] back, along with a conversation about what it means to have freedom of thought at a time when technology is literally being implanted in our brains. Brain computer interface, or B.C.I. ... are very small devices that go right on the surface of your brain, where they can pick up neural activity. The data is transmitted via Bluetooth to a computer program, which decodes the information. In a sense, they're hooked up to an artificial intelligence. So the neural network inside your mind communicates with a neural network outside. And through that, we are able to reconstruct people's intentions. For people with degenerative diseases, or who are paralyzed, or who otherwise have lost important abilities, these implants have been totally revolutionary. These patients can move their hands, type and in some cases, speak again. Optogenetics, a technique for turning isolated neurons on and off, has been used to implant false memories in mice, raising the possibility that, in the distant future, something similar could be done in humans. Neuroprivacy is the idea that we should have to give consent to anyone who wants access to our innermost selves. But there's a question: Does neuroprivacy apply only to my unspoken thoughts? Or does it apply to the electrical activity in my brain?

Note: Read about the Pentagon's plans to use our brains as warfare, describing how the human body is war's next domain. Learn more about biotech dangers. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and microchip implants.

The White House under Gerald Ford tried to block a landmark Senate report that disclosed the CIA's role in assassination attempts against foreign leaders and ultimately led to a radical overhaul in how the agency was held to account, documents released to mark the 50th anniversary of the report's publication reveal. The documents, dating from 1975, were posted on Thursday by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, as it sought to highlight the report's significance amid conjecture that Donald Trump may have authorized the agency to assassinate Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, amid a massive US military build-up against the country. Among the documents posted by the National Security Archive is a "secret/sensitive" options paper addressed to Dick Cheney, then chief of staff to Ford, that included a recommendation of outright opposition to publication of the report. Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, said highlighting the Church report's historical significance had become more urgent. "Fifty years after the scandal of the revelations of the Church committee report, we've come a long way in the wrong direction, where we have US presidents who now seem to feel they can openly discuss assassination plots against foreign leaders," he said. At least 83 people have been killed in 21 US drone strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific since early September.

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

Fifty years ago today, a special Senate Committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church lifted the veil of secrecy on the clandestine efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to target specific foreign leaders for assassination. The Church Committee overcame intense pressure from the Gerald Ford White House to withhold publication of the report, which exposed CIA operations to "neutralize" leaders such as Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and General Rene Schneider in Chile. "The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots," states the introduction of the 285-page report, officially titled Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. "The Committee believes that, short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy." To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee report, the National Security Archive is posting a small selection of documents on efforts by the Ford Administration to keep the report secret. Public outrage forced the CIA and the White House to retreat on the use of assassination as a tool of covert operations. In response to the report, on February 18, 1976, President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, which stated: "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination."

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

2025 has given Americans plenty to protest about. But as news cameras showed protesters filling streets of cities across the country, law enforcement officers–including U.S. Border Patrol agents–were quietly watching those same streets through different lenses: Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that tracked every passing car. Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock Safety's servers, we discovered that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock's national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted known activist groups, demonstrating how mass surveillance technology increasingly threatens our freedom to demonstrate. Via public records requests, EFF obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. The data shows that agencies logged hundreds of searches related to the 50501 protests in February, the Hands Off protests in April, the No Kings protests in June and October, and other protests in between. Some agencies have adopted policies that prohibit using ALPRs for monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment. Yet many officers probed the nationwide network with terms like "protest" without articulating an actual crime under investigation.

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

On July 31, 2019, just eleven days before Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell, his connection to the Rothschild banking dynasty became the subject of major public controversy. Anonymous sources informed Bloomberg of a 2015 visit to Epstein's New York mansion by baroness Ariane de Rothschild, the CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Group, a storied private bank and one of the largest Swiss financial institutions by assets under management. Newly released documents reveal that Epstein and de Rothschild's personal relationship was much closer than the bank previously acknowledged. According to emails released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee on November 12, Epstein planned to see a Broadway play with de Rothschild in January 2014, and scheduled a private trip with her to Montreal. A second set of documents–the leaked inbox of former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak ... sheds light on Epstein's efforts to leverage his personal friendship with de Rothschild to raise funds for the development of Israeli cyberweapons. It's not clear whether the Rothschild bank ultimately participated directly in Epstein and Barak's cyberweapons efforts–but in October 2015, de Rothschild negotiated a $25 million contract with Epstein's Southern Trust Company, the same entity Epstein used to fund Barak's intelligence-linked security startup Reporty Homeland Security (now known as Carbyne) earlier that year.

Note: Read more about the vast influence of the Rothschild empire. Israeli cyberweapons have been sold to the FBI and used against journalists and activists. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's crime ring.

The first thing Lana Ponting remembers about the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, is the smell. That hospital ... would be her home for a month in April 1958, after a judge ordered the then-16-year-old to undergo treatment for "disobedient" behaviour. Ms Ponting became one of thousands of people experimented on as part of the CIA's top-secret research into mind control. Now, she is one of two named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for Canadian victims of the experiments. She became an unwitting participant in covert CIA experiments known as MK-Ultra. The Cold War project tested the effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD, electroshock treatments and brainwashing techniques on human beings without their consent. Over 100 institutions – hospitals, prisons and schools – in the US and Canada were involved. At the Allan, McGill University researcher Dr Ewen Cameron drugged patients and made them listen to recordings, sometimes thousands of times. The technique was a form of "psychic driving," says doctoral student Jordan Torbay. "Essentially the minds of patients were manipulated using verbal cues," she says, adding he also looked at the effects of sleep drugs, forced sensory deprivation, and induced coma. Medical records show Ms Ponting was given LSD, as well as drugs like sodium amytal, a barbiturate, desoxyn, a stimulant, as well as nitrous oxide gas, a sedative known as laughing gas.

Note: Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and mind control.

Epstein's relationship with the Israeli government has long been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theorizing. But the extent of the connections has long been difficult to prove. That is, until October 2024, when the Palestinian group Handala released a tranche of more than 100,000 hacked emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who led the country from 1999 to 2001. Barak is known to have been one of Epstein's closest associates. He visited the financier's estates in Florida and New York more than 30 times between 2013 and 2017, years after Epstein had been convicted for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most prominent victims, who died earlier this year, alleged in her posthumous memoir that a figure, described only as "the Prime Minister," but widely believed to be Barak, violently raped her on Epstein's private Caribbean island when she was 18. Epstein helped to facilitate an agreement for Mongolia to purchase Israeli military equipment and surveillance technology from companies with which the men had financial ties. An Israeli spy, Yoni Koren, stayed at Epstein's New York apartment for weeks at a time on three separate occasions between 2013 and 2015. Koren served as an intermediary between the American and Israeli governments, helping Barak organize meetings with top intelligence officials, including former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Epstein's criminal enterprise and intelligence agency corruption.

Sarah wasn't expecting to experience paralysis at 7 am on a weekday during a meditation at her home. But in August, while listening to "The Gateway Tapes"–a set of guided meditations intended to help people reach new planes of consciousness–she says her limbs froze. Sarah ... says the tapes–which she had been listening to on and off for months–took her on a roller-coaster journey of out-of-body experiences. "I was in and out of time and space," she says. Developed by radio broadcasting executive Robert Monroe, the Gateway Process claims to be "a voyage of self-discovery" that can help people go "farther, deeper and faster into different dimensions of consciousness." Monroe founded the Monroe Institute in 1971. The facility claims to help coax people out of their bodies via in-person and virtual retreats, and even Spotify playlists, by way of self-hypnosis style exercises powered by "binaural beats"–sounds attuned to different frequencies which play in each headphone ear. In the early 1980s ... the CIA and the Department of Defense sent US Army lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell to the institute to ascertain its suitability as a defense contractor. McDonnell gave the organization and its unusual curriculum his approval in a 1983 report which has since been declassified. "There is a sound and rational basis," McDonnell writes, "in terms of physical science parameters for considering Gateway to be plausible in terms of its essential objectives."

Note: A society that can self-regulate, self-heal, and access deeper layers of perception is harder to manipulate and even harder to govern through fear. Read our latest Substack, How Consciousness Research Can Help Heal a Divided World to learn more about the Gateway Project. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the mysterious nature of reality.

The CIA experienced "as many failures as successes" in exploring the intelligence applications of LSD and other drugs, according to the October 1975 U.S. Senate testimony of the Agency's former top chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, the man most closely associated with the notorious MKULTRA behavior control research projects. The long-secret transcripts of Gottlieb's testimony to the staff of the United States Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee") were published today by the National Security Archive, 50 years after the historic intelligence oversight hearings, along with a selection of declassified CIA memos and other records concerning MKULTRA. The Church Committee transcripts are among the highlights of the Digital National Security Archive collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA. Gottlieb was a key bureaucratic player who signed off on hundreds of MKULTRA subprojects and who developed clandestine relationships with universities, prisons, hospitals, private laboratories, and private foundations that made it difficult to trace the programs back to the Agency. The Church Committee faced considerable obstacles in reconstructing the story, especially since Gottlieb and CIA director Richard Helms destroyed most of the original project records in 1973.

Note: According to Gottlieb's testimony, the CIA covertly dosed an unwitting individual with a massive amount of LSD to deliberately induce psychosis, causing him to experience violent paranoia and leading an unsuspecting psychiatrist to declare him mentally ill. This was done explicitly to discredit the man in the eyes of his colleagues–a tactic deemed as operationally useful for destroying a person's credibility without ever touching them. Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

Local cops have gotten tens of millions of dollars' worth of discounted military gear under a secretive federal program that is poised to grow under recent executive action. The 1122 program ... presents a danger to people facing off against militarized cops, according to Women for Weapons Trade Transparency. "All of these things combined serve as a threat to free speech, an intimidation tactic to protest," said Lillian Mauldin, the co-founder of the nonprofit group, which produced the report released this week. The federal government's 1033 program ... has long sent surplus gear like mine-resistant vehicles and bayonets to local police. Since 1994, however, the even more obscure 1122 program has allowed local cops to purchase everything from uniforms to riot shields at federal government rates. The program turns the feds into purchasing agents for local police. Local cops have used the program to pick up 16 Lenco BearCats, fearsome-looking armored police vehicles. Those vehicles represented 4.8 percent of the total spending identified in the ... report. Surveillance gear and software represented another 6.4 percent, and weapons or riot gear represented 5 percent. One agency bought a $428,000 Star Safire thermal imaging system, the kind used in military helicopters. The Texas Department of Public Safety's intelligence and counterterrorism unit purchased a $1.5 million surveillance software license. Another agency bought an $89,000 covert camera system.

Note: Read more about the Pentagon's 1033 program. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

Compared to other developed nations, the United States is an extreme outlier in the severity of its criminal legal system. Police in the United States kill civilians at between five and forty times the rate of similarly rich countries, for instance, and the United States imprisons people at about seven times the rate of economically comparable countries. The brunt of this aggressive penal regime is borne of course by poor Americans, particularly poor black Americans. Recently, all of the states in the US have begun to impose fees and charges and costs on offenders and their families: people now have to pay for staying in prison as if they're guests in a hotel. Or if they're on probation instead of being sent to jail, they have to pay for the probation supervision, or they have to pay for a urine test. In one police department in Missouri, offenders who have been tasered have to pay $25 toward the cost of using the taser. In this country, particularly in the neoliberal era, the local state simply doesn't have the capacity or resources to invest in communities and provide housing, schools, jobs, income support, health care services, and so on. What it does have is police and jails, and states have prisons. The politics of the day ... mean that it's always going to be much more likely that the police and the punishment are the first resort, rather than long-term investments in communities, work, families, income support, and jobs.

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

While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth obsesses over the supposed "softening" and "weakening" of American troops, the Pentagon is concealing the scale of a real threat to the lives of his military's active-duty members: a suicide crisis killing hundreds of members of the U.S. Air Force. Data The Intercept obtained via the Freedom of Information Act shows that of the 2,278 active-duty Air Force deaths between 2010 and 2023, 926 – about 41 percent – were suicides, overdoses, or preventable deaths from high-risk behavior in a decade when combat deaths were minimal. This is the first published detailed breakdown of Air Force suicide data. In 2022, the National Defense Authorization Act mandated the Defense Department to report suicides by year, career field, and duty status, but neither the department nor the Air Force complied. Congress has done little to enforce thorough reporting. From 2010 to 2023, active-duty maintainers had a suicide rate of 27.4 per 100,000 personnel, nearly twice the 14.2 per 100,000 among U.S. civilians – a 1.93 times higher risk. FOIA records show the most common methods were self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head and hanging. Other methods included sodium nitrite ingestion, helium inhalation, and carbon monoxide poisoning. [The dataset] shows a troubling pattern of preventable deaths that leaders at the senior officer level or above minimized or ignored, often claiming that releasing detailed suicide information would pose a risk to national security. Current and former service members described a fear of bullying, hazing, and professional retaliation for seeking mental health treatment.

Note: Read about the tragic traumas and suicides connected to military drone operators. A recent Pentagon study concluded that US soldiers are nine times more likely to die by suicide than they are in combat. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on mental health and military corruption.

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.