Government Corruption News Articles

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Last week, an Israeli defense company painted a frightening picture. In a roughly two-minute video on YouTube that resembles an action movie, soldiers out on a mission are suddenly pinned down by enemy gunfire and calling for help. In response, a tiny drone zips off its mother ship to the rescue, zooming behind the enemy soldiers and killing them with ease. While the situation is fake, the drone – unveiled last week by Israel-based Elbit Systems – is not. The Lanius, which in Latin can refer to butcherbirds, represents a new generation of drone: nimble, wired with artificial intelligence, and able to scout and kill. The machine is based on racing drone design, allowing it to maneuver into tight spaces, such as alleyways and small buildings. After being sent into battle, Lanius's algorithm can make a map of the scene and scan people, differentiating enemies from allies – feeding all that data back to soldiers who can then simply push a button to attack or kill whom they want. For weapons critics, that represents a nightmare scenario, which could alter the dynamics of war. "It's extremely concerning," said Catherine Connolly, an arms expert at Stop Killer Robots, an anti-weapons advocacy group. "It's basically just allowing the machine to decide if you live or die if we remove the human control element for that." According to the drone's data sheet, the drone is palm-size, roughly 11 inches by 6 inches. It has a top speed of 45 miles per hour. It can fly for about seven minutes, and has the ability to carry lethal and nonlethal materials.

Note: US General Paul Selva has warned against employing killer robots in warfare for ethical reasons. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

In July 2021 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) quietly disclosed findings of a potential increase in four types of serious adverse events in elderly people who had had Pfizer's covid-19 vaccine: acute myocardial infarction, disseminated intravascular coagulation, immune thrombocytopenia, and pulmonary embolism. Little detail was provided, such as the magnitude of the increased potential risk, and no press release or other alert was sent to doctors or the public. Eighteen days later, the FDA published a study planning document (or protocol) outlining a follow-up epidemiological study intended to investigate the matter more thoroughly. This recondite technical document disclosed the unadjusted relative risk ratio estimates originally found for the four serious adverse events, which ranged from 42% to 91% increased risk. More than a year later, however, the status and results of the follow-up study are unknown. The agency has not published a press release, or notified doctors, or published the findings ... or updated the vaccine's product label. Cody Meissner, a paediatrician and member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, said ... "One of the great problems was the suppression of opposing voices to various recommendations and that’s going to cause extraordinary harm ... everyone is aware that there are going to be side effects from any vaccine and as time goes by, we’re going to find out more and more about those side effects."

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

Dr. Anthony Fauci and his wife's net worth grew by $5 million during the COVID-19 pandemic as thousands of US residents struggled financially, according to a government spending watchdog group. The combined wealth of the 81-year-old retiring director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, soared from $7.5 million in 2019 to $12.6 million at the end of 2021, according to a report from the non-profit OpenTheBooks. "Despite becoming a figure of controversy, the system has rewarded Dr. Fauci handsomely," the group's CEO, Adam Andrzejewski, [said]. "Fauci's soaring net worth was based on career-end salary spiking, lucrative cash prizes awarded by non-profit organizations around the world and an ever-larger investment portfolio. He is the top-paid federal employee, his first-year golden parachute retirement pension is the largest in federal history, and he's accepting $1 million prizes from foreign non-profits." Last year, Fauci raked in lucrative awards from nonprofits, including $1 million from the Dan David Foundation for "speaking truth to power" and "defending science" during the Trump Administration. He kept $910,400 of that award, while roughly 10% went to scholarship winners. His total compensation was $456,028 last year, up from the $434,312 he earned in 2020. Overall, the couple's investments also increased by more than $900,000 in 2021 while their portfolios – which included trust, retirement and college education accounts – jumped $800,000 in 2020.

Note: Why is Anthony Fauci paid more than the U.S. president? Could it be a reward for gifting big Pharma with many billions in profits? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

Lockdowns during the first COVID-19 wave in the spring of 2020 only reduced COVID-19 mortality by .2% in the U.S. and Europe, according to a Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of several studies. "While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted," the researchers wrote. "In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument." The researchers – Johns Hopkins University economics professor Steve Hanke, Lund University economics professor Lars Jonung, and special advisor at Copenhagen's Center for Political Studies Jonas Herby – analyzed the effects of lockdown measures such as school shutdowns, business closures, and mask mandates on COVID-19 deaths. "We find little to no evidence that mandated lockdowns in Europe and the United States had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality rates," the researchers wrote. The researchers also examined shelter-in-place orders, finding that they reduced COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%. Studies that looked at only shelter-in-place orders found they reduced COVID-19 mortality by 5.1%, but studies that looked at shelter-in-place orders along with other lockdown measures found that shelter-in-place orders actually increased COVID-19 mortality by 2.8%. The researchers concluded that limiting gatherings may have actually increased COVID-19 mortality. 

Note: Why did other major media platforms overlook this vitally important news? You can find this critical study on the Johns Hopkins University website at this link. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

In 2017, the CIA had plotted to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who had taken refuge five years earlier in the Ecuador embassy in London. A senior US counter-intelligence official said that plans for the forcible rendition of Assange to the US were discussed "at the highest levels" of the Trump administration. The informant was one of more than 30 US officials – eight of whom confirmed details of the abduction proposal – quoted in a 7,500-word investigation by Yahoo News into the CIA campaign against Assange. The plan was to "break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want", recalled a former intelligence official. Another informant said that he was briefed about a meeting in the spring of 2017 at which President Trump had asked if the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide "options" about how this could be done. The Trump-appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, said publicly that he would target Assange and WikiLeaks as the equivalent of "a hostile intelligence service". Top intelligence officials intended to decide themselves who is and who is not a journalist, and lobbied the White House to redefine other high-profile journalists as "information brokers", who were to be targeted as if they were agents of a foreign power. In 2013 ... a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers ... failed to find a single person in Iraq and Afghanistan who had died because of the disclosures by WikiLeaks.

Note: CIA interest in assassinating Assange coincided with Wikileaks' publication of leaked CIA hacking tools. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

Louis Armstrong, his wife and a diplomat from the US embassy were out for dinner in a restaurant in what was still Léopoldville, capital of the newly independent Congo. The [musician] was in the middle of a tour of Africa ... organised and sponsored by the State Department. What Armstrong did not know was that his host that night in November 1960 was not the political attaché as described, but the head of the CIA in Congo. "Armstrong was basically a Trojan horse for the CIA," said Susan Williams ... author of White Malice, a new book which exposes the astonishing extent of the CIA's activities across central and west Africa. Armstrong's host, CIA station chief Larry Devlin, and other US intelligence officers posted to Congo used the cover of the musicians's visit to get access to the strategically important and very wealthy province of Katanga, which had recently seceded. There was much of interest to the CIA in Katanga, ranging from senior officials with whom they could not otherwise meet to crucial mining infrastructure, with 1,500 tons of uranium and vast potential to procure more. The CIA in the Congo, led by Devlin, was trying to kill the Congo's first democratically elected prime minister, 35-year-old Patrice Lumumba, fearful that he would lead the country into the Soviet camp. A mile or so from where Armstrong and Devlin had dined, the charismatic Lumumba was being held prisoner ... by soldiers loyal to Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the young military chief with a close working relationship with the CIA, who had effectively seized power some weeks earlier. Within two months of Armstrong's tour, Lumumba was murdered in Katanga. Devlin later claimed that the CIA was responsible, telling a US Congressional investigation "that the coup of Mobutu … was arranged and supported, and indeed, managed, by the CIA".

Note: Read how the CIA used modern art and other cultural figures as weapons during the Cold War in our Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Pentagon is running a 60,000-strong secret army made up of soldiers, civilians and contractors, who travel the world under false identities embedded in consultancies and name-brand companies – without the knowledge of the American people or most of Congress. The top-secret army was created by the Pentagon over the past 10 years as part of a program called "signature reduction," and operates both domestically and internationally using a low-profile force of clandestine warriors who sometimes wear civilian clothes as they carry out their assignments, Newsweek reported. The force is 10 times the size of the covert elements of the CIA, comes with a cost of more than $900 million, and engages about 130 private companies in operations in locales like the Middle East and Africa. About half of the "signature reduction" force is made up of special forces. Military intelligence specialists comprise the second-largest element inside the force. But the ... fastest-growing group in the unit is made up of cyber-warriors who use false personas and "nonattribution" or "misattribution" techniques online to disguise themselves so they can track high-value targets, collect "publicly accessible information" and engage in influence campaigns to manipulate social media. One recently retired senior officer who oversaw one of the programs said no one is fully aware of their extent or the implications they have for military warfare.

Note: Learn more about mission creep in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the military and in the intelligence community from reliable major media sources.

More than half of the money from the Treasury Department's coronavirus emergency fund for small businesses went to just 5 percent of the recipients, according to data on more than 5 million loans that was released by the government Tuesday evening in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit. According to data on the government's Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), about 600 mostly larger companies, including dozens of national chains, received the maximum amount allowed under the program of $10 million. The new data shows more than half of the $522 billion ... went to bigger businesses, and only 28 percent of the money was distributed in amounts less than $150,000. Liz Hempowicz, director of public policy for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, said the new data shows how the Trump administration chose to focus its coronavirus relief efforts on helping wealthy organizations at the expense of truly small firms. "The data shows that this program primarily benefited the well-banked and well-lawyered at the expense of the small businesses it was supposed to benefit," Hempowicz said. The newly released data comes after a federal lawsuit filed by The Washington Post and 10 other news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act challenging the SBA's refusal to release records on borrowers and loan amounts. A federal judge ordered the release of the data by Tuesday and the agency did not appeal.

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

Twice in the last week, Pennsylvania’s official COVID-19 death count spiked. Then, on Thursday, the number plummeted. The state Department of Health provided several justifications for the fluctuations, citing technical issues, lengthy investigations, and the addition of “probable” deaths. Facing mounting questions about the accuracy of the count, officials on Thursday removed more than 200 probable deaths from the tally. Health Secretary Rachel Levine said the change was made in an effort to be transparent. The state’s coroners – tasked with investigating suspicious deaths – have grown increasingly frustrated by the Health Department’s reluctance to seek their help. “There’s a discrepancy in the numbers,” Charles E. Kiessling Jr., president of the Pennsylvania Coroners Association ... said Thursday. The confusion began Sunday, when Pennsylvania raised its coronavirus death toll to 1,112 – an increase of 276 overnight. On Tuesday, the department reported another spike, from 1,204 to 1,564 deaths.The jump that day, first blamed on a computer glitch, was explained as a “reconciliation” of multiple reporting systems.” Levine also said the “significant increase” included “probable positive” COVID-19 deaths. “We will now be reporting probable deaths related to COVID-19 in addition to confirmed deaths,” she said. Jeffrey Conner, the coroner in Franklin County, said he was blindsided by the department’s news on Tuesday that 10 people had died of COVID-19 in the county. As of Wednesday afternoon, he said, he was aware of only one death. On Thursday, the state’s revised data reported just one death for the county.

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

Amid a humanitarian crisis compounded by mass layoffs and collapsing economic activity, the last course our legislators should be following is the one they appear to be on right now: bailing out shareholders and executives who, while enriching themselves, spent the past decade pushing business corporations to the edge of insolvency. The $500bn dollars of public money that Congress’s relief bill provides will be used for a corporate bailout, with the only oversight in the hands of an independent council similar to the one used in the 2008 financial crisis. While that body was able to report misuses of taxpayer money, it could do nothing to stop them. As currently structured, there is nothing to keep this bailout from, like its predecessor, putting cash directly into the hands of those at the top rather than into the hands of workers. Without strong regulation and accountability, asking corporations to preserve jobs with these funds will be nothing more than a simple suggestion, leaving millions of everyday Americans in financial peril. If not properly managed, this economic disaster has the potential to be the worst in American history. Our country cannot allow a small number of executives and shareholders to profit from taxpayer funds that we have injected into these corporations for reasons of pure emergency. We need to stop this rot at the core of our economic system and realign the priorities of government with those of workers and consumers.

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

In “Homewreckers,” his new book about the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, [Aaron] Glantz skillfully tells a bigger story about American housing that’s tortuous, confounding and ultimately enraging. Along with “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Homewreckers” shows what happens when private speculators get buoyed by government largess while non-tycoons are largely left to fend for themselves. After the housing bubble burst, the government was desperate to get lending banks off its books, and so it offered a sweet deal to prospective buyers of the banks: Those private investors could keep the gains on any loans held by the bank, but if the loans lost money, the government would bear most of the cost. It was like a mutant version of the subprime bubble that led to the financial crisis: Rather than renegotiate the loans, the new owners of these lending banks found there was more money to be made in foreclosing on the properties and becoming “a class of landlord that had never been seen before,” charging rent and fees to tenants — not infrequently the previous owners who were foreclosed on — while hoarding the equity for themselves. Corporate landlords ... are also more likely to buy properties in neighborhoods with large concentrations of African-American and Latino residents, who end up paying “higher and higher rents that ultimately transfer wealth from their communities to investors far away.”

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

John Longan was an agent with the US Border Patrol in the 1940s and '50s. Following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Longan ... moved on to work for the CIA. Put simply, Longan taught local intelligence and police agencies how to create death squads to target political activists, deploying tactics that he'd used earlier to capture migrants on the border. He arrived in Guatemala in late 1965 and put into place a paramilitary unit that, early the next year, would execute what he called OperaciĂłn Limpieza, or Operation Cleanup. Within three months, this unit conducted over 80 raids and multiple assassinations, including an action that, over the course of four days, led to the capture, torture, and execution of more than 30 prominent left-wing opposition leaders. The military dumped their bodies into the sea, while the government denied any knowledge of their whereabouts. Longan's OperaciĂłn Limpieza was a decisive step in the unraveling of Guatemala, empowering an intelligence system that over the course of the country's civil war would be responsible for tens of thousands of disappearances, 200,000 deaths, and countless tortures. It was common practice during the Cold War to send former Border Patrol agents to train foreign police through CIA-linked "public safety" programs. Men like Longan helped speed up the pace with which local security forces could target and kill political reformers, thus accelerating political polarization and social misery.

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

A dossier compiled by an MP detailing allegations of a 1980s Westminster paedophile ring is one of more than 100 potentially relevant Home Office files destroyed, lost or missing, it has emerged. The government faced fresh calls for an overarching inquiry into historical cases of paedophilia as it was revealed that a total of 114 Home Office files relevant to allegations of a child abuse network have disappeared from government records. David Cameron has already ordered the Home Office permanent secretary to look into what happened to a lost dossier given earlier in the 1980s to Leon Brittan, then home secretary, by the campaigning Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens. The revelation that further relevant documents have disappeared will raise fresh fears of an establishment cover-up. Dickens, who died in 1995, had told his family that the information he handed to the home secretary in 1983 and 1984 would "blow the lid off" the lives of powerful and famous child abusers, including eight well-known figures. In a letter to Dickens at the time, Brittan suggested his information would be passed to the police, but Scotland Yard says it has no record of any investigation into the allegations. On Saturday the Home Office made public a letter to Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, in which the department confirmed that correspondence from Dickens had not been retained and it had found "no record of specific allegations by Mr Dickens of child sex abuse by prominent public figures".

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

Tens of thousands of Belgians gathered in the heart of Brussels today, waving white balloons and white flowers in a popular outpouring of anger and frustration over a widening child sex scandal. The "White March," as it was called by organizers, was one of the largest in the country's recent history, drawing some 275,000 Belgians. It capped a week of spontaneous protests that erupted after Belgium's highest court removed a magistrate widely seen as a hero in the scandal, Jean-Marc Connerotte, from investigations into a pedophile and child pornography ring. So far, 13 people have been charged in the case, which involves the kidnapping, sexual abuse and killing of several children, with at least seven young girls still missing. The court ruled that Mr. Connerotte had compromised his impartiality by accepting a free dinner at a fund-raiser for the parents of missing children. The ruling prompted the public ... to take to the streets. The dismissal also followed press reports that Mr. Connerotte was on the verge of disclosing the names of senior government officials who had been recognized on confiscated videotapes, and during allegations of a high-level cover-up. The march was intended not only as a protest ... but also as an expression of sympathy with the victims of a gang reportedly led by a convicted child rapist, Marc Dutroux, one of the 13 charged. He was released 10 years early in 1992 from a 13-year sentence for multiple child rape. Scores of videos with child pornography were seized along with him.

Note: For an abundance of solid information on this major cover-up of child sex trafficking rings leading to high levels in government, don't miss the most excellent documentary Imperium, which provides reliable, verifiable information on all that is going on. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

In the late summer of 2020, Bruce Bartman went to Pennsylvania's voter registration website and signed up his mother and mother-in-law to vote. Both women were dead. A few months later, Bartman, who is white, requested a mail-in ballot for his late mother and cast her vote for Donald Trump. Bartman was arrested that December and charged with perjury and unlawful voting. He pleaded guilty, admitted he made a "stupid mistake", was sentenced to five years of probation and barred from serving on a jury or voting for four years. When Bartman pleaded guilty, nearly 1,000 miles away, in Memphis, a Black Lives Matter activist named Pamela Moses was facing her own election-related criminal charges. A few years previously, Moses, who is Black, permanently lost the right to vote after committing a felony. But no one had actually removed Moses from the voter rolls or told her she couldn't vote. And in 2019, when state officials began looking into her eligibility, a probation officer signed a certificate saying Moses had completed her sentence and was eligible to vote. So she applied to do so. Even though corrections officials conceded they made an error, Moses was indicted anyway. She was sentenced to six years and one day in prison. The case ... underscored what many experts see as a double standard in the US criminal justice system: white people face relatively light punishment for intentional cases of fraud, while Black people face tougher punishments for unintentional voting errors.

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

There's often outcry when a public figure eschews covid-19 related rules – but even more so when those breaking the rules are the same ones who set them. In 2020, guideline-flouting officials faced backlash across the world – from New Zealand to Ireland to Canada to the United States. There was California Gov. Gavin Newsom's attendance at a lavish $350 per person dinner party. Or the British prime minister's then-top aide Dominic Cummings, who defied a lockdown for a 260-mile road trip while he and his wife were infected with covid-19. And the senator in the Philippines who broke quarantine to visit the hospital where his wife was in labor – all waiting for his coronavirus test result, which ended up positive. As the pandemic persists, the cycle of rule-flouting, public outcry, followed by an official apology and sometimes, a resignation, continues. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is embroiled in another scandal – this one with a Christmas theme. In early December, controversy arose over a 2020 Christmas party (or series of parties) at 10 Downing Street, the British prime minister's office, in the midst of a strict coronavirus lockdown. Johnson issued an apology at the House of Commons. After the prime minister's apology, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Keir Starmer, said that the "millions" who followed public health protocols last Christmas "now think the prime minister was taking them for fools, that they were lied to."

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

In his new bestselling book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Children's Health Defense board chair and lead counsel Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. provides readers with previously little-known information on Dr. Fauci's handling of pandemics prior to COVID including the AIDS epidemic. "...Dr. Fauci copied the choreographed script for winning remdesivir's EUA from the worn rabbit-eared playbook that he developed during his early AIDS years, and then used repeatedly across his career to win approvals for deadly and ineffective drugs," writes Kennedy. "Time and again, he has terminated clinical trials of his sweetheart drugs the moment they begin to reveal cataclysmic toxicity. He makes the absurd claim that his drug-du-jour had proven so miraculously effective that it would be unethical to deny it to the public, and then he strong-arms FDA to grant his approvals." One of the AIDS treatments promoted by Dr. Fauci and his agency [NIAID] was azidothymidine (AZT), a powerful and toxic chemotherapy drug used widely for AIDS patients despite the availability of less toxic options. AZT, according to SPIN magazine, is a drug that "was worse than the disease." Kennedy also exposes Dr. Fauci's experiments using various toxic AIDS drugs on Black and Hispanic foster children in New York and six other states.

Note: Read more about the foster children used as guinea pigs to test HIV drugs. If you don't have time for the whole book (rated 4.9 stars on amazon.com), you can find an engaging summary of key points on this webpage. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and health from reliable major media sources.

The top 1% of Americans are avoiding paying an estimated $163 billion in taxes a year, according to the Treasury Department. That is pushing the estimated tax gap, the amount of money owed by taxpayers that isn't collected, to nearly around $600 billion annually, and to approximately $7 trillion in lost revenue over the next decade, the Treasury Department finds. Tax evasion is concentrated among the wealthy in part because high-income taxpayers are able to employ experts who can better shield them from reporting their true incomes. More complicated incomes such as partnerships and proprietorships – more frequent among high earners – have a far greater noncompliance rate that can hit as high as 55%. "The tax gap can be a major source of inequity. Today's tax code contains two sets of rules: one for regular wage and salary workers who report virtually all the income they earn; and another for wealthy taxpayers, who are often able to avoid a large share of the taxes they owe," wrote Treasury Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy Natasha Sarin. The IRS is unable to collect about 15% of taxes owed and the lack of resources has led to a fall in audit rates. For the IRS to appropriately enforce tax laws against high earners and large corporations, it would need money to hire and train agents who can examine thousands of pages of sophisticated tax filings. The Biden administration is pushing to raise the IRS budget by $80 billion over 10 years to help increase enforcement, IT and taxpayer services.

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

The Center for Countering Digital Hate published "The Disinformation Dozen" – a report on the 12 influencers it claimed were responsible for 65 percent of anti-vaccine falsehoods disseminated on Facebook and other social media platforms. But the story of charlatans peddling fake cures and political conspiracy theories isn't the only part of the Covid misinformation saga. Distrust in public-health messaging is also sown when public-health messengers show themselves to be less than completely trustworthy. The latest set-to in this drama was a July 20 screaming match between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Senator Rand Paul. The Kentucky Republican suggested that Fauci had lied to Congress in claiming that the National Institutes of Health had never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci took vehement exception, saying the research that the N.I.H. had funded ... didn't qualify as gain-of-function, a research technique in which a pathogen is made more transmissible. The larger truth – obscured until recently by fervent efforts (including by Fauci) to dismiss the lab-leak theory for the origins of the pandemic – is that the U.S. government's scientific establishment did support gain-of-function research that deserved far more public debate than it got. Beneficiaries of that funding engaged in deceptive tactics and outright mendacity to shield their research from public scrutiny while denouncing their critics as conspiracymongers.

Note: Read what happened when the publisher of "The Real Anthony Fauci" tried to place a full page ad in the New York Times for this #1 best seller. And why have all major media refused to review this book which is rated 4.8 stars on Amazon and has over 2,000 footnotes to back up the claims made? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media manipulation and the coronavirus from reliable sources.

The outbreak of Covid-19 has been anathema for most of China’s economy but the novel coronavirus was a shot in the arm for the state’s surveillance apparatus, which has expanded rapidly in pursuit of the epidemic’s spread. Facial recognition cameras, phone tracking technology and voluntary registrations have all been deployed to monitor the flow of people and the possible transmission of disease. “The Chinese surveillance systems currently ... has two purposes: the first is to monitor public health and the second is to maintain political control,” says Francis Lee, a professor ... at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Once the outbreak is controlled, however, it’s unclear whether the government will retract its new powers. While facial recognition provides a way to monitor crowds from a distance, governments have deployed close-range means of tracking individuals too. The municipal government of Hangzhou worked with ecommerce giant Alibaba to launch a feature through the company’s mobile wallet app, AliPay, that assesses the user’s risk of infection. The app generates a QR code. Guards at checkpoints in residential buildings and elsewhere can then scan that code to gain details about the user. John Bacon-Shone ... at Hong Kong University thinks that the ongoing threat of outbreaks will provide a constant justification for the new systems. “I am rather pessimistic that there will be full rollback of data collection once it has been implemented,” Bacon-Shone says.

Note: Remember all of the privacy and freedoms given up after 9/11? How many of those have been given back? Learn more about the serious risk of the Coronavirus increasing the surveillance state in this excellent article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

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