Government Corruption News Articles

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Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

On any given day in the United States, at least 137,000 people sit behind bars on simple drug-possession charges, according to a report released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch. Nearly two-thirds of them are in local jails. The report says that most of these jailed inmates have not been convicted of any crime: They're sitting in a cell, awaiting a day in court, an appearance that may be months or even years off, because they can't afford to post bail. "It's been 45 years since the war on drugs was declared, and it hasn't been a success," lead author Tess Borden of Human Rights Watch said in an interview. "Rates of drug use are not down. Drug dependency has not stopped. Every 25 seconds, we're arresting someone for drug use." Federal figures on drug arrests and drug use over the past three decades tell the story. Drug-possession arrests skyrocketed, from fewer than 200 arrests for every 100,000 people in 1979 to more than 500 in the mid-2000s. The drug-possession rate has since fallen slightly ... hovering near 400 arrests per 100,000 people. Police make more arrests for marijuana possession alone than for all violent crimes combined. The report finds that the laws are enforced unequally, too. Over their lifetimes, black and white Americans use illicit drugs at similar rates. But black adults were more than 2˝ times as likely to be arrested for drug possession. The report calls for decriminalizing the personal use and possession of drugs, treating it as a public-health matter.

Note: This latest report adds to the evidence that the war on drugs is a trillion dollar failure. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in policing and in the prison system.

James Patterson, that human fiction factory, has churned out another book, only this time it’s a real-life whodunit. Or perhaps, [this book] is more of a “why-did-he-get-off-so-lightly?” Jeffrey Epstein ... is, indeed, filthy rich. One supposition on how he got so, based on unnamed sources in "Filthy Rich," is that he crafted tax-avoidance schemes for filthy rich clients. Epstein hung out with a diverse cast of characters, among them Prince Andrew, Stephen Hawking and bra-billionaire Les Wexner. He also spent time with impecunious teenage girls who were engaged to “massage” him. Mary (not her real name) ... was 14 when she was invited into Epstein’s lair. The testimony of Epstein’s “masseuses” to police meanders from soft porn to more graphic fare and goes on page after page. Most of the women who told their stories to the police never got to testify in the half-hearted (at best) prosecution of Epstein, including “Alison, who claimed that she had been raped.” Backed by a “dream team” of lawyers - among them Alan Dershowitz (who defended O.J. Simpson and Claus von Bülow) and Ken Starr (whose investigation of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky led to his impeachment) - Epstein pleaded guilty to state felony offenses for solicitation of prostitution and the procurement of minors for prostitution. By doing so Epstein avoided the possibility of facing much more serious charges. Epstein received an 18-month sentence, but served barely a year.

Note: Read more about the child sex trafficking ring Epstein allegedly operated. Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

The poster child of the American torture program sits in a Guantanamo Bay prison cell, where many U.S. officials hope he will simply be forgotten. Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, known to the world as Abu Zubaydah ... was the “guinea pig” of the CIA torture program. He was the first prisoner sent to a secret CIA “black site,” the first to have his interrogation “enhanced ” and the only prisoner subjected to all of the CIA’s approved techniques, as well as many that were not authorized. He is the man for whom the George W. Bush administration wrote the infamous torture memo in the summer of 2002. Senior officials thought he had been personally involved in every major al-Qaeda operation, including 9/11. Today, the United States acknowledges that assessment was, to put it graciously, overblown. His extended torture provided no actionable intelligence about al-Qaeda’s plans. He has never been charged with a violation of U.S. law, military or civilian, and apparently never will be formally charged. Instead, he languishes at Guantanamo. After years in secret prisons around the world, he remains incommunicado, with no prospect of trial. Who is Zubaydah, really? Public understanding about Zubaydah remains remarkably controlled and superficial. In connection with Zubaydah’s stalled case seeking federal court review of his detention, the government has recently agreed to clear for public release a few of the letters he has written to us. These brief letters [are] published here for the first time.

Note: The use of humans as guinea pigs in government, military, and medical experiments has a long history. For more along these lines, see the "10 Craziest Things in the Senate Report on Torture". For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the intelligence community.

Protesters at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in Cannon Ball, N.D., rallying against the Dakota Access oil pipeline have been calling for reinforcements since summertime. As of this week, about 800 people had come. But in the course of just a few days, more than 1.5 million people marked themselves present at the pipeline protest using Facebook - even though they weren’t actually there. A recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that law enforcement agencies across the country use location tracking and social media data to identify activists. Protesters have reported phones turning on on their own, phone calls cutting out and live video streams being interrupted as evidence that they’re being spied on, said Jennifer Cook, the policy director for the ACLU of North Dakota. Law enforcement agencies ... said they are not relying on Facebook’s check-in system to track protesters. Last week, video of violent clashes between lines of police and protesters circulated online, showing demonstrators running from officers as 142 people were arrested. Most of them were charged with rioting and criminal trespassing. About 300 people have been arrested since the protests began over the summer. Tensions have intensified in recent weeks as the pipeline’s construction moves closer to a river crossing that activists view as a critical water source that they fear will be compromised by the oil main, which many Native American tribes have said treads on sacred land.

Note: For more on this under-reported movement, see this Los Angeles Times article and this article in the UK's Guardian. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

A new study of male honeybees shows that two insecticides, banned in some European nations but still used in the United States, can significantly reduce the bees’ ability to reproduce. The study ... found that thiamethoxam and clothianidin, two chemicals from the neonicotinoid family of insecticides, reduce living sperm in male honeybees, called drones, by almost 40 percent. The effects of pesticides on honeybee populations are considered one culprit among several factors causing periodic declines. Neonicotinoids have been shown by other studies to harm the health of individual bees and the reproductive ability of female insects. The new study expanded on the dangers of the pesticides for males. The two neonicotinoids used in the study were banned in the European Union in 2013, but are used on an industrial scale in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency ... will release risk assessments for the two chemicals, as well as another neonicotinoid, dinotefuran, in December. A significant amount of the global food supply is made up of plants that require pollinators like bees to survive. Any widespread threat to bees also constitutes a greater ecological threat. Beekeepers in the United States lost 44 percent of their honeybee colonies from April 2015 to April 2016, according to an annual survey conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership. The loss was 3.5 percent greater than that found from 2014 to 2015, when beekeepers lost 40.6 percent of colonies.

Note: The findings of US government scientists have been systematically suppressed when they highlight the link between pesticides and mass animal deaths.

A Wall Street Journal reporter was detained by federal agents at the Los Angeles airport who demanded to confiscate her two cell phones. Maria Abi-Habib, a reporter who covers the Middle East for the paper, detailed in a long Facebook post Thursday how Department of Homeland Security agents detained her in "a special section of LAX airport" to ask her questions. Abi-Habib has both U.S. and Lebanese citizenship and was traveling on an American passport. "They grilled me for an hour," she wrote. The agents then asked for her cellphones. "That is where I drew the line," Abi-Habib wrote. "I told her I had First Amendment rights as a journalist she couldn't violate and I was protected under." The agent then presented a DHS document that read that the government has the right to confiscate phones within 100 miles from U.S. borders. "If they forgot to ask you at JFK airport for your phones, but you're having a drink in Manhattan the next day, you technically fall under this authority," she wrote. "And because they are acting under the pretense to protect the U.S. from terrorism, you have to give it up." Abi-Habib told the agents that they would have to call the Wall Street Journal's lawyers because the phones are the property of the newspaper. This led to the agent accusing her of "hindering the investigation." The agent left to speak with her supervisor, returning 30 minutes later to tell Abi-Habib that she was free to go. DHS acknowledged the incident occurred, [and] asserted it has legal authority to confiscate anyone's electronics.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

On Wednesday, July 17, 1996, at 8:19 p.m., TWA Flight 800 took off from JFK airport and headed out over Long Island toward Paris. Twelve minutes later, TWA 800 exploded mid-air, killing all 230 people on board. Twenty years later, the crash of TWA 800 remains a subject of horror and fascination. Conspiracy theorists still insist that TWA 800 was brought down, deliberately or accidentally, potentially by the US military - despite a four-year-long investigation, the most expensive in aviation history, which found that a short circuit in the plane’s center wing fuel tank caused the crash. In his new book “TWA 800: The Crash, the Cover-Up, and the Conspiracy,” author Jack Cashill maintains that the plane was brought down by external forces and that the government has engaged in a decades-long cover-up. Cashill doesn’t offer a definitive alternate cause, but the strongest portion of his book are reprints of multiple witness statements, taken by the FBI and CIA in the immediate aftermath. Over 700 of these have since been made public; in them, 258 witnesses told investigators they’d seen a streak of white light approaching the aircraft before the explosion. A few witnesses used the word “rocket” or “missile” in describing what they saw. These vivid, first-hand accounts remain in stark contrast to the final report - and at the time, every possibility was investigated.

Note: Journalist Kristina Borjesson, a long-time supporter of WantToKnow.info, explores evidence of a cover-up in the wake of this crash in the documentary, "TWA Flight 800". For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Morley Safer, who was a correspondent on CBS’s 60 Minutes from 1970 until just last week, died Thursday at age 84. In 1965, Safer was sent to Vietnam by CBS. That August he filed a famous report showing American soldiers burning down a Vietnamese village. The next year, he wrote a newspaper column about a visit to Saigon by Arthur Sylvester, the ... head of all the U.S. military’s PR. Sylvester, [who] had arranged to speak with reporters for U.S. outlets, [said] that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good. A network television correspondent said, “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.” “That’s exactly what I expect,” came the reply. An agency man raised the problem [of] the credibility of American officials. [Sylvester], the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, [responded]: “Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid.” A Democratic senator from Indiana, entered Safer’s article into the Congressional Record, and ... a Republican representative from Missouri called for Sylvester to resign. For its part, the Pentagon told CBS executives: “Unless you get Safer out of there, he’s liable to end up with a bullet in his back.” Moreover, Sylvester absolutely meant what he said [to] the journalists in Saigon. [By that time], he’d already told some of the key U.S. government lies about the Cuban missile crisis.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about military corruption and the manipulation of public opinion.

A Michigan environmental official suggested a technician collecting samples for a suburban Detroit private water system “bump ... out” a test result that found very high levels of lead by testing more homes, according to a 2008 email. Doing so could avert a “lead public notice”, the email reasoned, which would alert residents of dangerously high levels in their water. “I’ve never heard (it) more black and white,” said Marc Edwards, a ... lead expert who helped uncover the Flint water crisis. “It just shows that this culture of corruption and unethical, uncaring behavior predated Flint by at least six years.” In early September 2008, a water laboratory technician collected samples from five of the nearly 45 homes in the [private water system]. The technician submitted the samples to the Michigan department of environmental quality. Of the five samples, one home registered a lead level of 115 parts per billion (ppb), nearly 10 times higher than the federal action level of 15ppb. Adam Rosenthal, an MDEQ environmental quality analyst, sent an email to the technician. He copied Mike Prysby, the state employee who was criminally charged last week for his role in the city of Flint’s two-year lead contamination crisis, along with state employee Stephen Busch. “I just saw the results – 115 ppb for lead is a bit high,” Rosenthal wrote in the email. “There is still time to collect more samples and possibly bump this one out.” Experts said the email shows MDEQ’s Rosenthal was explicitly attempting to “subvert” the lead and copper rule.

Note: Another recent Guardian article further describes how US authorities systematically distort water quality tests. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and health.

The federal government has been quietly fighting to keep a lid on an 11,000-document cache of government communications relating to financial policy. The Obama administration ... insisted that their release would negatively impact global financial markets. Unsealing some of these materials last week, a federal judge named Margaret Sweeney said the government's sole motivation was avoiding embarrassment. So what's so embarrassing? A sordid history of the government's seizure of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, also known as the government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs. Bailout-era Fannie and Freddie was turned into a kind of garbage facility for other Wall Street institutions, buying up toxic mortgages that private banks were suddenly desperate to unload. Even after the state took over the companies ... Fannie and Freddie continued to buy as much as $40 billion in bad assets per month from the private sector. Fannie and Freddie weren't just bailed out, they were themselves a bailout, used to sponge up the sins of private firms. The government ended up pumping about $187 billion into the companies. Within a few years ... Fannie and Freddie started to make money again. The GSEs went on to pay the government $228 billion over the next three years, or $40 billion more than they owed, [but] none of that money went to paying off Fannie and Freddie's debt. This ... prompted a series of lawsuits. In these suits, the government's pleas for secrecy were so extreme that it asked for, and received, "attorneys' eyes only" status for the documents in question.

Note: Why is no other media covering this important news?  For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the financial industry.

The war on drugs has failed, fuelling higher rates of infection and harming public health and human rights to such a degree that it's time to decriminalize non-violent minor drug offences, according to a new global report. The authors of the Johns Hopkins-Lancet Commission on Public Health and International Drug Policy call for minor use, possession and petty use to be decriminalized following measurably worsened human health. "We've had three decades of the war on drugs, we've had decades of zero-tolerance policy," said Dr. Chris Beyrer, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and the senior author of the report published Thursday in The Lancet. "It has had no measurable impact on supply or use, and so as a policy to control substance use it has arguably failed. It has evidently failed." Given that the goal of prohibiting all use, possession, production and trafficking of illicit drugs was to protect societies, the researchers evaluated the health effects and found they were overwhelmingly negative. For a role model, the authors point to Portugal, which decriminalized not only cannabis but also possession of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine. HIV transmission, hepatitis C and incarcerations all decreased, Beyrer said, and there was about a 15 per cent decline in substance use by young people in Portugal.

Note: While the war on drugs has been called a "trillion dollar failure", and the healing potentials of mind altering drugs are starting to be investigated more openly, there remains powerful evidence that the CIA and US military are directly involved in the drug trade.

Government lawyers on Thursday continued their fight to bury the Senate Torture Report, arguing before the D.C. District Court of Appeals that the 6,700-page text could not be released on procedural grounds. When the 500-page executive summary of the report was released more than a year ago, it prompted international outcry and renewed calls for prosecution. The summary describes not only the CIA’s rape and torture of detainees, but also how the agency consistently misrepresented the brutality and effectiveness of the torture program. But many of the most graphic details are in Volume III of the full report, which former Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein has said contains “excruciating” details on “each of the 119 known individuals who were held in CIA custody.” On the same day the executive summary was released, the Intelligence Committee sent copies of the full report to executive branch agencies with instructions ... that they be used “as broadly as appropriate to make sure that this experience is never repeated.” Last year, after succeeding Feinstein as chair, Sen. Richard Burr, R-Ga., requested that the copies distributed to federal agencies be returned to Congress, prompting a legal standoff. In the meantime ... the Justice Department has “refuse[d] to allow executive branch officials to review the full and final study.”

Note: For more along these lines, see the "10 Craziest Things in the Senate Report on Torture". For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the intelligence community.

692 felony convictions in California ... were thrown out between 1989 and 2012 based on errors or misconduct by police, prosecutors, defense lawyers or judges, according to a new study by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania. The report ... didn’t include misdemeanor cases, which amount to about 80 percent of all prosecutions, or juvenile cases. And it also excluded the costs of jailing people who were later released without charges, which may amount to $70 million a year, the report said. The study examined only records from California and ... looked at cases in which felony convictions were overturned and the defendants were later cleared. More than half the cases involved prosecutors’ wrongful withholding of evidence. One example was that of former Black Panther Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt. Pratt was convicted in 1972 of murdering schoolteacher Carolyn Olson [in 1968] and was sentenced to life in prison, based in part on [witness] testimony. He was freed in 1999 after a judge found that prosecutors had withheld evidence that the witness was an informant for the FBI, which was then trying to discredit Pratt as part of its Cointelpro campaign. The authors questioned long-standing laws that shield prosecutors from lawsuits by criminal defendants. They said they knew of no other profession that received immunity for “intentional wrongdoing that gravely injures another.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the prison system.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly developed a new way to measure its success in the war on terror: counting the number of terror threats it has “disrupted” in a year. In the section on “Performance Measures” in the FBI’s latest financial statement, the bureau reports 440 “terror disruptions” in the 12-month period ending on September 30, 2015. That’s ... more than three times the 2015 “target” of 125. In a vacuum, that would appear to suggest that the FBI’s terror-fighting mission - which sucked ... 54 percent of the bureau’s $9.8 billion budget in 2015 - is exceeding expectations. But that number - 440 - is much higher than the number of arrests reported by the FBI. The Washington Post counted about 60 terror-related arrests in 2015. Of those arrests, many were of people trying to travel abroad or trying to help others do so. Many more involved people planning attacks that were essentially imaginary, often goaded by FBI informants. There was only one genuinely “foiled attack” in the United States between January 2014 and September 2015. And that one ... was stopped by the local police department. The fact that the agency establishes a target for terrorism disruptions is also troubling, said Michael German, a former FBI agent.

Note: The FBI has made a habit of manufacturing "terrorist plots" from thin air. Now it appears that activities reminiscent of COINTELPRO are again being carried out to justify massive anti-terrorism spending. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing terrorism news articles from reliable major media sources.

The Navy is looking to increase its use of drones that are more and more independent of direct human control. In recent days, Pentagon officials and Navy leaders have spoken about the program and the push to develop more autonomous and intelligent unmanned systems. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in a speech earlier this month confirmed that the United States was developing "self-driving boats which can network together to do all kinds of missions, from fleet defense to close-in surveillance." And Rear Adm. Robert P. Girrier, the Navy's director of Unmanned Warfare Systems, discussed the effort at a January event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The drive is being dubbed "human machine teaming," which uses unmanned vehicles that are more independent than those piloted or supervised by human operators. Girrier told the audience that the "technology is there" and that more autonomous drones would allow the United States "to achieve supremacy at a lower cost." The Navy's push comes despite critics expressing increasing alarm at further automating drones, advances that have sparked fears of militaries developing robots that can kill without accountability. In July a group of concerned scientists, researchers and academics ... argued against the development of autonomous weapons systems. They warned of an artificial intelligence arms race and called for a "ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control."

Note: In another article Tesla founder Elon Musk's warns against the dangers of AI without regulation. A 2013 report for the U.N. Human Rights Commission called for a worldwide moratorium on the testing, production, assembly, transfer, acquisition, deployment and use of killer robots until an international conference can develop rules for their use. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

In 2007, shortly after vice-president Joe Biden learned that his eldest son would be deployed to Iraq, the then-presidential hopeful turned to a modest crowd at the Iowa state fair and admitted that he didn’t want Beau to go. Beau arrived in Iraq the following year. Though he returned home safely ... his health deteriorated, and he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Less than two years later, he died at the age of 46. A new book ... suggests a possible link between his illness and service. Based on clusters of similar cases, scientific studies and expert opinions, author Joseph Hickman proposes in The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers that [some] US service members in Iraq and Afghanistan confronted ... respiratory issues relating to their burn pit exposure. Others likely developed more life-threatening conditions such as cancers, Hickman contends, because of what the burn pits were built on top of: the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons program. The Pentagon ordered the use of open-air burn pits to dispose of the wars’ massive volume of waste. Among the other hazardous items service members recall being burned are: petroleum, oil, rubber, tires, plastic, styrofoam, batteries, appliances, electrical equipment, pesticides, aerosol cans, oil, explosives, casings, medical waste and animal and human carcasses. The VA does does not acknowledge a link between burn pits and long-term health problems. Of the 500 people included in Hickman’s burn pit study, the VA denied disability benefits to over 90% of them.

Note: Read more about these toxic burn pits and the US military's ongoing refusal to accept responsibility for the negative impacts of these on veteran's health. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

A UN panel will conclude Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is being "arbitrarily detained" in the UK, the Swedish foreign ministry has said. Mr Assange, 44, claimed asylum in London's Ecuadorean embassy in 2012. The Met Police says Mr Assange will be arrested if he leaves the embassy. The Australian was originally arrested in London in 2010 under a European Arrest Warrant issued by Sweden over rape and sexual assault claims. In 2012, while on bail, he claimed asylum inside the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge after the UK Supreme Court had ruled the extradition against him could go ahead. Mr Assange's Wikileaks organisation posted secret American government documents on the internet, and he says Washington could seek his extradition to the US to face espionage charges if he is sent to Sweden. In the statement, published earlier by Wikileaks on Twitter, Mr Assange said: "Should the UN announce tomorrow that I have lost my case against the United Kingdom and Sweden I shall exit the embassy at noon on Friday to accept arrest by British police ... However, should I prevail and the state parties be found to have acted unlawfully, I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me." Last October, Scotland Yard said it would no longer station officers outside the Ecuador embassy following an operation which it said had cost Ł12.6m. But it said "a number of overt and covert tactics to arrest him" would still be deployed.

Note: Read more about the "legal limbo" and propaganda campaign carried out against Assange and Wikileaks. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Top U.S. military commanders, who only a few months ago were planning to pull the last American troops out of Afghanistan by year’s end, are now quietly talking about an American commitment that could keep thousands of troops in the country for decades. The new American outlook marks a striking change for Obama, who campaigned on a promise to bring American troops home and has said repeatedly that he does not support the “idea of endless war.” And it highlights a major shift for the American military, which has spent much of the past decade racing to hit milestones as part of its broader “exit strategy” from Afghanistan and Iraq. These days, that phrase has largely disappeared from the military’s lexicon. In its place, there is a broad recognition in the Pentagon that building an effective Afghan army and police force will take a generation’s commitment, including billions of dollars a year in outside funding and constant support from thousands of foreign advisers on the ground. There are now 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Plans call for Obama to halve that force by the time he leaves office, but he could defer the decision to the next president.

Note: The US has spent several trillion dollars pursuing a policy of endless war since 9/11. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

Politicians and business leaders gathering in the Swiss Alps this week face an increasingly divided world. Just 62 people ... own as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire world population and the richest 1 percent own more than the other 99 percent put together, anti-poverty charity Oxfam said on Monday. The wealth gap is widening faster than anyone anticipated, with the 1 percent overtaking the rest one year earlier than Oxfam had predicted only a year ago. Rising inequality and a widening trust gap between people and their political leaders are big challenges for the global elite as they converge on Davos for the annual World Economic Forum, which runs from Jan. 20 to 23. Edelman's annual "Trust Barometer" survey shows a record gap this year in trust between the informed publics and mass populations in many countries, driven by income inequality and divergent expectations of the future. The gap is the largest in the United States, followed by the UK, France and India. The next wave of technological innovation, dubbed the fourth industrial revolution and a focus of the Davos meeting, threatens further social upheaval as many traditional jobs are lost to robots. "Far from trickling down, income and wealth are instead being sucked upwards at an alarming rate," the report says. It points to a "global spider's web" of tax havens that ensures wealth stays out of reach of ordinary citizens and governments.

Note: Read about the annual Davos forum and other more secretive meetings where global elites make decisions with far-reaching implications. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing income inequality news articles from reliable major media sources.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Law Department again has been sanctioned for withholding records involving a fatal police shooting, marking the eighth time in recent years a federal judge has formally punished the city [of Chicago] for failing to turn over potential evidence in a police misconduct lawsuit. U.S. District Court Judge Joan Gottschall on Tuesday ruled that the city acted in "bad faith" when it ignored a court order and made little effort to provide documents to the lawyer for the family of 20-year-old Divonte Young, who was shot and killed by an officer in 2012. In a sharply worded 24-page order, the judge criticized the city for its approach to discovery, the legal process that allows the two sides in a lawsuit to uncover relevant facts. "The City's cavalier attitude toward the discovery process ... warrant findings of willfulness, fault and bad faith," Gottschall wrote. In imposing her punishment, Gottschall ... stripped the city of legal protections that would have allowed its lawyers to withhold some documents from the Young family's lawyer. A Tribune investigation last year that analyzed nearly 450 cases alleging police misconduct since Emanuel took office found that a federal judge had to order the city to turn over potential evidence in nearly 1 of every 5 cases. The issue came to a head in January 2016, when a federal judge sanctioned one city lawyer for intentionally concealing evidence and ... took the rare step of tossing out a jury verdict in favor of the city and ordering a new trial.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing police corruption news articles 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.