Government Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Startling new evidence revealed in a BBC documentary shows that President Lyndon Johnson had no doubts that the Israeli attack on American spy ship USS Liberty, which left 34 American servicemen dead and 171 wounded, had been a deliberate attack. The incident happened ... during the Arab-Israeli Six Day War. Unmarked Israeli planes attacked and nearly sank the USS Liberty. Israel has always claimed that the affair was a tragic accident. The government of President Lyndon Johnson publicly accepted this explanation. In fact ... those at the very top never believed the Israeli version. The picture that emerges is of a daring ploy by Israel to fake an Egyptian attack on the American spy ship, and thereby provide America with a reason to officially enter the war against Egypt. Intercepts recorded during the incident reveal how America was convinced the attack was intentional, and the minutes of a White House meeting clearly suggest that President Johnson believed the attack had been deliberate. The Liberty survivors have continued to argue that the attack was intentional and that the US government colluded in a cover-up. Today, the veterans are still calling for a full investigation by Congress. It remains the only case of an attack on a US ship without a full Congressional enquiry. [The documentary] offers evidence of a secret collaboration between America and Israel before and during the war - a covert alliance of intelligence agencies that has always been denied by both sides.

Note: The complete BBC documentary can be viewed here. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the intelligence community.

Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence. Maria ... had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye. She saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. "They seemed to be taking a movie," Maria said. The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. "They were like happy ... I thought it was very strange," she said. She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. A statewide bulletin was issued on the van. The plate number was traced to a ... company called Urban Moving. A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. Arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. The five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens. The case was transferred ... into the [FBI's] Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which is responsible for espionage cases. The FBI believed Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation.

Note: Yet a later Washington Post article states the five were eventually released, even though "when authorities arrested them they had box-cutters in their moving van, the types of weapons used by the terrorist hijackers." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing 9/11 news articles from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our 9/11 Information Center.

The United States said today that Soviet authorities in recent months had sharply reduced the level of microwave radiation beamed at the American Embassy in Moscow. But in its first detailed public account of the situation the State Department nonetheless rebuked the Russians for continuing the radiation even at the current insignificant level. It said this showed “a lack of concern for living and working conditions of our people in Moscow.” Robert L. Funseth, the department spokesman ... refused to comment on why the Soviet Union was beaming the rays, a practice that officials have said began about 16 years ago. Soviet officials have justified the beams as necessary to curtail American electronic listening devices on the roof of upper floors of the embassy building. American officials have privately conceded that these devices exist to monitor Soviet radio and telephone transmissions. They have also said that the monitoring effort was being impaired by the jamming waves. What has irritated American officials was that the Soviet Embassy [in] Washington also carries out similar interceptions ... has not been subject to the countermeasures because of concern for Americans working in the area. The beaming of radiation against the embassy in Moscow was known only to a few American officials until last February when Ambassador Walter J. Stoessel Jr. briefed his staff on the situation ... because State Department medical officers feared that the radiation might pose a health hazard.

Note: Our investigations have indicated that there is a hidden war going on using microwaves which can damage health. The microwaves can target places as well as individuals. Learn more about this hidden war in this excellent, well documented essay. For more, see excerpts from major media news articles on nonlethal weapons and the dangers of microwave cell phone technology.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday introduced what she describes as the most ambitious anti-corruption legislation since Watergate. Warren's Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act ... aims to nix the influence of big money in politics. The legislation would "padlock" the revolving door in Washington by placing a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress, presidents and agency heads. The legislation would also expand the definition of who is a lobbyist to anyone who spends any time attempting to influence government. The proposal would also prohibit the world's largest companies, something defined by a company's annual revenue or market capitalization, from hiring or paying any former senior government official for four years after they leave government. Former senior officials would also have to file income disclosures for four years after federal employment. Warren's legislation would also ban members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, federal judges and other top government officials from owning and trading stocks. Currently, members simply need to disclose their stocks and trades. The bill would also create an entirely new office designed to police public corruption, called the Office of the Public Integrity, to strengthen enforcement and investigate possible violations.

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

Thousands of new documents from Project MKUltra, the Central Intelligence Agency’s mid-century mind control program, will soon be released. The new records include 4,358 undisclosed pages regarding MKUltra’s “behavior modification” efforts. John Greenewald, founder of The Black Vault, a site specializing in declassified government records obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, first uploaded MKUltra documents in 2004 - tens of thousands of pages, spread over four CD-ROMs. Still, the trove of MKUltra material available on The Black Vault represent only a small fraction of the material from the sprawling, multi-decade program, with the majority lost to history after CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed in 1973. This makes the new documents crucial to expanding our narrow perspective on the CIA’s actions from the operation’s beginnings in 1953 through the cover-up twenty years later. Project MKUltra was an illegal program of human experimentation undertaken by the CIA to discover methods, both pharmacological and psychological, for controlling the human mind. More than 80 colleges, prisons, pharma companies and hospitals collaborated in the program, including renowned psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, who served president of the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association. The existence of the previously unknown MKUltra pages was discovered in 2016, when a Black Vault user, Oscar Diggs, discovered irregularities in the collection the CIA disclosed to Greenewald.

Note: Read details of the CIA's bizarre efforts to keep these missing documents away from the public on this page. While Black Vault makes the MKUltra archive available for bulk download, you can view individual MKUltra files from this archive on this WantToKnow.info page. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing mind control news articles from reliable major media sources.

When Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated just minutes after winning California's 1968 Democratic primary, the United States was fiercely divided. Many looked to him to help heal that divide. That's part of an unfulfilled legacy his son, Robert Kennedy Jr., describes in his new book, "American Values." It's a history of the ... 40-year tension between my family and the CIA," he said. The Kennedy feud with the CIA was multi-generational. The family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, sat on a commission that called for an end to the CIA's paramilitary operations. And his sons John and Robert Kennedy both railed against the CIA's role in Vietnam. "The first thing [my father] was gonna do was to remove the clandestine services from the CIA and make the CIA ... an intelligence gathering organization," he said. But the seeds of doubt about who killed his father weren't planted by that notion. "I never suspected at any level that anybody other than Sirhan Sirhan had killed my father until maybe three years ago," he said. What changed for Kennedy? "Well, Paul Schrade." Schrade was a close friend of Robert Kennedy and was with the candidate the night he was shot. Schrade ... has insisted for decades that Sirhan could not have acted alone. He's now raised serious questions in Kennedy Jr.'s mind as well. "It's hard to believe that Sirhan shot my dad, that his bullets hit my dad. Because Sirhan was always in front of my father. And yet, all shots, all the four shots that hit my father came from behind him," he said.

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

“My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently told The Washington Post. “I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.” Kennedy’s second oldest son now believes ... that his father was killed by a second gunman. RFK Jr. even visited Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of shooting and killing his father, because he was “curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence.” He isn’t the only one. “If you believe the LAPD reports about this case, there is no way that Sirhan did it and did it alone,” Dan Moldea, an investigative journalist and author of The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, told Boston.com. Kennedy was assassinated ... on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy was walking through the hotel kitchen pantry [and] was shot from behind at point-blank range. Sirhan approached from the front, on Kennedy’s right. His gun never got closer than about a foot-and-a-half away [and] carried a maximum of just eight bullets. And yet, there’s evidence that suggests more than eight shots were fired. Who would the second gunman have been? Theorists most commonly point to ... Thane Eugene Cesar. Cesar was a security guard who hated the Kennedys. Cesar was also walking with Kennedy when the shooting occurred and ... owned a .22-caliber similar to Sirhan’s gun, which he initially told police he sold before the assassination, but had actually, it was later found, sold three months after the shooting.

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

President Trump vowed last year to release all the long-secret files related to the JFK assassination, but the administration announced Thursday that some documents will remain redacted until October 2021 for national security reasons. Trump gave the CIA, FBI and other agencies a deadline of April 26 to release documents related to the investigation into President John F. Kennedy’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. Trump ... had promised to release the entirety of the 5 million pages of records, most of which have been available since the late 1990s. Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post staff writer ... said in an interview that he was disappointed by Trump’s decision to delay the full release for another three years and, possibly, beyond. “Trump said that all the JFK files will be released, but the truth is that thousands of JFK files are still secret. The clear intent of Congress was to have these released last October and now we’re talking about 2021,” Morley said. “The point is that the CIA wants to keep this secret forever. It’s a very clear statement of intent.” Morley also said that the Trump administration is not complying with the stipulations of the Kennedy Records Act, which requires that the administration provide declassified explanations for withheld documents. Morley, who has been fighting the CIA in federal court for the last 15 years ... said he was quickly going through the 19,000 files that were released Thursday and came across redactions that made little sense to him.

Note: See this USA Today article for a summary of files released in 2017 on the JFK assassination. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing assassinations news articles from reliable major media sources.

With few exceptions, today’s populist insurgents are more concerned with immigration and sovereignty than with the top rate of income tax. This disconnect may be more than an oddity. It may be a sign of the corrupting influence of inequality on democracy. Rather than straightforwardly increasing pressure on politicians to do something about skewed income distributions ... rising inequality might instead boost the power of the rich, thus enabling them to counter the popular will. Research in political science gives substance to the impression that America’s rich wield outsize influence. The relation between concentrated wealth and the political power of the rich is scarcely limited to political spending, or to America. The rich have many means to shape public opinion: financing nominally apolitical think-tanks, for instance, or buying media outlets. Although their power may sometimes be used to influence the result of a particular vote, it is often deployed more subtly, to shape public narratives about which problems deserve attention. Rising inequality ... is associated with political agendas more focused on matters related to “social order”, such as crime and immigration. Issues such as economic justice are crowded out. As their wealth increases, [the rich] have a greater ability to press politicians to emphasise some topics rather than others. The rich are powerful, but not all-powerful. If political leaders tried it, they might well find that redistribution is a winner at the ballot box.

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

The relationship between US national security and Hollywood is much deeper and more political than anyone has ever acknowledged. It is a matter of public record that the Pentagon has had an entertainment liaison office since 1948. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established a similar position in 1996. Although it was known that they sometimes request script changes in exchange for advice, permission to use locations, and equipment such as aircraft carriers, each appeared to have passive, and largely apolitical roles. Files we obtained, mainly through the US Freedom of Information Act, show that between 1911 and 2017, more than 800 feature films received support from the US Government’s Department of Defence (DoD), a significantly higher figure than previous estimates indicate. These included blockbuster franchises such as Transformers, Iron Man, and The Terminator. On television, we found over 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from Flight 93 to Ice Road Truckers to Army Wives. When we include individual episodes for long running shows like 24, Homeland, and NCIS, as well as the influence of other major organisations like the FBI and White House, we can establish unequivocally for the first time that the national security state has supported thousands of hours of entertainment. For its part, the CIA has assisted in 60 film and television shows since its formation in 1947. This is a much lower figure than the DoD’s but its role has nonetheless been significant.

Note: Read how the Pentagon controls the script of hundreds of movies, some quite well known. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the manipulation of public perception.

The CIA has a long history of “spooking the news,” dating back to its earliest days when the legendary spymaster Allen Dulles and his top staff drank and dined regularly with the press elite of New York and Washington, and the agency boasted hundreds of U.S. and foreign journalists as paid and unpaid assets. In 1977, after this systematic media manipulation was publicly exposed by congressional investigations, the CIA created an Office of Public Affairs that was tasked with guiding press coverage of intelligence matters. The intelligence empire’s efforts to manufacture the truth and mold public opinion are more vast and varied than ever before. One of its foremost assets? Hollywood. The agency has established a very active spin machine in the heart of the entertainment capital, which works strenuously to make sure the cloak-and-dagger world is presented in heroic terms. Since the mid-1990s, but especially after 9/11, American screenwriters, directors, and producers have traded positive portrayal of the spy profession in film or television projects for ... favors at CIA headquarters. As Hollywood became increasingly embedded with Langley ... CIA employees often saw their public-affairs colleagues giving various celebrities personalized tours of the headquarters. “I can’t tell you how many times this happened,” recalled the former CIA officer John Kiriakou. There’s a revolving door between the CIA and Hollywood.

Note: Read how the Pentagon controls the script of hundreds of movies, some quite well known. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the manipulation of public perception.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George Orwell's Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are thinking. The device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collectedthrough phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records - it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think. The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one researcher has quit, citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability. Known as Aquaint, which stands for "Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence," the project was run for many years by John Prange, an NSA scientist at the Advanced Research and Development Activity. A supersmart search engine, capable of answering complex questions ... would be very useful for the public. But that same capability in the hands of an agency like the NSA - absolutely secret, often above the law, resistant to oversight, and with access to petabytes of private information about Americans - could be a privacy and civil liberties nightmare. "We must not forget that the ultimate goal is to transfer research results into operational use," said ... Prange.

Note: Watch a highly revealing PBS Nova documentary providing virtual proof that the NSA could have stopped 9/11 but chose not to. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

One of the country’s largest voting machine makers has admitted in a letter to a U.S. senator that some of its past election-management systems had remote-access software preinstalled, despite past denials that any of its systems were equipped with such software. Election Systems and Software (ES&S) told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden ... that the company provided election equipment with remote connection software to an unspecified number of states from 2000 to 2006. “ES&S provided pcAnywhere remote connection software on the [Election-Management System] workstation to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006,” wrote Tom Burt, ES&S president. The election-management system is used to count official election results and sometimes to program voting machines. PcAnywhere was the name of the remote-access software made by Symantec. In 2012, Symantec told all of its customers to disable or to uninstall the software after admitting it had been hacked in 2006, at the same time that ES&S was selling election-management systems with pcAnywhere preinstalled. ES&S would not say how many systems were sold with the software from 2000 to 2006 but stressed the company stopped using it in 2007, after it was prohibited by the Election Assistance Commission. A computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University discovered in 2011 that the technology was pre-installed on an election-management system that was sold to a Pennsylvania county.

Note: For more on this threat to democracy, see this excellent essay. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing elections corruption news articles from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Elections Information Center.

Astroturfing is when corporations or organization[s] try to make it seem as though whatever they are selling is part of a grassroots movement. For example when a seeming small group calling themselves Americans Against Food Taxes run a national ad campaign against a potential beverage tax. It’s not paid for by a small grassroots movement of concerned citizens, but a large beverage conglomerate lobbying against a soda tax. According to [John] Oliver, in the wake of U.S. Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United, astroturfing is becoming increasing common. Like a national wetlands organization funded by real estate developers and oil companies and a seeming restaurant worker group campaigning against minimum wage increase. “It’s pure straight up opposite world,” said Oliver. Some astroturfing experts work with many special interest groups, creating nonprofit shell companies of sorts to ensure that their ties to the fake grassroots campaigns can be kept secret. One of “the most infuriating tools” of astroturfing is the use of paid protestors. These paid protestors show up at places like town hall meetings masquerading as concerned citizens and reciting lines fed to them by special interest groups. The existence of these paid protestors is now a common theme on conspiracy message boards. “That is hugely dangerous,” said Oliver.

Note: The New York Times recently reported on the Koch Brothers' use of tactics like this to kill public transit projects. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and the manipulation of public perception.

The FBI doesn’t want the public to know more about how its agents pose as journalists during undercover investigations. But, in a federal court case, Justice Department lawyers ... acknowledged in a court filing that FBI agents who pretend to be journalists create a chilling effect, making it harder for real journalists to gain trust and cooperation from sources. The astonishing admission came as the FBI attempted to fend off litigation from Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which has filed requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The Reporters Committee’s litigation involves documents related to an FBI undercover operation in which agents posed as documentary filmmakers from a fake company called Longbow Productions to investigate Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters. In a motion filed July 23, Assistant U.S. Attorney Johnny H. Walker argued that providing FBI documents about the Bundy investigation and others in which a journalistic cover may have been used would not only disclose sensitive investigative techniques but also ... “would allow criminals to judge whether they should completely avoid any contacts with documentary film crews, rendering the investigative technique ineffective.” The FBI has previously disclosed that agents have pretended to be news reporters to further investigations. But questions remain about how often such covers are used and what policies are in place to govern the deployment of fake reporters.

Note: A mistrial was recently declared in the case against Cliven Bundy and others after the Justice Department was found to have withheld "massive amounts of evidence undermining federal charges". For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

Note down this number: MFG BGM-71E-1B. I found [it] printed on the side of a spent missile casing lying in the basement of a bombed-out Islamist base in eastern Aleppo last year. At the top were the words “Hughes Aircraft Co”, founded in California ... and sold in 1997 to Raytheon, the massive US defence contractor whose profits last year came to $23.35bn. Shareholders include the Bank of America and Deutsche Bank. There were dozens of other used-up identical missile casings in the same underground room in the ruins of eastern Aleppo. These anti-armour missiles ... were not individual items smuggled into Syria. These were shipments, whole batches of weapons that left their point of origin on military aircraft pallets. There are videos of Islamist fighters using the BGM-71E-1B variety in Idlib province two years before I found the casings of other anti-tank missiles in neighbouring Aleppo. There is neither an obligation nor an investigative mechanism on the part of the arms manufacturers to ensure that their infinitely expensive products are not handed over ... to Isis, al-Nusra/al-Qaeda – which was clearly the case in Aleppo – or some other [group] branded by the US State Department itself as a “terrorist organisation”. Why don’t Nato track all these weapons as they leave Europe and America? Why don’t they expose the real end-users of these deadly shipments? The arms manufacturers I spoke to in the Balkans attested that Nato and the US are fully aware of the buyers of all their machine guns and mortars.

Note: This article was written by award-winning investigative journalist Robert Fisk. More on this available here. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

The torture of a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist, including waterboarding, is described in meticulous detail in newly-declassified cables that CIA Director Gina Haspel sent to agency headquarters in late 2002, when she headed a secret U.S. detention facility in Thailand. The suspect, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was believed to have been involved in planning the USS Cole bombing in Yemen in 2000. Nashiri’s treatment during interrogation — forced nudity, shackling, being slammed against walls, being confined in a small box and mock executions, as well as waterboarding — has been previously mentioned in broad terms in official reports, hearings, court cases and news reports. But many specifics about what happened to Nashiri during his several-week stay at the Thailand facility, while Haspel was briefly in charge, have not been made public. They are contained in 11 cables obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a private research institute. On the 12th day of his detention, one cable to the home office reported, “interrogation escalated rapidly from subject being aggressively debriefed by interrogators to multiple applications of the walling technique, and ultimately, multiple applications of the watering technique.” The interrogators, it later said, “covered subject’s head with the hood and left him on the water board, moaning, shaking and asking God to help him repeatedly.”

Note: The above article contains graphic descriptions of torture overseen and then covered up by Gina Haspel. Another article, by a former CIA counterterrorism officer who was imprisoned for blowing the whistle on the CIA torture, referred to Haspel's actions as "war crimes, crimes against humanity". For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Several U.S victims of alleged "health attacks" in Cuba have hired a lawyer out of concern over how the U.S. government will handle their long-term medical treatment. "That's not at all clear," said lawyer Mark Zaid, who represents eight of the at least 24 U.S. diplomats, intelligence officers and relatives affected by the incidents in Havana. "Some already had to spend their own money" on treatment. "Are they being treated or are they being studied? It's not entirely clear what is happening," the lawyer said, adding that some of the victims had problems accessing their medical records at the UPenn treatment center because the records are government property. Zaid added that ... the cases have placed the government in a predicament because of the mystery not just on the so-called attacks but the injuries experienced. For example, federal employees who have been injured by incidents such as explosions, "the wounds have been specific and concrete, not strange brain and neurological damages. It's much more complicated." In a separate case, another Zaid client - Mike Beck, a retired National Security Agency counterintelligence officer - suffered a "potentially similar attack" in the 1990s when he traveled to an unidentified country. Years later, Beck and a companion on the trip were found to be suffering from Parkinson's disease. A confidential report convinced him that his illness was linked to a covert attack with a weapon that used microwaves, Beck told The Washington Post last year.

Note: There is no doubt that the US has electromagnetic weapons that can cause neurological disorders like this. We suspect this was a false flag attack to turn the American public against the recently opened U.S. embassy in Havana. To learn about how electromagnetic weapons can be used to torture anyone without legal recourse, listen to this revealing interview. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and non-lethal weapons.

Mike Beck, a National Security Agency counterintelligence officer, could always bang out 60 words a minute. But in early 2006, Beck struggled to move his fingers at their usual typing speed. Soon after, a brain scan showed why: Beck had Parkinson's disease, the second-most-common neurodegenerative disorder in the United States. He was only 46 - unusually young for Parkinson's. No one in his family had ever had it. Then, in an unsettling coincidence, he learned that an NSA colleague — a man he'd spent a pivotal week in 1996 with in a hostile country — had also just been diagnosed with Parkinson's. Eventually, Beck read a classified intelligence report that convinced him that he and his co-worker on the trip were likely the victims of a covert attack that led to their illnesses - and that has prompted a highly unusual workers' compensation claim. Beck believes that while he and his colleague were sleeping in their hotel rooms, the hostile country, which he cannot name for security reasons, deployed a high-powered microwave weapon against them, damaging their nervous systems. For the last four years, Beck, 57, has been trying to persuade the Labor Department to award him 75 percent of his salary, or about $110,000 a year. But the Labor Department won't approve Beck's request without solid evidence that he was targeted. In Beck's case — short of obtaining proof from the hostile nation's spy service — he'd need the endorsement of the NSA, which has refused to provide it.

Note: To learn about how electromagnetic weapons can be used to torture anyone without legal recourse, listen to this revealing interview. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and non-lethal weapons.

The Food and Drug Administration knew that some doctors were wrongly prescribing powerful opioid painkillers. The drugs include mouth sprays and lozenges meant to provide immediate relief for breakthrough cancer pain ... in patients who have been taking opioids for long periods of time. The formulations, referred to as transmucosal immediate-release fentanyl products, or TIRF products, can kill patients who take them without having first developed tolerance. But they were prescribed to patients who had no tolerance, and for migraines or dental pain, the team at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said. The U.S. is suffering through an epidemic of opioid abuse. Opioids, including prescription opioids and heroin, killed 42,000 people in 2016. At the same time, the CDC reported last year, the number of prescriptions for the painkillers tripled from 1999 to 2015. The FDA set up a special plan to control [TIRF products], called a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy. The FDA asked one of its expert panels ... to help review how the strategy for the TIRF opioids has been working. It has not worked as designed, the Johns Hopkins team said in testimony given to the panel. The strategy has "generated red flags for years," the team said in written testimony. “FDA had evidence as early as April 2016 that TIRFs were being prescribed for many patients who were not opioid tolerant,” they wrote in their testimony. “Of more than 25,000 patients receiving TIRFs, as many as 51 percent were not opioid tolerant.”

Note: A recent CNN report titled, "The more opioids doctors prescribe, the more money they make" shows how doctors have profited from over-prescribing these dangerous drugs. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in Big Pharma.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.