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.

Thousands of top traders and bankers on Wall Street were awarded huge bonuses and pay packages last year, even as their employers were battered by the financial crisis. Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general. At Goldman Sachs, for example, bonuses of more than $1 million went to 953 traders and bankers, and Morgan Stanley awarded seven-figure bonuses to 428 employees. Even at weaker banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, million-dollar awards were distributed to hundreds of workers. Mr. Cuomo, who for months has criticized the companies over pay, said the bonuses were particularly galling because the banks survived the crisis with the government’s support. “If the bank lost money, where do you get the money to pay the bonus?” he said. All the banks named in the report declined to comment. Incentives that led to large bonuses on Wall Street are often cited as a cause of the financial crisis. Though it has been known for months that billions of dollars were spent on bonuses last year, it was unclear whether that money was spread widely or concentrated among a few workers. The report suggests that those roughly 5,000 people — a small subset of the industry — accounted for more than $5 billion in bonuses. At Goldman, just 200 people collectively were paid nearly $1 billion in total, and at Morgan Stanley, $577 million was shared by 101 people. All told, the bonus pools at the nine banks that received bailout money was $32.6 billion, while those banks lost $81 billion.

Note: How can this happen? Corruption abounds, yet the fact that you are reading this shows we can change it all. For lots more on the realities of the Wall Street bailout, click here.

The Pentagon is preparing to make troops available if necessary to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency tackle a potential outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, FOX News has confirmed. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is preparing to sign an order authorizing the military to set up five regional teams to deal with the potential outbreak of H1N1 influenza if FEMA requests help. A senior U.S. defense official told FOX News that the plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the FEMA. No final decision has been reached on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it likely would include personnel from all branches of the military. It is not known how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces. In the event of a major outbreak, civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts, the official said. The military, as it would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients. As a first step, military leaders have asked Gates to authorize planning for the potential assistance. Orders to deploy actual forces would be reviewed later, depending on how much of a health threat the flu poses this fall, the officials said.

Note: In conjunction with all the other evidence that the swine flu scare is bogus, it appears that it may also be designed to provide a "wedge" to break down the prohibition, established by the Posse Comitatus Act, against use of military troops in domestic operations. For many revealing reports from reliable sources on government and military threats to civil liberties, click here.

A shift in authority has given military officials at the White House a bigger operational role in creating a backup government if the nation’s capital were “decapitated” by a terrorist attack or other calamity, according to current and former officials involved in the decision. The move ... was made in the closing weeks of the administration of President George W. Bush. Officials said the Obama administration had left the plan essentially intact. Under the revamped structure, the White House Military Office, which reports to the office of the White House chief of staff, has assumed a more central role in setting up a temporary “shadow government” in a crisis. And the office, a 2,300-person outfit best known for flying Air Force One, has taken on added responsibilities as the lead agent in shepherding government leaders to a secure site at Mount Weather in rural Virginia, keeping classified lists of successors and maintaining computer systems, among other operational duties. Many of these types of tasks were previously handled by civilians at other agencies, led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Officials at other agencies that have traditionally played critical roles expressed concern that the new structure placed too much power in the hands of too few people inside the White House. They also saw the move as part of the Bush administration’s broader efforts to enhance the power of the White House. Though the office reports to the White House, many of its employees are uniformed soldiers, and it has sometimes been led by a military officer. While Obama administration officials would not discuss details of their continuity plan, they said the current policy was “settled,” and they drew no distance between their own policies and those left behind by the Bush administration.

Note: For more on the Shadow Government, click here. For lots more on government secrecy from major media sources, click here.

The Obama administration's plan to increase the powers of the Federal Reserve, says one critic, is like giving a teenager "a bigger, faster car right after he crashed the family station wagon." Broadening the Fed's responsibilities won't help. Instead, we should think of how best to dismantle an overextended Fed. The Fed has been incapacitated by its transformation into an omnibus enterprise with responsibilities ranging from boots-on-the-ground regulation to high-level monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which created the Federal Reserve System, did so to forestall financial panics rather than pursue macroeconomic policies. The gold standard defined monetary policy. The Fed was merely meant to "provide an elastic currency" by serving as lender of last resort in times of crisis. The Act also assigned the Fed routine responsibilities for maintaining and improving the financial system – examining banks, issuing currency notes, and helping clear checks. The adoption of Keynesian and monetarist ideas by central bankers and elected officials subsequently cast the Fed in a proactive macroeconomic role. In 1977, an amendment to the 1913 Act explicitly charged the Fed with promoting "maximum" employment and "stable" prices. The Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 gave the Fed responsibility over holding companies designed to circumvent restrictions placed on individual banks. Congress further tasked the Fed with enforcing consumer-protection and fair-lending rules. While the record of the Fed's monetary policy has been mixed, its supervision of financial institutions has been a predictable and comprehensive failure. The Fed's excessively broad mandate also has thwarted accountability.

Note: The bill to audit the Fed (HR 1207) in the US Congress now has 276 co-signers -- more than 50% of all members. Yet the media is hardly reporting on this. Contact your Congressional representatives now at this link.

Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials. Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants. A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property. The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law-enforcement capacity. In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose. “The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said. The memorandum was declassified in March. But the White House debate about the Lackawanna group is the first evidence that top American officials ... actually considered using the document to justify deploying the military into an American town to make arrests.

Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on government and military threats to civil liberties, click here.

It was disturbing to learn ... just how close the last administration came to violating laws barring the military from engaging in law enforcement when President George W. Bush considered sending troops into a Buffalo suburb in 2002 to arrest terrorism suspects. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily a problem of the past. More needs to be done to ensure that the military is not illegally deployed in this country. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from law enforcement activities within the United States. The Lackawanna Six controversy is history, but there are troubling signs the military may be injecting itself today into law enforcement. The American Civil Liberties Union has been sounding the alarm about the proliferation of "fusion centers," in which federal, state and local law enforcement cooperate on anti-terrorism work. According to the A.C.L.U., the lines have blurred, and the centers have involved military personnel in domestic law enforcement. Congress should investigate. Civil libertarians are also raising questions about a program known as the Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear and High-Yield Explosives Consequence Management Response Force. The Army says its aim is to have active-duty troops ready to back up local law enforcement in catastrophic situations, like an attack with a nuclear weapon. That could be legal, but the workings of these units are murky. Again, Congress should ensure that the military is not moving into prohibited areas. After the lack of respect for posse comitatus at the highest ranks of the previous administration, the Obama White House and Congress must ensure that the lines between military and law enforcement have been restored, clearly, and that they are respected.

Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on government and military threats to civil liberties, click here.

The predominant model of drug addiction views it as a disease: humans and animals will use heroin or cocaine for as long as they are available. When the drugs run out, they will seek a fresh supply; the drugs, not the users, are in control. These conclusions, repeated frequently by politicians and the media, are based on experiments carried out almost exclusively on animals, usually rats and monkeys, housed in metal cages and experiencing a particularly poor quality of life. What would happen, wondered psychologist Dr Bruce Alexander, then of British Columbia's Simon Fraser University, if these animals were instead provided with a comfortable, stimulating environment? In 1981, Alexander built a 200sq ft home for lab rats. Rat Park, as it became known, was kept clean and temperate, while the rats were supplied with plenty of food and toys, along with places to dig, rest and mate. Try as he might, Alexander could not make junkies out of his rats. Even after being force-fed morphine for two months, when given the option, they chose plain water, despite experiencing mild withdrawal symptoms. He laced the morphine with sugar, but still they ignored it. Only when he added Naloxone, an opiate inhibitor, to the sugared morphine water, did they drink it. Alexander simultaneously monitored rats kept in "normal" lab conditions: they consistently chose the morphine drip over plain water, sometimes consuming 16-20 times more than the Rat Parkers. Alexander's findings - that deprived rats seek solace in opiates, while contented rats avoid them - dramatically contradict our currently held beliefs about addiction. Nobody seemed to care. Rejected by Science and Nature, Alexander's paper was published in the obscure Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, where it was summarily ignored. Two decades later, Rat Park sits empty; addiction remains a disease and the war on drugs continues.

Note: Is it possible the powers that be want us to believe addiction is much worse than it really is?

Eight elderly Canadians who were victims of CIA-funded brainwashing experiments in the 1950s reached a tentative out-of-court settlement Tuesday in their multimillion-dollar damage suit against the U.S. spy agency. The Canadian plaintiffs, who say they suffered permanent mental and physical damage as a result of the bizarre experiments performed on them at a Montreal psychiatric hospital, will divide a $750,000 payment among them, according to their attorney, James Turner. The Canadians, all patients of the late Dr. Ewen Cameron at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute in the late 1950s, were injected with repeated doses of mind-altering LSD, deprived of sleep, subjected to massive electroshock treatments and forced to listen to thousands of repetitions of taped messages taken from the most sensitive moments of their therapy sessions.

Note: Dr. Cameron was once President of the American and World Psychiatric Associations. For more on the severe abuses of doctors in serving the CIA's mind control programs, click here. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on CIA mind control experiments and programs, click here. The link above provides this abstract of the complete article, which can be accessed by payment of a small fee.

"The total potential federal government support could reach up to $23.7 trillion," says Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in a report released today on the government's efforts to fix the financial system. "The potential financial commitment the American taxpayers could be responsible for is of a size and scope that isn't even imaginable," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. "If you spent a million dollars a day going back to the birth of Christ, that wouldn't even come close to just $1 trillion -- $23.7 trillion is a staggering figure." The government has about 50 different programs to fight the current recession, including programs to bail out ailing banks and automakers, boost lending and beat back the housing crisis. So far they've cost taxpayers around $4 trillion. But Barofsky says if each federal agency spent the maximum potential amount involved in these initiatives, taxpayers could be on the hook for trillions more. The watchdog also warned today that hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars could be lost if the government does not increase the transparency of the TARP program, which he says has grown to an unprecedented scope and scale. Requiring TARP recipients to report on how government funds are used is among the recommendations urged by Barofsky. He also wants the department to report on the values of its TARP portfolio so taxpayers know about the value of their investments.

Note: For a treasure trove of revelations from reliable sources on the hidden realities behind the Wall Street bailout, click here.

After all that federal aid, a resurgent Goldman Sachs is on course to dole out bonuses that could rival the record paydays of the heady bull-market years. Goldman posted the richest quarterly profit in its 140-year history and, to the envy of its rivals, announced that it had earmarked $11.4 billion so far this year to compensate its workers. At that rate, Goldman employees could, on average, earn roughly $770,000 each this year — or nearly what they did at the height of the boom. Senior Goldman executives and bankers would be paid considerably more. Only three years ago, Goldman paid more than 50 employees above $20 million each. In 2007, its chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, collected one of the biggest bonuses in corporate history. The latest headline results — $3.44 billion in profits — were powered by earnings from the bank’s secretive trading operations and exceeded even the most optimistic predictions. But Goldman’s sudden good fortune, coming only a month after the bank repaid billions of bailout dollars, raises questions for Washington policy makers. In Washington, some lawmakers warned on Tuesday that a quick return to such high pay would stoke public anger as the Obama administration tried to overhaul financial regulation. They warned that Wall Street lobbyists were already trying to block financial reforms. “People all over this country feel an incredible frustration that they are seeing their neighbors lose their jobs and the government is helping companies like A.I.G. and Goldman Sachs and then the next thing they are reporting huge profits and huge compensation,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio and a member of the banking committee. “I think people are incredulous that this system is working this way.”

Note: For a treasure trove of revelations from reliable sources on the hidden realities behind the Wall Street bailout, click here.

Public health experts are gearing up for swine flu vaccinations this fall in what could be the largest mass-immunization campaign since the polio vaccine was introduced more than 50 years ago. Local public health agencies will bear much of the responsibility for vaccinating the public. For now, there are more questions than answers with regard to flu vaccinations, including how much of the vaccine will be made, when it will available, and who will get it first. In fact, the federal government has not officially announced plans to make a vaccine widely available, although it is expected to do so by the end of summer. "There's still a lot of information we have to figure out, and we're learning as we go," said Dr. Mantu Davis, deputy health officer with the Alameda County Public Health Department. "It's definitely a larger vaccination than anything we've seen, or anything in my lifetime." California authorities designed a mass vaccination plan years ago, under the assumption of a deadly pandemic flu and a limited vaccine supply, said Dr. John Talarico with the state public health department's Center for Infectious Disease. That plan is being revised, given that swine flu seems to be fairly mild so far and that a relatively large amount of vaccine may be available, even if it's not enough to give to everyone at once. A swine flu vaccine is still being designed, and the World Health Organization reported last week that a licensed version may not be available until the end of the year - weeks after the start of the flu season. An unlicensed vaccine - one that is still being tested but is deemed safe enough for the general public - may be available sooner.

Note: After hundreds died and thousands were crippled by a vaccine for the swine flu in 1976, how can they be talking about using an unlicensed vaccine? For lots more on the swine flu scare and the billions in profits for well-connnected pharmaceutical corporations and their major investors, click here.

The most consequential decision of the Supreme Court’s last term got only a little attention when it landed in May. And what attention it got was for the wrong reason. But the lower courts have certainly understood the significance of the decision, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which makes it much easier for judges to dismiss civil lawsuits right after they are filed. They have cited it more than 500 times in just the last two months. On its face, the Iqbal decision concerned the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The court ruled that a Muslim man swept up on immigration charges could not sue two Bush administration officials for what he said was the terrible abuse he suffered in detention. But something much deeper and broader was going on in the decision, something that may unsettle how civil litigation is conducted in the United States. For more than half a century, it has been clear that all a plaintiff had to do to start a lawsuit was to file what the rules call “a short and plain statement of the claim” in a document called a complaint. Information about wrongdoing is often secret. Plaintiffs claiming they were the victims of employment discrimination, a defective product, an antitrust conspiracy or a policy of harsh treatment in detention may not know exactly who harmed them and how before filing suit. But plaintiffs can learn valuable information during discovery. The Iqbal decision now requires plaintiffs to come forward with concrete facts at the outset, and it instructs lower court judges to dismiss lawsuits that strike them as implausible. “It obviously licenses highly subjective judgments,” said Stephen B. Burbank, an authority on civil procedure at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “This is a blank check for federal judges to get rid of cases they disfavor.”

Note: For many important reports from major media sources on the erosion of civil liberties since the 9/11 attacks, click here.

CIA director Leon Panetta just told Congress he cancelled a secret operation to assassinate al-Qaida leaders. The CIA campaign, authorized in 2001, had not yet become operational, claimed Panetta. His claim is humbug. The U.S. has been trying to kill al-Qaida personnel (real and imagined) since the Clinton administration. These efforts continue under President Barack Obama. Claims by Congress it was never informed are hogwash. The CIA and Pentagon have been in the assassination business since the early 1950s, using American hit teams or third parties. Assassination was outlawed in the U.S. in 1976, but that did not stop attempts by its last three administrations to emulate Israel's Mossad in the "targeted killing" of enemies. The George W. Bush administration, and now the Obama White House, sidestepped American law by saying the U.S. was at war, and thus legally killing "enemy combatants." But Congress never declared war. Washington is buzzing about a secret death squad run by Dick Cheney when he was vice-president and his protege, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. This gung-ho general led the Pentagon's super secret Special Operations Command, which has become a major rival to the CIA in the business of "wet affairs" (as the KGB used to call assassinations) and covert raids. America is hardly alone in trying to rub out enemies or those who thwart its designs. Britain's MI-6 and France's SDECE were notorious for sending out assassins. U.S. assassins are still at work. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. drones are killing tribesmen almost daily. Over 90% are civilians. Americans have a curious notion that killing people from the air is not murder or even a crime, but somehow clean.

Note: For more revealing information on this, click here. For more on assassination as a tool of state, click here.

The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal. The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored." The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says. Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.

Note: For many disturbing reports on increasing threats to privacy under the pretext of protection against terrorism, click here.

While the Bush administration had defended its program of wiretapping without warrants as a vital tool that saved lives, a new government review released Friday said the program’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism was unclear. Most intelligence officials interviewed “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists, the report said. The program ... played a limited role in the F.B.I.’s overall counterterrorism efforts,” the report concluded. The Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence branches ... could not link it directly to counterterrorism successes, presumably arrests or thwarted plots. The report also hinted at political pressure in preparing the so-called threat assessments that helped form the legal basis for continuing the classified program, whose disclosure in 2005 provoked fierce debate about its legality. The initial authorization of the wiretapping program came after a senior C.I.A. official took a threat evaluation, prepared by analysts who knew nothing of the program, and inserted a paragraph provided by a senior White House official that spoke of the prospect of future attacks against the United States. These threat assessments, which provided the justification for President George W. Bush’s reauthorization of the wiretapping program every 45 days, became known among intelligence officials as the “scary memos,” the report said. Intelligence analysts involved in the process eventually realized that “if a threat assessment identified a threat against the United States,” the wiretapping and related surveillance programs were “likely to be renewed,” the report added.

Note: For many illuminating reports from reliable sources on the realities behind the "war on terror", click here.

A federal judge has ruled that CIA officials committed fraud to protect a former covert agent against an eavesdropping lawsuit and is considering sanctioning as many as six who worked at the agency, including former CIA Director George Tenet. According to court documents unsealed Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth referred a CIA attorney, Jeffrey Yeates, for discipline. Lamberth also denied the CIA's renewed efforts under the Obama administration to keep the case secret because of what he calls the agency's "diminished credibility" in the case. The eavesdropping lawsuit was brought by a former agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency, Richard Horn, who says his home in Rangoon, Burma, was illegally wiretapped by the CIA in 1993. He says Arthur Brown, the former CIA station chief in Burma, and Franklin Huddle Jr., the chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Burma, were trying to get him relocated because they disagreed with his work with Burmese officials on the country's drug trade. Horn sued Brown and Huddle in 1994, seeking damages for violations of his civil rights because of the alleged wiretapping. Tenet filed an affidavit in 2000 asking that the case against Brown be dismissed because he was a covert agent whose identity must not be revealed in court. Lamberth granted the CIA's request and threw out the case against Brown in 2004. But Lamberth found out last year that Brown's cover had been lifted in 2002, even though the CIA continued to file legal documents saying his status was covert. The judge found that the CIA intentionally misled the court and reinstated the case against Brown.

Note: This may not seem like big news, but the fact that the CIA is facing court opposition is quite significant. In the past this never would have happened, much less have made it into a newspaper.

On a map of Baghdad, the US Army's Forward Operating Base Falcon is clearly within city limits. Except that Iraqi and American military officials have decided it's not. As the June 30 deadline for US soldiers to be out of Iraqi cities approaches, there are no plans to relocate the roughly 3,000 American troops who help maintain security in south Baghdad along what were the fault lines in the sectarian war. "We and the Iraqis decided it wasn't in the city," says a US military official. The base on the southern outskirts of Baghdad's Rasheed district is an example of the fluidity of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) agreed to late last year, which orders all US combat forces out of Iraqi cities, towns, and villages by June 30. Although the mission for most brigades and battalions is not expected to substantially change after June 30, US military officials have stopped using the term forward operating base in favor of the more benign-sounding contingency operating site. The SOFA and a wider strategic framework agreement set out a relationship between the US and Iraq very different from that of the military occupation of the past six years. One of the challenges of that new relationship is how the US can continue to wield influence on key decisions without being seen to do so. "For so long we have been one of the driving forces here ... it is such a hard habit to break," says a senior US State Department official. "I think we need to do everything we can not to make ourselves an issue. It has to be seen here as doing it quietly ... so that you are not doing things for the Iraqis, the Iraqis are doing things for themselves but with your help and we remain in the shadows.... It's a very delicate choreography," adds the State Department official.

Note: For a trove of revealing reports on the deceptive strategies used by the US to advance its wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

A swine flu vaccine will be fast-tracked for use in Britain within five days once it is developed, and 130 million doses are on order. The Department of Health expects to have enough vaccine this year to give it to half the population. Further supplies will be available if needed. Each person will need two doses of the vaccine, unless one single jab is found to provide high rates of immunity. The first doses specific to the H1N1 swine flu virus are set to arrive in September and could be given regulatory approval in less than a week. The move came after the first British patient without underlying health problems died from swine flu, taking the number of swine flu-linked deaths in Britain to 15. Peter Holden, the British Medical Association’s lead negotiator on swine flu, said that ... although swine flu was not generally causing serious illness in patients, health officials were eager to start a mass vaccination campaign, starting first on groups that were susceptible to infection or prone to complications. It is likely that the elderly would be given a seasonal flu jab to guard against other circulating flu strains — as happens every year — as well as the swine flu vaccination. “The high-risk groups will be done at GPs’ surgeries. People are still making decisions over this, but we want to get cracking before we get a second wave, which is traditionally far more virulent,” Dr Holden said. It takes several weeks or months to make flu vaccines, which are cultured using chicken eggs. The European Medicines Agency said the fast-tracked approval procedure has involved trials of a “mock-up” vaccine and that the speed would not compromise patient safety. “The vaccines are authorised with a detailed risk management plan,” the agency said.

Important Note: Don't be fooled by this media propaganda. The same rushed attitude is what led to hundreds of deaths from the swine flu vaccine in 1976. Click here for a powerful CBS 60 Minutes video showing how a huge vaccine propaganda campaign by the government led to these deaths. And a recent article in The Scotsman quotes a spokesperson for the Scottish government saying "We have said that a vaccine is being worked on and the plan is to vaccinate everybody." Remember that the media is beholden to pharmaceutical companies for billions of dollars in advertising income. For lots more powerful information on this vital topic, click here.

A group of 13 doctors who believe that Dr David Kelly, the Government scientist, did not commit suicide, but was murdered, are launching a legal campaign to demand an inquest. The original inquest into Dr Kelly's death six years ago in woods near his Oxfordshire home was suspended by Lord Falconer, then the Lord Chancellor. He designated the Hutton Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the weapons inspector's death as "fulfilling the function of an inquest". Dr Kelly died shortly after he was exposed as the source for a story claiming the Government "probably knew" that a claim Iraq could attack with weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes was not true. A team of doctors unconvinced by the findings of the Hutton Report has compiled a dossier which claims that a cut to the ulnar artery in Dr Kelly's wrist could not have killed him. The 12-page document concludes: "The bleeding from Dr Kelly's ulnar artery is highly unlikely to have been so voluminous and rapid that it was the cause of death." Among the doctors is ... is David Halpin, 69, a former lecturer in anatomy at King's College, London, and a former consultant in orthopaedic and trauma surgery at Torbay Hospital, who later went into general practice. Dr Halpin said they had argued their case in the legal document in "microscopic" detail and added: "We reject haemorrhage as the cause of death and see no contrary opinion which would stand its ground. I think it is highly likely he was assassinated." The doctors have been working closely with Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP, who believes the scientist was murdered by enemies he made in the course of his work as a weapons inspector.

Note: For a trove of revelatory reports on assassinations as a tool of state, click here.

The secretive religious group, the Family, ... appears to be the connective tissue of the Senator Ensign sex scandal and the Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina sex scandal. It‘s a mystery that concerns this house at 133 C Street Southeast in Washington, D.C. This building‘s financial paper trail [shows] that it‘s actually considered to be a church. That designation makes C Street a convenient tax-free haven for the secretive organization that runs it, an organization known as the Family. Members of Congress who live there are sworn to secrecy. This powerful, poorly understood religious group ... and the house at C Street have ended up reluctantly in the headlines now because of the two major politicians‘ sex scandals. Embattled Nevada Senator John Ensign lives at the C Street house. Prominent members of the Family ... as well as other members of Congress who live at C Street—were both aware of Ensign‘s secret affair and were involved in his efforts to pay off the mistress and her family. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford mentioned C Street by name in his long public statement of regret about his affair with a woman in Argentina. Jeff Sharlet ... secretly infiltrated the family to write a book [The Family] about them. SHARLET: They like to call themselves the Christian mafia. They mean this in the sense of money moving quietly behind the scenes. Where the money goes they believe God goes. Douglas Coe, "The Family" leader, ... again and again [uses] the model of Hitler as an ideal of strength. It‘s not that he‘s a neo-Nazi. It‘s that they fetishize strength. They look for the leader who they believe is chosen by God. Evidence [of this] is his power, his wealth, and his willingness to align himself with their version of American power.

Note: To watch a stunning MSNBC video clip on "the Family," click here. For how political sex scandals may be much more commonplace than you might think, click here. And for powerful inside information from one who claims to have escaped from "the family," and another who says he is from a very high level there, click here and here. To develop an understanding of the bigger picture behind all of this, click here.

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.