Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
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Children highly exposed to an insecticide prior to birth showed signs of impaired brain development and motor function, according to a new study of chlorpyrifos – a pesticide still used on US crops despite decades of warnings about its impact on children's health. The study ... is the first to tie prenatal exposure to the pesticide to "enduring and widespread molecular, cellular, and metabolic effects in the brain," the authors wrote. The study ... comes months after the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its plans to partially ban chlorpyrifos but allow continued use on 11 crops. The EPA ... banned chlorpyrifos in 2021 after a federal court ordered the agency to take action amid litigation and a wealth of evidence of the risks it poses to children. But the agency reversed course again after a different federal court sided with farm groups in opposition. MRI scans showed that kids with the highest levels of exposure were more likely to have reduced blood flow to the brain, thickening of the brain cortex, abnormal brain pathways, impaired nerve insulation and other problems. Chlorpyrifos was the 11th most frequently found pesticide in food samples in the most recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pesticide residue monitoring report, and a 2023 US Department of Agriculture pesticide residue report found traces of the chemical in baby food made with pears, as well as in samples of blackberries, celery and tomatoes.
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A long-suppressed oversight report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) concluded that the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which claimed Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump, had been manipulated under the direction of then-CIA Director John Brennan. The HPSCI report revealed that Brennan created a special Fusion Cell, excluded independent reviewers, and used a tightly controlled team of hand-picked CIA analysts to reverse what the underlying intelligence actually said. According to a CIA whistleblower who co-authored the ICA, Brennan put the team "under duress" to reach a conclusion that Putin supported Trump. The evidence did not show that the Russians favored Trump. According to someone close to the report, the raw intelligence showed that Russian officials saw Hillary Clinton as "more stable and more manageable" – and thus preferable to Trump. But Brennan's hand-picked team reversed that. Meanwhile, those responsible have faced no consequences. There was a time when if you abused your power in office, whether or not it rose to the level of a crime, you were exiled from D.C. Instead, Comey gets a teaching job in ethics, and Clapper and Brennan get TV contracts. The picture is less incomplete and, finally, clear. The Intelligence Community did not merely misread Russian intentions. It reversed its own analysts. It misled Congress.
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Amid escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric ... private prison corporations are once again expanding their grip on U.S. detention policy. In fact, today roughly 90 percent of detained immigrants are held in privately operated facilities, the highest share in history. The industry is instead preparing for explosive growth. On recent earnings calls, CoreCivic executives announced plans to triple the number of beds in their facilities within a few months. That would mean an additional $1.5 billion in revenue for the corporation, more than doubling its annual earnings. Meanwhile, growing scrutiny of immigration detention practices has led to reports of abuse, medical neglect, and deaths in custody. Privatization, with the cost-cutting practices that define it, is the structural driver of human rights violations at these facilities. Private prisons corporations are just one piece of the sprawling prison industry. The U.S. carceral system is comprised of a vast and deeply entrenched network of public-private partnerships that make billions from incarceration and detention. Commissary corporations mark-up basic hygiene items like toothpaste or tampons by 300 percent or more. Private healthcare providers routinely deny or delay treatment, contributing to suffering and preventable deaths behind bars. Private food vendors serve meals that are frequently expired or nutritionally inadequate, all in the name of cutting costs and maximizing returns.
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In women's prisons across Texas, tear gas–which includes agents such as pepper spray–has become the go-to response for minor infractions. Guards deploy it at close range in enclosed spaces, against policy, against humanity. They gas entire housing units to punish one person's "noncompliance." What they don't tell you is how this chemical weapon–which is banned in warfare ... affects women's bodies differently than men's. Studies have found that women experience more serious reactions to tear gas exposure, particularly impacting reproductive health. In 2021, a study on the effects of tear gas on reproductive health found that nearly 900 people reported abnormal menstrual changes after exposure to tear gas. Other studies have linked tear gas exposure to miscarriage and fetal harm. Criminal justice advocates have decried the growing use of tear gas and pepper spray in prisons, saying that they should only be used as a last resort when there's a serious threat to safety. But I've seen guards deploy it for cursing, for walking too slowly, for asking too many questions. It's not about safety; it's about control, about breaking our spirits through chemical warfare. The solution isn't better ventilation or more careful deployment, though both would help. The solution is recognizing that the use of chemical weapons against the incarcerated–many of whom are trauma survivors–is inherently sadistic and unnecessary. Tear gas is even used in Texas juvenile facilities.
Note: This article was written by Kwaneta Harris, an incarcerated journalist from Detroit. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and non-lethal weapons.
Data brokers are required by California law to provide ways for consumers to request their data be deleted. But good luck finding them. More than 30 of the companies, which collect and sell consumers' personal information, hid their deletion instructions from Google. This creates one more obstacle for consumers who want to delete their data. Data brokers nationwide must register in California under the state's Consumer Privacy Act, which allows Californians to request that their information be removed, that it not be sold, or that they get access to it. After reviewing the websites of all 499 data brokers registered with the state, we found 35 had code to stop certain pages from showing up in searches. While those companies might be fulfilling the letter of the law by providing a page consumers can use to delete their data, it means little if those consumers can't find the page, according to Matthew Schwartz, a policy analyst. "This sounds to me like a clever work-around to make it as hard as possible for consumers to find it," Schwartz said. Some companies that hid their privacy instructions from search engines included a small link at the bottom of their homepage. Accessing it often required scrolling multiple screens, dismissing pop-ups for cookie permissions and newsletter sign-ups, then finding a link that was a fraction the size of other text on the page. So consumers still faced a serious hurdle when trying to get their information deleted.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
In Silicon Valley, AI tech giants are in a bidding war, competing to hire the best and brightest computer programmers. But a different hiring spree is underway in D.C. AI firms are on an influence-peddling spree, hiring hundreds of former government officials and retaining former members of Congress as consultants and lobbyists. The latest disclosure filings show over 500 entities lobbying on AI policy–from federal rules designed to preempt state and local safety regulations to water and energy-intensive data centers and integration into government contracting and certifications. Lawmakers are increasingly making the jump from serving constituents as elected officials to working directly as influence peddlers for AI interests. Former Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., a former lobbyist appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, left Congress last year and returned to her former profession. She is now working as a consultant to OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT. Former Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., recently registered for the first time as a lobbyist. Among his initial clients is Lazarus AI, which sells AI products to the Defense Department. The expanding reach of artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping hundreds of professions, weapons of war, and the ways we connect with one another. What's clear is that the AI firms set to benefit most from these changes are taking control of the policymaking apparatus to write the laws and regulations during the transition.
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The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a "Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force" composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post. The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and be stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively. Cost projections outlined in the documents indicate that such a mission, if the proposal is adopted, could stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Trump has summoned the military for domestic purposes like few of his predecessors have. He did so most recently Monday, authorizing the mobilization of 800 D.C. National Guard troops to bolster enhanced law enforcement activity in Washington. The proposal represents a major departure in how the National Guard traditionally has been used, said Lindsay P. Cohn, an associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. While it is not unusual for National Guard units to be deployed for domestic emergencies within their states, including for civil disturbances, this "is really strange because essentially nothing is happening," she said.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.
Collaborating with robotics engineers and Italian 3D printer manufacturers, a Japanese company is building "homes of earth" made primarily from soil. Lib Work, Ltd. completed their first 3D-printed earth home in Yamaga, Kumamoto on July 22, calling their creative process "uncharted territory where tradition and convention offered no guide". With an eye toward recycling, sustainability, and reduced carbon emissions, Lib Work focused on combining 3D-printing with natural materials enhanced for strength, constructibility, and design quality. The walls of the completed Lib Earth House Model B use no cement (which produces industrial waste). Instead, they utilized only naturally derived materials with soil as the primary component to create sustainable earthen walls. Compared to the previous model (Model A) that used some cement, the building's strength has improved approximately fivefold while significantly reducing CO2 emissions from the manufacturing process itself. The walls contain cutting-edge sensors as part of a wall condensation monitoring system that monitors in real-time the temperature and humidity inside the walls. This system enables the house to manage its own condition by detecting condensation in advance to maintain a long-lasting, comfortable living environment. Additionally, the homes include remote operation of air conditioning, lighting, and bath controls via smartphone or dedicated monitor. It also features an off-grid energy system.
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Equipped with her own tailored bee suit and a hood to cover her floppy ears, Maple – a former police dog – has an important retirement task: helping save thousands of honeybee hives. The canine has spent the past five months sniffing Michigan bee colonies for American foulbrood, a highly contagious bacteria that's fatal to the insects. Maple, an English springer spaniel, uses her extraordinary sense of smell as a "high-speed screening tool" to prevent beekeepers from having to manually inspect every hive. American foulbrood only becomes detectable to humans by smell when it reaches severe infection, at which point the colony risks death, said Meghan Milbrath, a researcher and assistant professor of entomology at Michigan State University. The ultimate goal is for Maple's work to serve as a blueprint for teaching canines to detect honeybee diseases. It's part of a larger bee conservation effort in a record-breaking year for colony death in the United States ... primarily driven by pesticides, pathogens, poor nutrition and pests. Although Maple's new "target odor" is distinct from her previous job ... the fundamentals remain the same. Handlers expose the canines to a scent, offer a reward and teach the dog to conduct an action that means they've found the odor they're looking for. In Maple's case, she sits when she detects the smell. [Handler, Sue] Stejskal said she has to train Maple to be familiar and comfortable with the new environment so the pup can focus on the target odor.
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While trying to come up with a pesticide solution to kill off bollworms, Dr Robert Mensah had his eureka moment. It was the 90s, and in Australia bollworms were devastating cotton farms. He experimented and eventually came up with a simple food spray, "a mixture of food ingredients, yeast and sugar-based, diluted in water and applied to crops. It emits an odour which is picked up by beneficial predatory insects and attracts them to the fields where they kill pests." It was the beginning of an international grassroots campaign, in which Mensah has worked with various charities to teach people about this sustainable farming method. Ever since the dangerous side effects of pesticides became widely known, alternatives have been sought. This approach to farming, which reduces our reliance on pesticides, is called integrated pest management. In 2005, Mensah took food sprays to Benin, where the Pesticide Action Network (PAN UK) was helping farmers transition to organic farming. There, the misuse of chemical pesticides was seriously damaging people's health. The food sprays – cheap, safe and effective – caught on with farmers in Benin where thousands now use the technique. From there, Mensah took food sprays to southern Ethiopia, where they were also trialled successfully on vegetables ... and then to Vietnam where they were used successfully on maize. Another charity, Better Cotton, is now trialling food sprays in India ... where they've trained 214,000 farmers to use sprays.
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Tor is mostly known as the Dark Web or Dark Net, seen as an online Wild West where crime runs rampant. Yet it's partly funded by the U.S. government, and the BBC and Facebook both have Tor-only versions to allow users in authoritarian countries to reach them. At its simplest, Tor is a distributed digital infrastructure that makes you anonymous online. It is a network of servers spread around the world, accessed using a browser called the Tor Browser, which you can download for free from the Tor Project website. When you use the Tor Browser, your signals are encrypted and bounced around the world before they reach the service you're trying to access. This makes it difficult for governments to trace your activity or block access, as the network just routes you through a country where that access isn't restricted. But, because you can't protect yourself from digital crime without also protecting yourself from mass surveillance by the state, these technologies are the site of constant battles between security and law enforcement interests. The state's claim to protect the vulnerable often masks efforts to exert control. In fact, robust, well-funded, value-driven and democratically accountable content moderation – by well-paid workers with good conditions – is a far better solution than magical tech fixes to social problems ... or surveillance tools. As more of our online lives are funneled into the centralized AI infrastructures ... tools like Tor are becoming ever more important.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
French MPs gave themselves a round of applause for approving legislation to reintroduce a banned pesticide last month. A figure rose from the public gallery to shout: "You are supporters of cancer ... and we will make it known." Fleur Breteau made it known. Her outburst and appearance – she lost her hair during chemotherapy for breast cancer – boosted a petition against the "Duplomb law" to well over 2m signatures. On Thursday, France's constitutional court struck down the government's attempt to reintroduce the pesticide acetamiprid – a neonicotinoid banned in France in 2018 but still used as an insecticide in other EU countries as well as the UK – in a judgment that took everyone by surprise. The ruling said the legislature had undermined "the right to live in a balanced and healthy environment" enshrined in France's environmental charter. For Breteau, 50, a battle is won but the struggle goes on. "The law is a symptom of a sick system that poisons us. The Duplomb law isn't the real problem. It's aggravating an already catastrophic system," she said. "We are living in a toxic world and need a revolution to break the chain of contamination in everything ... If people don't react we'll find ourselves in a world where we cannot drink water or eat food that is uncontaminated, where a slice of buttered bread or a cup of tea poisons us. It will be a silent world, without animals, without insects, without birds."
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Was George Floyd killed by a police officer? The official answer, according to a newly revealed set of federal government records, is no. Under the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, anyone who dies in law enforcement custody, like during an arrest, must be reported to the Department of Justice. If the death resulted from police use of force, as Floyd's did, it is labeled "use of force by a law enforcement or corrections officer." But, when an unredacted copy of four years of data was inadvertently posted on a government website late last year, Floyd's case was listed under a different category, "homicide" – which refers to deaths at the hands of another civilian, not law enforcement. The error shows how even one of the most notorious cases of police violence, one that led to a murder conviction for the officer, can be hidden in the official statistics. A Marshall Project review ... identified hundreds of people who died in custody but weren't listed, and entire states that failed to report almost any deaths in their prisons or in their jails. We found at least 681 deaths missing from the federal count – a number that would almost certainly rise if more complete data were available nationwide. More than 5,000 people likely died in state and federal prisons in 2021, over 1,000 in local jails in 2019 and over 1,000 in arrest-related interactions with police in 2024. The actual toll is unknown because no one, including the federal government, bothers keeping track.
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A series of corporate leaks over the past few years provides a remarkable window in the hidden engines powering social media. In January 2021, a few Facebook employees posted an article on the company's engineering blog purporting to explain the news feed algorithm that determines which of the countless posts available each user will see and the order in which they will see them. Eight months later ... a Facebook product manager turned whistleblower snuck over ten thousand pages of documents and internal messages out of Facebook headquarters. She leaked these to a handful of media outlets. Internal studies documented Instagram's harmful impact on the mental health of vulnerable teen girls. A secret whitelist program exempted VIP users from the moderation system the rest of us face. It turns out Facebook engineers have assigned a point value to each type of engagement users can perform on a post (liking, commenting, resharing, etc.). For each post you could be shown, these point values are multiplied by the probability that the algorithm thinks you'll perform that form of engagement. These multiplied pairs of numbers are added up, and the total is the post's personalized score for you. Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter all run on essentially the same simple math formula. Once we start clicking the social media equivalent of junk food, we're going to be served up a lot more of it–which makes it harder to resist. It's a vicious cycle
Note: Read our latest Substack focused on a social media platform that is harnessing technology as a listening tool for the radical purpose of bringing people together across differences. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and media manipulation.
As the 2025 USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans take shape, a serious disconnect threatens public health. Some advocates are calling for higher intake of animal fats and promoting so called ancestral or animal based keto diets, citing traditional wisdom and nutrient density. Diets like Keto often rely on meat and dairy from industrial production systems, where contamination with drugs and chemicals is routine. The promise of healing through meat and fat collapses when those foods carry residues of antibiotics, steroid hormones, synthetic preservatives, arsenicals, cocciodiostats, and pesticides. Many of these toxins accumulate precisely in the fats and organs being celebrated as nutrient rich. A decade ago, as policy director at the Center for Food Safety, I helped publish a report entitled "America's Secret Animal Drug Problem," identifying over 450 animal drugs and feed additives used in U.S. meat production. That number alarmed me then. Today, the Food and Drug Administration has approved nearly 700 veterinary drugs for use in food-producing animals. This figure includes not only growth promoters and antibiotics but also synthetic hormones, beta agonists, coccidiostats, and antiparasitics. Less than 1% of meat and dairy in the United States is produced in regenerative organic systems on pasture. The remaining 99% comes from animals housed in industrial facilities, fed chemically saturated GMO grains.
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Each year, about 6,000 people die in prisons and jails, and another 2,000 during encounters with police, according to estimates by government agencies and nonprofit groups – numbers that experts believe are likely undercounts. Federal law has for 25 years required local agencies to report in-custody deaths, but the mandate is not enforced. In many places, there's no reliable public accounting of what happened or why. Families who lose loved ones in custody are often met with silence or conflicting accounts. The authorities tasked with finding the truth – from jail officials to medical examiners to state investigators – often operate slowly, without coordination, or behind closed doors. Late last year, the Justice Department published aggregated totals of deaths reported between 2019 and 2023. Due to a technical glitch, The Marshall Project was able to download the full dataset – a loophole that was quickly closed. (The department has not published unredacted death in custody datasets in the past because of privacy issues and concerns about data quality.) The records we reviewed showed widespread gaps: missing causes of death, vague entries and inconsistent details from jail to jail. Those gaps make it nearly impossible to hold institutions accountable, experts say. "You can't have that discussion without the data," said Rep. Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia and one of the law's original authors. "That's why we passed the law."
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In 1945, the horrors unleashed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely hidden from the outside world. Eighty years later, thanks to the testimonies shared by those who survived the atomic bombings of my country, we have a window into the truth of what happened on those dark August days when weapons of previously unimaginable power destroyed our cities. We also know what happened over the torturous months and years that followed, as those who weren't immediately burned alive succumbed to radiation poisoning and cancer. Nuclear bombing survivors have helped ... fuel public demand for post-Cold War arms-control treaties that resulted in significant stockpile reductions in the United States and Russia. They helped persuade nuclear-armed countries to stop explosive weapons tests that caused grave harm to the environment and to the servicemembers and civilians involved. They worked to establish the "nuclear taboo" that has spared the use of nuclear weapons in warfare for eight decades. They delivered millions of petition signatures to the United Nations that helped ... reduce nuclear risks. Again and again, they have proved that progress is possible, and for their decades of work to ensure that ... no country ever again face the unthinkable, the survivors in 2024 were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Demanding a nuclear-free world isn't naive. True naivete is believing that weapons designed to annihilate cities will keep us safe.
Note: Learn more about war failures and lies in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.
Health practitioners are becoming increasingly uneasy about the medical community making widespread use of error-prone generative AI tools. In their May 2024 research paper introducing a healthcare AI model, dubbed Med-Gemini, Google researchers showed off the AI analyzing brain scans from the radiology lab for various conditions. It identified an "old left basilar ganglia infarct," referring to a purported part of the brain – "basilar ganglia" – that simply doesn't exist in the human body. Board-certified neurologist Bryan Moore flagged the issue ... highlighting that Google fixed its blog post about the AI – but failed to revise the research paper itself. The AI likely conflated the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that's associated with motor movements and habit formation, and the basilar artery, a major blood vessel at the base of the brainstem. Google blamed the incident on a simple misspelling of "basal ganglia." It's an embarrassing reveal that underlines persistent and impactful shortcomings of the tech. In Google's search results, this can lead to headaches for users during their research and fact-checking efforts. But in a hospital setting, those kinds of slip-ups could have devastating consequences. While Google's faux pas more than likely didn't result in any danger to human patients, it sets a worrying precedent, experts argue. In a medical context, AI hallucinations could easily lead to confusion and potentially even put lives at risk.
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August 4, 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Storm. Little known outside the former Yugoslavia, the military campaign unleashed a genocidal cataclysm that violently expelled Croatia's entire Serb population. Croat forces rampaged UN-protected areas of the self-declared Serb Republic of Krajina, looting, burning, raping and murdering their way across the province. Up to 350,000 locals fled, many on foot, never to return. Meanwhile, thousands were summarily executed. As these hideous scenes unfolded, UN peacekeepers charged with protecting Krajina watched without intervening. Meanwhile, US officials strenuously denied the horrifying massacres and mass displacement amounted to ethnic cleansing, let alone war crimes. Operation Storm was for all intents and purposes a NATO attack, carried out by soldiers armed and trained by the US and directly coordinated with other Western powers. Despite publicly endorsing a negotiated peace, Washington privately encouraged Zagreb to employ maximum belligerence, even as their ultranationalist Croat proxies plotted to strike with such ferocity that the country's entire Serb population would "to all practical purposes disappear." High-ranking Croat officials privately discussed methods to justify their coming blitzkrieg, including false flag attacks. In preparing for the offensive, Croatian soldiers were trained at Fort Irwin in California and the Pentagon aided in planning the operation.
Note: Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.
A new Pentagon report offers the grimmest assessment yet of the results of the last 10 years of U.S. military efforts [in Africa]. It corroborates years of reporting on catastrophes that U.S. Africa Command has long attempted to ignore or cover up. Fatalities from militant Islamist violence spiked over the years of America's most vigorous counterterrorism efforts on the continent, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement – Somalia and the West African Sahel – suffering the worst outcomes. "Africa has experienced roughly 155,000 militant Islamist group-linked deaths over the past decade," reads a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. "What many people don't know is that the United States' post-9/11 counterterrorism operations actually contributed to and intensified the present-day crisis," [said] Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University. The U.S. provided tens of millions of dollars in weapons and training to the governments of countries like Burkina Faso and Niger, which are experiencing the worst spikes in violent deaths today, she said. In 2002 and 2003 ... the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks, resulting in a combined 23 casualties across the entire continent. Last year, there were 22,307 fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa. At least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance were key leaders in a dozen coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel.
Note: Read more about the Pentagon's recent military failures in Africa. Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.